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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| David wrote: | | Tannin, another interesting point might be to turn the question around: what will actually be permitted if 18C will be repealed? What can't you say now that you will be able to say? |
Winner, winner, chicken dinner. That's the same question that should be asked of almost every law on the books. |
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Tannin 
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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According to the law we have and have had for 20 years, Nothing "said or done reasonably and in good faith" which is "an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment" on "any event or matter of public interest" is illegal.
So why change something that works well?
I repeat my challenge: provide an example of the speech that you wish to legalise that is currently illegal.
None of you has even tried to do this. Massive fail.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| There is no fail, your beliefs on the matter are completely contrary to mine, so what you're arguing for as I see it is the restriction on the freedom of expression and I find any infringement on that freedom something to fight against. You're arguing specific legislation, I'm arguing against anything resembling legislation against one's rights to self expression or free speech. All this law does is threaten violence against people who wish to say things contrary to the current moral outlook of society. Let these ideas be said and debated, refuted or taken up without fear of Big Brother deciding that you're being offensive. Laws like this silence people well beyond their intentions, because people, knowing that the law exists, but not its specifics will self censor. |
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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Tannin wrote: | According to the law we have and have had for 20 years, Nothing "said or done reasonably and in good faith" which is "an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment" on "any event or matter of public interest" is illegal.
So why change something that works well?
I repeat my challenge: provide an example of the speech that you wish to legalise that is currently illegal.
None of you has even tried to do this. Massive fail. |
I do think that the phrases "good faith" and "public interest" are very broad and liable to subjective interpretation. Which of these criteria was Bolt said to fail again? Was it the "reasonableness" that was seen to be lacking?
I have tried to provide examples on the previous page. Can you provide a couple of hypothetical answers to my question? That is, why should we fight against 18C's repeal, other than "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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David, you have not provided even one example. Every one of the seven "examples" you presented is already perfectly legal speech.
I'll try to find the time later today to provide you with more detailed answers, but it's a very busy Monday here. I don't think I'll bother trying to respond to Wokko's posts even if time permits: he seems to be off in some doctrinaire fantasyland beyond the facts and reason, so there are probably better uses of our time.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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Tannin
Can't remember
Joined: 06 Aug 2006
Location: Huon Valley Tasmania
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| David wrote: | | I do think that the phrases "good faith" and "public interest" are very broad and liable to subjective interpretation. |
Crikey! You'll be discovering the secret of fire any day now! Of course they are subjective. Almost everything in law and government and business is subjective (in the sense you are using the term) and subject to interpretation and always has been.
_________________
�Let's eat Grandma.� Commas save lives! |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | Tannin wrote: | According to the law we have and have had for 20 years, Nothing "said or done reasonably and in good faith" which is "an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment" on "any event or matter of public interest" is illegal.
So why change something that works well?
I repeat my challenge: provide an example of the speech that you wish to legalise that is currently illegal.
None of you has even tried to do this. Massive fail. |
I do think that the phrases "good faith" and "public interest" are very broad and liable to subjective interpretation. |
Wouldn't that be a matter for the courts to determine based on the current web of interpretation and procedural constraints, as with the term "reasonable person" and no doubt dozens of others? It would seem far better to put something like this in treacle (the slow matter of judicial interpretation and process, whatever that entails in detail) than in stone so extremists in the future don't turn it into the equivalent of the US right to bear arms.
Once you hit the logical dilemma wall you have to resort to either (a) a fundamentalist choking to death of something, (b) a search for a new solution, or (c) a systematic checks and balances approach which gets you in about the right place. When stuck at (b) default to (c), unless you want to let the inmates take over the asylum.
Edit: See what Tannin says above!
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Wokko wrote: | | There is no fail, your beliefs on the matter are completely contrary to mine, so what you're arguing for as I see it is the restriction on the freedom of expression and I find any infringement on that freedom something to fight against. You're arguing specific legislation, I'm arguing against anything resembling legislation against one's rights to self expression or free speech. All this law does is threaten violence against people who wish to say things contrary to the current moral outlook of society. Let these ideas be said and debated, refuted or taken up without fear of Big Brother deciding that you're being offensive. Laws like this silence people well beyond their intentions, because people, knowing that the law exists, but not its specifics will self censor. |
But the most clear and identifiable menace in reality as we speak is the risk and real damage done daily to minorities through social exclusion and often very direct violence. You can't claim a plausible violence is worse than an actual violence. And a zillion cognitive science studies will show you the language of hate primes the brain to hate and take action on that hate (a tautology, really, as we all know hate controls action).
