Free Speech for some .... not for all

Oh yeah ... all journalists have their own agendum. In the article below journalist Brendan O'Neill writing at TheTelegraph forgets to mention the Greek athlete Paraskevi Papachristou   and   Stephen Birrelli  ... just two other names that come to mind right now.  Free speech is the right of all human beings.  If you don't like what some humans say, ignore them or tell them they are hateful or whatever... don't go advocating prison terms and other forms of punishment for us earth people. We are not  born into bondage.  We are free human beings still .... aren't we??  Or have the memos of our own enslavement, from the powers-that-be, gone into the "spam" folders?


Now that the conviction of a man who wrote a joke tweet about blowing up Robin Hood airport has been overturned, will his famous and media backers be turning their attention to having the conviction of Liam Stacey squished? I sure hope so.

Stacey was found guilty in March of committing a "racially aggravated public order offence" after tweeting a very poor taste joke about ailing footballer Fabrice Muamba, followed by several racist comments. He was imprisoned for 56 days. For tweeting. Yes, his tweets were dumb and offensive and written while Stacey was in the grip of drunkenness, but they were only tweets, only words, and to imprison a man for writing certain words is the hallmark of an authoritarian state.

For the backers of the airport bomb joker to fail to campaign with the same intensity for the overturning of Stacey's conviction would suggest double standards. It would suggest they're only interested in defending free speech for some but not for all, which of course is not free speech at all. It is privileged speech, the right to make jokes that Stephen Fry approves of, but not jokes that make Stephen Fry and his social ilk balk........