[Saline9515]

If you really believe that your fellow citizens can be easily influenced to undertake extreme actions by a twitter post, why not end democracy altogether? Since citizens are seemingly perpetual minors who lack agency over their actions. This is why all authoritarian regimes absolutely love hate speech laws.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> If you really believe that your fellow citizens can be easily influenced to undertake extreme actions by a twitter post

so words have no capability of influencing people? Why speak at all if it can never change anyones opinion?

See what happens when you do reduction to absurdity of any argument?

But seriously, ask yourself: Is the entire ad industry a sham? Are state actors like the kremlin troll farms, the chinese fake newspapers and the cia meme department all wrong and no one can ever be influenced because they are adults and rational actors all the time? Are objectively effective misinformation campaigns like Brexit not proof of succesful compelling speech through channels like cambridge Analytica?

> why not end democracy altogether?

democracy is about empowering people. Leaving people to construct an identity through heaps of misinformation is not democracy, its insane and it cannot work.

> Since citizens are seemingly perpetual minors who lack agency over their actions.

Someone spending billions of dollars in anti intellectualism propaganda, political smear campaigns and capturing media networks is not the fault of the individual citizens, they are not minors they are victims of targetted hostile information hazards.

> This is why all authoritarian regimes absolutely love hate speech laws.

Authoritarian regimes tend to brag about how free their speech is. America spent the 50s chest bumping while sending people to jail over "communist ties" under mccarthyism, they spent the 60s bragging about free speech while sending students to jail for complaining about vietnam, they spent the early 2000s talking about free speech while punishing allies who did not agree with Irak (like France) and sending people to black sites like Guantanamo. And now they brag about free speech while the sitting president Elon decides which individual words get flagged in his social network and the vice president Trump jails 3 different judges over their rulings

you know all that free speech

[Saline9515]

Citizens are supposed to have critical thinking to distinguish what's right and wrong, what's true and false.

Freedom of speech allows to hear different views and apply this critical thinking. The problem is that you seem to know better and want to choose what's allowed and not allowed to say, given your political bias and contempt for your fellow citizens.

Last, democracy is not about empowering (what an empty word...) people, but about managing the various interest to end up with something that is acceptable. If a subgroup is being bullied, it is normal that it expresses its resentment. For instance, when white british people are being mass raped, and in some case, likely eaten[0], with no or little enforcement by the Police due to fear of being seen as "racists".

As a side note, all of the examples that you give are about reducing freedom of speech, so I don't really see your point. You could have cited the Weimar Republic, that had stringent hate speech laws, which did not prevent the access of the NSDAP to power.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearance_of_Charlene_Do...

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Citizens are supposed to have critical thinking

i wish someone didnt dismantle the education department of the federal goverment....

> Freedom of speech allows to hear different views and apply this critical thinking.

thats all well and good except it has never existed in the US, with countless examples of people being jailed for wrongthink it just happened that those people were all leftist. The second accountability crossed the aisle the uproar began. No one gave a shit when people were sent to jail for protesting Vietnam, or when the black panthers where jailed on terrorism charges but the second someone asked if Rupert murdoch should be held accountable for spreading lies for 30 years then it became a chest thumping issue.

> The problem is that you seem to know better and want to choose what's allowed and not allowed to say, given your political bias and contempt for your fellow citizens.

56% of americans cannot read past a 6th grade level. its not contempt, its pity

> democracy is not about empowering

Demos - people. Kratia - power. Gezz someone should tell the greeks they dont even know their language.

> but about managing the various interest to end up with something that is acceptable

that is not democracy, that is politics. Democracy is a form of politics, which has certain principles, like empowering the people (in liberal western democracy this is usually views that spawn from the french revolution, aka humanistic principles, education and voting and creating political groups to represent interests.

> If a subgroup is being bullied, it is normal that it expresses its resentment.

being bullied and FEELING they are bullied are different things, and certain personality disorders, education levels and religious views have a much larger overlap with those feelings. I personally do not care that a bunch of rich christians feel they are the butt of the joke, they have both monetary and political capital their feelings are literally not supported by reality. And arguing about their feelings is a pointless exercise in trying to explain to a entitled child why they are wrong.

> For instance, when white british people are being mass raped

not happening. Source: white british person.

