My autonomy has never been infringed by someone expressing an opinion, however hateful or stupid.
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Right. Like Germany outlawing Nazi speech. And the US outlawing confederate flags, statues, and the like.
ETA: I don’t think the US should outlaw any of those, I was just struck by the parallel as I was typing.
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I don’t think that’s how rights work.
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If you want to speak crap, that’s one thing. If you target that crap at another human being, like this woman did to the police officer, that is assault. Unacceptable. Should not be protected. Ever.
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The point is that rights don’t exist. They’re a promise from an authority not to oppress you in a certain way - they’re a phantasm. You can believe they’re real all you want, but the only thing you can count on is the autonomy and agency you take for yourself. That includes defending your community from racism.
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Let’s not confuse insult with assault. The price you pay for the right to express your own thoughts is that other people will hurt you, from time to time, by expressing theirs.
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So other people have been fined for verbal racial abuse, but do the same thing to a cop and get prison time?
BLUE LIVES MATTER, I guess.
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Oldiebutagoodie:
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American people of color didn’t actually get equal protection under the law until 54 years ago, and that’s only counting the places that actually complied with Federal law.
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Yes and no.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act was basically a repeat of the Civil Rights Act of 1866.
Both times, it had more substance on paper than in reality.
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I understand fully what the intended point was to be. I am more interested in how existing power hierarchies replicate themselves in societies where widespread change has recently been wrought.
Here, for example, it appears saying awful, racist things to a cop is punished more severely than saying awful, racist things to a civilian. That South African society has adopted a pro-police bias so shortly removed from the police actually enforcing apartheid laws is more interesting to me than South Africa’s quite understandably enacted hate speech laws.
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OK, I understand that perspective.
So, if I am hearing you correctly, when you say “your rights end where my autonomy begins”, you aren’t suggesting a limit on rights, that is, you aren’t saying we should ask the authority to oppress us so that we don’t hear idiotic opinions. What you are saying is more along the lines of “I’ll punch the Nazi.”
Is that right?
I can live with that.
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The song is mostly ragging on Afrikaners, who were regarded rightly or wrongly as the driving force behind apartheid (itself an Afrikaans word). The chorus sing in Afrikaans accents and wear rugby shirts, because in South Africa rugby is associated with Afrikaners while cricket is associated with English-speakers.
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It sounds as if what you are saying is that (a) all relationships in any society are power relationships and (b) if you perceive that you are being oppressed, the only useful response is to exercise your right, oops, power of self defense.
Okay I guess. But in my country there are about three hundred million people with a widely differing range of views and many of them are very well equipped for self defense. The result if they all adopt your point of view should be…interesting.
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I’m pretty sure that’s not a thing that happened.
There’s some kind of regulation preventing them from being placed in some government-owned cemetaries or something? They’re not outlawed in general.
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Of course the Nazis can then punch back. This could lead to 1931 Germany, with the Rotfront and the Sturmabteilung duking it out in the streets. Did not turn out well.
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I’d argue that they all had some positive impact at first, but in 1866, that was enforced by the reconstruction regime built by radical republicans. African Americans made strides locally and even in congress during reconstruction, which a lot of people tend to forget. They think that segregation happened immediately after the civil war, and that’s not the case. The first black man in congress was during reconstruction. The 20th century civil rights acts also had some positive impact, such as with people actually being able to vote again, but once again, things are backsliding pretty bad. We’re back to the same levels of school segregation as we had in 1968.
This is why history matters, of course. Because although I don’t believe history repeats, it certainly echoes.
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Fuck that noise. Language matters, because language is our primary basis for connection and socialization, and being isolated through language has actual fucking consequences for people.
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Sometimes I like to remember this (reformatted in a gross violation of its original rhetorical strength):
There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as:
- the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.
- as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities.
- as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one.
- our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating “For Whites Only”.
- a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote
- a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote.
It’d be nice if America could at least get through that list.
Yeah, “good triumphs over evil” is a fairy tale, sometime evil wins. That’s a pretty shoddy reason not to fight, though. (Though obviously if we want to stop rising white supremacy simply punching people is not going to be sufficient)
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On the one hand, I find the lady’s conduct disgusting and I wish things like that never happened.
On the other hand, she was prosecuted for her hate. Something that wouldn’t have happened 15 or 20 years ago. I think South Africa has come a long way. Still a long way to go, but at least the country appears to be moving in the right direction.
The US is not moving in the right direction.
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