Posts by Russell Brown
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Carol Stewart,
.. that doesn’t seem all that far removed from John Ansell’s hateful and bizarre rants published in the Dompost and elsewhere where he decries the ‘feminisation’ of our menfolk.
It's a fairly common trope amongst that crowd, yes.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Idiot Savant,
My gut instinct? Because that would be work.
This was one of the reasons I shut down comments on NRT: I thought about the work that would be required to police comments, and the criticism it would inevitably engender, and went “fuck that, I’m not playing that game, that’s time I could spend posting”. And DPF has an order of magnitude more comments than I ever did.
It is a lot of work, and sometimes it's emotionally draining too. My view is that the best way to keep a discussion on track is to actively participate in it -- it's a show of good faith apart from anything else -- but not everyone has the time for that.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Alex Coleman,
Today, on KB, the debate was whether Glenn Beck was quoted out of context, or just plain correct. That has morphed into pointing out that Norway gives aid money to palestinians, which is the same thing as killing Jews, dontchaknow.
Far fucking out. That's an inane discussion ...
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Teh Standard has all the hallmarks of ‘we ARE struggling together!”. The Kiwiblog commenters’ club is Tea Party Central.
I don’t think the two are really the same, no. I don’t enjoy the atmosphere at The Standard, but it’s not home to the truly marginal, overtly racist types like Kris K the way Kiwiblog is. I’ve never seen the Standard equivalent of the KB thread I linked to in my post, for example. But there are certainly a few self-righteous jerks there.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
The snark at the Standard stems from the large number of right-wingers trolling the site and the righteous abuse they attract. IMHO, if the owners of the site were to ban righties from commenting, that would all go away and the site would be a much nicer place. But it’s their call.
Well, clearly, they'd have to ban me too. I got sick of being abused when I commented there.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Che Tibby,
not by inflicting humiliation and exclusion on their families.
but surely the act itself does that anyway?
No, it does not. People do that. Mike King has a heart-rending story of an older woman who contacted him via the Nutters' Club. Her husband had suicided and she was revictimised by all his former friends, who excluded and effectively dehumanised her.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Che Tibby,
how do you make people, depressed, lonely, [other] people realise how intensely selfish their act is?
Ideally, not by inflicting humiliation and exclusion on their families.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Paul Campbell,
but you don’t just let him spew his evil – you go down there with your soap boxes and call him out on it …. make sure he and the rest of society know that what he’s saying IS vile and evil
I got bored with doing that: it does not daunt them and it basically becomes trolling. And on their own blogs, they make it clear they're not interested in an exchange of speech:
Leftists/”progressives”/socialists are not welcome here. Pay for your own soapbox.
That's on the home page of Crusader rabbit. Meanwhile, a new and particularly fevered post contains passages like this:
Despite the media feeding frenzy as they pump up their circulations by deliberately ‘chumming’ the bloodied waters with the subliminal psychological triggers so beloved of Marxist-Socialists and their fellow travellers – ‘right wing’, ‘extreme right wing’, ‘Christian fundamentalist’, ‘Nazis and neo-Nazis’, ‘xenophobia’, ‘EDL’, ‘white racist’, ‘racist, racist, racist’, ‘right wing terrorists’, ‘hatred, hatred, hatred’ and so on ad infinitum – there is something happening below the surface.
This ‘something’ is deep at the moment, and one only gets occasional glimpses of its passing shadow whilst reading between the lines, but it is certainly there even though it is very difficult to grasp.
They seem to perceive some great turning point in their favor.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to MikeE,
Free speech does not imply an obligation to publish or promote… Far better that these racist idiots be out in the open than underground.
I do still wonder how Farrar can face getting up in the morning and writing a blog post in the knowledge that it will be another opportunity for those people to air their inane and abhorrent views.
-
Hard News: How much speech does it take?, in reply to Tristan,
Having said that the Norewegain response has been awe inspiring.
A facebook group to support the killers family has over 30,000 members.And the great and beautiful irony -- as far as Breivik and his fellow travelers are concerned -- is that Norwegians see such an expression of humanity as their own cultural imperative.