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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6312 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 8, 2025

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Okay what's your worst example of free speech under attack in the UK? I see claims like this posted to X a bunch but whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander.

A lady got sentenced to probation and community service for calling her rapist a name in a private text conversation with her friend.

Is this what you're referring to? It says it happened in Germany so I'm not sure.

https://eutoday.net/german-woman-jailed-for-insulting-rapist/

  • A man posts a video on Facebook expressing his opinion that immigration to the UK is out of control, and that those migrating to the UK include "scumbags" and "psychopaths". Arrested and charged with inciting racial hatred.
  • Street preacher tried (and thankfully acquitted) for "religiously aggravated intentional harassment" after saying "We love the Jews" to a Muslim family.
  • Former footballer posts a tweet arguing that a certain black female football commentator was a diversity hire. Convicted for malicious communications.
  • Shopkeeper posts a sign in the window of his shop explaining that, owing to "scumbags" shoplifting, he has no choice but to keep valuable items in locked cabinets. The police instruct him to remove the "offensive" sign.
  • Man posts a meme depicting Pakistani men armed with knives arriving to the UK in boats, with the caption "coming to a town near you". Jailed for eight weeks.
  • A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.
  • A Jewish man carries aroud a placard mocking the recently deceased leader of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah. Arrested.
  • Retired police officer tweets about a rise in antisemitism since the October 7 attacks in Israel. Arrested. In a real mask-off moment, the bodycam footage of his arrest features one of the arresting officers expressing alarm about the "very Brexit-y" books on his bookshelf.
  • The headteacher of a primary school retires, and the board of governors elect not to recruit a replacement, leaving the role vacant for several months. Parents of a pupil in the school (one of whom was on the board of governors last year) are exasperated by this, airing their grievances on a parents' WhatsApp group. The chair of governors objects to this and sends the parents a letter asking them to stop making disparaging comments on social media. Furious, the mother posts the letter on Facebook, venting her anger. Subsequently, the couple are arrested.
  • A list of people who've been arrested (and, in some cases, convicted) for doing things like praying outside abortion clinics or holding up signs reading "here to talk, if you want".

Just to illustrate that accusations of two-tier policing are entirely warranted, a 25-year-old influencer posted a video in which she called for the deaths of all conservatives. After being questioned by the police, she was not arrested.

A lot of these are genuinely shameful, and I'm not about to argue that the following one should actually be illegal, but this:

A woman is volunteering at a street stall offering advice for ethnic-minority women trapped in abusive relationships. A street preacher approaches her and asks her her opinion on whether domestic violence is specifically encouraged by the Koran. Arrested.

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume @dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim. The linked article describing Steele's behavior as "polite questions" is ridiculous. In the first place, this was clearly a stunt, not some good-faith attempt to have an unprompted theological discussion with a stranger, as that blurb implies.

But more importantly, it was a mean-spirited and counter-productive stunt. If you're actually concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse in Muslim households, a woman currently engaged in an outreach effort whose whole purpose is to acknowledge and deal with the problem - and a volunteer, mind you, not a professional NGO grifter! - is the last person you should antagonize for the sake of drawing attention to yourself. If you've got balls, ask a Muslim preacher. At a push, ask a random woman in a niqab. But for fuck's sake, when someone actually tries to do something about the exact thing you're complaining about, don't put her on the spot in public in such a way that she must either obfuscate and come across as a hypocrite, or own up to an actively anti-Muslim stance. (Never mind that the latter might put her at genuine personal risk: it would instantly destroy her credibility with the very abused women from fundamentalist households that she's trying to coax into trusting her!)

So - Steele's stunt was stupid, cruel, and cowardly behavior. In a common-sense world the appropriate response would be a slap across the face that no one sensible would think of prosecuting as physical assault, but of course, in the age of TikTok ragebait, giving him "minority punches preacher who was just asking questions" as his claim to fame would just be giving him what he was after by other means. Is suing him in a court of law an appropriate substitute? No. But I sympathize enormously with the desire to punish this kind of heel behavior in some way and wipe that smug grin off the guy's face. As it stands, he wasn't charged with anything, just briefly detained, and I think that's probably a fitting level of inconvenience for the offense, societally speaking, though I wish it didn't have go through the justice system.

