- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- world@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26284554
By Syma Mohammed
Published date: 20 February 2025 21:44 GMTAlex Tyrrell, party leader of the Green Party of Quebec, who accompanied Engler to the police station on Thursday, spoke to the Middle East Eye about Engler’s arrest.
“I think it’s a shocking attack on free expression and democratic rights and criticism of Israel in Canada - a country that’s supposed to be a free, democratic society. We’re supposed to speak out about a genocide," Tyrrel told MEE.
I remember killed yesterday when leftists made fun of “freeze preach”
Not so fun when the shoe is on the other foot, is it?
The right wing assholes whining about free speech don’t actually want free speech. You can see that in the campaigns to remove books from school libraries all across the country. All across the world the right are demonstrating time and again how little they actually support free speech.
What they want is the freedom to spew hate speech, which is the only kind of speech that a tolerant and free society should not tolerate. All other forms of speech they will gladly and eagerly suppress unless it agrees with them.
Right wing assholes don’t want free speech, but I do.
That includes extremist views, since the government should not in any way be in business of determining what those are
It’s not a question of “extremist”. What is or isn’t “extreme” is largely a matter of how far an idea strays from the norm. Some extreme ideas are very good, some extreme ideas are terrible.
The question, rather, is of purpose, not character. Intolerant speech - that is, speech whose purpose is to limit the rights of specific groups of people to exist - is the only kind of speech that we must be prepared to limit, because without limits on intolerant speech, the intolerant will ultimately abuse their freedoms to strip away freedoms from others.
This draws a hard line. It clearly defines and delineates what is and is not acceptable. It is a simple and clear rule that any tolerant society must abide by if it is to continue to be a tolerant society.
For the proof of this, you only need to look at what is happening in the US right now.
To you, speaking out against Israel is fine, but to some people it might be antisemitic. Whether or not it is against the rights of someone is actually personal opinion, not for the government to decide
But we’re not required to evaluate the facts of the case based on what “some people” think. We can objectively examine the content of people’s speech and ask whether it’s intent is to advocate against the basic rights of a group of people or not. Criticising Isreal does not meet that test, despite what the ADL might claim.
Yes, there are grey areas. Yes, there are hard calls that have to be made. But saying “This is hard” and then throwing up your hands and resorting to free speech absolutism because you can’t handle the difficult work of building a society is just childish.
How do you objectively decide that? Because Palestinian protestors would violate this:
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1854901645492072449
https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1800747111715311631
The same way you objectively decide anything else in law. You apply the principles to the facts.
Your first example there is a gimme; clear and obvious example of antisemitic hate speech. The fact that they’re protesting against Israeli genocide isn’t some magic shield that protects people from criticism. You can protest against the actions of Isreal without declaring that Hitler was right.
The second one is a grey area. That’s the thing; when you take a serious approach to the problems of the world, instead of fleeing to the simplicity of ideas like free speech absolutism, which require no degree of complex thought, you will inevitably run into grey areas. So I’m not going to give a hard answer on this one because I think it would take a lot of serious thought and debate to come up with a hard answer on it. But I will say that even if it was ruled as intolerant speech, nothing would be lost. You can protest against Isreal and stand up for Palestine without needing to celebrate the actions of Hamas. Those things are not intrinsically linked. So your examples do not demonstrate any kind of underlying flaw with Popper’s principle. Nothing of value is lost if we as a society choose to say that these kinds of speech are unacceptable.
A society can choose to say that certain types of speech are intolerable, but do we get better results by jailing those people? Or do we make it more acceptable over time to jail people who are simply protesting against the government? Do we then apply violence to the protesters who don’t agree to be peacefully arrested?
This isn’t a theoretical consideration. See Tiananmen square, arrests of protesters in Russia, Iran, etc. The propaganda mouthpieces of these countries love to point out when similar things happen in the West
What are you even talking about?
A bunch on nonsense. There maroons think that getting banned from Facebook for making death threats is the same as the government imprisoning you for speaking out against genocide.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Meechan
Not just death threats, but jokes too
There are still people who think the government should be in the business of fining and jailing people for things they say
Oh, you mean like slander, libel, inciting riots, or specific and actionable threats?
Those things are slightly different. You have the right to say “FIRE” in a crowded movie theater. You have to pay for the consequences if it’s not true.
If we’re talking about posting opinions that offended people, that’s a whole another thing. People can get offended because you have a difference of opinion.
I think you need to prove either damages were caused or you were endangered by someone (damages were not caused, but could easily have been)
I don’t consider “a person said something I didn’t like” as harassment