The solution to the problems of free speech – that sometimes people will say terrible things – is always and irreducibly more free speech. If you don’t like what a person says, argue back. Make a better case. Persuade people.

Alternatively, you could, like Hari, threaten them with legal action.

But let us assume that Hari’s views have changed since he used the Independent’s lawyers to threaten a blogger with a libel suit, and that today he is, as the above passage states, a “free-speech” fundamentalist. The response to speech you don’t like, he argues, must always and only be “more free speech”. In that case Hari presumably finds troubling all the official restrictions placed on speech anywhere in the world — not only by Muslim governments but also, for example, by our own beloved liberal democracies.

In England, lamentably, many speech acts are criminal offences, such as those threatening violence or “encouraging” the commission of an offence. We can look forward, I assume, to Hari’s campaign not only to abolish the concept of libel, but to defend everyone’s “right” to say to someone in a pub, “I’m gonna cut your face to ribbons”, or to stand on a street corner and shout: “Murder all Catholics!” Because, as I think we can all agree, the idea of “free speech” means nothing unless it is absolute.

As an example of what principled champions of “free speech” such as Johann Hari are up against, I offer the decadent reasoning of an American:

[P]recisely because speech is never “free” in the two senses required — free of consequences and free from state pressure — speech always matters, is always doing work; because everything we say impinges on the world in ways indistinguishable from the effects of physical action, we must take responsibility for our verbal performances — all of them.²

Of course, if you give that kind of postmodern nonsense any credence, you’re basically an appeaser of tyrants.

1. Hari wrote:

   I don’t respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don’t respect the idea that we should follow a “Prophet” who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn’t follow him. I don’t respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don’t respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice.

   This, he now pleads rather ambitiously, was part of a “a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics” — though he does not, so far as I can tell, adduce any actual examples of Buddhofascism. And evidently it was not, as he now claims, just a matter of “stating simple facts” (see this comment below). «

2. Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It’s a Good Thing, Too (Oxford, 1994), p114. «

['Intelligent Design' proponents] tended to refer to their opponents — that is, biologists — as ‘neo-Darwinists’. What was actually known as the ‘Neo-Darwinian Modern Synthesis’ of evolutionary science combined Darwinian theory with twentieth-century genetics. Yet the consistent use of the term ‘neo-Darwinist’ by evolution’s enemies imputed to science an idolatrous reliance on the supposedly outdated ideas of one man, as though he were the false god of an ‘evolutionist’ religion.¹

Now, in the New York Times, Carl Safina argues persuasively that biologists themselves have erred in accepting the term:

By propounding “Darwinism,” even scientists and science writers perpetuate an impression that evolution is about one man, one book, one “theory.” [...] Science has marched on. But evolution can seem uniquely stuck on its founder. We don’t call astronomy Copernicism, nor gravity Newtonism. “Darwinism” implies an ideology adhering to one man’s dictates, like Marxism. And “isms” (capitalism, Catholicism, racism) are not science. “Darwinism” implies that biological scientists “believe in” Darwin’s “theory”.

And this, Safina argues, leaves a rhetorical door open for liars:

Using phrases like “Darwinian selection” or “Darwinian evolution” implies there must be another kind of evolution at work, a process that can be described with another adjective. For instance, “Newtonian physics” distinguishes the mechanical physics Newton explored from subatomic quantum physics. So “Darwinian evolution” raises a question: What’s the other evolution?

Into the breach: intelligent design. I am not quite saying Darwinism gave rise to creationism, though the “isms” imply equivalence. But the term “Darwinian” built a stage upon which “intelligent” could share the spotlight.

For a case in point, see this remarkable farrago of unreason by the Telegraph’s anti-science correspondent Christopher Booker:

[Darwin] might [...] have recognised that some other critically important but unknown factor seemed to be at work, an “organising power” which had allowed these otherwise inexplicable leaps to take place. But so possessed was he by the simplicity of his theory that, brushing such difficulties aside, he made a leap of faith that it must be right, regardless of the evidence. In this he has been followed by generations of “Darwinians” who have found his theory so beguiling that, like him, they have refused to recognise how much it cannot explain.

It’s true that “Darwinism” cannot explain what Booker invokes, a “critically important but unknown factor [...] an organising power”, because such a power is by definition inexplicable. But hang on, if this “factor” is “unknown”, how does Booker know it’s “critically important”? Indeed, if it’s “unknown”, how does Booker know it’s an “organising power”? These are rhetorical questions: what is going on here, piquantly, is that a major broadsheet columnist is outing himself as a creationist.

Like his fellow creationists, Booker doesn’t have much truck with known facts. As Richard Wilson helpfully points out, Booker’s Telegraph column recycles two of its dunciac paragraphs from this earlier piece in the Spectator, wherein Booker confidently asserts that “genetically we are all but identical” to “mice and sea urchins”, and wonders plaintively how “much the same genetic coding can produce such an infinite variety of life forms?”

