Location Location Location
Addendum. It occurred to me earlier that much or all of this disagreement or confusion over terms may be simply geographical, or geographico-political. All three of the people who think I’m confused are in the UK. I wonder if this has to do with the difference between having a written consitution and bill of rights, and not having either. In other words, the UK doesn’t actually have an explicit written constitutionally protected right to free speech or a free press. As a consequence of that it also doesn’t have a Supreme Court. As a consequence of that, the gummint can pass laws that would be unlikely to pass over here (although items like the Patriot Act may raise doubts about that). The House of Lords may amend such laws in a more free speech direction, but not in deference to a written explicit constitutional right. It may be that the legal right is more taken for granted here, with the result that there is less need to be expansive about it. Or, maybe not – since as I’ve mentioned, lots of people over here think the First Amendment is very expansive. Still, it’s a thought.
And here I was blaming the fact that you are a transplanted Brit in New York (I thought you were anyhow) for what seems to me a muddled way of talking about rights.
From my US-bred and -educated perspective, I find it obvious to say, yes, he should have a legal right to say what he pleases (unless he incites violence) and no, he has no moral right to tell lies. “Duhhh!”
And it doesn’t matter who ‘he’ is, because that is true of everyone.
That for one part. For the other part, I can’t readily explain why but in a discussion like this, and I suppose the context of incidents like Irving and the cartoons affects it, somehow, “rights” just means “legal rights” to me and any other use requires an adjective.
But the discussion has usefully emphasized for me the difference between the treatment of Irving and that of Ward Churchill. Irving’s peers should have kept him from having a platform for his lies. They shouldn’t confuse what should be his legal right to say whatever he wants to say about the holocaust with any moral right to a platform. I think by and large they did this. Only people who shared his views gave him a platform. However, the case of Ward Churchill has been different, and there people have confused his legal right to speak his mind with a moral right to a platform, which he doesn’t have any more than David Irving does.
Juan, I thought something similar about OB, but I found out that she’s our paisana. She’s not ashamed of it, but she’s (rightly) not proud of it.
A transplanted Brit in New York! Nope. That sounds quite fun. But no: I’m a non-transplanted Murkan in Seattle. (Well, I’m transplanted from New Jersey to Seattle.)
‘I find it obvious to say, yes, he should have a legal right to say what he pleases (unless he incites violence) and no, he has no moral right to tell lies. “Duhhh!”‘
Thank you. It certainly seems obvious to me! But clearly not to everyone.
“However, the case of Ward Churchill has been different, and there people have confused his legal right to speak his mind with a moral right to a platform, which he doesn’t have any more than David Irving does.”
Just so – but people do get confused about that. Like those Northwestern student editors that Lipstadt had to explain things to. They thought it was a journalistic obligation, having published an article on Holocaust denial, to publish an article by a Holocaust denier.
Well, I’m sorry to see you are not proud of your country, Doug. I am very proud to be part of the United States. Far from perfect though it is, I don’t know of any other place in the world that makes me more hopeful than the U.S.
Huh!? A moral right?
This whole discussion has become too ethereal and complicated for me.
Norm seems to be talking in absolute terms as if, in human situations, you can make a rule that fits all cases.
You can be a judge, magistrate or parent of small children and believe any such nonsense! You can hope that truth will triumph over lies but experience suggests that the wait might be lengthy.
I don’t mind Irving being clapped in jail. He went to a country and deliberately broke the law. Perhaps it’s a bad law (and perhaps it isn’t) but he didn’t do it with any noble purpose in mind. He just wanted to continue propagating information he knows to be false.
The only free speech that is being curtailed is that of telling lies about the holocaust. I can live quite comfortably with that and easily find larger targets for my indignation.
Juan, I’m glad that I live here in central California, but I think that I’d feel a misfit in the vast majority of the USA. Primarily, I believe that this country is imperialistic. I’ll be paying my taxes soon, and it grieves me that so much of that money will go to the military.
I must say, though, that I am proud of the strides that the USA has made against racism. I’m always fascinated when I talk with another US resident who is very genetically distinct from me, but who has the same standard “media accent” that I have.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was in San Francisco’s China town, and I asked a young Asian woman for a restaurant recommedation. Evidently, her only language was Chinese. Not 5 minutes later, I approached an extremely similar-looking woman who responded in the same accent that I use to tell me about a good restaurant a couple of blocks away. You just never know here. That’s part of the reason that I learned Spanish.
From New Jersey to Seattle, eh? Well, that’s almost as far as London to New York. :)
The pride comes from thinking that you form a part of what is good and that it has helped to produce you. I moved to New York from east Texas as a teenager and everybody had told me how “cold” those yankees were. But I have to tell you I found them just as friendly and talkative and interested in you as anybody else. I think that sort of sealed it with me for the U.S. Even New York was all right. Coming to London, on the other hand, was a real downer. Later I came to describe the UK as “a kinder, gentler America”. But that was before I started going back to the US frequently, and it must be admitted that the US has calmed down a bit in the past 10 years and become a bit less violent. Bush is nearly worthless, I’ll agree.
