Slashdot Mirror
UK Men Arrested For Anti-Semitic Tweets After Football Game
magic maverick writes "Reuters reports that three men were arrested for posting anti-Semitic comments on Twitter following the English Premier League match between Tottenham Hotspur and West Ham United in October, police said on Friday. 'Two men, aged 22 and 24, were arrested on Thursday in London and in Wiltshire, while a 48-year-old man was arrested at his home in Canning Town in London last week on suspicion of inciting racial hatred. The investigation following the match on October 6 was triggered by complaints about tweets that referred to Hitler and the gas chambers.'
I guess it goes to show, you'd be stupid to use your real name or identifying details on Twitter. Perhaps the British should also work on reforming their laws on free speech (or lack thereof)."
Making "racism" illegal is no different that declaring thought crime. When the state can govern your speech and your thought, alls well, as long as you agree with the state. Once you don't, you're fucked. I've always argued, you can easily determine if a law is a good one by the simple thought experiment: "Once we inevitably elect the next tyrant, will this law help or hurt his ascent to power?" What do you think Hitler would have done with such a law? I think it's rather clear.
This! It's always the racist Republicans in the USA that whine constantly about free speech.
But where do you draw the line? If the government has the authority to arrest someone for hating Jews, then why can't they also arrest you for hating Republicans?
The way I would prefer to make sure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happens again is to publically ridicule the neo-Nazis, not send the police after them. The entire country pointing and saying "You people are crazy and dangerous" is a better safeguard than throwing some folks in jail. (Hitler got thrown in jail too, and look what happened to him...)
You cannot ban your way into removing things from society.
Someone who would put someone else in a cage for being rude or for having a different point of view deserves no civility.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
look: it's easy for americans to grandstand and showboat on this issue, because they didn't have something happen in the usa within 80 years ago which consumed the lives of millions of people because of a hateful, racist ideology.
Ever think the reason we didn't have that happen is because of freedom of expression? That the worst that's happened here never got to those proportions because people were free to talk about it both to blow off steam and to have their hate publicly refuted?
The one thing that the US does better than any European state is cultural integration. Freedom of expression is a big part of that, we air our dirty laundry right out there in public for all to see, to duke it out in the marketplace of ideas. It ain't pretty at all, but there is no pretty solution, only varying degrees of effectiveness and they are all ugly. We let those assholes have public freak-outs so that the people on the fence can hear the response from the sane ones.
When you censor speech it doesn't go away, it only goes underground where there is no voice of reason to point out the flaws. The cure for bad speech is good speech, not silence.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.