> with no or little enforcement by the Police due to fear of being seen as "racists".

This is also not true. It is a literal talking point of Tommy Robinson, famous neo nazi, over the grooming gang that affected a small town in britain a few years ago.

i know YOU dont care, because you are just here to racist dogwhistle but I will explain the context for the people who might stumble upon your comment.

A small town in england had a serious problem, a group of men where grooming and hurting little girls. The police and local council were aware, however the town being small were scared that such a big scandal would tarnish their reputation. The police force, lacking funding and training fucked up the case beyond recognition and asked for support, the local council told them to keep it under wraps. A reporter a DECADE later brought the case up, as little girls were still being harmed. Due to how the justice works in the UK there is a media blackout (no one is allowed to report while a case is active) in this media blackout Tommy Robinson made up the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist. Once the case was settled, a local council man (who was aware of the problem before it came to light) repeated Tommy Robinsons views as it exculpated him of letting little girls get hurt with his knowledge.

Other mass grooming cases with white perpetrators like the catholic schools in scotland case, reported by the same reporter and also decades long was somehow not national news in the same newspapers that reported the Tommy Robinson "fear of being racist" lines.

A neo nazi made up a lie, based on nothing and a council man who allowed the pain of minors in his council repeated it to not be accountable for his failings as a man. And now youre here a decade later, repeating it because you either know its false but want to spread hate, or dont know its fake and are contradicting your own claims that people are critical and can distinguish true and false.

> As a side note, all of the examples that you give are about reducing freedom of speech

by goverments bragging about their freedom of speech. You said countries who hate freedom of speech are the auth ones, I gave you examples of the country who uses the word freedom more than they use the word "the".

> which did not prevent the access of the NSDAP to power.

The big difference there is that Germany was an incredibly poor and unstable country. Syria is not haviing a civil war due to their freedom of speech laws, and neither did Germany. How free the press is in Sudan is not the reason they are being investigated by the UN for genocide.

[Saline9515]

Then how about empowering them to - speak? Not just say what you believe is allowed to say (this is authoritarian).

I'm talking about the practice of democracy, by the way.

And regarding mass rapes, being British yourself is clearly not a reference for truth. The wikipedia article I linked mentioned a mass grooming case in this town. You can't close your eyes on the evidence each time it doesn't follow your totalitarian narrative and expect that people will just shut up. Or you have to pass laws to do it, which ends up with the toxic situation of the UK, that has nothing to envy to the USSR.

Which is kind of funny given that you have laws to punish people who said something "creating anxiety", which is ... a feeling and totally subjective?

And there is no difference with Germany. Freedom a speech isn't something only for the affluent, first world. And the war in Syria started due to political repression against free speech being expressed against the regime. It didn't end so well for said regime.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> Then how about empowering them to - speak?

The strain of anti intellectualism has been a constant thread... nurtured by the false notion that democracy means my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge - Isaac Asimov

Being able to speak is not the same as having something to say. Knowing when to shut up is an important part of being a rational adult.

> I'm talking about the practice of democracy, by the way.

North Korea practices your democracy, they get to vote. Is that enough?

> he wikipedia article I linked

and I gave you a 3 paragraph explanation on the case. The police never said that, a neo nazi and a failing politician did. You are actively repeating lies while saying people are smart enough to never fall for them, are you just not aware you are being duped?

> You can't close your eyes on the evidence each time it doesn't follow your totalitarian narrative and expect that people will just shut up. Or you have to pass laws to do it, which ends up with the toxic situation of the UK, that has nothing to envy to the USSR.

yeah yeah if we dont allow racists to repeat lies then we end up like Venezuela. I get the vibe, but howabout we jail neo nazis, and hold youtubers to the same standards as news so we dont allow misinformation to spread so wide that people are repeating their narratives years later?

> Which is kind of funny given that you have laws to punish people who said something "creating anxiety", which is ... a feeling and totally subjective?

