Christopher Hitchens pointed out that the fatwa against Salman Rushdie was the opening shot in a culture war against freedom. The state of the world seems to agree with him.
Tag Censorship
Words and ideas lack the power to change the course of material world events by themselves.
The ECHR should be clear about the most elementary aspects of the job: legal protections are for people, not ideas or feelings.
Colombia has a blasphemy law, so I don’t know why it is glaringly absent on the map showing which countries have blasphemy laws.
The land of Locke, Hobbes, Darwin, Dawkins and Hitchens turned into a feudal pigsty.
I am reposting the Erdoğan poem — because an important part of free speech is the freedom to criticize and mock (and even insult) authorities
The bigoted prudes had the UN drop Wonder Woman as their Honorary Ambassador because, apparently, judging women by their looks is not wrong when they do it.
So, when someone, anyone, says “Happy Holidays” or “All Lives Matter”, instead of getting mad, maybe you should ask yourself what is it with your pet issue that have alienated people away from your cause?
I don’t need to be black to reject racism, I don’t need to be gay to reject homophobia, I don’t need to be Muslim to reject the anti-Muslim bigotry, and I don’t have to be a woman to support abortion.
Do you wonder how would it be if everyone with a YouTube account uploaded their own copy? Just to be sure everyone knows the bullying and intimidation tactics ISOC endorses when someone says something they dislike!
The guy can’t even tweet a *fact* without having a shitstorm coming his way. A common request is the ridiculous and patronizing idea that Dawkins should leave Twitter.
To date, they have published 19 issues and I hope they continue to exist in order to publish many more — I hope they will keep publishing even by the time when we will have recovered our right to mock and criticize any belief without paying with our lives, and when the words “blasphemy” and “Islamophobia” are only bitter memories of when the illiterate and bigoted tried to shove their sacred concepts.
This is not just a bad sign for free speech, but it is a bad precedent for science — what will ‘The Lancet’ do when very picky churchgoers choose to be offended with the conclusions of one of their papers? Judging by this bad decision, those will also be removed, lest they offend the illiterate.
Call me old fashioned, but I’m not into people losing their jobs and having their livelihood threatened just because they hold opinions I strongly disagree with!
They have really crazy people in Egypt:
Actually, drawing Muhammad is the kind thing to do because it questions religious authority, and questioning authority, any authority, is the first step to challenge injustice.
Bigots at the National University of Córdoba sent death threats to JM Mulet, who was on a tour of his book about we should not listen to fear-mongers when it comes to diet choices:
After a politically correct tantrum, DC Comics pulled this cover-tribute to the most popular story of how Joker was born:
When it comes to free speech, Bill Maher gets it:
We’re one week into 2015 and freethought in France is already threatened by Islam, now with a shooting at the…