Moonlapse's Private Blog

In British schools they can't talk about the Holocaust for fear of 'angering' Muslim students.

 

The EU stands for European Unconcious.

"Any society with healthy values will self-regulate such 'excesses' of free speech by ostracizing, ridiculing, and shunning those who propagate them. This de facto social censorship can be troublesome sometimes, but it does okay at balancing freedom and civility."

 

Absolutely. Regulating such offenders shouldn't be the purview of governments.

 

It cracks me up when you occasionally get someone on a privately-maintained Internet message board crying "censorship!" for being pulled up short (or booted out) on account of a lack of civility, where one has no business invoking government to determine what others should endure on what is basically their private property. The individual's freedom of association is no less precious than the individual's freedom of speech, but with one sweep for political correctness now, governments in Europe are curtailing both.

 

Hate-speech is abhorrent, and people who spew it simply suck. But you can't legislate civility. Governments that attempt to do so will only succeed in driving the hate underground -- governments won't make it go away.

 

It takes individuals to change society's attitudes, not governments. Often, those individuals happen to be comedians doing cutting-edge routines that test the very limits of what "polite" society will tolerate. I find it ironic that the very people who are advancing ideas about the stupidity of racism -- comedians such as Sacha Baron Cohen or Sarah Silverman who deliberately mirror the hatespeakers by "publicly condoning, denying, or grossly trivializing" sensitive issues -- are the very people who would be criminalized under the EU's rulings.

 

-- Nephele