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Pies4shaw 
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| Wokko wrote: | | nomadjack wrote: | Student politics these days is a complete cesspit (has it ever been any different?) which is reflected in the fact that about 5% of students bother to vote. It's made up of fundamentalist socialist wanks, rightwing ALP wannabees, and smug, smarmy young lib arseholes. Groups like SA are embarrassingly earnest and naive in equal measure while both mainstream parties are notorious for dirty politics and graft. It's kindergarten politics at its worst.
As far as the Reclaim Australia rally and those attempting to disrupt it goes, give me a break on the free speech angle please 
Hate speech has never been free and you are kidding yourself if you believe there is anything else but sinister motives behind those organising the rallies. I've been tracking the emergence of these kinds of movements and groups in Australia and overseas for decades. They are far from new and their game is about furthering their own political goals by preying on and amplifying the base fears of difference that many people in society hold. If you scratch the surface you'll find many of the same names and faces involved since the 1970s and 1980s, with the cause celeb moving from Jews to Asian refugees to immigration in general, to African immigration and now to Islam.
I'm all for the free exchange of ideas and debate on the merits of immigration and how modern Islam (whatever that is) might fit with Australian values (whatever they are) but since when has blatant bigotry had a legitimate place in rational debate? |
So who is it deciding what is unlawful speech? Who is it who decided what is too bigoted or racist or hateful to say? Because in every era there are people willing to silence their critics and it is far better to have all speech be free than risk censorious regimes and groups from silencing dissent. |
It's the lack of anything approaching a recognisable reasoning process that gives it away. A number of you are pretending that "Recoil Australia" is engaging in "speech", when it fact that is no more "speech" than my dog barking. |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| Pies4shaw wrote: | | Wokko wrote: | | nomadjack wrote: | Student politics these days is a complete cesspit (has it ever been any different?) which is reflected in the fact that about 5% of students bother to vote. It's made up of fundamentalist socialist wanks, rightwing ALP wannabees, and smug, smarmy young lib arseholes. Groups like SA are embarrassingly earnest and naive in equal measure while both mainstream parties are notorious for dirty politics and graft. It's kindergarten politics at its worst.
As far as the Reclaim Australia rally and those attempting to disrupt it goes, give me a break on the free speech angle please
Hate speech has never been free and you are kidding yourself if you believe there is anything else but sinister motives behind those organising the rallies. I've been tracking the emergence of these kinds of movements and groups in Australia and overseas for decades. They are far from new and their game is about furthering their own political goals by preying on and amplifying the base fears of difference that many people in society hold. If you scratch the surface you'll find many of the same names and faces involved since the 1970s and 1980s, with the cause celeb moving from Jews to Asian refugees to immigration in general, to African immigration and now to Islam.
I'm all for the free exchange of ideas and debate on the merits of immigration and how modern Islam (whatever that is) might fit with Australian values (whatever they are) but since when has blatant bigotry had a legitimate place in rational debate? |
So who is it deciding what is unlawful speech? Who is it who decided what is too bigoted or racist or hateful to say? Because in every era there are people willing to silence their critics and it is far better to have all speech be free than risk censorious regimes and groups from silencing dissent. |
It's the lack of anything approaching a recognisable reasoning process that gives it away. A number of you are pretending that "Recoil Australia" is engaging in "speech", when it fact that is no more "speech" than my dog barking. |
i refer you to the topic title. Thanks for your confirmation.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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Jezza 
2023 PREMIERS!
Joined: 06 Sep 2010
Location: Ponsford End
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| Nick - Pie Man wrote: | | watt price tully wrote: |
What NTPM didn't mention Jezza is that the Young Libs are far worse than SA 
Apart from the smell of dog shit on the bottom of my shoe that I dragged into the car, I can't think of anything worse than young libs. Hell, they're even more conservative than my cat & that's saying something. |
This is very true. Young Labor too (I've done hard time with both groups). There are many groups I could name that are full of young people and (coincidentally I'm sure) full of wankers too. The fact that I went off at SA in particular doesn't mean that there aren't other groups equally worthy of derision.
