What Trumps What
Another thought or two on free speech and lying.
Part of what I think I disagree with is Norm’s implication that there are only two possibilities, protection of lying as free speech or criminalization of it.
Now, even though Ophelia puts the point interrogatively and not as a conclusion, one can only assume she does so to leave open the possibility that falsehood, lying and such shouldn’t be protected under norms of free speech, and therefore may in certain circumstances be criminalized.
I’m not sure that ‘therefore’ is a therefore. I’m not sure that failure or refusal to protect X translates to a belief that X should or may be criminalized. It seems to me it can fall well short of that. Are we (logically, or morally, or both) obliged to protect everything we don’t think should be a crime? Surely not. Surely there’s a whole mess of things, a whole choppy sea of them, that we disapprove of and think wrong and wouldn’t dream of actively protecting, without therefore thinking they should be felonies, or even the equivalent of parking tickets.*
And I suppose this is how I look at the whole issue. I don’t see it as all or nothing, as free speech or nothing, as a blanket endorsement of free speech or a blanket criminalization of everything that’s not an explicit right. I suppose I look at it in a ceteris paribus way, and I often think other things aren’t equal. I suppose I see blanket or unconditional endorsements of free speech as a pre-emptive move similar to that executed by words like ‘respect’ and ‘blasphemy’. I think I’m going to write a book about this.
It’s not that I don’t think free speech is a good, and a tremendously important good at that, it’s just that I think 1) that it’s often a competing good and 2) that the things it competes with have to be evaluated on their merits rather than just dismissed by the trumping-power of free speech and 3) that as Stanley Fish and Onora O’Neill (among others) point out, pretty much everyone else thinks that too. If that’s true, if pretty much everyone else does think that too, then the blanket endorsement of free speech would seem to be functioning as a rhetorical tool.
Dave put it neatly in comments:
This is, of course, why politics is inevitable. There is no foundational response to the issue, other than to continue the clash between differing viewpoints over what constitutes a ‘correction’ and what a ‘falsification’, and to hope that those who defend freedom do not sell the pass one day…
There is no foundational response to the issue. Free speech is one good, but truth, accuracy, scholarship, reliable scholarship, the reliable universality and intercommunicability of scholarship and research and knowledge, methodological reliability, evidence, standards, trust – are also goods. It is by no means self-evident that free speech should protect a putative right to falsify history at the expense of all those very real and important goods. Research, inquiry, the steady accumulation of reliable, warranted knowledge would become impossible if everyone came to believe that free speech meant the right to simply invent one’s findings – to cheat, as Robert Pennock called it during the Kitzmiller trial. But – that doesn’t cash out to saying that scholars who lie should be hauled off to prison.
Onora O’Neill put it this way:
Yet even committed liberals don’t seriously think that rights to free speech are unlimited or unconditional, although they seem to be unsure about which limits should be set. They are often torn between an aspiration to justify free speech as minimal and uncontroversial, and a contrary belief that free speech matters because it is not minimal but powerful…Rights to free speech have always been seen as limited by other serious considerations, and must often be so restricted if we are to respect other rights. Nobody thinks that a right to free speech confers an unconditional licence to intimidate, to incite hatred, to defraud, to deceive or the like, and nobody thinks that the law should protect speech acts that harm, injure or put others at risk.
That’s what I’m saying. I don’t think Irving should be in prison (although I have to admit I don’t think it with much intensity or passion or even conviction, and I don’t mind much that he is there, especially after listening to Radio 4’s documentary on the trial last week) but I don’t think he has a right to falsify published history, either.
It’s all about lying, after all. Irving accused Deborah Lipstadt of lying by accusing her of libel – he was accusing her of lying about him, and he wanted the accusation to have an effect: the pulping of her book. He lost the case because he was shown to have lied extensively himself. His right to free speech didn’t trump that verdict – so in that sense it was not protected. It lost out to other, competing rights. Lipstadt won the case not because she had a right to free speech, but because the evidence showed that she told the truth and Irving lied.
Another distinction that I think helps to disentangle this is that between speech (such as speech to political meetings and rallies) and published writing. But that’s enough for now.
*Mind you, a lot of people do make exactly that translation, as I’ve remarked before. They do, oddly, hear strongly-worded disapprobation of, say, a certain kind of tv show or movie or book as a demand for censorship of same. But those are confused people, who are beside the point for the purposes of this discussion.
