Posts by Sacha
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And I can verify it won't accept a blank message with just the attachment #testing123
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Can I suggest defaulting all linked files to open in a new tab. #cactusrequest
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via Public Address System (which is a handy way in anyway, if you follow the dscussion threads regularly)
and can I recomend this page as a less cluttered front end for us frequent frefreshers who aren't using RSS
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to DCBCauchi,
The argument being presented here, as far as I can make out, is that that freedom should be encroached on by extending the definition of harm.
Freedom is "encroached on" already. Deal with it.
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Lew identifies a core of the conversation.
We are presently being treated to the rather undignified and unedifying spectacle of the political right — particularly the authoritarians and liberthoritarians — crying foul because people are drawing cautious, well-documented linkages between their own rantings and those of the Norwegian killer Anders Behring Breivik.
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The argument is essentially that “civilisation” is under threat from “the perverse anti-Westernism of the cultural elite”. There are many, many more such cases in overseas forums and I trust readers will have no difficulty finding them.
But Pascal’s Bookie, in comments at the Dim-Post, has found the nub:
They either need to disown the claim of existential threat, or explain why an existential threat does not justify violence.
This is exactly it. The right-wing commonplace that “Western civilisation is under threat” is at the heart of all the rhetoric being compared to Breivik’s nominal casus belli, and in many cases the similarities are more than merely cosmetic.
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The problem for the wingnuts presently whining about these comparisons is that their bluff has been called. They’ve been squawking about the existential threat posed by “others”, much as Breivik has, but he has gone one better and actually done something about it. And so they must pick a side: either “Muslims” (or “Māori”, “socialists”, “teacher unions” or the “cultural elite” or whoever “Western civilisation” is at war with this week) actually are the existential threat the wingnuts claim they are, or they are not.
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Lilith __,
there's a reason you can't get insurance for them
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Hard News: Science: it's complicated, in reply to Roger,
The other factor is the impact, the harm level. Nuclear power plants for instance may not break very often, but when they do...
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to DCBCauchi,
Could you please specify not just what those harms are but also how they outweigh the benefits of free speech?
Sorry, but I don't have time to lay out an entire philosophical position today. Legislation like the Human Rights and Broadcasting Acts have some of what you're after, though from a different mindset it's safe to say. Maybe others can help?
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
And telling that story requires crossing swords with major sources for future stories who are not bound by conventional accountabilities. The power balance has been quite deliberately tilted away from the public and the media.
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Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to DCBCauchi,
You've reduced it to personal 'offence'. There are other harms involved in denigrating groups of people. That applies in both broadcasting and other contexts.
