Some of these people were found guilty, some acquitted. All were prosecuted under these laws.
To be clear I don't agree with any of these people. I don't even find the Mike Ward joke particularly funny. It's a throwaway bit meant to be offensive from my point of view. But I don't think they should be able to be thrown in prison, fined, or sued, because someone's feelings got hurt over some words.
How do you determine this? If I define a common word to be offensive towards me, how would you argue against it if I really feel that way? Where do you draw the line?
>In 2015, France’s highest court upheld the criminal conviction of 12 pro-Palestinian activists for violating restrictions against hate speech. Their crime? Wearing T-shirts that advocated a boycott of Israel — “Long live Palestine, boycott Israel,” the shirts read — which, the court ruled, violated French law that “prescribes imprisonment or a fine of up to $50,000 for parties that ‘provoke discrimination, hatred or violence toward a person or group of people on grounds of their origin, their belonging or their not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race or a certain religion.'”
Or in the United Kingdom,
>In 2010, a militant atheist was given a six-month suspended sentence for leaving anti-Christian and anti-Islam fliers in a religious room of the Liverpool airport; according to the BBC, “jurors found him guilty of causing religiously aggravated intentional harassment.”
[0] https://theintercept.com/2017/08/29/in-europe-hate-speech-la...
The whole "freedom of speech" story in the US is the most successful brain washing story on this planet. You hammer this into children's brains from young age on, to make sure it becomes the knee jerk reaction to everything that the government does to fuck you over. Having only two political parties with candidates from the elite, detached from reality. Political decisions don't get made on the basis of what's best for the people, just do the opposite of what the other party would do. Working two jobs at minimum wage to feed your family. No health insurance, if you get sick just chew pain killers all day and keep working. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. US Life expectancy on the decline for several years in a row. "At least I can complain about it, so everything is fine. Just imagine I'd live in a country where I couldn't insult and verbally abuse others!"
Certainly. For example, in Germany it is illegal to curse at the police. There is a rather well-known video where police confront a man at his door but can't do anything more until he calls them cunts, at which point they turn around, force their way in, and arrest him.