The fact that you think asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence — even as a "stunt" — warrants assault does not incline me to give much credence to your attitudes towards censorship. Frankly, the more I learn about your worldview, the more infuriating and alien I find it.

A doctor knowingly lying to the concerned parents of a trans-identifying child about the efficacy of "gender-affirming care" in preventing suicide? A-ok. Asking someone a question about Islamic attitudes to domestic violence? Grounds for assault.

I object to the characterization of what I advocated as "assault" - perhaps my reaching for the image of a slap was needlessly confusing. I refer to a slap of the old-fashioned kind that women could once give to men who behaved like cads - not as an act of violence intended to cause physical harm, but as the strongest available signal of public disapproval. Feel free to substitute your preferred kind of public finger-pointing to shame people who behave in horrid but non-illegal ways. Personally, so long as it is understood that the purpose of such a slap is not actually to knock anyone down, I rather wish we brought it back; I mean it very differently from the "punch Nazis" meme, for which I now realize it could easily have been confused. But that's a whole other conversation and not relevant here, so again, perhaps I shouldn't have gone there.

I also object, and more strongly, with continuing to characterize what Steele said as "asking someone a question", as if he had just asked for directions to the post office. He did not "ask the woman a question" in the sense of genuinely seeking information from her. What he did was either intended as a gotcha, or as intimidation - in other words it was bullying. Moreover, as I said, had she been incautious in her answer, it may have goaded her into a response that jeopardized her volunteer work, or even put her safety at risk - which Steele knew perfectly well. Now again. I do not believe that what Steele did should be a crime, any more than I think high school bullies should be clapped in irons unless they get too physical. But it was, to my way of thinking, incontestably bad behavior, and over-criminalization of bullying is not the same thing as criminalizing the earnest expression of political or religious opinions, let alone the criminalization of "asking polite questions".

A gotcha is not bullying.

Not in a private discussion. Where you disrupt a stranger's activities in public and put a gotcha to them to engineer a viral moment, yes, it is bullying.

I agree, but that leads us to the next question: do Muslims deserve to be bullied? That is, is the humiliation/ostracization of Muslims in Western societies an effective means towards generally desirable outcomes? (For the record, I think so, but preferably in a more limited sense.)

That may well be the case. But as I said upthread, I would have had no issue if Steele had been going after a Muslim preacher. What I find outrageous about this anecdote is that he picked, as his target, a woman doing volunteer work to fight Muslim domestic abuse - which is to say, a woman doing what she can in the direction of liberalization! Did she still identify as a Muslim? Possibly. If so, does this reflect genuine faith, or simply very reasonable fear of the social consequences of becoming an apostate? Unknowable. But either way, such a woman should be an ally, not an enemy, to someone earnestly trying to deal with Muslim-associated customs' negative impact on society.

This is the same kind of transparent nonsense as that stupid "sealion" comic, isn't it.

What "viral moment"? He wasn't filming anything. He politely asked one of his fellow citizens a rhetorical, non-personal question in a public place.

He wasn't filming anything.

…Wasn't he (knowingly) being filmed? I thought he must be from the moment I read the summary; I can't really make sense of his behavior and incentives otherwise. Perhaps I'm too Internet-brained. Where's the still that illustrates the article from, if it's not a screenshot from a video?

More comments

strikes me as exactly a case of what I assume dr_analog meant by cases that are "offensive to the point of derangement" such that, even if you don't approve of the laws, it's hard to feel too bad for this particular victim

That's insane. "Offensive to the point of derangement" means insulting and harassing people, not "being mean-spirited" or "not actually being concerned about religiously-motivated domestic abuse", if this was the actual standard, you'd probably have to arrest the entirety of the BBC, possible the whole of the UK government.

I'm reminded of the highly insulting but hilarious British satirical puppet series "Spitting Image."

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior. He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head. I think that's plenty offensive enough to make the man a deeply unsympathetic victim of unjust laws, even if the laws are unjust. It's not about what he believes, it's about his actions.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse, i.e. the exact societal problem his stupid little stunt was intended to highlight. At the point when point-scoring for point-scoring's sake comes at the direct expense of actual furthering of the goals that points are nominally being scored for, I think you can start to talk about derangement.

