Sunday, April 17, 2016

Another illustration of "The 1st Amendment: why we say 'Screw you' to anyone

who wants to change it for reasons of PC or 'sensitivity'.
The German government has approved a criminal inquiry into a comic who mocked the Turkish president, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced.
 

By law, the government must approve any use of an article of the criminal code on insulting foreign leaders.
 

Mrs Merkel stressed that the courts would have the final word.
Here I can stand in public and say something like "Wonder if Merkel's old Official Soviet Minion Armband still fits?" and someone might think it in bad taste, but I can damn well say it.  Without the 1st, I might wind up in the dock for 'insulting a foreign dictator-wannabeleader.'
"In a country under the rule of law, it is not up to the government to decide," Merkel said. "Prosecutors and courts should weight personal rights against the freedom of press and art."
Bog off, tosser. A free society does not threaten a guy with years in gaol for writing a poem. If you don't know that that's wrong, you should just cut to the chase and appoint yourself mutasarrıfa of Erdogan's neo-Ottoman sanjak of Berlin.

And don't forget one of the aims of idiocy like this:
Some of these people were genuine innocents who've never been caught up in a time-consuming seven-figure legal battle before. But many others were making the argument cynically. They know that, if you can tie up a book or a magazine article in court, then there will be fewer books and magazine articles. As I wrote in my introduction to Geert Wilders' memoir, Marked For Death:
After I saw off the Islamic enforcers in my own country, their frontman crowed to The Canadian Arab News that, even though the Canadian Islamic Congress had struck out in three different jurisdictions in their attempt to criminalize my writing about Islam, the lawsuits had cost my magazine (he boasted) two million bucks, and thereby "attained our strategic objective — to increase the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material."




3 comments:

Phssthpok said...

"In a country under the rule of law, it is not up to the government to decide," Merkel said. "Prosecutors and courts should weight personal rights against the freedom of press and art."

Show me ONE country where 'The Courts' are NOT an arm of The Government.

Anonymous said...

UH.... GERMANY. NO first amendment. In fact no free speech AT ALL. That's GERMAN law. They also have 12 political party's , No right to speak in public, no right to own guns, in fact no "rights" AT ALL. If you don't like that you should become a German and change it. But it has NOTHING TO DO WITH AMERICA AT ALL. So why the outrage?

Firehand said...

That IS the point: they have no protection of free speech, and we do; it behooves us to protect it.