The hate speech review is horrifically wrong footed.
Beyond the technical issues of policing hate speech and beyond the concerns of Governments having the power to censor online speech, there are two issues that make this whole reflection on hate speech fraught.
The first is the Woke Left’s belief that micro aggression leads directly to macro violence. This ideological need to police micro aggressions as if they are war crimes has the ability to turn solidarity to stop terrorists live streaming their violence into a freedom of speech fight as quickly as you can say ‘the Wellington Twitteratti are coming for you’.
Section 61 of the Human Rights Act prohibits the “incitement of disharmony” on the basis of race, ethnicity, colour or national origins. Those wanting more controls want religion, gender, disability and sexual orientation added, which would be agreeable if it weren’t for the Millennial need to police micro aggressions and redefine ‘incitement of disharmony’ as bullshit twitter fights.
We saw what the woke did to the Pride Parade, it went from a 30 000 person event last year to a mere 2000 this year because pure temple activists demanded exclusion to be inclusive. Do we really want to trust them with a free speech debate?
The Woke Left’s super power to alienate aside, the main reason why re-examining hate speech to protect us from the kind of violence we saw in Christchurch is terribly wrong headed is that it won’t in any way shape or form project us from a repeat and in fact could work in the terrorists favour.
The Christchurch atrocity occurred because of grotesque incompetence from the Intelligence Apparatus, it didn’t occur because of a permissive attitude towards free speech.
The SIS (Secret Intelligence Services), the GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau), the NSG (National Security Group), the CNSN (Cabinet National Security Committee), the ODESC (Officials’ Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination), the SIB (Security and Intelligence Board), the CTCC (Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Committee), the NICC ( National Intelligence Coordination Committee) the IAD (Intelligence and Assessments Directorate), the NRU (National Risk Unit) and the NSPD (National Security Policy Directorate) all missed a white supremacist with multiple complaints against him while he plotted an atrocity for 2 years because they believed the threat was from Muslims, Māori, Environmentalists, Journalists and social justice activists.
Alpha Troll Predators like the Christchurch terrorist actually operate in the open, by forcing them underground we make them more dangerous and more difficult to monitor.
If we want to protect ourselves from a repeat of this terrible crime against our Muslim Brothers and Sisters, focus on the failures of the Intelligence Apparatus, not Hate Speech laws.
Well I suspect that those who covert strengthening hate-speech laws do so in the vein hope that they will be exempted so that hate-speech laws only apply to people to the right of the woke-left which is pretty much everyone who wasn’t at the 2000 strong woke pride parade.
Sam: “…they will be exempted so that hate-speech laws only apply to people to the right of the woke-left which is pretty much everyone who wasn’t at the 2000 strong woke pride parade.”
Heh! Yeah, I think that we can be forgiven for coming to that conclusion.
I’m yet to see any examples of the “hate speech” which people want to shut down. Not, I’d add, for lack of trying to elicit examples from such people.
So: I continue to favour free speech to the fullest extent possible.
This thread sent chills down my spine:
https://twitter.com/GGrucilla/status/1123114976602759168
Imagine these people and their friends having decision making power in the Police or the NZSIS!
Chills indeed, Bob. These medieval haters already exist in at least one govt dept.
I used to think that they were uber politically correct and fairly harmless. I was wrong. They can make life hell for their colleagues, and intimidate management too.
I took one bad accusation to the ERA, won; a previous issue one was settled in house – easily, because the manager was shocked, and said he could hardly believe what had occurred.
There many groups of people who learn to live with hate, bullying and prejudice on a daily-weekly -monthly-yearly-lifetime basis because they have no other choice. It humanises some, but not all, and further restricting speech is actually dangerous because it’ll be open sesame for the self-absorbed brats who cannot tolerate, accept, or understand difference.
The past week or so when supporters of Muslims have been accused of being anti-Christian anti-white anti-brown etc has been a stark example of how very ugly and very limited some people’s mental processes are.
Bob, these girls are making things up to suit their own narrative.
EG
“Anyone else notice that people with the most privilege, job security, and economic wellness are nearly always the least likely to speak out against injustice and put themselves at risk in order to tautoko others?”
Bob Jones is a long-term supporter of the Women’s Refuge movement.
This helps battered Maori women.
Phil Bagshaw, surgeon, has been openly critical of the health system which employs him and founded a charity hospital for the poor.Maori kids have high hospitalisation rates.
The Morgan Foundation funds various programs to help disadvantage and deprived people here and overseas.
Mary Joy Hardy worked tirelessly raising money for the Sallies, and Mary Potter Hospice.
