I am particularly interested in public organisations eg. like libraries holding online events and then using 'time-lapse' to mitigate "hateful" comments and later deleting all negative comments /feedback or even complaints so that feedback analysis is skewed and simply does not reflect public opinion. Even if some of comments are indeed hateful, threatening or abusive if they all are "disappeared" by staff how does this demonstrate transparency and accountability?
Thank you Sarah for this brilliant essay which puts so coherently my instinctive but muddled thoughts. More than anarchy, I fear it's the road to fascism.
I am generally supportive of your views, but I see some practical complications:
As you recognise, Allport’s Scale has logic. Examples are what Israel is currently doing to Palestinians (a culmination of the long-expressed view that Jews are superior), and arguably how the last few decades have seen a worsening of mainstream feminism from jokes about & disparaging of men, to widespread discrimination and even violence against them in some cases.
Noting your point about recording of "hate incidents" being a "breach of Article 10 ECHR. It must be revised", and then, "All hate incidents non crimes must now either be audited or deleted", implies to me a greyness about what should validly be recorded (particularly if an audit can justify not deleting an incident), and this suggests practical implications.
The recording of hate incidents or crimes unavoidably starts with subjective judgment, and the justice system inevitably takes time and is not perfectly efficient (actually I'd say it's appallingly inefficient – see: http://davidthorp.net/justice).
It seems useful to me that you would want to record a series of incidents that may suggest some risk, which may then provide some contextual evidence to support conviction in a future crime, even if they are not "speech crimes" in themselves. If worrying enough, these incidents might prompt action to prevent a crime. I reflect on the fact that when I've called the Police to complain about noise by neighbours, they do nothing about it, but they record the incident for these very purposes.
But there is a practical issue that all such incidents involve some subjective judgment & resourcing, and the more incidents you record, the more impractical it becomes to expect a legally perfect judgment on whether or not they should be judged as a "hate incident" worth recording. Some police officers might completely dismiss an incident, some might consider the same thing a "hate incident", and some might think it is potentially a prosecutable "hate crime". We should not allocate excessive resources attempting to perfect this judgment, which can only be legally made by a court.
Some obvious responses to this are that:
a) they should be labelled "offence incidents", to better reflect the fact of it having caused offence, rather than the unclear question of whether it legally constitutes "hate".
b) the accused should always be notified of the recording, and have the opportunity to complain and have it judged at a higher level.
c) such records should be kept secure and non-public. We certainly would not want such records to be available for "potential future disclosure to an employer" – who may easily act on a biased and prejudiced view (although we also have the broader problem of them doing this anyway based on a social media search).
Against these arguments I can see the concern about at what point has it become an Orwellian-State that's recording everything deemed inappropriate or a challenge to society's "established" views?
Dear Sarah, you are absolutely right - in fact my postgrad research (under the late Sir Roger Scruton) suggests that this and other current maladies can be attributed to erosion and replacement of private practice of virtues and 'ties that bind' by what has become known as 'virtue signalling'. Devoid of actual costly practice of virtues it requires strict adherence even in face of manifest absurdity, and is therefore not unlike beliefs associated with certain cults and sects, a well-researched subject. Unflinching belief in central tenets of an ideology despite all empirical and rational arguments to the contrary is common across all totalitarian ideologies, and the trans lobby is no exception. What is worrying, however, is that these cults and sects are usually not open to reform or rational argument... The willingness of some individuals and public bodies to go along with the flow of absurd commitments betrays intellectual and moral cowardice, a loss of nerve as Sir Roger used to say.
I am particularly interested in public organisations eg. like libraries holding online events and then using 'time-lapse' to mitigate "hateful" comments and later deleting all negative comments /feedback or even complaints so that feedback analysis is skewed and simply does not reflect public opinion. Even if some of comments are indeed hateful, threatening or abusive if they all are "disappeared" by staff how does this demonstrate transparency and accountability?
Thank you Sarah for this brilliant essay which puts so coherently my instinctive but muddled thoughts. More than anarchy, I fear it's the road to fascism.
I am generally supportive of your views, but I see some practical complications:
As you recognise, Allport’s Scale has logic. Examples are what Israel is currently doing to Palestinians (a culmination of the long-expressed view that Jews are superior), and arguably how the last few decades have seen a worsening of mainstream feminism from jokes about & disparaging of men, to widespread discrimination and even violence against them in some cases.
Noting your point about recording of "hate incidents" being a "breach of Article 10 ECHR. It must be revised", and then, "All hate incidents non crimes must now either be audited or deleted", implies to me a greyness about what should validly be recorded (particularly if an audit can justify not deleting an incident), and this suggests practical implications.
The recording of hate incidents or crimes unavoidably starts with subjective judgment, and the justice system inevitably takes time and is not perfectly efficient (actually I'd say it's appallingly inefficient – see: http://davidthorp.net/justice).
It seems useful to me that you would want to record a series of incidents that may suggest some risk, which may then provide some contextual evidence to support conviction in a future crime, even if they are not "speech crimes" in themselves. If worrying enough, these incidents might prompt action to prevent a crime. I reflect on the fact that when I've called the Police to complain about noise by neighbours, they do nothing about it, but they record the incident for these very purposes.
But there is a practical issue that all such incidents involve some subjective judgment & resourcing, and the more incidents you record, the more impractical it becomes to expect a legally perfect judgment on whether or not they should be judged as a "hate incident" worth recording. Some police officers might completely dismiss an incident, some might consider the same thing a "hate incident", and some might think it is potentially a prosecutable "hate crime". We should not allocate excessive resources attempting to perfect this judgment, which can only be legally made by a court.
Some obvious responses to this are that:
a) they should be labelled "offence incidents", to better reflect the fact of it having caused offence, rather than the unclear question of whether it legally constitutes "hate".
b) the accused should always be notified of the recording, and have the opportunity to complain and have it judged at a higher level.
c) such records should be kept secure and non-public. We certainly would not want such records to be available for "potential future disclosure to an employer" – who may easily act on a biased and prejudiced view (although we also have the broader problem of them doing this anyway based on a social media search).
Against these arguments I can see the concern about at what point has it become an Orwellian-State that's recording everything deemed inappropriate or a challenge to society's "established" views?
Dear Sarah, you are absolutely right - in fact my postgrad research (under the late Sir Roger Scruton) suggests that this and other current maladies can be attributed to erosion and replacement of private practice of virtues and 'ties that bind' by what has become known as 'virtue signalling'. Devoid of actual costly practice of virtues it requires strict adherence even in face of manifest absurdity, and is therefore not unlike beliefs associated with certain cults and sects, a well-researched subject. Unflinching belief in central tenets of an ideology despite all empirical and rational arguments to the contrary is common across all totalitarian ideologies, and the trans lobby is no exception. What is worrying, however, is that these cults and sects are usually not open to reform or rational argument... The willingness of some individuals and public bodies to go along with the flow of absurd commitments betrays intellectual and moral cowardice, a loss of nerve as Sir Roger used to say.