What's going on? A posting from IED that has nothing to do with KT?!

[IED0DXM%UCLAMVS.BITNET@wiscvm.wisc.edu]

Neil, it's a complicated issue, but in IED's opinion, the
only sensible solution is a very simple one. If you want
a "free" society, you simply HAVE to allow free -- completely
free -- speech. Human beings are smarter than society gives
them credit for: our present systems blame humans' evil
actions on the influence of humans' words, and this is
a specious idea. Human beings -- usually including even the
criminally insane -- can still distinguish between the actual
deed and a printed, illustrated or spoken description OF
the deed. The attribution of blame to the word instead
of to the deed is a critical error in social thought.
To be specific:
>Does this mean that we should give free reign to the likes of nazis, the
>KKK, paedophiles et cetera?

It's very likely that every Love-Hound reading this stuff today is
anti-Nazi. Likewise anti-KKK. Anti-paedophile? There's a good example for
our discussion. Even Kate has written -- with astonishing sensuality
-- about a more or less paedophilic obsession in "The Infant Kiss".
No-one here will deny that sexually abusing children is a shocking, serious
crime which must be prohibited by any civilized group. But to prohibit
someone from WRITING about sexually abusing children is every bit as
serious a crime as the act of abusing children itself. One reason for this
is that a crime of paedophilic abuse is (in most cases) a verifiable
fact, whereas there has never been a single judgment of "obscenity" which
withstood any empirical means of judgment whatever. And, however
unfortunately, this holds true for the WORDS of both the KKK and the
Nazis, as well.

>How must Asians in the East End of London feel about
>having excrement shoved through their letter boxes and petrol bombs thrown
>into their bedrooms by National Front supporters and then seeing the NF's
>papers and pamphlets being sold in their local markets. It is not so easy
>to be liberal when you dare not let your children out on the streets for fear
>of them being stabbed to death because of the colour of their skin.

People who stab people are committing a crime. People who TALK
about stabbing people are not. IED hates to sound so callous, because
the situation which you describe is obviously tragic. But the
solution is not to curtail the right to free speech!
Hatred and fear will not be dissipated by further oppression.
Your description of IED's opinion as a "liberal" one goes straight
to the heart of this difference of opinion. In IED's
opinion, the permission of free speech is in
no way linked with similar ideas about the relaxing of what Fu-Sheng
has called "physical" policing. On the contrary:

>Verbal forms of attack can do just as much damage as physical acts.
>Why favor one over the other?  How is "thought police" different,
>in principle, from our ordinary, "physical" police system?

The difference is clear and uniquivocal. We differ here in
precisely the way you describe in your second point:

>Demanding freedom means taking the burden of protection from the
>society onto oneself; most of us are not ready for total freedom.

This is exactly what IED disagrees with. Your pessimism about the ability
of our species to think clearly is, to turn Neil's term around on him,
essentially a kind of "liberal" justification of
leniency: by saying that society can't be "trusted", you're accepting
and promoting the idea that the influence of the word can be an
EXCUSE for committing physical crimes. If, however, you
do NOT permit the hypothetical "pernicious influence" of unchecked
speech as a legitimate excuse for the commission of physical crimes,
then you can have NO excuse for the suppression of free speech.

     The argument which favours the abrogation of distinctions
between speech and action depends upon the practise of making
excuses for the individual: "most of us" are not ready --
for what? For thinking? For telling the difference between
thought and reality? IED believes that they are ready. But whether they
are or not, they SHOULD be. Saying you killed someone because you read
about it in a novel is still not a widely upheld excuse, fortunately.
The fear of that kind of rampant criminal idiocy -- the fear that
people will do what they are told to do in the paper, even if they
know that it is a crime -- is based upon two weak premises: first, that
people are fundamentally stupid -- not just animals, but STUPID animals;
and second, that crimes cannot, even ideally, be controlled by "physical"
policing alone, but that these crimes COULD, with the help of some
magical formula for censorship, be "nipped in the bud" by means
of the suppression of free speech. And these two weak premises are the
basis of censorship law. If "physical" policing were effective, there
would be no need for any kind of "mental" policing at all.
It's not helpful -- and it's potentially extremely harmful -- to blame
the present faults of society on figments of a small minority's
imagination.

-- Andrew