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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.

While this may be legally true (IANAL), in reality this is very dependent on the person making the incitement. Muslims and other minorities effectively have legal privileges that include making exactly the sorts of statements you give with no repercussions.

Its usually true, but there are often specific requirements that the incitement is actually likely to lead to 'imminent unlawful action' or similar. That is, someone will hear it and immediately take an illegal action. "Beat up that guy!" while pointing at some person in the crowd would be a classic example.

Kind of like how yelling "I'm going to kick your ass!" isn't an unlawful threat/assault if the person doing the yelling does not have the capacity to carry out the proposed action due to distance or some other factor.

Not in the UK. "Inciting racial hatred" requires no direct call to violence whatsoever, you can be booked for any blasphemy pretty much so long as someone somewhere thinks it's over the line. To say nothing of "malicious communication" where you can be booked for anything anybody anywhere is willing to testify they find "grossly offensive" or "indecent".

Yeah, and the broadness of that seems to allow them to both attack speech that is genuinely causing no harm AND to be selective in how they interpret the standard to allow the whole "two tier" thing to occur.