The young libs are smug assholes. SA are rude assholes. Match made in heaven. |
I've had bigger issues with the Socialist Alternative than I've had with the Young Liberals.
The Socialist Alternative are rude, abrupt, condescending and most importantly they're a bunch of idiots who espouse idealistic views on important issues but don't truly understand the serious nature of them and haven't worked a day in their lives to understand how the real world works. I still laugh at the fact that the Monash University Student Association 'deregistered' them as a club last year.
I've had a debate with them once at uni O-Week about Israel and Palestine because they openly support the liberation of Palestine but when I posed the question of whether they think Israel should exist or not in its own right they couldn't provide a straight answer except for saying that Israel's atrocities against Palestine were abhorrent despite the lack of acknowledgement of what Hamas had done towards Israel as well. I don't support either side in this conflict but I just found it very interesting that they were so one-sided on this view and didn't even consider that the side they were supporting is fundamentally flawed in many respects and contradicts the beliefs they have on other issues such as supporting the rights of minorities such as gay people.
I know some people who are actually members of the Young Liberals and attempted to persuade me to join the group but I declined because I don't want to have any political affiliations when I enter the workforce after I finish uni plus most of the Young Liberals seemed like pretentious morons who just couldn't be taken seriously like most of these groups are at uni to be honest.
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| 1902 | 1903 | 1910 | 1917 | 1919 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1935 | 1936 | 1953 | 1958 | 1990 | 2010 | 2023 | |
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think positive 
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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I knew there was a reason I liked you jezza, so much common sense
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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Nick - Pie Man
Joined: 04 Aug 2010
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| Yeah you're clearly a smart guy. Don't be too hard on em. They might be moronic but that's only because they don't know any better. Most people don't wake up to how ridiculous they were in their twenties, until they hit their thirties. |
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pietillidie
Joined: 07 Jan 2005
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| Wokko wrote: | | nomadjack wrote: | Student politics these days is a complete cesspit (has it ever been any different?) which is reflected in the fact that about 5% of students bother to vote. It's made up of fundamentalist socialist wanks, rightwing ALP wannabees, and smug, smarmy young lib arseholes. Groups like SA are embarrassingly earnest and naive in equal measure while both mainstream parties are notorious for dirty politics and graft. It's kindergarten politics at its worst.
As far as the Reclaim Australia rally and those attempting to disrupt it goes, give me a break on the free speech angle please
Hate speech has never been free and you are kidding yourself if you believe there is anything else but sinister motives behind those organising the rallies. I've been tracking the emergence of these kinds of movements and groups in Australia and overseas for decades. They are far from new and their game is about furthering their own political goals by preying on and amplifying the base fears of difference that many people in society hold. If you scratch the surface you'll find many of the same names and faces involved since the 1970s and 1980s, with the cause celeb moving from Jews to Asian refugees to immigration in general, to African immigration and now to Islam.
I'm all for the free exchange of ideas and debate on the merits of immigration and how modern Islam (whatever that is) might fit with Australian values (whatever they are) but since when has blatant bigotry had a legitimate place in rational debate? |
So who is it deciding what is unlawful speech? Who is it who decided what is too bigoted or racist or hateful to say? Because in every era there are people willing to silence their critics and it is far better to have all speech be free than risk censorious regimes and groups from silencing dissent. |
Who do you think is deciding it's lawful speech? Come on, stop hiding behind the received status quo. You tell us where the authority for any norm you uphold comes from.
The social form you see is the result of a certain balance of power, not exceptional insight or morality on your part. Society and its legal system is sculpted to reflect that balance of power. Much of politics in turn is about trying to modify or protect the order of things, with "constitutions" and the like very quickly reinterpreted or reworked to restore "the right order of things" as circumstances change.
Thus, it is only "the right order of things" that white man should rule over others. Slavery unconstitutional now? No problem, implement segregation. Segregation on the nose? No problem, create giant, under-serviced, disadvantaged slums and criminalise the victims. Slums out of control? No problem, throw people into prison for three trivial offenses, privatise the prison system to incentivise the process, and police two different sets of rules on the street.
