The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

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boing
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#101 Post by boing » Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:27 am

You see, free speech can be fun.

I've always been conscious of the shape of my face but truth-to-tell it has more of the appearance of a corned beef can than a worm. And yes, it's eyes have gazed through both ends of your municipal drainpipes, enough to know that the view from either end is exactly the same and that the view through a rich man's drainpipes is no different. Metaphorically speaking I have both cleaned the drainpipes and polished the stars. I have drunk scotch around a campfire with worthy men and I have literally dined on the right hand of princes. My worthy man is one who can, at need, do capably and cheerfully what he asks other men to do for him, that's a high standard. In my egotism I admit that I don't really care about what anyone else thinks although I'm always happy to hear their opinions, your's are often especially entertaining.

My briefing to the co-pilot used to be "If you see me screwing up tell me about it. If you need to shout at me to get my attention that is OK, do it and it won't bother me. If you allow me to screw-up and don't say anything I will kill you". I believe in free speech because I know that by listening to it and looking for the gems in the dross it may change my world.

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#102 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:40 am

boing wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 10:27 am
You see, free speech can be fun.

I've always been conscious of the shape of my face but truth-to-tell it has more of the appearance of a corned beef can than a worm. And yes, it's eyes have gazed through both ends of your municipal drainpipes, enough to know that the view from either end is exactly the same and that the view through a rich man's drainpipes is no different. Metaphorically speaking I have both cleaned the drainpipes and polished the stars. I have drunk scotch around a campfire with worthy men and I have literally dined on the right hand of princes. My worthy man is one who can, at need, do capably and cheerfully what he asks other men to do for him, that's a high standard. In my egotism I admit that I don't really care about what anyone else thinks although I'm always happy to hear their opinions, your's are often especially entertaining.

My briefing to the co-pilot used to be "If you see me screwing up tell me about it. If you need to shout at me to get my attention that is OK, do it and it won't bother me. If you allow me to screw-up and don't say anything I will kill you". I believe in free speech because I know that by listening to it and looking for the gems in the dross it may change my world.

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Much to talk about over a beer sometime soon, I hope boing! :) :-bd
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#103 Post by boing » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:08 pm

It's fun sparring with you. Should we let the others back now? :-h

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#104 Post by TheGreenGoblin » Wed Nov 18, 2020 6:19 pm

boing wrote:
Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:08 pm
It's fun sparring with you. Should we let the others back now? :-h

.
Aw I guess so! ;)))
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#105 Post by barkingmad » Wed Nov 18, 2020 7:03 pm

Aaaw sweet! Bless you both for enlivening these dark days!

Best wishes from the swivel-eyed looney fruitcake who (possibly misteakenly) launched this thread.

Keep the dialogue bearable and printable and there’ll be no invitation to adjourn to the OK Corral... :O3 :-bd

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#106 Post by ExSp33db1rd » Thu Nov 19, 2020 5:50 am

404 ? I went back to post 81, and the link has just worked. Of course H. Clinton is involved in a pizzeria in Washington D.C. I've just read about it on the Internet.

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#107 Post by barkingmad » Sat Nov 21, 2020 1:17 pm

"If they ban the words we can use then they will by extension start banning what we're thinking".

Apologies for the source but needs must;

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/ ... f-new-york

This discussion (only 16 minutes for those ADHD sufferers here) will elaborate on the row, of which I knew nothing as I'm not a Radio 1 listener and only listen to Radio 2 on long car journeys as a source of traffic updates.

I was torn between posting the discussion here or in the Disgraceful BBC thread but I believe the issue of Free Speech trumps the Beeb;



"Was it for this that daddy died"? X(

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#108 Post by barkingmad » Wed Nov 25, 2020 10:01 am

More on the madness of crowds;

There is news that staff at the publisher Penguin Random House held an “emotional” meeting to express their dismay at the decision of the company to publish Canadian Professor Jordan Peterson’s upcoming book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life.

“Four Penguin Random House Canada employees, who did not want to be named due to concerns over their employment, said the company held a town hall meeting about the book Monday, during which executives defended the decision to publish Peterson while employees cited their concerns about platforming someone who is popular in far-right circles.