Me, I wonder how the same alphabetic coding can produce such a stunning variety of tongue-dragging moronitude in purportedly high-minded periodicals. And from long meditation on that improbability, I am inevitably driven to believe in a Stupid Designer. Surely the accretion of random changes could not possibly have resulted in organisms so ill-suited to rational thinking?

1. Unspeak, 2nd edn (2007), p.50. «

Happily, facts are rarely allowed to get in the way of the cretinous moralizing of pro-WADdists. And so came a more-than-usually moronic session in Parliament yesterday, wherein home secretary “Jacqui” Smith screeched:

I spoke to Professor Nutt about his comments this morning. I told him that I was surprised and profoundly disappointed by the article. I am sure that most people would simply not accept the link that he makes up in his article between horse riding and illegal drug-taking.

The “link that he makes up”? IANAL, but I think this manages to be both a falsehood about what Nutt says, and a slander of him for fabricating evidence (or at least it would be a slander if it weren’t for Parliamentary privilege). As far as I can tell from press coverage,³ Nutt did not assert — still less invent — any “link” between the two activities. He did not propose that horse-riding was a gateway pastime to Ecstasy use. He merely compared them in their harms. Is to compare two things now inevitably to “make up” a “link” between them? Of course it isn’t, and of course “Jacqui” Smith is either a numbskull or a liar.

That makes light of a serious problem, trivialises the dangers of drugs, shows insensitivity to the families of victims of ecstasy, and sends the wrong message to young people about the dangers of drugs.

I see. So noting some facts about harms attributable to a particular drug “sends the wrong message” about the dangers of drugs. We are obliged to conclude, I think, that the right message would be a lie. This goes one thrilling step further than when last year’s plan to “upgrade” cannabis (which didn’t mean distributing better-quality shit) was said to “send a message” that drugs were eevull. The policy now is that facts about drug use are the wrong message to be sending about drug use. You can’t handle the truth!

Not to be outdone in the competition to see who could honk more crassly, Conservative MP Laurence Robertson took the chortlesome opportunity to make fun of Professor Nutt’s surname:

Will she go a little further than she did in her statement just now and perhaps suggest to Professor Nutt that although he might be appropriately named, he is in the wrong job?

“Jacqui” Smith responded:

I made completely clear my view that there is absolutely no equivalence between the legal activity of horse riding and the illegal activity of drug taking, and that will always be the basis on which I make decisions about drugs policy.

That is rather a specific basis on which to base one’s entire drugs policy, isn’t it? Still, we look forward to all future statements on the WAD by “Jacqui” Smith containing a disclaimer that taking drugs is not the same thing as riding horses, despite what some insane so-called “scientists” might babble.

What “message” does this farce send to you, readers?

1. Or, more properly, the WADETLOFWTGRIANP — the War Against Drugs, Except The Legal Ones From Which The Government Rakes In A Nice Profit. «
2. Cutely, he even offered a new term for the proposed “addiction” to riding horses, viz. Equasy. «
3. I don’t have access to the journal article: if anyone does, feel free to cite interesting bits in comments. «

Meanwhile, is there any distinction left these days between “geek” and “nerd”? I had the impression that “nerd” used to be pejorative but was then reclaimed, as are so many negative terms for groups, by the very people at whom it was directed.

What’s your GSAT score, readers?

1. I had somehow forgotten that I do actually own a sword. «

So let me celebrate it, first, by laughing at Cass Sunstein’s poignant plea, in his book Republic 2.0, that people on the “left” should link more often to people on the “right”, for purposes other than critique (eg in their blogrolls), and vice versa, so as to help democracy. In other words, bloggers should proactively link to bloggers with whose writings they don’t agree at all. Well, the virtue of doing this somehow randomly, as a form of nonideological statistical “balance”, is mysterious to me, unless Sunstein cares to pop up and explain in comments exactly why, for example, I should arbitrarily link to people I consider idiots at best and, if proven not idiots, then liars. To take one example, Unspeak.net readers who have taken a close interest in the evolution of my blogroll (ie, I sincerely hope, none of you) will have noticed that I used to link therein to a quite well-known British group blog of pretend leftists who just so happen to spend all their time making excuses for acts of large-scale violence committed by their preferred states, joining in witchhunts started by fellow pretend leftists against people who write or say things they don’t like, and generally stirring up paranoiac fear about the Muslim horde of killers in our midst. I take it that those of my readers who aren’t already aware of that site are done a service by my omitting to provide a link that sends them there. Of course, the assumption that those who remain in my blogroll after I refuse to link to such maniacs must be people with whom I always agree is as dumb as a wet sock.

