Personally, I think refraining from distributing genocidal propaganda is pretty functionally dissimilar to being a bigot.
I don’t want to come off as abrasive and I don’t want to assume any ill-intent on your part, but it’s fucking frustrating hearing takes like this as a trans person. Equating the refusal to participate in a hateful disinformation campaign to refusing to marry a gay couple is deifying the liberal concepts of law & order at the expense of human decency. It is not hypocrisy to support anti-fascist actions whilst denouncing fascist actions, even if they express those actions in a similar fashion. For example, I largely support Just Stop Oil’s disruptive protests, whereas I would be disgusted if fascists defaced artworks by spray-painting swastikas all over. Is that hypocritical?
Again, sorry if I come on strongly in this comment, my frustrations are definitely from society at large rather than your comment, but having your right to exist being framed as a “political belief” is frankly exhausting.
I feel like there’s a “law as it currently exists” thing versus the ideal. The law as it currently exists makes it illegal to discriminate based on content. This has historically been an important vector for, say, allowing civil rights activists to send essays to be published in newspapers. But much as it was illegal to deny a gay couple their marriage license, it ought be somehow made illegal to spread damaging lies about trans people in order to stir up a hate campaign.
In this case I’d say that 5 days fully paid suspension is probably an appropriate consequence for this rule-breaking, and could only be made more appropriate if it actually included tickets to spend those days someplace warmer and friendlier than that part of Canada and a knowing wink from the postmaster general.
I think what you’re getting at is the heart of dysfunction with the Western world’s conception of free speech. We perceive free speech as the government getting out of the way and letting people say what they want, but if that’s the only thing you do then your free speech is very, very shallow. How do you stop bigots from shouting over minorities by clogging the mail? How do you stop the wealthy from owning all of the TV channels and controlling the public conversation? How do you stop corporations or foreign governments from astroturfing every online forum with misinformation?
Free speech, counterintuitively, actually requires a democratically accountable government to take responsibility for maintaining it. It does not simply come into existence by their absence.
Personally, I think refraining from distributing genocidal propaganda is pretty functionally dissimilar to being a bigot.
I don’t want to come off as abrasive and I don’t want to assume any ill-intent on your part, but it’s fucking frustrating hearing takes like this as a trans person. Equating the refusal to participate in a hateful disinformation campaign to refusing to marry a gay couple is deifying the liberal concepts of law & order at the expense of human decency. It is not hypocrisy to support anti-fascist actions whilst denouncing fascist actions, even if they express those actions in a similar fashion. For example, I largely support Just Stop Oil’s disruptive protests, whereas I would be disgusted if fascists defaced artworks by spray-painting swastikas all over. Is that hypocritical?
Again, sorry if I come on strongly in this comment, my frustrations are definitely from society at large rather than your comment, but having your right to exist being framed as a “political belief” is frankly exhausting.
I feel like there’s a “law as it currently exists” thing versus the ideal. The law as it currently exists makes it illegal to discriminate based on content. This has historically been an important vector for, say, allowing civil rights activists to send essays to be published in newspapers. But much as it was illegal to deny a gay couple their marriage license, it ought be somehow made illegal to spread damaging lies about trans people in order to stir up a hate campaign.
In this case I’d say that 5 days fully paid suspension is probably an appropriate consequence for this rule-breaking, and could only be made more appropriate if it actually included tickets to spend those days someplace warmer and friendlier than that part of Canada and a knowing wink from the postmaster general.
I think what you’re getting at is the heart of dysfunction with the Western world’s conception of free speech. We perceive free speech as the government getting out of the way and letting people say what they want, but if that’s the only thing you do then your free speech is very, very shallow. How do you stop bigots from shouting over minorities by clogging the mail? How do you stop the wealthy from owning all of the TV channels and controlling the public conversation? How do you stop corporations or foreign governments from astroturfing every online forum with misinformation?
Free speech, counterintuitively, actually requires a democratically accountable government to take responsibility for maintaining it. It does not simply come into existence by their absence.