OB, you say,
I think “trumping power” does not do free speech justice. In its own realm free speech should be absolute. It’s simply necessary to keep things clear, to make sure we all know what each other is thinking. It gives all sides the possibility of sharing a common ground — where we say what we think and feel.
I say, “in its own realm” because when speech can directly and immediately cause physical harm, e.g. “kill that xxxxx bastard now!” or the famous “Fire! Fire!!” in a crowded theatre, we are not in the realm of speech but of action. But we need the can directly and immediately cause physical harm to keep us all honest. And it has to be interpreted fairly and consistently, for our side and for theirs, for all sides.
Anything that does not cause a clear and present danger can be countered with words. It doesn’t need anything else to counter it.
But Juan, that just ignores the issues I’m talking about. What does it mean to say that anything that does not cause a clear and present danger can be countered with words? How does that address the issue of falsified history and other scholarship? How can it be countered if, for instance, no one knows it is falsified? Are you claiming that scholars (for example) have a right to falsify their work as long as they can get away with it, and that there is no moral issue and nothing more to be said?
And what do you mean ‘free speech should be absolute’? You mean the right to it should? If so, what do you mean by ‘right’? Merely non-criminalization? But I’ve already conceded that; I’m talking about other possible meanings of right. Or something else? If so, what? If you don’t mean the right to it should, what do you mean?
I find this kind of discussion frustrating. I try to tease out some specifics that go beyond the windy generalities about Free Speech, and then I get back more generalities about Free Speech. That’s why I say the generalities are too easy – they are too easy. Just repeating Free Speech and ignoring all the questions about particulars is very easy, and not very interesting or illuminating.
(That’s not personal, Juan; I’ve had the experience several times in Real Life; I ask questions about details and people just look at me blankly and say Free Speech.)
Exactly. And Lipstadt herself thinks he should not be in prison, although she also (she is always careful to add) understands why Austria thinks the law necessary. But, exactly: it is Irving who tried to silence Lipstadt, not the other way around. He has zero credentials himself as a champion for blanket Free Speech. Of course, it doesn’t follow that he should either not have Free Speech or be imprisoned, but it does complicate the picture.
And it certainly casts doubt on the (I think bizarre) idea that ‘Anything that does not cause a clear and present danger can be countered with words. It doesn’t need anything else to counter it.’ I think that’s just that idea I’m always disputing, that there is a magic mechanism which sees to it (how?) that the truth always triumphs In The End (what end?). Irving could have won that case; Lipstadt could have decided not to fight it; Penguin could have decided not to fight it. There is no magical unseen Platonic Force that makes sure that lies don’t win. Lies can win; they do win, often.
I do not think that the idea that free speech is, other things being equal, a great good, entails accepting that Irving or other falsifiers have a Right to publish faked-up history.
To think that truth will always win just because it’s true is a very silly idea indeed. People tell lies, for all kinds of reasons, and unless other people, for whatever reasons they may have, expose the lies for what they are, those lies, unchallenged, have an excellent chance of being accepted by everyone either totally ignorant of the case in question or not privy to all its details. Which is usually “most” people.
You have standards institutes for products, that evaluate whether those products do what they claim, in order to protect consumers from either wasting their money or harming themselves or others. In fact there are plenty of watchdog organisations out there for all kinds of issues and they don’t put people in jail (not directly, though information they gather could be used in a prosecution) and aren’t necessarily condemned for warning about things they think need it.
If everyone can basically say what they like, I don’t see why we require special defences for the “right” to falsify history. Nonsense strands converging again; it leads to laws proposed that would defend mythological beliefs against ridicule.
I’m up to p.129, which reminds me that just because a proven liar should not have less rights to free speech than anyone else, doesn’t mean the truth has no more value than a lie.
To follow up my earlier pithy comment [cheers OB], the problem here is not the speech, but the state — that ‘restrictions on free speech’ require the invocation of a law-making, law-enforcing body that will, if it deems it necessary, physically coerce people into not saying something…
When this issue is discussed in terms of what speech is OK or not, the surface is being mistaken for the substance, which as the framers of the US Constitution and subsequent declarations would have told you, is the question of what we risk creating by NOT upholding freedom of speech, within reasonable limits [to be decided, as ever, by politics, politics, politics]…
OB, I’m sorry if I irritated you, provoking you to pick nits like “when you say free speech do you mean the right to free speech” when that sort of usage is common currency. Fwiw, I am getting back very unexpected replies to what I say, too! :)
Like this,
I obviously didn’t say truth will always win in the end. I didn’t mean to imply it either. I suppose I’m not starting from a point of trying to guarantee that truth will win out. I’m saying we should fight our political battles out in the open. And may the best case win.
