Nov. 20, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
24:37
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| There have been some worrying developments regarding the operation of the British state of which many people seem blissfully unaware. | |
| A huge number of people are falling foul of legislation and agents of the state who operate from a paradigm that is distinctly illiberal. | |
| It all revolves around one question. | |
| Should the government determine your morality? | |
| It is a small mind that believes laws are our moral standards. | |
| Such an argument validates the worst excesses of previous eras, such as slavery, segregation and public execution. | |
| If we, like some literal communists, believe that the laws define our morality, then how did we even argue that slavery was wrong to begin with? | |
| There is a difference in UK law between freedom of expression and freedom of speech. | |
| Freedom of expression is protected by Article 10. | |
| We've got the freedom to hold opinions, to express those opinions and ideas. | |
| However, it's still subject to the law, so we don't have total freedom of speech. | |
| In America, you have got the legal freedom to call me a racial slur. | |
| In the UK, you do not. | |
| The answer is that, in the liberal state, society is the progenitor of its own moral standards, and this social impetus shapes the laws of the land through its elected representatives. | |
| This puts the decision-making power as to the moral standards by which society should be run in the hands of society itself. | |
| The irreducibly complex matrix of interactions between individuals and social groups in which we all exist in our day-to-day lives. | |
| There is no central authority dictating right from wrong because the liberal state has no overarching moral goal. | |
| Instead, the protection of the rights and liberties of the citizenry is the end, and justifiable procedures, accountable lawmakers, and impartial judges are the means. | |
| A liberal state should not only not attempt to indoctrinate its citizens into a particular set of moral standards, it cannot indoctrinate them because it does not hold a higher goal than the freedom of the people themselves. | |
| This was one of the primary objections that the Italian fascist movement held against liberalism as an ideology. | |
| As fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentili wrote in conjunction with ex-socialist demagogue Benito Mussolini in The Political Doctrine of Fascism, No action is exempt from moral judgment. | |
| No activity can be despoiled of the value which a moral purpose confers on all things. | |
| Therefore life, as conceived of by the fascist, is serious, austere and religious. | |
| All its manifestations are poised in a world sustained by moral forces and subject to spiritual responsibilities. | |
| It is opposed to classical liberalism, which arose as a reaction to absolutism and exhausted its historical function when the state became the expression of the conscience and will of the people. | |
| Liberalism denied the state in the name of the individual. | |
| Fascism reasserts the rights of the state as expressing the real essence of the individual. | |
| It is not the nation which generates the state. | |
| That is an antiquated naturalistic concept which afforded a basis for 19th century publicity in favour of national governments. | |
| Rather, it is the state which creates the nation, conferring volition and therefore real life on a people made aware of their moral unity. | |
| The fascist state is wide awake and has a will of its own. | |
| For this reason, it can be described as ethical. | |
| The fascist state is not a night watchman, solicitous only of the personal safety of the citizens, nor is it organized exclusively for the purpose of guaranteeing a certain degree of material prosperity and relatively peaceful conditions of life. | |
| A board of directors would do as much. | |
| As we can see from these excerpts, the fascists objected to the liberal restraint of state power. | |
| As described, the liberal state is a night watchman, a guardian over the citizens that create and sustain it, to protect them from foreign agents and one another, and guarantee their rights under a constitutional order. | |
| Beyond that, the liberal state has no commentary on the nature and morality of its wards. | |
| Why should it? | |
| Once the rights and freedoms of its citizens are secured, there is no further need for interference. | |
| The moral burden of the behaviour of society is transferred to the core component of society, the individual. | |
| The millions of individuals that comprise society must now engage in the profoundly complex, extraordinarily messy business of negotiating the moral standards by which they all must live. | |
| From this chaos, a moral order arises that suits the people who must live with it on a daily basis. | |
| This process is an anathema to the fascist state. | |
| What should be a well-ordered, centralized culture with curated ethical standards and a unifying goal becomes an uncontrolled bedlam of heterodox human activity, much of which offends the sensibility of the fascist. | |
| Order must be restored by whichever means are to hand and swiftly, lest the melting pot of moral ideas grow outside of the shadow of the anointed leader. | |
| Who knows what terrible things such people might think? | |
| The entire moral order of the nation is at stake. | |
| So, why is this relevant to 21st century Britain? | |
| Increasingly, in the last two decades, the British state has veered away from its position as the night watchman. | |
| In 1997, Britain elected its first Labour government since their previous disastrous tenure in the 1970s. | |
