Heartland

smiscandlon wrote:

sultan2075 wrote:There's a distinction between liberty and license--one implies responsiblity, and one does not. In this case, however, good manners and common sense will be a lot more beneficial than speech codes or hate-crime laws.

A good point well made. However, it appears we live in a society of speech codes and hate-crime laws. Good manners and common sense apparently take a back seat.

Yes, well, I tend to think that with over-legislation comes a lack of personal responsiblity, so, er...quod erat demonstrandum, I guess. When the government becomes your mother, your real mother is able to abdicate all responsibility for raising you well. Thus you need more laws, etc, etc, etc.

nick the stripper wrote:I'm sorry, but you can't stop people from saying something or stating a point of view or calling someone something because you don't like it. Freedom of speech is a basic right. If you ban something because it offends someone, then you might as well ban anything that can offend anyone, which, if were the case, would practically force us to not say anything. Plus, this will just cause the bigots to feel as if their victims and will increase hostility.

In short: if you're for banning freedom of speech, you're a fascist [whoops, i did a racism].

Freedom of speech is just a poor abstraction over freedom of the truth. Falsehood has no integral freedom, it's just too easily confused to legislate otherwise.

Motz wrote:Freedom of speech is just a poor abstraction over freedom of the truth. Falsehood has no integral freedom, it's just too easily confused to legislate otherwise.

So you should only be allowed to say something if it is objectively true? That throws all discussions about ethics out the window then, as with personal opinion and religion.

sultan2075 wrote:When the government becomes your mother, your real mother is able to abdicate all responsibility for raising you well.

Ah, so I guess it's my mother the UK government that you're calling a dirty whore in your sig line?

So true, so true...

Motz wrote: Freedom of speech is just a poor abstraction over freedom of the truth. Falsehood has no integral freedom, it's just too easily confused to legislate otherwise.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, in [i]Schenck v. United States, 1919[/i] wrote: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.

The question is whether or not speech you don't like is necessarily subject to truth or falsity. Not all speech is of such a character, thus, Holmes probably offers a better rubric here than the one you have in principle offered, simply because it is less problematic. In other words, it follows from a Lockean or classically liberal conception of limited government power--to protect life, liberty and property in a minimal sense from the predation of others. Thus, the limits on freedom of speech are determined prudentially based on this minimal standard, not on the basis of philosophical questions of truth and falsity.

smiscandlon wrote:

sultan2075 wrote:When the government becomes your mother, your real mother is able to abdicate all responsibility for raising you well.

Ah, so I guess it's my mother the UK government that you're calling a dirty whore in your sig line?

So true, so true...

I wouldn't go that far, but I will freely admit to being a great admirer of Churchill and occasionally, when in my cups, toasting the memory of the old British Empire on which the sun never sets.

In fact, I think I've mentioned here before that I rather liked the Old Empire.

You know, this bout of gay-hatred is not some mystical and evil thing, it's a matter of people simply naturally disliking gays. And they should have the right to dislike them.
The ones making a big fuss about these things in the media etc. know full well that it is merely antagonistic to do so. It is so as to create discontent. People who don't like gays don't naturally go out in parades to search and destroy, as long as they are not pushed in their face.
And this is exactly what the mainstream media attempts to do.

What it comes to discrimination and so, i don't know what is wrong with being able to hire people you prefer. If you don't like gays, do you really have to stand one in your office? Why should you? Do you think it creates a harmonious atmosphere to force such things?

Most people who dislike gays naturally and who use expressions like 'it's so gay' have no problem with gay people ni daily life as long as they "behave", that is not wave their sex in front of their face.
It's not any different from man not being able to say anything he likes to a woman. It's common decency.

And if you don't like someone, are you not allowed to not deal with them?

What about this. In a bar, a gay person comes to hit on you, and you say 'bugger off, f**king queer'? All of a sudden, you are being sued for a hatecrime.
A woman would be well within her rights to say that to a man, 'bugger off, f**king oaf' if a man was harassing her.

i have no problem with anyone in real life, but i have had some gay people hitting on me and i have found it offensive. They've no reason to do so, it's not been a case of love at first sight, it's been a case of 'i am gay and i'm going to flaunt it at your face because i'm special'.
Mind you, i've never had a girl come hitting on me.
Luckily enough, Finland, and another country this's happened to me, the Philippines, are not hate-laws countries as of yet and i had every right to express my opinion on their advances.

This is all insanity.

naturally

What a useless word.

Freedom of speech effectively equates to freedom of choice. Freedom to choose whether or not to use a specific word or term. The consequences of doing so are of course something that each person has to take their own responsibility for. As for adjudicating what is acceptable here, to my mind opening a discussion on that one could well be analogous to letting a 5 year old play with hand-grenades.

How is naturally a useless word? It is the most important word in my vocabulary, but if you disagree, at least say why, state your case, instead of telling me authoratativelly that it's useless in general.

But this is just the kind of response you get from liberal nitwits. No content, no substance, just nonsense in defense of any liberal idea they might think of.

There's no talking with these kinds of people and i have no intention of doing so in this thread any further.

Good day, and feel free to be as liberal as you like.

Josh, I believe equally in the existence of absolute truth and in our inability to define it. Opinion is a crutch for incomplete fact. A necessary one, but still a crutch. Never has "I don't necessarily agree with everything I think" applied more

itnAklipse wrote:Most people who dislike gays naturally and who use expressions like 'it's so gay' have no problem with gay people ni daily life as long as they "behave", that is not wave their sex in front of their face.

