Limits on speech imposed by government will never affect those whose thinking is in line with that of the great and the good. They don’t need free speech protections. (Put on a personal level, no one ever demanded the suppression of speech about themselves that said ‘hey, buddy, you’re just a terrific, witty, insightful guy with George Clooney looks’.)
And so the benefits of a very wide scope for free speech are that it gets dissenting ideas out there and that it’s never wise to allow insiders to arbitrate what speech can be uttered. The two most powerful defences in favour of a wide-ranging scope for free speech (to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview) are these. Firstly, there’s the John Stuart Mill argument that as much speech as possible in the crucible of competing ideas moves society ever closer towards optimal choices, not just because nonconformist views are sometimes right (and we all know that’s true) but because even when the dissident is wrong his views force those with establishment views to better understand and fine-tune their own outlooks. Or secondly, the straight-out cost-benefit argument that the dangers and harms of too much speech are vastly outweighed by the dangers and over-reach of big government and the administrative state policing what speech is allowable, knowing what we do about human nature and the desire to suppress views one finds unpalatable. Notice that both those free speech defences are grounded in a simple, consequentialist cost-benefit calculation. Both, I think, are powerful, though I am somewhat in the minority in thinking the second of those is the strongest of the arguments for free speech.
Be that as it may, think now about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. I’m going to be blunt and say straight out that I profoundly disagree with her censorious worldview and I simply cannot understand why Peter Dutton, the leader of a political party that professes itself to be committed to free speech principles, defends her. (Okay, having watched Scott Morrison’s even more enervated, enfeebled and factually wrong “free speech never created a single job” understanding of free speech at work, I can understand that this is no longer disqualifying to lead the party of Robert Menzies. So I understand it as a fact about today’s Australian political world. It just massively disappoints me.)
But leave politics out of it. Go back to Ms Grant, a.k.a. our ‘eSafety Overlord’ – though lord knows why this body or position even exists. Remember when she wanted to suppress a true online video of an Islamic extremist stabbing a Christian bishop? Let me ask you all this. If there were a video of an openly white supremacist walking into a Melbourne mosque and stabbing an Imam, do you think that Ms Grant, or anyone in the Australian government, would want to suppress that? Or would try to impose a worldwide ban on it? Yes, yes, yes it’s notoriously hard to prove a counterfactual scenario. But I’m about as certain of the answer to that hypothetical as I am about anything – namely, that ‘no, the eSafety Commission apparatus would not have tried in any way to suppress that sort of video where the white supremacist was the violent thug. Readers can decide what they think for themselves. For me, the crucial factor is often ‘how does this speech/video affect the insiders’ or government’s worldview?’ And anyway, surely in both cases it’s good for society to know the true facts, even if some harms follow?
Moreover, it’s pretty obvious to any thinking being that three or four decades of steroidal multiculturalism policies have brought with them quite a few downsides. (Don’t take it from me. Take the word of a host of Anglosphere politicians on this, including wokester former UK PM David Cameron.) Put more bluntly, significant social problems and downsides have been caused by decades and decades of large-scale mass immigration together with the gradual diminishing of assimilation policies and the now ubiquitous failure to teach youngsters the (to me quite obvious) true fact that Australia and the Anglosphere have produced amongst the best places to live in human history – heck, even just to teach them a soupçon of patriotism and love of country. And we have a generation of politicians across the political divide responsible for this mess. And they, and the insider class generally, do not want speech that shows the bad consequences of these past policies. (And by bad outcomes I mean more than just the rather significant economic costs of mass immigration of low skilled people from cultures quite distinct from ours that has seen Australia deliver what? Seven straight quarters of per capita GDP decline?)
So speech and videos – even true videos of actual facts – that undercut the establishment’s rosy ‘multiculturalism has been an undiluted good’ message are deeply disliked. (See Britain and Southport and the whole Rotherham grooming gang disgrace for more evidence of this.) Governments and their administrative state actors want that sort of talk – true talk – diminished, downplayed, suppressed and if possible cancelled. It makes them look bad. But if some true event supports the authorised, rosy picture, something like the view that the bad guys here are white working class Neanderthals, well the desire to suppress that really doesn’t exist.
