What 18C does is, it prohibits the utterance of words that could potentially offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone and that is problematic.
Criminal offenses fall under two categories. Mala in se are intrinsically wrong as determined by a civilised society, for instance rape, murder and theft. These are wrong in and of themselves regardless of how they are dealt with from a legislative standpoint. Mala prohibitum are arbitrarily wrong because the lawmakers say so, for instance driving a vehicle without a license, illegal drug use and copyright infringements. 18C is a malum prohibitum presented to the world by the left as a malum in se in order to boost its appeal to moral conscience, hoping to guilt trip Australians into appreciating its alleged utility.
Sherry Sufi’s scathing overview of Australia’s be-always-politically-correct legislation “18C” covers the psychology and realpolitik of obtaining a gateway for claiming victimization in response to a critic’s speech and the power to take the same to court for it.
As often noted in this space, there’s no greater a signal to malignant narcissism than the want of obtaining control over someone else’s talk — and then from that what may be heard in the political sphere. In that regard, 18C would appear devised to open the way to serving an autocratic speech-suppressing will.
Excerpted from Sufi’s piece:
Those fearing the worst may wish to note that Australia continues to remain one of the most ‘discrimination-sensitive’ nations on earth. Statutes designed to protect the vulnerable from discrimination based on race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, age, disability or religion are staggering in number as confirmed by the voluminous list below.
What Ken Wyatt and Adam Goodes should be asking is, why should discrimination not be fought using existing Criminal Code provisions and the various defamation laws already in place which seek to protect all Australians regardless of racial origin in the face of abuse and vulnerability. The very existence of these special ‘identity-specific’ laws presupposes that those it represents are different from the rest of Australia. It assumes that they are weaker and want to be treated differently.
Customers and staff of the Forbes and Burton Cafe in Darlinghurst have walked out on the owner, after the Daily Mail reports cafe owner ‘Steven’ turned down a Brazilian man applying for a job because he was “black”.
Nilson Dos Santos applied for a job at the cafe, and apparently ‘Steven’ didn’t ask him a single question, merely made the remark that Nilson was “black”.
Steven reportedly said he didn’t want “coffee made by black people”.
Apparently after being turned away by Steven, Mr Dos Santos stood up and announced to the other customers on Sunday why he had been rejected from the job and even asked them if they minded being served by a black man.
By title, one wonders what might be inadequate about, say, the “Racial Discrimination Act (1975), as regards fielding what might become greater bad news for cafe owner “Steven”, if indeed events took place as told.
Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful for someone to do an act that is reasonably likely to “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate” someone because of their race or ethnicity.
Section 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act contains exemptions which protect freedom of speech. These ensure that artistic works, scientific debate and fair comment on matters of public interest are exempt from section 18C, providing they are said or done reasonably and in good faith.
These are the pages banned by PTA in collaboration with FB.
BackChannel’s source.
I asked my source for a top half-dozen elements blocked (filtered out) by Pakistan’s government with the complicity of the common carrier Facebook — generally liberal progressive organizations or personalities and their pages. The following is what he reported.
Screen capture: Taliban is Zaliman post on PTA censorship. Read it and weep.
Bhensa (Buffalo)
“It is basically a satirical page which uses satire to hit religious orthodoxy and terrorist outfits,” says my source:
Saeen
Tip source: “OMG. Saeen has been taken down second time in 2 days.”
I reminded the source that the censorship may have blocked the site.
🙂
On trust, I’m leaving “Saeen” in even though I’m not certain what “Saeen” is may be, is, or was. It’s enough to know that something with a name, probably good, liberal, good natured, helpful, has been censored and intimidated by the State of Pakistan through the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority with the imprimatur of Dr. Syed Ismail Shah, who himself seems in “webpression” quite progressive himself (at the bottom of this post, you may see and hear him speak).
“Ministerial Programme 2014 interview with Syed Ismail Shah, Chairman of Pakistan regulator PTA.”
