Quotulatiousness

August 23, 2013

Putin’s newfound fans in the American conservative movement

Filed under: Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:22

In Reason, Cathy Young looks at the unlikely fandom for Russian President Vladimir Putin among American social conservatives:

Russian President Vladimir Putin, the career KGB officer who has presided over the rollback of his country’s post-Communist freedoms and revived Cold War-style anti-Americanism, is an unlikely hero for American conservatives. Yet the Kremlin strongman has lately found some fans on the right who see him as a defender of Christian values — most recently, in the imbroglio over Russia’s new legal ban on gay “propaganda.” It is a sad misjudgment that does a disservice to the causes of conservatism, freedom, and religion alike.

Spokesmen for several right-wing groups including the American Family Association have praised the Russian law, which prohibits any pro-gay speech or expression that could be accessible to minors. Veteran columnist Pat Buchanan has joined the Putin cheerleading squad. And, shockingly, the usually thoughtful author Rod Dreher, who blogs for The American Conservative, has added his own “1.5 Cheers for Putin.”

While condemning anti-gay violence and authoritarianism in Russia, Dreher praises Putin’s willingness to speak up for Christianity and laments that “post-Soviet Russia, for all its grievous flaws, is . . . more conscious of its Christian history and character than the United States.”

This is a truly grievous misunderstanding of the reality of religion and politics in 21st Century Russia. Russia today is outwardly far more religious than most of Western Europe, but it’s a religion of state more than church: Orthodox Christianity has taken Communism’s place as the new official ideology, with church membership an official badge of patriotism and loyalty.

August 21, 2013

The Guardian gets a taste of the medicine it prescribed for the tabloids

Filed under: Britain, Government, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

In sp!ked, Brendan O’Neill talks about the amazing double standards of Britain’s “chattering classes”:

If there was a Nobel Prize for Double Standards, Britain’s chattering classes would win it every year. This year, following their expressions of spittle-flecked outrage over the detention of Glenn Greenwald’s partner David Miranda by anti-terrorism police at Heathrow airport, they’d have to be given a special Lifetime Achievement Award for Double Standards.

For the newspaper editors, politicians and concerned tweeters now getting het up about the state’s interference in journalistic activity, about what they call the state’s ‘war on journalism’, are the very same people – the very same – who over the past two years cheered the state harassment of tabloid journalists; watched approvingly as tabloid journalists were arrested; turned a blind eye when tabloid journalists’ effects were rifled through by the police; said nothing about the placing of tabloid journalists on limbo-like, profession-destroying bail for months on end; said ‘Well, what do you expect?’ when material garnered by tabloid journalists through illegal methods was confiscated; applauded when tabloid journalists were imprisoned for the apparently terrible crime of listening in on the conversations of our hereditary rulers.

For these cheerleaders of the state’s two-year war on redtop journalism now to gnash their teeth over the state’s poking of its nose into the affairs of the Guardian is extraordinary. It suggests that what they lack in moral consistency they more than make up for with brass neck.

Everything that is now being done to the Guardian has already been done to the tabloid press, a hundred times over, and often at the behest of the Guardian. For all the initial depictions of Mr Miranda as ‘just Glenn Greenwald’s partner’, in fact he was ferrying encrypted information from the NSA leaker Edward Snowden on flights paid for by the Guardian. That is, he was detained and questioned over journalistic material acquired through illegal means. That’s already happened to the tabloids. Over the past two years of post-phone hacking, post-News of the World harassment of tabloid hacks by the state, 104 people have been arrested, questioned, usually put on unjustly elongated bail, and sometimes imprisoned. These include many journalists but also office secretaries and other non-journalist types, like Mr Miranda, who stand accused of handling illegally acquired material. The 104’s crimes include ‘disclosure of confidential information’ – not that dissimilar to what Greenwald and Miranda have done in terms of getting hold of and publishing Snowden’s illegally leaked confidential material. Yet while the redtop writers rot in legal limbo, Mr Miranda becomes a chattering-class cause célèbre.

