Posts tagged “free speech”
In the late 1970s, Quasar Industries fooled the public with a fake household robot that was actually just a guy in the crowd with a wire up his sleeve. More interesting: the resulting debate on ARPANET became the internet's first free speech controversy.
Brendan Eich was wrong to donate to Prop 8, Mozilla's board was wrong to appoint him CEO, and the resulting mob rule was fine by me. We're still losing the broader culture war, so I'll take any wins I can get. Our freedom to be ourselves matters more than your comfort with that.
Holocaust denial laws are misguided. Jailing David Irving for 17-year-old statements he already retracted highlights the absurdity: we're criminalizing specific speech rather than racism itself. You can't selectively ban one form of hate speech without appearing hypocritical, especially given our defense of the Muhammad cartoons as free expression.
The cartoon controversy is muddled because both sides are partly right. The first cartoon is genuine hate speech; the rest are legitimate commentary. Meanwhile, we condemn their treatment of gay people while they condemn our blasphemy, each convinced the other is crazy. And neuroscience suggests neither side can really help it.
The Bush administration is going after porn, which surprises no one who remembers Ashcroft covering naked statues. My response: enjoy this portrait of Ashcroft made from pornographic images. Also, Wonkette is great and the Republibloggers criticizing it for gay jokes really need to check their irony detectors.
I got Jean-Luc Picard in a sci-fi character quiz. His associated quote about censorship and freedom feels deeply true to me, and I'm curious about its origins -- attributed to Picard, who quotes a fictional judge. Why do geeks find this sentiment so self-evident? More on that later.
Responding to Bob's comments on censorship: we can't make value judgements about information because we lack the context to predict what will prove useful, or to whom, or when. The SARS cover-up illustrates my point perfectly. Allow free flow of information; punish misuse instead.
Surveys show nearly half of Americans want to gut the First Amendment in the name of national security. Freedom of speech, press, religion, academic freedom -- all apparently negotiable. Honestly, people who'd so eagerly surrender these rights deserve exactly what they're asking for.