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Nature abhors monocultures and encourages variance and adaptability all the way through. What is true in biology with regard to basic structures and their differentiation and elaboration in nature may be true also of the intellectual development of our gregarious species. I remind conversational partners often that our small planet supports an inventory of about 7,000 living languages, each one of them approaching, inventing, and seeing the world surrounding and the speaker speaking a little differently. With some trims for the survivability of the greater humanity, we should, imho, love and preserve as much of that thought as we may while with mind in mind also dancing and encouraging creativity, new invention, and altogether a more robust humanity.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
Obama said Thursday that the referendum would violate both the Ukrainian constitution and international law. He called on Russia to help reduce tensions on the Crimean Peninsula, as he ordered sanctions on Russians involved in Russia’s military intervention and Ukrainians who have jeopardized democracy and looted national assets. Obama later spoke by phone with Putin for more than hour.
Putin also claims that “there is every reason to believe” chemical weapons were “used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons, who would be siding with the fundamentalists,” despite a forthcoming U.N. report that will reportedly finger the Assad regime as the culprit.
I’m going with Femen — those gals put their boots on the ground and boobies in the air every time out, never mind catching cold.
One might wish one could say as much of Russians standing off to the side of Russian nationalists whom Putin means to portray as majority Russians, the only Russians, the Russians who are represented, at least by himself, not by the pestered Alexy Navalny (three hours ago: “Navalny Fined for Participation in Unsanctioned Public Gathering,” RFE — it’s got to be back in business big time with Russia’s rush backwards to despotism) or the now absent-from-Russia-until-Putin-leaves Gary Kasparov:
Mr. Putin belongs to an exclusive club, along with Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Miloševic, as one of the very few leaders to invade a neighboring nation in the nuclear age. Such raw expansionist aggression has been out of fashion since the time of Adolf Hitler, who eventually failed, and Joseph Stalin, who succeeded. Stalin’s Red Army had its share of battlefield glory, but his real triumph came at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, three months before the end of the war in Europe. There Stalin bullied a feeble Franklin Roosevelt and a powerless Winston Churchill, redrawing the Polish borders and promising elections in Poland when he knew that the Communist government the Soviets were installing was there to stay.
In Washington, D.C., Ketchum represents Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia. One may trust it was well paid for the September placement denying Assad’s use, well investigated, of chemical warheads in the Syria’s civil war.
At least one might consider Ketchum in the best of like company:
In May 2009, Waldman filed paperwork with the DOJ indicating he would be working with Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska to provide “legal advice on issues involving his U.S. visa as well as commercial transactions.”
Deripaska had his U.S. visa revoked in 2006 due to longstanding concerns about his links to organized crime and because the State Department was concerned he lied to American investigators who were looking into his business.
American Executives Working For Putin – Business Insider – 3/5/2014, on Adam Waldman representing Oleg Deripaska. Others included in the Business Insider story by Hunter Walker include Ketchum Inc.; Robert C. Jones, an attorney “ultimately responsible to Ketchum, Inc. (the money involved: about $535,000 in contracts devoted to working for Russia); William Nordwind, partner in a consultancy serving both Gazprom and Ketchum (I don’t want to relay the earnings — the story is larger than this paragraph and the curious reader may click to it.
Caption: “On the mourning of March 6 2014 Pussy Riot members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, along with Peter Verzilov and members of their prisoners rights NGO “Zone of the Rights” arrived in the city of Nizhny Novgorod to inspect a local prison. At 7.20 am an organized group barged into the McDonalds where members of Pussy Riot with their crew were having breakfast and attacked them with pepper spray, green antiseptic and other weapons.”
So sad to see these two so less wild after gulag time, but they were peacefully doing their new NGO thing, and by that I mean doing what human rights NGOs do, i.e., looking into matters involving the victimization of others.
On Ukraine and Crimea, on democracy and human rights in Russia, forget about Ketchum and company and what they do for money: go with the girls, Femen and Pussy Riot, for integrity.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
I see no reportage of the video up top on either site, not that I’m looking too hard for that or expect that from a system invested in controlling constituent access to global information.