[…]

But, believe it or not, the double standards run even deeper than that. For today’s outraged defenders of Greenwald, Miranda and the Guardian from a state war on journalism were the architects of the state’s far larger, far more destructive war on tabloid journalism. From the Guardian itself to Labour MP Tom Watson to various influential members of the Twitterati, many of those now shocked to find officials harassing journalists for doing allegedly dodgy things were at the forefront of demanding that officialdom harass redtop hacks for doing dodgy things. If you unleash and cheer a war on journalism by the state, you really cannot be surprised when the warmongers eventually put you and your journalism in the crosshairs, too.

July 22, 2013

The latest revival of the anti-pornography crusade

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:10

Laurie Penny explains why the renewed urge to blame pornography for social ills is misplaced:

We’ve been here before. The debate about the causes of sexual violence has been going on since the feminist porn wars of the 1980s, which were both more and less exciting than they sound and involved a great deal of shouting in draughty meeting rooms. The internet is the current culprit, but the arguments against explicit material are exactly the same as they were when the main smut delivery systems were rental videos and grubby mags. In 1981, the writer Ellen Willis noted that “if anti-porn feminists see pornography as a brutal exercise of predatory male sexuality, a form of (and incitement to) violence against women, the right also associates pornography with violence and with rampant male lust broken loose from the saving constraints of God and Family”. Today, the same social conservatives who are cutting child benefit and closing domestic violence shelters still borrow freely from feminist rhetoric about exploitation of women and children when it suits them.

The worst thing about this debate is that it turns a real-world, complex problem into a simple moral choice: porn is either good or bad, right or wrong, and not one shade of grey can be permitted, let alone 50. Having watched a great deal of pornography in the name of research and recreation, I can assure you that not all of it is violent, and indeed that almost any sexual taste, from the placid and petal-strewn to the eyebrow-raisingly reptilian, is catered to online for a modest fee. It is equally true that there is something traumatic about a lot of modern-day pornography, something repressed, violent and deeply involved with a particularly vengeful misogyny that has been on the rise only since women have become more economically independent over the past two generations. Some people like that sort of thing; others have grown up learning it as an erotic script, because sex is fundamentally a social idea. To say that dirty pictures are the problem in themselves, rather than a structure of violent misogyny and sexual control, is to confuse the medium with the message.

One of the most common retorts to the anti-porn alliance is that to campaign against online smut is to do something disgusting and decidedly post-watershed into the wind. The genie of unlimited filth has been let out of its dodgy bottle and no amount of legislation will stop us polishing our lamps.

That’s true, but it’s inadequate. After all, I spend my life, as an idealist and a feminist, arguing that vast, ambitious social change is not only possible but essential. Controlling the consumption of online pornography would require an enormous programme of state and corporate censorship, and the argument against this sort of socio-sexual state control should be not that it is unfeasible, but that it is monstrous. I do not want to live in a world where the government and a select few conservative feminists get to decide what we may and may not masturbate to, and use the bodies of murdered women or children as emotional pawns in that debate.

It is supremely difficult to achieve radical ends by conservative means. Feminists and everyone who seeks to end sexual violence should be very cautious when their immediate goals seem to line up neatly with those of social conservatives and state censors. I believe in a world where violence against women and children is not routine. After all, the idea of a world without sexism is no more unrealistic than getting rid of pornography — and a lot more fun.

It’s useful to keep in mind when claims about pornography being responsible for cases of sexual assault or rape … as the availability of porn on the internet has increased, incidences of violent sexual crimes have been decreasing in most countries. That little fact seems to get omitted when the accusations are being hurled.

Update: Simon Bisson says that the “key to cleaning up the internet is tackling the darknets, not letting censorship in by the back door”.

The latest proposals to lock down the UK internet in the name of preventing child pornography are at best a misunderstanding of how the dark side of the internet works, and at worst a basis for a censorship infrastructure that could make the Great Firewall of China look like a leaky sieve.

In an interview with the BBC, prime minister David Cameron proposed that search engines should block certain terms, warning users of the consequences of searching for those terms.

