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Indeed, Mr Abbott, Section 18C is 'clearly a bad law' : Comments
By Joshua Forrester, Lorraine Finlay and Augusto Zimmermann, published 6/5/2016After all, international human rights law does not recognize a right not to be offended.
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Common ? Moi ?! Well, yeah:
'How you going, you old bastard ?' There was a time when that greeting was - as intended - a mark of respect and affection.
I hate to disagree with anyone, as is probably well-known, but I'm not so sure that, as ttbn remarks, the 'real' pseudo-left are sooks - I think they know very well that there is a very soft market of ideas out there, (or a market for very soft ideas) and that many, particularly the hot-house Gen Y kiddies, can be marshalled to rise up in indignation, and then dissolve in angry tears, at any opinion which is other than their own.
In that sense, they are fertile ground for co-opting in the struggle against genuine democracy, and of common sense (to the extent that they overlap) - and a necessary part of their defence, a NECESSARY part, is the right - perhaps even the obligation to offend, to shake up the smug, self-righteous notions that anti-democrats so jealously guard, and their demands of others to toe some line.
Take, for example, the BS surrounding the myth of Indigenous Deaths in Custody: as was pointed out even before that Royal Commission got going, the proportion of deaths in custody who were Indigenous (22%) was slightly lower than the proportion of prisoners in custody who were Indigenous (23 % at the time).
Nowadays, twenty five years later, the numbers are respectively 23 % of deaths in custody, and 28 % in custody. Since I don't want Indigenous people dying at all if possible, I'm not inclined to jump to false conclusions which exaggerate Indigenous deaths, (Christ, there's enough of those already) but that doesn't seem to have ever bothered the pseudo-left. After all, the maxim is 'grab anything which can be used as a stick up the arse of the establishment and shove hard'.
Cheers, Alan.
P.S. Oops, I've probably offended someone. Well, stiff: grow a pair.