Freedom of speech

[banger]

Is it for everyone , or just people you agree with

[banger]

WHY is it bad to hack and expose photographs of a woman’s naked body but apparently OK to steal and make public the contents of a man’s soul?

This is the question that should burn in our minds in the wake of the Barry Spurr scandal.

For just a few weeks ago, when a hacker invaded the iCloud ­accounts of female celebs and ­rifled through their intimate snaps, there was global outrage.

This theft of explicit private photos of actress Jennifer Lawrence and others was a sex crime, we were told. It was an act of misogynistic tyranny, proof that even women’s private lives were not safe from the bulging eyes and clasping hands of a hateful, macho culture.

To peer into a woman’s most intimate moments was a “sexual violation”, said a writer for Guardian Australia. Just because these women were in the public eye, just because they “offer their image to public consumption”, that didn’t mean they were “trading (in) their intimacy”, she said.

Fast forward to last week, and some of the same people whose jaws hit the floor at the audacity of those who leaked these women’s private, unguarded pics were cheering the hacking of Spurr’s private, unguarded words.

Spurr, a professor of poetry at the University of Sydney, has had his private emails pored over and published by pseudo-radical, eco-miserabilist website New Matilda. In some of his emails, in what he has since claimed was a cheeky competition between him and his friends to see who could be the least PC, Spurr used words that would no doubt cause pinot gris to be spilled if they were uttered at a dinner party.

He described Tony Abbott as an “Abo lover”, referred to a woman as a “harlot”, called Nelson Mandela a “darky”, and used “Mussies” for Muslims and “chinky-poos” for Chinese. He now has been suspended by the university.

Many people will wince on reading those words. Just as we will have winced if we happened upon those photos of well-known women doing porno poses or ­engaging in shocking sex talk in videos shot by their boyfriends.

And that’s because these behaviours, both Spurr’s knowingly outrageous banter and the act­resses’ knowingly sluttish poses, share something important in common: they were private acts, not intended for public consumption. They were things done or said between intimates, far from the eyes and ears of respectable ­society. Yet where right-on commentators and tweeters stood up for the right of famous women not to have their private nakedness splashed across the internet, they have relished in the exposure of Spurr’s soul to the panting, outraged mob.

Spurr’s private thoughts are fair game for public ridicule, they claim, because of his position as a specialist consultant to the federal government’s review of the national curriculum.

New Matilda says Spurr’s standing as someone who could “influence what will be taught to every child in every school” means his intimate chatter is a legitimate target for moral policing. His private thoughts clash with his public duties, it says.

Imagine if this tyrannical insistence that everyone should have a spotless private life were taken to its logical conclusion. For a start, we might argue that it was legit to leak those female celebs’ intimate photos on the grounds that they exposed the women’s hypocrisy. Many of these actresses and singers are role models to young girls and pose as demure creatures in their work lives. But behind closed doors they get up to stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in Hustler. Their private lives run counter to their public personas. Does that mean they should be exposed, mocked, ridiculed, made into quarry for pitchfork-wielding moralists? Of course not. And neither should Spurr.

No amount of faux-progressive lingo about exposing “institutional racism” in the upper echelons of Australian society can disguise the fact Spurr-bashing is an old-fashioned, McCarthyite hounding of someone for having a private life and private thoughts that fail to adhere to new orthodoxies.

The hounding of Spurr by an army of intolerant tweeters and hacks is Salem-like intolerance dolled up as a radical exercise in tackling racist attitudes.

New Matilda rather gave the game away when it said it had one aim — “cleansing the national curriculum review of the toxicity of this man’s views”.

Cleansing. What a word. It speaks to the true driving force behind the assaults on Spurr: an incredibly authoritarian instinct to rid the public realm of anyone whose outlook is not 100 per cent pure and decent, as defined by the new self-styled guardians of moral probity: so-called progressives, with righteousness in their hearts and rotten tomatoes in their hands. We need to face up to the seriousness, to the sheer intolerance, of the creeping new trend for punishing people for their private thoughts. It isn’t happening only in Australia. In the US, Donald Sterling, a business magnate and owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, was expelled from basketball earlier this year and turned into an object of international ridicule following the leaking of an ­entirely private phone conversation in which he said something disrespectful about black people.

