Kulturkampf

[Potato]

The basketball dildo affair is honestly one of the most menacing things going on right now. It's portrayed as a joke, but it really has the vibe of raptors testing fences.

I love how they keep ascribing these motivations to what was probably some frat boy douchebag prank to take the piss out of the lesbians on court.

[benji]

[Potato]

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cm2vkgelrwwo

The Premier League will no longer take part in the Rainbow Laces campaign after ending its partnership with LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

[HaughtyFrank]

"Actually it's your fault Spotify that you implemented age verification after we implemented a law that threatens every website with a gigantic fine"

[HaughtyFrank]

The kind of shit that has you swearing it has to be fake until you google it

https://cityclerk.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2016/16-1104-S3_misc_03-21-25.pdf

[Eric Cartman]

But people can still call people faggy retards at public meetings?

[Alpacx]

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/articles/cm2vkgelrwwo

The Premier League will no longer take part in the Rainbow Laces campaign after ending its partnership with LGBTQ+ charity Stonewall.

Pro sports is an area where anti-homphobia campaigns can still be useful so of course the queers/trans/non-binary ruin it.

[benji]

[HaughtyFrank]

What kind of annoys me is that these countries still think they're a bastion of free speech. Just recently I saw a German politician make the argument "That people who complain about a lack of free speech are just upset that they're being criticized for their opinions" something that's just patently untrue when you have people sitting court because they made light of the attempted Trump's assassination.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/news/german-satirist-el-hotzo-acquitted-over-trump-attempted-assassination-comments/

He basically imported the argument from US free speech debates without understanding that at this point the UK and Germany have very different understandings of free speech than the US.

[benji]

The UK's tradition diverged greatly from the US before most of these people were even alive. It moved towards the more restrictive continental one probably even before the war. Rather famously, libel was only changed towards the US's version in the last decade. The UK communication acts for the internet always did the opposite of the US's "anything goes" Section 230 style world, they were more restrictive than even other continental versions. (Sweden for example has something that's essentially like Section 230.)

I don't mean this to argue in favor of the US approach in anything, even if I obviously do favor it, but much of the US approach was informed by the UK's censorship regime. The US's lack of prior restraint has always been framed against the UK's requirement for state approval before publication that the UK has mostly only ever ceased because of the pressure release of the US's system. The claim that the US was better adhering to Anglo tradition and rhetoric had a real effect on shaming the UK's elites over the centuries, but they rarely argued to try and outdo the US as much as merely out do the continent.

The UK was only a "badge of honor" because everyone else was so terrible and the US was a backwater that itself took a while to fully form its defense of free speech. By the post-war period where the US's views were starting to dominate liberal discourse the Commonwealth countries elites mostly attacked it as too permissive and looked towards the continental belief that freedom of speech needs to be suspended when it infringes on the right of the state to have an "ordered society" which is why that's been written into every legal defense of the right everywhere in the world but the US. Mill's argument was never really taken seriously anywhere but the US, and much of that was done against the conscious will of the majority.

Again, obviously I'm biased but I think putting the question the way I did to Occam that he refused to answer exposes the difference in the belief in the rhetoric: should someone be imprisoned (or killed) for their speech? Even when they answer "yes" to a specific example, I find most Americans that don't post on ResetERA.com can be convinced towards the merits of no. I've always found this more difficult with Europeans, continental or TERF Island. (For what it's worth, I've also found Canadians are closer to Europeans, Aussies closer to the US.) But as you mentioned, the rhetoric has often been unchanged despite this great disagreement about what seems to be the most fundamental part of the concept.