Friday 13 February 2009

Free speech

As in so many other ways, I'm an extremist believer in free speech. I believe that Abu Hookhand should have the freedom to call down a plague on our houses as much as I should have the freedom of speech to call him a cunt, or Prince Harry to call his friend a Paki.

Really, the professionally aggrieved make things worse by suppressing them. This whole thing about specific words causing offence is a crock of shit. It was always the intent behind the words that makes a word good or bad. Most of the people who are professionally aggrieved seem to specialise in milking this whole divide and conquer thing anyway.

When I'm with my friends, we compete to find the most outrageous and offensive things to call each other. We impugn each other's sexuality, parentage and character in ways that would probably make Harriet Harman explode.

The only moan we have is that it's getting more and more difficult to come up with a new angle.

(One of the most amusing things was when one of us called one of the ladies "a dullard." Not "a chav dullard", or "a rug-munching dullard", or even "a Scottish dullard." Just "a dullard", which not even the most po-faced and pious member of the Righteous could ever moan about. She was outraged and offended to an extreme I've never seen before, a level which even the most skilled diversity outreach worker would struggle to achieve, because it was genuinely personally insulting to her.

And of course, she is now universally known as "The Dullard." Although not while she's in the kitchen, as she has a rather impressive collection of serious cutlery.)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I personally can't handle being called a cretin. Call me a cunt, bastard, twat, anything and it's fine as long as you don't call me a cretin. I think I know what's coming Obnoxio, please don't disappoint!

Keep up the excellent work!

Obnoxio The Clown said...

Dullard. :o)

Jon said...

Anon, that's a most interesting, well observed, sensitive, and highly intelligent post.

Obo, I left this rant at Dale's site last night, I were that angry:

----

Huhne: "But there is a line to be drawn even with freedom of speech."

Who is to draw the line? If a line is drawn then speech is no longer free. I didn't realize it before I heard him on the radio this morning, but the man is an authoritarian; and in that respect indistinguishable from the rest of the Righteous.

ALL speech should be allowed. That includes rebuttals, however vehement or offensive, which demonstrate why and where the speaker is wrong.

If a speech is deemed to incite hatred or violence, once again some busybody or policeman has done the deeming on our behalf. As a grown-up, I refuse to accept such interference.

If violence ensues, there are laws to deal with it and penalties to be paid. Speech itself breaks nobody's skull.

My God, even to be articulating such basic stuff brings home to me the nightmare we have, through cowardice and moral equivocation, created for ourselves in this country.

Anonymous said...

Speech crime today, thought crime tomorrow!

Anonymous said...

Huhne is an arse-waddling piss bugler.

He deserves to have his eyes ripped out with corkscrews and whatever dismal collection of objects make-up his genitalia beaten to nano-scale thickness with a meat-tenderiser.

But worse than that he's a Lib Dem.