* * *
If the world’s on fire, we can see it today, but no one can see it all at once. I’ve missed protests in Venezuela, a now ongoing story in major media, and am not inclined to keep up daily with the tragedy dogging the Burmese Rohingya (Malaysia, which accepts members of the Muslim tribe, would do well to attend their defense and retrieval) or the Central African Republic (CAR), where Christian militia have been persecuting Muslims, although that conflict I might well bring on to these virtual pages.
This episode well portrays the different workings of “western” and “eastern” minds. The western mind wants the protests to be about “freedom of speech”; the eastern one, apparently, wants it to be about freedom from insult.
The protesters reportedly claimed the series defames the large and powerful Bakhtiari tribe. A Bakhtiari family in the series is depicted as corrupt, nouveau riche and monarchist.
Since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency he never really left, Russia’s descent into neo-Soviet authoritarianism has become daily more brazen. Dissidents are once again being put on show trials that call up the ghosts of Joseph Brodsky, Andrei Sinyavsky, and Yuli Daniel. Laws are being jammed through the Duma with the express purpose of making Western-minded Russians fear that they will be arrested for spying for foreign powers.
The state media regulator Roskomnadzor filed a motion with the court in early October to have the agency’s license revoked, accusing the agency of publishing videos with foul language, according to reports in the local and international press.
While Putin’s machinery poses its challenges to foul language (and gay pride, judging by the latest), it would seem to welcome every opportunity to further abuse basic human rights and democratic values. By way of doing what it has been doing — and doing it better — it has inspired its opposition locally, online, and worldwide.
The MediEval Empire is back!
And it is fast returning Russians to the status of loyal — more and more frequently, barely tolerated — subjects.
Ah, the glory.
The funny thing is, predictably, with Al Qaeda operating in Syria, Putin remains an heroic standard bearer for decency and freedom despite what the Putin-armed Assad regime has done to Syrians (don’t look — at least put it off twenty more seconds) and what Putin’s editing of laws may be doing (are) to Russia’s vast and under-served constituency.
Still, the disappointment . . . .
Peering out from behind the bars of the closed and censored USSR, during the Perestroika period, we young journalists felt an incredible urge for freedom. While we were all ready to make sacrifices for that prize, none of us could not imagine in our worst nightmares that in a free Russia journalists could be killed for their work. Media professionals could be censored in USSR, fired, jailed or even exiled – but not killed. We also believed – and our Western counterparts with whom we were shared this belief – that the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War would herald in a new era of free expression and independent talented journalism would inevitably flourish across Europe and Central Asia. East and West, we would create a bright liberated information space stretching undimmed from the Atlantic to the Pacific. We failed utterly to anticipate and foresee how corrupt authorities and criminal gangs would develop new forms of censorship and pressure to bring our dream so violently to heel.
The Russian advocacy group International Academy of Spiritual Unity and Cooperation of Peoples of the World nominated Mr. Putin, characterizing his forged agreement with Syrian President Bashar Assad — to turn over admitted chemical weapons cache to international authorities — a world-class and prize-worthy piece of diplomacy, United Press International reported.
On Nov. 10, Russian performance artist Pyotr Pavlensky undressed on Moscow’s Red Square, right in front of Lenin’s tomb, sat down and nailed his scrotum to the pavement.
Reactions to the radical act, which Pavlensky meant to be a “metaphor of the apathy, political indifference and fatalism of modern Russian society,” ranged from disbelief to mockery. A police source told state-owned news agency RIA Novosti that the action constituted normal behavior “for a mentally ill person.”
Make of that what you will — ouch! — and otherwise enjoy the references.
Netflix has it, so I’m off to watch the Khodorkovsky documentary.
Russia: TV Crew Reporting on Sochi Olympics Harassed | Human Rights Watch – 11/5/2013: “From October 31 to November 2, 2013, Russian traffic police stopped Øystein Bogen, a reporter for TV2, and cameraman Aage Aunes six times while the men were reporting on stories in the Republic of Adygea, which borders Sochi to the north along the Black Sea coast. Officials took the journalists into police custody three times. At every stop and in detention, officials questioned the journalists aggressively about their work plans in Sochi and other areas, their sources, and in some cases about their personal lives, educational backgrounds, and religious beliefs. In several instances they denied the journalists contact with the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow. One official threatened to jail Bogen.”
