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kiwisteveh


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RE: Australia News
I can stump you by asking where you get the erroneous information about Australians mostly being pasty white.

And are you really suggesting that the criminality in the US is because many Americans are not pasty white? Because that would be really revealing...

You didn't answer my other question. Do you not have ANY hate speech laws?


Scarbrems


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RE: Australia News
The very simple answer to your question about whether this law applies to all is 'yes'. In the State of Victoria, anybody of any colour would be arrested for publicly giving a Nazi salute.
There are no laws around black power or similar salutes. I would imagine there might be, however, if the following applied:

Any black/Aborigine group had been responsible for mass genocide and had a hand symbol closely associated with that

Any black/aborigine group had tortured or brutalised large numbers of white people and had a symbol closely associated with that.

Any black/aborigine group had once been in a position of high government and had permitted the ill-treatment of another ethnic group or had publicly condoned ethnic cleansing and that symbol was closely linked with that.

Harambe is ur Daddy

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RE: Australia News

Crime is a function of many things and it includes one's culture and access to resources. Australia really doesn't have many people anyway (an entire continent with a little more than half the population of California) so that is probably another reason the crime is lower.

On hate speech, it becomes relevant if you DO something. And you can't issue threats that are specific, as it is then criminal threatening. For example, if you say Trump is a ****, no one cares. We hear it all the time. If you say you are going to shoot that **** Trump at his next rally, you might get a little visit from the Secret Service.

Also, you can be sued for libel.

CD Richards

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RE: Australia News
Message edited:

Harambe, You got it. If you want me to go on a rant to end all rants, just get an American to say to me I don't know what freedom is. I've only just covered the tip of the iceberg.


Donald J Trump is the only President in the history of the United States who has successfully stacked a Supreme Court to the extent they can decide he has unfettered power to do as he likes, including wipe his slate of all his crimes. Biden's decision to stay longer than many people would have liked may have involved a few factors, but if you think cowardice was one of them, methinks you're living in la-la land.


Regarding shootings, you speak of "poor neighbourhoods of a certain race" -- to which race are you referring? I was under the impression most mass shootings were committed by white Americans. Furthermore, this simply isn't true as far as mass shootings go. A quick check reveals only 1.5 of the latest 10 mass shootings occurred in "poor" areas. The remainder were mostly in middle-class or relatively affluent locations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States) Both Sandy Hook and Columbine are middle class to affluent neighbourhoods.


School shootings are not "fear mongering bullcrap". For starters, guns are the number one cause of death of American school-aged children. That statistic should be mind-blowing to any sane adult. In the last 25 years, 554 school children have been killed in school shootings, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. That's an average of 22 per year. In that period, how many children have died by shooting in Australian schools? Zero. In fact, you can go back as far as you like and you won't find one. So yeah, it's real. You don't need to fear sending your kids to school here, in any area, rich or poor. You don't need armed guards and metal detectors at school entrances, and you don't need to practice "active shooter" drills. You don't need to make ridiculous suggestions about arming teachers. Oh, the price of "freedom".


I don't feel a need at this moment to dredge up crime stats for Aus vs US. From memory, I don't think there was a massive difference overall - except in one area, and there is no prize for guessing what that is. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_homicide_rates, for 2020 (the last year with figures for both countries), 40 Americans died by gun homicide for every 1 Australian. These figures are quoted per head of population.


I think I have already stumped an American by asking pretty much the question you suggested. If you don't have safety, if you don't have security, if you don't have peace, what sort of freedom do you have?


Finally, I'd like to echo Emma's comment. I couldn't give a toss if someone wants to take my country to task for the way they do things. I'm not my country, and my country is not me. Furthermore, I'm a big boy, and capable of defending it where needed or criticising it where that is required. I'm not going to beg and plead with people not to express their views. Please feel at liberty (there's that word again) to speak your mind. You might get an argument you're not ready for, you won't get crocodile tears.




CD Richards

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RE: Australia News
Message edited:

I didn't have the heart to tell him, Steve, that in spite of all the carrying on about pet-eating and rapists and murderers, Australia in fact has a higher immigrant population (of all shades and hues) than the US, by a substantial margin.



Scarbrems


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RE: Australia News
It's similar, then, to the UK, Simian. Just saying you don't like black people/gays/white people/whatever won't, contrary to popular belief, get you arrested just because we have hate crime laws.

In reality, the 'hate crime' has more relevance in conjunction with offences relating to harassment and public disorder. It's about intent. If you were overheard saying, for e.g., 'I hate black people's down the pub to your mate, you aren't going to find the cops at your door. If you persistently said it loudly to your neighbour who was black and threatened to do him harm because he was black, yes, you would probably get a visit if the neighbour reported you.

Similarly, if you persistently and deliberately visit a public space with the sole purpose of making abusive and offensive statements expressing hatred of a particular group, regardless of who that group is, you can expect a chat with the boys in blue, but it will be a 'chat' and you will likely just be asked to move on, same as anyone shouting abuse in the street would if they were being a public nuisance.

You can have an organised demonstration in this country about anything you like. We've had demos here with people holding 'England for the English' placards etc. The police are usually in attendance because there could be trouble as with any demonstration involving large numbers of people. You can expect to be arrested if you damage property or smack somebody else in the face. Most of the arrests at these things relate to public disorder and criminal damage.

You don't, you really don't, get arrested for simply saying you 'hate' any group. It's the intent, it's the setting, it's the circumstance. And yes, it applies to everybody, depending again on setting and circumstance.

