“We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC“

This is not just wrong, it’s so wrong it’s not even remotely compatible with how we define freedom. To see this in writing is just disturbing and sad that after all these decades of lip service on moderation and opening up and being a global participant, China is basically no different than it was under Mao.

But, yes, something fucky is going on with their account management system, which is actively blocking people from disabling their accounts (via blocking account verification attempts, I believe).

This is very much not true. For one, there's rampant consumer capitalism, very little social net, no tens of millions starving to death, and something like 10-100x more personal income.

I don't know if you have family that grew up under Mao or not that you can go check with, but, this is a really, really false statement to make.

I'm not saying it's all peachy now, just that it is a far cry from Mao.

I do agree that CCP's statement there about freedom of speech is ridiculous to say about something spoken in the US.

Is this a list of four different differences? Under Mao, when tens of millions of people starved to death, how much of a social net was there?

Under Mao, despite an ostensibly strong social net, many still starved to death. I intentionally listed those two together because Mao time was not so great for many.

If you look at free speech in Europe for example, in eg Germany there are laws against hate speech or defamation of individual people (quite differentiated, an opinion is ok and true facts are ok, but invented facts are not). One of the targets is Nazi propaganda, and in general the support is good.

Still, the goal is similar, social stability, peace and protection of minorities. People do not get disappeared, but they do get sued.

Let’s not act as if that’s an unimaginable term.

Despite the kind of hand-wringing about this that folks such as yourself routinely engage in over this subject, German society has somehow managed to survive and thrive despite this relatively minor limitation on their freedom of speech. They even have some hateful racist shitbags gaining seats in the Bundestag.

Most countries: Has a fairly clear legal definition of hate speech, in statute or precedent.

The judge explicitly asked his defence to explore freedom of expression. He chose not to. The rest of his "defence" was laughable and easily disproved lies. The judge pointed out his failure to explore freedom of expression in his summing up. Short of using neon, how much more clearly could the judge have telegraphed it? The conviction was therefore on pure technical breach of the law with no mitigation.

Markus Meechan was left looking like a complete moron who threw away his opportunity of defence. In addition to being a bottom feeding racist. Oh, and a scammer as he crowdsourced a load of money for the defence he didn't bother offering.

> In addition to being a bottom feeding racist.

It surely was a dog whistle all along. A pug whistle to be exact. I am not sure what to say to this.

> a load of money

deserved in my opinion and he is not the one looking like an idiot coming out of this story.

Admittedly, some jokes live only from the reaction.

Reading the judgement took my opinion from surprise at an apparently ridiculous verdict, to one that was entirely fitting.

>> a load of money > deserved in my opinion

For what? A defence he did not use after encouragement?

I watched the actual video in question, and with regards to the judgement, I disagree that it was menacing, anti-semitic, or racist.

The video, if anything, is anti-racist and anti-anti-semitic. It's certainly not threatening to anyone of reasonable mind, unless one considers the pug to be a danger to the Jewish community.

It's not painting Nazi atrocities as a positive thing, it's making clear that it's literally the most horrendous thing possible.

The judge takes issue with some things having a different impact when part of a joke.

>"You accepted that the phrase “* the *” was anti-Semitic though not, you said, when used as part of a joke."

It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?

He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to. So after the judge points to the exit, he faces the other way and sulks.

He deserved conviction. Except we're not nearly done.

(From memory) His tale of the joke intended solely for his girlfriend was completely shredded as a pack of lies in court. His girlfriend didn't even subscribe to his channel, or know of his joke. The judge had a better awareness of how Youtube worked than the guy with the channel. In context the "private joke" was for mass distribution and nothing to do with his girlfriend.

Now he deserves prosecution for perjury. Moronic and obvious perjury, but perjury nonetheless. So bad I was laughing while reading the judgement. I think perjury carries the lengthier maximum sentence. We're still not done.

> It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?

[Yes I did. The judge very clearly states the conviction is on the simple breach of the law. Context and mitigating circumstance is irrelevant as Meecham chose not to use the freedom of expression defence. Thus "in-context" does not matter at all.

So forget the pug. Forget the joke, the context, the way he made it totally not funny unless you're seven. It's obviously anti-semitic, but not especially harmful. Meecham accepts it's anti-semitic. It's not threatening compared to a march with dozens of thugs chanting the exact same phrases, into the faces of actual people. The law must cater for both ends of the threat scale being videoed and distributed. Clearly it is reasonable for there to be some offence, and some chance of mitigation for the lesser or technical breaches and parody or humour.

Repeating a phrase he accepts as racist, over and over, to clips of Hitler, jews and for some reason Buddha (IIRC, it's been a while), is clearly anti-semitic in context. Clearly it's not threatening on the scale of possibility of people using the same phrase and actions in a different context. Just a feeble joke, but accepted as anti-semitic by Meecham in court nonetheless. Still, he's not on trial for how funny he is or isn't either.

This is all 99.9% pointless discussion. None of this section is relevant as it's mitigation that the defendant chose not to use. Were he not a complete moron he would have most likely been reasonably acquitted for freedom of expression.]

He was offered an out by the judge in the context of the legal system. Then ignored it.

