Peter Bolivar
I don' t know why people are so afraid to hear opposing views. Its sad that so many people who supposedly believe in the freedom of speech are so willing to try to take it away from others. It is one thing to ban speech that is inciting violence or include death threats. It is entirely another when someone is spouting nonsense or even vile thoughts.
Anyone wanting to ban speech should realize that, if they are able to do so, then someone else is just as capable of doing it to them as well.
Lastly, few really know what liberal means anymore... What oft passes for liberalism on university campuses is anything but
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Anthony McCarthy
@Peter Bolivar This is nonsense, there is a lot of speech that is banned and not just banned, banned by law. Libel and slander, perjury, various levels of plagiarism, . . . and it is ironic that if you want to comment on Michael Enright's facile and entirely predictable posture as a champion of the rights of fascists and crypto-Nazis with billionaire funders and who have held political power, you will be subject to an enhanced level of speech control by the CBC. Speech is and always has been regulated - when it comes to its commercial value - but it is considered to be terrible to do so in defense of the basic level of equal rights and the only legitimate form of government, egalitarian democracy. We have a right to defend egalitarian democracy against its ideological enemies who, taking power, destroy equality and restrict rights. To claim on some allegedly high moral plane - one which is far easier for affluent, straight, white men to take in the United States and Canada - is absurd, especially if it is claimed that we are unable to disginguish between lies and the truth and the difference between those who support equal rights and those who want to destroy them.
Considering another comment which they put up slammed democracy as a terrible idea, it's amazing they found what I said too much to allow.
Doug Barr
The debate between Frum and Bannon is good for Democracy but tragically Democracy has been disastrous for humanity. Democracy was given birth and is sustained by divisions in humanity and as Aesop apparently first said 2600 years ago, "divided we fall." So Michael, while you're cheering on Frum and Bannon as they give life to democracy you'll be cheering the death of humanity. The tragedy is if, but as seems more likely when, we hit bottom it will have been for nothing. . .
So, would they have allowed a Neo-Nazi and a white supremacist to debate the fate of the First Nations? How about a debate with a Klansman who wants to use the "N-word" as often as possible?
ReplyDeleteAnd Germany, as I understand, has tight restrictions on speech and ideas related to Nazism, yet democracy thrives there, even after taking in the decidedly un-democratic former East Germany (by which I mean a generation or so of people who didn't know true democracy).
If good speech drove out and triumphed over bad speech, FoxNews would have been a blank space on the cable decades ago.
The old arguments seem to me to come down to the old slogan "it can't happen here" which is absurd, it's happening here, it's been getting steadily worse since 1968.
DeleteI can't remember who said it but they said it's quite possible that within the year we will have the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts, Roe v. Wade and a whole host of other things overturned by five members of the Supreme Court, given a majority by Senators who represent less than 20% of the voters in the country, with two justices put there by a white supremacist who was recorded bragging about how he got away with sexually assaulting women, through the collusion of a white supremacist fascist like McConnell nullifying Obama's presidency by denying Merrick Garland a hearing. Oh, yeah, and the clincher vote is a sexual assaulter who committed open perjury during his confirmation hearings and the Republicans put him on the Court, anyway.
Democracy has already been nullified in the United States. Enright claimed that Bannon was a "lone, right-wing American gas bag" when said gasbag is far from alone and a gas bag who has, in concert with billionaires foreign and domestic and the kind of forces they can buy, with the aid of the Supreme Court and the Republicans in congress and in state houses across the country, delivered what is very possibly a death blow to American Democracy.
That kind of journalist has convinced me that journalism is hardly the saviors of democracy they claim to be. Jefferson's slogans in that regard are as empty as that slaveholder-slave-rapist's start to the Declaration.