This is just a holding post for what needs to be a longer piece, but there are a whole load of live questions in early 2025 about what kinds of speech are inappropriate – and legal definitions of various “hate-speech” related ideas – blasphemy, islamophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, you name it.
Quite simple for me, since the idea of appropriateness of communications is built in to my “rules of engagement” for decades, but poor innocents who’ve grown-up with the un-moderated social-media travesty of free-speech, especially the would-be “anything goes” Musk variety are left floundering. (I say “would-be” because of course his X/Twitter algorithms control his interests NOT wider freedoms, so it’s not even “freeze peach” let alone actual free-speech anyway.)
Before we get to details of different kinds of protections from expressions around various protected characteristics, let’s just stick with the generality of hate-speech as potential “hate-crime incidents” for a moment. For anyone reporting any incident to the authorities as a potential crime, it’s recorded as a non-crime until police investigations show it to be a crime. Of course the innocents are triggered by NCHI’s (Non-Crime Hate Incidents) – just short-hand to allow the police to filter-out vexations accusations of hate-crimes – especially those around the gender-wars, and the battles between Woke and anti-Woke activists. (A pox on both their houses.) Claim and counter-claim. You talk war, you get war. Vexatious accusations of hate-speech are themselves hate-speech.
I labelled the problem as “identity politics” years ago (updated here). What people identify as, and how others relate to the identity of others. (The basis of identity generally is a whole other #GoodFences topic here … my speciality in fact. )
Speech, is a physical action like any other, and can be a crime. The problematic ones are obvious and there really are only two right now:
GENDER & SEXUALITY
Let’s start with the gender vs sexuality wars – the whole LGB/TQI+ word-salad – most serious because it’s been allowed to become the cause of the fuckwits in the white-house and the demise of democracy, even though the original issue is the physically trivial. Self-identity (name-claiming) or other-identity (name-calling) for “neuro-atypical” life-style reasons have been turned into “vexatious” agendas by “Woke” activists helped by the anti-Woke taking the war to them. The right to identify as something is one thing, but it doesn’t confer any rights against those of other legally recognised identities.
The neuro-atypical tag is a clue and there are many more than this gender/sexuality case. These are mental health-care issues.
Typical left-liberal groups and thinkers have frankly failed to get a grip on reality here, confusing multiple individual rights in the absence of collective responsibilities, leaving the field wide-open to (c)onservative, (C)onservative and authoritarian factions. (See fascist fuckwits in the white-house and see Borders vs Business.)
RACE, ETHNICITY, RELIGION & CULTURE
These really are one “cultural” issue, and my go-to expert here is Kenan Malik. In short for this starter post, they really are one complex, tangled issue. Any legislation that attempts to define one without seeing the whole is doomed. Proper consideration of whole and parts is “Systems Thinking”.
Judaism and antisemitism have been a special case since the “World in Crisis” in the first half of the 20th C. For good reason. But in fact that world in crisis through two world-wars has been responsible for so many un-resolved conflicts in thought and ideas between the objectively physical and the subjectively mental. Between dead-things and living-systems. Anyone who thinks coming down on one side of that generic conflict is any kind of resolution needs to think harder.
Post-9/11 2001, the other pairing is Islamophobia and Islamism (and associated-terrorism, though terrorism isn’t of course limited to this one ideological conflict.) Religion generally vs free-thought, secularism and humanism is another. Even the pro-life vs abortion, end-of-life-care vs assisted-dying and many more, are confusions between physical realities and mental moralities not resolvable by picking sides. A systemic dialogue is non-trivial, complex as well as complicated. Meantime the rule of law and the rejection of physical violence apply, even where for all the reasons above, the law may currently be an ass.
Including hate-speech, yes, really.
(Watch this space.)
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Post Note: That Woke / anti-Woke reference above focusses on what has become the extremes of DEI, but predictably, with the Whitehouse Fuckwits gung-ho for throwing all their babies out with the bathwater, zero DEI is as bonkers and inhuman as the other extreme. (Obviously the reason for my “Pox on both their houses” default position.)
Interesting – scary – piece here on LinkedIn about a piece published anonymously in the BMJ on the immediate human consequences of current actions.
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- Glenn Lyons on LinkedIn
- BMJ Editorial on an Anonymous Letter
- And another on LinkedIn:
DEI in an AI context, a warning from Auke Hunnemann
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