I think your comment says more about the Muslim community than anything.

Well, yes. Just because I am very progressive for this website on a number of issues does not mean I am an automaton repeating the maximally woke point of view on every issue, and the dangers of Islamism, and illiberal customs perpetuated by Muslim communities more broadly, are among the things I take very seriously that the current progressive bloc is very bad at seeing for the massive problems they really are.

Well, the point is that free speech is important because it can be ugly while telling important truths. I agree the speaker in this context was not polite but he shined a light on the evils of Islam.

Again, I am coming at this from the perspective that asking someone trying to work among Muslims to answer a question like this in public is hostile behavior.

For a given (very expansive) definition of "hostile", sure. The problem is that no one, and I mean absolutely no one, is under any obligation to be non-"hostile" to others. This sort of behavior is completely normal. Media, including public media, do it all the goddamn time.

He was in effect demanding that a woman he'd never met paint a target on her head.

And as for "deranged" - where I think it tips over into derangement is the fact that he specifically did this to a woman volunteering to fight Muslim domestic abuse,

The only people who are being offensive or deranged in this situation are the ones that would target the woman. Under no circumstances is the person asking the question describable as such.

Thank you, I am now convinced free speech is under attack in the UK.

I'm glad I was able to persuade you.

British man visits some friends in the states, during which trip they invite him to try his hand at firing a gun. They take some photos of him holding assorted various firearms, in a fashion which highlights his inexperience. When he gets home, he posts some of these photos on LinkedIn with self-deprecating captions.

Arrested.

This one blew up recently during Tucker Carlson vs Pierce Morgan show: A UK woman who was battered by her boyfriend was sentenced for calling him a faggot in text message to her "friend" who reported her to police. The charge for texting the word faggot was "malicious communications offences". The boyfriend who obviously was not gay was not arrested. Pierce Morgan invited her to talk about it.

By the way, there are 12,000 arrest for online communication offenses a year in the UK. So there are plenty of examples.

From the Telegraph this morning:

A TEACHER was banned from working with children after telling a Muslim child that “Britain is still a Christian state”, The Telegraph can disclose.

The primary school teacher was referred to his local child protection board over comments made to the pupil at an inner-city primary school in London. A senior detective from the Met’s child abuse investigation team also became involved.

In this case, the teacher was suspended and subsequently sacked for an incident in which he allegedly admonished students for washing their feet in the sinks in the boys’ toilets. Police were also called in to investigate an alleged hate crime.

According to the child who made the complaint, the teacher told them the school was not a religious one but that there was an Islamic school a mile away if they wished to go there instead. He also told them: “Britain is still a Christian state” and pointed out that the King was head of the Church of England.

The teacher tried to explain to the year six class the importance of British values of tolerance. It was claimed he reminded the children that Islam remained a minority religion in the UK.

In his legal claim against the local authority, lawyers for the teacher pointed out the school was a non-faith school and that prayers had been informally banned from the playground – and by extension that included washing feet in the toilets – and confined to a prayer room set aside for the purpose.

But the school suspended the teacher in March last year and subsequently sacked him. A month later in April 2024, he was informed he was being referred to the local safeguarding board as well as to the Met. The police inquiry was subsequently dropped.

Is it an indictement that there was a policy inquiry, or reassuring that it was dropped? Pick your poison.

A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence (the Koran-burning man's conviction was overturned on appeal).

Okay here's where I boiled over into rage.

Glad some of these are being overturned on appeal, I guess? Still, yeah something's fucked in the UK.

Glad some of these are being overturned on appeal, I guess?

Yeah, though these reaching appeal is still 4 steps too far. They shouldn't have been 1. convicted, 2. charged, 3. investigated, 4. reported to the police.

I could see how maybe the police are idiots and leaving it up to them to try to interpret speech laws is a disaster. But the fact that convictions happen at all is batshit.

When are we going to start seeing this in British crime dramas? There's got to be a plot somewhere, in everything from Slow Horses to Down Cemetery Road to Law & Order: UK, where we see someone arrested for tweets as if the criminal drama it depicts is considered legitimate, and the audience on board.