Laws are made by the majority. If we’ve got the power to make a law we’ve got the power to make our case against a lie or a pernicious idea, policy or ideology. If we don’t have available to us the shortcut of a law proscribing expression of the offending ideas or lies, we have to make the effort to make our case, over and over again and in as many different ways as it takes to win the day.
We will have a better society if we do it this way. It will be fresher, more energetic, more authentic.
I’m not saying anybody should be criticised for not employing or publishing Irving. I would criticise them for employing or publishing him. But they should have the right to do it.
I’m saying that this is a category error:
That free speech is a good on a different level, a more fundamental level. It is part of the infrastructure which we need to make decisions about truth, accuracy and the rest. And this argument,
doesn’t hold because the right to lie about history simply does not mean the lie will be believed. I was living in the US when I learned about the existence of a law in Germany against denying the holocaust and my first response was to say, “uh oh! What’s up? What are they trying to hide? What part isn’t true?”
Declaring something “legally true” does not give it any legitimacy among thinking people.
Cheap crack, Stewart, to which the response is to substitute ‘Trinity’ for ‘Holocaust’ in Juan’s post…
On a related matter of free speech, it seems that the UK Life League has chosen to publish home addresses of people it considers abhorent, including Ron Liddle for daring to criticise evangelicals;
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/7days/story/0,,1729098,00.html
Is that a free speech issue? These people appear to be connected to Christian Voice, at least their site links directly to CV’s homophobic anti-police campaign.
Stewart, your analogy seems so inapt that it took me a while to figure out what you meant. Now that I have, I’m still not sure what to say. Is an apple an orange? Uh, no.
But seriously, as someone brought up in the U.S. where “it’s a free country!” is something every kid has defiantly said a million times to other kids, to parents and to anyone else who was listening (or just out of earshot in some cases!), to be told there’s actually a law against saying something is not true just brings immediately to my mind the possibility that it is, in fact, not true. I had never doubted the holocaust before then but after then I wondered about it for a while.
Don’s question is interesting. Publishing personal details might violate privacy laws. If some harm came to the person whose details were revealed, the UK Life League might have some liability.
As OB as said, there are some things which you may not be able to proscribe but you may want to put the people who do them under police surveillance.
Juan, sorry back if I irritated you back, but (there always is a but!) –
I wasn’t picking nits. Surely the issue of what is a ‘right’ to free speech is exactly what I’m trying to get at here, so if I want to be precise about it, that’s not picking nits, it’s going on talking about what I’m already talking about. The fact that the shorthand ‘free speech’ for ‘the right to free speech’ is common currency is not a reason (in my view) to go on using it without question; on the contrary, part of what I’m trying to tease out here is what common currency is and what might be wrong with it. That’s not picking nits. It’s basic. It’s more like picking hippos or camels or boulders.
“I’m not saying anybody should be criticised for not employing or publishing Irving. I would criticise them for employing or publishing him. But they should have the right to do it.”
Well if that’s all you’re saying, you’re hurling yourself against an open door. That’s what I’m saying – that is, depending on what we mean by ‘right’. That’s one of the things I’m trying to get at – what do we mean by ‘right’? I’m claiming that we mean more than just non-arrest and non-imprisonment. I’m claiming that the word ‘right’ has more overtones than ‘legal right’ and that the discussion of the whole subject is confused because that doesn’t get spelled out. That’s why I think the nits need to be picked.
You just don’t see people marching up and down with banners defending the ‘right’ of newspapers to tell systematic major lies. So…
But I want to write an endlessly long post about all this, so I shouldn’t fritter it away in a comment.
“That free speech is a good on a different level, a more fundamental level. It is part of the infrastructure which we need to make decisions about truth, accuracy and the rest.”
Hmm. Interesting. But I’m not convinced. We can’t make those (political, as Dave says) decisions down on the infrastructure if there aren’t norms in place about truth and lies.
The home addresses question. I wrote an article partly about that for the current issue of TPM. I think publishing people’s addresses, especially in a context of threats, 1) should be illegal (I don’t even know if it is or not) and 2) is dead wrong. I can say why in two words: Bernard Slepian.
