In its editorial today, “In Our Opinion: The tragedy in Virginia,” the Hampshire Gazette mysteriously jumps from voicing concern about security on college campuses to advocating greater regulation of speech upon political and social issues.
“ … A repeat offenderMax Karson has a long tradition of offending people. Even the tragedy at Virginia Tech is not outside his reach.
Karson began publishing offensive material while a student at Amherst Regional High School. In his crude publication "The Crux," he sought to spread his insults as far and wide as possible. He got suspended from school twice, only to be reinstated with the help of the Western Massachusetts ACLU.
Karson is now offending people as a student at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he has been distributing an outrageous newsletter called "The Yeti," which is also packed with vulgar language.
It turns out that his timing is as bad as his taste. He declared in a women's studies class this week that he could see why Cho Seung-Hui went on his violent rampage at Virginia Tech. He also said that, like Cho, he could become angry enough to kill a large number of people, even for the most mundane reasons. After students and faculty complained and expressed fears, Karson was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of "interference with staff, faculty, and students of an educational institution."
Karson thinks he's doing us all a favor by pushing the limits of free speech, but free speech is not without responsibilities. Karson has a right to his opinions, but his fellow students have a right to react to what they find hostile and offensive and to protect themselves in the face of threatening remarks.”
Arresting someone for a newsletter is a violation of the freedom of the press. One would think the Gazette cherishes that right. Apparently it does not.
I can only ask the Gazette to think deeper about what the consequences of editorials like this one may lead to. Not only was Imus shut up upon the basis of what many people deemed to be his “irresponsible” speech, (and I agree with that characterization), but it should remember that not so long ago, the Dixie Chicks were, too. Advocating “responsible” social and political regulation of free speech is harmless, so long as the views expressed by the offensive speaker seem irresponsible to you, but a clear suppression of your rights to express your views when your views are deemed irresponsible by others.
The evil here, if any, is ignorance, not a lack of social and political constraints upon our freedom of speech, in my opinion at least.
Friday, April 20, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
What Imus said ...
was inexcusable in my opinion. Nonetheless, I am concerned. For you to understand why, I need to you first to understand how Imus would be judged under constitutional jurisprudence.
What he said constituted defamation, which can be either an oral (“slander”) or written (“libel”) statement of fact that is false and damaging to a person’s reputation. While the law has features to it intended to prevent defamation claims from chilling free speech about public and private persons, alike, the first amendment does not protect defamatory speech and speakers. There is no public good in false statements of indisputable fact.
Also, generally speaking, CBS as a private broadcaster was well within its constitutional rights to fire Imus, regardless of whatever contractual consequences it may suffer as a result if it breached its contract with him.
Nonetheless, as I said, I am concerned. What if the young women actually were nappy haired hoes? What then?
The justifications for hounding Imus out of a job used by the self-righteous Imus critics focused more upon the offensive, inflammatory and controversial character of the sexist and racist speech than it’s defamatory, that is, false character. It would not matter to them if what Imus said had been dead-on, irrefutably true, and there’s the rub.
Protecting each of us from harm by reason of a tyrannical majority because of the offensive, inflammatory and/or controversial ideas we may express (unless they are defamatory) is precisely what the first amendment is suppose to do. While Imus was fired by dint of social activism, to me there’s precious little practical difference between such marshalling of overwhelming public opinion and more subtle forms of governmental chilling, suppression and censorship of free speech. Each are highly coercive and damaging to the free flow of ideas. (See the PS below.)
To the Imus critics, chastising Imus was not good enough – nothing short of firing Imus even begins to satisfy them. Similarly, chastising Moporn by Nopornorthampton is not good enough for them – nothing short of getting the Moporn blog pulled by its ISP and its founders fired from their jobs is good enough for Nopornorthampton, for example.
Nopornorthampton equates this sort of activism with people like Gandi marshalling public opinion to bring the British to their senses, etc. But, there is a difference. What the Imus critics and Nopornorthampton want to do is shut people up. However abhorrent racist points of view might have been to Gandi, Gandi was not about shutting people up.
