The professionally aggrieved

This bloke had a disagreement with his girlfriend. He went to the pub and stayed out all night while his girlfriend stayed home sobbed her eyes out.

Now click here.

Plausible?

Or was your first thought "This shirt excuses domestic violence"? Like twitter did?

The professionally aggrieved saw this shirt and immediately started seeding twitter with "Look at this shirt, it makes domestic violence into a joke". Now if you look at the shirt again, thinking about domestic violence, it also makes perfect sense.

But crucially, it would make sense in almost any relationship dispute, violent or not. The frame of mind you're in when you first see the shirt has a massive impact on how you take it.

Needless to say, of course, that TopMan have pulled the shirt.

Freedom of speech

Sometimes, I get comments that really make me grind my teeth and reach for the delete button. Then I stop and realise that deleting those awful dribblings would make me no better than them.

But now I need to go to the dentist again.

Not so fucking proud of Twatter today

See, now I feel like a bit of a cunt, really. Having been all enthused by what Twatter can do to support free speech, I've now seen what it can do to stop free speech.

This is the thing about free speech: sometimes it's fucking nasty. Sometimes you have to support the right of people to say hateful and unpleasant things. I didn't agree with Jan Moir's nasty, innuendo-laden nastiness at all. But I fully support her right to say such nasty things so that everyone can see her for the nasty bitch she is.

Stephen Fry and Derren Brown have led a charge to bully advertisers into withdrawing from advertising on that page. And they're full of triumphalism about their success. Now I would have had no problem with M&S or whoever saying themselves "Fuck that, we don't want to be associated with this nasty old bag." But this was just a massive bullying campaign from people who didn't like a particular point of view being expressed.

Just stop and think about this for a moment: where does this end? If Stephen Fry doesn't like what Geert Wilders says and launches a Twitter campaign to get him banned from the country, where do you stand then? If a hundred thousand Daily Mail readers start a campaign to get Stephen Fry banned from ever appearing on TV again, where do you stand then?

This kind of unthinking, vindictive mob nastiness is, in my opinion, not significantly more intelligent or conductive to our well-being as a society than Jan Moir is.

The two freespeechers have a slightly ironic take on this: they don't want anyone to read the Mail.

Update: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown has a curious post about freedom of speech here: basically, she says, freedom of speech is fine, until you cross the line. And the line is defined, by, well, our liberal elite betters:

However, though I passionately believe in free speech, I am not an absolutist nor a hypocrite.

In other words: "I believe in free speech until someone says something that I really disagree with. Oh, and then I'm not a hypocrite because I say so."

I guess what fucks me off about this story is that instead of the government telling me what I am supposed to think and say, I now have Stephen fucking Fry and Derren fucking Brown dictating the norms by which I must live.

Update 2: As if by magic ...

A blogger needs your moral support

I don't always support bloggers in libel cases, but I think my bete rouge deserves support:

Interestingly, the jury will be asked to rule on whether or not it is libellous to call somebody 'one cherry short of a Schwarzwalderkirschtorte'. Not my words, but those of a reader, left in the comments box. If I lose on that point, the consequences for internet freedom of speech are clearly considerable.

This is not a party political issue; indeed, the mighty bluerinse himself, Iain Dale, is appearing on Dave's behalf.

I wish Dave well, and I hope you will too.

Dave Barry on free speech

If you don't already read Dave Barry, go out and get some now. You can thank me later.

Tip of the clown wig to the Whited Sepulchre.

How ironic

The speech Geert Wilders would have given, if the fearty fuckwits had let him in:

For a moment I feared that I would be refused entrance. But I was confident the British government would never sacrifice free speech because of fear of Islam. Britannia rules the waves, and Islam will never rule Britain, so I was confident the Border Agency would let me through. And after all, you have invited stranger creatures than me. Two years ago the House of Commons welcomed Mahmoud Suliman Ahmed Abu Rideh, linked to Al Qaeda. He was invited to Westminster by Lord Ahmed, who met him at Regent’s Park mosque three weeks before. Mr. Rideh, suspected of being a money man for terror groups, was given a SECURITY sticker for his Parliamentary visit.

Well, if you let in this man, than an elected politician from a fellow EU country surely is welcome here too. By letting me speak today you show that Mr Churchill’s spirit is still very much alive. And you prove that the European Union truly is working; the free movement of persons is still one of the pillars of the European project.

How touching.

How misplaced.