Jailed Anti-Kremlin Punk Rocker Launches New Appeal | Russia | RIA Novosti – 11/7/2013: “Tolokonnikova’s husband, Pyotr Verzilov, said he had been informed the Pussy Riot band member was being relocated to a prison colony in the territory of Krasnoyarsk, located 3400 kilometers (2100 miles) east of Moscow, but authorities have yet to confirm that information.”
Mihail Chemiakin – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “With his colleagues from the museum he organized an exhibition in 1964, after which the director of the museum was fired and all the participants forced to resign. In 1967 he co-authored with philosopher Vladimir Ivanov a treatise called “Metaphysical Synthesism”, which laid out his artistic principles, and created the “St. Petersburg Group” of artists . In 1971 he was exiled from the Soviet Union for failing to conform to Socialist Realism norms.”
Mstislav Rostropovich – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “Rostropovich fought for art without borders, freedom of speech, and democratic values, resulting in harassment from the Soviet regime. An early example was in 1948, when he was a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In response to the 10 February 1948 decree on so-called ‘formalist’ composers, his teacher Dmitri Shostakovich was dismissed from his professorships in Leningrad and Moscow; the then 21-year-old Rostropovich quit the conservatory, dropping out in protest.”
All of that above: barely a morning’s drag-and-drop with a hint or two of actual writing in it . . . . I like it although it could change that old book title and jazz and music line “That was then, this is now” to “That was then: THIS is still THEN.”
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Perhaps we could have both for a while — then, now, and then.
My correspondent in Pakistan sent me the link to an anti-Semitic (anti-Black, anti-Muslim, etc.) hate page and asked “How do you deal with these white supremists?
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Nice people . . . .
We let them talk all they want.
The timbre of the surrounding culture is such that when they’re found out, individually, their business and social prospects may be minimized by natural normative social processes. They’re sickness — and that’s most American, not only Jews but most Christians as well, view it — is such that they’re liable to gravitate to their own intellectual kind.
If the group has any history in crime or violence, the police will monitor minimally through ex-con or probation relationships with individuals (not with the group), and if more attention is needed, the old joke about FBI COINTELPRO applies: “How do you get to meet an FBI agent?” — “Attend a KKK meeting!”
If the organization commits a crime, the whole law enforcement community will be up its ass pretty damn quick to make arrests on the crime and conspiracy to commit it.
If the organization has developed a criminal history, then even reformed, it’s probably infiltrated and tracked. The old “COINTELPRO” — a term that may be looked up — involved some dirty tricks bordering on entrapment but always inspiring mistrust and paranoia within the targeted group.
Oddly enough and relevant here, it’s unknown to what extent the still new Federal intelligence and security communities have going on with the Muslim Brotherhood in America (incidentally, there are no holds reading Chechnya’s Kavkaz Center or Al Qaeda’s Inspire feeds). On the surface, it appears that the Administration has hired and integrated into its departments key Brotherhood figures like Mohamed Elibiary — http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2013/09/muslim-brotherhood-supporter-gets-homeland-security-promotion.html — and given out promotions. I think the intent was to elevate, integrate, and surround with the greater polygot American culture the mentality involved. That too seems not to be going so well and the conservative right press harps on these Obama decisions quite a bit.
I’ve been convinced for a while that the Obama Administration has been playing a deeply deceptive politics abroad and at home, so it hasn’t endorsed the Saudis — and their being upset about that has been in the news this week — nor has it abandoned Israel, but we are worried about Iran’s steps toward failproof defense of its nuclear war making capability, which it may do by acquiring a civilian reactor too dangerous when active for destruction or dismantling. The workaround, since Russia wants to sell the Ayatollah on its part of the nuclear business, Chernobyl notwithstanding, has been to mess with the intellectual capacity in human talent and machinery involved in the pursuit of those aims. There Israel and the U.S. may diverge, for the Israelis feel that an endless policy of half measures will lead to their own destruction.
