"At a minimum, speech will have to be limited for the sake of order. If we all speak at once, we end up with an incoherent cacophony. Without some rules and procedures we cannot have a conversation at all and consequently speech has to be limited by protocols of basic civility. It is true that many human rights documents give a prominent place to the right to speech and conscience, but such documents also place limits on what can be said because of the harm and offence that unlimited speech can cause."
That's more or less what the vast literature condenses to, whether you look at the academic archive or even what has been said in ME over the years, and through people who were not all Gabby-Alters, including some notable contributions from Gabby herself. I guess Molly and I don't want to exclude any views in principle, but this is impossible in practice. It would be good to have Islamic contributors - yet one quickly despairs. We don't talk about the Jihadis, though I have occasionally let one in. This only delays the ban button. "Bob" showed up recently writing in Chinese and was, in fact, some kind of spam. RP may have been real at some point, though as [email protected] has clearly become a German alter by numbers. Gabby's emails to me as 1234rp might be interesting conversation over a beer at the end of a bad hair day at work, at least after the 5th pint. The general problem is that 'people like us' want to talk about stuff that is already kept out of the general flow of the education-military-whats-left-of-industrial-presstitute-newsroom propaganda. What we want to say and get response to is already excluded from dominant communication in the public domain. I don't think academics get anywhere near what free speech is. Over the years I've met a few people I could say more or less anything to. My parents certainly were never in this group! And these people were able to give me help understanding what I was trying to say and think. Only one was an academic. In management, the words 'tell us it warts and all' should tell the recipient to shut up and stay out of trouble. How does some floozie sitting in comfort based on modern equivalents of slaving investments get to stop others expressing their experience as it comes in words I hear everyday? What of silence, ignoring, that dork with the loud voice on a mobile phone, the druggie creep blaring loud musak - and the actual lack of listening, reading, even thinking it might be worth learning some stuff to share with others? Science actually excludes idiots and those who don't understand the esoteric language games of specific practices. I would guess trying to form a discussion group, given we end up with all kinds of rules and tedium about the 'curtains', has little to do with any vaunted notions of rationality and people would be better off, like Francis, going to night school or doing a MOOC (I've just finished one and am off to Paris to meet a couple of classmates). I assume the only real people left in here are me, Molly, Allan and Tony - apologies to Ash and Andrew if they have actual pulses. There are obviously a few more we have counted on as friends in the 'bush'. I wonder if we might try to set something else up, possibly something with a tad of future commercial possibility. For now, one needs to remember until we have done the 'blood tests' our own freedom of speech has been severely curtailed. -- --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups ""Minds Eye"" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
