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And to me that is the core conflict between Europe and the New World captured in a single exchange.
Jordan Peterson is Canadian and Cathy Newman is a resident of the planet Idiot - it's too pat to boil it down to New and Old Worlds.
Especially since free speech is defended by law in both England and apparently Brussels, as it says in the article. The defendant wins most of their cases if they actually get to court.
The issue is informal sanctions and discrimination producing a chilling effect, something which is at least as prevalent in the US as it is in the 'Old World'.
If free speech is protected in the UK, why are there literally thousands of arrests for tweets?
Easy: the UK defines free speech as the ability to say X but not Y. Suffice to say a dog is not a cat even if the government says it is a cat. Likewise, Europe lacks free speech even if they claim they have it.
If free speech is protected in America, why do people get fired and blacklisted for the things they say?
Come on, be serious. There are compromises made in every country on Earth
In practice, the UK has more legal protections against being fired or discriminated against for your views, even when those views are right-wing. That is why people who go to employment tribunals tend to win their cases. It doesn't usually give them their jobs back.
The UK has less protections for tweeting in a way that makes the government worried. This is not good.
Broadly, in the US you are more likely to be ruined, in the UK you are more likely to get arrested. Neither of these are good.
Because the American goverment is one of limited powers. The protection is protection from the government.
Being arrested is far worse than people deciding not to do business with you. Being arrested is the state using its monopoly on violence on you.
That's a perfectly valid perspective. But we're now talking about the real tradeoffs and decisions that America makes: we can't protect your speech from retaliation by your employers because that infringes their rights.
America has a particular, limited right to free speech which says that no government can legally punish you for your speech. And that's fine, that's a perfectly valid conception of free speech. I personally happen to disagree with it: I think many people would rather spend a night in a police cell than be blacklisted from their career. That's just my opinion.
What irks me is silly "in America unlike Europe we have Free Speech" comments which ignore the complexity in both countries.
How do you propose to fix this? What do you propose to do? Because the status quo is that the government gets to decide what is allowed to be said in public, and the 1st amendment was codifying that no, the government doesn't get to do that. It doesn't say that everything is OK to say in public. It doesn't say that there are no consequences. But it takes the government out of it and returns it to interpersonal conflict.
So, how do you propose to control all people everywhere to fix this? Because from here is just sounds like whining that someone is trying to do better, but can't fix everything.
No, that's not what I meant to say. I think you are treating the subject in a mature way, albeit one I disagree with.
What I'm asking for is more recognition from others that free speech must ultimately involve trade-offs which different countries are handling in different ways, and less chimping out from certain people (not you @KMC) about how America is glorious land of Free Speech and England/Europe is a contemptible tyranny.
In America you (plural) have broadly decided that it's terrible if the government can punish you for speech, but ok if your employer does. In Europe it's the other way round - it's the governmnt's job to step in and tell your employer that they don't have the right to fire you if they dislike your politics.
But this isn't even true. Cofnas was originally fired by a European employer, and it took intervention from the US government to get him reinstated. After firing him failed he is now being criminally charged by a European government.
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