In contrast, shutting people up is what people like Nopornorthampton, Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter, are all about.
Yours/AC
PS – I take limited comfort in the theory that an “independent” judiciary will protect me against the excesses of any political or social activism. Almost all of our judiciary are either elected officials themselves or appointed by elected officials, who must take into account public opinion about the (potential) judge’s opinions, and after reaching the bench, judges are still subject to elections or elected officials to preserve or advance their careers. So, while we learn mostly about the judges who have from time to time been brave enough to risk their own careers and social standing to render unpopular opinions based upon principles, the reality is that, historically, judges on balance have not been and are not immune to social and political pressures. They are not as independent of the mob as one might think. (Double entendre intended.)
The distinction between social activism on the part of the public and governmental regulation of speech is more illusory than real. They are not so separate, but instead exist side by side upon a continuum of social and political regulation. So, the willingness to stand up to social pressure to suppress, chill and/or censor expression can be at times just as important as standing up for the supremacy of the first amendment, in my opinion at least.
What he said constituted defamation, which can be either an oral (“slander”) or written (“libel”) statement of fact that is false and damaging to a person’s reputation. While the law has features to it intended to prevent defamation claims from chilling free speech about public and private persons, alike, the first amendment does not protect defamatory speech and speakers. There is no public good in false statements of indisputable fact.
Also, generally speaking, CBS as a private broadcaster was well within its constitutional rights to fire Imus, regardless of whatever contractual consequences it may suffer as a result if it breached its contract with him.
Nonetheless, as I said, I am concerned. What if the young women actually were nappy haired hoes? What then?
The justifications for hounding Imus out of a job used by the self-righteous Imus critics focused more upon the offensive, inflammatory and controversial character of the sexist and racist speech than it’s defamatory, that is, false character. It would not matter to them if what Imus said had been dead-on, irrefutably true, and there’s the rub.
Protecting each of us from harm by reason of a tyrannical majority because of the offensive, inflammatory and/or controversial ideas we may express (unless they are defamatory) is precisely what the first amendment is suppose to do. While Imus was fired by dint of social activism, to me there’s precious little practical difference between such marshalling of overwhelming public opinion and more subtle forms of governmental chilling, suppression and censorship of free speech. Each are highly coercive and damaging to the free flow of ideas. (See the PS below.)
To the Imus critics, chastising Imus was not good enough – nothing short of firing Imus even begins to satisfy them. Similarly, chastising Moporn by Nopornorthampton is not good enough for them – nothing short of getting the Moporn blog pulled by its ISP and its founders fired from their jobs is good enough for Nopornorthampton, for example.
Nopornorthampton equates this sort of activism with people like Gandi marshalling public opinion to bring the British to their senses, etc. But, there is a difference. What the Imus critics and Nopornorthampton want to do is shut people up. However abhorrent racist points of view might have been to Gandi, Gandi was not about shutting people up.
In contrast, shutting people up is what people like Nopornorthampton, Adam Cohen and Jendi Reiter, are all about.
Yours/AC
PS – I take limited comfort in the theory that an “independent” judiciary will protect me against the excesses of any political or social activism. Almost all of our judiciary are either elected officials themselves or appointed by elected officials, who must take into account public opinion about the (potential) judge’s opinions, and after reaching the bench, judges are still subject to elections or elected officials to preserve or advance their careers. So, while we learn mostly about the judges who have from time to time been brave enough to risk their own careers and social standing to render unpopular opinions based upon principles, the reality is that, historically, judges on balance have not been and are not immune to social and political pressures. They are not as independent of the mob as one might think. (Double entendre intended.)
The distinction between social activism on the part of the public and governmental regulation of speech is more illusory than real. They are not so separate, but instead exist side by side upon a continuum of social and political regulation. So, the willingness to stand up to social pressure to suppress, chill and/or censor expression can be at times just as important as standing up for the supremacy of the first amendment, in my opinion at least.
Sunday, April 01, 2007
Heaven Forbid Their Thoughts Wander to the Wild Side!
