The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 in front of the Irish parliament would aim to neutralize the speech of Ireland’s version of MAGA (MIGA) domestic terrorists or whatever:
Bill entitled an Act to amend the law relating to the prohibition of incitement to violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of certain characteristics (referred to as protected characteristics) of the person or the group of persons and to provide for an offence of condoning, denying or grossly trivialising genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against peace and, in doing so, to give effect to Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA of 28 November 2008 on combating certain forms and expressions of racism and xenophobia by means of criminal law.
What does “trivialising [in the British spelling] genocide” actually mean? Whatever the government wants it to. It means you go directly to court to endure Kafkaesque bureaucratic torture for unspecific crimes manufactured in vaguely phrased law.
One of the champions of the bill is an intersectional young Irish lady, Green Party Senator Pauline O’Reilly.
Ireland’s descent into authoritarianism continues.
This is Irish Green Party Senator Pauline O'Reilly weaponising the concept of “safety” to justify censorship and other encroachments on freedom of speech.pic.twitter.com/qdD59IDE07
— Andrew Doyle (@andrewdoyle_com) June 15, 2023
When one thinks about it, all law and all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. This is exactly what we are doing here. We are restricting freedom but we are doing it for the common good.
If a person’s views on other people’s identities make their lives unsafe and insecure, and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, our job as legislators is to restrict those freedoms for the common good.
This overly socialized ditz apparently thinks the entire point of her position as a legislator is to “restrict freedom” rather than use the law to protect general freedom by, in very limited cases, proscribing specific freedoms of others that would intrude on other, more principled freedoms.
She’s right that legislation often restricts freedom, but she fails to understand the underlying moral justification for limiting certain freedoms in the interest of preserving other freedoms higher in the hierarchy of freedoms.
Related: Digital Fingerprints: Obama’s Masked Assault on Internet Freedom
For instance, in the Western tradition, an individual is barred from fatally shooting another individual without justification, such as a credible threat to his own life. That, on its face, could be called a restriction of freedom, but it is a justified restriction because it preserves the more valuable freedom of the other individual of living his life unmolested by unjustified violence visited on him by other members of society. That’s how this works. Hobbes, Locke, et al. worked through all of this centuries ago, and their conclusions governed Western morality and legal canon since.
But in this woman’s interpretation of her role, the government’s job in crafting law is “all about restriction of freedom,” apparently unconstrained by any limiting principles, in order to legally terrorize opponents of her Social Justice™ religion.
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