La verite est en marche et rien ne l'arretera , Ctd

Fintan O’Toole wrote in The Irish Times here:

"Over time mainstream opinion comes to recognise that honest beliefs once held by decent people were reprehensible, not because the people were bad, but because the beliefs were shaped by prejudice. This will happen, probably quite soon, with beliefs about sexual orientation."

He continued:

"Sincerity is as irrelevant here as malevolence – it simply doesn’t matter why people uphold structures of discrimination. Throughout history, decent, moral people have believed with complete sincerity that slavery is a moral good, that women are lesser beings who must be protected from their weakness by being obedient to men, that Jews should be confined to ghettoes, that the Irish are incapable of rational thought, that Catholics are unfit to live in democracies and so on."

He continued:

"This is true even of very great men. Aristotle thought slavery entirely natural. Abraham Lincoln thought for most of his career that when slavery was abolished blacks should be shipped out to Africa because they couldn’t possibly live side by side with free whites. Does this make Aristotle and Lincoln bad men? No. It just makes them examples of highly moral and intelligent people who cannot escape inherited structures of discriminatory thought."

He concluded:

"The whole point of the law is that it’s not about giving people equal status because you like them. It’s about freeing people from subjection to the arbitrariness of other people’s benevolence. Gay men and lesbians shouldn’t have to care one way or the other whether the members of the Iona Institute love them or not. Just as the rest of us shouldn’t measure the rights of our fellow citizens by what they get up to in bed."

In full here.

@DavidAllenGreen - Let's ban the banning of things

David Allen Green (@DavidAllenGreen) (@JackofKent) wrote of the political addiction to prhibition and the impulse to ban things in The New Statesman here:

"Those calling for something to be "banned" should... ask two simple questions. First, what will the prohibition do in respect of the undesired behaviour? And second, what other consequences may flow from the prohibition? Good answers to both these questions will inform the political choice as to whether such a ban should be implemented and, if so, how. We may even get better laws as a consequence; we could even get prohibitions that actually work and are proportionate. 

The call for something to be "banned" should be the start of a mature and constructive political debate, and not the end of one. Perhaps the time has come to ban just banning things."

In full here.

Adam Wagner on blogging, social media and self-regulation

Hanging around for #leveson? You could read my inquiry statement on social media regulation! http://t.co/mrysUZfq
— Adam Wagner (@AdamWagner1) November 29, 2012

Adam Wagner was asked here: "The Inquiry would also welcome your views on the extent to which the content of websites, and the manner in which you operate, can be regulated by a domestic system of regulation?"

He responded here:

I do not think blogs can or should be regulated by a domestic system of regulation, for the following reasons: 

a. Practically unworkable: Practically it would be impossible to regulate all blogging. Hundreds of thousands of blogs are set up each day, let alone posts published, and the term is so elastic (see above) that the task would be simply too large and amorphous for any regulator to manage. Even if only popular blogs were targeted, say those over a certain number of hits, what is to stop an individual blogger simply setting up a new blog in order to avoid regulation? I expect that such a system would be simply unworkable. 

b. Current system works: The current system of criminal and civil law already provides a reasonable level of regulation. Bloggers - whether their websites are read by 1 or lm people - are subject to financial penalties for libel or quasi-criminal sanctions if they commit a contempt of court. See for example the case of Elizabeth Watson, referred to be below, who was sentenced to 9 months imprisonment (later suspended) for breaching a court order through information published on her personal website. That being said, I also note a 1 February 2012 report in The Independent that Mr Justice Peart has said in relation to an Irish case involving the www.rate-yoursolicitor.com website that "The civil remedies currently available have recently been demonstrated to be an inadequate means of prevention and redress".