Or, it is only "the right order of things" that incumbent capital and its attache of sophisticates should rule over the riff-raff. Common folk having too much say? No problem, make unlimited corporate financial interference in elections constitutional. The poor and underclass interfering in election results in key states? No problem, make it prohibitively confusing and difficult for them to vote. Getting bad press somewhere? No problem, threaten to sue, punish financially, or retaliate with a dirty PR campaign. Down in the polls? No problem, start beating the nationalist drums of war through the media channels whose content you heavily influence and frighten people into relying on your authority. Protesters pushing for change? No problem, tweak the law so you can pepper spray them and carry them off for being in public space so they can't protest effectively.
Or, it is only "the right order of things" that Euro-Anglo-America should rule the great unwashed mass of lesser peoples. Need resources? No problem, declare the folk you invade madmen with weapons of mass destruction. Need land? No problem, declare terra nullius. The UN getting in the way of something you want? No problem, unilaterally declare it untrustworthy. People tiring of boots on the ground? No problem, send out drones on the sly instead. Need to silence foreign policy critics? No problem, run a terrorism-based fear campaign to frighten people into handing over their rights, making it illegal for dissidents to even tell the media they're being investigated.
And on we could go.
Put simply, there are no pre-exisiting rights that are not subject to the prevailing weight of power—no matter how hard people try to cover their assumptions about "the right order of things".
Edited.
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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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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Guy Rundle's article on the protests. Stui, you might find a lot to agree with here:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2015/04/09/rundle-reclaim-australias-secret-communist-origins/
| Quote: | How to defeat Reclaim Australia
Guy Rundle
The anti-Muslim Reclaim Australia will not be stopped with counter-demonstrations or vile attacks. But there is something we can do.
Someone might be able to make a bit of cash by putting together an Australian songbook for Reclaim Australia — 18 great misunderstood and wilfully misinterpreted Australian classics, from Friday on My Mind — a song registering increasing disquiet about the prevalence of the Muslim holy day — to When the War Is Over [and Islam is defeated], to Wake Up Jeff, and by Jeff I mean, of course, Straya. What a pity Mixed-Up Confusion is a Dylan number.
The playing of Redgum’s I Was Only Nineteen at the rally on the Gold Coast last weekend was a surprise, but given Reclaim Australia is so deeply confused, it shouldn’t be. You’d think that anyone wanting to drum up a sense of national duty and global conflict would steer clear of a song that portrayed such wars as meaninglessness and incomprehensible, but what was wanted from the song was a sense, above all, of self-pity.
I Was Only Nineteen gains its power from the absence of the self-pity — the narrator is trying to make sense of his world using a consciousness that has itself been shattered. That process necessarily foregrounds scepticism about the whole tawdry national parade with which the song begins. When you take loyalty to that as given, the lyrics become whinier than the violin on the original. “I was only 19” is really saying “I still am — pounded by a world I don’t understand”. Had they been really honest they would have played What About Me?.
There is no right-wing populist setlist that is not a document of a failed revolution. In the 1940s, the Communist Party of Australia developed a national culture strategy, drawing on notions of mateship and de facto egalitarianism to suggest that the Australian worker was “a natural Communist”. This involved the repopularisation of bush ballads, which had been largely shunned, and their introduction to school teaching — hey, don’t thank us! — the adoption of the Eureka flag, and much more. When the movement split along Soviet and Chinese lines in the ’60s, the Maoists took the nationalism with them and founded the Australian Independence Movement. Redgum itself came out of a project for the “politics and art” course of the Maoisante philosopher Brian Medlin. Hard to know whether Reclaim Australia would be more shocked by that or by the fact that John Schumann ended up working for the Democrats. The Maoists went full-bore for Australian nationalism, setting up a chain of “Kalkadoon bookshops” with Eureka stubby holders, Ned Kelly condoms and the writings of Mao, etc. They were stores run on firm Marxist-Leninist principles, letting you in only on the proviso you wouldn’t buy anything and closing immediately if you tried to.