Those laws were passed by the "anti woke" party to have vague sentencing to punish people like Just Stop Oil and the black rights marches. It is not the kind of "cancel culture gone mad" you think it is, it is the exact kind of entitled, feelings > reality nonsense I am arguing against. You just dont like when the "woke" judges use the rules you wanted passed to hurt others

[Saline9515]

> Given that you seem to like etymology, I'm sure you'll enjoy to know that the modern acception of "intellectuals" was coined by Maurice Barrès. Here is a translation:

"Nothing is worse than these gangs of half-intellectuals. A half-culture destroys instinct without replacing it with consciousness. All these aristocrats of thought are keen to show that they do not think like the vile crowd. We see it all too well. They no longer feel spontaneously in agreement with their natural group and they do not rise to the level of clarity that would restore them to a considered agreement with the mass."

Which is quite in line with your thought that the masses are not to be trusted they must shut up!) and should be shepherded very closely by gifted individuals (like you) to avoid any wrongthink.

> Regarding democracy "empowering" certain people creates as well power imbalances. Thus, you need institutions and boundaries such as a constitution. And freedom of speech allows to express yourself when those imbalances become too strong. Poor white people speaking out in the UK is often bellitled by elites as racism. In reality, it's the result of decades of discrimination against them, starting at school. https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...

> Regarding the grooming gangs, if you had read the wikipedia link, you would have known that Tommy Robinson has nothing to do here and that the case was brought by a feminist activist. Maybe feminists should shut up, too?

> I get that you want to jail many people for thinking and saying things you don't like. Sounds like a totalitarian regime to me. Don't whine because Trump jails pro-palestinian protesters, then?

> I don't care who passed those ridiculous gagging laws in Britain. It doesn't matter. As with Weimar, the same laws were passed by well-meaning centrists, and then used by nazis. History rimes.

[Amezarak]

> A small town in england had a serious problem, a group of men where grooming and hurting little girls.

The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns. It wasn't just Rotherham. This is trivially provable by simply going to the Wikipedia page. It's also still ongoing.

> the unfounded lie that the police did not chase them due to fear of being called racist

This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists, but what was actually found in the council report.

> The report found: "Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-289516...

You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs: https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/18/rotherham-police-chief-admits...

I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this and still post about it. I do think this is one of those stories that is so horrifying it's better not to think about it. But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> The exact same thing happened in dozens of English towns.

and most cases, as the scottish one the perpetrators were white, so the case did nt become a part of the "mass grooming brown people" narrative.

The issue is not minor and the reasons why it happened were apparent, from lack of care, to institutional pride to just abject neglect. Girls in underfunded council homes, at risk of homelessness, in orphanages being taken advantage with video evidence sent to the council, a channel 4 documentary from 2004 and still took a decade and a journalist uncovering it AGAIN for it to finally be tackled.

That is not the result of "staff being nervous bout identifying the origings of the perpetrators" because that came after the thing was uncovered. There was a video, sent to the council that was ignored.

> This was in fact not an unfounded lie made up by right-wing extremists

It was constantly, uncessantily repeated by Tommy Robinson and his ilk. Some lovely "reporters" from some online media also tweeted about it, they now have jobs in places like GB News.

> what was actually found in the council report.

the report that came after the trial? The report that could use that excuse to ignore their decade of abject neglect to the suffering of those girls?

Yeah I am sure there are plenty of other excuses in the report, you know where there was 0 mention of the "fear of being racist", in the channel 4 documentary from 2004 that dealt with it while it was happening.

> what was actually found in the council report.

Here just if we are quoting the report let me just jump to the conclusions

"The Jay report found no evidence of children's child social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators".

Individual reports of people feeling nervous do not somehow make the racist narrative true, the systemic review of 1400 cases showed that it was not the cause of the mishandling. A judge IGNORED a letter from an abused girl, like being scared of being called racist never was the reason

> You can also find stories featuring the very words of police chiefs

The police were found REPEATEDLY fucking up the case beyond recognition, the initial inquiery in 2001, the weir report, literally stopped reporting to the police finding their intervention from "poor professionalism practice from early stages" to end up not even sharing information due to "police response being so often inappropiate".

The Jay report in 2013 found that the police dismissed victims deeming them "undesirebles" and staff who reported the issue where met with indifference and scorn.

The police that ignored 1400 kids being hurt in their town want you to believe they were too scared to stop it?

Btw the report was so damming that the chief of police was "asked to step down". so yeah def it was the woke people not letting him prosecute that was the issue.

