Legal Beagle: Think it possible that you may be mistaken
394 Responses
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Tom Beard, in reply to
Well, wouldn't it suck if the majority decided that your speech was dangerous, and shouldn't be allowed?
Do you recognise any difference between "allowed" and "given a prominent and privileged platform"?
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Sara Bee, in reply to
golly she'd be brave to try to express that. Cos if the boundaries are stated out loud, then there's a whole lot more hassle trying to manage them. I wouldn't mind betting it's a deliberate decision, NOT to say what's acceptable and what's not. You may know otherwise?
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Tim Hannah, in reply to
why aren;t people talking about the rape rather than how important it was to get rid of two people who were crap at handling a discussion about it – because its much simpler
That’s a really good question John.
(I think it’s mostly because people keep starting conversations about how terrible it was that they were stood down, for six weeks, probably on full pay, because that’s terribly important and a violation of their rights. Why do you think it is?)
[Edited to add quote and note that I realise John gave his theory for why. I think he’s wrong though.]
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Tom Beard, in reply to
why aren;t people talking about the rape rather than how important it was to get rid of two people who were crap at handling a discussion about it
A) Yes, people bloody well are talking about the rape. But here, this is a discussion about "free speech" and "boycotts", so the discussion on this post will concentrate on that.
B) "crap at handling a discussion" is so much of an understatement that it sounds like a deliberate missing of the actual point. This wasn't just a botched interview, it was bullying. And their relentless attempts to discredit, belittle and humiliate a friend of victims, and the victims themselves, can only be seen as an attempt to justify and/or deny the rapes.
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Deborah, in reply to
Do you mean “wait their turn”? I never suggested they should.
It would come from a combination of my first comment on this post:
I’m hearing overtones of a fancied up version of “women, get to the back of the bus and wait your turn” in this analysis.
and your response to it:
I guess maybe I suggesting that the better option is to take your turn at the same time as others, rather than silencing others so you can speak?
Phrased as a question, of course.
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
It would be great if you could engage with the actual harm done by rape culture enablers like JT and Willie Jackson instead of insisting that it’s all about free speech.
Free speech is what I do. I have always* opposed placing pressure on advertisers over the content of current affairs shows. I have always opposed pressuring book stores not to stock certain books.
I have written about these things before. And this was an opportunity to try to use a current event to discuss something I feel strongly about, and to draw it together with other topics I feel strongly about in the broader area of speech designed to get others to stop talking.
I could write about the harm that discussing the clothing choices of rape victims causes, or advising women not to go to parties where people who boast about rape will be in attendance, but I have no particular knowledge in that area, or any idea how to explain it in a remotely intelligent way in my voice; at best, I would just be parroting what I have heard from others. Also - and quite recently - I've been told that there are already enough white men talking about rape.
* there was probably a time where I didn't oppose it much, but I don't recall there being a time when I supported it.
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
talking about the rape rather than how important it was to get rid of two people
How about you ask Graeme that.
But if you ask me it's because talking about rape is hard and talking about abstracts like free speech is easy
But if you're asking why it is important that the two broadcasters are off air - here is my opinion
Because they were rape apologists and rape enablers
Because they denied the existence of Amy's rape
Because they could not see that what they did was in any way wrong
Because they could not apologize
Because their voices make money for Media works (well not that much)
Because their voices were loud and the voices of the victims are not
Because our society continues to accept rape and excuse rape
Because they were examples of a society that blames the girlsNot because it was simple ... but because it was the right thing to do
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Be surprised if JT is back, You still want to talk about the third ring in a social media Circus -. What happened ops mishandling, West auckland community inaction , what role Waipareira Trust in all this. Mayoral inaction Even allowing for mishandling being upsetting to Amy - whose opinions we don't know- and discouraging rape victims from calling RL - Is willie and JT being on full pay really the most important issue.
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I don't believe that the initiator of this discussion has any interest in engaging the people he's supposedly talking about [on the terms of argument they consider important, rather than his own].