When the radical Marxist tide that had flowed strongly in the organised working class began to ebb, the nationalist culture remained, like a marooned shipwreck. It was inevitable that it would be taken over by a new movement that has no systemic politics to speak of, simply a set of interlocking obsessions, as Shakira Hussein’s brilliant report illustrated. There was no chance such a movement would tap into the prevailing neocon narrative, with its elite commitment to globalised capital and free-market liberalism; nor could they create a Tea Party-style movement that draws on folk American traditions of “last best hope of man”, manifest destiny, etc. Trying to find some way to refloat themselves, they can’t help but be attracted by the most surging sense of national selfhood, which is indigenous self-determination in whatever addled way they understand it.
Without the infusion of movement for class power, it’s inevitable that such a movement will become a mess of fetishes, obsessions and magical thinking. Indeed that was part of an earlier appropriation by the Right of national symbols — in the ’30s and ’40s, when the “bush legend” movement became the “Australia First” movement, dissenting from joining the Second World War, and allied with the Jindyworobak poetry movement, which sought to connect modernist political writing to Aboriginal song cycles (many of which they recorded and preserved); eventually some of the Jindies began to believe that they could take on the telepathy they believed Aboriginal people possessed. Australia First was crushed by being interned (not before they tried to blow up some rail lines during WWII), and the Left took over the folk-nationalist franchise.
Now a section of the Right has got it again. It is organised around opposition to Islam because it needs to construct a strong adversary to gain an identity from. A generation ago, it was east Asians who were the threat because of their cultural otherness and alleged ant-like conformity, while Islam was an Abrahamic religious culture with shared norms. Now the batshit crazy notion of Islam as some unique force outside all other human meaning has been revived. That’s a worldwide thing, but like all such movements, particular obsessions are put forward. The halal thing has become obsessive in a way that it isn’t anywhere else. It is a purity obsession, of course — a ghost fear of contamination attaching to an object, atavistic in form. To a degree it’s a repurposing of general concerns around food safety, contamination, healthiness, etc, taking another form. Obsessive stories about what’s good and bad for us get a political makeover. None of this is done consciously, of course.
But, above all, it is concrete, the Right’s great initial strength and its ultimate weakness. Simple stories and symbolic objects give them things to coalesce around — look at their design style, and its habit of piling more upon more, because four Eureka-painted skulls must be better than three, if you can cram them among all the centred Zapf Chancery around the burning Sydney Opera House. Trouble is, without an underlying consistent argument the movement can only propagate with more objects, more magic. Should it try to become mainstream it loses its allure for many. Should it stick with the magical thinking it inevitably goes through a series of splits, as 9/11 trutherism and chemtrails become too much for some. Active politics involves an end to self-pity; for many, that is all that holds their selfhood, and a meaningful world together. Projecting power and self is too risky.
That doesn’t mean one should be quiescent about Reclaim Australia, but it does suggest a strategy against them — one also suggested by dealing with similar movements such as the now largely dissipated English Defence League:
1) Matching them on the street is good and necessary; giving them a reflected sense of purpose and unity isn’t. They can only gain a unity from what opposes them. Ridicule, parody and piss-taking is an important part of undermining that incipient sense of identity. Refusing recognition keeps them permanently in suspension.
2) Don’t try to restrict their free speech with state laws, but use the full force of the law against violent or threatening acts. Counter-demonstrations are legitimate, as is a degree of forcefulness in denying public space. Using 18C or other laws to try to get their marches cancelled simply extends the state into the public sphere, and it legitimates such. But any violent or threatening acts should be pinged, reported and prosecuted, dividing the movement between its violent and non-violent groupings. Criminal prosecution doesn’t create martyrs — it just isolates and segments an already atomised movement.
3) Separating the leaders from the led. The movement obviously has leaders, who have largely constituted the movement from leftovers. They will emerge as public figures. They tend to be split types, intelligent but also thought-disordered who simultaneously believe and don’t believe the myths they’re peddling. Desperate for fame and recognition, they will respond to temptation and ultimately become separate from, and suspected, by the people they initially energised.
4) Check their backgrounds. Most such leaders are entrepreneurial chancers for whom political populism is the latest go. Demonstrating the separation between the leaders and their more sincere, if befuddled and sometime pernicious rank-and-file decomposes the relationship. Such movements will tolerate success for a while, but what they really crave is disappointment and betrayal, and a sense that the world is stacked against them. Which in turn allows for a return to self-pity, and a sense that they have preserved their identity, in a fallen world.