Or put differently yet again, governments find it near impossible to be ‘content neutral’ as the American First Amendment jurisprudence helpfully articulates the matter. And so too, generally, do the tribunals and commissioners these governments – across the political divide – put in place. If you didn’t realise this during the two and half years of Covid lockdown governmental thuggery (and by governmental I include the police, the public health caste supremos, the editors of top medical journals, the upper echelons of the universities, the list goes on) then nothing will open your eyes. Again, notice how much the sceptics, iconoclasts and dissidents got right about the wrongs of lockdowns and how much governments got wrong – to the point that Mr Trump’s Cabinet nominee Dr Jay Bhattacharya to this day rightly notes that the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from government. But it was the views of sceptics that the government establishment tried its hardest (sometimes successfully) to silence.
So Mill was right. The cost-benefit calculation shows that giving government agencies the power to suppress speech is pretty much always a greater long-term evil than suffering any short-term harms of allowing the speech. Our eSafety Commissioner is woefully wrong-headed. In Australia and Britain and Canada we have a huge problem with politicians not understanding or caring about free speech. There is this irony however, one that will drive the bien pensants to distraction – the politician in today’s world with the greatest commitment to free speech is one Donald J. Trump. And it’s not even close......The full article is published HERE
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
And so the benefits of a very wide scope for free speech are that it gets dissenting ideas out there and that it’s never wise to allow insiders to arbitrate what speech can be uttered. The two most powerful defences in favour of a wide-ranging scope for free speech (to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview) are these. Firstly, there’s the John Stuart Mill argument that as much speech as possible in the crucible of competing ideas moves society ever closer towards optimal choices, not just because nonconformist views are sometimes right (and we all know that’s true) but because even when the dissident is wrong his views force those with establishment views to better understand and fine-tune their own outlooks. Or secondly, the straight-out cost-benefit argument that the dangers and harms of too much speech are vastly outweighed by the dangers and over-reach of big government and the administrative state policing what speech is allowable, knowing what we do about human nature and the desire to suppress views one finds unpalatable. Notice that both those free speech defences are grounded in a simple, consequentialist cost-benefit calculation. Both, I think, are powerful, though I am somewhat in the minority in thinking the second of those is the strongest of the arguments for free speech.
Be that as it may, think now about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. I’m going to be blunt and say straight out that I profoundly disagree with her censorious worldview and I simply cannot understand why Peter Dutton, the leader of a political party that professes itself to be committed to free speech principles, defends her. (Okay, having watched Scott Morrison’s even more enervated, enfeebled and factually wrong “free speech never created a single job” understanding of free speech at work, I can understand that this is no longer disqualifying to lead the party of Robert Menzies. So I understand it as a fact about today’s Australian political world. It just massively disappoints me.)
But leave politics out of it. Go back to Ms Grant, a.k.a. our ‘eSafety Overlord’ – though lord knows why this body or position even exists. Remember when she wanted to suppress a true online video of an Islamic extremist stabbing a Christian bishop? Let me ask you all this. If there were a video of an openly white supremacist walking into a Melbourne mosque and stabbing an Imam, do you think that Ms Grant, or anyone in the Australian government, would want to suppress that? Or would try to impose a worldwide ban on it? Yes, yes, yes it’s notoriously hard to prove a counterfactual scenario. But I’m about as certain of the answer to that hypothetical as I am about anything – namely, that ‘no, the eSafety Commission apparatus would not have tried in any way to suppress that sort of video where the white supremacist was the violent thug. Readers can decide what they think for themselves. For me, the crucial factor is often ‘how does this speech/video affect the insiders’ or government’s worldview?’ And anyway, surely in both cases it’s good for society to know the true facts, even if some harms follow?