While that’s all very well, it’s an approach that’s not going to stop the real trade in illegal images — which never touches the big search engines, and hides behind encryption and custom-built networks that Peter Biddle and three other Microsoft engineers christened “darknets” in their 2002 paper. That flaw makes the proposals both misguided and dangerous, as the Open Rights Group notes in its considered response.

The problem facing anyone trying to block child porn or online drug dealing is that it doesn’t happen on the public internet. Online criminals know what they’re doing is illegal, and they’ll take complex precautions to hide their locations and the services.

[…]

While Silk Road is a publicly-known darknet site, there are many, many more that are only known to a small group of trusted individuals, bound together to secrecy in the knowledge that what they are doing is illegal. It’s on sites like those that illegal images and video are traded and shared, and bought and sold.

You won’t find them in the web space your ISP gives you, or through searches on Google or Bing. They’re squirreled away at the end of a DSL line somewhere well away from the jurisdiction of the UK government, in a country with loose regulations, and looser policing. Or worse still, they’re hosted in the fast flux DNS of a bot network, distributed across the unwitting PCs of hundreds or thousands of innocent users.

Stopping the web’s bad guys is not a matter of censoring the internet. That’s impossible. What’s needed instead is an international agreement on notice and take down for illegal content, and on shared intelligence about the servers and services criminals are using, with cooperation on shutting down botnets and cybercrime syndicates.

July 11, 2013

Rupert “Emmanuel Goldstein” Murdoch

Filed under: Britain, Business, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

James Delingpole on the quick march to government control over the British media:

I was listening to Radio 4 news yesterday as with salivating glee it reported the recall of Rupert Murdoch to the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee and I thought to myself, not for the first time: “Britain is losing the battle for press freedom.”

What worries me most is that so few of us seem capable of comprehending a) how we’re losing it and b) why it might be a problem. The default assumption behind the BBC’s reportage — and unfortunately, probably, an accurate one — is that most normal people think that Murdoch is the very type of low-down reptilian evil, that he is primarily responsible for dumbing down our culture and abasing standards within our media, and that every time he gets his comeuppance it’s a jolly good thing.

Needless to say, I disagree totally with this analysis — and not purely because I’d love it if he plucked me from obscurity and gave me an incredibly well paid job, writing, say, the James Delingpole Tells It Like It Is column in the Sun. No, I say it because I sincerely believe it. Tabloid media moguls like Murdoch do not create public taste: they reflect it. And if, like me, you believe in free markets and freedom of choice then we should applaud the farsightedness and tenacity with which he broke the print unions at Wapping, and the way he pioneered satellite viewing in Britain with Sky and the way in the US his Fox channel and his Wall Street Journal fight such a heroic and inspiring battle against the liberal consensus. Sure, I’ve no doubt he’s very good at drowning kittens — he’s a ruthless billionaire businessman, for heaven’s sake — but the benefits this buccaneer has brought to our world economically and socially far, far outweigh any he damage he might have done.

Yet you’d never guess this from his treatment in the media nor from the way he’s represented in public debate. Really, he’s like our very own Emmanuel Goldstein — the all-purpose hate-figure created by Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-Four in order to channel the people’s discontent in the “correct” direction.

June 28, 2013

Turkish PM throws treason accusation against BBC journalist

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:07

I guess the BBC is doing a fair job of agitating the powers-that-be, at least in Turkey:

Selin Gerit, a London-based presenter for BBC’s Turkish service, was until last week relatively unknown in her home country. However, that changed when Recep Tayyip Erdoğan told parliament she was guilty of treason over her coverage of the anti-government protests sweeping the nation.

The prime minister’s condemnation has triggered concerns among fellow journalists, who believe Erdoğan — who accuses the media of fanning the demonstrations — is attempting to stifle dissent.

The campaign against Girit was launched last weekend when the mayor of Ankara, Melih Gökçek, posted a series of angry tweets. The BBC criticised what it called government intimidation. The corporation’s comments triggered Erdoğan to claim in parliament the following day that Girit was “part of a conspiracy against her own country”.

