There is a new controversy in Great Britain over the expanding criminalization of speech. An arrest has been made after an intensive investigation of napkins left at a Chinese restaurant containing racist language. The napkin was left by a young couple at the Hong Kong Star, a restaurant in Dumfries, Scotland. As vile as the language was on the napkin, the investigation and arrest illustrates the degree to which speech is being criminalized in Great Britain. Warning: this article has profane and racist language below.
The napkin reads:
“What a dirty squint eyed little fuck he was, the wee premature dwarf tell me the wait would be half a fucking hour,’ the note said. ‘The shitheep facility shuts at two and there was no a heartbeat in the bit. Were you no wanting any service you wee gook? ‘Done me dirty am no happy.”
Staff posted the note on Facebook and declared “Whoever you are you are no longer welcome in the facility.” That is, of course, perfectly appropriate and fair. However, the offensive incident was quickly converted into a criminal investigation.
We have previously discussed the alarming rollback on free speech rights in the West, particularly in France (here and here and here and here and here and here) and England ( here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here). Much of this trend is tied to the expansion of hate speech and non-discrimination laws. Once allowed to criminalize speech, individuals and groups demand more and more prohibitions. England is in a free fall over free speech and this week is yet another example. The police have moved to make wolf whistles the latest category of hate speech.
Like other nations before it, Great Britain will not eradicate hate by criminalizing hate speech. Instead, these criminal investigations have only heightened the appetite for greater and greater censorship of any speech deemed offensive or hostile to any group.
No news report of arrest in Dumfries. Jonathan Turley was snookered by a Faux Neuz site.
“Arrest over ‘ Offensive Napkin Comment'”-
BBC NEWS, MARCH 30, 2018
Looks like BBC NEWS got “snookered”, too.
Missed that. Thanks.
According to Police Scotland the perps have not been located.
And to my surprise, such a napkin appears to have been left in the establishment.
See Mark Steyn: in Britain, the police fight anything but crime.
David Benson – I hope he wrote with his non-dominant hand. 😉 This is one perp I do not want to be caught.
CV Brown – if you said with a Scottish brogue (sp?) you would stay out of moderation, too. 😉
CV Brown – I do not go to the Chinese buffet just because I do not want to find out how the cats and dogs are tasting today. 😉
Reblogged this on The Inquiring Mind and commented:
Uk decline accelerated by the continued oppression of speech and thought
Most commenters here were suckered in.
The appropriate response was for the owner to ban the patron from returning, although it doesn’t sound like he would be a repeat customer anyway.
Speech should not be criminalized, no matter how repugnant I, or anyone else, finds it. Do you know how many times people are offensive to others in their day to day lives, on social media, or in person? People say horrid things. If you are going to criminalize offensive speech than anytime anyone mocks Trump or his voters, they go to jail, when Hillary offends half the women of the nation, she goes to jail (finally!), anytime someone writes something about white men, they go to jail, along with all of the run-of-the-mill bias and bigotry you see every day. Do we really want to go down the road of the speech police, or can we just handle ugliness when we find it like civilized people?
Britain has had a ‘Conservative’ government since 2010. The British ‘conservatives’, like their American and Canadian counterparts, are adept at one thing: spinning their wheels.
So, are you implying that conservatives support political correctness and speech censorship?
Liberals once defended the First Amendment and free speech but that group has been hijacked by the anti-white, open-borders, extreme feminist, LGBT consortium that seeks to elevate to protected status all speech that supports their agenda while silencing anyone who dares express dissimilar views. The U.S. Democrat Party along with their sycophants in the entertainment and media industry have hitched themselves to that wagon. Collectively, they are the ‘grease’ beneath the spinning wheels.
However, I do blame conservative leaders for lacking the courage to defend free speech. Many are more concerned with reelection than with defending the constitutional rights of those they are supposed to represent.
I’ve been alive long enough to know that the only way to turn this around is with money. Politicians suddenly grow a backbone when they are lured with the prospect of continuous campaign contributions. George Soros and the entertainment industry understand how the game is played. So does the NRA.
The American Civil Liberties Union is supposed to defend first amendment rights but they are all too frequently marching in lockstep with the very consortium that seeks to undermine freedom of speech. The First Amendment Coalition exists primarily to defend journalists and members of academia in freedom of speech cases, i.e., the consortium sympathizers. The only one I’ve found thus far that is worth investigating by individuals concerned with the continued eroision of our first amendent rights is the Campaign for Liberty.
“However, I do blame conservative leaders for lacking the courage to defend free speech. Many are more concerned with reelection than with defending the constitutional rights of those they are supposed to represent.”