| New Labour swept to power, led by the charismatic and confident figure of Tony Blair and his signature Cheshire Cat Grin. | |
| The 2003 Communications Act was stewarded into law by Socialist Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell. | |
| This should not have been a particularly remarkable occurrence, as it was primarily an update and consolidation of communication regulators to adapt to the new digital landscape that had emerged from the widespread adoption of the internet. | |
| Except, the internet was a vastly different form of communication than to what had come previously. | |
| The 2003 Communications Act was the legal descendant of legislation that had been created in the 1930s to prevent the misuse of the telephone system that was being installed across Britain. | |
| The purpose was to prevent obscene, menacing or grossly offensive phone calls being made to unsuspecting users. | |
| But when the previous legislation was packaged together to supersede the Telecommunications Act of 1984, a Pandora's box had been opened. | |
| In the 1984 Telecommunications Act, the legislation specified that any grossly offensive communication must be committed via a public telecommunications system, a system that operated on a one-to-one basis. | |
| When repackaged in the 2003 Communications Act, this was rewritten in section 127 as a public electronic communications network. | |
| It does not appear that at the time anyone gave much consideration to this terminology. | |
| The internet was not nearly as complex as it would become, and people generally lacked expertise with it. | |
| There was no parliamentary debate, so presumably this was just the established language the civil service had been using. | |
| As far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to have been much thought put into it. | |
| And I think appearing to be negligent on this regard is probably the most positive way that you could frame it, because the results are far-reaching and open the door to open authoritarianism. | |
| Before, to be grossly offensive, one must have specifically targeted another person. | |
| Now, to be grossly offensive, one need not target anyone at all. | |
| Any post on social media, whether it is seen by one person or one million people, could, at the discretion of the authorities, be deemed grossly offensive, and the sender of the offensive tweet, post, or video would find themselves on the wrong side of the law. | |
| You're probably aware of the now famous case of Mark Meachin, known online as Count Ancula, and the case of the Nazi pug, but you're probably less familiar with a teenage girl from Liverpool called Chelsea Russell. | |
| In October 2016, a 13-year-old boy called Frankie Murphy was hit and killed when a car accidentally knocked him from his bike. | |
| In tribute to Frankie, Chelsea Russell decided to post a series of rap lyrics to her 100-follower profile on Instagram by US rap artist called Snapdog. | |
| These lyrics were widely shared by his social circle. | |
| The lyrics on Chelsea Russell's account were discovered and reported to Merseyside Police. | |
| The case was picked up by Constable Dominique Walker from a specialist police hate crime unit and a lady whose brother, Anthony Walker, had been the victim of a notorious race hate murder in Merseyside. | |
| When the case was heard in court, it was PC Walker who told the court that she, personally, found the words on Russell's Instagram grossly offensive. | |
| She said, As a black woman, I found the words offensive and upsetting. | |
| The words are offensive to both black and white people. | |
| Chelsea Russell was charged with sending a grossly offensive message by means of a public electronic communications network and found guilty. | |
| She was given a curfew that restricted her movements between 8pm and 8am for 8 weeks and ordered to wear an electronic tag on her ankle for the duration of her sentence. | |
| She was also ordered to pay £500 towards costs and an £85 surcharge. | |
| District Judge Jack McGarver said, There is no place in civil society for language like that. | |
| Everyone with an Instagram account could view this content. | |
| The lyrics also encourage killing and robbing, so are grossly offensive. | |
| A police officer took offence to something sentimental a young lady had posted to social media and invoked the expanded definition of the Communications Act to have that person arrested and charged with a crime. | |
| The judge convicted her on moral grounds based on no objective standard. | |
| These are agents of the liberal state using their institutional power to give the state an ethical dimension and impose their moral standards on the population. | |
| But, at least, this is a reactive mechanism. | |
| While Chelsea probably couldn't have foreseen this and considered posting these lyrics to be an effectively inconsequential act, as these lyrics are regularly sung in venues across the world to tens of thousands of people, she and others at least have the ability to avoid persecution by the ethical state by not posting to social media. | |
| If the desire of the state to engineer the moral standards of society ended there, then it would be bad. | |
| But unfortunately, it gets worse. | |
| If it wasn't enough that the state should react to citizens violating its moral precepts, there is an increasingly sinister agenda underway in Scotland. | |
| One Scotland is a project by the Scottish Government to eradicate discrimination and prejudice, as they state on their website. | |
| Scotland believes in equality for all. | |
| One Scotland celebrates the progress we've already made on equality whilst recognising the work still to be done to achieve a truly inclusive society. | |
