This is an argument I made before, that we all have limitations on the freedom of speech/expression

Brasidas wrote:I debated this point elsewhere but is valid here:

(I would like to point out this is not a debate about posters f forums, I just am using an example of our limitations)

Remember I said none of us would have backed Philagain freedom of speech in the poor views he made to Me Lord, Nicko and Eddie. In fact in each case nobody did ever claim such a thing, in fact they rightly as most rational people do were also offended by his comments, showing outrage at his comments:

Yes, however (since it seems I've been sussed) I didnt recon phils "freedom of speech" was (or indeed should have been) censored in any way....did any of us actively require admin to "do something "

Me I combated his inanity by attempting to drive him into paroxisms of rage.....whereupon he safely self combusted....

My point is on we all have limitations at which point we reach and stand against something that offends us, which is my only point here.
This makes a similar argument, though I disagree on some points where to me a satire is just a cartoon and comedy and should be taken as such when taking the mick/piss out of religion. I defend the right to take the piss out of religion but he makes the same valid point, where they clearly would be to anyone a limitation:







Dear liberal pundit,



You and I didn't like George W Bush. Remember his puerile declaration after 9/11 that "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"? Yet now, in the wake of another horrific terrorist attack, you appear to have updated Dubya's slogan: either you are with free speech... or you are against it. Either vous êtes Charlie Hebdo... or you're a freedom-hating fanatic.


But isnt that at least in part true...you cannot be "a bit" in favour of a fundamental right, it is absolute..if it is NOT absolute then it is NOT by definition a "right" but a concession

I'm writing to you to make a simple request: please stop. You think you're defying the terrorists when, in reality, you're playing into their bloodstained hands by dividing and demonising. Us and them. The enlightened and liberal west v the backward, barbaric Muslims. The massacre in Paris on 7 January was, you keep telling us, an attack on free speech. The conservative former French president Nicolas Sarkozy agrees, calling it "a war declared on civilisation". So, too, does the liberal-left pin-up Jon Snow, who crassly tweeted about a "clash of civilisations" and referred to "Europe's belief in freedom of expression".




In the midst of all the post-Paris grief, hypocrisy and hyperbole abounds. Yes, the attack was an act of unquantifiable evil; an inexcusable and merciless murder of innocents. But was it really a "bid to assassinate" free speech (ITV's Mark Austin), to "desecrate" our ideas of "free thought" (Stephen Fry)? It was a crime - not an act of war - perpetrated by disaffected young men; radicalised not by drawings of the Prophet in Europe in 2006 or 2011, as it turns out, but by images of US torture in Iraq in 2004.

Yet they used the cartoon as their reason.....interesting eh?




Please get a grip. None of us believes in an untrammelled right to free speech. We all agree there are always going to be lines that, for the purposes of law and order, cannot be crossed; or for the purposes of taste and decency, should not be crossed. We differ only on where those lines should be drawn.







Has your publication, for example, run cartoons mocking the Holocaust? No? How about caricatures of the 9/11 victims falling from the twin towers? I didn't think so (and I am glad it hasn't). Consider also the "thought experiment" offered by the Oxford philosopher Brian Klug. Imagine, he writes, if a man had joined the "unity rally" in Paris on 11 January "wearing a badge that said 'Je suis Chérif'" - the first name of one of the Charlie Hebdo gunmen. Suppose, Klug adds, he carried a placard with a cartoon mocking the murdered journalists. "How would the crowd have reacted?... Would they have seen this lone individual as a hero, standing up for liberty and freedom of speech? Or would they have been profoundly offended?" Do you disagree with Klug's conclusion that the man "would have been lucky to get away with his life"?


well whilst NOT actually attending the rally some of his friends (in france) did exactly that(it might have been one of the others but thats not important)




Let's be clear: I agree there is no justification whatsoever for gunning down journalists or cartoonists. I disagree with your seeming view that the right to offend comes with no corresponding responsibility; and I do not believe that a right to offend automatically translates into a duty to offend.




When you say "Je suis Charlie", is that an endorsement of Charlie Hebdo's depiction of the French justice minister, Christiane Taubira, who is black, drawn as a monkey? Of crude caricatures of bulbous-nosed Arabs that must make Edward Said turn in his grave?




Lampooning racism by reproducing brazenly racist imagery is a pretty dubious satirical tactic. Also, as the former Charlie Hebdo journalist Olivier Cyran argued in 2013, an "Islamophobic neurosis gradually took over" the magazine after 9/11, which then effectively endorsed attacks on "members of a minority religion with no influence in the corridors of power".

It's for these reasons that I can't "be", don't want to "be", Charlie - if anything, we should want to be Ahmed, the Muslim policeman who was killed while protecting the magazine's right to exist. As the novelist Teju Cole has observed, "It is possible to defend the right to obscene... speech without promoting or sponsoring the content of that speech."