Ultimately, Reclaim Australia is a distant echo from the Keating restructuring of the early ’90s, when a section of the old Anglo working class were dismissed as surplus to requirements. As their fortunes fell, those of a stream of migrants rose, their tighter social networks and capital networks allowing for steady social advancement, which the more atomised social networks of other groups could not match. Nothing real about this process can be admitted, which is why Reclaim Australia pays relatively little attention to real social problems that do exist in their rhetoric — fraying of social cohesion within multicultural societies, the real rise of ethnic-branded gang crime and the like. To talk of such would be to admit that there are both social problems and social solutions. What they want is a transcendental enemy, omnipresent Islam, coming in via halal through our very pores.
Once the movement has been broken down and the pernicious separated from the pathetic or the merely pliant, the latter can be spoken to in different terms, appealing to the better side of themselves. In terms befitting a group of people who can’t understand I Was Only Nineteen. |
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Pies4shaw
pies4shaw
Joined: 08 Oct 2007
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| David wrote: | Guy Rundle's article on the protests. Stui, you might find a lot to agree with here:
https://www.crikey.com.au/2015/04/09/rundle-reclaim-australias-secret-communist-origins/
| Quote: | How to defeat Reclaim Australia
Guy Rundle
The anti-Muslim Reclaim Australia will not be stopped with counter-demonstrations or vile attacks. But there is something we can do.
Someone might be able to make a bit of cash by putting together an Australian songbook for Reclaim Australia — 18 great misunderstood and wilfully misinterpreted Australian classics, from Friday on My Mind — a song registering increasing disquiet about the prevalence of the Muslim holy day — to When the War Is Over [and Islam is defeated], to Wake Up Jeff, and by Jeff I mean, of course, Straya. What a pity Mixed-Up Confusion is a Dylan number.
The playing of Redgum’s I Was Only Nineteen at the rally on the Gold Coast last weekend was a surprise, but given Reclaim Australia is so deeply confused, it shouldn’t be. You’d think that anyone wanting to drum up a sense of national duty and global conflict would steer clear of a song that portrayed such wars as meaninglessness and incomprehensible, but what was wanted from the song was a sense, above all, of self-pity.
I Was Only Nineteen gains its power from the absence of the self-pity — the narrator is trying to make sense of his world using a consciousness that has itself been shattered. That process necessarily foregrounds scepticism about the whole tawdry national parade with which the song begins. When you take loyalty to that as given, the lyrics become whinier than the violin on the original. “I was only 19” is really saying “I still am — pounded by a world I don’t understand”. Had they been really honest they would have played What About Me?.
There is no right-wing populist setlist that is not a document of a failed revolution. In the 1940s, the Communist Party of Australia developed a national culture strategy, drawing on notions of mateship and de facto egalitarianism to suggest that the Australian worker was “a natural Communist”. This involved the repopularisation of bush ballads, which had been largely shunned, and their introduction to school teaching — hey, don’t thank us! — the adoption of the Eureka flag, and much more. When the movement split along Soviet and Chinese lines in the ’60s, the Maoists took the nationalism with them and founded the Australian Independence Movement. Redgum itself came out of a project for the “politics and art” course of the Maoisante philosopher Brian Medlin. Hard to know whether Reclaim Australia would be more shocked by that or by the fact that John Schumann ended up working for the Democrats. The Maoists went full-bore for Australian nationalism, setting up a chain of “Kalkadoon bookshops” with Eureka stubby holders, Ned Kelly condoms and the writings of Mao, etc. They were stores run on firm Marxist-Leninist principles, letting you in only on the proviso you wouldn’t buy anything and closing immediately if you tried to.
When the radical Marxist tide that had flowed strongly in the organised working class began to ebb, the nationalist culture remained, like a marooned shipwreck. It was inevitable that it would be taken over by a new movement that has no systemic politics to speak of, simply a set of interlocking obsessions, as Shakira Hussein’s brilliant report illustrated. There was no chance such a movement would tap into the prevailing neocon narrative, with its elite commitment to globalised capital and free-market liberalism; nor could they create a Tea Party-style movement that draws on folk American traditions of “last best hope of man”, manifest destiny, etc. Trying to find some way to refloat themselves, they can’t help but be attracted by the most surging sense of national selfhood, which is indigenous self-determination in whatever addled way they understand it.