“He is an icon of hate speech and transphobia and the fact that he’s an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book, I’m not proud to work for a company that publishes him,” a junior employee who is a member of the LGBTQ community and who attended the town hall told VICE World News.

Another employee said “people were crying in the meeting about how Jordan Peterson has affected their lives”. They said one co-worker discussed how Peterson had radicalized their father and another talked about how publishing the book will negatively affect their non-binary friend.

Douglas Murray took to Twitter and commented:

“Any such ‘tearful’ staff should be fired immediately and their jobs advertised the next day. If you don’t understand free speech you’ve no right pretending to work in a publishing house. Penguin Random House Canada should “Reagan airport worker” the lot of them”.

How would O-N members treat these unfortunate members of the publishing house team? :-?

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#109 Post by boing » Wed Nov 25, 2020 4:29 pm

Management provides your paycheck. You do not decide management policy, you are paid to carry it out. If you object to carrying out the policy because it goes against your beliefs then PO. That's what someone with a real conscience would do but more likely we will see lawsuits based on some sort of distorted discrimination charge.

I would remove them but I would make sure I had the evidence saved and my "ducks in a row" first. I unfortunately terminated someone once, shame but he was simply not doing the job, his wife made our life difficult for months by calling various agencies down on us resulting in several inspections.

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#110 Post by FD2 » Sat Nov 28, 2020 10:11 pm

More on Jordan Peterson

Who’s afraid of big bad Jordan Peterson? No-one but the ‘sobbing’ young liberals


https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what- ... -liberals/

Apologies for copying the whole article but there is a pay barrier.


Reading a book can bring a tear to your eye – but rarely does the prospect of a forthcoming publication provoke a breakdown. That is, unless you work for the Canadian branch of Penguin Random House, where a number of staff reportedly confronted their employer claiming that the planned release of Jordan Peterson’s newest, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, “wasn’t right” and should be rescinded.

It’s important to note that these employees are unlikely to have read the advance copy or notes sent by Peterson to secure his deal with Penguin. In fact, one employee told Vice that Peterson was “an icon of white supremacy, regardless of the content of his book”. The fear and terror that Peterson strikes into the hearts of young liberals would make Hans Gruber jealous.

But the characterisation of him as an “icon of hate speech and transphobia” and all-round enemy of polite society is about as real as a Hollywood villain. Peterson has soared to notoriety in part on the back of incredulous rage by commentators claiming he’s “dangerous”. Another employee told Vice that Peterson was “responsible for radicalising and causing [a] surge of alt-Right groups, especially on university campuses”. Peterson began his new-found role as a provocateur with an entirely reasonable protest – he refused to engage with the demand that he “state his pronouns” at the University of Toronto, where he is a professor.

I interviewed him for spiked at the time – back in 2016, the only people who had heard of him were those of us who kept an eye out for infringements on freedom of expression. Far from a campus menace, Peterson attempted to engage in public debate (literally in the campus square) about why he had decided to take a stand for free speech. He didn’t inspire an alt-Right rebellion – in fact, he was shouted down by a mob of incensed students.

Will there be any sense appearing in the foreseeable future? Will these students who shouted him down ever think for themselves? Will Random House Canada ever sack their tearful employees? Thank God for Douglas Murray's commonsense.

Canada, which used to be an example of strength and courage in the world has become the leader of pathetic wokeness. Trudeau got away with appearances in blackface when younger came to light when anyone with right leaning views would have become a pariah.

For me, the most interesting thing about Peterson is his assertion that freedom of speech is an important principle which must be defended even if it gets you fired or slandered. But that’s about it; his later brand of “pop-psychology meets self-help philosophy” always struck me as dull. More importantly, it was often apolitical. Peterson seems to have stuck a chord with lazy lads who enjoy being told to sit straight and brush their teeth. If that’s the extent of the alt-Right threat, I think we’re OK.