Turkish journalists see the focus on Girit as a warning to them all — an example to cow the rest of them into submission. Serdar Korucu, editor of a major domestic news outlet, said: “The prime minister is telling us, ‘Be careful what you say and do, or you can easily be next’.”

The mainstream media have ignored much of the unrest, with CNNTürk airing a documentary on penguins while the central square in Istanbul became the scene of street protests unprecedented in Erdoğan’s 10-year rule. The public was outraged, and protests were staged outside local news outlets.

Many journalists, however, were not surprised. Fatma Demirelli, managing editor of Today’s Zaman, the English-language daily, said self-censorship had long become the norm in newsrooms. “Journalists now have a sort of split brain: on the one hand you see what the news is, but on the other you immediately try to gauge how to report it without stepping on anyone’s foot,” she said. “Self-censorship has become an automatic reflex.”

May 23, 2013

Pornography isn’t the problem – you are the problem

Filed under: Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

In Psychology Today, David J. Ley explains that there’s no such thing as pornography addiction or sexual addiction:

Porn is not addictive. Sex is not addictive. The ideas of porn and sex addiction are pop psychology concepts that seem to make sense, but have no legitimate scientific basis. For decades, these concepts have flourished in America, but have consistently been rejected by medicine and mental health. The media and American society have accepted that sex and porn are addictive, because it seems intuitively true — we all feel like sometimes, we might do something stupid or self-destructive, when sex is involved. But, this false belief is dangerous, and ultimately not helpful. Because when people buy into the belief that porn is addictive, it changes the argument, and all of a sudden, it seems like it is porn and sex that are the problems. Porn addiction becomes a label, and seems to be an explanation, when in fact, it is just meaningless words and platitudes that distract from the real issue. But sex and porn aren’t the problems. You are.

People do have a strong response to video pornography. Internet porn is very good at triggering male sexuality. The economic forces of the open market have driven modern internet porn to be very, very effective at triggering male sexual buttons, to get them aroused. But women actually have a stronger physiological response to porn than men and based upon this research, women should be more addicted to pornography than men. But the overwhelming majority of the stories we hear about are men. Why is this? Because one part of this issue is an attack on aspects of male sexuality, including masturbation and use of pornography, behaviors which society fears and doesn’t understand.

Porn can affect people, but it does not take them over or override their values. If someone watches porn showing something they find distasteful, it has no impact on their behavior or desires. But, if someone watches porn depicting acts that they, the watcher, are neutral about, then it does make it slightly more likely that they express interest in trying that act themselves. Take anal sex for instance. If a porn viewer finds it disgusting, watching anal pornography isn’t going to change that. But, if they are neutral on it, then watching anal porn probably will slightly increase the chance that I would be willing to at least give it a try. But, there is the crux of the issue — the people who gravitate towards unhealthy, violent porn, are people who already have a disposition towards violence. So — the problem is not in the porn, but in those people. Regulating porn access really is going to have no impact on these people as they can (and do) find far more violent and graphic images in mainstream Hollywood films like Saw.

Here’s some often-ignored empirical science about porn — as societies have increased their access to porn, rates of sex crimes, including exhibitionism, rape and child abuse, have gone down. […] Across the world, and in America, as men have increased ability to view Internet erotica, sex crimes go down. Believe it or not — porn is good for society. This is correlational data, but it is extremely robust, repeated research. But, it is not a message that many people want to hear. Individuals may not like porn, but our society loves it, and benefits from it.

H/T to Radley Balko for the link.

March 22, 2013

QotD: Battening down the (free speech) hatches

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

I have to confess, as an ignorant inhabitant of North America, that I don’t really understand the current press scandal in the U.K., and I was hoping that perhaps someone could enlighten me.

As I understand it, a number of members of the press committed crimes in the course of gathering material for stories — that is, they committed acts that were already illegal, and which already carried substantial penalties.

It would therefore seem that preventing such acts in the future would require nothing more than diligently enforcing existing law.

I’m therefore curious as to what purpose is articulated for ending freedom of expression in the U.K.