Reading the full judgement warmed my heart and restored a little faith in British justice.

OK, he's a moron as well as a convicted criminal, and clearly shown to be a perjurer. End of. I wonder what happened to the thousands he crowdsourced for his defence, but no-defence-offered really.

Is that the judgment? If so, when you say "He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to", are you referring to this part?

> I should note that although I invited both legal representatives to make legal submissions during the trial about the law on freedom of expression, that was done only to a very limited extent. In the absence of focused submissions on that topic by either the Crown or the defence, all I can say is that, while that right is very important, in all modern democratic countries the law necessarily places some limits on that right.

The next paragraph is relevant to the context, as he makes clear that in the absence of those explorations, the conviction rests solely on the narrow fact of whether the law was breached or not. i.e. without any mitigation taken into account:

“This trial, unusual though some aspects have been, was therefore concerned, ultimately, only with the narrow fact-based question of whether the Crown has proved beyond reasonable doubt that your using a public communications network on one day to post the video onto your video channel, constituted an offence contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. I found it proved on the evidence that it was. My finding establishes only your guilt of this offence. It establishes nothing else and sets no precedent.

Because local prejudice can provide bias, jurors can be influenced by a lawyer's courtroom performance, most juries aren't actually a random sample of the population, long trials usually create hasty verdicts, most jurors don’t have a background in law, and jurors do not need to reason their decision.

Not to say that there aren't pro's to trial-by-jury, but not every Westerner is convinced that trial-by-jury is better than many of the alternatives, and that doesn't make a Westerner any less of a "Westerner."

Nullification is rare and unfortunately that line of defense largely failed during the drug war. But I think that's largely because the government was able to successfully make it a racial issue. It's not always easy to take advantage of deep social divisions for all kinds of policies, and that's why dictators don't like juries.

Kind of like guns. How useful are they against tyranny really? Useful enough that tyrants try to take them away, and that's all I need to know.

Is that actually the case? A dictator should have little problem punishing jurors for bad judgments, incentivizing them to fall in line like judges. But in (western) democracies, dictators seem to arise from demagogues / populists winning elections. Such a zealous fan base will be reflected in the jury.

I don't disagree with your post at all, but I wanted to note that it's important to remember that companies aren't people, they're machines generally designed to maximize profit. Morals don't apply to them - only the law, and money does.

Personally I've boycotted Blizzard in response, and I hope more people do.

One might suggest that encouraging freedom / democracy is in the long run health of all for-profit companies. I haven't seen any boards or shareholder activists argue against this yet.

That is "technically correct" but meaningless in practice. It's like saying that people are just a collection of molecules. While technically not wrong, humans are of course more than the sum of its parts. The collection of molecules, arranged in a certain way, exhibits emergent behaviour; it will seek food or have intelligent thoughts, which molecules individually can't be said to do.

Likewise, companies as institutions are more than the sum of their people, and will display behaviour that cannot be fully explained by looking at their people individually, and this has very much real consequences. Like a nation is more than a collection of people, and this fact has consequences on the real world.

Each company has different behaviors, some broadly can be assumed, like, a company won’t usually want to deliberately destroy or bankrupt itself (there have been exceptions to this!). Others will contribute greatly to social or environmental programs that directly hurt short term profits. how they get to those decisions is complex and requires strategy, execution, leadership, etc. Not something so 19th century as “profit maximization”

My original post was to state that’s it is false to suggest that a company is always a profit-maximizing amoral machine. People aren’t machines and The emergent behavior of any given corporation rarely is “Profit maximization”. It is sort of like saying the emergent behavior of a sports team is “point maximization”. It is meaningless and not true.

What's with the apologist mindset there?

If you can't hold a group of people accountable for ethical conduct, from whence comes the idea that singular actors should be regulatable by traditional justice systems?

Corporations were intended to distribute risk to enable collective groups to attempt something which none individually could have hoped to do without a significant chance of losing everything.

They were not intended as a bulwark through which to engage in ethically dubious behavior in search of profit. Profit is not a right. Merely a happy byproduct of a job well done.

Ethical behavior, and actually performing a valuable service for the society hosting the corporation is the primary goal. Not profit generation.

The sheer bullheaded insistence that profit is the be all end all of human activity needs to die.

WE have thrown it away already, China is just trying to speed things up.

I've thought quite a bit about this, and my conclusion is that everything is cyclical and has a rise and fall because it only takes a few generations to unlearn hard-fought lessons. Only this time around technology is going to enable a level of control that has never been achieved before. I can only hope that technology will also allow the escape of that same level of control.

A perfect example is how larger and larger swathes of the populace is ok hampering free speech in the name of empathy. They don't fully understand the implications, and there will be generations that will be forced to relearn those lessons, and it won't be a cheap lesson.

Thank you again for recommending it, I really enjoyed the insights it had. I found the idea that democracies tend to end up dictatorships/authoritarianism to be extremely fascinating.

And the observation that market driven economies have happened in the past helped me realize current times are not nearly as unique as I believed.

I'm not generally interested in history, but this particular topic interests me due to the changes I've seen in just my lifetime.