| One Scotland embodies the inclusive society we want in Scotland where equality and human rights are respected and every individual and minority group feels valued. | |
| Despite the great progress made to date, discrimination and prejudice do still exist in Scotland. | |
| The Scottish Government continues to work hard to promote equality in Scotland, realising the full potential of human rights in all areas of life. | |
| This agenda has been expressed in numerous ways in Scotland. | |
| In September 2018, the Scottish public found themselves subjected to a moralising attack from the Scottish Government. | |
| Produced by the Leith Agency, an Edinburgh-based communications agency, the Scottish public were bombarded by adverts promoting an intersectional agenda. | |
| Dear homophobes, dear bigots, and dear racists, and continue on to threaten legal action against Scottish citizens. | |
| Though the adverts claim to target behaviour, the imperative is against the opinions of the citizenry itself. | |
| The campaign had no practical justification at all. | |
| The violent behaviour described in the adverts is already illegal. | |
| So what is the need for the campaign in the first place? | |
| In November 2018, the Scottish Government followed up this campaign by imposing a mandatory intersectional agenda across all state schools. | |
| As reported by The Guardian, Scotland will become the first country in the world to embed the teaching of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex rights in the school curriculum, in what campaigners have described as a historic moment. | |
| State schools will be required to teach pupils about the history of LGBTI equalities and movements, as well as tackling homophobia and transphobia and exploring LGBTI identity. | |
| After ministers accepted in full the recommendations of a working group led by the Time for Inclusive Education campaign, there will be no exemptions or opt-outs for the policy, which will embed LGBTI inclusive education across the curriculum and across subjects, and which the Scottish Government believes is a world first. | |
| John Daly, the co-founder of TIE, said, This is a monumental victory for our campaign and a historic moment for our country. | |
| The implementation of LGBTI inclusive education across all state schools is a world first. | |
| In a time of global uncertainty, this sends a strong and clear message to LGBTI young people that they are valued here in Scotland. | |
| This is an ethical agenda, a moral goal that the Scottish Government is imposing on its own society, driven by the ideology of intersectionality, which includes intersectional feminism, race relations, and gender identity, an ideology that the majority of Britain does not appear to support. | |
| While it is difficult to find polling on intersectionality as an ideology, according to a 2016 survey performed by the Fawcett Society, only 7% of Britons describe themselves as feminist. | |
| Opinion polling on the issue of transgenderism also reveals the Scottish Government's ideological worldview is out of step with the rest of society. | |
| As reported by The Times, nearly 7 out of 10 adults in Scotland say parents should be told if their children change gender at school, while 13% disagree and 18% don't know. | |
| Meanwhile, 57% say the parents have a right to be informed about transgender children sharing a room on overnight school trips, 25% disagree, and 18% don't know. | |
| Most adults believe that either the law should stay as it is, only allowing people to change their gender on their birth certificate at age 18 or over, or at not at any age. | |
| Just 6% believe that children should be allowed to change their gender on their certificate at age 12 or over. | |
| Maggie Mellon, one of Scotland's foremost authorities on child welfare and a former vice-chairwoman of the British Association of Social Workers, said that it was heartening but not really surprising to know that most adults disagree with the policies that the government and local authorities and others have been foolish enough to adopt in the face of persistent lobbying by trans activists. | |
| This would probably not be so much of a problem if being transgender did not come with its own set of risks that are broadly ignored by trans activists. | |
| Transitioning to another gender dramatically increases one's risk of mental health disorders, propensity to commit suicide, and hormone therapy poses several physical risks such as an increased chance of stroke and cancer. | |
| I am of the opinion that an adult should be able to do to their own body whatever they wish as long as they are capable of making an informed decision on the subject. | |
| However, a recent whistleblower claimed that activist teachers are grooming autistic children into believing that they are transsexual and figures show that a third of children referred to the NHS's gender identity clinic display moderate to severe autistic traits. | |
| These children are given puberty blockers to delay the natural development of their bodies. | |
| The whistleblower claimed that she was advised not to tell parents or other teachers about the alleged decisions of the children. | |
| The British state is adopting an agenda that goes beyond the liberal model of being the protector of citizens' rights. | |
| Despite the lack of support for intersectionality, the government is taking the shape of Giovanni Gentili's ethical state. | |
| It will propagandise and punish its own citizens according to its own moral standards that are not broadly shared by the rest of society. | |
| This is backed by the full force of the law using an inquisitorial police force. | |
| In the case of Count Ankula and his viral Nazi pug video, there was not even a complaint made against the video itself. | |