As I say, it's a logical dilemma. You can't have both, so you work a pragmatic outcome, a key aspect of which is logically prioritising actual violence over plausible violence.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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On a side note, I don't think you guys are taking free speech seriously enough if you think the risk the solution of 18C poses is even in the top ten free speech risks (particularly when the risk it resolves, the ostracising of minorities, is a far greater actual problem.
The greatest menaces to free speech by a country mile are (a) a lack of information awareness, (b) a lack of an ability to mentally absorb, catalogue and critically assess new information (serious education), (c) the flooding of minds under stress with hysterical, misleading and statistically distorted information, (d) time poverty based on the slowing of real wage growth, (e) the encroachment of tyrannical corporations on employee free speech (one of David's best and most timely topics, IMO), (f) a lack of global experience and tolerance of variety and difference, (g) the ever-present drivers of prejudice in their many forms, among many others.
We don't know how to resolve those problems extensively, but we do know how to deal with them considerably, so I wish you'd focus on them. At the moment you're grieving over the painting on the wall which is a fraction of a millimetre out, but not conceding you have no way of straightening the frame without making it worse.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm
Last edited by pietillidie on Mon Mar 31, 2014 1:19 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| pietillidie wrote: | On a side note, I don't think you guys are taking free speech seriously enough if you think the risk the solution of 18C poses is even in the top ten free speech risks (particularly when the risk it resolves, the ostracising of minorities, is a far greater actual problem.
The greatest menaces to free speech by a country mile are (a) a lack of information awareness, (b) a lack of an ability to mentally absorb, catalogue and critically assess new information (serious education), (c) the flooding of minds under stress with hysterical, misleading and statistically distorted information, (d) time poverty based on the slowing of real wage growth, (e) the encroachment of tyrannical corporations on employee free speech (one of David's best and most timely topics, IMO), (f) a lack of global experience and tolerance of variety and difference, (g) the ever-present drivers of prejudice in their many forms, among many others.
We don't know how to resolve those problems extensively, but we do know how to deal with them considerably, so I wish you'd focus on them. At the moment you're grieving over the painting on the wall which is a fraction of a millimetre out, but not conceding you have no way of straightening the frame without making it worse. |
I very much agree with you that this subsection of the racial discrimination act is hardly the most pressing affair, and that the government has (as with most of their hobby horses) prioritised it out of all proportion. I'm also inclined to agree with you that at least several of the threats you list are much more serious. But are they really threats to freedom of speech, per se?
For me, free speech is about the freedom to communicate outwards (particularly politically or artistically). That's its most central function. There's also the problem of whether there are accessible channels for that communication to be heard, but for me that's a quite distinct (albeit somewhat related) problem. The reason why the right to speech is worth protecting in and of itself is perhaps more than anything about freedom from tyranny: the ability to be a dissident, for instance; likewise, the ability to create non-state-sanctioned art, or the ability to communicate one's displeasure with the status quo without being given a one-way ticket to the Gulag. It doesn't directly follow that these forms of communication have a right to be heard, however. Indeed, it is reasonably expected that crackpot ideaswhich most of us agree should be able to be held and/or expressedshould not be given serious time in the mainstream media. Likewise, it's to be expected that radical ideas will be given much less airtime than mainstream ones.
The reason I point all this out is that I think most of the issues you list (certainly a), b), c) and f)) belong to that second categorythey're about flow of information, not limitations on the right to expression. And don't get me wrong: they are all serious issues that have a significant impact on the functioning of our democracy and the wellbeing of people (the most recent election being a rather spectacular and horrible case in point). As such, we should be giving them much more attention than we currently are; but that to me is no excuse to take our eye off the "free speech" ball. On that front, I would argue that we are right to be a little neurotic.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Wokko
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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| David wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | On a side note, I don't think you guys are taking free speech seriously enough if you think the risk the solution of 18C poses is even in the top ten free speech risks (particularly when the risk it resolves, the ostracising of minorities, is a far greater actual problem.