In Britain, two football managers were sacked following the leaking of private emails in which they made juvenile jokes about gays and black people.

There is something Stasi-like in this moral policing of private speech. In the wake of the Sterling scandal, a columnist for The Washington Post said: “If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public square, don’t say them … Such ­potential exposure forces us to more carefully select our words and edit our thoughts.”

This is terrifying. It is a straight-up celebration of the kind of public denunciations of private deviancy that were encouraged under Stalinist regimes. Why don’t we just put a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style telescreen in everyone’s homes? That’s surely the only way to ensure that no one misspeaks privately, and instead edits their thoughts and suppresses their more “toxic views”, or risks finding themselves a target of “cleansing” by their ­betters. The haranguing of Spurr and others turns the clock back to a darker moment in human history.

During the Inquisition, people were regularly tried and punished for their private beliefs. The Enlightenment thinkers who came in the wake of that calamity insisted that such tyranny should stop. In the words of the great enlightened 17th-century English jurist Edward Coke: “No man, ecclesiastical or temporal, shall be examined upon the secret thoughts of his heart, or of his secret opinion.” Spurr is being punished for his ­secret opinion.

Coke’s enlightened view, his conviction that individuals must be free to think and say what they want in their private lives, is in mortal danger today. It’s being crushed by a New Inquisition, staffed by members of the chattering classes, inflamed by Twitter and assaulting not only individuals such as Spurr but also the very principles of privacy, autonomy and freedom of thought.

Brendan O’Neill is the editor of Spiked in London.


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/barry-spurr-hounded-by-moral-crusaders-of-the-new-inquisition/story-fnhulnf5-1227101561515
 

[stringvest]

I've passed the above on to the relevant authorities. 

[alles ist gut]

I've passed the above on to the relevant authorities. 

Pseuds Corner?

[Mustangt125]

Great article, though the board population of "progressives" will try to poke holes through it all.

 

Liberals wants tolerance and acceptance, yet they are the least tolerant and least accepting of ideas that aren't in line with theirs.  It's so obvious everywhere that people don't notice it anymore.

 

"We don't like your guns and your Christianity, take those signs down"

"Well shouldn't you respect my lifestyle?"

And that's where the liberals usually pop out the race card, the feminism card, or the safety card. 

[stringvest]

What are these 'guns' signs?  What do they say?  I'm intrigued.

[Dr Nowt]

"Just as we will have winced if we happened upon those photos of well-known women doing porno poses or ­engaging in shocking sex talk in videos shot by their boyfriends".

 

"And that’s because these behaviours, both Spurr’s knowingly outrageous banter and the act­resses’ knowingly sluttish poses..."

 

The argument that what is private correspondence should not have been hacked and shared in the manner it was on principle, irrespective of the content, would be perfectly sufficient on it's own.

 

Drawing a moral link between the actions themselves of naked/sexual pictures of women taken in private for private use and making widespread racist comments when safely in the company of friends, as though both are acts worthy of equal wider scorn for being unpleasant, is a rather strange one however, is it not?  Either the author's playing devil's advocate to the nth degree, or it's instructive as to his own thought processes.  He also uses the word banter; egregious in the extreme.

 

I did like "...in what he has since claimed was a cheeky competition between him and his friends to see who could be the least PC" though.  Bravo sir, that's definitely taken in at least two or three people who all share the IQ of a pineapple.

 

Yours progressively.

 

PS: have guns and Christianity been banned in the States now then?  I rather thought from the many schoolchildren still regularly being turned into mince over there that the loony left hadn't quite got their way on at least the first. 

