I disagree with what you say, but.........

[pietillidie]

[David]

Isn't the government proposing to ban these boycotts altogether, however? That to me is very sinister.

[pietillidie]

^That would be sinister, then. Boycotts are a critical check and balance�just do the due diligence to make sure the facts are right.

[stui magpie]

I'd have to read the detail, but I wouldn't have a problem with making these groups be accountable for truth in advertising when they're marketing these campaigns.

Other than that, personally I think trying to stop them is dumb and wrong. Let em make dicks of themselves.

But if the companies are held to a standard when advertising their products or services, so should people marketing against them.

[Tannin]

Stui, they already are. Green groups (like any other group) can be and have been sued for making "misleading" statements in boycott campaigns - in nearly all cases, the actions were dismissed as worthless and the courts effectively found that the campaign advertisements were accurate.

[Wokko]

If the company can't sue for defamation then there is NO reason to prevent a boycott. If a company wants to have a practice, or take a social position then it deals with the consequences, as do the people who bring attention to it. Like the Chick-fil-A boycott that brought in more customers for them than they lost (no point boycotting a product/service you don't use), it's all about a free exchange of ideas and people being free to make their own choices and decisions.

[stui magpie]

[Wokko]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gciegyiLYtY&feature=youtu.be

Rowan Atkinson on freedom of speech/expression.

[watt price tully]

[Wokko]

[David]

Great video, Wokko. Before anyone suggests that it's irrelevant to the Australian context, remember that the word "insult" also appears in section 18C of our own racial vilification act. It seems like it's interpreted less broadly here than there, but it's a reminder of where we don't want to go.

[pietillidie]

Atkinson is an entertaining fellow, but that was a cleverly-phrased but extremely shallow and ignorant rehash of dated ideas.

The thing you guys have to demonstrate is that the authoritarian monster in your heads is real, and that any unjust limitations of free speech that slip through the cracks are even in the same league as the suffering caused to minorities by a systemic ostracism that is coordinated, spread, justified, marketed and amplified and through hate speech.

Did Atkinson [add any name here] once mention the science which demonstrates the known biological mechanisms through which hate speech manifests itself in human suffering? Addressing that would have been sophisticated. Did he also distance himself from bullying campaigns on the basis that such behaviour is simply a form of "inoculation" for young kids, and that the odd suicide or stress-induced psychiatric problem can't be helped?

Of course he didn't. Because he's starting from the assumption�rooted as it is in a gross ignorance of both the hard biological mechanisms and social science data�that racial vilification is mere trivia. In his very limited comprehension of the matter, hate speech is the equivalent of measles for kids; fleeting grief for long-term good. He didn't even say such vilification is a problem, but we can't do much about it, sadly; he deemed it a life necessity that does its victims good, no less! Did he even realise how sinister that analogy was? Probably not; he showed very little understanding of the matter generally.

The more you look into this debate, the more you can see that it is being used as the last refuge for those who hate fair competition and are struggling to embrace the brave new world of diversity, with many others being dragged along by the empty religious slogan "free speech, free speech".

And it makes perfect sense. When you're in the dominant social group growing up, you quickly learn that one of the easiest ways to control people is to get the dominant mob to ostracise them. You can't kill the bastards, but you can at least keep them out of spheres of influence and control them.

While group politics is a normal state of human affairs, the anti-competitive free kick here is being able to access the biological and sociological hate mechanisms of the dominant group and the individuals who identify with it. Once you've triggered those mechanisms, you get automatic, tacit and systemic organisation against the minorities concerned. You don't even need to formally organise it in a clanish manner. Just keep triggering the out-group hate mechanism, and people fall into line like North Korean soldiers, or Americans after 9/11, or Australians fantasizing the Asians are coming, or what have you.

We all know full well that substantial marginalization can be achieved while upholding the letter of the law, because, well, "sticks and stones". And how much more without the inconvenience of having to even ponder whether or not we're contributing to other people's suffering?

The dominant group claims it's simply a matter of "sticks and stones", and then they all repeat this to each other, again and again, until it becomes "fact", confirming in their minds just how true it must be!

Such a primitive "mob rules" understanding of democracy seems oblivious to the historical fact that an agreement on rights (formal or tacit) always precedes serious democracy. This is because you can't have a truly democratic vote until you accept all constituents as equal first, meaning until you have a serious bill of rights. And that's because if the dominant mob defines itself against others, it will simply vote in a block and crush the less powerful. (And if there happens to be a dominant minority, such as feudal lords and a monarchy, they simply never hand over power to begin with because they class the mob as lesser beings. Either way, rights based on a recognition of the equality of others precedes democracy). And all 18C is doing, is updating those rights to reflect a diverse, fair and humane society with a new set of constituents.

In the context of this debate, the simplest way to demonstrate these dynamics is to see how those arguing against 18C never ever touch the science of hate speech and group ostracism, and forever crap on about imgaginary free speech demons, or point to the past, or point to countries with entirely different pre-rights power systems, or simply crap on about the importance of free speech, free speech without concrete present facts.

Contra Atkinson, anyone who has spent five minutes looking into the cognitive and social psychology of dominance, or studying the sociology of minority communities, knows it's not a matter of sticks and stones versus Gulags, it's a matter of one group being placed under a damaging degree of stress with real-world impacts and deprivations, and another group not wanting to let go of its historical dominance and feeling threatened by a progress which reduces its unfair competitive advantage.

Any why would that surprise? Progress has always been about that, hence all we're hearing is the same tired arguments against progress we always hear.

[think positive]

[stui magpie]

[David]

PTID, I just wish that someone on either side of the debate would sketch out the boundaries a little. It seems like on one side we've got people like Atkinson whose otherwise brilliant speech is marred by a refusal to address where the limitation of free speech might lie; but I feel like you're coming from the opposite direction and doing exactly the same thing. My question, then (and I think I already posed this to Tannin earlier on in the thread) is this: how far would you be willing to see freedom of expression reduced if the goal were, say, to reduce oppressive language against minorities? I could also ask Wokko and other opponents of 18C just how far they think restrictions on freedom of speech should go. That's really where the core of the argument lies, and I feel the restatement of ideological commitments doesn't really help us solve that problem; it just leads us to the conclusion that we need to protect minorities from oppression, that we need to protect free speech from authoritarian control and that where these two goals clash, we need to resolve it. That's more or less where we are now, so how do we work out which way to go?