Moreover, it’s pretty obvious to any thinking being that three or four decades of steroidal multiculturalism policies have brought with them quite a few downsides. (Don’t take it from me. Take the word of a host of Anglosphere politicians on this, including wokester former UK PM David Cameron.) Put more bluntly, significant social problems and downsides have been caused by decades and decades of large-scale mass immigration together with the gradual diminishing of assimilation policies and the now ubiquitous failure to teach youngsters the (to me quite obvious) true fact that Australia and the Anglosphere have produced amongst the best places to live in human history – heck, even just to teach them a soupçon of patriotism and love of country. And we have a generation of politicians across the political divide responsible for this mess. And they, and the insider class generally, do not want speech that shows the bad consequences of these past policies. (And by bad outcomes I mean more than just the rather significant economic costs of mass immigration of low skilled people from cultures quite distinct from ours that has seen Australia deliver what? Seven straight quarters of per capita GDP decline?)
So speech and videos – even true videos of actual facts – that undercut the establishment’s rosy ‘multiculturalism has been an undiluted good’ message are deeply disliked. (See Britain and Southport and the whole Rotherham grooming gang disgrace for more evidence of this.) Governments and their administrative state actors want that sort of talk – true talk – diminished, downplayed, suppressed and if possible cancelled. It makes them look bad. But if some true event supports the authorised, rosy picture, something like the view that the bad guys here are white working class Neanderthals, well the desire to suppress that really doesn’t exist.
Or put differently yet again, governments find it near impossible to be ‘content neutral’ as the American First Amendment jurisprudence helpfully articulates the matter. And so too, generally, do the tribunals and commissioners these governments – across the political divide – put in place. If you didn’t realise this during the two and half years of Covid lockdown governmental thuggery (and by governmental I include the police, the public health caste supremos, the editors of top medical journals, the upper echelons of the universities, the list goes on) then nothing will open your eyes. Again, notice how much the sceptics, iconoclasts and dissidents got right about the wrongs of lockdowns and how much governments got wrong – to the point that Mr Trump’s Cabinet nominee Dr Jay Bhattacharya to this day rightly notes that the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from government. But it was the views of sceptics that the government establishment tried its hardest (sometimes successfully) to silence.
So Mill was right. The cost-benefit calculation shows that giving government agencies the power to suppress speech is pretty much always a greater long-term evil than suffering any short-term harms of allowing the speech. Our eSafety Commissioner is woefully wrong-headed. In Australia and Britain and Canada we have a huge problem with politicians not understanding or caring about free speech. There is this irony however, one that will drive the bien pensants to distraction – the politician in today’s world with the greatest commitment to free speech is one Donald J. Trump. And it’s not even close......The full article is published HERE
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
7 comments:
Prodessor Allan writes, "Limits on speech imposed by government will never affect those whose thinking is in line with that of the great and the good. They don’t need free speech protections."
That may be the case in Australia but certainly not in NZ. Here, it is precisely those views that are censored, such as those of the "Listener Seven", and anyone else who believes in equality and rationality as opposed to racism, tribalism, communism, mythology and woke propaganda.
Call me a pedant, but when I read "the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from (the American) government" I have to observe that the government in question was Donald Trump's government. Trump's misinformation encompassed a dismissal of the seriousness of the virus, promoted bleach and horse pills as a remedy, thereby contributing to the death of a million Americans. As a result, there has now been a drop in the life expectancy of the average American. That shameful legacy starkly illustrates the cost of Trump's so-called free speech. And as for the last sentence, precisely how does Trump silencing all public announcements by the CDC contribute to a "commitment to free speech"? That's a comment straight out George Orwell's newspeak. I just pity the American people who are now going to suffer all over again when the next epidemic arrives. It may have already started as measles and tuberculosis start taking lives. But they shouldn't expect the CDC to tell them what to do. It's not allowed to. Or the WHO for that matter. But not to worry. Trump says Bobby has it under control. And you can have that advice for free.
Replying to Anon at 5.56 am: It is because the thinking of the Listener 7 was NOT in line with that of the 'great & the good', i.e. the received wisdom, that they were censored!