Is it claimed that the laws were not being enforced before on the powerful? Then surely the new restrictions on freedom will be selectively enforced as well, with only the weak being stifled. (That is, of course, universal — the powerful never need permission to do anything. Freedom is a protection for the weak, the strong need no protection.)

Is it claimed that performing criminal acts was somehow insufficiently illegal? Is it claimed that the existing laws against criminal conspiracies are not already broad, vague and all-encompassing?

Perry Metzger, “Doubly-illegal acts”, Samizdata, 2013-03-21

Explaining the title of this post:

Daffy Duck: “Batten down the hatches!”
Bugs: “We did batten ’em down!”
Daffy: “Well, batten ’em down again, we’ll teach those hatches!”

March 19, 2013

New British press control rules to apply to the internet … the whole internet

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:37

In Forbes Tim Worstall explains why the British government’s new Ministry of Truth press censorship body will have effective reach across the entire internet:

This isn’t what they think they’ve done, this is true. And it’s also not what they intended to do (or at least I hope they didn’t mean to do this) but it is still what they’ve done. They’ve passed a law which effectively censors the entire world’s media. And they’ve done this simply because they are ignorant of the very laws they’re trying to change. Which is, I think you’ll agree, a little disturbing, that politicians would casually negate press freedom just because they don’t know what they’re doing.

[. . .]

It’s a standard Common Law assumption that publication does not take place where the printing presses (or servers etc) are. Publication takes place where something is made available to be read or seen. We’ve even had two recent cases that show this. Rachel Ehrenfeld published a book in the US and yet was still sued for libel in London. For a few copies of that book had made it over to England and thus it was deemed that publication had taken place where English libel law prevailed. Just in case you think that this is some English peculiarity there was a very similar case with Dow Jones in Australia. Something was published in New York. But it was read in Australia (remarkably, by the man the piece was about, he downloaded it) and this was sufficient for the Australian courts to agree that therefore the potential libel had occurred in Oz and should be tried under Oz law.

This is even clearer with reference to child pornography laws. “Production” of child pornography includes the act of downloading such. For before it was downloaded there was one copy, on the server. Once downloaded, there are two, one on the server, the other in the browser. Thus the downloading is in itself the production of that pornography. This very point is drawn from the standard Common Law principles about publication.

Therefore, it doesn’t matter where your servers are. For that’s not what defines publication. It also doesn’t matter who the material is aimed at: nor even what language it is in. Publication happens if someone in the UK downloads whatever it is. That, in itself, is the act of publication.

March 18, 2013

Britain’s left: they have to destroy press freedom to save it

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

In the Guardian, Nick Cohen explains why the rush to regulate the press is such a bad move for the left:

We are in the middle of a liberal berserker, one of those demented moments when “progressives” run riot and smash the liberties they are meant to defend. Inspired by Lord Justice Leveson, they are prepared in Parliament tomorrow to sacrifice freedom of speech, freedom of the press and fair trials. They are prepared to allow every oppressive dictatorship on the planet to say: “We’re only following the British example” when outsiders and their own wretched citizens protest.

Try warning them that one day they and this country will regret their hooliganism and they reply in the sing-song voice of a child in a playground: “Well, that’s what Murdoch and Dacre want you to say.” It’s no good pointing out that Murdoch and Dacre are tired old men from a dying newspaper industry and they will not be keeping us company for much longer. Nor can you quote Orwell’s words to the effect that just because a rightwing newspaper says something does not mean it is wrong. Nothing works.

The Labour and Liberal Democrat parties are custodians of the best of Britain’s radical traditions: the traditions not only of Orwell, but of John Milton, John Stuart Mill and the men and women who struggled against the Stamp Acts and the blasphemy and seditious libel laws. Their successors are not worthy to follow in their footsteps. For the sake of a brief partisan victory, for the chance to shout: “Yah boo sucks” at the hated tabloids, they are inviting political regulation of the press at a time when the web revolution allows not only newspapers but also large blogs and the websites of campaign groups to be “significant news publishers”, to use the ominously vague phrase Labour and the Liberal Democrats are offering to the Commons tomorrow.