> I think it's very concerning that you could be so dangerously misinformed on this

I am not. The narrative has been taken 20 years to build, the reports bring up "fear of racial tension" in increasing order, from not appearing in weird report in 2001 to being the subject of most of the complaints the iopc found in 2021. That gradual build up of "oh we wouldve stopped it but we didnt wanna upset the pakistanis" is not but the increasing deflection of responsabilities by members of councils and police who had the means and simply did not care. They let girsl in vulnerable posiitons be hurt, knowing full well it was happening and then they scrambled for a scapegoat, and the scapegoat was "we would be called racist".

Again there are plenty of grooming cases in the UK, the glasgow case, the well cathedral case etc. all long loong case, all with the police knowing, all ignored. But those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men, which is unsurprising as they are the mayority in the country. Most of the victims of CSA are kids in vulnerable positions, drugs, lack of parents, behavioural issues, homeless and those are the groups least likely to be helped by police. Put 2 and 2 together and you see why they get hurt and why the police fail. Then when it all goes public, they scramble and in this case Tommy Robinson came up with the Asian grooming gangs moniker and the tabloids repeated it and now a decade later suddenly every cop wants to say it was the fear of being called racist why they did not answer to the people in danger.

You can check the weir report and see that it's not there. and then in 2014 AFTER the media blackout and the tommy robinson campaign it appears for the first time. and suddenly in 2020 it is mentioned multiple times.

> But just dismissing it as insane racist nonsense is even worse.

Its not dismissing it. It just about the ACTUAL changes needed to affect change. The inquiry found that social care staff was underfunded, that the police routinely ignored evidence, that they ignored video evidence, that their behaviour was unprofessional and inadequate. The Sarah Evrand report found the same failings, a completely inadequate police force full of racist, mysoginistic behaviour that leads to poor performance.

You could kick out every asian person of the UK and you will still have 16 year long grooming cases if the police do not implement needed changes. Because the glassgow case was also almost a decade long and just as bad as Rotherham in the most harrowing cases. And despite being white as snow they were monsters and the police failed to protect those kids too

[Amezarak]

Most of the dozens of towns in the scandals have the same perpetrators. It is a qualitatively different issue: we’re talking about organized gangs of foreign-origin perpetrators raping thousands of girls in each of these towns.

This is clearly not the same sort of thing as the “usual” case of individuals abusing their power and trust over children in their care.

It takes very little work to find more and more examples. Why are you pretending they don’t exist?

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_sex_gang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bristol_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derby_child_sex_abuse_ring https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aylesbury_child_sex_abuse_ring

The list goes on and on and reading through the cases, most of the convictions/arrests got only the tip of the iceberg, as they themselves say.

Edit: I just looked up this Glasgow case and it’s not even close to the same scale, Rotherham was literally three orders of magnitude worse in terms of victims. Of course a criminal ring that victimizes 1000x the number of children will get more attention.

Edit2: of course, you can google almost any UK city and find a grooming gang story - here’s one where asylum seekers ran a massive grooming gang in Glasgow, much bigger than the case you mentioned: https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5215881/police-scotlan...

> those cases dont make the Daily Mirror and Sun front page somehow. Most of the perpetrators of CSA are white men

I’m not sure why you mention this given you immediately dismiss it. The per capita rate is not even comparable. To take Rotherham, Wikipedia reports it’s only 5% Pakistani and the population is about 100k. And the “conservative estimate” is that the gang there abused more than a thousand girls. Of course taken over the whole country we would expect the main perpetrators of any general crime category to be the native people - but that’s an absolutely bonkers per capita discrepancy and for some reason people are afraid to point out there’s an obvious cultural problem relating to one specific group of people. Instead you just want to say “well English people do it too” (almost never in these organized gangs vs single abusers) and “well if the cops were better” instead of “our policies introducing these people here in combination with our attitudes about policing and race caused this.”

You certainly don't have to convince me British police are among the worst in the world, it's obvious the British institutions hate lower class British people and there's plenty of videos of police going hard after people for not paying their TV license, criticizing the school board, or livestreaming unapproved opinions while ignoring murders, rapes etc. It certainly isn't just these cases, they apparently also let e.g., the Russian mob murder people, but god forbid you press send on a bad tweet.