| Scottish police appear to have discovered it and actively sought Jewish groups that would take offence in order to be able to present charges against Meetin, who, after two years of legal action, was given an £800 fine or faced jail time. | |
| As of recording, he has still not paid the fine. | |
| On 17 November 2018, the Daily Mail reported that in 2016, police recorded a report of a hate crime regarding an unknown dog that had fouled outside of the victim's address and the victim perceived this to be a racial incident, while another case of an alleged hate crime involved a suspect's dog barking at a victim. | |
| The patent absurdity of a dog committing a hate crime is only overshadowed by the fact the police report actually records the complainant as a victim of the dog fouling their pavement because the complainant perceived the incident to be racially motivated. | |
| And according to hate crime legislation, that's all that's needed. | |
| As London Metropolitan Police state, As | |
| London Metropolitan Police state, to British law, a dog defecating on a pavement can indeed be a racist hate crime, because the bar as to what is and is not a hate crime is defined by the victim's own perception. | |
| This means that, well, literally anything could potentially be a hate crime, so long as the victim perceives it to be such. | |
| Combined with the subjective nature of what constitutes being grossly offensive, the ethical state now has at its disposal the tools with which to persecute almost any person at any time. | |
| As long as they have a social media presence or there is something recorded of which they have done, and with such ideologically driven agents manning the posts, it should come as no surprise that there has been a dramatic rise in hate crimes reported to the police. | |
| As the BBC reports, the number of hate crimes in England and Wales has increased 29%, according to Home Office statistics. | |
| There were 80,393 offences in 2016-2017, compared with 62,518 in 2015-2016, the largest increase since the Home Office began recording figures in 2011 and 2012. | |
| This has not gone unnoticed by the police officers themselves, who regularly complain that time spent investigating hate crimes is time wasted that could otherwise have been spent investigating real crimes and not crimes that are ideologically motivated. | |
| As Richard Cook, chairman of the West Midlands Police Federation warned, I do not believe for one second that this is what the public, outside of the politically correct court of Twitter, expects or wants us to do. | |
| Let us focus urgently on genuine crime, supported by basic evidence. | |
| Let's not encourage people to think we can solve deep social problems or give impolite people manners. | |
| Mr Cook also observed that recent police cuts combined with Sajid Javis' suggestion that misogyny and ageism should also become hate crimes would necessarily draw resources away from crimes that affect public safety such as burglary and assault. | |
| This has been a long time coming. | |
| In 2010, Paul Chambers was arrested for telling a joke on Twitter in a two-year-long case that became known as the Twitter Joke Trial. | |
| Chambers was convicted and it was not until his third and final appeal that his sentence was overturned, probably due to the subsequent public outcry and public support from celebrities such as Stephen Fry and Graham Lynan. | |
| David Alan Green, his solicitor, wrote an article for The Spectator before the final High Court judgment, entitled, The Menace of Section 127, in which he detailed the problems with this section of the 2003 Communications Act and the wider implications for social media use in the UK. | |
| What then constitutes a message or other material of a grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene, or menacing character? | |
| Well, it would appear that it is now effectively whatever the police and CPS says it is, regardless of context, including self-evident jokes and irony. | |
| This is all that would be needed for an arrest or a charge. | |
| All of which is then required is to get a judge to agree with them if the defendant dares to put up a defence at a risk of a higher sentence. | |
| This uncertainty means that the offence has a worryingly low and fluid threshold. | |
| And given that the police and CPS are taking the widest possible view of what constitutes a message sent by means of a public electronic communications network, anything sent over the internet, in other words, then the potential scope of the application of this offence becomes deeply alarming. | |
| We now have, inadvertently, it seems, a wide-ranging offence regarding electronic communications which can be used almost at a whim by police officers seeking easy grounds for arrest or by the CPS wanting a convenient way to proceed with the prosecution when they cannot use other offences. | |
| Whether Paul takes his case to the High Court or not, we appear as a society to have reached the point where any of us can be arrested and potentially convicted just because, in effect, some official takes exception to an unwelcome electronic communication. | |
| And if this is the case, then we have ceased to be a liberal society. | |
| Dear homophobes, racists, bigots, transphobes, and disabledists, there are things this country doesn't welcome. | |
| We don't welcome you attacking people because of their religion, where they're from or the colour of their skin. | |
| We don't welcome you abusing and bullying disabled people. | |
| We don't welcome threatening gay, lesbian or transgender people with verbal or physical abuse. | |
| Haters are not going to hate here. | |
| That's why if we see anything, we're calling the police. | |
| We believe in acceptance. |
Export Selection