COGO, Hate Speech and the assault on liberty
COGO, Hate Speech and the assault on liberty
The proliferation of Thoughtcrime laws is extremely worrying…
First, the Armchair General would like to extend an apology for the lacuna in his missives: last week saw a requirement to deliver three battle plans on three consecutive days — and this led to some late nights, and busy days. You will no doubt be thrilled to know that every one of them was delivered to a receptive audience and positive feedback. Regardless there is much to say, so on with the show…
There is a famous quote by American journalist and satirist H. L. Menken, which has been deployed by many political writers over the years:
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
It is an enduring quote because it has the ring of truth1, and it certainly fits with the Machiavellian aspect of politics. This attitude was, without doubt, deployed by governments across the world during Covid (and, to some extent, still is).
Your jaundiced2 General would like to propose a related, alternative and rather more plausible soundbite that, I believe, more adequately describes the Western world in the twenty-first century:
The whole consequence of practical politics is the keep the ignorant populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be kept in comfort) by an endless series of colossal fuck-ups, labelled as crises, caused entirely by the government.3
Every time that you see the media whipping up a frenzy about a “crisis”, you can be 99% sure that the issue in question has been caused by the state — and that the real solution is to remove the government intervention. And that is never, ever the action actually proposed.
Crises of Government Origin
Your jaundiced General refers to these phenomena as “Crises of Government Origin” (COGO), and will form the back-bone of a series of posts titled with that acronym. Many of the issues are interlinked, and most are absolutely critical if we are ever to confront the economic and social issues facing us today.
These include (but are not limited to):
the energy crisis;
the Climate Warming / Change / Heating crisis;
the housing crisis;
the NHS staffing crisis;
the police shortage crisis;
the obesity crisis;
the education crisis;
the pandemic crisis;
the productivity crisis;
the activist “charity” crisis;
the drugs crisis (Scottish edition);
the rape gang crisis;
the intersectional and gender crisis;
just about any other “crisis” you can think of.
To be sure, the UK government is not the worst in some of these areas — but, since it is in UK that my comfy leather armchair is situated, it is the rampant stupidity of our own governments that I shall concentrate on. And no, not all of these posts will include reminding people that Grant Schapps is a prick.
I can promise that every one of them will include illustrations demonstrating the mind-gargling incompetence of our governments (of all persuasions) and “Rolls Royce” civil service4.
The law is a blunt instrument, and the government is really inefficient at doing anything at all.
Fundamentally, the Western world is failing — culturally and economically — because the government now has a hand in so much of society. And the UK is in the vanguard of this malaise as Sharon White, at the time Permanent Secretary to the Treasury (and currently fucking things up in typically Rolls Royce civil servant fashion at John Lewis), said (in a rare example of her being right) in 2015 at the Institute for Government:
The UK is “almost the most centralised developed country in the world”.
Indeed it has been observed that, by some measures, the UK is more centralised than Soviet Russia. This is why we are failing.
The Crises Of Government Origin (COGO) series aims to examine some of these failures — large and small. For starters, let’s have a look at Hate Speech laws and why they are so dangerous.
A thicket of laws
The most important thing to remember is that, in the Common Law5 whereby a person is assumed to be free to do anything not restricted by legislation, any law is a restriction on individual liberty — by definition. This was recently and explicitly acknowledged by Irish Green Party Chairperson Senator Pauline O’Reilly in a speech (via Samizdata):
“When you think about it, all law, all legislation is about the restriction of freedom. That’s exactly what we are doing here, is we are restricting freedom but we are doing it for the common good. You will see that throughout our Constitution, yes, you have rights but they are restricted for the common good.”
Senator O’Reilly was arguing, of course, for yet more restrictions based on the fact that she doesn’t like hurty words. And because she’s essentially a fascist (as are the vast majority of Green politicians and supporters).
“Everything needs to be balanced. If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”6
To switch to another analogy — although not a particularly divergent one given that Communism and Fascism are basically both variants on Totalitarism — the Senator is proposing that Ireland adopts laws to stamp out Thoughtcrime.
In the world of the Classical Liberal, “harm” can only be physical — as articulated in the Non-Aggression Principle that is the core axiom of libertarianism7:
you shall not initiate force or fraud against any person’s life, liberty or property.
To initiate force or fraud against life is assault and murder; against liberty is slavery; against property is theft. It is, although unacknowledged, the core of a Classical legislative corpus, and was for many decades.8
Further, although the attribution of the phrase “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins” is heavily disputed (though the sentiment is often attributed to the great philosopher John Stewart Mill), it obviously refers to physical violence.
