Brendan O’Neill wants Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination act "torn up" than reformed - Polidicks

[IMG]http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/image/5383922-3x2-700x467.jpg[/IMG] [QUOTE]Section 18C doesn’t only limit the rights of racists to pump hatred into the public arena. More menacingly, it limits the right of the public to be the guardian of the public arena, and instead allows officialdom to decide on our behalf what we may hear and in essence what we should think.[/QUOTE] [QUOTE]Brendan O’Neill doesn’t just want Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination act reformed, he wants it torn up. In this opinion piece, he argues that we should trust the public to determine which ideas have validity and which don’t, rather than relying on the government. When I tell people I think Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act should be scrapped – not reformed, but ripped up – I always get the same response: ‘How can you defend the rights of racists?’ Many seem to believe that if you oppose legal restrictions on the uttering or publication of potentially hurtful racist speech, then you are either being soft on racists, or worse, you’re standing up for them. ‘Why would you lobby on behalf of such unpleasant people?’, comes the query. But the reason I want Section 18C to be thrown into the shredding machine of history is not because I am committed to the right of racists to spout nonsense about minorities, but rather because I care for the rights of all Australians to know that such prejudices exist and to pass judgement on them. Freedom of speech, you see, is only partly about the freedom of the speaker; it is also about the freedom of the audience, the reader, the man in the street, who should have access to all ideas and the liberty to make up his mind about which of these ideas has moral worth and which does not. There are two freedoms in freedom of speech. There is the liberty of people and groups to publish their thoughts, however offensive others might find them. And there is the just-as-important liberty of the public to decide, through independent thinking and open debate, whether those thoughts are true, false, good or rotten. Section 18C doesn’t only limit the rights of racists to pump hatred into the public arena. More menacingly, it limits the right of the public to be the guardian of the public arena, and instead allows officialdom to decide on our behalf what we may hear and in essence what we should think. It reduces the public to the level of children, who must be guarded from certain ideas, presumably on the basis that we are incapable of working out for ourselves which ideas deserve serious attention and which should just be ridiculed into oblivion. Throughout history, acts of censorship have always been motivated as much by disdain for the public as by animus towards a particular writer, artist or agitator whose ideas have rattled the rulers of society. Censorship might ostensibly involve burning a particular author’s book or censoring a certain magazine, but the real target of these acts is the potential audience to such material, who are judged by officialdom to be so suggestible or volatile, so lacking in the mental and moral capacity to judge good from bad, that they must have their eyes and ears blocked to certain ideas. This was recognised by the great 18th century firebrand, Thomas Paine. When, in 1792, a court in England sentenced him to death in absentia for the crime of writing The Rights of Man, a fiery pro-democracy pamphlet, Paine said the verdict was a ‘sentence on the public, instead of the author’, because the public was being told ‘they shall not think, they shall not read’. The censorship was a ‘prohibition on reading’, said Paine, which did not only undermine his own right to write but also the right of the public ‘to reason and to reflect’. The growth of the ideal of freedom of speech during the years of the Enlightenment was motored, not by any relativistic notion that all ideas are equally valid, but rather by a profound trust in the ability of the public to use reason to determine which ideas had validity and which didn’t.[/QUOTE] [url]http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/counterpoint/racial-discrimination-act-and-freedom-of-speech/5383914?WT.mc_id=Innovation_Radio-RadioNational-Counterpoint|BrendanOneillOnTheRacialDiscriminationActAndFreedomOfSpeech_FBP|abc[/url]

isn't this the bit of legislation that gives people the right the be gigantic shitcunts because ~~[i]It's their faith?[/i]~~ he's right, this whole fucking thing is retarded.

[QUOTE=ZakkShock;44549006]isn't this the bit of legislation that gives people the right the be gigantic shitcunts because ~~[i]It's their faith?[/i]~~ he's right, this whole fucking thing is retarded.[/QUOTE] No, it restricts people from publicly making racist comments, essentially.

did we accidentally let some wild republicans loose in austrailia they seem to be destroying the political ecosystem

[QUOTE=Sableye;44549270]did we accidentally let some wild republicans loose in austrailia they seem to be destroying the political ecosystem[/QUOTE] Idk if the US is willing to accept the entire liberal party

There there, nobody really cares what Brendan O'Neill wants...

Yeah when the fuck did the Republican party decide to make inroads here.

If this is the worst Australia gets, then I might move there next.

Great! I hope the rest of the western world will follow.

[QUOTE=CyberHawk;44550113]Great! I hope the rest of the western world will follow.[/QUOTE] When polls show that 90% of Australians don't show that this change is wanted, it likely will not happen. If Labor were actually a political party, and not missing, they'd be playing this off as a huge deal.

So he's basically a libertarian?

His reasoning is actually pretty fair, you could definitely argue that racists should be given freedom of speech to rant off about their horrible ideas (and everyone else should have the right to call them bigoted idiots). Having people discuss racist ideas and reject them is much better than never talking about them at all