Why is it that when people start lurching wild-eyed toward the right they often start with overboard animal rights stuff?

And what on earth does Malcom McLaren's version of "Je t'aime...moi non plus" sound like? Not to mention Nick Cave's...

@SarahHeartburn: This must be the flip side of serial killers starting out by torturing animals.

@SarahHeartburn:
MClaren did his own version? No, don't say this...shy oh whu?

Oh, Bardots racist rants in Europe is old news...she's really quite angry-funny esp as France is the most ethnically mixed country in Europe.

It's like Bardot, erm, do you know were you're fellow actors got those big lips and ever so olive skin and dark hair? It ain't latin hun, it's those arabs...

Sigh.

what she said is stupid; love to know how it became prosecutable

That's nothing. One time Tuesday Weld called me a woolyback.

She's clearly holding a lot of anger in her turkey neck.

Shelley Winters mocked my shrill-yet-throaty speaking voice.

@if_i_only_had_a_heart: Much of Europe (or a portion - Fr and Gr for sure, presumably other countries) criminalizes hate speech. Before thinking *gasp* how can they?, remind yourself - preferably with the help of a detailed, graphic account - of the shit that went down there 1930s - 1944, and it may dispel the shock. Where there is a history like that, where hate speech led to unimaginable atrocities, some speech abridgement is necessary. Nearly any risk of recurrence is unacceptable.

At least, I think that is the thinking. I understand it completely.

@if_i_only_had_a_heart: @TheLorax:

Yeah, I'm from Britain originally and it's a crime there and all over the EU to incite racial hatred. That's been the law as long as I can remember.

I presume that's the law Bardot's being prosecuted under.

"Coochie-coochie-coochie-BOOM!"

She's just being French. That's how they roll.

@TheLorax: While I understand the rationale, I find it completely unacceptable to bar any kind of speech in any way whatsoever. Freedom of speech is, and should always be, the one near-absolute freedom.

I've found that people with ignorant and hateful ideas almost always discredit themselves when they open their mouths far better than any anti-hate law ever could anyway. And laws to stifle speech will invariably lead to a lack of discourse and the establishment of only one 'correct' manner of thought.

Let the hateful people be heard from, if for no other reason than to remind us all that such things really do exist.

Charo publicly denigrated my unpredictable sex drive.

@skahammer: Faye Dunaway mocked my receding hairline and stabbed me in the neck with a spork. :(

@SarahHeartburn: On the bright side, you can see she hasn't wasted any of her money on plastic surgery.

@flossy: @skahammer: NIP IT. NIP THIS IN THE BUD!!!

@Buzz Killington: I completely agree. After having lived in Europe, I still find it unsettling/scary.

@PandoraSpocks: Jeez, what crawled up your ass and died? (It was Liz Taylor, wasn't it?)

Liz Taylor published an entire article in Commentary criticizing my pedestrian eye-color.

@flossy: She's just trying to save you from falling down that slippery slope. We can smell gateway comments a mile away. Help is available.

You can prosecute someone for this in France? Please. All the woman is guilty of is loving animals too much.

@if_i_only_had_a_heart: @Buzz Killington: @TheLorax:

Actually, France is the king/queen of "free speech" and the French are very proud of it (think Voltaire: "I do not agree with what you say but I will fight so that you have the right to say it"). So yes, Europe and certainly France is very pro free speech. There is a difference, however, between free speech and incitement.
In Rwanda, for example, it was RADIO shows that led to the mass genocide. It was men on the airwaves inciting their people to "kill them all" (meaning the Tutsis).
So yes, free speech ends when it infringes upon the rights of others.

@Henifer Hropes: Not that I'm saying that whatever BB said reaches the level of incitement (though one could argue that a person of her influence could certainly have the ability to incite violence)

@Buzz Killington:

I applaud the idea of what you said. However, if I was, say, an elderly Muslim shopkeeper, I would like to think I could go about my business without racist customers insulting me openly, or the local paper suggesting I go back whence I came. It would be scary to have no redress in law.

I really support these laws, but of course I grew up with them. I was surprised on moving to the US that similar 'inciting racial hatred' law didn't exist here.

@SSteele: agreed. The French, in face, were so proud of their free speech tradition that they had a VERY hard time after WWII prosecuting a man who incited a lot of violence. (Pierre Drieu LaRochelle if you want to look him up.) He has the dubious honor of being the only man in French history of being sentenced to death for what he said and not for what he did.

@Henifer Hropes: *in fact, not in face.

Sorry, but how is complaining about how sheep are slaughtered racist?

@SSteele: Hmm. I was called a "stupid nigger" in England and a plain old "nigger bitch" in France. I don't know that it protects you so much from on the street, in your face commentary as opposed to "racially volatile" speech in the press or at some public speaking engagement (or if your forced to watch the black soccer player you just threw bananas at and jeered with monkey sounds reply with an understandable Nazi salute-how dare he). The officer I told in the English case (at the urging of another bus passenger) was like "Well, that wasn't right at all."

And that's it.

Apparently it wasn't just that she said it. She made the comments in a letter to Sarkozy, and then her animal rights foundation pubished the letter. I assume the publication of the letter by an official entity she's in charge of would make the statements liable to prosecution. This is the link to a story in the Guardian:

[film.guardian.co.uk]

This does not bode well for Claudia Schiffer.

@SarahHeartburn: I highly recommend Barry Adamson's cover. He was a long-time bassist for Nick Cave.

Don't you remember the trial a few years back when Michel Houellebecq was prosecuted for saying Islam is "the stupidest religion in the world" or something like that? He was prosecuted under French law as a French citizen, when he made the comment during an interview with an Italian magazine. He was giving interviews to promote his novel about Europeans who travel to Thailand to sexually exploit poor people (and who get blown up by terrorists). In the US the novel got no attention whatsoever, but that's probably because it was written by a foreigner.

@SSteele: Well, there's hateful speech, and there's harassment and/or incitement.

Harassment requires legal redress, be it from a crazy stalker, a bunch of teenage punks or a racist making threats. And incitement is pretty much someone saying flat out 'find so-and-so and kill them' or 'burn a church' and so forth.

But someone saying 'Islam sucks' or 'Catholics are sheep' or 'Jews are greedy' or whatever the hell else they choose isn't harassing anyone directly, and their right to say it shouldn't be infringed upon by the government. Once the government starts to regulate what we can say (and effectively what we can think), it will quickly creep into areas that we never intended originally.

Racism used to mean treating people of different races differently.

Now racism is when you treat people of different races the same.

@if_i_only_had_a_heart:

Offending folks in France is ilegal, which is ironic since they are so damn good at it!

First, look at a Brigitte Bardot film from the 1950s.
Then look at Brigitte Bardot today.
See what racism does to people?

Monica Vitti threw her Negroni in my face. I think she mistook me for Marcello Mastroianni, though.