In Wellington Mark Dunajitschick is funding the building of a new children’s hospital which will help all children of every ilk.
There are masses of good kiwis working tirelessly as volunteers in many areas, and willing to stick their necks out. We all know some, or are some.
I wonder why hasn’t Chloe noticed them, or is she colour blind ?
Her above statement is misleading and mischievous, deliberately or not.
Bob: “This thread sent chills down my spine”
Me too. Jeezus…. it gave me the creeps.
“Do we really want to trust them with a free speech debate?”
NOPE
“f we want to protect ourselves from a repeat of this terrible crime against our Muslim Brothers and Sisters, focus on the failures of the Intelligence Apparatus, not Hate Speech laws.”
Easy enough to say when you’re not the one targetted by hate speech………
It’s easy to be liberal on free speech when the attacks are not made against you, day after day, week sfter week, year after year
Until finally some radicalised nutter takes all tgat hare speech and acts on it
If not white supremicists or Islamists or someone wanting to bomb an abortion clinic
Free speech aint free We should get that notion right out of our minds
Meanwhile
This:
“A Palmerston North church is considering introducing security measures after it and another church were targeted with anti-Muslim propaganda.
Attendees of All Saints’ Church, and the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit found the crudely written pamphlets on their windscreens after Sunday services.
Reverend Andy Hickman from All Saints’ Anglican Church said the pamphlets were distressing.
“The pamphlet itself uses really extreme language such as ‘Islam is the enemy, this is a declaration of war, this is them versus us’,” he said.
Both churches held solidarity events with the Manawatū Muslim Association after the Christchurch shootings.
Mr Hickman said he believed the events were directly connected to the pamphlets, but they would not be deterred.
“Everybody I have communicated with have no regrets, because we won’t allow hate to divide us.
“Love overcomes a multitude of fears, so we will continue to publicly express our solidarity with our Muslim friends,” he said.
He has reported the matter to the police, but in the meantime he said the church was looking at increasing security.” https://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/388162/palmerston-north-churches-targeted-with-anti-muslim-pamphlets
Mjolnir: “Free speech aint free…”
The term “free” in this context means the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint. I really don’t know what you thought it meant.
“Easy enough to say when you’re not the one targetted by hate speech”
While you’re at it, perhaps you could give us some examples of hate speech. Is it just “things people say that you don’t like”?
You may wish to deplatform people with whom you disagree, but it by no means follows that the boot wouldn’t be on the other foot, and it’s you yourself who gets deplatformed.
So true.
I’m waiting for the orientation/gender/ethnicity rule because overwhelmingly the woke left viciously decries hetero white males.
The wokelings will be roasted on their own fire.
Keepcalm, they hate white heterosexual woman too. I can name one woman in a Wellington govt dept who was labelled, “White bitch and rich bitch,” because she was Pakeha and owned her own home, where she lived alone and twice went home to her empty house and rang The Samaritans.
Something that does need to be added to human rights is the right to information. Receiving good quality journalism is an absolute right, with relevant and accurate reporting essential to democracy. I would class the manufactured drivel produced by main stream media both direct hate speech (biased, racist, elitist, corporatist, emperialist), and also hate speech by omisson (irrelevant, incomplete, inaccessible). HRC and BSA should be ashamed.
+1 Jody
Good points.
And who decides what is good quality journalism ?
The same people that decide what is and is not hate speech?
Sorry but this is precisely the same flawed logic.
The trouble with these idiots is that there is at least a small chance that their antics will create a backlash against gays and other groups who now actually have it pretty good compared to 30 years ago.
Oh, yeah. “Pretty good”.
Feeling an itsy bit smug, are we??
So you think they don’t have it pretty good compared to circa 1980s when homosexuality was illegal?
Can you please explain that to the rest of us? I’d love to hear the logic.
To focus on the (neologism) hate speech and contemplate compromising our rights is simply easy for you to do isn’t it Andrew.
Given the Bill of Rights isn’t entrenched and confers only obligations in dealings with government rather that actualizing personal individual rights there’s nothing stopping you is there?
But actually if you were in a fixed context and you were forced to consider those rights embedded you and the rest of the so called brains trust would actually be expected to devise some sort of national public campaign to address the real causes, which are the toxic beliefs of the toxic individuals not the secondary effect they have which is their alleged hate speech.
But since that would require more skills than you currently have available you simply won’t go there. It’s so much easier just to menace those rights. But folks I think we should consider how to fix that context in place before people like Andrew Little abscond with it and flush all the rights down the toilet. You’d be swimming through miles of turds to get them back
The freedom to hate … the woke/fellow traveller/immigrant/UnAmerican must be defended at all cost …
Hate allows us to divide and conquer and be divided and conquered – where would all powerful social media tribalism be without it?