Without the infusion of movement for class power, it’s inevitable that such a movement will become a mess of fetishes, obsessions and magical thinking. Indeed that was part of an earlier appropriation by the Right of national symbols — in the ’30s and ’40s, when the “bush legend” movement became the “Australia First” movement, dissenting from joining the Second World War, and allied with the Jindyworobak poetry movement, which sought to connect modernist political writing to Aboriginal song cycles (many of which they recorded and preserved); eventually some of the Jindies began to believe that they could take on the telepathy they believed Aboriginal people possessed. Australia First was crushed by being interned (not before they tried to blow up some rail lines during WWII), and the Left took over the folk-nationalist franchise.
Now a section of the Right has got it again. It is organised around opposition to Islam because it needs to construct a strong adversary to gain an identity from. A generation ago, it was east Asians who were the threat because of their cultural otherness and alleged ant-like conformity, while Islam was an Abrahamic religious culture with shared norms. Now the batshit crazy notion of Islam as some unique force outside all other human meaning has been revived. That’s a worldwide thing, but like all such movements, particular obsessions are put forward. The halal thing has become obsessive in a way that it isn’t anywhere else. It is a purity obsession, of course — a ghost fear of contamination attaching to an object, atavistic in form. To a degree it’s a repurposing of general concerns around food safety, contamination, healthiness, etc, taking another form. Obsessive stories about what’s good and bad for us get a political makeover. None of this is done consciously, of course.
But, above all, it is concrete, the Right’s great initial strength and its ultimate weakness. Simple stories and symbolic objects give them things to coalesce around — look at their design style, and its habit of piling more upon more, because four Eureka-painted skulls must be better than three, if you can cram them among all the centred Zapf Chancery around the burning Sydney Opera House. Trouble is, without an underlying consistent argument the movement can only propagate with more objects, more magic. Should it try to become mainstream it loses its allure for many. Should it stick with the magical thinking it inevitably goes through a series of splits, as 9/11 trutherism and chemtrails become too much for some. Active politics involves an end to self-pity; for many, that is all that holds their selfhood, and a meaningful world together. Projecting power and self is too risky.
That doesn’t mean one should be quiescent about Reclaim Australia, but it does suggest a strategy against them — one also suggested by dealing with similar movements such as the now largely dissipated English Defence League:
1) Matching them on the street is good and necessary; giving them a reflected sense of purpose and unity isn’t. They can only gain a unity from what opposes them. Ridicule, parody and piss-taking is an important part of undermining that incipient sense of identity. Refusing recognition keeps them permanently in suspension.
2) Don’t try to restrict their free speech with state laws, but use the full force of the law against violent or threatening acts. Counter-demonstrations are legitimate, as is a degree of forcefulness in denying public space. Using 18C or other laws to try to get their marches cancelled simply extends the state into the public sphere, and it legitimates such. But any violent or threatening acts should be pinged, reported and prosecuted, dividing the movement between its violent and non-violent groupings. Criminal prosecution doesn’t create martyrs — it just isolates and segments an already atomised movement.
3) Separating the leaders from the led. The movement obviously has leaders, who have largely constituted the movement from leftovers. They will emerge as public figures. They tend to be split types, intelligent but also thought-disordered who simultaneously believe and don’t believe the myths they’re peddling. Desperate for fame and recognition, they will respond to temptation and ultimately become separate from, and suspected, by the people they initially energised.
4) Check their backgrounds. Most such leaders are entrepreneurial chancers for whom political populism is the latest go. Demonstrating the separation between the leaders and their more sincere, if befuddled and sometime pernicious rank-and-file decomposes the relationship. Such movements will tolerate success for a while, but what they really crave is disappointment and betrayal, and a sense that the world is stacked against them. Which in turn allows for a return to self-pity, and a sense that they have preserved their identity, in a fallen world.
