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EFF Looks At How Blasphemy Laws Have Stifled Speech in 2012
As part of their 2012 in review series, the EFF takes a look at how blasphemy laws have chilled online speech this year. A "dishonorable mention" goes to YouTube this year: "A dishonorable mention goes to YouTube, which blocked access to the controversial 'Innocence of Muslims' video in Egypt and Libya without government prompting. The Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, a group based in Egypt, condemned YouTube's decision."
All I said was that this piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!
I am officially gone from
There are 2 reasons I can see for the EFF using the more general term:
1. One of the winners was Greece, going after someone who was satirizing a Greek Orthodox monk. It's not always about Muslims.
2. The organization opposes all attempts to censor online speech, not just religiously motivated attempts.
I am officially gone from
Not saying something for fear of some group of asshats using it as an excuse to kill people is being a coward. These people would have killed even if the film hadn't been made. It was nothing but a convenient excuse.
Problem with most laws over here, they are based on the fear and not some sense. In some airports over here carrying a water bottle carries a torture sentence.
Every government tries to enact laws that mold its citizens to fit one particular morality, regardless of whether it's led by religion, hivemind democracy, or dictatorship. For localized groups that face communal problems, this has usually been perfectly fine. The real problem comes from applying one group's morality (and therefore its laws) to another group. The Internet lets everyone see everyone else's actions immediately, so what's perfectly fine to an irreverent filmmaker with poor taste in comedy can quickly spread as outrage among people with a stricter sense of decency.
To the people who enact and support the religious laws "over there", they make perfect sense, just as the people who support anti-terrorist or gun control laws in America think those laws make sense.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
You don't have the right to not be offended.
SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
Obviously, nobody gets fired for "right leaning views". But you can find a cause to fire anybody if you look just hard enough. Academia is generally a pretty hostile environment to either social or fiscal conservatives. Most conservatives I know just don't talk about their political views in such environments at all, but sadly still have to listen to the endless left-wing chatter of their colleagues.
I knew a lot of Communists (big "C") and communists (little "c") in the late '50s and early '60s. Some of them followed the party line, and some of them didn't. Obviously the Trotskyites didn't.
For most of the Communists I knew, the question was, "When did you leave the Party?" Some of them left the Party after the Hungarian revolution, some of them left after the Czechoslovokian revolution.
They left the party because they couldn't support a government that was doing the same kind of thing that the U.S. was doing in Vietnam, Haiti, Chile, Argentina, and Iran -- overthrowing democratically elected governments, and replacing them with compliant dictators.
In other words, most of the Communists I knew had more integrity and commitment to democracy than the right-wing corporate suckups in this country.
So if you're going to talk about the Communist Party, let's open the discussion to the crimes, murders and dictatorship on both sides of the cold war. Let's bring Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush into the dock.
I think history will give credit to the American Communist Party for one great contribution to democracy: the civil rights movement.
If you believe J. Edgar Hoover, the Communist Party was responsible for training the leaders of the black civil rights movement, and showing them how to organize their movement.
Do you know who Rosa Parks was? She led the Montgomery bus boycott, which put an end to racial segregation on the Montgomery, Alabama public transportation system. Do you know who Martin Luther King is? They were trained at the Highlander Folk School http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highlander_Research_and_Education_Center where Communists and non-Communists taught them how to develop effective strategies to attack racism, and organize the community to fight it.
Let's go back to the history that your high school may have skipped through quickly. From shortly after the Civil War, up to even 1968, black people in the South (and a lot of other places in America) weren't allowed to vote. Think about that for a second. What's wrong with Communism? They don't have free elections. Well, up to 1968, Americans weren't allowed to vote, because of the color of their skin. And according to William F. Buckley, and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, that was fine, and the federal government had no business interfering with state decisions on the matter.
And of course black people were also discriminated against in education, the courts, and everywhere else. They had fucking lynchings.
Think about that. Lynching black people for trying to vote. Are you OK with that? Your right-wing heros were.
The Communist Party, for all its many failings, supported the civil rights movement. The Daily Worker sent reporters to cover the struggle, when a lot of other newspapers were ignoring it.
And in fact, the editors of the Daily Worker, and other Communists, were sent to jail for publishing newspapers and books, holding meetings and classes, organizing demonstrations -- the very activities protected by the First Amendment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_v._United_States#The_court.27s_decision
People were fired, not for being Communists, but for having left the party years ago, or having associated with Communists, and refusing to testify and denounce their former friends before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And people were fired for defending Communists. Or not denouncing Communists strongly enough.
When I took my first physics course in college, my professor was teaching physics in the U.S. for the first time in many years. He had been blacklisted, and left the country till then. I didn't know that until I read his obituary in the New York Times.
So don't go crying to me about how nobody asks conservatives to dance at the faculty parties. Unlike a lot of teachers in the 1950s, you don't know what it means to be fired for your ideas.