It is thought crime time everybody

A judge has ordered best-selling writer and journalist Oriana Fallaci to stand trial in her native Italy on charges she defamed Islam in a recent book.....In “La Forza della Ragione,” Fallaci wrote that terrorists had killed 6,000 people over the past 20 years in the name of the Koran and said the Islamic faith “sows hatred in the place of love and slavery in the place of freedom."

A woman who visits Italy but hasn't lived there in years has been put on trial in Italy because she published comments that said bad things about Islam.

Now i want you to take this in

In Great Britian if anything you say EVER gets published there (like i don't know on maybe the Internet) you could go to trial and have to face the british standard for Libel (where you have to prove what you said is true... Now the british media has learned a little trick on that but thats another story)

In Australia if you make a comment or publish something online that the government doesn't like... you could be hauled to the land down under.

In Canada if you break a canadian media ban ( as a blogger did and darned near took down the canadian government) you potentially could go on trial in canada -that government felt that halling US bloggers across the border for trial would be bad precident-

Greece demanded extradition of a british national who did some cartoons they viewed as blasphemous to jesus.. that is currently fighting its way in the courts. And did i mention the cartoonist had no control over his work being published in greece... it doesn't matter to the greek government.

Or how a canadian human rights board could hall in american broadcasters for a "rascist comment" if the signal is heard by a single canadian

What many people have fought and bleed on beaches and hills and all manner of god foresaken places on this planet we are taking away. The first amendment is dying, and it is dying because we are becoming a global community. Slander, Libel, indeed any kind of content no longer stops at national borders. And as EU regulators are now coming into this country to force manufactured goods to meet EU compliance regulations, how soon till they come after our books? after our movies? after our tv? I mean if they want them EU compliant out of the US for manufactured goods... heck why stop there.

Google sensors its content going into CHina but people can get around the content blockers so heck... google wants those 1 billion or so people living in a communist plantation, so why not just censor the content for everyone in the world.

This is why i hated the ICJ as an idea. Instead of saying "lets set the legal standards of this court to the highest level of fairness as a example to those nations who do not meet this standards of human dignity." we are going to go with the Mean (or maybe even the Median) standard.

So, Instead of holding freedom of speech to the highest standard and enrich our collective humanity, in the new global age we will meet some where in the mushy middle.

Unless we get some kind of treaty mechanism globalization will slaughter the first amendment in its bed.. and it won't be the only casualty.