Thursday, April 18, 2013

Free Speech aka The Right to Be a Dick

As usual someone put this better than me, in this case it was Edward R Murrow who said: "The right to dissent - or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong - is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society."

Or if as I have already said, "the right to be a dick"

I'm writing this blog in the cloud of fallout on Twitter from Old Holborn's spiteful, unpleasant tweets about various aspects of Liverpool and touching upon seriously sensitive subjects such as the Bulger case and Hillsborough. In doing so he's just showing the world what a twat he is. It's offensive, it's unnecessary and I'm pretty sure he wouldn't say any of it if any of the people involved were standing in front of him.

Indeed mocking Liverpudlians seems to be something of a thing amongst certain tweeters and now is not the time or the place to ask precisely how they would have felt if 96 of their friends, family or fellow fans had set off for a football match, died & then been traduced by the media and police and their concerns swept under a carpet of cover up. Me, I'd be raging until I got justice. And I wouldn't let anyone forget, however much they would like too.

That's not the point of this blog. The point of this blog is about free speech.

Unless he's actively threatening someone Old Holborn has the perfect right to be an offensive twat. That's what free speech is for. It's not for the people whose views we are comfortable with or who we share a sense of humour with. It's for those people whose views we disagree with. who would hate us and everything we stand for or are just offensive.

There's no right not to be offended.

If someone is being a dick on Twitter you can ignore them or block them. RT their post & point out their utter twatworthiness or take them on in an argument. You shouldn't try to silence them because what's to stop someone doing that to you the next time their offended.

I can't pretend to understand the anger - though I can make a wild stab at it  - that some people currently feel towards Old Holborn but I believe free speech has to be more than just 'free speech for the people we agree with'.

I blocked Old Holborn ages ago because I found his shtick all a bit tiresome. The radical libertarian (right-winger) with his fearless desire to pursue left-wingers. I'd recommend everyone do the same if that's how they feel.

We've had a battle over the last few days over respect for the dead & freedom of speech. I think it is OK to make jokes about & burn Thatcher in effigy, even if it isn't very nice. I think Old Holborn's entitled to be offensive about whatever he wants to wank on about. I just don't need to see it.

Freedom of speech means nothing if it isn't the freedom to be a dick.

The Rise of Trollnalism

I have decided that there's a type of 'journalist' who writes more for the reaction they get than any genuine beliefs they may have on a topic. These people I am going to call Trollnalists and they include Richard Littlejohn, Toby Young, Melanie Phillips, Samantha Brick and others.

They're job is to write something so ridiculous that the main purpose is to drive traffic to their websites. Whether they believe the nonsense they write is irrelevant. Perhaps they do. In a way I hope they do because to write this stuff purely for mercenary purposes would be truly soul destroying.

What trollnalists do succeed in doing though is annoying their opponents into publicising their work and driving traffic to their various sites (although as you can imagine the Daily Mail is the real fountainhead of Trollnalism.)

In fact the Daily Mail is a fine example of a newspaper that has become a black hole for actual news or facts but almost purely filled with opinion and trollnalism. That's partly because its very sweary editor - if Private Eye is anything to go by - is clearly on a mission to drag Britain back to the 1930s and he'll do that in whatever manner he feels is appropriate. The fact that he's wouldn't recognise his own hypocrisy if it was dancing around in front of him wearing a black shirt is not unexpected. Trollnalism is by its very nature without memory.

So when Mrs Thatcher dies they call for respect for her memory, whilst forgetting what they wrote about Michael Foot. Or they belittle the state for preventing them from having free speech in a fog of post-Leveson hysteria but demand the banning of a song on BBC Radio because it is insufficiently respectful. Freedom of speech is only something for the Trollnalist, not for us.

I'd argue that Trollnalism is becoming the key driver of a lot of what passes for journalism in the British press these days. Facts are no longer sacred, or even relevant. Opinion, especially strong opinions, are it. Of course Trollnalism saves a lot of hassle and hard work with fact checking, research or thought. Angry about something or someone: write a column. Found a stick with which to beat someone who can't possible argue back: write a column.

Always the anger. Always weeping for a better past that never really existed. Never seeing anything positive. Name calling and spite aimed at people who disagree with you and always they disagree with you for the wrong reasons. And, of course, it is always them that has standards.

Trollnalism: the present and future of newspapers desperate for readers. Why bother with facts when an angry opinion will do.

And I should know.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks (Or Not)

Once, when I was young and beautiful, I was on the cutting edge of left-wing student politics. I marched, I waved banners and I even got myself elected as 'Campaigns Officer'. For one short & glorious year I was as annoyingly left-wing and politically correct as it was possible for a middle class, white, straight, able-bodied man to be.

If things had gone terribly wrong I might have ended up getting involved in politics properly. By now I might even have made a career out of it. Fortunately my lack of financial common sense put an end to all those hopes (although it doesn't seem to have stopped George Osborne).

I suppose the point was I was playing at politics. I'm pretty privileged all things considered. I've never had to struggle for anything. I have a loving family who have cushioned me from the worst that fate has - so far - been able to through at me. I've never had to worry about a place to live. I got through school (boys only grammar school) with the minimum of scars. I have wonderful friends. My life has never been impinged upon by religious bigotry, sexism, homophobia or anything else (excluding the occasional unoriginal joke about my weight, which I am perfectly capable of batting away these days with the use of a cricket sledge I picked up). My life has been pretty privileged.

Privilege is a mysterious thing. A lot of the time those of us that have it, don't see it. It's like a perception filter. So I've always been careful when getting involved in conversations about political issues to avoid stomping all over people's experiences because they aren't mine.

If you want to see what women have to put up with on a day-to-day basis: look at #everydaysexism on Twitter. Some of it might make you feel guilty. Sometimes I get confused about whether my behaviour is right or not. I see myself as acting from the best of motives but what if that is still wrong. In my view you have to listen carefully to what other people tell you. My experience is limited to my experience. Yours to yours.

We don't experience the world in the same way. We can't possibly. How different would my life have been if I'd been Toni, for example. It might have been exactly the same. Might. I suspect it wouldn't. The key thing for me is empathy and if your first reaction to someone is to say, 'no that's not how it is because I say so' then something is wrong.

You can't use language that is designed to hurt or belittle people because their viewpoint is different to yours or because they've pulled you up on something that you've said or done. There are many degrees of privilege in society, many different ways to experience it but telling someone that their experience isn't valid or is less valid than others is surely oppression of some kind.

So if you believe in a cause, the success of which will benefit a huge group of people. That's great. But if you believe that only your experience is valid & you use the platform you have to express that belief at the expense of others then something is wrong. Talking down to people, excluding their experiences because they don't fit an arbitrary set of categories or just trying to make them invisible by omission is wrong. The rightness of your cause makes no difference to this.

It is possible to be on the right side of history & still be a bully.