[Teflon Don]

What are these 'guns' signs?  What do they say?  I'm intrigued.

 

[stringvest]

Crikey. 

[Stu Monty]

Great article, though the board population of "progressives" will try to poke holes through it all.

 

Liberals wants tolerance and acceptance, yet they are the least tolerant and least accepting of ideas that aren't in line with theirs.  It's so obvious everywhere that people don't notice it anymore.

 

"We don't like your guns and your Christianity, take those signs down"

"Well shouldn't you respect my lifestyle?"

And that's where the liberals usually pop out the race card, the feminism card, or the safety card. 

 

Or the "Just stop being such a cunt" card.

[Stu Monty]

Just read it. Deeply wrong headed stuff. The idea that women are sluts for taking pictures of themselves tells you everything you need to know about the man. How dare they! Always pretty pitiful watching people argue for their right to be massively racist and sexist cunts and not have it deemed relevant to them holding positions of power in society.

[Hades]

The Australian is a right-wing Murdoch owned publication. Might as well post articles from the Mail for analysis.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Great article, though the board population of "progressives" will try to poke holes through it all.

 

Liberals wants tolerance and acceptance, yet they are the least tolerant and least accepting of ideas that aren't in line with theirs.  It's so obvious everywhere that people don't notice it anymore.

 

"We don't like your guns and your Christianity, take those signs down"

"Well shouldn't you respect my lifestyle?"

And that's where the liberals usually pop out the race card, the feminism card, or the safety card. 

Does anyone ever say "We don't like your guns and your Christianity?"

 

Or, do they argue that there has to be a sensible limit to the right to bear arms (because, with no limits it would include the right to have nukes and anthrax in your garage) and that there should be a debate on where society accepts those limits?  As for Christianity, the USA is founded on religious freedom guaranteed by a separation of Church and State.  It's there in the Constitution that all the conservatives and Tea Partiers claim to love so much.  (Although, of course, their respect for religion never seems to extend to Islam.)

 

I won't even address " the liberals usually pop out the race card, the feminism card, or the safety card."  That line is so hackneyed and crass, it doesn't bear argument.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Great article, though the board population of "progressives" will try to poke holes through it all.

 

Also - it really isn't a great article.  It's laced with logical inconsistencies, hysterical overreaction and hypocritical self-righteousness and pretension.

[PestiRed]

I'm a bit baffled as to what the race and feminism cards are in relation to having a gun. You can only have black, female guns? You can only have a gun if ethnic minorities are allowed guns too?

 

I also quite like the safety card. Presumably it goes something along the lines of "please put your gun away, I don't want to be shot in the head"

[AngryOfTuebrook]

[AngryOfTuebrook]

http://europe.newsweek.com/counter-extremism-bill-455637?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=/counter-extremism-bill-455637

 

Security, prosperity and opportunity for all will be the themes of the Queen’s Speech on May 18, No. 10 has indicated, as David Cameron is set to reveal tough new laws to clamp down on extremists.

 

This carries on from plans announced last year. In his speech in July, the Prime Minister laid out the government’s plans to combat extremism; then followed the announcement of a counter-extremism strategy to run parallel to the Prevent program that was launched after the London bombings on July 7, 2005.

 

From a primary prevention perspective, the two-pronged approach to combatting extremism is something we have needed for years. It was recommended in the 2010/2011 review of Prevent. It did not happen for five years under the coalition government. But finally the soft and hard end of preventing Islamist radicalization are going to be handled separately.

 

Among other things, the proposals in the new clampdown being referred to as the Counter-Extremism Bill are to include “extremism banning/disruption orders.” These would not criminalise hate speech or the promotion of terrorism—for they are already illegal under the Terrorism Act 2006—but rather the intent to engage in such offenses, if ministers reasonably believe this to be the case, leading to potential banning orders.

 

In essence, these measures target those who operate in what the police have called the “pre-criminal space” and therefore expand the definition of people who could be incarcerated from those who do bad things to those who think bad things.

