Kwame Anthony Appiah’s series of Reith Lectures is called ‘Mistaken Identities‘. I really enjoyed listening to the first lecture on ‘Creed‘ and am looking forward to the rest: ‘Country’, ‘Colour’ and ‘Culture’.
In the first lecture, Appiah walked us through the idea that religious practices and doctrines are far more fluid and open to interpretation and change, than the fundamentalists would have us believe. This is a good thing in my view, as it offers hope that illiberal ideas spread under the guise of religion can eventually be abandoned.
But I found myself wondering whether the Internet and digital technology may actually stifle that process. Continue reading
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I’m bookmarking this Washington Post profile of Professor Susan Benesch, whose research looks at ‘dangerous speech’—that is, speech that can incite mass violence.
For Benesch, it’s important that people understand that the type of speech she wants to counter is different from hate speech, which she says is a broad category for which there is no agreed-upon definition. An advocate for free speech, she does not believe that hate speech can or should be silenced. In fact, it’s one of the central reasons she sought to differentiate dangerous speech.
Despite having written very little on this blog about the United States Presidential election, I’ve been following it closely. My main source of news and commentary has been podcasts: The FiveThirtyEight weekly round-up in particular. But I’ve been reading mainstream news sites and blog commentary too.
Even as she makes history as the first woman to run for president, and even as she prepares to become the first woman to take the office, Hillary Clinton is still the victim of sexism. Most analyses attribute her lead to the to the failings of her opponent: Donald Trump is egotistical, misogynist, racist. He is under-prepared and has led a shambolic campaign. There is an implication that Clinton—a historically unpopular candidate—is not winning on her own merits but because The Donald has thrown the election to her. In another year (so goes the argument), against another candidate, she would lose. Continue reading
Remember the incident over the summer when a woman was detained by the police, after a crew-member on a Thompson Airways reported her for the ‘suspicious’ activity of reading a book? Faizah Shaheen spoke about her experiences to the WorldLink programme on the Deutsche Welle English language service, as part of an hour long programme about fear. Continue reading
The Crown Prosecution Service have updated their guidelines for when someone should be prosecuted for something posted to social media. I spoke to Kieran Corcoran of Heat Street about how the UK laws governing social media really need to be updated:
Robert Sharp, a spokesman for free speech campaigners English PEN, also commented, telling us: “Free speech must always include the right to offend.
“The law already bans abusive, harassing or threatening messages, which is surely adequate to stop the worst social media trolls.
“The words ‘grossly offensive’ are highly subjective and introduce ambiguity into the the law. This in turn chills free speech.
“Parliament should legislate to remove these words from the Communications Act, just as it removed similar wording from the Public Order Act in 2014.
“Other countries look to the UK on free speech issues – criminalising causing offence sets a poor international example.”
The CPS has tried to head off criticism of its new laws by advising prosecutors to exercise “considerable caution” in their decision-making to avoid “a chilling effect on free speech”.
The Public Order Act amendment I mentioned was a tweak to section 5. See the Reform Section 5 website for more details.