WATCH: Sacha Baron Cohen is Wrong About Everything

Benedict de Spinoza: “In a free society every man may think what he likes, and say what he thinks”.

This is how it should be, but isn’t, and if the likes of the Cohens were to have it their way, worse it will get.

In the freer but not that distant past, a man was at liberty to say what he wanted to say. If that resulted in harm to another man or property, the harm could be proven and measured, the man engendering the harm was taken to court, given his due process. If found guilty, punished, the punishment could be have been the gallows.

That was it, no 3rd party censorship, no limits to what one can or cannot say (or do as the logical extension of the freedom of life). The censorship was self administered – everyone was aware that saying (or doing) something that would lead to someone’s else loss would not go unpunished, the severity of the punishment commensurate with the harm.

In our society, in order to prevent harm we restrict anything that we think can cause harm before that harm happens, and that includes harm from genuinely free speech. It’s done in a mistaken belief that this preventive action can stop harm ever happening. Evidence is aplenty to show it doesn’t.

The justification for the restriction of the freedom of expression is to say one cannot shout ‘fire’ in a theatre if there’s no fire because life may be lost in the stampede the shout’s likely to engender. In law, one cannot be specific, one must be general, it’s not just that one cannot shout ‘fire’ in a theatre, one must not say other words that may cause harm. This necessitates the existence of someone who decides what words cannot be said because they could lead to someone getting hurt e.g words of hate.

It’s that, the someone or someones to decide what goes and what doesn’t that’s the unsurmountable hurdle because what is a hate speech that causes measurable hurt for one may be for another something that merely offends.

On the etymology of Cohen/Khan (etc) that has been mentioned in some comments – it is interesting.
One originates from a Priest class and the other from a Chieftain class. Theres is no genetic connection supposedly . Although central Asia connected a lot of peoples.

Interestingly Imran Khan PM of Pakistan, a Pashtun did seem to have an arranged marriage with a jewish princess, which was dissolved after there was progeny and before he gained his high office – not bad for a mere sportsman!
There are stories, apocryphal perhaps, that the great Priest/Chief Kissinger referred to him as ‘our boy’ who should be looked after as he progressed to his current high office.

Just mentioning out of curiosities sake. Khan is my cricketing hero as Cohen was once a comedy hero – until he tried his shtick on an elderly Tony Benn, but was bested by that great socialist. Not had any time for him since.

Given this performance for AIPAC, one must assume Mr. Cohen would approve of Paypal’s censorship of Grayzone for daring to challenge MSM narratives on Iran with their reporting – err, rather I mean – “their conspiracy theories”

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/01/09/paypal-blocks-donations-iran/

Hold on with your binary judgments: Cohen makes some very good points (to a very biased audience it’s true) …before drawing some very bad conclusions. The very worst people to adjudicate moral right from wrong are the ADL, the recuperated NAACP, or the government …any government. I had to look up Masnick’s Impossibility Theorem: which I found to be self-evidently true. But I was aware of another Impossibility Theorem – Arrow’s – that correlates it. There is no inherently unbiased way to estimate the Common Good. Letting a small but very vociferous group – like the ADL – have undue influence over the potentiality of censorship is a dreadful idea. But the totally unmoderated proliferation of fact free and prejudiced opinions – given virtual space to breed like bacteria – is an equally terrible solution. Popper’s ‘Paradox of Tolerance’ also has to be considered: lest we become subsumed by intolerance.

https://medium.com/the-politicalists/karl-popper-john-rawls-the-paradox-of-tolerance-f7d9a74a5a86

So this is perhaps an ‘impossibility’ conundrum with no positive outcome? Are we at Rawl’s point of no longer tolerating the intolerant? Will ‘no-platforming’ act as an accelerant to actually catalyse the rise of fascism? James tacitly showed ‘the answer’ – which is is a turn away from digitised virtual to face-to-face actual human relations. Where we all self-censor for the Common Good. Which is the basis of all true socialism: shared work; shared ownership of the means of production; shared ownership of property (except personal property); shared responsibility; etc. Which, along with Arrow’s Theorem (which challenges the assumption that democracy is inherently ‘fair’) – entails smaller, localised, holarchic and heteronomous relations and units of organisation. It is a fundament of globalisation: the autonomisation of prejudiced fact-free opinionated bias. And with it: the virtual social relations and organisation around opinion – that gave rise to social media. Entailed by the economics of opinion and the politics of the opinionated.

Humanity has a serious problem: itself. Or more literally: its-Self. The self is pathological opinion. The virtual self is freed of many extant social norms to become a virulent socio-pathogenesis – if allowed. The self is a narrative construction that we fashion out of self-confirmation biases to be the best socially acceptable and valuable (social capital; social currency) confection of representations of representations that conform to appearance. The apparition of being is appearing to be. I’m not talking about social media. I’m talking about the social ground of vapidity that social media is the technocracy of.

What is perhaps more scary is that it is not just social media that is ungrounded and proliferating prejudice from fact-free virtual avatars of mediocrity and loneliness – it is the whole of bourgeois society …the Spectacle (which is already 50 years old and long predates even the internet). And we can draw a line of flight back 150 years of the Fetish of the self – as the socially-transferable and transactable ‘universal equivalent’ money-form – right back to Marx. And the subjectification of human virtual object relations did not start there.

In a bourgeois society: the self is ungrounded and autonomised in a set of make-believe social relations which are all inherently prejudiced, fact-free, independent of reality, and deeply unconscious. So the fact-free censor the fact-free and the prejudiced censor the prejudiced? Unless we can turn away from this and toward a more direct ‘face-to-face’ de-commodified and de-monetised set of human relations …organised around authentic and meaningful experiential cooperation and ‘means of life’ economics …then the dark-gravity cyber-blackhole of emptiness and loneliness at the heart of globalised and digitised human virtuality will continue to expand and proliferate prejudice. And the only thing that can slow it is the bourgeois prejudiced.

Shut the internet down and return to more socially instantiated relations is actually among James’ repertoire of solutions …in his expanded ouvre. But anarchy is unpopular. That is because capitalism colonised the entire planet with its virtual inevitability and digital desirability by obscuring humanities true relationship with the environment. We mimic nature to enfold ourselves in nature at a human-scale of affordability …on natures budget and finance terms: not our bourgeois imaginary ones.

In the meantime: pass the image of the fair-trade popcorn.

Two ways to look at this:

1. The James Corbett way.
2. SBC in character, playing his biggest pisstake…….

Wouldn’t it be funny, if it was 2.

Maybe SBC could go in character or not and look at the preducies/rascism of these individuals.

A bit of print appears when I click on this item, but then it disappears and I can’t read it.

I may have posted this already on an earlier Off-G article but it’s relevant here:

From S B Cohen’s speech:

“…Zuckerberg says that “people should decide what is credible, not tech companies.” But at a time when two-thirds of millennials say they haven’t even heard of Auschwitz, how are they supposed to know what’s “credible”? How are they supposed to know that the lie is a lie?”

You’re not to be trusted to know what’s ‘credible’ unless you know about Auschwitz. The Holocaust is your guide to everything!

And isn’t it curious how the Holocaust has ceaselessly been used to emphasise a misanthropic view that says human nature is irredeemably evil – especially when amplified by masses. And to note that SBC’s ‘humour’ is based on ‘proving’ that everyone is racist and bigoted. Note how all this feeds so conveniently into that oldest political trick: divide-and-rule.

Along with David Baddiel, another unfunny zionist tool posing as a comedian.