Do you hate speech?

My Twitter account is locked. I locked it after seeing the correspondence from Imran Ahmed to ‘Katy’, (I assume representing Twitter) and acknowledging a meeting on Tuesday. Time stamped  Wed 29 Jan 2020 08:52, the email says:

“Given the positive nature of the talks, we hope to see the following in the coming weeks:

1) A commitment to not just bring back the import/export facilities for blocklists but a commitment to work with CCDH on a new initiative to make it far easier for people to more easily share their blocklists so we can start to harness social power to collectively exclude hate actors from public discourse.

2) The banning of hate actors as we discussed in the meeting, including [redacted] and the people in the attached document.

3) A full review of both George Galloway and Katie Hopkins’ ability to use your platform to spread hate and a commitment to publicly publish the full decision with reasoning by March 13^th (six weeks’ time) so that our society can have a constructive and evidenced debate on Twitter’s merits as a place for people to communicate, build relationships and find new information.

Could we schedule to reconnect on progress w/c March 9^th? In the meantime, I will be on email and phone although some hours behind you in the States.

We think these are reasonable and constructive requests. We hope you agree.

Best wishes,

Imran Ahmed”

CCDH stands for the Center_[sic] for Countering Digital Hate. Now, my opinion of hate is that is a visceral, primitive emotion which has little place in cool adult discourse. It is a word used by truculent children to hurt their parents. It is a word uttered in anger and frustration by those with no vocabulary to distinguish between dislike, antipathy, aversion, loathing or even simple preference. Increasingly it is used against people with a different opinion to the hate-detector, for this is what CCDH really is. Clearly of the left, this is an organisation with one purpose; to de-platform those with whom they disagree.

In setting themselves up as arbiters of what hate is they also get to impose rules about what kind of hate is permissible. For, make no mistake, the suspension of Katie Hopkins is motivated by the pure leftist hatred for anybody who gets in their way. If the fascists – limitation of free speech is an instrument of fascism – of CCDH get their way, Twitter will become a thought-free bubble of ideological consensus which uses the acquiescence of useful idiots to further an agenda as insidious as any they loudly proclaim to oppose.

I hear through the grapevine that my blog has restricted access under certain ‘safeguarding’ processes of the ISPs. I regularly see Tweeters I follow complaining that their reach has been limited, their tweets rendered invisible and their ability to follow others curtailed. I hear of shadow-banning and other practices which reduce the ‘volume’ of their voices. And I see, daily, members returning after short suspensions for the most innocuous of expressed sentiment, where clearly no ‘crime’ was committed.

They are of one mind, the banners, the mass blockers, the deniers of others’ freedoms. And they have one aim which is to create a sanitised ‘safe space’ where only the approved opinions may be promulgated. This is an extension of state education, where teachers quietly reinforce the ‘correct’ modes of thought and turn their charges against the politics of their parents. They speak of harm, where no harm exists. They pretend to openness and diversity, but brook no diversity of thought.

As with school, so with Twitter

Tonight, when we symbolically part company with a supranational exercise in restricting independent freedoms, I will unlock my Twitter account again; It is far too restrictive to remain behind self-imposed bars. How long I survive this hostile environment is going to be a matter of chance; no doubt I am already on a number of blocklists and if Ahmed and his brownshirts get their way that will be all they need to remove me from the platform altogether. Be careful what you wish for, you who see hate in every disagreement; be very careful indeed, for you may be next.

(If you have got this far and you agree, endorse, or just want to share, there is a link below which you can use to spread the word. Many thanks in anticipation.) 

Free Speech on Trial

Hush. Tell nobody. I may be breaking the law by even thinking these thoughts, let alone writing them down. Paul Grange had what he thought was a funny idea for a sick joke, so he had it printed on a tee-shirt and now he may be facing a prison term. Why? Because he committed the now cardinal sin of offending ‘certain people’. As it happens I have literally zero interest in or concern for the ‘victims’ of H***s***ough, other than being uneasy about the way that the ‘V’ word now appears to confer special privileges. It’s not just the denizens of the city of eternal maudlin grief though; it is all too easy these days to self-identify with one of an increasing number of victim groups and demand different treatment.

The special snowflakes and their safe spaces on university campuses around the western world stamp and screech that they must not be offended. Similarly, the Caroline Criado-Perezes of the misandrous neo-feminazi sect insist that their views alone be considered and all others dismissed. Even Turkey’s President Erdogan demands his own personal right not to be the butt of jokes, no matter how easy a target he makes of himself. And you can forget about imagining this is only about genuine verbal violence, even relatively mild humour faces the same charges; it is now practically illegal to tell a joke if another party fails to find it funny. Soon this could be grounds for divorce; "Dey bombed ar chippie!" could be cited as spousal abuse.

