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Samizdata quote of the day Even “knobhead” makes six appearances.
– Matt Scott, reporting on the judgment in the John Terry racism trial for the Telegraph. This trial holds the distinction of making everyone involved, from the accused, to the accuser, to the sport’s governing body, up to the politicians who came up with the law, look very stupid indeed.
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Oh, well, soccer. N’importante.
Politicians need no help to look stupid.
I am always pleased in a nasty sort of way to see the progressives dismayed. I am pleased in a more creditable way to see free speech reinforced.
Regarding Mr Terry’s explanation of how he came to say those words; it certainly could be true. Though, as a general observation utterly unrelated to anything else in this comment, how sad it is when a good lawyer’s ingenuity and creativity must go forever unacknowledged.
Football is extremely unimportant. But here we have a footballer being prosecuted by the state for insulting a rival competitor.
I am the only person I can find on the web who has tried to raise this as a free speech issue.
http://edwardburroughs.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/socrates-galileo-and-john-terry/
Natalie, you’re surely not suggesting Terry’s lawyers made up his defence….
Massive waste of time and money. (The court case that is, not Chelsea FC).
Let me get this straight.
A professional football player is/was being criminally prosecuted for words that he said to another professional football player, both of them being on a football field and playing at the time?
Really?
Really?
I heard Little Steven recounting on the radio this morning that a massive concert in Hyde Park was summarily ended in mid-performance because some petty functionary enforced a curfew.
Really?
Really?
Little Steven may have the right way of it when he referred to Britain as a ‘police state’. Probably because he knows not from the term ‘jobsworth’. But that’s what (it would appear) the whole country is descending into – a collective of pecksniffing pettifoggers, eagerly sniffing out the most trivial infractions, even as (in the words of Hunter S. Thompson), ‘thieves and pimps run free.’
You should wish for a police state. Instead you are being eaten to death in a thousand tiny bureaucratic bites. And, I feel sure, in both of the typically-insane actions described above, a mouthpiece of the state will duly speak out and defend these actions as being right, and proper, and completely in the public interest. After all, the rules are quite clear!
Not Buttle! TUTTLE! Brazil, here you come.
llater,
llamas
Stephen Willmer,
In the immortal words of Francis Urquhart,
“You may say that. I couldn’t possibly comment.”
A pity that the quality of football banter is so poor. I remember a funny incident, back from the early 70s. A referee booked Liverpool’s Emlyn Hughes (remember him?) for a late tackle on a player. “What do you mean, `late’? I got here as soon as I could, Ref”
Only a few years ago there were television comedy shows where such racist language was normal – true the characters who used it were normally unsympathetic, but the idea that using this language should be a CRIMINAL OFFENCE would have seemed like science fiction.
A social revolution has taken place in which the practice of freedom of speech has been destroyed and being rude (if the rudeness is rational, or sexual or…..) is now a CRIME.
I suspect that the battle was lost back in the 1980s with the term “polticial correctness GONE MAD”.
“Gone mad” implies that political correctness is a good idea that is only a bad thing if taken to an extreme.
Political correctness (the Cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School) is actually an evil idea – a weapon to use against “capitalist” society.
But the PRINCIPLE was accepted as good – with only exterme “gone mad” examples, being considered bad.
Thus the fight to preseve freedom was lost.
It will not stay at racial speech – it will, of course, spread (as it was always indended to).