The writer is in Australia.
Remember this if you remember nothing else about the philosophical battle for free speech. More scope for speaking one’s mind helps the outsiders in society – those outside the so-called Overton Window’s allowed ambit of ‘acceptable speech’; the sceptics, apostates, iconoclasts, nonconformists and dissidents; basically those who differ from received opinion beyond what the powerful deem prudent. 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.
James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article first appeared in Spectator Australia. Next Wednesday, February 12th, in London and online, Prof Allan is defending the motion ‘A UK Bill of Rights Would Not Protect Free Speech’. For more info and to sign up go here.
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https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1887605772252766406
Trump latest…
Pull every single media contract for GSA… Politico, BBC and Bloomberg.”
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1887622776569110726
President Trump has just signed an executive order requiring an audit of EVERY NGO which relies on federal funding, per Reuters
Biden gave BILLIONS to these NGOs to facilitate an invasion of our country.
trump is doing a good job laying waste to all the woke & climate bollox, and put IC cars back on the playbook, but Whintey Webb warns about sacred Calves and how Big Tech has rallied around Trump but are still there with their connections to the Deep State.
Heed the warning:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZ0uuC7GIDI
Governments should not be funding NGOs. Tax money should go exclusively to the provision of essential services that it makes sense for a centralised state to provide – national defence, protection of the borders (which should really be seen as national defence as we are being invaded daily), law and order, justice system, network stuff like road, rail and utility infrastructure. That’s it.
Indeed – make NGO’s survive on their own, and we’d clear out a ton of them in no time
We have to persuade a lot more people that coercing tax money out of people is dangerous and should be very limited. The default assumption seems to be that if some activity X or campaign Y seems like a Jolly Good Idea to some large enough group of people and they argue it’s For The Public Good then it’s fine to threaten people with prison if they don’t share your views AND refuse to pay for it. If enough people think it’s a Good Idea, let them bloody pay for it.
Especially the UK government. Our government funds NGOs that actively campaign against government policy. It even funds NGOs that bring judicial review lawsuits against government action meaning that we’re literally paying for the lawyers that make it so that we have to pay for other lawyers to achieve democratically elected goals…
UK Column was saying how the Online “Safety” Bill can also come after publishers to blogs…..In other words, people who comment on articles. We have a bumpy ride ahead. My take on this is they want this in place before their next PsyOp.
I’m not sure it’s even right to say that speech is sometimes harmful. Harm comes from how people react to that speech.
Good article.
Imo some speech e.g. Holocaust denial or using words such as nigger is genuinely harmful, although most speech that wokesters claim is harmful isn’t.
I would much rather see a small amount of harmful speech rather than having non harmful speech that a few people e.g. moderators at Fb, MSN disagree with or think will offend a few snowflakes censored.
I suppose it depends on what exactly you mean by harmful.
Something that will cause a lot of upset to people who aren’t woke/professional offence takers. This is why I used Holocaust denial as an example because I think a lot of people whose relatives were murdered would, quite rightly, be upset by claims that it didn’t happen, whereas Imo people who claim to be upset by gender critical opinions deserve to be “upset”/”hurt”.
I don’t go out of my way to gratuitously offend people, but is getting upset “harmful”?
That reminds me of the time when Bill Clinton said: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is ‘is……
Nobody should have the right not to be offended.
Trump has had access to the JFK file for a long time. One hopes that he was so horrified that he vowed to expose it and tear it apart. Trump says he will release everything to do with the 1960s assassinations and the deadline is in just a few days time. Maybe that will be a revelation so shocking that the CIA would have to immediately scatter itself to the four winds.
They have had a few weeks (or head start) to ‘lose’ pages etc.
Might be a bit optimistic but I am just hoping that they have decided to let it all out given the gravity of the timesand also because it might suit the Trump agenda given that Trump has just offered all CIA employees the option of quitting with a year’s severance pay. Obviously this can be construed as a way to tell the corrupt characters to get out while you can.