This assertion was certainly clarified by the prominent lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays in his 1939 book “Democracy Works”9:
In a society where interests conflict I realize there can be no absolutes. My freedom to swing my arm ends where the other fellow’s nose begins. But the other fellow’s nose doesn’t begin in my brain, or in my soul either, as the religionists would have it.
In modern society, we have expanded the meaning of harm far beyond the physical — and this has had hugely damaging effects across the whole of Western society (but particularly in the USA and UK).
Mentally taxing
As with most legal clusterfucks, much of the justification seems to have mutated from the USA, but psychiatrists — eager to increase the standing of their profession (like most physicians) — seized upon the idea that mental harms should be included in criminal legislation. In the UK, this really took hold in the 1992 case of Alcock v Chief Constable of South Yorkshire Police, which was a claim for the victims and relatives who suffered psychiatric injury due to horrific scenes they witnessed at the Hillsborough Disaster.
Over the years, politicians have seized upon this concept as a way of being seen to “do something” to woo voters with measures that seem to cost almost nothing (and therefore don’t invite retaliation from The Treasury). Nevertheless, this attitude (combined with abysmally incompetent law-making) has led to legislative abominations such as Victim Impact Statements and the egregious Hate Speech Laws — and culminating (so far) in the dangerous and totalitarian absolute fucking abortion of Ireland’s Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 being ushered in by bastards like Senator O’Reilly in Ireland.
Taking offence
When a crime is alleged, the very first thing on the agenda for any police force is to establish whether or not a crime actually took place (it is not that unusual for people to make things up for motives of, say, revenge. Rape is very popular in this category — Home Office research in 2022 [PDF] states around 12% of rape allegations are proven to be false (although only about 3% are “malicious”)). Only once it has been proven that a crime has been committed can any investigation into the perpetrators begin.
Generally speaking, it should be obvious that proving a crime based on physical consequences — a broken nose, a damaged orifice, stolen property, etc. — is far easier than proving mental harm (which is, except in the most extreme cases (e.g. PTSD), effectively unprovable). So, when laws were introduced that made “hate speech” a crime, then that made the legal situation vastly more difficult because “harm” was almost impossible to prove — which meant that, in the eyes of those championing these measures, not enough people were prosecuted.
So, Hate Speech Laws were extended to include offence — and it became a criminal matter if you said something that was likely to offend a person or group. And that offence is subjective — it doesn’t matter whether you intended to offend or not.
Not surprisingly, this has led to colossal abuse of the legal system by bad faith actors, pressure groups, “community representatives”, fake charities, and various other grievance mongers. (And do, please, note that this effect was entirely intentional when the law was drafted.)
Politics drives failure in the police
Given that all of the above has come about through political parties taking a political position, this has now filtered through the politically-controlled public sector. As a very pertinent example, this has led to a refocusing of police forces — who are now perceived as spending their time trawling Twitter and other social media, looking for people being offensive, rather than solving “real crimes” — such as theft, burglary and murder.
Police have failed to solve a single burglary in neighbourhoods across nearly half of England and Wales in the past three years, official data show.
An analysis of police data from 30,100 neighbourhoods found that in 48.2 per cent, no break-ins had been solved in the three years ending March 2023, prompting warnings that burglary has been decriminalised in parts of the country.
This colossal failure — alongside ludicrous antics such as officers dancing about in rainbow socks or whatever, doing a creditable impression of Brave Sir Robin and being filmed running away from BLM protestors, refusing to stop crimes in progress, allowing thugs with machetes to invade Hyde Park, and many, many more examples of public shameful cowardice, corruption, and incompetence — has led to a extremely damaging loss of faith in the police as an effective law-keeping force, with a Daily Express poll showing that just 10% of their readers trust officers.
Not only has it led to mockery but also, in many cases, the withdrawal of public assistance, replacement with private provision, a serious drought in quality candidates wanting to join the police force, and a complete loss of trust in the criminal justice system as a whole.
These laws are far from being the only thing wrong with the police force — insane amounts of form filling do not help either. But many of these forms need to be filled in to protect the police from subjective allegations of racism and other hate crimes. So, not only are the police distracted from what most people in this country would deem to be “real crimes” (i.e. physical criminality) by having to investigate vexatious hate speech allegations, but these laws have cascaded down to further increase the inappropriate paperwork burden too.
"If you stop somebody you have to fill such a huge form and go back to the station for hours," he [retired police officer, Sean] said, "if you arrest somebody you can actually take your entire shift dealing with one person.”
