A Critique of Freedom of Speech, Protest & Racism in 2020.

racism it's a problem in scotland
it's a problem in canada i have lived in scotland i have lived in canada scottish parliament recently proposed a law banning hate speech the draft of the law has for the time being been thrown out or sent to have revisions because the first draft would have pretty much banned any use of speech whatsoever potentially it was much too broad and ill-defined i notice the public response to this has been a demand to define racism i think this is 180 degrees wrong what we need to define is speech i don't believe that freedom of speech exists so that you can interrupt someone and insult them because of the color of their skin while they're buying groceries or while they're standing in the lineup to pay for their groceries at the grocery store is that what you mean by speech when you say freedom of speech would you really would you really be opposed to a law that limits your freedom of speech in that context speech is now being used politically to mean the whole range from carefully considered academic articles published in peer-reviewed volumes that sit in the library down to fights between boyfriends and girlfriends husbands and wives that may indeed these days end up on the internet on instagram live on youtube you name it right speech has been used in such a broad sense that it's inevitable we have to legislate limits to freedom of speech let me say this when i lived in scotland people thought i was older than i was because i was tall for my age in general i was taller than everyone in scotland at that time i hope the average height has increased since then i seem to tower like a giant over both children and adults when i was in scotland but i was i was still a child and people tried to start fist fights with me because i was a jew based on my appearance they tried to insult me and say racist things to me and start fist fights with me that only happened to me one other time in my life i can remember and i was in florida in the united states of america okay is that is that speech is that the freedom of speech you want to preserve we have a very strangely parallel problem in the united states with protest right there's a sense in which we all want to preserve the freedom to protest but we have to define protest the united states constitution does not any protest whatsoever is supposedly legal and protected under their constitution well some people think that an effective form of protesting against the corruption or incompetence of the police is to burn down a fast food restaurant a burn down at wendy's a woman i i might add a an african-american woman a black woman was shot at and as i recall her daughter in the back seat died she herself didn't die because she was trying to drive her car past that same wendy's and a group of armed protesters themselves also african-american part of the black lives matter movement they felt a legitimate form of protest was to block off that intersection and to prevent to have a blockade to prevent any traffic from from passing by and to use guns to force people to stop or turn around if they wanted to drive by and she was just trying to go i think she was trying to drive her daughter had been visiting a friend and she was trying to drive from one house to another and said nothing nothing to do with politics not for her right so what is what is protest right you see how the effort to define racism more narrowly or more precisely can be a dangerous distraction from what the real political problems are okay i have been in one situation i was actually in england not scotland where some tonys were denouncing basically in racist terms you know an outsider because you know you're not from around here now i admit this is not strictly speaking racist this is like localism versus foreignerism it's some other term could be used here it's xenophobia maybe and it's in its purest form and man i've never lived in any other culture like that i've never lived another culture like scotland and england where people are just down for a fist fight or a knife fight or to stab each other with a broken beer bottle they are down for that broad daylight all the time they want to fight for no reason at all they're looking for a reason they want you to give them a reason and often enough racism is the reason i saw an interview with a man and he wasn't that young when the interview was conducted he looked about 25 to me but he was talking about his experiences as a teenager in scotland sky was black completely born and raised in scotland showed his mother on camera by her accent his mother also seemed to be born and raised in scotland i don't know our whole story um so this guy i mean he really he really was as scottish as i am canadian i'm born and raised in canada you know uh and all his life starting from when he was tall enough to be perceived as a teenager white scottish people were shouting the n-word at him on the street including like from the front steps of their house like they'd see him through the window and they'd run out onto the front porch the house and start showing the n-word and other it's trying to get into a fist fight with him and partly just because he was a big guy who looked like he'd be a a good fight and many of these fistfights when with the police showing up and the police would ask him what happened and he'd say oh well this guy called me the n-word and the police said why did why don't you just let him why just keep walking and he said i just remember this is what he said in the interview it wasn't a terribly witty or instead of saying he said well he said that to me not you didn't he that was you know what he you know completely sincere you know it's just obviously it's not the most it's not the ideal answer to give a police officer but i think his point was he was insinuating if you the police officer had been in my position you would have beaten this guy up also okay so now those police are in the position of saying this is freedom of speech like people literally have the right to come up to you and denounce you because of the color of your skin to your face or show you in a grocery store or at any at any given time all right is that is that freedom of speech is that the freedom of speech you want enshrined in law that you want in a future constitution i'm not asking whether or not it's the freedom of speech you already have in the constitution you've got the [ __ ] piece of crap worthless constitution from 200 years ago wherever you live so i have viewers all over the world since world war ii in some places since wherever it is you you you live the constitution you've written i'm sure it doesn't give a satisfactory answer but my point is it would be very easy to write a satisfactory answer to this um there was a tv show called jersey shore and on one season of that tv show i used to watch that show with my ex-wife while we were working out at the gym on the step machine they had the step machines with the tv screen that was how i first encountered jersey shore and i think it was in reruns i don't think it was new um i i saw most of the episodes of jersey shore no i don't know um you know there is a scene that ends with the police arresting one of the main characters in the show because this is all caught on tape some other people who were at a nightclub with him were running after him and shouting the worst insults they could come up with you know again and again he was walking away he was leaving the club he was walking on the sidewalk with his girlfriend hand-in-hand and these guys kept coming up and insulting him and sharing his insults loudly this is at night on the sidewalk outside and eventually after the third or fourth time whatever it was he turns around and he punches one of these guys in the face he's a very strong just one punch can really can harm someone for the rest of their lives can do terrible damage theoretically could it could not but one punch can can change somebody's life can change your life too and the police come and arrest him for aggravated assault in the united states as it as it stands now freedom of speech means that the guy who ran into the nightclub instigating this fight again and again and again did absolutely nothing wrong he was enjoying his freedom of speech at two o'clock in the morning on the sidewalk shouting insults chasing after someone who was walking away from him holding out this girl again and again that's that's protected right now as freedom of speech it is the wrong question to ask how do we define racism what we need to ask is what is the speech that is being protected for political purposes and what is the type of speech that's being constrained delimited ultimately condemned this always struck me as being the unasked and unanswered question in thailand very briefly in thailand you cannot say anything criticizing the king criticizing the royal family criticizing the monarchy under any circumstances not even on a facebook message what have you i could understand if they wanted to have a law saying you can't interrupt a religious ceremony that the king is presiding over you can't interrupt a parade on the main street where you're within 500 meters of the king i could understand having laws saying look freedom of speech doesn't give you the right to disrupt everyone else what everyone else is doing at this party for the sake of your political cause but obviously it's tremendously important that people do have the ability to complain to criticize on facebook in newspaper articles to dispute uh what really happened in various historical episodes and i might add even the most shocking even the most disturbing of historical episodes i think i've already mentioned in this video i'm i'm jewish and i know what it's like to be punched in the face and insulted for being jewish i do okay i once read an article written by a well-intentioned guy who was pointing out by the way also my parents worked in the museum field he had these great examples of lies about the holocaust that were in museums and he was saying he's not a holocaust denier one of the examples was of um a photograph and someone working at the museum had painted smoke coming out of a smoke stack to make it look more dramatic so there was white smoke smoke stack and he was saying look this is actually really this is really tampering with the store of lemons people look at it they don't know it's painted on there's like photoshopping evidence and he got into some of the technical details about how the gas chambers worked it was like it didn't actually produce that kind of smoke it was this big dramatic column of smoke he said look what actually happened here didn't produce and part of his point was if you don't have the freedom of speech to cross-examine it to ask unthinkable shocking questions right something really important is going to be lost here okay however that's not the same as having the freedom to interrupt someone at a funeral can you guys remember this can you guys remember back when gay rights still more of an uh open and unresolved case united states do you remember christian fundamentalists showing up to protest at gay people's funerals holding signs shouting making noise cheering saying that that person is going to hell confronting the priest and the grieving parents or the grieving boyfriends and whatever whoever shows up at this funeral and saying this person has no right to be buried in a christian cemetery and they're going to hell and this is the passage of the bible that says so and so on and so forth is that what freedom of speech means to you is the ability to advocate for homophobia at a funeral the right to advocate for racism at the grocery store or someone's waiting to check out their groceries right see what's most disturbing to me of all i'm now 42 years old i've never heard anyone else ask this question i've never heard anyone else discuss this karl popper philosopher and a scientist both he said that the most disturbing thing to him about his scientific discoveries and his new ideas and philosophy was that he never wanted to believe that they were original in at least one or two cases he actually paid a researcher or hired an intern to go through the history books and check someone else must have pointed this out before someone else must have come up with it it's so obvious right and he would be kind of horrified and dismayed to find that no nobody else had raised this objection nobody else had asked this question there's no record this this is before the invention of google on the internet now right um we have a case here in canada it's again raising old wounds about racism and people are asking the same questions a woman died in hospital and the the employees of the hospital doctors and nurses were saying insulting things to her while she lay there dying it is being interpreted as racism the much more disturbing possibility is that these doctors and nurses would have been just insulting to a white person as they were to an aboriginal person an indigenous person a first nations person the woman who was left it's it's possible it's possible it's racism and it's possible this was unprofessionalism cruelty so on and so forth right do you believe in freedom of speech do you believe that a doctor or a nurse has the right to stand there and tell you that you deserve to die that you're a terrible person while you're lying there in your hospital bed dying and the whole public is responding to this by talking about racism and defining racism and institutional racism and as if we're going to do some kind of purity test to decide who is and who isn't racist among doctors and nurses i see a whole political system that inevitably is going to come to the wrong conclusions it's going to fail to find the right answers because nobody is asking the right questions