Quote:
Originally Posted by Redway
No, it isn't there to protect everyone. For example, if a drunken cockney chav gets on public transport and starts mouthing off about how she hates hangovers after a good night out then she'd be looked on as weird, yes, but it can be justified by free speech.
However, someone who choses to be openly racist and use extreme abuse and threats on someone simply isn't acceptable and nobody should have to be subject to that. If free speech was there to protect everyone, would people really be arrested for this sort of thing? If you don't have boundaries then you're basically saying that every abusive, vile, idiotic thought that enters someone's mind - even if it hurts someone, which it will - should be tolerated. Why defend the idiots but not the people who are being victimised?
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I think that's the point you're missing - people are NOT arrested for this sort of thing in most countries. It's rather freakish and scary. It happens in Iran, China, North Korea. I'm in the US - if you arrested someone for making a racist comment on Twitter here, assuming you could even get a court willing to order their ISP to give you their home address, and the ISP actually agreed, you'd lose your job and the agency which employed you would be sued for civil rights violations.
Someone mentioned in another thread the other day that there was no point in worrying about some abusive comment made on Twitter because the poster of it would be arrested. I thought they were kidding. The very idea of being arrested because someone is offended by what you've typed is the antithesis of free speech. Once again, what you consider abusive is not universal, and tomorrow, the people in charge may decide it is your opposition to that idea which is the abusive. I absolutely cannot fathom embracing that kind of slippery slope.