Have you even read the article? Because all answers to your questions are there. Oh and btw, there are more types of people on boingboing than just ‘USians’. I, for example, am actually German.
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Sicher hab ich den Artikel gelesen. Von Autobahn oder Landstrasse steht da nix, da steht sidewalk. Sharpira hat das auf den Platz vor Twitters Eingang gesprüht. Fun fact (wenn ich mich nicht irre aus dem SPON-Artikel dazu): the next day, the public space had been cleaned - but only the part near Twitters front door.
My disclaimer was just that, a disclaimer. We are, after all, using an anglophone forum, frequented by many US Americans who are sometimes bewildered about what’s covered by free speech and what’s not in Europe, and specifically in Germany.
And I still don’t understand your usage of the term misdirected here. Would you care to elaborate? I might just be lost in translation. After all, I’m a German native speaker, not native anglophone.
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Sorry, I prefer not to use my native language in an english-speaking forum. A matter of courtesy to other readers.
Anyway: what did I mean by misdirected? I meant that the foul language that was initially directed at some particular people are now repacked to be directed at those who created a forum for these slurs: Twitter.
Get a street artist to draw unsolicited dick pics on the offending sender’s home
So it’s actually not mis-directed any more, right?
Anyway, we could argue that it’s redirected, but this would mean the content would now be directed to twitter, which is clearly not the case. Otherwise, this would actually be punishable by law due to the fact that inflammatory and derogatory content).
I don’t see why a law against racial slurs in public becomes absurd when someone quotes said slurs while not making them their own. The law is quite probably not applicable here, as I suggested in my initial response…
No need to get so anal about it. Mis-directed, re-directed. I think you got me.
Oh dear. Well in that case, it would be impossible for someone to play, for example, a Nazi on stage or in a movie, because everything he would say would have to be taken at face value.
Yeah, well… that’s our typical German approach at fighting discrimination: just put a thin veil of censorship on people’s freedom of expression: problem solved.
Listen, I really didn’t understand what you were saying in the first place, so no need to get personal. Also, you seem to misunderstand what I wrote. Let me re-iterate: in this case, it’s even unlikely that there is a case which would end in court, and of so, I bet the court would rule in favour of the artist. But there are good reasons that showing off racial insults (and Nazi symbols, since you brought up Nazis on stage) is illegal under current German law. The law is far from absurd, and also doesn’t get absurd in said case.
It might be that I simply misunderstood your phrasing. But then again, your last line seems to implicate that you think that racial slurs should be covered under freedom of opinion, or expression. That’s bullshit.
The thin veil here is the veil of civilisation under which barbarism stares into our face. It never goes away, but we might as well try not feed out and celebrate it under a different name.
What I am saying is that the German state has always used this thin veil of censorship to cover up the existing problem of racial hate and discrimination. It hardly ever went any further. As to the problem of free expression vs punishment of verbal barbarism, it’s a dilemma and both sides have a point in saying that either full freedom of expression is indispensable to a free society or control is.
I am personally unable to find a definitive standpoint for myself which, again, is quite untypical for our culture that always pushes us to pick a solution and from then on claim that it’s the right one. More often than not, we’re actually much less sure than we pretend to be, but I tend towards absolute freedom of expression with the exclusion of direct ad hominem and incitation to violence.
Just look at how the neo-nazis use the fat that it’s forbidden to deny the holocaust for their own propaganda means and how that prevents an open discussion which would certainly result in their ideas being publicly crushed under the evidence of nazi crimes and also how they are able to turn the tables on their adversaries by claiming there is no freedom to tell ‘the truth’. The internet has become a vector for this problem and more restrictions, as we are on to now, are not going to be the solution.
The argument that neo-nazis don’t go away by making their propaganda illegal has been put forward many times, and I consider it to be a trueism. But the alternative approach, making it legal to wear the Nazi cross and to openly deny the holocaust, wouldn’t make them go away as well.
I, for one, don’t believe that they have more success due to laws restricting denying the atrocities committed during the third Reich.
Defining at which point my free speech violates the human dignity of others is difficult, and has sometimes to be discussed. But I tend to accept that my freedom ends at points where it causes harm to individuals, or groups of people, or society as a whole. (The latter is the most difficult to define, however, I think it might be important to remember). Racial slurs, directed at a specific person as well as directed at the general public, do cause real harm. And protecting minorities is an important societal achievement.
We can easily discuss if blasphemy laws, the weird lesè-majestè laws we just got rid of in part and several other laws protecting the actual majority, or those in power, are good for something or should be dumped. But in case of racial slurs?
No, sir.
That said, I come back to my geo-referenced disclaimer: unlike the US, most of continental Europe has law modelled on the French Code Civil. This leads to important cultural differences when discussing free speech, I think. Given that Twitter and Facebook, and all the other, smaller platforms, are US companies also culturally, this leads to problems. Attempts like the recent “lex Twitter” in Germany are quite short-sighted and obviously motivated by the upcoming elections, but I wouldn’t dismiss them as total garbage, and decidedly not as censorship. It’s a feeble attempt to motivate the companies to get their shit done in the language they might understand: money.
But don’t get anyone with a law background started on the matter; I guess it’s not worth the paper it’s written on.
However: it’s written. And there you have it. Cultural difference. You might call it anal, I call it the rule of law. 
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