British diplomat arrested for racial rant

The diplomat, 47-year-old Rowan Laxton, allegedly shouted “f***ing Israelis, f***ing Jews” while watching television reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza last month. He is also alleged to have said that Israeli soldiers should be “wiped off the face of the Earth” during the rant at the London Business School gym near Regents Park on [...]

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Chetan Kunte and NDTV

(See updates below) (This post, for legal reasons that will be obvious, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 License.) Gaurav Sabnis writes about the unfortunate case of blogger Chetan Kunte, whose views about Barkha Dutt’s “unethical reporting” apparently caused NDTV to browbeat him into deleting the post and replacing it with an apology. [...]

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Geert Wilders may face prison term for ‘insulting Islam’

Freedom has taken a battering in Netherlands lately and this latest news is a sad day for those of us who believe in free speech. On a related note, it might be interesting to try and figure out what’s the best place for free speech today. USA? Perhaps has the broadest protections for speech anywhere [...]

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Sullivan on gay rights and freedom

Popular blogger and premier gay rights activist Andrew Sullivan writes: So I oppose hate crime laws because they walk too close to the line of trying to police people’s thoughts. I support the right of various religious associations to discriminate against homosexuals in employment. I support the right of the most fanatical Christianist to spread [...]

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Australia joins China in censoring the internet

Eugene Volokh has a thoughtful post about the matter. There’s not much I need to add. A sad day for freedom.

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The return of criminal libel in Ohio?

This case may have set a worrying precedent. I do not advocate, as some libertarians do, that we do away with all defamation laws. It does make some economic and moral sense to penalize speech that is demonstrably and objectively false, and results in specific harm. However, I am in all circumstances opposed to defamation [...]

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Speech is best countered by speech

And thuggishness by, well, see below… A month ago, I wrote critically about Obama’s attempt to silence advertisements that opposed him: using a combination of his passionate supporter-strength and legal threats. Sadly, it was not a one-off incident. The latest targets of the Obama campaign is an advertisement by the National Rifle association (NRA). Obama [...]

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Cracking down on hate speech

After Canada, it is Australia. Australian gun lobbyist Ron Owen has been told he is entitled to express his homophobic views, but that he went too far with the bumper sticker: “Gay Rights? Under God’s law the only rights gays have is the right to die.” Queensland’s Anti-Discrimination Tribunal found Owen guilty of inciting hatred [...]

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First Amendment survey

This survey reveals everything that is wrong with the the state of freedom in the US. Some highlights: 42% believe that people should NOT be allowed to say things in public that are offensive to certain religious groups. 54% believe that people should NOT be allowed to say things in public that are offensive to [...]

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“Legitimate to kill owners of immoral satellite channels”

No, it’s not the Taliban saying this, but the senior-most judge in Saudi Arabia. The most senior judge in Saudi Arabia has said it is permissible to kill the owners of satellite TV channels which broadcast immoral programmes. [...] “There is no doubt that these programmes are a great evil, and the owners of these [...]

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On displaying nooses and free expression

Hanging a noose has been a symbolic expression of hatred towards blacks since the days of the Ku Klux Klan. However, noose incidents have increased substantially over the last year, prompting some states to pass hate-crime style laws against it. According to DiversityInc, To date, three states have passed laws to punish those who use [...]

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Death penalty for blogging in Iran?

Iran’s parliament is discussing a bill which would make “establishing weblogs and sites promoting corruption, prostitution or apostasy” a crime punishable by death. The bill also stipulates that once awarded, the sentence “cannot be commuted, suspended or changed”. More here. As a morally corrupt (certainly by Iranian standards!), prostitution-advocating libertarian and atheist who delves into all these matters in his posts [...]

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Trying Oil CEO’s for crimes against humanity?

Inflammatory rhetoric from doomsday-sayers isn’t anything new; nevertheless this statement by climatologist James Hansen strikes me as extreme. Special interests have blocked transition to our renewable energy future. Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, as tobacco companies discredited the smoking-cancer link. Methods are sophisticated, including [...]

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On making offensive statements online

This is a disturbing and stark reminder of how much India lags behind the US in free speech. The cyber cell of the Pune police on Saturday arrested one more suspect for allegedly uploading obscene and derogatory text about Congress chief Sonia Gandhi on a social networking site. The suspect has been identified as Nithin Chakravarti Suresh [...]

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A free-speech clarification

(Updated 6/13) In response to an emailed comment by a certain reader, I feel it is appropriate to clarify my stand on free speech. I frequently say I believe in complete freedom of speech, no hate-speech exceptions, etc. However when I say complete freedom of speech, I use the term only to refer to expressed opinions. [...]

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