There’s nothing revolutionary about his lobster theories, either – the idea that, like the crustacean, human beings tend towards hierarchies and thrive on serotonin-induced progress the further we socially climb – because they simply sound like biological determinism, reheated for a modern age. When it comes to the trans issue, Peterson is about as incendiary as the thousands of feminists refusing to use words like “cis” and “womxn” when told to by Twitter activists. In 2019’s billed “debate of the year” between Peterson and Slavoj Žižek, the Leftier of the two came out on top – not by revealing the inherent prejudice of his opponent, but simply by questioning why Peterson was so obsessed with “personal change”. More objectionable than his refusal to adhere to what trans activists want him to say is Peterson’s inability to see the narcissism at the heart of his mantra for a good life.

Even if Peterson was the most heinous thinker to walk the earth in 2020, there is still a free-speech question at the heart of this bizarre story of teary publishers. There is plenty on Penguin’s portfolio that one could get upset by. (A recommendation of “books to understand Brexit” included Ian McEwen’s fictional diatribe The Cockroach, which would make even the mildest Brexiteer grit their teeth.)

The question is, if you’re working in a publication house, why would you expect to politically agree with every piece of work? Publishing is already a closed shop – an author’s success rides on their ability to please right-on commentators on social media as much as their ability to sell in Waterstones. We should celebrate the idea that a wide range of books be available to the public. Reading books you disagree with is the only way to test whether your own ideas stand up to scrutiny. Since when did being open to new ideas make you a bigot?

We might snigger at the wet behaviour of Penguin’s Canadian employees. But it’s important to understand that they didn’t learn their censorious tendencies from the wind. From no-platforming speakers at universities, a practice that has been around since the 1980s, to the banning of saucy books in the name of public decency, freedom of speech has always been restrained by “ifs” and “buts”. At the time of the obscenity trial in 1922, the Sunday Express described James Joyce’s Ulysses as full of “unclean lunacies… larded with appalling and revolting blasphemies”. The article argued that such a publication was dangerous to the public, as “the greater the artist, the greater is his moral responsibility”.

No one has yet managed to produce a book to match the genius of Joyce’s opus, but it might be a little easier to produce a counter-argument to the likes of Peterson. Instead of crying about the ideas we don’t like, we should always, instead, have the courage to offer better ones.


What has become of Canada? Once a great example of courage and commonsense in the world and now the leading example of this sort of pathetic wokery. Trudeau got away with the disclosure of his blackface antics when younger, when anyone with right-leaning views would have been reduced to pariah status.
These pathetic examples of crybabies should be shown the door and find jobs more suited to their mentalities - nannies perhaps?

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#111 Post by barkingmad » Sun Nov 29, 2020 9:51 am

Good old British TV impartial reporting and interviewing in this short clip, during which I lost count of the number of times Cathy Newman said “you’re saying” and Peterson has to correct her by clarifying what he actually said or wrote;



The “gotcha” moment where C M was totally stumped and speechless actually lasted much longer than the clip shows.

Much later when interviewed about this discussion J P was enough of a gentleman to state he wishes in retrospect he had NOT said ‘gotcha’ and might have handled the badgering better.

I am surprised he didn’t do a John Nott or Michael Heseltine, rise from the chair and tell her it’s a waste of time, rip the microphone off and wander off loudly practising expletives! ~X(

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#112 Post by ian16th » Sun Nov 29, 2020 12:22 pm

Who is this Cathy Newman?

I think that I'm lucky not knowing.
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#113 Post by Karearea » Sun Nov 29, 2020 10:03 pm

Well I got 2:09 through that and gave up, saying "what an annoying idiot!" - that is what I am saying.
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#114 Post by barkingmad » Mon Nov 30, 2020 9:47 am

“Who is this Cathy Newman?”

She works for this UK TV channel whose remit is similar to that of the BBC but funded via advertising;

https://www.channel4.com/corporate/abou ... l-4s-remit

She is another “reporter” acting like most on these channels who think they have the inalienable right to ram their opinions down the throats of the viewers rather than impartial reporting and reasonable attempts to elicit information from the interviewees.

Luckily in your location you will not have suffered this form of ‘journalism’...?

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#115 Post by barkingmad » Sat Dec 05, 2020 7:23 pm

Here is a short address, no graphs, no illustrations, mainly audio and less than 4 mins duration.