Ultimately, Reclaim Australia is a distant echo from the Keating restructuring of the early ’90s, when a section of the old Anglo working class were dismissed as surplus to requirements. As their fortunes fell, those of a stream of migrants rose, their tighter social networks and capital networks allowing for steady social advancement, which the more atomised social networks of other groups could not match. Nothing real about this process can be admitted, which is why Reclaim Australia pays relatively little attention to real social problems that do exist in their rhetoric — fraying of social cohesion within multicultural societies, the real rise of ethnic-branded gang crime and the like. To talk of such would be to admit that there are both social problems and social solutions. What they want is a transcendental enemy, omnipresent Islam, coming in via halal through our very pores.
Once the movement has been broken down and the pernicious separated from the pathetic or the merely pliant, the latter can be spoken to in different terms, appealing to the better side of themselves. In terms befitting a group of people who can’t understand I Was Only Nineteen. |
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He's not going to accept (at least) the parts I have bolded in points 1 and 2, above. Those are, of course, the antithesis of his OP.
I note, in passing, that Rundle has at least a basic grasp of what "free speech" means - it's not being silenced by the State, not some sort of right-at-large to talk objectionable twaddle without demur from other people who have a legitimate view to express. |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| To Talking is my primary function. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I don't see freedom of speech as purely a state-ordained thing. It can be (and, nowadays, often is) infringed upon by employers, and it can also be curtailed by other members of the public. For instance, if a group of vigilantes unhappy with your professed political stances kidnapped you and locked you in a basement, that would certainly be an attack on your freedom of speech.
I think it's also worth discussing forms of 'soft censorship', such as a cultural climate in which expressing a certain view might lead to, say, negative social consequences. That's a genuine imposition on freedom of speech. And, as PTID reminds us, lack of access to speaking platforms also constitutes a mitigation of that freedom.
But freedom of speech is never, ever the freedom to not be criticised. That's the central fallacy that this thread was based on. Indeed, without the freedom to criticise, freedom of speech isn't really good for much at all.
_________________
All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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| David wrote: | I don't see freedom of speech as purely a state-ordained thing. It can be (and, nowadays, often is) infringed upon by employers, and it can also be curtailed by other members of the public. For instance, if a group of vigilantes unhappy with your professed political stances kidnapped you and locked you in a basement, that would certainly be an attack on your freedom of speech.
I think it's also worth discussing forms of 'soft censorship', such as a cultural climate in which expressing a certain view might lead to, say, negative social consequences. That's a genuine imposition on freedom of speech. And, as PTID reminds us, lack of access to speaking platforms also constitutes a mitigation of that freedom.
But freedom of speech is never, ever the freedom to not be criticised. That's the central fallacy that this thread was based on. Indeed, without the freedom to criticise, freedom of speech isn't really good for much at all. |
FMD are you genuinely obtuse? That was not and never was the central premise of this thread, fallacy or otherwise.
The central premise was the hypocrisy of those on the left who complain bitterly when their protests are disrupted by authorities yet think nothing deliberately disrupting others whose views they disagree with.
Exhibit A, a quote from the original post.
| Quote: | The Socialist Alternative/alliance whatever decided to stage their own rally. So the same people who complain bitterly and publicly when they believe that their rights to protest are infringed by the authorities, will organise to actively disrupt another protest that they disagree with.
Wow, hypocritical much?
is this what the left really think of free speech? Is it only free speech as long as it follows left wing guidelines and when it strays from that, censorship is fine? |
You then twisted and turned every which way to say it wasn't censorship.
Freedom of speech comes with freedom to criticise. It has to work both ways, only an imbecile would think otherwise but there's a difference between criticising what someone says and actively attempting to prevent them getting that message out AKA censorship.
And to all those who would say that censoring what they consider to be "hate speech" is fine with them, I don't really have a problem as long as you own that call and don't pull the hypocrisy act later on.
FFS, Let it go.
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| stui magpie wrote: | | FMD are you genuinely obtuse? |
I always thought of myself more as acute, but perhaps that's wishful thinking.
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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
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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Once again, extremists who don't represent the mainstream progressive voter.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | | Once again, extremists who don't represent the mainstream progressive voter. |
And, um, you do?
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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