This is what I get for waiting too long before responding. Now I have to answer posts from several pages ago.
Honk, do you really think the classic "I'm just following orders" justification is relevant here?
Given the stakes, yes, I do. But don't worry, I'll have a different take if and when this guy starts committing war crimes or crimes against humanity.
I keep forgetting that you believe normalized injustice is acceptable (you'll claim you don't, then bring this exact point of argument up in some other unrelated thread).
I've already told you that I don't think enforcing these laws is morally right. That doesn't make him a monster or even someone of poor moral character overall. There's a wide gulf between doing a bad thing and therefore fundamentally being a bad person who can always be counted on to do bad things.
They're not completely different and they are fundamentally related. Power hungry enforcement of insanely authoritarian laws all have the same foundation. His thinking that he can use his wacky powers to extradite people from across the world is not remarkably different from the idea that he can punish people for mean tweets in the first place.
There's a major difference between those two ideas. People are regularly punished for mean tweets in the UK, whereas extraditing citizens of other countries to punish them for breaking laws of a country they aren't subject to is a thing that has never happened and could never happen, and the chief of the Metropolitan Police can safely be assumed to know that. It makes perfect sense for Rowley to believe that he can do the former and not believe that he could do the latter.
He's a rich executive that lives and works in the UK, him calling for the UK to prosecute foreigners is relevant to the discussion.
Yeah, but I don't think it's fair to really blame the UK for having a dumb rich executive who publicly says stupid shit detached from the reality of the law among its population. By way of a counter-example, there's a similar dumb rich executive who lives and works in the US who also publicly says stupid shit detached from the reality of the law - in his case, it's been repeated assertions over the years, including one quite recently, that people who burn or deface the American flag should be punished by the law. Never mind the fact that flag-burning is
textbook free speech and laws prohibiting it have been explicitly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Still, I think you'd agree that it wouldn't really be fair to ask "Is the US okay?" as a general question simply because of this guy. Simply because of this guy's dumb take on flag-burning, I should clarify. I
do think it's fair to ask "Is the US okay?" as a general question when we take into account that the guy I'm talking about is the former President of the United States, and has a good chance of being re-elected this November. But that's going off-topic.
Real freedom of speech - in the sense that you can literally say anything you want - doesn’t exist in the US or the UK or anywhere. And nor should it, actually. All societies are governed by rules, and they have to be because in a society my actions affect others. So I can’t drive as fast as I like because I might kill someone. You can’t just do or say anything you want in the context of a society. All those Americans trumpeting their “freedom” must scratch their heads every time they get a speeding fine. In the US you can’t even cross the road until the little man tells you. They’re so free!
This sort of response - "Hey, I think your rules are bullshit." "Ah, but you have rules too! Hypocrite much?" - is so pedantic that it's not worth even discussing. What I especially object to about speech restrictions in Britain is that expressing certain opinions is punished, which is a thing that never happens in America. For example, let's look at
the case you mentioned earlier. This guy is being punished for expressing his opinion. Maybe things would be different if he were explicitly asking people to burn down a specific hotel, but he's really not. It's a shitty opinion from a shitty person, but an opinion nevertheless, and he should be free to express it. If the government has the power to decide which opinions are permissible and which ones aren't, I don't think that society is truly free. Sure, you agree with them now. But what happens in the future if your opinion is the one the government says isn't permissible? What happens if many years in the future, corrupt elements in the government are cracking down on political and social opposition to their policies by declaring those opinions impermissible?
After all, incitement to riot is illegal under US federal law, and "incitement to imminent lawless action" (lmao nice specificity, good job guys) is also exempt from first-amendment protections. This is fairly sensible (if asininely phrased, but we're not expecting competence here, are we?). Discussing this would be as pointless as pointing out that water makes your skin dry.
I think the "imminent" qualification is very important. It's the difference between yelling "Jump!" at a would-be suicide jumper and talking about how you feel that anyone who's ever had a suicidal impulse ought to go through with it, or the difference between yelling "They're going to kill you! Run, fight back, don't let them take you!" at someone whom the police are arresting and talking about how you feel that as a general principle, nobody should ever peacefully submit to being arrested - or, to return to the Tyler Kay case, the difference between leading an angry anti-immigrant protest to a hotel known for housing migrants and refugees and bellowing, "There it is, let's burn it down!" and expressing your anti-immigration opinion and saying you'd like to see the hotels that house immigrants be burned down.
Unlike civilised countries, "obscenity" is considered an acceptable excuse to crack down on speech
I strongly agree with you that obscenity laws are bullshit and have no place in a country that values free speech, and I remember making a thread on the subject many years ago on the old FES. In fact, I'll go further and say that what especially grinds my gears about obscenity prosecutions is that judges historically seem to interpret the final part of the Miller test that determines whether or not something should be concerned obscene, namely "Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value" as "Do I personally find this work to appeal to my own subjective taste?" which I don't think at all is what the Supreme Court meant by that! For example, George Carlin's hilarious routine about the seven words you can't say on television, an absolute comedy classic, was ruled by one court to lack artistic merit, although thankfully they didn't go so far as to declare it obscene.
That being said, though, do other countries not have or enforce obscenity laws? There's a whole section
about the UK on Wikipedia, but it doesn't exactly summarize the question we're discussing neatly. I'm sure you know more about it than me.
neither is "commercial speech"
"Commercial speech" is simply subject to more regulations than political or religious speech. For example, if you really want to put out a political ad that says something ridiculous about how every citizen will be given their own flying car if you're elected, you can. Nobody's going to stop you. But when you're promising goods and services in exchange for people's money, then there are more rules. You can't just outright lie about the benefits or lack of drawbacks that the drugs you're selling have, for instance. This is perfectly consistent with speech being free as a general concept, and I don't think that other countries do things especially different.
I'm glossing over the meme that is your defamation laws, because... y'know, low-hanging fruit.
I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I've always heard that Britain is the country that has the most memal defamation laws of all, ones that heavily favor plaintiffs and have been used many times by rich assholes (J.K. Rowling being one prominent example) to silence people they don't like in a way that would never be allowed in America. You really think that America has worse defamation laws?
Oh, and not to mention the US's poor standing in press freedom benchmarks.
Please explain. What's wrong with our press freedom?
For what it's worth, it's been great following the UK police's effective response to the riots and terrorist attacks. The US has been left in the dust, despite their police departments being so much bigger and better-equipped. Someone should look into that, y'all are being scammed out of your tax dollars.
There are a lot of things that Britain does much better than America when it comes to policing, but arresting and prosecuting people for expressing certain opinions is not one of them. It's fundamental to a truly free society, and without that, your freedom only exists at the government's pleasure.