Ginny [they/she]

The UK was not open and tolerant in the 70s, which is why there was one race riot after another on the 80s.

The UK has definitely gotten worse in the last few years or so, possibly a decade, but before that was a golden period just after terrorism-related Islamophobia had died down and before refugee-related Islamophobia kicked in where the UK was probably the best it ever was on terms of racial attitudes.

I call Britain a shitty little TERF island all the time, and I’m from Lancashire if that helps.

I have it on good authority that no man is island entire of itself, but every man is a piece of the continent - a part of the main.

Thin line between opinion, free speech, and a lie.

And yet, it’s there. Just as it is in defamation law.

Who defines truth, hate speech, and opinion[?]

A jury of your peers and the Public Order Act 1986.

The US has free speech. Apart from all the exceptions it carves out and designates not protected speech, including but not limited to incitement, threats and harassment, sedition, and obscenity. Obscenity in particular was famously ‘defined’ for a while as “I know it when I see it”. So why draw the line at hate speech?

Is it not a weird state of affairs when saying “X is a paedo” is legally actionable but saying “trans people are all paedos and X is trans” isn’t, even week when X’s house gets burned down either way?

When the other side wins an election are you now the criminal?

Sure, the UK parliament could pass a law saying criticising the prime minister is now illegal. The courts will inevitably issue a declaration of incompatibility with human rights law, but the government, in theory, could ignore it. If the public swallows it. But there’s nothing really stopping that happening in the US either. Congress could pass a law making it illegal to criticise the president, and since the president gets to pick the judges, it could almost certainly come under the sedition exception to the first amendment if the president really wanted it to pass. If the public swallows it.

And that’s what it comes down to at the end of the day. Whether or not the public swallows it. For all the US right wing likes to harp on about freeze peach that sure doesn’t seem to apply if you want to say something bad about America or use the word cisgender. Do you really think the American public is much less likely to support authoritarianism than the British public?

Rob Schneider peaked literally last century with Deuce Bigalow. As if that were not bad enough…