The Right To Be Offensive

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Jan 202017
 

There are people out there who believe that “I’m offended” is some sort of magical trump card that calls a halt to the debate and requires the offender to issue a grovelling apology. It finds it’s most extreme expression in religion – blasphemy.

Which is a useful place to find excellent examples of the foolishness of trying to avoid offence – there are those who consider that the Koran is blasphemous because it is not a christian holy book and similarly there are probably those who consider that christian churches are hotbeds of blasphemy because they’re not islamic. Which group is right? Or perhaps they are both wrong.

Now I do not believe in going out of my way to be offensive to people, but neither am I going to restrict my opinions because they might be offensive to some people out there.

And when you come down to it, the offended person isn’t really hurt are they? Nobody dies; nobody is hospitalised. The only “harm” that occurs is the harm that the offended person causes to themselves.

And if you choose to be offended by something I write, bear in mind that I can choose to be offended by some of the things you hold sacred :-

  1. That you  believe in a stone age psychotic deity who proclaims “Love and worship me, or I’ll send you to a place of eternal torture”.
  2. That you insist on eating charred decaying animal corpses; and worse do so where I can smell the odious aerial effluent.
  3. Perhaps you voted for what may very well turn out to be the most cartoonish president of the USA since records began. You did know that the entire world is looking at the US freak show and shaking their heads in disbelief?
  4. Perhaps you believe that certain groups are inferior – women, men, people of a different “race”, etc.
  5. Perhaps you think that the rich are perfectly entitled to avoid their obligations to society and that tax avoidance is not a dishonourable thing to do.

But I choose not to. I’ll argue about it, and quite possibly think of you as stupid. But I won’t be offended

And if you do get offended, well then good.

  1. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/06/03/im_offended_126814.html

Two US Free Speech Myths

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Jan 142017
 

One of the things you regularly encounter online is the fetish Americans have for free speech; not entirely a bad thing, but some of what they believe is a bit of a myth. Part of the problem is that the first amendment to the US constitution is just a little vague and handwavey :-

or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press

First of all, what is that word “abridging” supposed to mean? It literally means shortening which makes the phrase nonsense even if it was supposed to be read as if “restricting” was the word used. Of course the meaning of language does change and it could well be that at the time, “abridge” would have unambiguously meant restrict. And “freedom of speech”? We normally take that to mean any form of expression whether spoken, written, drawn, or generated in some other way. But was that what was meant?

But now onto the myths … the first is a simple one and there is no real debate about it.

The right of free speech does not give you a right to be published by a third-party. If you are on Facebook for example, there is no right to free speech there – Facebook can decide to arbitrarily restrict what you can say perfectly legally. The government cannot restrict what you self-publish, but your publisher (including forum admins, mailing list admins, etc.) is free to refuse to publish for any reason at all.

Ultimately the only recourse to such censorship is to self-publish which is relatively easy on the Internet.

The second “myth” is a bit more debatable, but arguably the right to free speech is more about being free to criticise the government; in an era of lese-majesty and seditious libel, the major concern of the American revolutionaries was with political free speech. And whilst there has been free speech, there have always been restrictions on that freedom or consequences :-

  • Obscenity (as determined by the Miller test).
  • Inciting imminent lawlessness such as encouraging a lynch mob. Although this one can be a dangerously slippery slope given it’s historical use against people protesting the draft.
  • Commercial speech including advertising, and copyright.
  • Libel and slander.

So when looking at a particular restriction on free speech – such as hate speech (i.e. racial or religious hatred) – it is perfectly feasible for a law to be enacted to make such speech punishable in some form.

2016 A Bad Year? Try 1914, 1918, 1939 or 1945!

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Dec 302016
 

Everybody keeps whinging about how bad 2016 has been.

A few old people died (and some not so old people). That’s sad, but it happens every year. And yes some of your childhood heroes died – that’s what happens when you get older.

And yes a few bad political things have happened in 2016.

But is it somehow specially bad? Try comparing it with some other notoriously bad years :-

1914 Start of WWI which eventually killed millions of combatants.
1918 The beginning of the so-called Spanish flu pandemic which eventually killed up to 100 million people around the world.
1939 Start of WWII which eventually killed millions of combatants, and we learned just how evil humans can be when they put their minds to it.
1945 The first use of nuclear weapons.

So however bad you thought 2016 was, there have been a few other years far worse.

Are Humans Evolved To Eat Meat? Not so much!

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Dec 292016
 

As a vegetarian (who doesn’t intentionally go around prophesying) I often encounter the hackneyed old “but we’re evolved to eat meat”. The obvious response is that just because we’re evolved for a certain kind of behaviour does not mean we should necessarily follow it. And of course, it’s not true – we’re evolved to be omnivores not carnivores.

But here’s the thing: Eating certain forms of meat exclusively for a moderately extended period of time can cause death by what is effectively starvation. As a very rough rule of thumb, the wilder an animal is, the leaner its meat is likely to be. So any of our ancestors who ate nothing but meat were likely to be at best severely malnourished and likely to die young.

Of course our ancestors didn’t eat like that or we wouldn’t be here. They ate anything they could get their hands on – animals that didn’t run fast enough, proto-vegetables, grains, fruits, nuts. Anything that wasn’t poisonous.

We’re also evolved to eat more than we need. The idea is that we store fat in reserve for hard days ahead, but these days any “hard days” rarely involve lack of food. Another example of how we should be prepared to intelligently disregard evolved eating habits.

Does this mean we should all become vegetarian? No, of course not. There are plenty of reasons to stop eating meat, but this is not one. It may be a good reason to eat meat less frequently – have high quality meat three times a week rather than junk meat seven times a week.

The New Defence

The Morality of Drone Killings

 General, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 282016
 

There is an interesting video from 33c3 dealing with drone killings :-

As an aside, one of the thing that makes the Chaos Computer Club congress more interesting than many security conferences is the attention given to more “political” issues.

Drones offer the enticing possibility of tackling terrorist groups without putting people at risk, but the reality is somewhat different.

  1. Drone killings are in effect an act of war against the citizen(s) of a foreign country; very often where war has not been declared. To put it into perspective what if the UK operated drones in the 1970s and targeted US citizens who were helping to fund the IRA? And sometimes these actions resulted in “regrettable collateral damage”?
  2. Why is it not possible to provide information on targets to the law enforcement officials in the country where the target is living? It is possible that the law enforcement officials are compromised in some way of course (for example the US authorities were often against dealing with IRA terrorism), but not in all cases.
  3. Who decides that a target is so evil that they deserve death from the sky? The obvious solution here is a higher court order rather than an arbitrary decision by the military, although secret court orders are almost as bad as arbitrary military decisions. At the very least, such court orders must be made public after the death of the target.
  4. Just how reliable are drone killings anyway? How many times have we heard of “collateral damage” (the sanitised version of “Ooops! We killed the wrong people.”)? And how many times have we not heard of collateral damage? Many videos of drone killings show vehicles being targeted which leads to the most obvious problem – you do not know that the target is within the vehicle and you do not know that he or she is alone in the vehicle.
  5. “Spinning” the effectiveness of drone killings by counting all “military aged males” as militants unless they can be demonstrated to be innocent (i.e. guilty until proven innocent) is about as despicable as it gets. You cannot claim to be in the right if you resort to such claims.

It is all too easy to claim that we’re all under threat from terrorism and that anything that might reduce that threat is justified. But criminal activity by governments is never justified.

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