Back to other hate groups, Islamic Jihad in America, and “homeland security” — I think the aim of responsible government, such as it may be (some voters believe it absent and the country already “sold down the river”, a colloquial phrase having to do with shipping slaves from pleasant Kentucky to the markets of New Orleans) — is to treat political threat and violence engineered by Muslims no differently than it does Christian ideologues and any number of cults and gangs similarly involved with their own weird tribal politics and the posture taken against the rest of the world. If there’s a problem with that, it may be that the Muslim Brotherhood is latched to a major religion, has decades of organizational history behind it, and has a vision for mankind to rival the Nazis in its supremacist aspect.
Shimmer applies. If the scale and tempo of violence — any group or cause — American politicians and the government will ramp up the pressure to suppress that form of political exuberance. Apparently, an annual atrocity or two may not produce sufficient cause to, for example, revisit laws on sedition. The concern remains that what we do for one mob and its cause, we must do for all. For the most part, instead of criminalizing the politics, we wait for the politics to become criminal, and then we take apart the organizations.
In national religious politics: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/10/17/richardson-texas-imam-leaves-dallas-central-mosque-quietly/ The imam has been noted as one of the 500 most influential Muslims in the world, so there’s an intelligence story in there that I’m unlikely to pry apart. Maybe the crackdown on the Brotherhood in Egypt involved information that impugned the imam; maybe the Wahhabi thrust in the politics unseated the stance he represented, and he was forced from power; perhaps some other aspect in politics or state needs, including Erdogan’s interest in supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, call him back to Istanbul; perhaps he really did take an early and quiet retirement, all the better to avoid hoopla and the long crediting in speech in public of mentors and associates along the way.
The true topic is a combine of national mission — egalitarian secular democracy here — and national security, so whether white dudes in basements talking about The Jew over their beer or the leader of the largest mosque in Texas, we’re trying to look at them the same way, guaranty the freedom of the law abiding, including the most hateful of the law abiding or the most contemptuous of others, if that, and keep our radars hot, as it were, for criminal activity.
And that’s how we deal with all of that! 🙂
Whew.
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I credit the same correspondent with awakening me to the politics 101 phrase “behind the curtains,” and with that in mind and much impression garnered from years of blogging feel confident about President Obama’s dividing political surface from political real story.
I’m equally confident about the conservative right’s beyond-the-pale demonizing of the American President and note that not with an overabundance of respect for the office — that would be other than American too — but with numerous second looks into the rationale for moving figures like Elibiary into the Administration’s ranks. The far right cries “Infiltration!” I happen to think such moves make for closer looks and for a look at administrative integration as a potentially culturally transforming process.
What doesn’t work only teaches us more than we knew when we started.
Were it not for greed — and that may be a subject for other writing on this blog — the American political system would be a greater joy for working, but even so, it’s very good at what it does, and what it does, by and large, is produce an Awesome Discourse (a little more important than merely the Awesome Conversation, lol) sustaining a productive domestic tranquility.
In America, so far and far past the Civil War, we’re still much inclined to reach for our quills rather than our quivers when it comes to domestic politics.
Confronting the challenge posed by an uncomfortable truth may be more compassionate and productive than the passive enjoyment of a comforting, patronizing, or placating word. To get a little improvement in “qualities of living”, which might include psychological and spiritual variables as well as physical indices, wants for accuracy in observation and analysis in regard to things that are wrong or not so good, and things that are possible, if not always ideal.
What can be done?
Whether with the geopolitical transitional edges between the medieval and modern; whether with the political psychology related to narcissism in power; whether with capital and communal tensions involving resource allocation, development, and trade — one wants to see into states of affairs with both comprehensive and comprehending means.
That much would be helpful.
Greed is not good; money should not be everything: from household to state, even from the flower box to the lands held by an estate, multiple cultural, environmental, and social ecological systems bear on their productivity and sense of well-being: we should get our heads around that and act to produce law and policy accordingly.
“By blocking websites and bringing Internet access to a crawl, Iranian authorities are saying their own citizens don’t deserve information about the election,” said Sherif Mansour, CPJ’s Middle East and North Africa Coordinator. “What kind of an election is it when journalists are tossed into prison and voters are denied access to the news?”
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