 

This is problematic.

 

It is philosophically against all the values that we hold in a liberal secular democracy. While radicalization and extremism have rightly been identified as troubling, bigotry cannot be banned. Instead, it should be subject to robust challenge.

 

Extremist organisations that are not proscribed as terrorist organisations do not reach the threshold of illegality under terrorism legislation. Broadening this to include more groups not connected to violence, other than through the fact that the ideology to which they adhere is also supported by those who commit violence, is troubling in a liberal democracy. We can't let ourselves become totalitarian whilst trying to protect ourselves from the very same ideology.

 

It is strategically counter-productive because, while we should oppose extremism of all kinds, and there are many groups that worsen community cohesion and even build the mood music to which violent extremists dance, it is clear that the line drawn in the U.K.’s very broad counter-terrorism legislation is at the point which violence occurs, is threatened, or is planned for.

 

Non-violent extremist organisations may build residual support for ideas that are subsequently taken up violently in a small percentage of cases. But more often, they give traditionally disenfranchised members of society a chance to air their opposition to the government. Banning them altogether would send these groups underground and make it harder for liberals to win the battle of ideas.

 

While banning terrorist organisations is a valid counter-terrorism decision because it is a strong disincentive for membership and displays a firm stance against violence, it also allows for prosecution of those who seek to threaten our national security.

 

We cannot claim that it protects our national security, because by definition these are organizations that fall short of our terrorism threshold due to their non-violence. It is a band aid trying to fix a bullet hole, and seeks to challenge the symptom rather than the cause of extremism.

 

What we should be doing instead is building civil society coalitions that work together to counter the totalitarian ideas that Islamism promotes.

 

Initiatives such as FATE (Families Against Terrorism and Extremism), which held its inaugural summit in Paris, can play a major role in getting families involved with disrupting terrorist messages to youngsters. Initiatives promoting liberal values help to create environments within universities where ensuring greater freedom of speech and challenging extremist voices can be far more productive than the government dictating banning orders.

 

And we need more initiatives that encourage civil society challenges to extremism.

 

These efforts will be more effective than hard-end measures without many of the unintended consequences.

We can keep free speech and free enquiry in places where it is important. We don’t have to go against our own British values or civil liberties, which keeps us on the moral high ground. We don’t criminalise extremism and add to the perception that the government hates Muslims. And we don’t push extremism underground to an ungoverned space that is harder to deal with.

 

Rather than banning extremists from using the internet, for example, let’s challenge what they are saying and win the battle of ideas. That way, we don’t make extremist content more attractive to rebellious teenagers, we don’t have to constantly waste resources playing whack-a-mole, and we don’t drive extremists to the dark depths of the internet where civil liberties campaigners build momentum and criminals conduct their activity away from state surveillance.

 

Haras Rafiq is Managing Director at the Quilliam Foundation, the world's first counter-extremism think tank.

[Stu Monty]

Egypt sentencing three journalists to death today for "leaking state secrets".

 

Top lads. Great allies. Repeat customers.

[Anubis]

I'm sure Philip Hammond will be doing a CJ Craig as we speak.

 

[njackets]

It should be for almost everyone, although even I would draw the line over the religeous bell ends in the U.S protesting at Military funerals (Fags should die etc) and the twats over here protesting over the lads being bought home from Afghan/Iraq.

[Bjornebye]

The day they tell me I can't call Richard Madeley a cunt is the day I fuck off to Chile

[Jairzinho]

They aren't ready for you, Stig.

[Rico1304]

The Chief Inspector of GMP thinks freedom of speech shouldn't be extended to those critical of religions.

[Mook]

The Chief Inspector of GMP thinks freedom of speech shouldn't be extended to those critical of religions.

Suits me, I can still call the police a shower of cunts.

[Trumo]

The Chief Inspector of GMP thinks freedom of speech shouldn't be extended to those critical of religions.

 

Remind him that Freemasonry is not a religion.