Americans: If the UK had a supreme court..

[mrmitchell]

More proof: Capitalists don't have a sense of humor.

[DanS]

I haven't had my cigar, snifter of brandy, and ten thousand dollar hooker for the evening. So sue me.

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

You are taking the piss there Imran?

No, not at all. It is quite obvious when Germany and France ban all mention of Nazis. And Britain's libel laws are not conducive to free speech (the accused must prove that it wasn't libel, compared to the other way around).

Nazism is rather a sore historical point for France and Germany - it is a common history they would rather forget about.

Libel laws? Don't get me wrong but libel laws are very, very specific when it comes to debating civil liberties. Patriot act anyone?

[Provost Harrison]

You all seem to have bypassed my point regarding the fact that BNP has criminal links and being a police officer and involved with such an organisation is a conflict of interests. What about if a police officer was a member of the provisional IRA or the mafia? Would that be acceptable?

[OzzyKP]

Pssh, unions have ties to the mafia, but that doesn't stop anyone.

[JimmyCracksCorn]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse


Canadians are subjects too, but we have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

No, you're citizens, and so are the British.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by DanS
Obviously, you didn't account for the fact that the US has by far the largest porn industry in the world.

And in which country was there a huge fuss over a woman's nearly naked breast?

Just one, not even a full serve of a whole nekkid as a jaybird bosom.

Germany has a thriving porn industry, therefore it must have great free speech too.

Thailand as well. And Japan. Except they don't show pubic hair.


Banned in the U. S. A. :

'In America, the leading enforcer of this "deprave and corrupt" standard was Anthony Comstock, a grocery clerk-turned social activist who persuaded Congress in 1873 to expand the federal obscenity law. The new "Comstock Law" barred sending through the mails not only "any obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of vulgar and indecent character," but "any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contraception or procuring of abortion." '

'The Supreme Court finally confronted the obscenity issue in 1957. In Roth v. United States, Justice William Brennan wrote for the Court that even though sex is "a great and mysterious motive force in human life," and "a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages," sexual materials that have a predominantly "prurient" appeal to the average adult, and that utterly lack "redeeming social importance," are not protected by the First Amendment. '


'The Supreme Court's use of "contemporary community standards" in Miller v. California to define criminally punishable obscenity means that the law evolves along with social mores. Thus, in the decades since Miller, pornography has become a highly profitable industry in the U.S.; sexually explicit material is produced and distributed outside the commercial pornography industry by amateurs and publishers of personal Web sites; sex talk is pervasive on nonprofit listserves; and obscenity prosecutions have been sporadic and unpredictable.

This does not mean that pornographers have nothing to fear from obscenity law today; but, as a practical matter, legal controls on sexual expression now tend to take more indirect, primarily non-criminal forms. '


'Yet artists who address sexuality or even simple nudity in their work are often denied public display space. The problem frequently arises after a town official chooses an art exhibit or delegates the job to a local curator, but then someone complains that one or more works in the show are offensive, "pornographic," inappropriate for children, or a form of "sexual harassment." The offending works are removed; official "no nudity" policies sometimes follow.'

http://www.fepproject.org/factsheets/sexandcensorship.html

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Don't get me wrong but libel laws are very, very specific when it comes to debating civil liberties. Patriot act anyone?

Do you really want to compare anti-terror laws in the US and UK? You wouldn't like the answer you'd get.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by DinoDoc
Do you really want to compare anti-terror laws in the US and UK? You wouldn't like the answer you'd get.

No, but then the United States hasn't had the problem of British citizens and politicians aiding and lending credence to terrorist campaigns on United States' soil and against its citizens abroad since 1969.

Put the war on terror in the United Kingdom into an American perspective:

if the deaths and casualties from 1969-1980 in Northern Ireland alone were translated into American deaths and damages, then given that at the start of the Troubles the American population was roughly 130-140 times that of Northern Ireland's, the death toll would be:

276 000 dead, and 1 and one half million injured.

In one decade.

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/sutton/index.html

In the same ten year period, over 200 million pounds was paid out for compensation in damages to property in the province, and in 1979 the British taxpayer's bill for subsidizing the economy of an already depressed area was 860 million pounds.

American ambassadors would have been assassinated in London, American senators and members of congress murdered where they worked, American state governors killed, Americans gathered in bars assassinated en masse, in year after year of bombing campaigns, to say nothing of the routine deaths of soldiers and police by sniper fire, land mines, rocket attacks and death by handguns and torture.

Consider the amount of manpower and materiel fom the British Army diverted to the Province, at a time when the Cold War was at its most frigid.

In point of fact, the Republic of Ireland's laws relating to terrorism and terrorists were harsher than those of the United Kingdom, but then its security services and banks had suffered at the hands of the I.R.A. and Loyalist terror groups too.

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/events/dublin/chron.htm

[St Leo]

Originally posted by molly bloom
"any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contraception or procuring of abortion." '

Prevention of contraception or prevention of conception?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by St Leo

Originally posted by molly bloom
"any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of contraception or procuring of abortion." '

Prevention of contraception or prevention of conception?

I think it means, in its old fashioned, rococo kind of way, 'the prevention of conception' which is 'contra-ception'.


So no books on natural sponges, how to raise lemons or vinegar douches.

But presumably thinking about President Harding in the nude would be okay.

[Drogue]

Re: Americans: If the UK had a supreme court..

Originally posted by Park Avenue

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3930175.stm

Please for the time being ignore whether you or anyone else agrees or disagrees with the BNP's policies. Create a different thread if you wish to discuss those.

But if threatened with the sack for one's political beliefs, surely you Americans could take this issue to a higher and higher court? What would be found?

This just seems anti-democratic, and dare I say it, fascist.

If you have beliefs that are in direct contradiction with your employer, that impact your job, you deserve to be fired. The police is committed to equal opportunities and positive race relations. If a police officer disagrees with that, to the extent that he's prepared to join a group that is against that, then he should be able to lose his job.

[Drogue]

Originally posted by Park Avenue
It's like being banned from the American police force for voting for Nader..?

No it's not. Nader's policies are not in direct contradiction with the police force's. The BNP's are. If you believed that murder should be legal, to the extent you joined a lobby trying to make that so, then you could be fired for it too, because it directly contradicts your work.

[Solly]

Well then aren't today's police force like Hitler's of old. Given how we voters complain of no main different between the mainstream political parties, there is basically a tyranny of three. You're either a Lib Dem, Tory, or Labour voter, or you can't get a job with the state. Ridiculous state of affairs. And the politics of the BNP ought to be no matter: freedom of political affiliation isn't freedom to affiliate with a political party of the state's choosing, it's absolute freedom. And we plainly do not have that.

[Solly]

And Provost, before your latest meandering little whines, I suggest you read the first post of this thread again. Carefully this time.