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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Apparently Labor is going to treat Incel ideology similarly to political Islam in the UK (BBC, Guardian).

It will also "identify any gaps in existing policy which need to be addressed to crack down on those pushing harmful and hateful beliefs and violence", she said.

As a freedom of speech apologist, I don't think that this is a good development, but just the response to the latest moral panic and about as justified as the response to 'D&D satanism'.

What should be illegal is incitement to crimes. I am sure that this is already illegal in the UK. "Blow up Parliament for Allah", "Rape some bitches to protest against wokism", "Kill a cop to bring forth the dictatorship of the proletariat" are not protected speech, if anyone posts them on their facebook they would quickly be removed and the poster charged.

Of course, even here, technically enforcing this on more obscure pages is basically impossible without cracking down on the free internet as much as the CCP does (and possibly not even then). Punish what you can find and don't lose too much sleep over some .onion board which you can't police, or infiltrate them if it looks like they are planning concrete crimes in the physical world.

To make broader pieces of ideology illegal, such as "people should live according to Sharia law" or "Capitalism is just a development stage to be overcome" or "Women should have less/more power" would curtail freedom of speech too much for my taste.

I also don't think it will succeed on the object level much. Given that the punishments for simply reading the wrong ideology is hopefully going to be light (CSAM being the only content where merely intentionally viewing it should be a crime), that prohibition will do little to dissuade people from consuming Incel ideology. The main reason why an edgy teenager would not read something widely considered bad is not because the government forbids it, which is to admit 'this is so dangerous that we can't allow people to read it', but that it is generally considered lame in his circles. If Mrs. Cooper bans Incel ideology, that will make Incel ideology less lame, not more lame, because established politicians are invariably lame. (My vocabulary is probably half a century out of date, my point stands.)

Drawing the line at "incitement of crimes" only serves to reward people smart enough to know how to incite crimes with sufficient plausible deniability as to make it not worth any prosecutor's while to go after them.

This is a fully general counterargument against anything. Take fraud. There are clear-cut cases: someone paints a rock yellow and sells it as a gold to some fool. There are also transactions which are not fraudulent, and neither party ends up feeling cheated.

And then there is a large grey area of transactions where one party really gets a raw deal and ends up regretting the transaction, but intentional deception by the other party is arguable.

Does this mean that we should throw up our hands in despair and strike fraud from the books as it only rewards people who are smart enough to stop just short of outright fraud? Few people seem to think so. Instead, most are happy to see obvious scammers punished, honest merchants go free and the people in between getting lengthy boring trials.

I will grant you that 'incitement of crimes' is not carving reality perfectly at the joints, because reality is not a bimodal distribution separated neatly by that line. But most of the offenses in criminal law work that way. Fraud. Rape. Murder. DUI. Either we pass arbitrary rules (blood alcohol has to be x for DUI) or we have general rules and leave the rest to the courts (such as manslaughter vs murder II vs murder I).