Thursday 29 March 2018

Free Spech and the Nazi Pug Story

It seems Free Speech is dead in Scotland. Well, it's dead in the UK, but South of the border the authorities aren't brave enough to actually prosecute and set a legal precedent. Yet. They just deport foreigners whose viewpoint they don't like.

We don't have free speech, it's qualified or approved speech, but now it's worse because any Passing snowflake that is hurt by your harsh words can get redress through the courts and get you banged to rights. Got to protect those poor Snowflakes. By in the day we used to omit the word snow and just called 'em flakes, nutters or window-lickers.

But in not-so-Bonnie-anymore Scotland, you can now be convicted for making an offensive joke. The evidential bar for hate crime has been set so low that anyone that says they are offended by your words is enough to get you prosecuted.

So you post up on YouTube and all someone has to do is go to the Old Bill and say they were offended, and off to chokey you go.

No qualification as to whether this is something someone "should" be offended by. No, all you do is to state you are offended and your collar will be felt. No defence of "It was just a joke m'lud". Nope, context is ignored.

I think Peugeots and Citroens are shit cars and for saying this if Peugeot or Citroen were to take offense to that statement and notify the Police, I would be in court.

The thing is with the Scottish case is the comedian that posted the Nazi Pug video posted the reasons for making his pug salute, but the court decided (and this is the important point) to ignore that context and prosecute him for the words he used, taken out of context.

To be honest, this video by Jonathan Pie the comedic spoof reporter just about sums up the idiocy of it all.
 
 
But as he says, where are the other comedians? Why are they not up in arms about this? Will they be boycotting the Edinburgh festival given that any offensive jokes they make could land them in court? After all, any words you use will be taken down and used out of context and there is now a legal precedent. The court doesn't care you were just making a joke....