Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi sentenced to death for songs critical of regime

So many examples to choose from, and you picked a joke from 14 years ago that you LOLed at.

At any rate, let us know when you find all these Leftists that support executing this guy.

 

I'm an American so I'll take every opportunity I can to talk about the principles of free speech

I referenced a free speech case earlier, National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, where the Supreme Court ruled that " a person's assertion that speech is being restrained must be reviewed immediately by the judiciary. By requiring the state court to consider the neo-Nazis' appeal without delay, the U.S. Supreme Court decision opened the door to allowing the National Socialist Party of America to march."

There's an interesting ACLU blog post about the case written by the Jewish lawyer who represented the neo-Nazis. He writes:

While any effort to censor by punishing a speaker after the fact is likely to violate the First Amendment, preventing the speech ahead of time is even more likely to violate the Constitution, even where the anticipated speech is profoundly offensive and hateful. Central to the ACLU’s mission is the understanding that if the government can prevent lawful speech because it is offensive and hateful, then it can prevent any speech that it dislikes. In other words, the power to censor Nazis includes the power to censor protesters of all stripes and to prevent the press from publishing embarrassing facts and criticism that government officials label as “fake news.” ...

[The Anti-Defamation League] alleged that if the Nazis came to Skokie, the survivors would suffer serious emotional harm by being forced to relive their personal Holocaust experiences. We responded that no one who objected the Nazis had to attend their demonstration and that if claims of subjective harm could shut down a public assembly than anyone who objected to a controversial demonstration could prevent it by asserting it would inflict emotional harm.​

An anecdote: while I was growing up, I had family in Jasper, Texas. We visited once or twice a year. In 1998 James Byrd Jr. was tied to a pickup truck and dragged to his death over three miles. It was horrific and prompted a lot of soul searching for the town. The Ku Klux Klan took the murder as an opportunity to rally on city property. I remember my family expressing horror and dread that the KKK was coming to town in an obvious attempt to stir up even more racial hatred. Their very presence, much like that of the neo-Nazis in Skokie, is inflammatory and threatening to African Americans. Due to free speech rights, the march happened without much incident. The content was predictably provocative: you can hear one of them say "They don't have no rights... kill 'em!" in this clip.

Do you think that the neo-Nazis in Skokie and the KKK in Jasper should've been prohibited from speaking because the content of their speech, which includes clothing and signs, was inherently violent, anti-Semitic and racist? Should the state have the right to shut down their speech?

FWIW I think Columbia is well within its rights to shut down the student encampment. Columbia is a private university with its own policies and it appears that the students who set up tents on the main quad willfully violated rules against camping. Where I am more reluctant to make a judgment is in the case of UT yesterday; it's a state school and, from what I can tell, students were protesting on the west mall of campus as authorities came in to violently break it up. That is the state (governor and police) using force to disrupt speech it does not like on state property. Making martyrs out of the protestors only enflames the situation more. The attention - breathless media coverage, nonstop cherry-picked tweets, and strong-armed state response - only makes the committed protestors dig their heels in deeper and attract more casual protestors who don't like the way their fellow students are being treated.

I think generalized calls of genocide against another group are abhorrent. I think the students have made strange bedfellows with hardcore Palestinian activists who live in a fantasy world where their demands of "From the river to the sea" are actionable and would love to see October 7 repeated. I think Columbia, as a private institution, has the rights to set up its own code of conduct and punish students who violate it. But I shudder at the state of Texas attacking protestors on state property because they do not like the content of the protestors' speech.

 

I've noticed a trend of you contradicting yourself within minutes. Perhaps you've noticed my posts like this one. Just FYI.

 

Most of us aren't as avid followers of the Iranian hip-hop scene like you are. Which Iranian rapper do you think will step up to take his place? What was your favorite track of his?

I had no idea this happened. It's terrible and the kind of thing that I think both sides of the political aisle expect to happen in the theocracy of Iran. There simply isn't going to be a lot of outrage from something that happened to someone none of us, other than you, had even heard of. Of course Putin supports Iran, and Republicans support Putin. The leftists do get outraged by that.