If we’re to believe Paul Hunt, criticizing Muslims or even telling jokes about Arabs shagging camels starts us on a slippery slope that will sooner or later precipitate us to pogroms and mass-shootings.
Hate speech legislation won’t make us even slightly safer from terrorism, and will divert police resources from tackling real crime. It will be used by ideologues to shut down adult discussion of complex issues such as the challenges facing multicultural societies. It will also lead to absurdities like this https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=12202875.
Chruskl:”If we’re to believe Paul Hunt, criticizing Muslims or even telling jokes about Arabs shagging camels starts us on a slippery slope that will sooner or later precipitate us to pogroms and mass-shootings.”
That fellow needs to choose his words with a great deal more care than he seems to have done so far. The last thing we in NZ need right now is zealotry of that sort coming out of the Human Rights Commission.
Come to that, my view is that NZ doesn’t need the HRC; probably never did. Time to disestablish it.
The problem with hate speech is _not speech_.
The Guardian today posted a history of how parts of Sweden tackled neo-nazism (hint: they did it intelligently):
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/may/01/hate-is-always-local-the-swedish-city-that-said-no-to-neo-nazis
Great post Martyn and also many good responses in the comments.
Thanks everyone – it makes me feel fairly confident that we won’t go down the road of the UK where you’re likely to get your door broken down by Speech Police for presenting a non PC fact online.
As a centrist, I really hope Andy Little & like minds in Labour and the Greens pursue this notion because, if the sample of comments here is anything to go by, it will drive hordes of voters away from the Left. But shhhh – don’t tell them that. 😉
Don’t hold your breath Andrew. I may try and get “Madam Butterfly” banned from NZ. It is blatantly anti-white male, anti-American, anti- American military, and it stereotypes Asian women as meek submissive
victims who self-harm.
Gilbert & Sullivan is worse with racial and social stereotyping and dopey ethnic allusions – but I never liked G &S anyway.
Shakespeare’s worse, anti-Semitic, brutally accurate in much of his history, and again he shows white men as weak and vacillating and a black man murdering his virtuous white wife. Total ban – we don’t need this sort of thing.
Read, ‘The Sale of Saint Thomas’, describing cannibalising a holy – if a doubting – man and it is so hateful that probably all the Gloucestershire
poets should be banned outright.
I started checking Hans Christian Anderson, but the racial metaphors and assumptions in ‘The Shepherdess and The Chimney Sweep’ could give kids such a distorted and negative view of unrealities that I gave up.
Maybe a total ban on all colloquial speech, and if the Greens have their own pet words which they want to keep, we don’t have to keep them – or them keep the words. Their call.
Very good Snow White
LOL
As someone from the other side of the political divide I thought this was a great article and great comments.
Good to see common sense can prevail and override ideological mantra that we see comming from to many people currently in high places
Jody: “Receiving good quality journalism is an absolute right, with relevant and accurate reporting essential to democracy.”
Yes indeed. And if there’s been any of that in my lifetime, it’s been only occasionally. For the most part, we’ve been fed propaganda. Had we known the truth about what’s gone on in the world since WW2, I’m certain that we’d have put pressure on our governments to act differently from the way they did.
Jay’s: “And who decides what is good quality journalism ?”
We the citizens decide that. But we can only do so if all pertinent information about issues or events is made public. And – a priori – we here need journalists, not just reporters. As far as I can tell, we still don’t have any in NZ; and – a fortiori – we don’t have any foreign affairs specialist journalists. There’s no tradition of that here, sadly.
Until the rise of the internet, we got from the msm propaganda glossed as news. This goes right back to my childhood and the Korean war. I remember dinner table discussions among family members about it. They relied on what the newspapers reported; it has been only in the last 20 years or so that I’ve learned the real history of that ghastly conflict. That’s been thanks largely to US academics and historians, and a few journalists. I’m certain that, had we known the truth, we’d not have allowed NZ troops to fight there.
We were also fed propaganda regarding the Cuban missile crisis (I thank Noam Chomsky for publishing the revisionist history), notoriously the Vietnam war, the end of the USSR, the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the ME conflicts, imperialism in Asia, Africa and South America and so on.
Had there been a tradition of actual journalism here, the political direction of this country would, I’m sure, have been very different. We’d have been much more likely to be non-aligned.
“The same people that decide what is and is not hate speech?
Sorry but this is precisely the same flawed logic.”
I agree with you. This is precisely why I favour freedom of speech to the fullest extent possible.
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