Today, the online magazine spiked launched Free Speech Now!, a brand new campaign for 'unfettered' freedom of speech, with no ifs and no buts.
The editor of spiked, Brendan O'Neill, says:
'"Every man should think what he likes and say what he thinks." It is 350 years since Spinoza wrote those profound words. And yet every man (and woman) is still not at liberty to think what he or she likes, far less say it. It is for this reason that, today, spiked is kicking off a transatlantic online magazine and real-world campaign called Free Speech Now! - to put the case for unfettered freedom of thought and speech.'
'Freedom of speech is in a bad way', says O'Neill. 'Ours is an age in which a pastor, in Sweden, can be sent to jail for preaching to his own flock in his own church that homosexuality is a sin. In which British football fans can be arrested for referring to themselves as Yids. In which those who too stingingly criticise the Islamic ritual slaughter of animals can be convicted of committing a hate crime.'
'This new illiberalism commits the double offence of shutting up those who have something to say and shutting down the critical faculties of everyone else, discouraging debate in favour of promoting only those ideas that small groups of people have predetermined to be good, right, scientifically or politically correct, and safe for the little people to consume.'
The Free Speech Now! campaign is necessary challenge to this new illiberalism. Combining an online hub, providing free-speech lovers with the sharpest, most insightful articles, interviews and podcasts around, with plans for a series of live events in the US and Europe, Free Speech Now! will mount a vital defence of this most important of liberties.
O'Neill says:
'We need a renewed commitment to the freedoms of thought and speech, and one which is consistent - which defends these freedoms not only for writers and the right-on, but also for so-called deniers, for the politically weird, for those who are offensive or outrageous. For it is only by having unfettered freedom of speech that we can guarantee an open and lively public sphere in which bad claims or ideas might be intellectually beaten, and the truth, arrived at.'
View Free Speech Now! here: http://www.spiked-online.com/
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Media Release
What we call PC in the US is a movement that has a basic tenet that the favored person has the right to not be offended; that the favored person gets to define when they are offended. Another tenet is that as long as you agree with the favored person, you are free to say what you please until the favored person changes their mind about you or what they want you to think and say.
@Robert JM
These days that's a tall order, that's why we have so many rules and regulations, ppl don't use common sense any more they run to the authorities for remedies instead. And they are only too pleased to oblige by creating even more regulations.
Your idea about free speech is a bit wish·y-wash·y, I agree, don't denigrate someone for being black, white or whatever colour, but not being able to tell someone, who for all practical purposes is white but claims black status, is a bit rich.
Given that the person may have 98% of one ancestry and only 2% of the other.
Specially when claiming such status brings with it certain benefits not available to others, outside of that group.
And this is precisely what started this discussion about free speech.
I'm afraid that I don't understand the Australian concept of free speech. I know that I must be very careful about what I say about any politically powerful group or I will be punished, but I find that hard to reconcile with 'free speech'. I know I can say anything I want about 'rich old white men' and have nothing to fear (I learned this on the ABC). I can probably get away with rubbishing 'white men' and probably 'men', but maybe not 'old men'. Probably it is open season on 'the rich', as long as they are not members of any protected group. I can slag the bloody seppos all I want and probably the poms, at least if they are rich, old white poms, but all other nationalities are protected unless they are ROWMs.
Is this pretty much the gist of Australian free speech?
I don't believe in the fundamental right to unrestricted free speech.
Instead I believe in the right of the individual to do as the please as long as those actions don't interfere with the rights of another individual.
Free speech is an extension of this principle and it effective means a individual has the right to speak against any group or organisation but not to do the same against an individual.