Funny – after I wrote that, I read this in an interview at Free Inquiry –
“But when a producer at This Week with George Stephanopoulos invited me to appear on the show, my wife suggested I not do it out of concern for my safety. Consider the beating of the professor in Kansas who was attacked for announcing he was going to teach a course on evolution versus Intelligent Design, or Bernard Slepian…”
OB,
Your original post mentions “free speech” about a dozen times. Not once does it speak of “the right to free speech”. I take it that you mean “the right to free speech”, or “the right to freedom of expression”, when you say “free speech”. And that is what I mean when I use “free speech” here.
Are you saying you can’t make any decision about free speech until you establish some norms about truth and lies? What norms?
Juan, it may be a huge upbringing difference at work here (I’ll concede without further ado that the crack was cheap). I was not brought up in the States and “it’s a free country” was not something I or people of my acquaintance actually said, though it was something one heard in American movies and TV shows. On the other hand, I knew plenty about the Holocaust as a kid. I don’t think the phenomenon of Holocaust denial was in any way known to me till maybe the Seventies, possibly even late Seventies and I’m pretty sure I was aware of its existence before I knew about laws forbidding it. Now that you explain it like that, I can more readily understand your reflex, but the first thing to leap into your mind would not have been the first thing to leap into mine.
Juan, so I do. Fair point. I would say that when the word ‘absolute’ (or ‘certain’) makes an appearance, extra specificity is useful – but now that you point it out I think I should have been more precise m’self.
What norms? The ones I’m talking about. The norms about lying and falsification. The ‘oughts’ about truth, lies, distortion, deception, fraud, cheating, falsifying records, tampering with evidence. Things that are not (all, necessarily) illegal, but that we nevertheless don’t think of (exactly) as rights.
‘It’s a free country’ – that’s a funny phrase. As Juan indicates, it’s not really a straightforward valorization. It’s more like something obnoxious people say when they’re being obnoxious. It’s not ‘sincere’ – it functions more like ‘fuck you’, actually.
There are some interesting contrasts between the Irving case and the brouhaha centered around Ward Churchill.
For those unfamiliar with Churchill, he is a teacher at Colorado University who stirred up controversy with an essay about the terrorist attacks on 9-11. Because his views were widely unpopular people also began to examine his scholarship. It was, in my opinion, obviously sub-standard. He falsified evidence, cited sources that actually refuted his position as if they supported it, and trod dangerously close to plagiarism.
In this case, as with Irving’s, the Free Speech issue was discussed at great length, while the issue of intellectual honesty got barely mentioned. I suppose with Churchill this was because the two were largely unconnected. His poor scholarship was separate from his unpopular views, not used to support them. At least not directly.
I was caught in the uncomfortable position of supporting his right to hold his unpopular opinions (which I didn’t agree with) but thinking he did deserve some measure of censure for his lax academic writings. However, since in the public sphere these two issues had become entangled, it would be somewhere between agonizingly difficult and impossible to act on one issue without at least the appearance of being motivated by the other.
So Irving goes to jail while Churchill goes back to the classroom with a light slap on the wrist and more publicity than a mediocre instructor could hope for in their wildest dreams.
It seems like there should be some middle ground here. Something between incarceration and instant celebrity. Some way to separate matters of opinion from matters of fact. Some way to say that, yes, you may hold any opinion you damn well please but you are not allowed to slag off the facts.
The middle ground is exactly what I’m talking about. Everything between criminalization and Right. I’m claiming there’s a very large territory between the two – and I find it interesting that a lot of sensible people seem to find that a mistaken or incoherent idea.
Ward Churchill is a great example. I talked about him a good deal here – I wonder if I made the same point about his falsifications v his mere opinions. I think I did, but I’m not sure…It will be interesting to find out.
OB, I think the confusion in this argument is here, where you say: “That’s what I’m saying – that is, depending on what we mean by ‘right’. That’s one of the things I’m trying to get at – what do we mean by ‘right’? I’m claiming that we mean more than just non-arrest and non-imprisonment. I’m claiming that the word ‘right’ has more overtones than ‘legal right’ and that the discussion of the whole subject is confused because that doesn’t get spelled out.”
