Posts by Steve Parks
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On the other, the idea of consequences for speech can be made to justify outcomes we might not want to support, such as certain kinds of ostracism. Short version, I don't think the idea of consequences for speech implies carte blanche.
Can you give a more specific example of what you mean, WH?
I don't see how free speech cannot come with the corollary of freedom to criticise that speech; freedom of expression and freedom to criticise that expression are just two sides of the same coin.
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But then, Americans are just weird about swearing. ...
I keep having conversations wherein people apologise for swearing because they said "shit" once, which usually runs so beneath my radar I don't even ping it as swearing until they start apologising. One day I'm going to, I don't know, drop a rack of nearly-boiling test tubes on my foot and then they're all going to get a terrible shock.
Seems a job at a comic shop might be the place for you:
I had my 1-year-old son in a comics shop a couple months ago... The retailer was loudly holding court with a couple of fanboys. It was fucking this and fucking that and what the fuck and fuckity fucking fuck.
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I recommend [Kick Ass], too. but that's because it's one of the best films I've seen in a long time, and it made me laugh like a drain.
Seconded. (Well, thirded, I suppose.) Funny, great action scenes, and a good moral for the kids too (who couldn’t see it at the cinema, because it was R18).
WRT the use of the F-bomb and the C-bomb, isn't what they are referring to secondary to how they feel to say/scream/yell.
They're good, sharp, short, percussive words, with good hard consonants in them at the right place, like most good swearwords are. To a certain extent, what they refer to is incidental to their, um, 'mouth-feel', as it were.I agree, although the “not for polite company” nature of the words is also a big factor, otherwise, any utterance with “sharp, short, percussive words, with good hard consonants in them at the right place” would suffice. The gendered nature of the words may be the least important factor, except in as much as that informs how they came to be considered socially taboo.
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It is wrong of me to have found this photograph somewhat, er ... compelling, though?
Why, I have no idea what you mean.
Unless you mean you think she's gorgeous. In which case, yeah that's fine.
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I give you Deborah Hill Cone...
You can have her back.
Another "free speech = freedom from being criticised if I say something stupid" argument. Plus a bunch of bizarre observations thrown in.Anyone interest in a real example of infringement of free expression should watch The Court Report episode 14 (don't think it’s available online just yet, but should be soon).
It’s about Valerie Morse, who was convicted and fined $500 for offensive behaviour for setting alight a flag during the ANZAC day dawn service. The appeal is now at the Supreme Court. It isn’t anything like as extreme an example as the one Danyl used on his blog, but it is a legitimate case for concern over free expression. -
It's kinda sweet that you believe Steve, in a government ' genuinely trying to make the best decisions for the people'.
I didn’t say they act they way all the time, obviously, just there may be occasions when a government tries to implement a policy that’s good for society, albeit maybe in part because it coincides with their vested interests or what have you. Your notion that the governments of NZ have and always will act corruptly or maliciously, all the time in dealing with public policy issues is simplistic, to say the least. I don’t think we always have particularly good government, but we ain’t secretly being run by the Evil League of Evil.
... my not doing the census hurts no-one.
Correct, it makes no difference whatsoever. It’s your reason for not doing it that I’m discussing. So far, that reason seems to be little more than paranoia.
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There's no balance.
People are tricked and fooled.
Maybe, but I don't see what that's got to do with the census. There'll still be government spin and bias in media even without a census, and we'd lose a tool that can sometimes be used by government critics to show this. While a government genuinely trying to make the best decision for the people may botch it because they didn't have the necessary info to make the right judgment.
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The timeline is fuzzy to me at this point, but Ben was the absolute first to step up and say "It's not OK", without test-polling or fear of consequences, right?
Very same day. I'm pretty sure the stuff news article on Ben's decision was the next main turn reported on, after the initial story.
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Can there be such a thing as pure freedom? Pure freedom of speech? We have censorship; swear words are bleeped out in prime-time. We can’t commit slander.
I suppose there can be “pure freedom of speech” if it is defined as the absence of those things. There’s no reason we couldn’t dispense with censorship and defamation laws. But even if we did, it wouldn’t make any difference in this case. Henry didn’t lose his job because he breeched censorship laws. He lost his job in effect because of the amount of criticism he and TVNZ received, and possibly because people freely expressed their intention to boycott TVNZ and their sponsors/advertisers.
And it's worth thinking about why we would applaud Ben Gracewood or Paul Yandall quitting on principle after the hosts they worked with said offensive things -- but not be comfortable when the sponsor that helps pay the most does the same thing.
I guess that's because Ben did it out of principle and I assume (tho could be wrong) a sponsor would do it for financial reasons.
Yeah. Ben didn’t wait until he could gage the reaction of the country over the remarks. How many sponsors were going to pull out regardless of what feedback they were getting?
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...cos the world is sooo black or white, and NZ is just like the United States, eh.
I don’t see how that’s got much to do with it. Chapman’s mistake wasn’t in missing ‘shades of gray’, but in misunderstanding how the principle he advocated works. Also, in the US, people sometimes lose their jobs due to public pressure/advertiser pressure. This seems consistent with what you’re defending.
it says a lot about Anand Satyanand's character...
Yep. Ben Gracewood’s not the only one who has impressed me in this sorry affair. Satyanand has been all class.
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From Danyl's blog:
The Nobel Peace prize was just awarded to the Chinese writer and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo, one of the authors of the Charter 08 manifesto who was sentenced to eleven years imprisonment and ‘two years deprivation of political rights’ by the Chinese Government as punishment for publishing a text that called for China to abandon authoritarianism and ‘recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system’. So just to recap:
- Throwing someone in prison for eleven years for publishing a political manifesto: violating freedom of speech.
- Calling for a talk-show host to be sacked after they made racist comments: not violating freedom of speech, but rather exercising it.
Well said.
...and we, as a country, get a good slapping from Grace Dent in the Guardian (scroll down to the end of the article) ...
Feeling even more ashamed now.
You’re a sucker for punishment, web. I think her criticism is more aimed at the sort of person who defends Henry with the “he says what we’re all thinking” line, rather than actually at NZ. “I'm sure, like most media bores, he thinks he's only saying what the country is thinking. So if that's the case,..."
Note the “if that’s the case” caveat.