Every instance of the asymmetry described is in effect an admission of guilt by the ruling elite.
Not that I’m suggesting they ever feel guilty about the imposition of their New World Order policies they inflict on their unwilling and increasingly resentful populaces, who sadly for them still cling to traditional notions of democracy and fairness.
The elites think that they are the enlightened ones whose duty it is to guide the benighted masses towards a new Utopia ruled over by a wise and benign technocracy, which is how they see themselves.
It’s only those on the other side of the divide who are able to see just how ridiculous these people are.
With the advent of new forms of media however, they’re realising that they’re losing control of the narrative, which is why there’s a push towards increasing censorship and surveillance in an attempt to suppress dissent.
We have to keep pushing back. The alternative is slavery.
They say the Arab Spring was the last time the Globalists favoured social media in an open platform. Remember the old slogan of YouTube…..’Broadcast Yourself’.
Getting hosed-off with having to log in three or four times a day, (and I’m not the only one). C’mon DS sort it out.
You and me both. Worst is the fact that most times login is refused even though the details are exactly the same because my browser remembers them. So most of the time I cannot log in so I cannot comment or even like. I’m not sure there’s much point in paying my subscription next year. (clearly I managed to successfully log in, at the second time of asking, to post this comment but most of the time I am not allowed in)!
It’s when you’re composing a comment, especially a lengthy one, then when you come to post your comment it won’t allow it. Lo and behold It’s because in that time frame I’ve been logged out!😤 So you have to copy and paste your comment once you log back in. So I wonder if the site only has a set time limit or number of log-ins before you’re automatically logged out. Perhaps for security reasons or something.
‘eSafety Overlord’
Safety? Who for, though? Safety for our children from mass rape or murder by the Establishment’s beloved foreigners? Or will it be safety for the scum who inflicted this mass-rape/murder catastrophe on us?
In terms of big tech you can fight against it. Simple thing like using cash and using harsh words if anyone ever suggests anything other than cash. No smartphone outside the house obviously. You hear about these arrests at protests – most of them are because people took their phones along. Some even stand there taking pictures. Frankly if you are that naive then you probably won’t last much longer. What is your phone some masturbatory device that makes you feel uncomfortable when you’re without it? If so then you have understood nothing and you are ripe for culling.
Think about your phone and about how it demeans you. It turns you into a little wanker. At least with a desktop computer you have to make an effort to sit down. This smartphone device only exists to turn you into a little wanker. Look at how diminished you are compared to five years ago.
A study was conducted in America and it asked children which invention they hate most and they said the smartphone because their parents would mess with their phones when they are supposed to be nurturing children. It isn’t my job to continually point out your sickness so please try to take hold of it yourself. When I look at how feeble your will is I don’t blame the power elite for wanting to knock you off.
Only a slave wants censorship of any kind.
If you have just read that statement and find yourself disagreeing, then I’m afraid you have the mentality of a slave. Sorry.
I see people who want censorship more as tyrants than slaves. They want censorship of everything they don’t like or disagree with, and everything they think should be allowed must not be censored, and they want everyone else to abide by their definition of what’s acceptable AND for the state to enforce that with everyone’s tax money.
No longer a mensch or even a man just a vassal awaiting orders. The footsoldiers of an agenda that you vaguely disavow. Look at yourself. Ask what you have been doing for the last thirty years in terms of awareness. Absolutely nothing. So have some humility in terms of your last minute resistance. It means very little.
This was a fantastic read but,
“to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview”
Why must one need to be religious to buy the idea of natural rights or God given rights for that matter? All one needs is an imagination for this. I am a life long agnostic and have no doubt I will die as such but believe ever so strongly in the strength and importance of the idea of natural, God given rights.
An interesting piece by James Allan but am I the only one who finds his style of writing difficult to read unlike say David McGrogan or James Alexander?