Freedom Of Speech

Imagine if the above headline was: “In support of the wholesale slaughter of babies.”

Examine your reaction to it. Your reaction is the problem.

Now, there are only two credible reactions to reading something like this. One is that it’s some kind of poorly-focused black humour, that the author is being deliberately provocative (and not very funny). The other is visceral moral outrage. The very idea that we should do such a thing.

Continue reading "The abortion debate goes where it’s never gone before" »

The biggest slap in my five months of house arrest came not at the start when the magistrate said he wanted to make it “as much like jail” as he could. It came only days from the end, at the hands of an elderly hospital volunteer, on one of my rare excursions into the real world.

As I walked into the foyer of the Austin Hospital for a check-up to see how my newly transplanted liver was behaving, the beaming, bespectacled old-timer asked how I was doing.

I said: “I feel great. Only 12 more days and I’m out of jail.” His mocking, condescending reply: “You weren’t in jail.” I felt like saying: “You try it, sunshine.”

Continue reading "The Human Headline:  Ungagged and unbowed" »

I was absolutely intrigued by Sophie Mirabella’s attack on the growing “Occupy Wall Street” movement yesterday. In case you missed it, she basically dismissed these peaceful protesters as nothing more than a bunch of angry, anti-capitalist losers, looking to place the cost of their own failings into the hands of others:

“…There’s a strange dichotomy about this movement. These “occupiers” want other people to earn less, while presumably they are supported by the Government or benevolent families so they can spend their days creating sanitation problems in the street rather than earning a living themselves.

“They want other people to pay for their “free” college education. They want to hold others to account for the way they believe the world has failed them. There is an underlying sense of entitlement that just jars with the “other people are greedy bastards” protest.

Continue reading "Mirabella and the hypocrisy of the shoutier-than-thou" »

It’s easy to defend free speech when you support a speaker’s views. It’s harder when you oppose them. Now, after the ruling in the Bolt case, free speech champions – even those who dislike and disagree with Andrew Bolt – should be speaking out.

They line up, to the right and to the left, the self-appointed arbiters of political and societal fashion, the media commentariat. From their pulp pulpits they lay down how we ordinary Australians should think. Their words today are the gospels of tomorrow, regurgitated in dozens of accents and emphases throughout workplaces, bars and coffee shops as well and re-broadcast by phone, email and Twitter.

The best known is Alan Jones, motor mouth of the airwaves, syndicated nationally on commercial radio, hard-core conservative. But there are a dozen or two others, in newspapers and on radio and TV, of various political shades. Most of the time, the harsh pronouncements wash us by, grating and irritating in equal measure on either side of public debate. But occasionally they hit the mark, roughly on target: a surge of public opinion forces focused governments to respond to what appears to be the will of the people. 

Continue reading "Bolt case shows need for more free speech, not less" »

Earlier this year a mate and I drove 300km across North Carolina to have a pork sandwich. The town of Lexington is the capital of what our American friends call “barbecue” –slow-cooked, shredded pork shoulder served with a vinegary chilli sauce and coleslaw. You can feel your heart slowing down as you eat it and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Heading west from Lexington, towards the hillbilly heartland of the Appalachian Mountains, we saw a huge billboard on the side of one of the backroads.

It said: “You are now entering Klan Country” and bore the swastika-inspired logo of the Ku Klux Klan and a huge Confederate Flag.

Continue reading "Freedom of speech extends to the vulgar, vacuous and vile" »