Another highly placed Obama felching neo nazi leftie American legal scholar named Eric Posner is endorsing gutting the First Amendment in favor of anti-blasphemy, anti "hate speech", anti - inequality laws and state sponsored censorship. It's the most anti-Free Speech commentary I've seen yet. And naturally it comes from a leftie.
The first amendment to the US Bill of Rights means little to us British of course. But our rights are enshrined in law too. The Magna Carta? you might well ask. No but closeish, our common law rights are enshrined in a document signed into law before that even. king alfred's Liber Judicialis was written in the ninth century. So why are we letting these jumped up colonials and a bunch of closet Jew Roasters in Brussels dictate to us what we can and can't say.
It turns out Prof. Goebbels Posner is of the opinion that "we overvalue free speech" (i.e. the ethics and values of goat molesting, vagina mutilating woman killers are the right ones and our Graeco Roman Christian values are wrong. So we must abandon ours our moral code and adopt theirs or to put it another way, "often free speech must yield to other values and the need for order." Didn't Hitler say something like that?
Chicago law professor Posner, who also argues "We have to remember that our First Amendment values are not universal; they emerged contingently from our own political history, a set of cobbled-together compromises among political and ideological factions responding to localized events..."
Well yes, American rights such as Free Speech did emerge from American history and the shared Anglo Saxon values of the English speaking diaspora and the Germanic lands. Islamic values, which Prof Posner seems so fond of emerged out of Muslim history. Their values suit them, our values suit most of us with the exception of ego tripping elitist academics like Posner who have never done an honest days work in their lives but have progressed from being hooked on coke to being hooked on power.
If Posner was a tenth as intelligent as he thinks he is (Chicago you must remember is the University that gave Barack Obama a tenured Professorship which did not require him to deliver any lectures, host any tutorials or even turn up to collect his mail) he might understand the case for free speech is a profoundly philosophical one, with a very long history (stretching back to Ancient Greece) and it is not only a Western idea, either. Posner is allegedly a highly educated legal scholar so we have grounds to suspect he knows this but finds it inconvenient and thus pretends it is not so (In Posner's Brave New World can we expect it will be verboten to suggest that some public figure is, umm, being economical with the truth?)
The western culture hating Posner goes on to say "As often happens, what starts out as a grudging political settlement has become, when challenged from abroad, a dogmatic principle to be imposed universally. Suddenly, the disparagement of other people and their beliefs is not an unfortunate fact but a positive good. It contributes to the 'marketplace of ideas...'"
Challenged from abroad? So this guy thinks that when a raving Muslim cleric damands we decare free speech illegal and make insulting the Prophet a capital offence punishable by stoning we in Europe, the USA, Australia, Canada, Japan and other outlying farmsteads of the civilised world should simply cave in to extremist demands.
There is a lot wrong with the way free speech laws are interpreted these days but the freedom to examine and criticize people and beliefs is a positive good, How else will we ever be able to separate good ideas from bad ones? How else will we be able to determine that educating little girls is far more beneficial to society than mutilating their vaginas and using ancient, outmoded marriage traditions to enslave them. There is no other way other than freedom of discussion. And government can't specify in which ideas or criticisms are and aren't permitted -- that would assume we already knew and agreed on Truth.
Does this self righteous, simpering clown seriously ask us to believe that if we are allowed the freedom to think for ourselves we might decide that Nazis or other right wing fanatics are right after all."
It is not right wing extremists who threaten our freedom but left wing extremists like Posner who yearn for authoritarian totalitarianism that we must fear. We must never forget that Hitler's political movement were the National Socialists.