So, to a large extent, the police staffing crisis is down to politicians passing fucking stupid, badly thought-out laws that nobody asked for, in order to pander to fractious special interest groups that are, like politicians, jockeying for power and money (just on a more local level).
Opening the door to Big Brother
The most appalling result of such laws, though, are that they have given politicians licence to start legislating our thoughts and opinions.
Hate Speech Laws, and other similar pieces of legislation, introduced into the criminal justice system the concept of a crime with no defined harm.
If someone assaults you, then there may be physical damage to your body, which may require medical repair, loss of income, etc. If someone breaks into your house and steals your property, then you have lost property to that value; similarly if someone defrauds you of money. And there is obvious loss if you are enslaved.
But if you are offended by something that someone has said… well, there is no real harm — as wonderfully articulated by the libertarian comedian Steve Hughes in the routine below. Especially if you are the kind of thin-skinned do-gooder that gets offended on behalf of ethnicities to which you do not belong (of which there are many examples).
Many people decry the slippery slope as a fallacy, but all too often it is not. And once you can legislate for crimes with no harm, and for crimes that are fundamentally to do with people’s opinions, then where do you stop? Well, it is certainly true that you get people like Senator O’Reilly supporting laws that criminalise thoughts and opinions, and openly, and apparently without embarrassment, making speeches that support this disgusting position:
“If your views on other people’s identities go to make their lives unsafe, insecure and cause them such deep discomfort that they cannot live in peace, then I believe that it is our job as legislators to restrict those freedoms for the common good.”
Because the real problem is, well, who gets the power to decide which opinions are “correct”? You might think that the Greens are lovely fluffy people who just want to ensure that everyone can get along: but the next government might decide that the only correct opinion is that the Jews are the root of all evil and must be exterminated.
In any case, it is certainly not too far-fetched to imagine that some hard-line Greens (who, remember, are in a ruling coalition with the SNP in Scotland) might decide that extolling the virtues of petrol cars should be a crime; and subsequently it is a crime to point out the flaws in electric cars (of which there are many) as crimes against Gaia.
All of this couldn’t be further away from maintaining an army to defend against foreign powers, running a criminal justice system, and collecting the bins (the only proper activities for a government).
Hate Speech Laws must go
Hate Speech laws are capricious, divisive, and wasteful of police time. Further, and most importantly, they are absolutely antithetical to conceptions of freedom and justice under the law.
The subjectivity of Hate Speech Laws means that a crime has taken place only because some person has asserted that it has: no objective harm, or intention to harm (mens rea), need be offered or proven.
These types of laws have, demonstrably, become a slippery slope that has put in the fence-posts for a state that can proscribe what we are allowed to say and to think — in other words, to allow for some of the worst aspects of a totalitarian dictatorship.
The last thirteen years of Conservative governments have not abolished these abominations; in fact, they have actually extended them — as stark an indication as you need that the Tories are not the party of liberty (but we suspected that when Cameron ditched the torch of freedom logo, right?).
In doing so, they have wasted police time and resources, let serious crimes run riot, and entrenched division of communities and the power of grievance mongers, and severely reduced the freedom of the population to say and do as they wish.
It looks almost certain that we will see a Labour government in next year — and their intention is to extend these sorts of laws. God help us all.
The same applies to Menken’s definition of Puritanism: “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”
Caused less by poor mood than incipient liver failure. Now pass the port, would you, old chap. No, to the left, you fool!
Yes, yes — I realise that it needs honing, but it will do for now. Feel free to submit more elegant versions in the comments.
Snork.
This does not apply to the European-style Napoleonic juris, where you are, in effect, not allowed to do anything unless it is specifically allowed.
Incidentally, one of my solid guiding principles is that as soon as you hear someone use the phrase “the common good” then you should stop giving any favourable attention to what they are saying — they are either a charlatan or a totalitarian. Depending on their level of power, they are likely to be very dangerous and you should proceed with extreme caution (and keep a very close eye on your wallet).
I have met people who claimed to be Libertarians who do not subscribe to the Non-Aggression Axiom: these people are not Libertarians because the axiom is the central tenet of Libertarianism. It is, you might say, axiomatic.
The only was in which Common Law peoples could justify slavery was to pretend that black people were not, in fact, humans, and so the laws did not apply to them. This, in turn, justified many other injustices such as segregation.
1939, Democracy Works by Arthur Garfield Hays, Page 28, Random House, New York (Questia), and cited here.