I'm boycotting this discussion.
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john Drinnan, in reply to
and because its a good simple quick hit in a complicated and upsetting discussion on sexual violence
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
It would come from a combination of my first comment on this post:
...
and your response to it:Ah. I had intended my response to "aren't you saying 'wait your turn'"? To be read as "no, don't wait to speak until others have stopped; speak now, while others are speaking!"
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
Because they denied the existence of Amy’s rape
Well, I'm reasonably sure that didn't happen.
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A C Young, in reply to
Speak using what platform?
Because websites like the Hand Mirror (and public address) have been protesting this stuff for years.
How are the relatively powerless supposed to get their voices heard in a commercial setting without any economic power to back them up?
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john Drinnan, in reply to
Well Public address apparently has a large number of high net earners - a lot of Pa followers are in the mainstream media and bureaucracy - along with Whale Oil you are a part of the new media Revolution. Public address has a strong consensus - which adds to the power of its arguments
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Deborah, in reply to
I did take my turn, Graeme. I wrote an op-ed for my local paper but it didn’t get picked up by Stuff, so it only went out locally. I spoke at the local rally. My university has reproduced the text of the opinion piece on-line, and I guess that I will get paid in the form of standing at my university, and my standing locally (even some of the very conservative parents at my childrens’ school have been complimentary), but I didn’t get a single penny, nor did my voice get amplified and heard nationally. No doubt that’s for all sorts of reasons, but one of them would have to be the systemic difficulty that confronts women when they try to get airtime. Many, many more men get to have their opinions aired widely than women do.
I have a negative freedom to speak, to attempt to join the conversation. No one is going to stop me. Alas, unlike JT and Willie Jackson, no one is going to pay for me for it either.
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Graeme Edgeler, in reply to
I did take my turn, Graeme.
And for it, you have the thanks of me, and many others.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
Because they denied the existence of Amy’s rape
Well, I’m reasonably sure that didn’t happen.
Correct. Amy was a reporter, not a survivor.
But they did repeatedly deny that what Amy was describing happening to other girls was rape. So, yeah.
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Chuck Bird, in reply to
In that case Deborah what do you think of the latest leader of the Labour Party referring to Judith Collins as a trout. Is that acceptable from someone who aspires to be a Prime Minister?
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Tim Hannah, in reply to
– Is willie and JT being on full pay really the most important issue.
Your first engagement in this debate here (I think, could be wrong) was complaining that somebody called somebody else a rape enabler on twitter, and how terribly uncivilised that was, and you want to rag on me for making a mountain out of a molehill?
But, no. Obviously not. Jackson and Tamihere are a sideshow. The entire 'freedom of speech' argument that all of us guys are so keen on having is very very far from being the most important issue.
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Lilith __, in reply to
I didn’t get a single penny, nor did my voice get amplified and heard nationally. No doubt that’s for all sorts of reasons, but one of them would have to be the systemic difficulty that confronts women when they try to get airtime. Many, many more men get to have their opinions aired widely than women do.
This makes me very sad. If people as eloquent as you don’t get heard, that’s a big loss for our society and for public discourse.
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Chris Waugh, in reply to
No, it’s not completely banned,
Sorry, Graeme, but this aspect of your argument is really, really bugging me. Willie and JT were not silenced (as countless others have said already), and the two books you have cited are not even remotely banned. Not partially banned. Not incompletely banned. Not imperfectly banned. Simply not banned in any way, shape or form. Some booksellers decided to not sell them, but the authors and publishers are still free to sell them via the internet or mail order or markets or out of the boots of their cars or whatever. When a book is banned the government takes all remaining unsold copies off the shelves and out of the warehouses and pulps them and the book is only available through illegal underground/pirated editions or bought in a jurisdiction where it is not banned and smuggled into the country. To smuggle a copy of a banned book in to a country means running the risk of customs searching your luggage and confiscating the banned literature*. Internet searches for banned books are likely to see your browser mysteriously 404ed, perhaps even for your internet connection to go dead for a few minutes.