As they say in New Orleans, True Dat!
And the ACLU long ago deserted defense of the First Amendment for everyone but liberals.
Turley needs to take a closer look at free speech in peril here in the USA! As I evoked several years ago, his own university has a dismal free speech record: thefire.org/schools/george-washington-university/. Why does he remain silent about that? It would be a very good personal experience testing of the waters of democracy in his own backyard, if he stood up to denounce GWU’s speech codes. Here in my neighborhood, I was permanently banned from Sturgis Library w/o due process or even warning. My tax dollars help support the fascist library director, Lucy Loomis, who still proclaims as Chief Hypocrite at the Helm that “libraries should provide materials and information presenting ALL points of view” (ALA). And yet of course my point of view and the points of view of those I publish have been permanently banned. Does anyone give a damn here in my neighborhood? The Barnstable County Human Rights Commission? Town Manager? Local community college lawyer adjuncts? Nope! Have any of you out there tested the waters of democracy in your neighborhoods???
G. Tod Slone, PhD (Université de Nantes, FR), aka P. Maudit,
Founding Editor (1998)
The American Dissident, a 501c3 Nonprofit Journal of Literature, Democracy, and Dissidence
http://www.theamericandissident.org
wwwtheamericandissidentorg.blogspot.com
todslone@hotmail.com
217 Commerce Rd.
Barnstable, MA 02630
You may not like the language, but it is funny. 😉 And I don’t think he is coming back anyway so banning him is a futile effort.
From the graphic for this article and the South African article, I was expecting these articles to begin with Turley saying, “And now it’s time for another episode of Fun with Flags.”
Best be careful with the graphic for this article, else you might be accused of being a Confederate sympathizer.
https://patch.com/washington/seattle/best-selling-author-confuses-norwegian-flag-confederate-flag
Jonathan Turley, you should know better than to believe anything you read @ Metro.
Having been to Scotland several times, once for a year, I have difficulty believing this is other than made up.
Sounds like normal conversation for that part of the world and #2 Scotland and Wales are now separate countries let them do as they bloody well please. Insofar as the statues and Twain other book problems that’s a problem of a dysfunctional education system who want to hide the past and having done so can show or speak no reason not to repeat it so we get the racism of the Brooklyn Museum. Not to hard to figure out the driving force is sheer stupidity.
Sounds like a hoax.
Yup.
ROTFLMAO! Scottish wit at its best!
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
There are some who ban the reading of Mark Twain’s book Huckleberry Finn because the N word is used often and is the first name of N ____ Jim. Schools outlaw the book. They outlaw other Twain books as well.
The British Isles are “roughing it” as far as I am concerned. Fly over and flush. One has to be innocent to go abroad.
And one wonders what justice they’d dispense upon Captain Ned Blakely. There’s a dilemma.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Captain_Ned_Blakely
Enigma is correct. His name was just Jim, and I believe his character was based on the blackface minstrel shows of the era. The N word was applied frequently, as it was the vernacular of those times, but it was not his actual name. It was a window upon far different times.
I don’t think Jim was based on “the blackface minstrel shows of the era.” Twain, as a steamboat pilot, and earlier, as a resident of a Mississippi river town, had extensive contact with blacks, and they are portrayed throughout his work as he knew them, and he referred to them as they were referred to by others he knew.
The white trash, who also figured in Twain’s work, used the N-word. More sophisticated people called them negroes or colored. Then there were cross-over people — not white trash but who still used the N-word, because people just weren’t consumed by political correctness back then.
Life on the Mississippi — which is considered Twain’s masterwork of nonfiction, and relates to his masterwork of fiction, Huck Finn — provides a lot of information concerning interactions between whites and blacks along the Mississippi.
And in that book, Twain recalls meeting Joel Chandler Harris (aka Uncle Remus) — whose stories many blacks today consider offensive and intended to put blacks down. But Harris spent most of his time with black slaves and servants — more time than he spent with whites — and he had a great respect for their culture — their stories and the vernacular with which the stories were told. The Uncle Remus stories are actually African folk tales that came to America with the slaves — as a matter of oral, not written, tradition — and Harris’ intent was to preserve those stories for posterity, as the blacks were largely illiterate, and they didn’t really have a tradition of writing their stories anyway — so their stories would have been lost forever if he had not written them down.
Both Twain and Harris wrote the way people spoke. That’s one of the main attributes that gave birth to “modern” literature and distinguished American Literature from European Literature.
In short — Twain wasn’t writing about minstrels — he was writing about everyday people whom he’d known.