Yes, Katie Hopkins is an attention-seeking professional troll and bigot, and there is no way anyone can pretend that her Tweet about the Scottish ebola case wasn’t offensively racist. And no, I won’t link to it because that will only serve to spread her hate.
But hateful as it was, it fell short of direct incitement to violence. So is there any real justification for Police Scotland to get involved?
Liberal England feels the same way
I am not surprised that the police have picked up on the modern fashion for claiming offence. They know a good repressive ideology when they see it.
But I wish there were more on the left who would stand up for free speech – or at least for common sense.
Quite
Judging from some comments I’ve seen on social media it seems that too many people aren’t willing to make the distinction between supporting someome’s freedom to say something and supporting what they actually said.
If you do not support the freedom of bad people to say bad things in spaces you don’t own or control, you don’t really believe in freedom of speech. Many on the left do not, although a lot of them aren’t intellectually honest enough to admit it.
If you support a “right not to be offended”, where do you draw the line? Who decides which groups nobody is allowed to offend?
