Comedian Mark Meechan, who publishes content under the name Count Dankula, had been found guilty under the Communications Act for a video involving his girlfriend’s pug performing Nazi salutes and has now been fined £800 for being “grossly offensive.”Nazi Germany pursued 'Hitler salute' Finnish dog: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-12139150Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
So the verdict has come down and the youtuber known as Count Dankula, also known as Mark Meacham in real life, has been found guilty of a hate crime because he posted a video wherein he had taught his girlfriend's dog, which is cute as a button, to do Nazi salutes and so on to respond to Nazi slogans because he wanted to turn the cutest thing in the known universe into the most despicable thing in the known universe,
which would be a Nazi and Yeah, not my particular taste for humor at all, but he has been found guilty of a hate crime.
He has fortunately avoided jail time, although the last two years, as the court has wound, as the case has wound its way through the Dickensian Labyrinth lower intestine London subway map of the UK court system, the two years of that has been punishment enough, I'm sure, but the actual punishment is an 800 pound fine, it's about 1100 dollars.
Now, this is terrible on many levels, of course.
The UK is a precedent-based system.
They don't have the same foundational rights as America.
So it's a precedent-based legal system, which means once you get one precedent past the goalie, then everything is open season from there on in.
So that is a huge issue.
The UK is significantly ramping up It's a deployment of the Armed Might of the States to counter crap posting on the internet.
Agents from over 29 forces arrested over 3,300 Britons just last year for internet trolling and so on.
And over two years, that's an increase of almost 50%.
And half of those arrests have led to actual prosecutions.
The Times of London actually had to dig these figures up through Freedom of Information Act requests.
The loosely termed conservative named Amber Rudd, she's the Home Secretary.
The conservatives have been in charge of Britain since 2010, has recently launched a new police unit with the sole goal of going after internet trolls.
And... Basically, they're going to try and harass, arrest, and perhaps even convict, of course, people who are annoying on the internet.
And the whole point of this, of course, is to spread these chilling waves of fear to everyone so they don't end up Speaking freely and being edgy when it comes to their communications.
There is a Communications Act of 2003, Section 127, declares it illegal intentionally to, and I quote, cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another with online posts.
It's illegal to, and I quote, cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another.
This is the criminalization of provoking hysteria.
And what that means, of course, is that hysterics have now been weaponized.
People who are easily offended have now been weaponized.
are now very well armed.
And this is a great tragedy, of course, coming from the UK, which was one of the major forces that brought free speech to the modern world.
Go back to John Milton's defense of free speech called Ariopagitica.
It's an amazing document.
And, of course, the whole point of scrubbing the history of the UK from the UK has been to have people scorn the gifts that their ancestors fought and bled and died to hand them.
So the issue with all of this, of course, Is that it is an awful, horrifying, and terrible thing to criminalize speech.
There is a foundational moral principle called the non-aggression principle, which is that it is immoral to initiate the use of force against others.
Now, being offended by someone, they have not initiated the use of force against you.
They have not. Like, if you kidnap someone and force them to watch your videos, then you have initiated force by confining them.
If you post something on the internet, you are not initiating the use of force against anyone.
This was, of course, no incitement of violence.
This was no equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater, which has never, to my knowledge, actually happened or been adjudicated on, but it's a standard example of limits of free speech.
And what has happened now, of course, is that people who are upset can deploy their own personal army of police to go after those who have upset them.
This is crazy. I mean, this is going to end so terribly, it's hard to even express just how badly this is going to end.
It's illegal to, quote, cause annoyance, inconvenience, or needless anxiety to another, end quote.
What about commercials?
Do they not cause inconvenience and annoyance?
You understand that this is a completely subjective and fundamentally totalitarian.
It's not even a law.
A law is supposed to have some objective definition, wherein you know whether or not You are in compliance with the law or not in compliance with the law.
Law is about shoplifting.
Fairly clear. Don't pocket the starbursts on the way out and you're pretty much good to go.
But when laws are based upon the emotional reactions of unknown people in your neighborhood or in your country, Well, where does this end?
Where does this go? This simply is a way of policing and enforcing the spontaneous thoughts and expressions of people so that they can communicate with each other.
Now, this is going to be selectively applied.
Is anyone particularly surprised that it is, say, a white male who is being targeted for this kind of stuff?
Now, a woman was recently targeted as well because she posted the lyrics to a rap song which included the n-bomb And now there's a fine, there's community service and so on.
