Nah, you have every right TO SAY that other people should have their free speech infringed on the basis of your ideology. But if you do, you are quite apt to be called a totalitarian. This is what free speech is all about! You get to say we shouldn’t have a right to free speech on things, and we get to call you names that, annoying for you as they are, are quite accurate.

Incidentally, totalitarian is an apt description since free speech is the cornerstone of all other rights in any society, since it is how political discourse happens. It is also essential for the functioning of a market as it allows information about products and services to be spread without being vetted by a central agency. In other words, the first thing you would do in order to take away from liberties, would be to start defining speech codes.

Also, I feel using UN declarations as a basis for human rights is rather akin to quoting the Catholic church’s doctrine as if it was an authority on human rights. Owing to both organisations’ propensity for turning a blind eye to systematic child abuse taking place under their aegis, neither deserve to be quoted with undue reverence.

If websites wish to be more proactive and sensible with their terms and conditions then that’s their game, but in reality they’re not there to protect anyone but the owner of the site.

It was Mad Mel he cut and pasted, but other than that, broadly agree.

This is the problem with the paper giving free reign for people to start their own blogs without checks or any kind of screening process. While blogger and wordpress or whoever do the same thing, they’re not giving the impression that the content has somehow been approved by a somewhat respected broadsheet newspaper.

I doubt anyone at the paper had a clue that Barny had started a blog there at all until either the Graun or someone else brought it to their attention - and from that point the paper had to choose between giving the BNP a platform or appearing to be part of the Politically-Correct establishment.

But whether or not it was a deliberate decision - the blog’s there now, and it seems to have been abandoned for a week. The longer it stays that way, the more rubbish it looks as it gets invaded by white supremacist nutbars, and the more damage it does to the BNP’s attempts at looking more reasonable and serious. The best thing is probably to ignore it until it fizzles out - only stopping to pull apart the less dribbly posts.

Having said that though - it could be back next week. I’m pretty sure I saw a disclaimer when I signed up saying that users would be temporarily banned on their first offence - and a couple of the more blatant anti-immigration sentences have been removed.

The Telegraph doesn’t appear to be as open as the Graun or even the Daily Express with its deletions. I was just about to start a reply to someone who had argued that the tiniest amount of black genes would make a person more violent, that apartheid South Africa had the right idea and included references to ‘mud people’ when I noticed it had disappeared and another message urging us to blame the ‘p*kis’ has gone without so much as a mention.

In that case, we should be prepared to out argue the main posts, which isn’t difficult, bat down the crazyloons who have racist websites that seem to refer to phrenology, and point out every breach of the terms of service until he gets permanently banned.

Grrrrrr… here we go again.

I’m not going to get into defending the name of the blog again.

But have a look at this story:
http://mwcnews.net/content/view/22941&Itemid=1

Americans received a good dose of conservative idiocy over the weekend.

The dose, which almost defies belief, involves noted conservative commentator Michelle Malkin, who got upset with a television advertisement by Dunkin Donuts that featured 30-minute chef Rachel Ray.

The reason for Malkin’s distress over the commercial? The war on terrorism, a war that excites conservatives even more than the war on drugs, the war on communism, or the war on immigrants.

Malkin went ballistic because in the commercial Rachel is wearing a scarf that bears a resemblance to a kaffiyeh, a traditional scarf worn by Arab men, which apparently some people in the Middle East view as a symbol for Palestinian independence and Islamic radicalism.

So, there you have it: Rachel Ray, the chef who shows people how to make 30-minute meals, and Dunkin Donuts, the company selling donuts and coffee, secretly and subliminally promoting terrorism and al-Qaeda and maybe even anti-Semitism.

when Jim Jay says he would rather the Telegraph not host a blog by a fascist, then it doesn’t mean he wants to make it illegal…. any more than the conservative nutjobs in the US who complained against the above ad wanted to make certain garments illegal.

I really despair when people look at such debates about free speech in black/white terms and start throwign around ‘totalitarian’ with abandon.

Just as an appetiser…
2. Your continued use of the Site constitutes your agreement to all such Terms.

(so breach the terms and they’ll boot you off - those damn authoritarians - why don’t they just go and kiss Mugabe?)

Users must
4.3.1. comply with all applicable laws, regulations and codes;

4.3.6 not post, transmit, submit, refer to, make available or link to or from (or authorise or permit any other person to do the same) any material which:

a) is untrue, fraudulent, inaccurate or misleading; and/or

b) is obscene, threatening, menacing, offensive, defamatory, abusive, is in breach of confidence, in breach of any intellectual property right (including, without limitation, copyright) or otherwise is in breach of or violates any applicable law or regulation or code, and/or

5.1.7. you waive any moral rights in all material you submit
(just added this last one for fun - it’s not part of my argument - just amusing)

So leaving aside his cut and pasting from Littlejohn (breaching copyright) and the fact that if you stop people posting things that are untrue the entire world wide web will come crashing down around our ears….

he’s argued that (among other things)

- all immigrants are to blame for everything
- therapists are all rapists
- the police should break the law to get crime down (surely it would go up if they did that, never mind)
- send the army in to sort out ethnic crime

This doesn’t breach 4.3.6?

Incitement to racial hatred and Incitement to commit criminal acts (which I think is now called encouraging or assisting crime, although that might not have come in yet actually) breaches 4.3.1

I mean I’ve not read all his posts so I’m sure there is plenty of other wild ramblings that breach the t and c but I believe I’ve established i have a point on this. I’m open to correction of course.

