Free speech is absolutely essential to democracy. Without the right to disagree, there is quite literally no political freedom. It is only on the basis of disagreement that we can work out what is the right thing to do.
Free speech is absolutely essential to democracy. Without the right to disagree, there is quite literally no political freedom. It is only on the basis of disagreement that we can work out what is the right thing to do.
He should go on the stage. The one with the noose hanging from the ceiling and the trapdoor in the floor…
But he’s right. We need to be able to disagree with Spud so that he can show us his brilliance and superiority over us mere plebs.
Any further disagreement once he has explained the error of your thinking is simply trolling, probably of a neo-liberal nature.
Beware of false prophets…by their fruits ye shall know them.
I can’t stand the man but free speech is not the same as giving someone a platform.
True, but he’s always claiming to want debate, until it looks like happening. The obvious place would be where he, to stretch a word, writes. Or at least where fist hits typewriter.
And when it’s not his blog, when it’s a paper in which he’s occasionally been lucky enough to get a piece, he posts a comment asking, not, instructing the editor to remove other people’s comments.
Yes, I did enjoy telling him he couldn’t do that because it wasn’t his gaff.
He’s right; free speech is essential. THE DEBATE IS OVER!
I’ve just read it all: truly remarkable. He expressly cites comedians being sacked as proof that free speech is being eroded. Yet search high and low for one word, just one word from him about the cancelling of Graham Linehan; you won’t find it. He purports to defend journalism. Yet search again, this time for his defences of Alison Pearson, of Julie Bindall, of Kathleen Stock, for his outrage at Joanne Rowling being doxed; you’ll be searching forever. He fears the arrest of Palestinian Action supporters is the end of all our freedoms (which might not be far off, to be fair). Yet he has demanded the no-platforming of so many people for the crime of not holding the exact same view that he holds.
Yes, he’s just a fucking arsehole. He’s also though now a friend of the leader of the Greens; he could actually very soon be a parliamentarian. Which makes you wonder just how many others just like him are skulking around one of the two houses.
How come we never see Murphy or the ASI Troll on these pages?
At least as far as I know I’ve never banned or deleted either of them.
I do curtail the occasional one that strays into libel or out and out racism and vileness which is more a matter of my taste than anything else. But it’s one in months – and please, no, don’t take that as being a challenge.
Sigh. Know you lot.
Please ban the tedious halfwit who makes a misery of the ASI blog should it arrive here.
Hell, he has even banned me, as well as the donkey
The eyes have it.
That’s potato eyes of course
I have never seen a man whose bearing was so provoking and intolerable. To no opinion, which differed from his, he accorded the honour of even a condescending consideration. Everyone who contradicted him he treated with abject contempt; every argument that he did not like he answered either with biting scorn at the unfathomable ignorance that had prompted it, or with opprobrious aspersions upon the motives of him who had advanced it.
Remind you of someone? Actually it’s Carl Shurz on Marx (another utter cunt, except it seems to his kids), quoted by Sowell.
Free speech? Didn’t Murphy get a blogger sacked?