I think that you are using the word right to imply oughts, which are different things. I think the first move in defending free speech is to confine right to its legal sense, and to my mind your countermove — to say that right has “overtones” that aren’t legal (for instance in one’s right to healthcare and such) is a way of seeming to address the free speech argument without really meeting the free speech argument. While a historian may decide to publish a work in which he engages in gross falsifications, nobody is obliged to publish it, and — if he works in a university or something — he can be fired for it. Because the Irving case seems to involve a lot of heat, let’s go to other cases — for instance, Bellesiles “Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture.” In this book, B. apparently made up data. He resigned, under pressure, from Emory. I am pretty sure the book was pulled.
Now, let’s say B. gets a small press to re-publish the book. Your notion is that he has no right to do this, I think. But this lack of right is toothless — you don’t mean he should be arrested. You don’t mean the press should be sued for fraud (or do you?). So in terms of social action, what do you mean?
To my mind, B., while having no right to his job, or rights over and above the contractual with his publisher, certainly has the right to publish his book. There is a certain level of “let the buyer beware.” This, though, is true of every book — there’s no holy writ. In fact, I’d call that the whole basis of secularism, and I’d say it would endanger the whole enterprise of truth seeking to arm us with a whole new set of causes to sue people who we find to be “spreading error.”
Interesting, roger.
“I think the first move in defending free speech is to confine right to its legal sense”
But, one, I’ve already said that if its legal sense is the only one in play, then I’m not disagreeing with that. But my point is that I don’t think it is the only one in play. I think people tend to talk about a right to free speech without stopping to ask if they mean a legal right or something more, and that that confuses the discussion. So since that’s what I’m talking about, it would be counter-productive for me to confine right to its legal sense. And the fact that that is the first move in defending free speech is beside the point, because that’s not the main thing I’m doing. I’m doing something else. It’s no good giving me advice on how to do something I’m not trying to do!
“So in terms of social action, what do you mean?”
I don’t have to mean anything in those terms, do I? Why can’t I just be talking about, for instance, a moral right? One can talk about moral rights without necessarily meaning anything in terms of social action. I think all sorts of things are wrong, without having any ability to do anything about them. That’s nothing new, it applies to most people.
“There is a certain level of “let the buyer beware.””
But how can the buyer beware if the evidence has been falsified? That’s like expecting the buyer to beware of adulterated pharmaceuticals – well how would we go about doing that? Bring a laboratory with us when we go to the drugstore?
Which is not, however, to say that I think we should sue your hypothetical Bellesiles (good example, by the way). I’m simply pointing to the fact (the putative fact) that we don’t think he’s morally right to do that, and that that is at least one way to translate ‘he has no right to do that.’
To put it another way, I wouldn’t sue B (I don’t think), but I wouldn’t defend his right to publish his book, either. I wouldn’t defend it because I don’t believe in it. I would argue against his publication of such a book (thus against any putative right to publish it). That’s how we’re supposed to instantiate free speech, isn’t it? By arguing, rather than coercing.
I have lost a comment I thought I had posted here an hour or so ago. I thought I went through the usual process and got the usual response but the post is not here.
And now it’s a bit late for me, I’m afraid.
I guess the most important thing was I was saying thanks to Stewart for his understanding. I don’t know what it was like to grow up in Europe, of course, so I have a hard time imagining how someone who did, much less someone in Germany or Austria, might view outlawing holocaust denial. I would tend to stick to the principle that unless it caused a clear and present danger then it could be and therefore should be met with argument rather than law. But I don’t feel I’m in a position to judge whether that danger existed when the laws were passed. I don’t think it exists now.
OB, if “it’s a free country” signifies nothing more than a “fuck you” to you, I would say you’ve only had a superficial exposure to it. It may be used primarily that way in the movies but in real life, it is used sincerely. It’s used in outrage; it’s used defiantly; it can be whined or roared, and yes of course it can be snarled. I don’t know, maybe now it’s been ruined by becoming a film cliché.
As for
I don’t see how this can be prior to freedom of expression. You need freedom of expression to deal accurately with those things.
I think Roger’s got a good point, and liability for “spreading error” sounds like the other side of the coin of “legally true”. :)
You slipped by me there with that response to Roger’s. I see what you’re saying there and I see some sense in it, though I still take issue with the “trumping” idea.
Thanks for the chat. Good night all!
OB, but here is the problem with the rights talk. I don’t know anybody who claims a “right” to falsify in the way you are speaking about. Even people who falsify will justify themselves by saying, hey, I represent a higher truth.