As Nopornorthampton often points out, expression often successfully misleads us for the worse, particularly when we are young or vulnerable. Certainly there are certainties we can all agree upon to protect them from? Probably so, but the scope of these certainties are narrower than most in the mainstream believe, I suspect, even with respect to sex and what may be viewed as sexually stimulating materials.
The trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past. So, who knows? Pervasive promiscuity may be good for us.
Let your mind take a walk on the wild side with me to the Congo, and go out, far, far out on a limb, literally.
What do we find? Well, we might find the renowned Bonobo Chimpanzees, a very close relative of ours on the evolutionary tree. As portrayed in a PBS documentary I saw (more than once) and related in Wikipedia: "The species is distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal and egalitarian culture … [Common] Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today.”
“They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable ... Females are much smaller than males but can be considered to have a higher social status. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. The male's status reflects the status of his mother, and the son-mother bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, rank does not play as prominent a role as it does in other primate societies.”
Sounds like they’re a bunch of politically correct men and women, to me at least. Indeed, the Noho utopia many dream of. But Bonobo’s are not renowned for being tree hugging liberals and dyed in the wool feminists. No, they are renowned because in Bonobo society casual incest, heterosexual, gay and lesbian sex is the rule, not exception. They have sex like in greeting each other men traditionally shook hands and women hugged. They have sex even more pervasively than that, really. There is no shame … (See, "Shame Me, Baby, Shame Me" below.)
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Name to learn more, if you wish.
Could it be mere coincidence that it seems to me that the most patriarchal, violent and oppressive human societies tend to be also the most puritanical societies? May be the Bonbos are on to something. Bonobos certainly live among themselves better than most of us relatively puritanical humans live among ourselves. Indeed, “Bonobos, … are generally held to have superior intelligence to Common Chimpanzees.”
Humans, too??? Would we have something to learn from Bonobos that we should teach of kids, if we wish for them to live in a more peaceful and egalitarian world ...? Just wondering. :)
You never know ... “[t]he trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past …”
Yours/AC
The trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past. So, who knows? Pervasive promiscuity may be good for us.
Let your mind take a walk on the wild side with me to the Congo, and go out, far, far out on a limb, literally.
What do we find? Well, we might find the renowned Bonobo Chimpanzees, a very close relative of ours on the evolutionary tree. As portrayed in a PBS documentary I saw (more than once) and related in Wikipedia: "The species is distinguished by an upright gait, a matriarchal and egalitarian culture … [Common] Chimpanzees and Bonobos both evolved from the same ancestor that gave rise to humans, and yet the Bonobo is one of the most peaceful, unaggressive species of mammals living on the earth today.”
“They show us that the evolutionary dance of violence is not inexorable ... Females are much smaller than males but can be considered to have a higher social status. Aggressive encounters between males and females are rare, and males are tolerant of infants and juveniles. The male's status reflects the status of his mother, and the son-mother bond often stays strong and continues throughout life. While social hierarchies do exist, rank does not play as prominent a role as it does in other primate societies.”
Sounds like they’re a bunch of politically correct men and women, to me at least. Indeed, the Noho utopia many dream of. But Bonobo’s are not renowned for being tree hugging liberals and dyed in the wool feminists. No, they are renowned because in Bonobo society casual incest, heterosexual, gay and lesbian sex is the rule, not exception. They have sex like in greeting each other men traditionally shook hands and women hugged. They have sex even more pervasively than that, really. There is no shame … (See, "Shame Me, Baby, Shame Me" below.)
Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonobo#Name to learn more, if you wish.
Could it be mere coincidence that it seems to me that the most patriarchal, violent and oppressive human societies tend to be also the most puritanical societies? May be the Bonbos are on to something. Bonobos certainly live among themselves better than most of us relatively puritanical humans live among ourselves. Indeed, “Bonobos, … are generally held to have superior intelligence to Common Chimpanzees.”
Humans, too??? Would we have something to learn from Bonobos that we should teach of kids, if we wish for them to live in a more peaceful and egalitarian world ...? Just wondering. :)
You never know ... “[t]he trash heap of history is littered with the discredited certainties of times past …”
Yours/AC
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