What does this mean? Does this mean that if you're a rapper and go to England and perform in public and drop the N-bomb that you can now be prosecuted?
Well, we would never expect that, right?
So this is now going to be selectively applied.
And it's always struck me as an astounding phenomenon.
And it just comes out of the fact that we're not taught to think even remotely logically these days.
But it is an astounding thing.
To be offended by somebody else's speech and the selective way in which this offense is prosecuted is something astounding to see.
And the way that you really understand what this is, is the concept of white privilege is extraordinarily offensive to me.
But nobody cares about that, you understand, right?
I mean, it is very offensive. The concept of patriarchy as a white male.
White privilege and patriarchy are highly offensive to me.
To say that I am somehow wrong or bad or evil and so on because of my race and my gender, neither of which I have any choice or control over, is an astounding phenomenon.
It is sexist and racist, but...
It is something that is not only protected, but is openly encouraged and taught all the way from primary school through postgraduate school.
It is an incitement often to aggression, to hostility, to attack, to denigration.
But it's not only defended, it's publicly paid for and promoted.
Now, when you have, of course, in the UK, these Muslim Pakistani rape gangs that have raped and tortured upwards of hundreds of thousands of young white British girls, when you have knife attacks occurring on a continual basis, In London. I mean, I grew up in London.
I remember, distinctly remember, as a six-year-old, a seven-year-old, an eight-year-old, wandering around town, getting off and on buses, going, swimming, going to parks, never had a moment's thought about danger or personal security or worry or fear or any of those things.
The only thing I remember as a kid was fear that the IRA would put bombs in shopping bags, in bus shelters and so on, and being told to be aware of all of that.
But, of course, going after a speech.
Look, if you are a policeman, you don't really want to do a whole lot of dangerous work, right?
So is it easier to go break down the door of somebody who's typed something, quote, offensive on the internet, or is it more difficult and dangerous to go after pedophile child rape gangs?
It's not that hard. You'd much rather go kick in the door of somebody who posted something that someone finds offensive than go and deal with actual criminals who can be quite dangerous, who can target your family, and whom, of course, this is the big problem with British policing, and we know this since the grooming scandals, the child rape scandals started in the 1980s, that they were not prosecuted because of fears that happened.
The perpetrators were non-white and therefore the concerns of racism.
And what that means, of course, is that police would much rather, it's always safer to go after a white person than a non-white person, so this is all going to be selectively applied.
And this is the thing, I don't know, it's sort of like an intelligence test or an IQ test or something like that, because the reality is, when you give the government the power to do something, The question is always what you have to ask yourself.
I mean, there's tons of stuff that I find offensive that you find offensive and so on.
First of all, you could avoid it.
Second of all, maybe the people who were offending you have a point.
You know what was really offensive when it first came out?
Abolitionism. The idea that slavery was immoral.
Massively offensive to people.
You know what else was offensive? Equal rights for women.
A lot of people were highly Offended by that and a lot of people were highly offended by the end of Jim Crow and segregation and more equal rights for blacks and other groups within the West.
All of these things were offensive.
So the idea that if you don't have offense you don't have progress.
This is so foundational to understand.
A new idea is in general startling to people and they will often recoil and the way of course you keep New ideas or rational ideas or genuinely progressive ideas away from people is you you mind their personalities with hyper-emotional reactions to anything approaching the truth and that way you can keep new ideas rational ideas from battling the irrational demons planted in the minds of children and young people often by state education but Smart people say,
okay, well, it's tempting. I understand it's the ring of power.
It's tempting to use the state to suppress speech.
It's tempting because we all have speech that we consider so egregious that we'd like it to not be around.
I mean, of course, it's natural.
But it's an intelligence test because you understand, if you have any kind of brains, that if you give the state this power, the fundamental test is, would you be willing to give this power to your worst enemy?
Would you be willing to give this power to your worst enemy?
Well, some yes.
When it comes to prosecuting a murderer, right?
Or a suspected murderer.
Yes, I would be willing to give my worst enemy the power to put somebody through the court system where there's significant evidence that they committed a murder.
Absolutely. Same thing with theft.
Same thing with rape. Same thing with assault.
I'm perfectly comfortable giving my worst enemy that power.
Hmm, but you see, here's where the great challenge lies, that if we now say that speech which people find offensive can be criminalized and people can be dragged through the court for years and pay an enormous amount in legal fees and then be hit with a fine and so on, would you give this power to your worst enemy?
