Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.
The focus this time: The Hushing of H8rz.
First, a little mood music:
If a society is one “where freedom of expression is valued”, then you don’t need to justify what you say, like in Canada:
“Canadian comedian Mike Ward has lost his appeal and has been ordered by a Quebec judge to pay $35,000 because of a joke he told about a disabled boy.”
“Ward was ordered to pay $35,000 to Jeremy Gabriel, who suffers from a genetic disorder that causes facial deformity and affects his hearing, due to a joke the comedian told at shows between 2010 and 2013.
“…
“The joke in question was regarding Gabriel’s disability. In 2005, Gabriel sang to Pope Benedict and Celine Dion to flesh out his dream of becoming an international singer.
“Ward’s jokes called Gabriel a bad singer, stating that he was ‘terminally ill’ and that Gabriel not passing away meant that his Make a Wish’ was invalid. Gabriel was not actually terminally ill, as Gabriel’s genetic disease—Treacher Collins syndrome—does not generally have an effect on lifespan. He was also not a Make-a-Wish kid, as Ward was embellishing the story for the sake of the joke.
“Ward’s jokes make have been tasteless, but does that mean he should have to pay $35,000? I don’t think so, but the Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ruled the joke was discrimination against Gabriel and his parents and ordered Ward to pay damages for ‘making discriminatory comments regarding Jéremy Gabriel, infringing his right to equality.’”
How bad is censorship in the U.K.? So bad that even their high court was taken aback as what the police there were doing, which was likened to the Cheka or the Gestapo:
“Harry Miller, himself a former police officer and now a businessman, was reportedly harassed by the police at his workplace for poking fun at the notion of self-assigning one’s gender. ‘We need to check your thinking,’ one of the officers told the 54-year-old defendant when they showed up at his workplace, Daily Telegraph reported. The local police also approached the directors of his company in an apparent attempt to intimidate him.
“‘I was assigned mammal at birth, but my orientation is fish. Don’t mis-species me,’ Miller had written in one of his seemingly harmless tweets. He was also charged with “hate incident” for retweeting a poem deemed offensive to transgenders.
“Police Constable Mansoor Gul admitted ‘educating’ Miller on the transgender issue. ‘What you need to understand is that you can have a fetus with a female brain that grows male body parts and that’s what a transgender person is,’ he reportedly told Miller.”
If you don’t call a man a woman if he claims to be, then welcome to years in a Norwegian jail.
“The latest example is Norway, which has just amended its penal code, first passed in 1981, to outlaw even ‘private remarks’ that the ruling class considers offensive. Reuters reports: ‘People found guilty of hate speech face a fine or up to a year in jail for private remarks, and a maximum of three years in jail for public comments, according to the penal code.’
“What makes this amendment particularly gratuitous is that Norway is, as Reuters puts it, ‘one of the most liberal countries in Europe for LGBT+ people.’ The country operates on a full system of self-identification, and no medical proof is required to change one’s legal gender. LGBTQ+ ideology has been mainstreamed in every sphere of life imaginable. Still, radical gender activists will not be at rest until every private citizen repudiates biological truth and relinquishes his every doubt about their dogma.”
TTFN.
