Monday, July 10, 2017

There Was a Time When Journalists Backed Free Speech

By Chirs Uhlmann

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Repressive Tolerance (1965) — Herbert Marcuse

It was a liberating experience. In a morning moment of madness I had decided to tweet into the maelstrom of media rage created by former prime minister Tony Abbott’s decision to fly to the US to address the Alliance Defending Freedom.

It had been prompted by an interview where an American tolerance commissar opined it was appalling, in a democracy, that people opposed to abortion and gay marriage were allowed to air their toxic views.

This progressive truth was so self-evident it went unremarked by the interviewer.

My clear intent was neither to defend Abbott’s world view nor his decision to speak to a cabal of “reactionary” Christians on the hand-grenade topic “the importance of the family”. It was simply to say: “Once upon a time journalists believed in free speech …”

It seemed an unremarkable intervention. It wasn’t surprising that there was a social media storm in the Twitter teacup because its obsessives are always stewing over something. But that defending free speech could be cast as a crime against tolerance screams something very disturbing about our times.

That some who lit torches with the mob were journalists says a lot about the state of the media. These reporters have appointed themselves the prefects of progressive verities. That is disturbing because

Read the rest here.

3 comments:

  1. There is simply no way that the rise of political correctness and hate speech laws have simply coincided with the decentralized speech of the internet. Also, it is no surprise that such PC thinking was incubated and encouraged in academia, then promoted by the media and large corporations.

    Most countries are now socialist countries. As with any political takeover, speech must be controlled via the institutions in power. If one looks back over a century and considers the capture of schools and the consolidation of businesses into large corporations, the impetus for those actions can be seen presently. Large institutional blocks are easily controlled and coerced via government to do its bidding.

    Speech was free but the NARRATIVE was always easily controlled and disseminated. This explains the ease with which socialist laws were passed and wars were launched.
    The advent of decentralized thinking proved to be a large threat to socialism’s need for a homogenous narrative.

    The only question was, how would those institutions go about regaining that narrative? The last twelve years or so have provided the answer and, as frustrating as it has been to witness, the process has been very informative and enlightening. One of the first examples was the blackout of Ron Paul’s presidential run. That was a huge eye-opener for me.

    Slowly, the steady push against internet free speech (unapproved thought) has continued to the present day, where speaking out against the narrative now risks censorship, unemployment and even arrest.

    Academia, corporations, and the media are, in effect, part of the government. Whether they believe in the government's utopian path or simply understand the government's threats, they are part of it.

    Under the auspices of government’s benevolent concern for the world’s feelings, the world embraces the latest, and most permanent, version of sedition laws. Very clever.

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    Replies
    1. Brutus, thank you for your wonderfully cogent analysis. You have certainly described quite accurately the current moment.

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    2. @Dwight You're welcome. Hopefully someone will soon discover a solution to the problem at hand. Regardless of the current year, I am not looking forward to 1984.

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