There are ideologies I find absolutely repulsive in the world, who I guess I'm natural enemies of, and they're natural enemies of me, and I want to Fight out the battle of ideas in the public arena using the wit, the eloquence, the sophistry, even sometimes always based on rationality that is at my command.
That's what I want. I want to engage in the public sphere and sometimes the private sphere with the people I disagree with so that the better ideas can win the day.
But... If you are going to surrender free speech, please understand that sooner or later and almost always sooner rather than later, the group you find the most egregious is going to gain control of that state power and use it against you.
That is foundational to what it means to give up free speech.
It is not your friends who are going to be in charge of free speech investigations, of free speech arrests, of violations of hate laws or hate speech laws.
It is not your friends.
It is not you. It is not people you agree with.
It is not your buddies. It is not your companions.
It is not your ideological mates who are going to be in charge of that.
It is almost invariably and inevitably and sometimes quite quickly going to be those who consider the worst of the worst who are going to have this power over you and that is why other than the general principle that speech does not violate the non-aggression principle speech is not the initiation of force Well, that's the intelligence test.
And of course, you know, bad people will come along and say, hey, give me this power, and it will only ever be used to take care of people who are really bad, who are just plain wrong, who are nasty, and they will, of course, select the least popular people in order to get your agreement to limiting speech with the power of the state.
And this is why we must defend this on principle.
This is not a joke I would have made in a million years.
This is not a joke I think is funny, but this is the principle.
This is the principle. They come for the people you like the least, then they come for the people you like the most, then they come for you.
It's inevitable. Now, in case you want to know just how far England, the UK, well, Europe as a whole, has drifted from the concept of free speech.
I'm going to tell you a story, but first let me just give you one other principle I wanted to remind you of.
Free speech arises from humility.
The humility of saying, I do not know the best way that society should be organized.
I do not know the truth.
I do not have a monopoly on the truth.
And We must open the gates to everyone to participate in the public sphere so that the very worst ideas, the most irrational, anti-rational, horrible, horrifying ideas can be given their day in the central square, can be shone with the light of public interaction so that they can be exposed and routed as the terrible, bad, wrong ideas that they are.
We want to invite people into the public sphere that we find the most egregious so that the anti-rationality of their arguments can be displayed.
I mean, the flat earth is, to me, a completely ridiculous notion.
And, you know, one of my most popular videos was me listening to a guy explain to me why the earth is flat and going through the arguments and, of course, Of course.
Now, I was not expecting to have my mind changed, and it certainly wasn't.
But yeah, we invite the people into the public sphere so that if their ideas are offensive but right, then they can begin to hold sway.
If their ideas are offensive but wrong and wrong, then we can forget the offense, we can simply expose them as false.
The moment you start excluding people from the public sphere, you understand, they don't vanish.
They don't disappear. They disappear from view.
But that doesn't mean that they disappear from society.
It simply means that they create their own subcultures.
They find ways around these, and then what happens is they begin to discuss these ideas, terrible and anti-rational as they may be.
They begin to discuss these ideas, reinforce each other, and there's nobody who's bungeeing in to set them straight.
There's no public arena, public sphere.
Wherein their ideas can be exposed and dismantled.
They do not go away.
They do not vanish.
They simply go underground and spread that way out of sight of public view.
It is an extraordinarily dangerous position to take.
So, just how far has the UK, has Great Britain drifted?
1941. England and its allies are in a desperate struggle against National Socialism, against Hitler's National Socialists.
Now, Finland was fairly favorable to the Nazis and there was a German Vice-Consul who reported a terrible, terrible act, 1941, before the tide had even turned in the Second World War.
There was a Finnish man named Tor Borg, and he was called in for questioning.
And they demanded to know of this Finnish fellow Tor Borg, was it true that his dog had, upon hearing the word Hitler, made a mockery of Adolf Hitler by performing a Nazi salute.
In Nazi-friendly Finland, 1941, this guy's dragged in for questioning.
After a few weeks' review and consideration, not two years, you understand, after a few weeks' review and consideration, the case collapsed, because there were no witnesses.
So, a paper was found in the German Foreign Office, which said, regarding this affair, and I quote, Considering that the circumstances could not be solved completely, it is not necessary to press charges.
It is not necessary to press charges, said the Nazi-friendly Finnish government.
So England, Great Britain, the Commonwealth, spent untold amounts of blood and treasure.