A woman visited for a "non-crime hate incident" over an image of two police standing next to two men holding a flag of a major Pakistani political party, captioned "How Dare They"

An American in England told by police to apologize for an unspecified Facebook post

English blogger arrested for "Fuck Hamas" tweet

There's tons of these, to the point that the claim "whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander." is just gaslighting.

There's tons of these, to the point that the claim "whenever I look into it the people are being so offensive to the point of derangement or they're co-mingled with violent threats or slander." is just gaslighting.

It was a genuine question. Not everyone has the time to exhaustively get to the bottom of every culture war claim.

This entire year for example I've seen reported /outrageous thing Trump did that violates democracy/ and then I spend an hour checking into it and find oh actually the thing he did was totally legal and I'm just so tired of this shit and now treat every claim as epistemically flimsy by default.

It was a genuine question. Not everyone has the time to exhaustively get to the bottom of every culture war claim.

Didn't you say that you actually looked into several of them, specifically related to the UK and free speech?

Yes. Just because I clicked on three random ones on X to look into doesn't mean I was able to exhaustively review the culture war claim "free speech is under attack in the UK".

The handful I randomly clicked on, the perpetrator seemed like he crossed multiple lines and the UK wasn't clearly crushing political speech.

Since it's being mentioned here, and because I trust TheMotte more than X, I thought I'd ask for the worst examples (and y'all delivered, thanks!)

English blogger arrested for "Fuck Hamas" tweet

All the more bizarre given that they were seriously considering prosecuting the hip-hop band Kneecap for yelling "Up Hamas" during one of their gigs.

I understand the logic that it's illegal to offer support to a proscribed terrorist organisation, even if I don't agree. But it's also illegal to criticise Hamas? Are you just supposed to pretend they don't exist, or something?

There’s the freedom to remain silent on Hamas.

What also hasn’t been ruled out is the freedom to make neutral statements about Hamas: “Hamas is one of the organizations of all time!”

Checkmate, smug freezepeach Americans.

A man who was convicted and fined for setting a Koran on fire, while the man who attacked him with a knife while he was doing so only received a suspended sentence

A German girl was jailed for ...defaming (cyberbulling?) a gang rapist whose sentence was entirely suspended. Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.

An Old Town stabbing case ended in defeat for Multnomah County prosecutors once jurors learned the wounded man had been videoed uttering a racist slur in the struggle’s aftermath.

So the jury accepted that saying a slur can justifiably provoke aggression backwards in time? Incredible.

No. The defense's theory is that the wounded man was the aggressor; yelling the slurs afterwards was part of the evidence.

Transit cameras showed Edwards, a fixed-blade knife clasped at his side, approaching Howard from behind as he sat on a bench. The video has no sound, but Howard springs up and pushes Edwards as soon as he sees him. The duo scuffle against a wall for a brief moment, ending with Edwards stabbing Howard in the shoulder.

Edwards is the defendant, Howard is the man who was stabbed.

Note this wasn't "violent homeless guy attacking ordinary commuter", this was "two violent homeless guys get into a fight". So I can see there might be reasonable doubt, although based on the still in the article (I haven't seen the video) I think Edwards should have been convicted.

Similarly, in Oragen a stabber was acquitted because the victim said a racial slur.

Obviously this is outrageous, but I do think it's important to put jury nullification and infringements on free speech in different categories. It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.

It's not like the victim himself was prosecuted for saying a racial slur.

In what way is "you can be justifiably stabbed for saying that" not an infringement of free speech? The only thing I can think of is that it might not be covered by the Second First Amendment of the US.

EDIT: off-by-one error

I hate to fall back on the "they're a private company, they can do what they want" argument, but there is an important distinction between the government arresting and prosecuting you because of something you said vs. a jury of your peers collectively deciding that something you said was so appalling that it retroactively exculpates the person who assaulted you.

The former is indicative of government overreach. The latter is indicative of ethical myopia and skewed priorities among political progressives. Both grave issues, but distinct ones. It's yet more evidence that Western progressives no longer see themselves as upholding the spirit of the First Amendment (even if they will grudgingly uphold it to the letter) — but then, we already knew that, they haven't even been pretending otherwise for a long time.

there is an important distinction between the government arresting and prosecuting you because of something you said vs. a jury of your peers collectively deciding that something you said was so appalling that it retroactively exculpates the person who assaulted you

No. There is not.

