Thin line between opinion, free speech, and a lie.

And yet, it’s there. Just as it is in defamation law.

Who defines truth, hate speech, and opinion[?]

A jury of your peers and the Public Order Act 1986.

The US has free speech. Apart from all the exceptions it carves out and designates not protected speech, including but not limited to incitement, threats and harassment, sedition, and obscenity. Obscenity in particular was famously ‘defined’ for a while as “I know it when I see it”. So why draw the line at hate speech?

Is it not a weird state of affairs when saying “X is a paedo” is legally actionable but saying “trans people are all paedos and X is trans” isn’t, even week when X’s house gets burned down either way?

When the other side wins an election are you now the criminal?

Sure, the UK parliament could pass a law saying criticising the prime minister is now illegal. The courts will inevitably issue a declaration of incompatibility with human rights law, but the government, in theory, could ignore it. If the public swallows it. But there’s nothing really stopping that happening in the US either. Congress could pass a law making it illegal to criticise the president, and since the president gets to pick the judges, it could almost certainly come under the sedition exception to the first amendment if the president really wanted it to pass. If the public swallows it.

And that’s what it comes down to at the end of the day. Whether or not the public swallows it. For all the US right wing likes to harp on about freeze peach that sure doesn’t seem to apply if you want to say something bad about America or use the word cisgender. Do you really think the American public is much less likely to support authoritarianism than the British public?

I always thought of Garak as more of a bratty bottom.

Dragonborn have to come from somewhere.

Not sure what your point about the Falklands is? They want to remain a British overseas territory.

It’s also nasty.

Now scientists think they know where it goes.

Twitter, mostly.

Rob Schneider peaked literally last century with Deuce Bigalow. As if that were not bad enough…

They better not remove “I am fond of pigs”.

Why can’t anyone study to become a qualified surgeon? Why can’t anyone study to do whatever it is they wanted to do?

What exactly is your point here? That medicine degrees are inaccessible? (Sounds like an America problem.) Or that requiring a medicine degree is a capitalist conspiracy because surgery can be learnt on the job?

Why would we need a specific word to describe that gap in the first place?

In principle, anyone who wants to can study to be a surgeon. It’s just that most of them will fail, be it at the first hurdle of qualifying for a medicine degree course, the next hurdle of actually passing the course, or any of the subsequent hurdles in training. By contrast, pretty much any able-bodied person who sets out to learn how to flip burgers will have succeeded, by and large, within a few days.