And why have you been so silent on the glaring double standards? Did you not know that Charlie Hebdo sacked the veteran French cartoonist Maurice Sinet in 2008 for making an allegedly anti-Semitic remark? Were you not aware that Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that published caricatures of the Prophet in 2005, reportedly rejected cartoons mocking Christ because they would "provoke an outcry" and proudly declared it would "in no circumstances... publish Holocaust cartoons"?

cartoons mocking an ideology are NOT the same as cartoons mocking a tradgedy or is this guy too dumb to realise that....
a clever attempt to try to conflate two very different arguments...and it fails....


Muslims, I guess, are expected to have thicker skins than their Christian and Jewish brethren. Context matters, too. You ask us to laugh at a cartoon of the Prophet while ignoring the vilification of Islam across the continent (have you visited Germany lately?) and the widespread discrimination against Muslims in education, employment and public life - especially in France. You ask Muslims to denounce a handful of extremists as an existential threat to free speech while turning a blind eye to the much bigger threat to it posed by our elected leaders.




Does it not bother you to see Barack Obama - who demanded that Yemen keep the anti-drone journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye behind bars, after he was convicted on "terrorism-related charges" in a kangaroo court - jump on the free speech ban wagon? Weren't you sickened to see Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of a country that was responsible for the killing of seven journalists in Gaza in 2014, attend the "unity rally" in Paris? Bibi was joined by Angela Merkel, chancellor of a country where Holocaust denial is punishable by up to five years in prison, and David Cameron, who wants to ban non-violent "extremists" committed to the "overthrow of democracy" from appearing on television.

his continued reference to holocaust clearly shows this as an anti semitc rant...but hey ho...let him rant...its just some can see his game....




Then there are your readers. Will you have a word with them, please? According to a 2011 YouGov poll, 82% of voters backed the prosecution of protesters who set fire to poppies.

Apparently, it isn't just Muslims who get offended.


yeah...but we want em prosecuting...not murdering.....
and again there is a world of difference between something all to real......and his "immaginary sky friend"

Yours faithfully,




Mehdi




http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/mehdi-hasan/charlie-hebdo-free-speech_b_6462584.html?utm_hp_ref=uk

Brasidas wrote:You miss the point, were people offended Victor?

yes they were, but the point is the two ARE different and any attempt to conflate the two is disingenious....utterly so
getting offended about something real and concrete is one thing...getting upset to an even greater degree over an "immaginary something or other" and commiting murder on the back of it is just.....primitive....


I am making no point on cartoons, read what I said.

Again people have called for free speech to be limited, we see this in law and we see it in freedom of expression.
The point is we all have limitations on this because it is a very natural human reaction to such hateful speech.
This is not antisemitic that is absurd, he point is true as seen where the examples show cases of other religions prevented such publication.
The fact is have you ever seen such satire allowed to be published on the holocaust? no and again the holocaust is a special case...its REAL
I never have and why have none dared to?

again the liberal/lefty commit to inadvertant anti semitism by conflating a "real event" with fantasy
and noblely FAIL to realise that there is plenty of satire which mocks quite adequately both christianity AND Judeaism

mocking "islam" or Mohammed or Allah is THE SAME AS mocking christianity / christ or judaeism/yaweh
mocking islam IS NOT THE SAME as mocking the holocaust or the dead of two world wars...


You even have had limitations by as an admin ban posters yourself.

Brasidas wrote:Does not matter on difference, that is the same but different levels of freedom of speech/expression where again if you had bothered to read I stated the following:

My point is on we all have limitations at which point we reach and stand against something that offends us, which is my only point here.
This makes a similar argument, though I disagree on some points where to me a satire is just a cartoon and comedy and should be taken as such when taking the mick/piss out of religion. I defend the right to take the piss out of religion but he makes the same valid point, where they clearly would be to anyone a limitation:


My point is on limitations we all have, which is a natural human reaction we have where we all at some point we not tolerate something said or done.
Though as you seem to want to, his point is right again based on levels, it is irrelevant whether you disagree and I share your views it is okay to take the piss out of religion, his view is and rightly that of responsibility of what we set out to offend or did you miss that point?

People certainly do not set out to offend events like the holocaust, because they know it would be very insensitive, his view is though even though it is seen by you and me as a lesser insensitive issue by insulting religion the bases is then on yet gain levels, not on whether then it is irresponsible to offend.

So we allow up to a level on what we will allow as an offense, its just his view is lower than ours as what to offends, but all 3 of use believe that the point to offend at some level is wrong.
Then the view to offend is irresponsible, we only differ based on conjecture and our own views.

Brasidas wrote:No clash, that again is conjecture on your part and your views.
Again you miss the point the reason to offend is wrong and irresponsible and shows people can be intensive towards others, because we all have limits as proven on this.

I can quite easily argue you will find most religious people no matter the faith, especially with a literal or practicing belief would be offended at insensitive views to their faiths. Take the film dogma, brought about death threats to the producer of the film. So that is silly to claim a clash of civilizations.

Uhm...dunno about that didge....I would consider those who made said death threats over that film to be the rotting remains of a long dead (it just doesnt know it) so called "civilisation, which has no more in common with us now than Islam has...


People are just very sensitive about the belief in faith dependent on how religious they are.

Should the religion be immune from criticism or humour?
No