March 17, 2013

Proposed British press regulation will apply to bloggers as well

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Guido Fawkes offers a warning to those bloggers cheerleading for the British government to impose controls on the tabloid press:

One thing that surprises Guido is that his comrades in the liberal, progressive blogosphere have seemingly not noticed that the proposed Royal Charter aims to control and regulate them as well as the tabloids.

Schedule 4, Point 1 of both the government and the opposition’s versions of the Royal Charter will bring blogs under the regulator’s control:

    “relevant publisher” means a person (other than a broadcaster) who publishes in the United Kingdom: a. a newspaper or magazine containing news-related material, or b. a website containing news-related material (whether or not related to a newspaper or magazine)”

[. . .]

To all those bloggers who support this press control Charter because they hate Murdoch and Dacre, Guido offers this cautionary counsel, remember that the new regulator will cover you as well. You will have all the expense and bureaucracy of compliance as Murdoch and Dacre face, without the means. Unless like Guido and the Spectator you plan to become media outlaws too…

March 9, 2013

More on EU proposal to ban all forms of pornography

Filed under: Europe, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

In the Telegraph, Bruno Waterfield follows up on yesterday’s story (linked here):

Controversy has erupted over next Tuesday’s European Parliament resolution “on eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU”, meant to mark international women’s day, after libertarian Swedish MEPs from the Pirate Party spotted the call for a ban in the small print.

While not legally binding, the vote could be the first step towards European legislation as the EU’s assembly increasingly flexes its political muscle within Europe’s institutions.

The proposal “calls on the EU and its member states to take concrete action on discrimination against women in advertising… [with] a ban on all forms of pornography in the media”.

Kartika Liotard, a Dutch left-wing feminist MEP, is seeking “statutory measures to prevent any form of pornography in the media and in advertising and for a ban on advertising for pornographic products and sex tourism”, including measures in the “digital field”.

The MEPs are also demanding the establishment of state sex censors with “a mandate to impose effective sanctions on companies and individuals promoting the sexualisation of girls”.

March 6, 2013

Colby Cosh: “One sees what fine jokes result when the state tries to make one plus one equal fried chicken”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:25

In Maclean’s, staff optimist and all-around-softy Colby Cosh tries to make lemonade out of the sour Whatcott ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada:

The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt “hate speech.” The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially “hateful,” conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions’ targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.

But since we columnists are in the business of telling truth, whatever a court thinks, it ought to be admitted that, dead or alive, free speech in Canada was never in such good shape. The Supreme Court’s decision is an elaborate partial rescue of standing precedent; the constitutionality of hate policing by provincial commissions was established many years ago, and the unpleasant surprise is only that it wasn’t killed on this occasion.

[. . .]

For those of us who make a living in creative or intellectual expression, it is worth something to have the laws limiting it defined as clearly as possible while being compacted into a minimum volume. The Supreme Court has made the rules clearer, and this is not to be sneered at, even if its logic sometimes is — especially since the overall authority of human rights commissions has undergone net diminution in the process. It is just possible the chief justice wasn’t entirely asleep at the switch.

March 2, 2013

Chief Justice McLachlin’s “evolving” view of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

In the Ottawa Citizen, Karen Selick explains why the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision in the Whatcott case was so surprising:

For 22 years, free-speechers have cherished the hope that another case involving censorship and human rights legislation would come back before Chief Justice McLachlin. That’s because in 1990, before becoming chief justice, she wrote dissenting judgments in two cases, Taylor and Keegstra. Her opinion then was that the censorship sections of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and the Criminal Code violated the Charter guarantee of freedom of expression, and that the violation was not justified in our free, democratic society. She therefore voted to strike down the censorship clauses as unconstitutional.

Justice McLachlin was outvoted in both Taylor and Keegstra by the narrowest of margins: 4-3. The majority of the 1990 court found both the CHRA and the Criminal Code provisions constitutional. However, Justice McLachlin penned a long and eloquent paean to freedom of expression, recounting its historical value as “an essential precondition of the search for truth,” a promoter of the “marketplace of ideas” and “an end in itself, a value essential to the sort of society we wish to preserve.”

