Anyhow if you are going have a personal online account abuse is inevitable, which is why I don't have one.
I think many get confused about racism. I don't think there was a generalise attack on a race here. It was more a personal attack that mentioned
race which is quite different. I would add I have not seen any of the tweets.
Such things are best ignored in my opinion, it is making a mountain out of a molehill and focusing on race does not really help as it
is in itself racism in a way.
In my opinion is best not to define people by race.
All I would say is some people were rude to Cyrus and it is about time they grew up and leave it at that.
I was out with a friend of mine yesterday who lives in England and he brought over two English friends for the rugby match at the weekend. One of them while describing her experience at the hotel reception described the receptionist "as a little leprechaun" and said she "couldn't understand a word she was saying". The leprechaun comment irritated me. Am I being too sensitive?
Forget about the performance or entertainment. It's only the result that matters.
No it is not, what about the image of a lynched David Beckham, now if a black player had got sent off in a similar fashions and dummy of him was lynched, would that be racist?
No it is the same thing.
It is says he deserves to be lynched because he is rubbish, not because he is black!
Last edited by tricky_colour; 28/11/2017 at 7:43 PM.
People have committed suicide as a result of abuse and harassment. Just because certain words might not be threatening, harmful or abusive towards you or the censor doesn't mean those words may not be threatening, abusive or harmful to certain others. Feel privileged that malicious words directed your way can have so little impact on your life; that experience isn't universal.
The law ought to protect even those you so blithely dismiss as "insane". The law is there to apply to everyone and to protect everyone.
If I'm interpreting you correctly, you would have no problem with Irish and British newspapers publishing "tricky is a paedophile" as their headlines tomorrow with completely fabricated stories about you abusing children underneath? Because that's what absolute free speech could mean; they'd have an absolute right to say whatever they liked about you whenever they liked. What if hostile and hysterical mobs burned you out of your home, or, worse, tried to kill you, on the basis of that malicious and outrageous fabrication? That would be a real life-threatening consequence. You'd be OK with all of that and would continue championing absolute free speech?
There can be different degrees of regulation of expression. Obviously regulation that suppresses benign individual expression or all forms of dissent is bad, but absolute free speech can also be dangerous. The key is striking a healthy balance that enables all people to express themselves as openly as possible without causing material or measurable personal or social harm.
You think we should all just ignore racism? It's easy to ignore it if you're not on the receiving end of it. Those at the butt of it can hardly ignore it. Once again, feel privileged that you don't have to endure it.
It's important to be alert to race as a concept - not necessarily as an identity or as a measure on an abhorrent phrenological chart - but because it was a central facet of modern Western internal and foreign policy and, by extension, historical and colonial systems of division and rule.
Last edited by DannyInvincible; 01/12/2017 at 6:59 AM.
I dunno about that, tricky. Whilst I'm not advocating a clamp-down on free speech or anything of the sort, speech can obviously be very dangerous. See here for historical examples of where it cost lives: http://freespeechdebate.com/discuss/...gerous-speech/
I'm not making a value statement on censorship with this question - I'm just intrigued by your assertion - but how exactly did censorship kill millions of people?
As P_Stu says, absolute free speech doesn't exist, nor can it in any civil democratic society where the vulnerable and disempowered require protection. In my view, if public regulation of expression is ever deemed required for whatever reason, then that regulatory process ought to be as democratic, transparent and thorough a process as is possible with the proposer subjected to a high-threshold burden of proof as to the necessity of the regulation proposed.
I do admit that there is an interesting paradox at the heart of the free speech debate though: free speech absolutists have no answer to how power is monopolised in the marketplace of ideas, whilst, at the same time, I don't think it's possible for non-absolutists (and I include myself in this bracket) to satisfactorily define who polices what cannot be said in a pure incorruptible way.
Essentially, whilst gross inequality and disparities can exist at both individual and institutional levels in terms of held power – which can be monopolised in the arena of communication – and in the degree of access to channels for expression or in a party's capability to voice themselves or be heard, thus materially diminishing free expression in practice where it is supposedly unstifled in theory, there is no incorruptible way of assigning power to police expression to some sort of benevolent, protective or omniscient overseer – be that a democratically-elected authority or some sort of mechanism to ascertain and effect the will of popular consensus – so as to protect the vulnerable and disempowered, against whom expression by the powerful can be used as a weapon to further suppress and silence.
In fact, assigning power to such an observing body to police expression would effectively be akin to explicitly sanctioning monopolisation. Even if that power is assigned to or by a democratic majority, unless there is absolute unanimity in any "consensus" at all times (which is highly unlikely, if not practically impossible), those who assented hold the monopoly of power, whilst the views of dissenters are dismissed.
Although representative democracy might assist in ensuring a greater number of people are served, in accordance with their declared preference, the inherent problem is still unsolved; a Tocquevillian tyranny by a majority remains possible.
Interestingly, the "free speech" policy of Twitter has evolved quite radically over time. Twitter’s policy evolution also serves to demonstrate the paradox inherent to the concept of untrammelled free expression. When Twitter was initially established, it was an unregulated forum for communication and exchange, but the company felt that this "libertarian" approach was actually having an inadvertent and unwanted chilling effect on expression. Consequently, to enhance diversity of expression, they introduced rules limiting certain undesired types of expression. Of course, democratic societies do the very same.
Next person to start another racism thread gets the boot for a week.
The multiple racism threads arose from posts moved from discussion on the abusive tweets directed towards Cyrus Christie in Christie's thread. Individual posters had nothing to do with with their creation.
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