So “because YOU don’t like it - you’d like them to stop”

Yes, that’s right. I’d like them to stop. I’ve even asked them nicely.

If someone were to suggest that we make it illegal however I’d try to persuade them that that would be the wrong course of action. Sorry if that annoys you but I do think that’s compatible with liberalism (whether I am one or not).

Otherwise we are saying that no liberal has ever said “oh *do* shut up”. No liberal has ever been angry that a newaper has printed an outrageous article, and thought it wrong of them to print it. No liberal editor has ever decided not to print something submitted to them on the grounds of taste, decency or political illiteracy.

Just because something is legal does not mean it is right. I think they should have the right to host Barnbrook’s blog but I don’t think that they are right to do it. This is all simple stuff to be honest.

Either try and persuade them that immigration has very little to do with the rise in house prices or if they are totally hysterical ignore them.

As a seperate policy bring house prices down - but thats another topic.

Eh? No, he’s not.

He’s saying he doesn’t like it, it shouldn’t be illegal - <b<but he’d like them to stop anyway.

That ain’t no Liberalism I’m aware of.

I think Lee @ 18 is spot on - not sure about the hatred bit, but going along with it for now.

I don’t understand Planeshift’s point @ 16 - obviously there is a clear difference. Did I give the impression that I think a ruthless dictatorship is equivalent to a benign democracy? (What about a ruthless democracy and a benign dictatorship?)

Planeshift @ 21 - if say a person concerned about housing prices thinks that one of the pressures on housing prices is the amount of immigration we have experienced over the past decade, how would you address that?

So let’s get this straight - someone does something COMPLETELY LEGAL in a private arrangement between an individual and a legitimate business - but because YOU don’t like it - you’d like them to stop. And you wrote this Article on Liberal Conspiracy!!

Holy shit, you’re in the wrong place, mate.

So your straw man looks rather flimsy to me. These discussions would probably be slightly more constructive without distorting other people’s arguments.

Except they are addressing them. There have been numerous pieces of legislation passed to deal with it, numerous policy announcments and numerous immigrants deported and detained. The opposition are also always trying to tell us of their proposals to limit immigration, such as points systems (now adopted apparently). You may have noticed that “properly addressing” the concerns of the ignorant led to the situation where people in Iraq who worked for the British Army were refused entry because the home office would rather leave people die than fail to “properly address” people’s concerns over immigration.

So it should be legal for an ISP to host a BNP website but illegal for a newspaper? What an absurd distinction — and likely to become a meaningless one soon too, as different parts of the media merge onto the Internet.

I quite like participatory democracy - and I think we should find a fair and open way of making decisions in society not just on this question but all questions. At the moment we have Parliament and some laws enforced, or not, by the police - that’ll do for now.

I’ve not attempted to deal with who runs Britain in this post but I think the idea that there should be a process whereby we put limitations of freedom of expression (as now) seems reasonable. We can talk about what the best way of doing that is - of course.

i think Planeshifts point is important here.

If you have a quick look at the T and C’s you’ll see the breaches straight away.

We should take apart the BNP arguments, of course, I’m not arguing against that and never have.

“Balance can never be struck on this” I agree. It’s an art not a science in my opinion.

You’re not wrong as far as I’m concerned.

“It is an important point that those who suffer at the hands of fascism do not do so because they lost an intellectual context, and beating their arguments is not always sufficient.”

But a balance can never be struck on this, if you start banning one area of non-incendiary speech because it may or may not end up causing some disturbed individual to do physical harm to people you just start down a slippery slope. The law is there to stop people being able to actually stir up hatred and confrontation between different groups of people and that is great, it’s the right way to limit freedom of speech in a liberal manner, but it is also the last point at which we can do so before we start verging on the realm of censoring honest, if not distasteful, opinion because someone or some group of people arbitarily decides it might not be helpful to a peaceful society.

I did not understand from your sample letter what specifically you believed violated the T&Cs.

I was unaware that the BNP bloggers were made featured bloggers. What is the process here? Is it random, based on hits, or is it a staff decision? This makes no difference, by the way, to the contention that Barnbrook was not ‘given’ a blog.

My point about the Nazis related to the fact that they did not come to power merely because they expressed their views but also because of the situation that Germany was in after the First World War. It is the failures of other German politicians, ordinary Germans, and other European states, that helped the Nazi rise to power - it is about context. The Nazis were born from and took advantage of this context.

This idea is I think what I and some other commenters were trying to express in response to related articles and comments on LC in the past few days: I think there is a problem in Britain that mainstream politicians are failing to get to grips with people’s concerns about immigration. Such concerns may be ill-founded and poorly expressed, but mainstream politicians don’t seem to be properly addressing them. I believe that is where the real danger lies - not in people like Barnbrook making public fools of themselves, or any sense of legitimacy you might get from a My Telegraph blog, but in normal people turning to Barnbrook’s ilk because he at least is appearing to address their concerns.

Obviously they will be disappointed in the end, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to make that mistake in order to have mainstream politicians eventually do their jobs properly.

But I think that it helps if the BNP’s arguments are soundly taken apart by their opponents - and it also helps if the BNP make themselves look like the fools they are.

Well you could apply that “fit to decide” to any law, but I think there is a clear difference between a dictatorship ruthlessly preventing any disagreement, and an elected representative democracy enacting laws to prevent incitement to racial hatred or ensuring employees of the state don’t hold views that would see them act in a discriminatory fashion.