The entire Liberal political formula is based on this particular fiction (amongst others) but there is actually no difference at all. It's the same people, doing the same thing, with the same outcomes. What they call themselves is a trick.

And indeed Liberals know this because the main entity from which they sought to free themselves was not the state, but the Catholic Church. A more canonical "jury of your peers" you will not find in history.

That progressives have done away with any sort of true belief in the ideas of John Stuart Mill is a foregone conclusion at this point. They are Rawlsians first and Marxists second.

That progressives have done away with any sort of true belief in the ideas of John Stuart Mill is a foregone conclusion at this point.

I agree with you. But I will reiterate that there is a distinction between the government throwing you in jail because of something you said, and a jury of your peers electing not to convict someone for assaulting you because of something you said.

Where do you see these claims, specifically, and what have you looked into?

We recently discussed the case of Graham Linehan, though my favorite example is some blokes getting arrested for arrenging trans flags to look like a swastika. The UK in particular is documentably so bad, that at this point the burden of proof is on you to show that they are being reasonable.

Here's one where a guy got threatened with a hate crime for asking a foreigner to speak english fluently.

The larger problem is that England in particular has always used suppression of speech (See 'D' Notices) liberally to keep the peace. This was culturally supported as traditionally the English have by and large enjoyed their peace and quiet. This vestigial cultural limb has now metastasized into something else entirely.

I just don't think the UK govt has the funds to police itself correctly so it is using its traditional tool of suppression of communication instead of dealing with the root cause of ethnic tension and cultural instability.

To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

I prefer American speech norms, but if it's a matter of different cultural approaches to conflict and politeness, I don't object to it. Different folks, different strokes.

if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

You will have to clarify if the individual is a white Briton (in which case they will throw the book at him) or not.

These 'non-crime hate incident' investigations and other 'hate crime' investigations seem to be clearly directed at white heritage British and not at minorities. Its why there are claims of 'two tier policing'. There's plenty of YouTube clips out there comparing similar behavior between the majority/minorities and the differing official response.

I didn't see the need for American style free speech norms until I saw the path that the UK has chosen to go down. Other Western nations are struggling with how to respond with mass migration and multi-culturalism and suppression of the heritage majority seems to be cheap low hanging fruit for their governments.

To what extent is this applied fairly in England? E.g. if someone posts "death to the Jews" or "English people should all die in a fire," do they get Big Brother knocking on their door?

What do you think? They're still dragging their heels about the rape gang fiasco, you think they'd do anything approaching fairness regarding Muslim shitposting?

A quick search reveals several counterexamples, to say nothing of those with non-Muslim perpetrators, but I guess vibeposting is more satisfying.

Thanks for pulling in some actual counterexamples, that was interesting for me to learn. It's good to hear the opposite side of the story now and then.

I'm sorry how is that a counterexample to anything we've posted so far?

ThenElection's post seems to imply that "death to Jews", "English people should die in a fire" exist on the same vein of hate speech that would be opposing Muslim/Trans hate speech. I guess to some extent that makes sense because of Muslim/Jew enmity. But it's smuggling in too much to pretend the the fairness here on most people's mind is not white person, nationalistic person, straight person, conservative person, and not just that Jewish is treated as a protected class along with Muslim.

There are a couple different speech policy regimes that could exist in England, all consistent with "you're not allowed to criticize Muslims or migrants." I'm just trying to get a better sense of which one best describes England.

  1. Muslim supremacy: you can't criticize Muslims, but white people and especially Jews are fair game.

  2. Inter-ethnic protections: you aren't allowed to criticize people outside your ethnicity.

  3. Wokeness: depends on who, whom, and the particular ordering of the progressive stack. 1) is kind of a degenerate version of this.

  4. Universalism: no one is allowed to criticize anyone aggressively.

None of those are my preference, but 2) and somewhat 4) seem like defensible approaches. My guess is that 3) is closest to what's happening, but that's just based on Twitter vibes.