The greatest menaces to free speech by a country mile are (a) a lack of information awareness, (b) a lack of an ability to mentally absorb, catalogue and critically assess new information (serious education), (c) the flooding of minds under stress with hysterical, misleading and statistically distorted information, (d) time poverty based on the slowing of real wage growth, (e) the encroachment of tyrannical corporations on employee free speech (one of David's best and most timely topics, IMO), (f) a lack of global experience and tolerance of variety and difference, (g) the ever-present drivers of prejudice in their many forms, among many others.
We don't know how to resolve those problems extensively, but we do know how to deal with them considerably, so I wish you'd focus on them. At the moment you're grieving over the painting on the wall which is a fraction of a millimetre out, but not conceding you have no way of straightening the frame without making it worse. |
I very much agree with you that this subsection of the racial discrimination act is hardly the most pressing affair, and that the government has (as with most of their hobby horses) prioritised it out of all proportion. I'm also inclined to agree with you that at least several of the threats you list are much more serious. But are they really threats to freedom of speech, per se?
For me, free speech is about the freedom to communicate outwards (particularly politically or artistically). That's its most central function. There's also the problem of whether there are accessible channels for that communication to be heard, but for me that's a quite distinct (albeit somewhat related) problem. The reason why the right to speech is worth protecting in and of itself is perhaps more than anything about freedom from tyranny: the ability to be a dissident, for instance; likewise, the ability to create non-state-sanctioned art, or the ability to communicate one's displeasure with the status quo without being given a one-way ticket to the Gulag. It doesn't directly follow that these forms of communication have a right to be heard, however. Indeed, it is reasonably expected that crackpot ideaswhich most of us agree should be able to be held and/or expressedshould not be given serious time in the mainstream media. Likewise, it's to be expected that radical ideas will be given much less airtime than mainstream ones.
The reason I point all this out is that I think most of the issues you list (certainly a), b), c) and f)) belong to that second categorythey're about flow of information, not limitations on the right to expression. And don't get me wrong: they are all serious issues that have a significant impact on the functioning of our democracy and the wellbeing of people (the most recent election being a rather spectacular and horrible case in point). As such, we should be giving them much more attention than we currently are; but that to me is no excuse to take our eye off the "free speech" ball. On that front, I would argue that we are right to be a little neurotic. |
Tyranny? There's no such thing as tyranny you right wing, wingnut conspiracy nutball. 
Next thing you'll be saying we have the right to defend ourselves against tyranny, then it'll be off to the psych ward with you.
There really needs to be a sarcasm font. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| David wrote: | | pietillidie wrote: | On a side note, I don't think you guys are taking free speech seriously enough if you think the risk the solution of 18C poses is even in the top ten free speech risks (particularly when the risk it resolves, the ostracising of minorities, is a far greater actual problem.
The greatest menaces to free speech by a country mile are (a) a lack of information awareness, (b) a lack of an ability to mentally absorb, catalogue and critically assess new information (serious education), (c) the flooding of minds under stress with hysterical, misleading and statistically distorted information, (d) time poverty based on the slowing of real wage growth, (e) the encroachment of tyrannical corporations on employee free speech (one of David's best and most timely topics, IMO), (f) a lack of global experience and tolerance of variety and difference, (g) the ever-present drivers of prejudice in their many forms, among many others.
We don't know how to resolve those problems extensively, but we do know how to deal with them considerably, so I wish you'd focus on them. At the moment you're grieving over the painting on the wall which is a fraction of a millimetre out, but not conceding you have no way of straightening the frame without making it worse. |
I very much agree with you that this subsection of the racial discrimination act is hardly the most pressing affair, and that the government has (as with most of their hobby horses) prioritised it out of all proportion. I'm also inclined to agree with you that at least several of the threats you list are much more serious. But are they really threats to freedom of speech, per se?
For me, free speech is about the freedom to communicate outwards (particularly politically or artistically). That's its most central function. There's also the problem of whether there are accessible channels for that communication to be heard, but for me that's a quite distinct (albeit somewhat related) problem. The reason why the right to speech is worth protecting in and of itself is perhaps more than anything about freedom from tyranny: the ability to be a dissident, for instance; likewise, the ability to create non-state-sanctioned art, or the ability to communicate one's displeasure with the status quo without being given a one-way ticket to the Gulag. It doesn't directly follow that these forms of communication have a right to be heard, however. Indeed, it is reasonably expected that crackpot ideaswhich most of us agree should be able to be held and/or expressedshould not be given serious time in the mainstream media. Likewise, it's to be expected that radical ideas will be given much less airtime than mainstream ones.