But when I look at the way freedom of expression is handled in the US v. the way it’s handled in the UK (and did you know that an EU directive on television has required the member states to outlaw “incitement to hatred” based not just on race but on a litany of things including religion since 1989), I start thinking that if push actually comes to shove over these things, I’m going to move back to the US forthwith!
The Northwestern student editors are just the sort of thing that could sap all hope out of you in one go. It reminded me of this quote, which I heard and it nearly made me scream at the time,
But then I followed those words to see where they led. They led to this,
Of course, from there it goes rapidly downhill, for it is Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. However, up to there, even Pinter seems to have some contact with reality. Likewise, those student editors at Northwestern may just have some chamber in their brain that is not entirely occupied by stale, thin air. It’s hard to imagine where it might be, though. :)
No, I don’t mind Irving being clapped in jail either – especially after hearing him on that documentary. He’s quite remarkably vicious. No, I just agree with people who think it’s a bad idea in general. But Austria and Germany aren’t ‘in general’.
Good one, Juan – made me blurt with laughter.
Regarding the subject of the post, in Britain and in Australia, Parliament is supreme.
That means that no Parliament can pass a law binding a future parliament.
A law such as the 1655 Bill of Rights is extinguished by future incompatible laws, to the extent of the incompatibility.
I have read Magna Carta; an instruction manual for governing a modern country it is not. The Australian Constitution basically delegates certain powers of the separate states to the federal government; it does restrict that government from taking over the states’ powers, though not thoroughly.
So when Australia’s High Court had to find a right to freedom of speech in the Constitution they said it was ‘implied’.
I like the implied right to free speech. Its a lot better than no such right!
I don’t think this is a question of US/UK distinctions, I think it is simply due to some people not really being able to accept that legal rights and moral rights are, and should be, distinct, and may not necessarily coincide.
This difficulty often seems to be suffered by those that want to talk about moral rights as being more than just a convenient device, because they frequently want to enshrine their moral rights into law. Those of us of the ‘nonsense upon stilts’ variety find it much easier to regard legal rights instrumentally.
As to the niceties of the law in the UK, the Human Rights Act trumps domestic law, so I guess we do have this idea of rights enshrined in our legal system now, along with the ‘right’ of appeal to Europe.
GT, be civil.
Yeah, ‘implied’ rights – tricky things!
“they frequently want to enshrine their moral rights into law”
Exactly. Whereas here (I still think) we sort of cut our teeth on the idea that you just don’t get to enact all your moral intuitions into law. I think that’s more part of the air in the US…but maybe I’m wrong. Anyway doesn’t matter, it’s the basic idea that seems to be at stake here.
Who was it who said (ironically) ‘everything not forbidden is permitted’? I have no idea. Will have to look it up.
Everyone said it. It’s a commonplace. Used in programming, too, apparently, along with the reverse. I didn’t know that. Interesting.
Found it! T.H.White, _The Once and Future King_, part one, “The Sword in the Stone”,
Second impression, September 1958, copyright 1939, 1940 by T.H.White. On page 121, the Wart is visiting an ant colony:
“The place where he was seemed like a great field of boulders with a . . . fortress at one end . . . [O]ver the entrance to each tunnel, there was a notice which said:
—————————————
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY
—————————————
The phrase was taken over by quantum physicists, who called it “White’s Law”.
Since when does ‘permitted’ = ‘compulsory’? Sounds like ol’ TH White was doing a little Red-bashing back in the late 30s, there, and fair do’s to him, but it’s rather distinct from the proposition that you can’t stop me doing anything not formally prohibited…
Ah! That would be where I got it then. That book was a huge favourite of mine in my youth, and still is in many ways. Yes, he was decidedly doing some Red-bashing – the ant colony part always made me a little uneasy. It’s an interesting thought experiment though…
Thanks, Elliott, I’m really glad to know that!
Mmmmmmmm – I don’t think so. The ants do sound very Soviety – I think.
Tingey’s got his knickers in a twist, I see. Too bad, old boy.
Huh?
“How do you insert a link, for a word or phrase, with pretty blue underlining into these boxes?”
Not that I actually know, but the glib and annoying answer I choose to give is that once we have resolved the major conflicts between differing worldviews, these little details will probably take care of themselves.
“I hope that before people try to do this to me again, that they check their sources first.”
Before people try to do what to you, GT? Have a different interpretation of a literary passage? Is that, er, forbidden?
And what does your passage show? No one denied that White talked about Hitler elsewhere in the book. I simply agreed with Dave that the ants adventure read to me like a bit of (possibly accurate) Red-bashing, and then expressed doubt about your different interpretation. Notice I used the word ‘think’ twice. It’s an opinion. Having an opinion different from yours isn’t doing something to you.
It might be offending him….
Sorry, I’ll get my coat…
snerk