Replying to The Jones Boy: Trump's suggestion of a chlorine derivative to combat Covid was misquoted. His instincts that China might have been behind the lab leak may have been right. Re Covid generally, let's wait for the completion of some unbiased investigations.
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Ivermectin and bleach may be seen in hindsight as quite harmless even if misguided compared with the mountain of evidence growing up in peer reviewed literature indicating the vaccines were far from harmless and also ineffective.
Consider Pro. Angus Dalgleish world expert in melanoma who shows the potential link between c-19 vaccines and the increased cancer risks and this has gained international attention .Also a Japanese paper by Takada. last year showed the unsafeness levels (ROR) for Pfizer and Moderna were respectively for myocarditis and pericarditis 15 and 54 which is demonstrably unsafe and insanely so. Also the white clots morticians have observed in bodies never seen before vaccines and information that has been suppressed. Also the Nature paper that shows vaccines increased your risk of getting covid. That was evidence 2.5 years ago but suppressed . There is much more but most of which has been suppressed.
All this indicates censorship and lack of free speech by governments is so wrong. I have personally lived through the nightmare of a loved family member inflicted with carditis a few weeks after having the vaccine . The so called medical people involved refused to make the link and even denied giving the blood test Tot T which reveals heart inflammation to hide the link.
Sounds to me that your judgement is compromised by your unfortunate personal experience Gaynor.
I presume your reference to "carditis" means myocarditis. Everybody knows there is a very small but increased risk of developing myocarditis after the Pfizer vaccination. Figures from the United States suggest that this risk is about six cases of myocarditis per million-second doses. In New Zealand the Coroner has found there have been two deaths as a result of myocardits following a dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
But as you know, correlation does not prove causation. Life is random. A lot of things, good and bad, occur after a person is vaccinated that are not caused by the vaccination. And even if the vaccination were shown to be the cause of the myocarditis (which it hasn't), Medsafe has found that the rate of deaths following vaccination was lower than the expected number of natural deaths.
Life is about risk management. Nearly twelve million doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been administered in New Zealand. Two suspected deaths sounds pretty good odds to me. And even if the vaccination does cause myocarditis, the research shows you’re much more likely to develop myocarditis after catching the virus than from being vaccinated against it.
So the risk management equation shows it is significantly safer to become vaccinated against COVID than not. Regrettably, your loved one's experience is hardly scientific evidence for asserting otherwise. And I will treat your assertion that the vaccines were ineffective with the contempt it deserves.
' I suggest reading "Takada paper Shows Very Clearly the Covid vaccines are not safe " Journal of Infection and Chemotherapy . These articles are peer reviewed in journals like this . It is available on the internet. My assertion would be that people should be given all the information so they can make up their own minds whether they take the vaccine or not. If I get any flu , which I haven't had for many decades I have a regime of supplements including vit C , D , A zinc and more to build up my own immunity , stay in bed and have drinks and no heavy foods. I never take paracetamol or other pharmaceuticals which according to some enlightened professors of medicine
can be detrimental. This is what was badly lacking in prevention by MS Medicine during covid -non pharmaceutical advice on home remedies. It was just vaccine , vaccine vaccine . Apparently one bit of research revealed everyone who died of covid lacked Vitamin D.
The brutal truth Gaynor, is that the vast majority of people do not have the capacity to form valid judgements on vaccines. Even if people had access to "all the information" as you assert they should, the vast majority would not understand what they were looking at, far less be able to process and interpret that information in a meaningful way. That's why our society trains and employs experts to do that job. They are called virologists, microbiologists, geneticists, and medical specialists of all sorts. We inhabit a world that is healthier, safer and more longer lived than any in history, all as a result of their efforts. Yet you have the nerve to say you know better. I'm sorry Gaynor. Even your comments on the efficacy of vitamins are unsafe because any dietition will tell you that if you eat a balanced diet, most supplements you buy from Chemist Warehouse wind up being flushed down the toilet. Which, by the way, is where I consider antivaccine opinions such as yours also belong.
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