Highly suitable for these crazy times and does not include a source which irritates/infuriates so many in O-N;



Our gibbering, stammering, blonde mop-headed tub of lard seems incapable of multi-tasking lately.

Is he really suffering from long-tall-Covid-1984 symptoms?

This evening he’s probably gazing into the steel-grey eyes of UVDL on a video call, fantasising perhaps... [-X

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#116 Post by 4mastacker » Sun Dec 06, 2020 12:26 am

UVDL has had seven sprogs so any fantasising by Boris is probably whether or not he would touch the sides.
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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#117 Post by barkingmad » Sun Dec 06, 2020 10:59 am

4mastacker wrote:
Sun Dec 06, 2020 12:26 am
UVDL has had seven sprogs so any fantasising by Boris is probably whether or not he would touch the sides.

Ooooh! That is soooh bitchy!

Us elderly males also have to accept that equipment deteriorates with wear, tear and age and often becomes ‘inop’!

Excuse me but I must adjourn discreetly and continue training for the Harvard University challenge, as featured elsewhere in O-N... :D =))

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#118 Post by FD2 » Sun Dec 06, 2020 6:21 pm

George Burns quipped when he was 90, "Trying to have sex at my age is like trying to play Pool with a rope".

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#119 Post by barkingmad » Tue Dec 15, 2020 12:58 pm

From this little snippet it seems the worms in the Dusty Halls of Academe might be turning;



Great for D M, says it like it is yet again! :YMAPPLAUSE:

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Re: The Price of Free Speech : Unaffordable?

#120 Post by barkingmad » Thu Dec 24, 2020 8:07 am

In addition to Douglas Murray’s book “The Madness of Crowds”, maybe some here might also wish to spend their Christmas gift of book token(s) on this tome as well, just in order to keep an eye on how the virulent strain of ‘woke’ madness is proliferating despite lockdowns imposed by wobbly-jawed publishers running away from the Twatterati;

“Julie Burchill’s book on cancel culture – Welcome to the Woke Trials – was cancelled by its publisher last week after she got into a Twitter spat with Ash Sarkar. But it has now been uncancelled, thanks to the Free Speech Union. Guido Fawkes has the story.

Julie Burchill’s publisher has agreed to pay her in full and relinquished all rights to her manuscript, following an intervention by the Free Speech Union. Last week, Little, Brown announced it would not be publishing Burchill’s book, Welcome to the Woke Trials, after she got into a Twitter spat with literal communist Ash Sarkar. The hard left pundit had attacked Rod Liddle for making light of child rape, having dug up an eight-year-old Spectator article in which he said he had avoided becoming a teacher because he couldn’t trust himself not to try and have sex with his teenage pupils. Burchill told her that was a little rich coming from a Muslim, given that Mohammad’s wife Aisha was a child when he married her. “I don’t WORSHIP a paedophile,” she said. “Lecturer, lecture thyself!” Little, Brown promptly cancelled the book.

As Brendan O’Neill commented: “Julie Burchill was hired for being Julie Burchill – and then Julie Burchill was fired for being Julie Burchill.”

Guido doesn’t like to criticise other people’s faiths, however it should not be an offence to be blasphemous…

Luckily for her, Burchill is a member of the Free Speech Union and reached out for help. Following an intervention by the FSU’s legal team, Little, Brown has now agreed to pay Julie’s advance in full and returned all the rights in the book to her so she can take it elsewhere. According to her agent Matthew Hamilton, several publishers have contacted him expressing an interest in the book.

Toby Young, FSU General Secretary, says: “For a publisher to cancel a book on cancel culture because a self-proclaimed communist has denounced the author is completely unacceptable. This is Great Britain, not Stalin’s Russia. I’m glad we were able to help.” Julie is unrepentant. “I’ve been upsetting bourgeoise bed-wetters since I was 17 – now I’m 61 and nothing has changed. Last time I checked, that wasn’t against the law. I am indebted to the Free Speech Union for stepping in to protect my rights.”

They would have got away with if it weren’t for that pesky Free Speech Union… :YMPARTY:

Am I allowed to wish everyone a Happy Christmas, or is that racist and religiously biased against minorities?! :-s

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