Verily I say unto thee, that BearItAll spake thusly:
> Roy Schestowitz wrote:
>> New bill to give bloggers same shield law protection as journalists
[...]
> You mean that they can legally talk absolute bollocks?
>
> It does sound a bit risky in that absolutely anything could be said, and
> repeated. A clever virtual orator could persuade people to do all kinds of
> stupid things, like join cults or terrorist organisations claiming the
> words are someone elses.
That's the price of free speech. You cannot establish such a principle
and then arbitrarily dictate who is free to speak and who isn't.
In as much as I believe in free speech however, I also believe in
justice, and if someone slanders or libels another, or incites
terrorism, then that is due cause to take legal action. *That* is (and
should be) the deterrent against criminal behaviour, not martial law and
censorship.
> These Bin Laden folk, talking ordinary kids into strapping bombs onto
> themselves and blow themselves and a few strangers up. Has to be some
> clever talkers to persuade them to do that. "A source close to Bin Laden
> said...." that gets them round ay FBI visitors because they only have to
> say 'I have a legal right to keep quiet about my source'.
Fundamentalist Muslims have been spreading anti-Western propaganda for
centuries, I doubt if some free-speech amendment is going to make much
difference to them.
The way to counter another's opinion, is to simply voice your own, and
hopefully gather widespread support for it. There's plenty of "bad guys"
spreading all kinds of propaganda out there, but there's no way I'd
compromise my own liberty by changing the system to inhibit free speech
... it works both ways. As and when the bad guys turn words into action,
then by all means the good guys should use the law as a countermeasure.
> So rather than protect bloggers with various laws, I think it is much better
> and safer in world terms to cut the hands off all bloggers. See if there is
> room for that in an ammendment would you.
Fortunately, the Internet is not yet governed by the Islamic Sharia.
--
K.
http://slated.org
.----
| 'Also, no one calls it PCI-X even though that's the "official "
| shortening of the much more commonly used "PCI Express".'
| - Hardon Quirk, COLA's resident "genius".
`----
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.20-1.2312.fc5
18:58:28 up 28 days, 16:30, 2 users, load average: 0.21, 0.24, 0.19
|
|