If I were to get up in front of my class and tell the students a version of events a few kilometres from where I sit in the spring and early summer of 1989, I would expect to be fired and deported, which would see me separated from my wife and daughter and them turfed out of our apartment. Anything I may write on the subject on the internet is likely to disappear behind the Great Firewall and may well see me invited out for a cup of tea with somebody who may or may not be a police officer but certainly has the power to cause unpleasant things to happen to me. Willie and JT (if we really must refer to them that way) were not silenced.
Right, now back to trying to catch up with this discussion (sorry if somebody's already made that point, I was just a bit too irked to go through the whole thread first) or perhaps wander off and get lunch...
*A customs officer once asked to see the CDs in my luggage and confirm that they were only music and did not contain anything illegal. I showed him my discman (this was some years ago), and he was cool with that. I sighed with relief when I was well out of earshot, because if he'd decided to check the book I had in the same bag he might have noticed it was by a China-born Nobel Prize winner in exile in Paris....
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Bart Janssen, in reply to
Because they denied the existence of Amy’s rape
Well, I’m reasonably sure that didn’t happen.
Correct. Amy was a reporter, not a survivor.
My bad, "Amy’s rape" was meant to equal “the rape Amy reported upon” not “the rape of Amy”
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Mark Hubbard, in reply to
No doubt that’s for all sorts of reasons, but one of them would have to be the systemic difficulty that confronts women when they try to get airtime.
That's a bugbear of mine, Deborah, against your argument.
If you think your opinion is repressed as a woman, try being given a voice to air libertarian views. Only 327 people looked at my post stating my discomfort with Tiso's campaign, quoting Kundera, and only 213 people looked at my post regarding how self-defeating it is, under the new linguistic puritanism, to silence people with their privilege. (Privilege as a censor, and as a wall to trap us all in our differences, such as what happened on Twitter with the Law Revue Girls, accused of racism due to their privilege, on Saturday night - per my blog.)
Nothing Tiso did breaches my principles, but I don't like seeing voices of those we don't agree with, even if they're spouting evil, silenced, and I especially don't like campaigns that set out to silence. I don't think it follows that it matters whether those voices have more prominence than yours or mine. Indeed Willie and JT have found that their very prominence is what has brought ruination on their heads - it has worked against them.
Plus, related but not, per my only other comment in here, if we are to silence those who speak as inappropriately as Willie and JT - neither of whom have probably said anything I agree with - then much of the comedy that gives my life value, including even 7 Days and Jono&Ben on tonight, will all have to be consigned to the void, given the context dropping this always entails.
I do struggle with this issue: rape culture is evil, but - even though there shouldn't be a but - a society is more healthy by having a diversity of voices, and not forcing ignorance or hate underground. That's why I'm also against hate speech laws.
In fact I'll repeat my Milan Kundera quotation, because it sums up, almost below the level of analysis, my discomfort with Tiso's campaign:
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being:
"When she told her French friends about [why she would not attend a street protest against the communists], they were amazed. "You mean you don't want to fight the occupation of your country?" She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison. But she knew she would never be able to make them understand."
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B Jones, in reply to
I could write about the harm that discussing the clothing choices of rape victims causes, or advising women not to go to parties where people who boast about rape will be in attendance, but I have no particular knowledge in that area, or any idea how to explain it in a remotely intelligent way in my voice.
Yet you feel qualified to argue that balanced against the principle of free speech, free speech must win out? How can you make that comparison without giving proper credit to one of the things you're comparing?
Also – and quite recently – I’ve been told that there are already enough white men talking about rape
Better than them refusing to talking about it.
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Mark Hubbard, in reply to
One addendum to my post immediately above. The argument is raised that Willie & JT are not silenced.
That's irrelevant. Tiso's campaign in going to the advertisers, could only have had the one intention, being to silence them permanently.
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