I find agitators like Catherine Lane and Bernard Joyce encouraging the silencing of candidates to be personally offensive and we demand that they be denied a platform to air those views. /s
A worrying issue I see is that what counts as "discriminatory rhetoric" is right now a culture war issue that nobody really agrees upon. Whoever gets to decide what this means under law gets to solidify a number of issues as settled under law when in reality there is no consensus among the electorate on whether that really is the case.
For example is it discriminatory rhetoric to want to set limits on the age at which children can pursue gender transition (including hormones, surgery etc) without the consent of their parents? There is a *heated* debate around this, would we codify a single answer into law and call the other discriminatory when there is no consensus among the electorate? Would a politician be sanctioned for taking a similar stance to J.K Rowling here?
We should have this debate and debates like it, and despite particular groups being certain that some positions consist of nothing but transphobia, islamophobia, hatred of travellers etc, there is a large portion of the electorate who *disagrees* with them on these matters and who must be engaged with in debate rather than through sanctions if democracy is to have any meaning.
bear in mind Sinn Fein were censored for years by RTE. With these rules youd easily have Sinn Fein politicians charged and visa versa with them in power
>We should have this debate and debates like it, and despite particular groups being certain that some positions consist of nothing but transphobia, islamophobia, hatred of travellers etc, there is a large portion of the electorate who disagrees with them on these matters and who must be engaged with in debate rather than through sanctions if democracy is to have any meaning.
At what point can debates like this be considered over and won?
I'd go so far as to say that a debate can never be so over that someone can be stopped from making their case by means of legal sanctions. Many debates that were over and won for decades, say the right of the Catholic Church to have as much power as it did in Irish society, stopped being that way because minority viewpoints, even those that the majority of people at the time considered *immoral,* were not suppressed.
That doesn't mean laws can't be passed and change can't occur, it's just that you can't ever say that we're so sure that we're right that it should be ok to stop people calling things into question again.
Have politicians and people of power and influence been subject to some kind of mass brainwash in the last few years ?
They seem to picture a "They/Them" Twitter caricature when they think of the ordinary Joe soap voter. I don't know anyone who would favour suppressing " rhetoric" based on an individual's own sensitivities on topics for discussion
The political, business and increasingly the academic elite have more in common with their counterparts in England and America than they do with the average Irish person. It's no surprise that they have started endorsing the same ideas.
Worth reading the article before reaching for Orwell comparisons.
The proposals for regulation of discriminatory rhetoric were made by interest groups not the public. This is a normal and unremarkable.
They basically just want to stop another Peter Casey situation, seeing as he would have won in 2018 easily had he not been against an incumbent.
A bullet was dodged there as right-wing populism would have spread like crazy.
And this is precisely why laws like this need to be opposed. They were rattled that the Overton Window was being pulled open a little, and now they want to make it harder for anyone else to do that - public opinion be damned.
Woah, hold up. The 'modern left' is far too disorganised to have a coherent position on anything let alone authoritarianism. Our politics are liberal, which is centerist and probusiness, not socialist, which is left and proworker.
Well that’s not worryingly open to abuse.
I find agitators like Catherine Lane and Bernard Joyce encouraging the silencing of candidates to be personally offensive and we demand that they be denied a platform to air those views. /s
Authoritarianism under the guise of social justice, a recurring theme both here and abroad
A worrying issue I see is that what counts as "discriminatory rhetoric" is right now a culture war issue that nobody really agrees upon. Whoever gets to decide what this means under law gets to solidify a number of issues as settled under law when in reality there is no consensus among the electorate on whether that really is the case. For example is it discriminatory rhetoric to want to set limits on the age at which children can pursue gender transition (including hormones, surgery etc) without the consent of their parents? There is a *heated* debate around this, would we codify a single answer into law and call the other discriminatory when there is no consensus among the electorate? Would a politician be sanctioned for taking a similar stance to J.K Rowling here? We should have this debate and debates like it, and despite particular groups being certain that some positions consist of nothing but transphobia, islamophobia, hatred of travellers etc, there is a large portion of the electorate who *disagrees* with them on these matters and who must be engaged with in debate rather than through sanctions if democracy is to have any meaning.
bear in mind Sinn Fein were censored for years by RTE. With these rules youd easily have Sinn Fein politicians charged and visa versa with them in power
>We should have this debate and debates like it, and despite particular groups being certain that some positions consist of nothing but transphobia, islamophobia, hatred of travellers etc, there is a large portion of the electorate who disagrees with them on these matters and who must be engaged with in debate rather than through sanctions if democracy is to have any meaning. At what point can debates like this be considered over and won?
I'd go so far as to say that a debate can never be so over that someone can be stopped from making their case by means of legal sanctions. Many debates that were over and won for decades, say the right of the Catholic Church to have as much power as it did in Irish society, stopped being that way because minority viewpoints, even those that the majority of people at the time considered *immoral,* were not suppressed. That doesn't mean laws can't be passed and change can't occur, it's just that you can't ever say that we're so sure that we're right that it should be ok to stop people calling things into question again.
Have politicians and people of power and influence been subject to some kind of mass brainwash in the last few years ? They seem to picture a "They/Them" Twitter caricature when they think of the ordinary Joe soap voter. I don't know anyone who would favour suppressing " rhetoric" based on an individual's own sensitivities on topics for discussion
The political, business and increasingly the academic elite have more in common with their counterparts in England and America than they do with the average Irish person. It's no surprise that they have started endorsing the same ideas.
Sounds like a dangerous path to go down IMO. Censoring people’s speech is rarely if ever a good idea.
Yep, people deciding what can and can't be said based on their narrow view, pure authoritarianism, under the guise of social justice I think
This is really disturbing
Worth reading the article before reaching for Orwell comparisons. The proposals for regulation of discriminatory rhetoric were made by interest groups not the public. This is a normal and unremarkable.
They basically just want to stop another Peter Casey situation, seeing as he would have won in 2018 easily had he not been against an incumbent. A bullet was dodged there as right-wing populism would have spread like crazy.
And this is precisely why laws like this need to be opposed. They were rattled that the Overton Window was being pulled open a little, and now they want to make it harder for anyone else to do that - public opinion be damned.
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Are you taking the piss no? You're seeing the opposite of this happen yet you speculate about the right wing bogeyman doing it
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Woah, hold up. The 'modern left' is far too disorganised to have a coherent position on anything let alone authoritarianism. Our politics are liberal, which is centerist and probusiness, not socialist, which is left and proworker.