I use “hate speech” more or less following Judith Butler’ development on in Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997).

A question : What do you think the word “assholes” to be a generalisation of ?

If I were to say “Jews are assholes”, or “Black are assholes”, or “Palestinians are assholes”, would you consider this as generalisations ?

How can I judge whether or not I am an asshole myself ?

I don’t think that your calling quebec soveigntist as “jerks” is innacceptable. It is a stupid statement and it closes dialogue, but I don’t see it as innaceptable. Soveigntist, individuals, made the choice to involved politically in this movement, and they are responsible of their own choices.

It is calling people “assholes” or “shitty people” only because of where or how they were born, that is innacceptable.

that’s the thing : you did not apologize. You said you COULD apologize (“I can apologize to high heaven on the inappropriate things I said”) but the fact is : you did not actually apologized.

And as far as I can see, you still can’t recognise what was exactly inappropriate in your statements, seeing the difference between referecing, without any context, to a third party experience where quebec superstar was called “homard” supposedly because of its acadian origin; and your own personnal responsability in writing statements threating an whole ethnic group as “assholes” and “shitty people”. You cannot even make the difference between beeing called “homard” and beeing “asshole”. You didn’t call us “frogs”, you called us “assholes”.

About that I should defend other injustice. Well, I will say that you don’t have any idea who I am, what is my life and what my social engagement. Indeed, this is MY group you are directly attacking here, my own experience and my own identity that you are pragmatically denying, not in an abstract sense, but pragmatically, in this post, specifically.

But I guess distinctions and nuances are not your thing.

The only thing I am asking you is to explicitely apologize for your hatred statements towards my community.

@Mackey

This is the same thing here. It is one thing to criticize patriachy and men domination, but it would be another thing to call men, as a whole, as beeing essentially “assholes” and “shitty people”. While the first perspective is essential to liberation and justice, the later statement is an hate speech (in Butler’s sense), because this statement, in itself, is an act of injustice.

Marie Anelle has the right to account of her own experience of beeing dominated by some quebecers, or even, quebec as whole. Nobody denied this.

What is not acceptable, and is indeed hate speech, is to call a whole group “assholes” or “shitty people” only because of their ethnic origins.

It seems that in MA talking about her experiences about being Acadian, that those from Quebec are making it about them when that wasn’t the purpose of MA’s post.

If you actually read my other post, you will see that I apologized for crossing the line.

At this point, I question that you “really want to understand” and said that you’re done with this debate. I was giving you credit for at least wanting to delve deeper instead of being like another commenter who basically did the EXACT thing I was bitching against (though being told that I wasn’t Acadian enough for her was new), now I’m not so sure.

As for your understanding of derailing…If you read the sections in Derailing for Dummies, you will find that some commenters describe quite a few of the headings….especially “You’re Being Hostile”, “But That Happens to Me Too!”, “I Don’t Think You’re As Marginalized As You Claim” and “Aren’t You Treating Each Other Worse Anyway”. You can also note that the site is sarcastic and it’s clear that it’s about a commenter.

I fully expect that you will jump to the defence of everyone who feels the way you do now. But I have a feeling that you wouldn’t stand up for Oilnecks, Inbreds, pot-smoking hippies, spudheads, every name a Newfoundlander has ever been called, homards (or my personal favorite…inbreds of the East), or square heads because it doesn’t hurt you enough to be constituted as “hate speech”.

About “Minister of Secularism”

I have made some research to know what exactly Marie Anelle was referring to when using this term, and I must say that I don’t know what she is talking about (and I am not sure neither that she, herself, knows what she is talking about). You can see for yourself at the list of Ministries, in the Quebec government webpage :

http://www.gouv.qc.ca/portail/quebec/pgs/commun/gouv/minorg/?lang=en

(the french translation of secularism is “laïcité “)

However, a few years ago, there was big governemental commission that concluded that the government should adopt a policy of “open securalism” and “interculturalism”. You can read a press release about this report here :
http://www.accommodements.qc.ca/communiques/2008-05-22a-en.html

I can’t know tell you exactly how this report has been dealt by the current Quebec government (maybe you should ask to Marie Anelle), but one thing is sure, is that these proposals were and still are highly debated in Quebec francophone public space.

That’s it. I am still waiting Marie Anelle apologie for threating my whole community as “assholes” and “shitty people” and “immigrant haters”.

From Wikipedia, hate speech is « outside the law, any communication which disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic. Hate speech is, outside the law, any communication which disparages a person or a group on the basis of some characteristic such as race or sexual orientation ».

So from this definition, « hate speech » doesn’t need to be the inciting violence, and/or prejudicial action.

But if we want to go by the Law (do we really want to go that far ?), here is what Wikipedia says about the Canadian criminal Law:

« In Canada, advocating genocide or inciting hatred[10] against any ‘identifiable group’ is an indictable offence under the Criminal Code of Canada with maximum prison terms of two to fourteen years. An ‘identifiable group’ is defined as ‘any section of the public distinguished by colour, race, religion, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.’ It makes exceptions for cases of statements of truth, and subjects of public debate and religious doctrine. The landmark judicial decision on the constitutionality of this law was R. v. Keegstra (1990) »
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech#Canada

Personnaly, I think considering an whole ‘section of the public distinguished by ethnic origin’ to be « assholes », « immigrant haters », and « shitty people »; doing this on a publicly accessible website, as Marie Anelle did, qualify as an offence under the criminal code of Canada.

So, as far as I am concerned, as a member of the ‘Quebec’ group and as reader of this blog, the debate for me is not about Marie Anelle experience, but more pragmatically about recognising the fact that this post contains hateful speech towards Quebec people and making Marie Anelle and the blog editors accountable for this.

And I currently live this experience not as a debate, but as a struggle. At least, I would ask you to recognize my own experience.