It seems to me, and maybe I am just missing this, that you are defending things that are already in place — for instance, universities punish fraud (among other things), and publishers say they punish fraud too (although, as we see with the Frey case, that punishment is delayed until they have to).
And in these cases, I think the distinction is between person and role. For instance: there isn’t a shred of evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC attack. Yet Vice President Cheney has continually implied it. Even after the Fbi said that it was close to impossible for Mohammed Atta to have met some Iraqi authority in Prague, as Cheney claimed — he still claims it.
Myself, I feel like as a person, Cheney has a perfect legal right to do that. But as a Vice President, he should be punished for his fabrications.
This is a case, too, in which I think your comparison to the buying pharmaceuticals is misleading. In fact, I have a hard time believing anybody who is convinced by Irving is convinced because it is the first time he or she has been told about the holocaust, and Irving is their sole source of information. There is a difference between general historic knowledge and specialized knowledge about pharmaceuticals. Even in the latter case, actually, I am a little impatient with people who simply accept the authority of one doctor or pharmacist without question. Isn’t that a failure of education, in a way? Aren’t we supposed to question? Isn’t this the whole point of your criticism of religion?
Still, I agree with you to an extent about roles. Supposedly, 3/4ths of the soldiers in Iraq, according to the latest poll, think we are there in revenge for Saddam Hussein’s planning the 9/11 attack. So yes, big lies can succeed, for a while. And if a public is irresponsible enough to allow its leadership to tell lies without punishment of any sort, then we are in deep, uh… trouble.
Juan, I may make cracks, some of them cheap, but clarifying issues is the point, not judging someone else before understanding where they’re coming from. To further clarify where I was coming from, I did not (as you seem to have assumed) grow up in Europe, although the home environment was overwhelmingly European. The years prior to my attaining majority were spent first in Australia and then in Israel, neither of which, to avoid any further erroneous assumptions, resulted in my acquiring characteristics typically considered as either “Australian” or “Israeli,” although both experiences exposed me to potential influences very different to those present in an American childhood and adolescence.
As to the issue at hand, to expand (maybe) on Roger’s latest, the “right to falsify” is problematic in part because no one is actually claiming to want it. Yes, maybe, in the general sense that freedom of speech must not be qualified by the a priori condition that the content of that speech be verifiably true, but people don’t go around saying they’re lying and it’s their right to do so. In the case of knowing liars and falsifiers (the genuinely deluded are another case), they are, if you like, always engaging in a double falshehood: the untrue information they are disseminating coupled with the assertion that they either know or believe such information to be true. They are faking facts and their good faith (not, of course, faith in any religious sense). Relativising everything is one of way of getting around the demonstrable untruth of their statements, in the “my truth, your truth, many truths” sense, so that if you try to pin them down, you’re the bad guy, the censor, the ogre trying to prevent interpretation. Part of the defence of their truth can require an attack on the nature of yours. But, other than maybe the occasional concession that something was stretched or enhanced or exaggerated to make a point or in the name of some artistic license, you don’t generally find people admitting falsifications, which is why this “right to falsify” remains a kind of orphan right, which many insist must be part of the package of free speech, but no one really wants to own up to needing, wanting or using.
Funny, but if I hypothesise about it, I can almost admire the honesty of a group of liars who might band together to campaign for falsifiers’ rights.
“It seems to me, and maybe I am just missing this, that you are defending things that are already in place”
Sure, I am. I said that. I’m not arguing for new policies, I’m just trying to clarify what we mean when we talk about this stuff. I’m trying to put back in some things that often get left out. I’m trying to make the discussion less evasive and dishonest.
“but people don’t go around saying they’re lying and it’s their right to do so.”
Just so. And you also – oddly – don’t get people saying Irving is lying and it’s his right to do so. You get them saying he’s expressing an offensive opinion and it’s his right to do so. My point is that that’s evasive, and just settles the question without even discussing the real issue (or at least a real issue).
Stewart, sorry if I offended you. I suppose I did think you grew up in Europe but my remark about my not growing up in Europe was as much with reference to understanding reactions to holocaust denial as to any notion of where you were from.
It’s the freedom of speech issue as such that interests me most in this thread and I’ve turned my attention to OB’s latest post on that.
Juan, you did not offend me at all. Most of us don’t know a lot about other contributors’ backgrounds, which is why clarifications are sometimes useful. More importantly, this is the site where we deal with the issues, not the need not to offend. Right?