Free-speechers hoped that, given another opportunity to exert her influence among an entirely different panel of SCC judges (she is the only member of the 1990 court still on the bench), she would be able to sway a majority to her 1990 views.

Instead, she herself has apparently abandoned those views, voting with a unanimous court (6-0) in the Whatcott case to uphold the main censorship clause of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.

February 27, 2013

Australia’s “human rights enforcement” industry

Filed under: Australia, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:57

Australia, like Canada, has a large and over-mighty set of bureaucracies empowered to pursue “human rights” scofflaws (I put “human rights” in scare quotes because the most prominent cases in both countries appear to be enforcement of certain privileges rather than ensuring equal rights for all). Nick Cater says that the joyride for these — if you’ll pardon the expression — kangaroo courts may be coming to an end:

Quietly at first, but with a swelling, indignant chorus, respectable Australians of unimpeachable character began howling Roxon’s bill down. The contrivance of describing race, gender, sexual orientation, disability or 14 other grounds for victimhood as ‘protected attributes’ jarred; the inclusion of industrial history, breastfeeding or pregnancy or social origin suggested overkill; the reversal on the onus of proof, obliging alleged racists, misogynists and wheelchair kickers to demonstrate their innocence, seemed a step too far. The ABC’s chairman, Jim Spigelman, a lawyer of some standing, voiced his concerns about the outcome of the Bolt case. ‘I am not aware of any international human-rights instrument or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy that extends to conduct which is merely offensive’, Mr Spigelman said. ‘We would be pretty much on our own in declaring conduct which does no more than offend to be unlawful. The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech.’

[. . .]

Unlike political opinion, attributes like age or gender or sexuality are objective facts. They did not have to be demonstrated. As Senator Brandis pointed out: ‘There is no imperative for a 45-year-old man to go around saying, “I’m 45”. That does not happen.’ Political opinion, however, means nothing unless it is expressed.

Brandis: ‘I do not know if you are familiar with Czeslaw Milosz’s work The Captive Mind, or Arthur Koestler’s book Darkness At Noon… The whole point of political freedom is that there is an imperishable conjunction between the right to hold the opinion and the right to express the opinion. That is why political censorship is so evil — not because it prohibits us holding an opinion but because it prohibits us articulating the opinion that we hold.

‘We all agree that there is no law in Australia that says you cannot have a particular opinion. We all agree that there are certain laws in Australia, including defamation laws, that limit the freedom of speech. My contention is that there should not, in a free society, be laws that prohibit the expression of an opinion… This attempt to say, “Holding an opinion is one thing but expressing an opinion is quite different”, is terribly dangerous in a liberal democratic politic.’

January 18, 2013

For your “protection”, some new smartphones are configured to hide “mature” content

Filed under: Britain, Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:52

Willard Foxton discusses some eye-raising configurations on new smartphones in the UK:

When you get a new phone, there’s a very good chance it comes with automatic filters enabled. For example, it’s very common for you have to explicitly request the ability to call premium-rate phone lines. This is long established, but now, a sinister new trend has started, whereby phone providers are automatically blocking access to certain websites for “mature content”, rather than “adult content”.

Mobile provider 3UK is blocking access to political satire as “mature content”; Orange is preventing access to feminist articles as “mature content” through its automatically applied Orange Safeguard service; several providers are blocking perfectly legitimate sites like Pink News because they deal with gay issues, or Channel 4’s excellent Embarrassing Bodies website, because of the graphic discussion of body parts and sexuality.

This was bad enough when these services were blocking porn (I for one wholeheartedly support the right of teenagers to watch smut on their iPhones), but now it seems overzealous providers are blocking access to anything a Catholic Bishop might consider for adults only. This carries not only the problem of “overblocking” caused by lazy filter design — notably, it’s hard to get your website read if it refers to Middlesex or Scunthorpe — but also as these filters are automatically applied, most people don’t even realise they are losing access to certain parts of the web.

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