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So, Teresa Nielsen Hayden points out in her particles that the UC press is having a big sale. This is so wrong: this should have happened three months ago so my dad could have had fun with it (he was always a dangerous man in a bookstore).
But the thing that's been on my mind off and on today is Ken Livingston. The BBC World Service actually ran a tape of the conversation he's in trouble for, and you know what? It's outrageous to suspend a mayor for a month on the basis of the conversation. No, I wouldn't compare paparazzi to concentration camp guards, but the conversation is as he said it was, a complaint about reporters harrassing him and then saying "it's just my job." There's not a shred of anti-Semitism in it.
Politicians say really awful things all the time. If you can't lose your job for suggesting that the crime problem would be minimal if all the black mothers were forced to have abortions, you surely shouldn't be able to lose your job for saying that a reporter is like a war criminal. (different countries, but still -- lately I think the US has a worse record overall on free speech issues than the UK)
The thing is, I think the Ken Livingston thing is being used, consciously or not, to subvert the original intent of hate-speech rules. Hate speech is about espousing, inspiring, inciting, instigating, and organizing violence against targeted populations. Nowhere in Ken Livingston's conversation did he suggest that violence against reporters was in the least bit appropriate. He did suggest that the newspapers' behavior towards him was violent in some way (I'm not able to judge how accurate his complaints about the news media are, but the fact that the reporter pursued this case in this fashion sort of indicates a partisanship that I would think a newspaper would not like to be caught with). But the rather stiffer than necessary legislation that's been adopted for hate speech (I do listen to BBC World Service, so I have had at various times gotten fairly thorough descriptions of the law, though I couldn't repeat it here without looking it up, which I may do if I remember after this nightmare weekend is over) -- is being used, I think, to go after people who rock the boat, not people who threaten violence against minorities. And I think we'll see more of it, in the US and the UK. Just a few more boiling chips in the frog soup.
But the thing that's been on my mind off and on today is Ken Livingston. The BBC World Service actually ran a tape of the conversation he's in trouble for, and you know what? It's outrageous to suspend a mayor for a month on the basis of the conversation. No, I wouldn't compare paparazzi to concentration camp guards, but the conversation is as he said it was, a complaint about reporters harrassing him and then saying "it's just my job." There's not a shred of anti-Semitism in it.
Politicians say really awful things all the time. If you can't lose your job for suggesting that the crime problem would be minimal if all the black mothers were forced to have abortions, you surely shouldn't be able to lose your job for saying that a reporter is like a war criminal. (different countries, but still -- lately I think the US has a worse record overall on free speech issues than the UK)
The thing is, I think the Ken Livingston thing is being used, consciously or not, to subvert the original intent of hate-speech rules. Hate speech is about espousing, inspiring, inciting, instigating, and organizing violence against targeted populations. Nowhere in Ken Livingston's conversation did he suggest that violence against reporters was in the least bit appropriate. He did suggest that the newspapers' behavior towards him was violent in some way (I'm not able to judge how accurate his complaints about the news media are, but the fact that the reporter pursued this case in this fashion sort of indicates a partisanship that I would think a newspaper would not like to be caught with). But the rather stiffer than necessary legislation that's been adopted for hate speech (I do listen to BBC World Service, so I have had at various times gotten fairly thorough descriptions of the law, though I couldn't repeat it here without looking it up, which I may do if I remember after this nightmare weekend is over) -- is being used, I think, to go after people who rock the boat, not people who threaten violence against minorities. And I think we'll see more of it, in the US and the UK. Just a few more boiling chips in the frog soup.
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