A group of black people chatting about whites being bastards isn't going to get them arrested. Regularly shouting on street corners 'death to all white people' and harassing all the white people passing will probably attract interest from the constabulary. A few notable Imams have been arrested for this behaviour, and I am pretty darn sure that in America if a Muslim religious leader repeatedly publicly did that sort of thing, he'd find himself having to answer some questions.

Yes, the individual takes responsibility, here, but just like anywhere else, the individual does not live in a vacuum. The effect individual actions have on other people is, surely, the cornerstone of most laws. I'm not allowed to run down the street naked, because other people wouldn't like it. Pretty sure I can't do that in America either.

Harambe is ur Daddy

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RE: Australia News

CD: I am not comparing American gun violence to Australian gun violence, dude. I never ever said anything about arming teachers. I never crapped on Australia's free speech laws. And I never said that you don't know what freedom is. I agree that Americans overuse that word to the point of ridiculousness. I only waded into those thread to challenge your factually incorrect statements, which you are trying to obfuscate by throwing in unrelated data, like the obsession with so-called "mass shootings". Can we not agree that shootings in general are the issue?

As far as free speech, I consider this a discussion, not an argument. Our way of dealing with hate speech is to privatize it. If you say something people think is hateful, you will likely get "cancelled". Cancel culture may have gone overboard, but it is free speech and free enterprise at work. Boycotts are an expression of free speech. We've been doing them here ever since the Boston Tea Party 251 years ago.

Like I said, in America, kids are statistically way safer in school than out of school when it comes to getting killed. I wasn't comparing American aggregate crime to Australian aggregate crime. But if you are looking at American aggregate crime, Columbine copycats may tend to be white but most kids who die from guns are not dying with a white face at the other end of the barrel. White people have tried to run me over sometimes, but I have never been threatened with a gun by a white person. (Important exception: the sniper who shot Harambe was most likely white). By focusing on white shooters, you're playing into a trope of the media: that lives taken by guns are only worth reporting on if they were taken by a white person.

And I'm not even that interested in defending guns. I don't own one and I don't like being threatened with them. I just think you are overly focused on them just for purposes of scoring political points. We have a bigger problem right now from Chinese-imported fentanyl, and it is killing young people across all races. Drugs, alcohol and motor vehicles kill WAY more folks than guns. It's not even close. And a large amount of our gun violence probably also involves drugs and alcohol.

SCOTUS hasn't let Trump get away with much of anything. They are not ruling on a person, but on a principle of the law. This is really a separate discussion.

Finally, Biden is not a coward. He is a f**king coward. I have written several posts about it and I'd rather let my poetry do the talking than regurgitate points I have already made on the subject many times.

Scarbrems


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RE: Australia News
The truth is, Harambe, I don't think the reporting of mass shootings is about colour. It's about rarity and shock value.

Somebody shooting 40 kids in a school is newsworthy because it's rare. Maybe it shouldn't be the case, but if you have gang shootings, rival drug dealers, etc, shooting eachother on a regular basis, it might be local news, but it's not going to be national. A few column inches, maybe. A bit more if an innocent child is involved, but if it's frequent enough, it almost becomes treated as petty crime, wrong though that might be.

I can give you an example from my own country. It's no secret that knife crime is an issue, here. I might hear about it on local news if there was a stabbing. I would be more likely to hear if it was a shooting, because that would be rarer, but if it's the usual criminal element, it will be a paragraph in the local paper, maybe making it to local news. Three young girls got stabbed fatally recently. That made national headlines because it was children. Not gang related, not about turf wars, not about what's known as 'beef' with another adult. 3 kids leaving a dance class.

That's the difference. Doesn't mean at a national level we don't care about the volume of knife crimes, or that nobody is doing anything about it in general. In fact, because we don't, in this country, sit on our hands saying, 'oh, woe is me, it's hopeless, let's have a free for all and arm everybody', the legal measures taken to reduce the number of knives on the streets ARE working.

I have gone off the main point, there, which is that it's not about ignoring the crimes committed based on colour. It's about the out-of-the ordinary nature of mass shootings. Similarly, somebody who kills maybe two women, but chops them into bits after torturing them for weeks is going to get headlines over someone killing somebody in a street brawl.

Harambe is ur Daddy

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RE: Australia News

Scarbrems, yes. That's it exactly.

Scarbrems


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RE: Australia News
The reason those of us from other nations appear to make a big deal about the school shootings in the States is that, whilst from an American perspective, in the great scheme of gun-crime, these are rare enough to warrant national news, to the likes of Steve, Craig and I, they appear alarmingly frequent.

There has only been ONE school shooting in my entire 50 years of life in the UK. And absolutely nobody's response was 'arm the teachers'. Whilst our comparative size might go some way to explaining this difference, it doesn't quite explain it. And since, as you say, the school shootings we hear about tend to be white offenders, as the one in the UK was, it's not about demographics,
either.

We do talk about these crimes differently. Mental health is spoken about. He was odd, he was a loner, he was obsessed, etc. if we were to drag colour into it, I'd say we are more likely to focus on mental illness as a cause than we do when a POC is involved. The recent stabbing of young girls I mentioned was not perpetrated by a white man. There's been a lot of furore about the police 'hiding' the man's ethnicity. They did keep it under their hat because the man was Muslim and they feared the usual reprisals against the Muslim community. Because, of course, the mental illness tag can't be the reason if he's Muslim. It must be his religion, his culture, therefore every Muslim in the country must be blamed for it.

Here in the UK, that's a BIG difference. We don't blame every white guy for the actions of one nutter. We will, however, blame every Muslim, even if the crime has no obvious link to that.


   
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