Loudmouth,

"Surely you should have the right, when attempting to express yourself, to say or write something which you suspect I might find offensive or insulting ? What is the point of OLO if none of us ever offends any other poster ?...."

I'll just add that OLO is what one might refer to as a sub-forum of society - and, like many other institutions, it has the power to make its own rules regarding what is and is not acceptable as far as free speech goes.

So there are things we can't say on OLO (and other places) that are legally acceptable in wider society, but we tacitly agree to abide by those terms when we sign up.

Yes indeed, Poirot, and those limits thankfully go well beyond what one might see in the Woman's Weekly. Long may it be so.

Joe

Dear Banjo,

Thanks for the reply, I agree with most of what you wrote.

>>The jihads want to impose their law on everybody. <<

Is offending not only what they claim makes them tick, but what actually is sacred to all the 7% of French people that are Muslims the right way to convince them not to impose sharia on us because an open society that grants freedoms of speech is superior to the one which does not even for them? As I said, if I do not like your behaviour and would like to change it, is saying (or drawing) vulgar things about your mother the best way to go about it?

>>it would be a regression of our civilisation for them to be prevented from doing it.<<

Prevention, puts it on the legal level, and I am concerned not on what is legal but what is civilised. I don’t think it would be a regression if I criticised, and questioned what you say and do without offending you, as mentioned above, even if nobody could prevent me from being offensive. It is not a regression if you criticise a Jew but refrain from making fun of the Holocaust.

Again, thank you for the informed insight into the French soul which I understand much less than the Russian or German soul.

By the way, the German reaction to the Je-sui-Charlie movement is an increased reassurance by Frau Merkel to the Muslim (mostly Turkish) community here; she just officially repeated the sentence “Not only Christianity and Judaism but also Islam belongs to Germany”, first uttered in 2010 by the then President Christian Wulf when it was still somewhat controversial. Something like telling the French we respect your understanding of free speech, and at the same time telling her own Muslims, never mind that, we respect you as you are, including your religion, please keep on integrating (True, we do not have here troublesome banlieues, at least not to that extent).

Dear Joe (Loudmouth),

Wow - you actually read The Australian Women's Weekly?

Good on you!

Foxy,

I don't think I've bought one since it was a "weekly".

Dear Poirot,

I buy it for my mum - she's in an aged care
facility and shares it with her neighbours.
Bless her! They all love it! They're in their
nineties.