But it gets worse: as the architects of their own butt-hurt choose what to find offensive they also get to to claim a special status above that of mere mortals; they imagine themselves as crusaders for justice, irreproachable and morally right. In the extreme they get to create new and lucrative roles as advisers to higher powers – real powers – as to what is appropriate behaviour for everybody else. Joining the ranks of economists, climate-fear peddlers and racism-definers is a new class of expert – the offence-adviser – whose weapon of choice is ‘hate speech’. It’s a booming business and could prove lucrative; students are already studying ways of identifying ever finer grades and shades of anguish.

Nobody denies that words can bite but, in Britain at least, we used to refuse to let words cause actual harm. Stiff upper lip, ignore and walk away... don’t let them see they’ve got to you. There is an inevitability in the constant desire to seek recognition and redemption; perversely it only keeps making it worse. The offence-seekers garner no respect for their very public outrage, but they can’t seem to see why and would prefer to see crime where there is little other than questionable taste. And their persistence has paid off.

Do you find this offensive? 

No longer are these moral freedom and justice warriors alone in their fight. Their high-pitched screeches have recruited powerful allies and now the EU is giving itself powers to decide at which point your free speech becomes hate speech. Instead of ignoring you or trying to appeal to your better nature they will simply criminalise your opinions and in policing opinions they will be repressing your ability to express what you think. Thought crime is real. Think twice before you post that witty repost... It is beyond a joke.

Who's in charge here?

A rum old do, yesterday. First we have Call-me-Dave announcing some thinly thought-through and badly launched policy to do with English language lessons for certain muslim wives, the shadowy outcasts from British society, who remain in Pakistan even as their corporeal selves inhabit back-to-back terraces in Bradford. Then we have the unedifying sight of Parliament, hoist by their own petard and backed into a corner whereby they must debate the wholly un-British notion of banning a prominent person for having an opinion.

I say debate but it was more of a virtue-signalling whine-fest by a bunch of the sort of illiberal morons the left would allow to make decisions affecting everybody. Because, of course, the left know best how we should all behave. When I say ‘the left’ I also include a good many Tory MPs because the Tories have truly lost their way as well, desperate to fall into the centre-left vacuum created by Corbyn’s dragging Labour back to the heady days of Ban the Bomb and the hippy-dippy Greenham Common peace camps. What can any of them be thinking? (Can any of them be thinking?)

Firstly Trump. What caused the mother of all Parliaments, in what was formerly proud to be a free country, to waste time discussing the banning from these shores of a United States presidential candidate who directly echoed the views of millions of American and British people? If the leaders of countries must – as the EU clones all do – sing out from a monotone song-sheet a pack of lies few of them can genuinely believe, then we have no leadership at all. Thankfully, despite the whining of the perpetually offended the inevitable conclusion of the ‘debate’ was the only one that made any sense. Had they actually decided to ban Trump we may as well have shut up shop there and then.

But there’s the flaw in ‘direct democracy’. As a twitter dialogue clarified, socially conservative people – the natural order of the traditional British - tend to be independently minded and don't need to rally to social causes of low merit. This is in contrast to the visceral reaction of the social media rent-a-mob who went at it like knives. Half a million people signed that petition to debate banning Trump, so what? Over a million people petitioned the BBC to reinstate Jeremy Clarkson. Neither represents the strong views of the majority of people, they are simply barometers of reaction to events and depend heavily both on entrenched views and how they were spun.

Maybe we should ban petitions and polls altogether on the basis that they are likely to engage ‘the wrong type’ of voter? Radio 4 is currently airing a series looking at the failures of the pre-election pollsters who put Labour ahead and failed to predict the election outcome. It turns out that the polling organisations have belatedly realised that knocking on doors in the daytime was more likely to garner the views of Labour voters. (Nobody on the programme I heard dared to explain why, but we all know the reasons.)

Similarly while nobody with a sense of proportion who values freedom of speech would want to ban somebody like Trump, on comedy value alone, the opponents of freedom readily engage in the sort of rent-a-mob frenzy that fuels movements like Tell Mama and Unite Against Fascism, both of which, along with many others, agitate for aggression against ‘the silent majority’.

New petition - Teach Trump English?

Of course, it’s not only the majority who have no voice. Part of Cameron’s thinking depends on the notion that if those closeted muslim wives were to speak-a-de-English more good they would be able to engage in the community and help to counter the threat of radicalisation. (If only they could talk, eh?) Like the pollsters this flies in the face of reality and only serves to bolster the opinions of those who believe our leaders are spineless when it comes to the real threats to our way of life. Trump has no plans to behead, burn, rape or eradicate our traditional culture, whereas islam has expressed every one of those desires and has taken steps to carry them out. Who is the real threat here? It seems to me that it is those ‘leaders’ who refuse to lead but are happy to be led.