The reason I point all this out is that I think most of the issues you list (certainly a), b), c) and f)) belong to that second categorythey're about flow of information, not limitations on the right to expression. And don't get me wrong: they are all serious issues that have a significant impact on the functioning of our democracy and the wellbeing of people (the most recent election being a rather spectacular and horrible case in point). As such, we should be giving them much more attention than we currently are; but that to me is no excuse to take our eye off the "free speech" ball. On that front, I would argue that we are right to be a little neurotic. |
That's still far too narrow an analysis in my view. The problem isn't with the importance of free speech, but weighting that particular right to such a degree that you are led to underplay other things which are clearly more fundamental than free speech such as physical safety, or have more actual impact than free speech at the minuscule level of constraint we're talking about.
There is a real concern here that this weighting you're granting free speech is rooted in an emotional attachment to the primacy of free speech rather than solid argument or evidence. Simply suspecting free speech takes primacy over other rights (probably based on the cultural mantras we grew up with, which is not a criticism of you, but a reality for us all), or re-living tales of the Iron Curtain, as instructive as they are in their own right, is not enough.
At the principled end of the argument, free speech is a trivial loss when you're malnourished, impoverished, living in chaos, or gravely ill. At the utilitarian end of the argument, the impact of, say, gross ignorance through time poverty, misinformation, and deficient (formal and/or informal) education, can completely neuter or in fact outweigh the benefits of free speech.
A blind, sloganistic reification of "free speech" leads people into all kinds of nonsense ideas, from Singapore being a despot's paradise, to Chinese people not valuing free speech, to the US being "the blessed land of the free".
Moreoverand here's where this argument bites in this debatesuch a skewed approach to rights in this instance leads us to prioritise, say, the right to be a sinister racist creep over the right to feel physically, psychologically and socially safe.
Yet plainly, no matter how many times you repeat the incantation "free speech, free speech", the safety of citizens is an infinitely more fundamental need and right than Andrew Bolt's juvenile, compulsive desire to get attention.
I suspect many people grossly under-weight what's going on in the minds of victims of racial hate here. The extremely annoying free speech restrictions faced in my part of the world pale into comparison to the fear of god the racist mob puts into outsiders, not to mention the oppressive claustrophobia of being shut out of fair competition. Free speech is way down the list compared to those. And my experience is just a tiny taste of what other far less mobile and empowered minorities feel daily.
At the utilitarian end of the argument, the Iraq War led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the creation of millions of refugees. Much of the support for it was generated by scumbags who bombarded people with lies and deceit. (And while we're at it let's not forget the "free speech" of the Nayirah testimony in the Gulf War http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_(testimony) ). Well, there's a tiny fraction of the body count of "free speech, free speech", without accountability, in action for you.
Now, I'm not saying I have a solution as to how we can make stiflers of human knowledge and insight such as Rupert Murdoch answer for their abuse of humanity (and that's what it isdoctors and lawyers would lose their licenses to practice if they engaged in such professional misconduct and made so many gross errors), but we can't pretend "free speech, free speech" tells us anything sophisticated about the world.
That is, any discussion about free speech which is not simultaneously carried out within the context of the weight of all rights on the one hand, and the weight of practical outcomes on the other, risks becoming trite and misleading, and inadvertently sanctioning far worse in actual, lived daily experience than it imagines.
_________________
In the end the rain comes down, washes clean the streets of a blue sky town.
Help Nick's: http://www.magpies.net/nick/bb/fundraising.htm |
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watt price tully 
Joined: 15 May 2007
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With little due respect Wokko, your peddling nonsense with respect to holocaust denial & the Toben case.
The case of Toben was not denying the holocaust but the manner in which it was done.
Toben vilified not merely denied.
He kept on operating explicitly against the judges orders trying to cloak himself in the flag of Freedom of Speech.
One is free to deny, free to have opinions but not to incite violence, vilify etc.
Your representations on the matter whether intended or not, are erroneous & mischievous & misrepresent section 18 C. You keep on stating or leave the false impression that one is not allowed to comment on the Holocaust per se. That is wrong.
Toben was jailed for being found to be in contempt of court - not for holding a particular view.
_________________
“I even went as far as becoming a Southern Baptist until I realised they didn’t keep ‘em under long enough” Kinky Friedman |
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