But this illustrates why free speech is important. Let’s assume ad arguendo that Muslims are in fact making Britain worse. If you categorically remove the ability to question problems (eg increasing Muslims and encouraging Muslims to stay is making Britain worse), then you either (1) end up with a worse country and/or (2) remove it from a political discussion into a violent one.

Asking a question instead of making (plausible) assumptions. Some cultures do take being polite more seriously than child rape.

A woman was sentenced to 31 months imprisonment for making the following tweet in the aftermath of the Southport mass stabbing, where three children were murdered:

"Mass deportation now, set fire to all the f****** hotels full of the b******* for all I care... if that makes me racist so be it."

She regretted it and deleted it four hours later, but that didn't stop the UK bobbies from scooping her up to meet their quota for the month. While distasteful and based on erroneous information (the perpetrator was in fact a second-generation African migrant, not a recent arrival residing in a migrant hotel), this tweet would be perfectly legal in the US. Throwing housewives in prison for years, for getting a bit heated online after a terrorist attack, is absolutely insane. It's even more ludicrous when considering how the UK police claim they don't have the resources to investigate rapes, burglaries, and other actual crimes that actually impact citizens' day-to-day lives.

based on erroneous information (the perpetrator was in fact a second-generation African migrant, not a recent arrival residing in a migrant hotel)

Talk about misinformation. It doesn't matter he isn't fresh off the boat. He isn't english. So she was completely right. Send the refugees back, send the migrants back, and their progeny.

Second-gens are Schrodinger's Immigrants. If he commits a crime, he was born here and is as British as any Tom, Dick or Harry. If he obeys the law and pays taxes, he's an example of how immigrants enrich our society.

Both things can be true at once.

People (including Elon Musk, who can't be prosecuted, and Lucy Connolly, who quite properly was) called for arson, directed against actual, identifiable human beings who were Muslim asylum-seekers based on a crime committed by someone who was neither an asylum-seeker nor a Muslim.

Some of us think that, morally, facts matter when burning people out of their homes.

Legally, actual incitement has always been a free speech corner case, going back to John Stuart Mill's writing about when it is legitimate to say that corn-dealers are responsible for starvation. (He thinks this is fine under normal circumstances, but not if said directly to a riotous mob outside the home of an identifiable corn-dealer). The US tradition is deliberately overprotective of free speech in the corner cases to avoid chilling effects. "Grass is magenta, therefore you should burn down a hotel with people in it" is exactly the kind of speech you would prefer not to protect, but need to if you want as strong a free speech culture as the US is trying to produce.

Lucy Connolly did not call for arson. She said she wouldn't care if all the hotels were set on fire. That's quite a bit different from instructing a specific person to set a hotel on fire.

So to steelman the case, this is very similar to the Charlie Kirk situation; no one specifically told anyone in particular to assassinate him, but there is definitely an air of "won't someone rid me of this turbulent priest" around.

There are objections to this; like, for example, it matters whether it's a private citizen of no particular standing or following vs a public figure, it matters how specific the call to action is, etc. - but it's at least not completely unreasonable as a rule of thumb.

That being said, I absolutely believe that if a white man had gone on a stabbing spree through a Muslim community, and a Muslim woman had posted something like "Throw all those right-winged white **** in jail, hell, shoot them all in the streets, see if I care", nothing would've happened at all.

Well, people did lose jobs for tweets about the Kirk assassination (and we had like 5 blissful days of Kimmel being off the air), which isn't great from a free-speech perspective. But being sentenced to 2.5 years of prison goes way way WAY beyond that.

Perhaps she could have tried pleading innocent on this basis, she didn't though. Her tweet said 'Set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards for all I care', so I imagine lawyers could debate exactly where this falls on the spectrum with inciting statement at one end and expression of apathy at the other.

Whether or not her post was intended as a call to action would matter under US law, but the UK crime with which she was charged ('inciting racial hatred') has no such requirement.

It may not be required for a crime to have taken place, but it certainly seems to have been a major sentencing factor. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce83pj1ggmeo

When sentencing Connolly at Birmingham Crown Court last October, Judge Melbourne Inman KC highlighted that her X post was "widely read" and had been reposted 940 times.

He also pointed to other posts that "included further racist remarks" and emphasised the seriousness of her offence was due to an intention to "incite serious violence".

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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