Like the heterosexuals who eat each other's faces in front of me?

Why should that only apply to gays?

Oh, and read up on the naturalistic fallacy and its cousin, the Is-Ought problem

That was quite a flounce there.
You're so gay itnAklipse!

James Blast wrote:You're so gay itnAklipse!

*Snigger*

Homo Sapiens!
the planet is already conquered

Motz wrote:Like the heterosexuals who eat each other's faces in front of me?

Fcukin' filthy hettie breeder b'stards, polluting my planet with their whining rugrat crotchfruit, demanding special dispensation to whop out their stretch-marked saggy National Geographic-type boobs because "little Quasmolinda-Cassidy-Coprophila is hungry and I don't see why I shouldn't flop them out on the tube, it's completely natural, although if I see you ogling my norks I'll get a cob on and curse you out for being a perve," clogging the pavements and platforms with their space-age alloy 6-speed automatic transmission air-conditioned DVD-player equipped "strollers" (it's a fckin' PRAM, people!!!! ) that cost more than a kidney dialysis machine, banging on and on about the latest nannying techniques ("Shutupyou!" worked fine for my generation), how wonderful their cnut-dropping is ("Well you know, Samuelionis Peterfield is an indigo child, so talented and sensitive, and of course he's allergic to everything so we have to feed him organic asparagus harvested by pygmies from the southern slopes of the sacred mountain of Fcukmetheresoneborneveryminute in the Hindu Kush") and, most damning of all, putting those fcuking "Baby on Board" signs in the back windows of their 4x4 petrol-sucking behemoths that they can't drive anyway but "are so safe - Which? magazine said that I could run over an entire pride of poor people in it and Jocelyn Sh*tweasle Aloycious wouldn't feel a thing" and have been no closer to the great outdoors than Glyndbourne, rubbing their fertility in our faces while the rest of us are just trying to get the fcuk off this poxy planet without entirely fcuking it up for the rest of the ecosystem. The b'stards.

Disclaimer: it goes without saying that none of the foregoing applies to Keef & Magrat's wee'un, nor indeed to the offspring of other HLers, knowing as we do that these saviours of humanity who will glide through life to the strains of YCBTO and Vision Thing are the kinds of people that we WANT to share a planet with, and that we welcome with outstretched arms, in the sure and certain knowledge that the more there of of US then the fewer there are of THEM.

Well that told me then

tldr.

What about really happy people, I think it's a damn shame they can't stand up and say I Feel Gay Today!....well they could but they would get funny looks

While we're at it, p*ss felching scumwading, was once used to describe those that partake of chewing tobacco. I think it's a damn shame they've lost that particulr terminilogy.

weebleswobble wrote:What about really happy people, I think it's a damn shame they can't stand up and say I Feel Gay Today!....well they could but they would get funny looks

While we're at it, p*ss felching scumwading, was once used to describe those that partake of chewing tobacco. I think it's a damn shame they've lost that particulr terminilogy.

Say what??

I guess I've never called something "gay" because I'm not five. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but where I live it's more of something that a child would say. whether or not that's sad (so widespread) or good (at least we know it's stupid) is up to you.

Oh, and for the record, I believe one should have a right to say whatever one wants (give a speech against the jews, tell people to murder blacks, whatever) while we should punish those that violate others' rights (say, I guess, killing someone, taking their stuff, keeping them from leaving you). Hopefully, this type of "don't censor anything" will keep level ideas that seem better (like, say, jews are o.k. or "black people are the same was white people, excepting skin tone and social regard or whatever"). If the only idea was the freedom to discuss, fascism (and other disgusting -ism's) would falter. I hope.

Oh, and I'm drunk, so that should be way more fleshed out. hopefully the point gets across.

itnAklipse wrote:liberal nitwits

You're wrong if you think I'm a liberal as in one who believes in liberalism. I'm a libertarian/anarcho-capitalist.

To move on to the point about the word natural. Nature as defined by dictionary.com: "1. existing in or formed by nature (opposed to artificial): a natural bridge. 2. based on the state of things in nature; constituted by nature: Growth is a natural process."

In my opinion, there isn't a thing that isn't natural. I'm sure you're aware of Locke and Hobbes who spoke about what we must have been like in nature. But in my opinion, we're in nature now. The city is our natural habitat just as the damn is the Beaver's. Even technology is natural. There's monkeys in the jungles who have built and used weapons based on instinct. Out technology is just a more advanced form of that. But to use "natural" to justify something is a mistake. Just because something is that way, doesn't mean it should be that way.

I think a better word would be "normal" as in what is generally done, but even that has the same problems for justifying something because it is an appeal to the ad-populum fallacy.

Opinion is a crutch for incomplete fact. A necessary one, but still a crutch.

No offence, but I'd hate to live in a world of absolutes. Perspectivism is far more exciting.

8.5 wrote:I guess I've never called something "gay" because I'm not five. Maybe it's a cultural thing, but where I live it's more of something that a child would say.

That's a very good point, 8.5, the term is really the domain of under-12s and immature spoiled bitchy teens, sadly there are some of both here.

You obviously attend a very civilised school. It's the year 11s who are the worst offenders ear, but everyone through years 7-13 seem to punctuate their sentences with "fag" or "gay". No wonder there are so few of us out at school