State-powered Puritanism is alive and well in the west. And freedom of speech is in its death throes.
Or so it seems in Great Britain. And the U.S. isn’t far behind, suggests Brendan O’Neill.
O’Neill, editor of the London-based Spike, recounts recent absurd assaults on freedom of speech, so frequent now in Britain as to be routine.
Consider the case of the malevolent hashtag. A hashtag is a label with a pound sign that Twitter-folk use to flag and meta-comment on their tweets. A soccer fan named Stephen Dodds thumbed the hashtag “#DISGRACE” to bemoan how Muslims attending a game were conspicuously praying during halftime. His tweet provoked an Internet uproar. Good. But Dodds was also reported to the police, who investigated his open hashtaggery for two weeks (!!).
And how about the case of the svelte-model-adorned subway ad that dares ask British ladies if they’re “beach-body-ready”? Uh oh. A direct psychic assault on those who will never be “beach-body-ready” in the super-model sense of the word. After feminists vandalized the ads, something called Advertising Standards Authority lurched to investigate — not the vandals, no: the blatantly anti-blobby sentiment.
Few opinions or postures fail to offend somebody.
What offends me is that we should ever be subject to arbitrary, government-backed assaults on our rights launched to satisfy persons especially thin-skinned and/or especially eager to stomp on the rights of others.
As with all fake rights, foisting a fake right to not-be-offended can only violate genuine rights. #DISGRACE.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
3 replies on “It’s a Disgrace”
George Owell is spinning in his grave, 1984’s thought crime is alive, well and metastizing in the UK and U.S., not to mention much of the rest of the world where there is no tradition of tolerance.
It is so sad that prophetic warnings can be so easily ignored. Please keep up your good work.
This is nothing new.
Have you ever tried to make a conservative comment on a college campus? Or in high school, for that matter?
Rights require no effort on someone else’s part.