UN Human Rights Council voted to punish freedom of expression if a believer in any deity so chooses to take offence
Tag Free Speech
Iran has been in a state of civil unrest since Mahsa Amini’s death sparked acts of protest in which Iranian people have given free rein to Islamophobia.
Late last week, the Scottish government announced that its ‘blasphemy’ law would be abolished, and secular organizations around the world…
Quentin Tarantino‘s ninth film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, will be released worldwide by late July. The movie is…
Christopher Hitchens pointed out that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was the opening shot in a culture war against freedom. The state of the world seems to agree with him.
The ECHR should be clear about the most elementary aspects of the job: legal protections are for people, not ideas or feelings.
Colombia has a blasphemy law, so I don’t know why it is glaringly absent on the map showing which countries have blasphemy laws.
The land of Locke, Hobbes, Darwin, Dawkins and Hitchens turned into a feudal pigsty.
I am reposting the Erdoğan poem — because an important part of free speech is the freedom to criticize and mock (and even insult) authorities
So, when someone, anyone, says “Happy Holidays” or “All Lives Matter”, instead of getting mad, maybe you should ask yourself what is it with your pet issue that have alienated people away from your cause?
I don’t need to be black to reject racism, I don’t need to be gay to reject homophobia, I don’t need to be Muslim to reject the anti-Muslim bigotry, and I don’t have to be a woman to support abortion.
Thought crimes are coming back and NECSS wants to make sure you know it. If you can’t disagree with the host, is it even worth speaking at such a venue?
At some point Charlie Hebdo chose not to draw Muhammad any longer… or so we were told. But it isn’t true:
Let’s recall the words of Pope Francis exactly a year ago, when he *advocated* violence in the name of god just after the terrorist attack at Charlie Hebdo:
Do you wonder how would it be if everyone with a YouTube account uploaded their own copy? Just to be sure everyone knows the bullying and intimidation tactics ISOC endorses when someone says something they dislike!
The guy can’t even tweet a *fact* without having a shitstorm coming his way. A common request is the ridiculous and patronizing idea that Dawkins should leave Twitter.
To date, they have published 19 issues and I hope they continue to exist in order to publish many more — I hope they will keep publishing even by the time when we will have recovered our right to mock and criticize any belief without paying with our lives, and when the words “blasphemy” and “Islamophobia” are only bitter memories of when the illiterate and bigoted tried to shove their sacred concepts.
This is not just a bad sign for free speech, but it is a bad precedent for science — what will ‘The Lancet’ do when very picky churchgoers choose to be offended with the conclusions of one of their papers? Judging by this bad decision, those will also be removed, lest they offend the illiterate.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m not into people losing their jobs and having their livelihood threatened just because they hold opinions I strongly disagree with!
They have really crazy people in Egypt: