Free speech and censorship issues hit both North America and Europe yesterday. In Norway, one of the few real advocates for Men's Rights left in the Manosphere---blogger Eivind Berge---was awarded damages for violations of his free speech rights by a Norwegian Court. The Gulating District Court of Appeals ruled against the Norwegian Government, citing its wrongful arrest and imprisonment of Berge and awarded the blogger the equivalent of about $4,500 in compensation.
As Berge describes them in his article (linked above), the speech laws in Norway are very similar to those in the United States. There has to be a direct causal connection between speech and illegal activity before speech becomes illegal. Historically in the US, such cases actually more commonly fell under Criminal Conspiracy statutes than those pertaining to actual illegal speech. The Norwegian Supreme Court, in overturning Berge's original case, ruled that what is published on a blog are private and personal thoughts of the writer; and as such there was no compelling interest in Norway to suppress that kind of speech.
Eivind Berge: Defender of Free Speech
One would logically assume that American Manosphere writers would be celebrating the Berge verdict, but not so. Instead, they are calling 'censorship' Twitter's decision yesterday to ban several obnoxious Nazi/MRA trolls. Unfortunately, in the US the views of the Nazis and the American Men's Rights Movement are becoming practically indistinguishable. Twitter is a private company with its own Terms of Use policies; and although Twitter doesn't comment on its decision to ban users for privacy reasons, many industry insiders believe that the ban was related less to the political views expressed than to the relentless spamming, doxxing, and other harassment that the guilty parties were engaging in.
Nazi Richard Spencer was the biggest target of the Twitter ban, along with all his affiliated front-groups. Spencer had prominent Red Pills Steve Sailer and the homosexual activist Jack Donovan among his regular writers. Notorious White Nationalist trolls---and self-confessed Red Pills John Rivers and Ricky Vaughn were banished. Pax Dickinson; who is a regular follower of Red Pills Vox Day and Roosh Valizdeh was also banned. Dickinson was formerly CTO of Business Insider who was fired in 2013 for using Twitter to say things like:
"In 'Passion of Christ II, Jesus was raped by a pack of niggers. It's his own fault for dressing like a whore though." and "Who has more dedication, ambition and drive? Kobe only raped one girl, LeBron raped an entire city. +1 for LeBron!"
Pax Dickinson: Wall Street Abuser of Free Speech
Spencer and Dickinson were outraged by the ban; apparently American Red Pills haven't figured out that censorship only applies to government and government-funded entities. Spencer went so far as to claim "Corporate Stalinism" although he regularly violated Twitter's policies. Manosphere bloggers and Twitter trolls Mike Cernovich and Matt Forney---evidently jealous that Twitter didn't consider them important enough for a ban---wrote of coming purges, etc.
The Far Left didn't fare any better today. Matt Harrigan, CEO of Packetsled was forced to resign after making some rather detailed assassination threats against President-Elect Trump online. Dickinson and Harrigan are perfect examples of why Corporate America needs a swamp-draining as badly as the government does. Also Twitter cracked down on Rutgers faculty member Kevin Allred. Allred, an Adjunct Lecturer in Rutgers' Department of Women's and Gender Studies claimed today that randomly shooting Whites would help get the 2nd Amendment repealed.
In case Allred hadn't noticed, white police officers have been getting randomly shot all over the country this year. And it does violate Twitter's policies to threaten public officials like Harrigan and Allred did.
Kevin Allred: Defender of Left-Wing Campus Speech Codes
Allred was in the news about a year ago for offering a class called 'Politicizing Beyounce'. Tuition at Rutgers starts at about $11,000 a year and taxpayers cough up $1 billion a year for the privilege of receiving an 'education' under the likes of Kevin Allred.
Berge's case showed that the Government has no authority restricting freedom of speech; what the Twitter cases showed is that defending Free Speech involves public self-policing. It is up to us as free citizens to expose and condemn extremist rhetoric; it's not up to the government to define what constitutes extremist speech and use the power of the State to enforce it.
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