Topic: No Offense: The New Threats to Free Speech (Read 1098 times)

I don't know where people got the idea from that they have a right to never be offended. As an ideal, it's hard to argue against, but it's impractical to live in a complex society as ours and expect that you will never be offended. People should not attempt to offend other people for the sake of it, of course. But living in a free society does not mean you have a right to not be offended, and you especially do not have a right to curb someone else's speech because it offends you.

That is not quite the case, he is referring to the fact that you are not allowed to threaten people on twitter (i.e. make personal threats of violence against people), as far as I understand though, there is nothing that stops people being offensive if they so wish as long as it's not personally threatening.

Mean things? Like what?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11202290/Sharia-law-or-gay-marriage-critics-would-be-branded-extremists-under-Tory-plans-atheists-and-Christians-warn.html

Almost all Muslims in the US vote Democratic.

I thought this was really interesting, thanks for posting it.  It is interesting how free speech is absolute in the USA until it effects a protected class and then it rapidly becomes less free.  I liked the point about you have to have free speech before you can determine if someone is a racist, you can't have prior restraint, which seems to be the path taken by lots of groups in the USA.

On Feb. 14, 1989, I happened to be on a panel on press freedom for the Columbia Journalism Review when someone in the audience told us of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s religious edict for blasphemy against the British novelist Salman Rushdie. What did we think? We didn’t, as I best recall, disgrace ourselves. We said most of the right things about defending freedom of thought and the imagination.

But the death sentence from Iran’s supreme leader seemed unreal—the sending of a thunderbolt from medieval Qom against modern Bloomsbury—and we didn’t treat it with the seriousness that it deserved. I recall, alas, making a very poor joke about literary deconstructionism. My colleagues, though more sensible, were baffled and hesitant. Was it even true—or perhaps just a mistranslation?

We knew soon enough that it was true. The literary, media and political worlds rallied in defense of Mr. Rushdie. He became a hero of free speech and a symbol—even if a slightly ambivalent postcolonial one—of Western liberal traditions. But he also went, very sensibly, behind a curtain of security that was to last many years.

And by degrees—when it seemed that not only Mr. Rushdie’s life but the lives of his publishers, editors and translators might be threatened—his base of support in the literary world thinned out. Sensitive intellectuals discovered that, in a multicultural world, respect for the Other meant understanding his traditions too, and these often were, well, sterner than ours. Freedom of speech was only one value to be set against…ahem, several other values. Fear, cowardice and rationalization spread outward.

Twenty-five years later, we can look back on a long series of similar events, including: the 2002 anti-Christian riots in Nigeria, in which more than 200 people were killed because a local tabloid had facetiously suggested that Miss World contestants would make suitable brides for Muhammad; the 2004 murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh for his movie “Submission,” in which passages from the Quran were printed on women’s bodies; the riots in Denmark and throughout the Middle East in 2005 in response to the publication of cartoons of Muhammad by a Danish magazine; the murder threats against Dutch politician Geert Wilders for his 2008 film “Fitna,” which interleaved passages from the Quran with clips of jihadist violence.


http://online.wsj.com/articles/no-offense-the-new-threats-to-free-speech-1414783663?mod=trending_now_3