Secondly, I will celebrate Blogroll Amnesty Day by recommending to you some blogs from my current Google Reader list that I didn’t previously recommend here, and none of which, by the way, falls into Sunstein’s dully manichean taxonomy of the blogo-icosahedron: Brainiac, Paper Cuts, Stanley Fish, Ben’s Blogbox, An and für sich, and The Triforce. I won’t spoil your inevitable delight by describing them: just click on the links and see.

What are your favourite blogs, readers? (And yes, since it’s still Blogroll Amnesty Day hereabouts, you’re allowed to nominate your own.)

I thought that was silly then, and still do. Very often, in order to lead the reader through some line of thought to some (as we hope) subtle conclusion, it is first necessary to state the obvious, so that we can all agree on our starting point. Surely it can’t hurt to signal this rhetorically by starting with “Obviously…”.¹ I think that to do so is actually a courtesy to the reader. The message of “obviously” is: “I know this is self-evidently true, but please be patient, I do not mean to insult your intelligence: I state this because I am going to do something with it in a minute that you might find more interesting.”²

Similarly, it isn’t a redundancy to say of some claim, “That is obviously false”, compared with saying “That is false”. By adding “obviously”, you mean that it is not false in any subtle or sophisticated way, just plain wrong. At the same time, you also imply a criticism of the person making the claim (who should have seen that it was obviously false).

It is also quite common for the negative connotation of “obvious” to be used for suspense. If you are working rhetorically through some problem, you might well say at an early point, “The obvious answer is p“, deliberately invoking the idea that what is obvious is not necessarily the case (because, indeed, you plan later to refute it).

We know, after all, to be suspicious of what is obvious. Often, too, “obvious” is a term of disapprobation in artistic criticism: you can lament that the painter or screenwriter, as it may be, did the obvious thing, not some other thing that might have been more unusual and piquant. Meanwhile, to conclude of some claim, “That is obviously true”, is very often to take a position of superiority, to affect the pose of having no time to waste on simple facts that are evident to all.

Perhaps the difference between the courteous and the critical uses of “obvious” or “obviously” is simply this: it depends on who is making the claim you are describing as obvious. If you’re making it yourself, then to call it “obvious” is an apology for starting from basics (as well as, perhaps, a tiny boast that what follows is going to be less than obvious, in some satisfying way).³ But if someone else has made the claim, then to call it “obvious” seems nearly always to be an attack on that person. It’s not clear to me why this asymmetry should exist.

What are your favourite uses of “obviously”, readers?

1. We ought to distinguish starting with the word “obviously”, as in “Obviously, bees can fly”, with shunting “obviously” into the middle of a sentence, where it is more often exploited as mere phatic emphasis, and indeed will often be read as protesting too much – as, for example, if I were to say: “Oliver Kamm is obviously an obituarist and music critic of rare talent.” You might even be alerted to a particular weakness in that very statement, compared to others I make around it, by my own decision to buttress it with a pleading “obviously”. «
2. I distinguish this use of “Obviously” from the more radical rhetorical apology for obviousness, “It goes without saying”. If it really does go without saying, then there is no need for you to say it. «
3. A more comically boastful use of “obvious” is available, too, as when a mathematician or chessplayer calmly announces that the solution to some tortuously anfractuous puzzle is “obvious”. Sure, it’s obvious to you, because you’re a genius! «

The flaw of the Bush-Cheney administration may have been less in what it did than in the way it did it — flaunting executive power, ignoring Congress, showing scorn for anyone who waved the banner of civil liberties.

Right… So, for instance, torturing people was fine, they just shouldn’t have been so obstreperous about it? Well, y’know…

The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems.

Really? Is it?

Waterboarding — simulating drowning by pouring water over the suspect’s mouth and nostrils — is a brutal interrogation method.

It’s not “simulating drowning”, it is drowning, just stopping before the victim’s death.

But by some (disputed) accounts, it was CIA waterboarding that got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to talk.

It was CIA forced partial drowning that “got” KSM to “confess” to plotting to bomb a bank that didn’t exist until three years after he was arrested.

It is a liberal shibboleth that torture doesn’t work — that suspects will say anything, including lies, to stop the pain. But the reality is perhaps less clear.

Perhaps less clear. And our evidence is… er… say, are you following the new season of 24? (By the way, try saying “liberal shibboleth” very quickly, ten times in a row. Fun, huh?)

As president, Obama may want to preserve some flexibility. (Suppose, for instance, that after a big attack the CIA captured the leader who planned it; there would be enormous pressure to make the terrorist divulge what attack is coming next.)

Sure, Obama might want to preserve some flexibility by torturing the “leader” who “planned” a “big attack”. On the other hand, he might want to preserve some flexibility by doing yoga, or perhaps studying the Feldenkrais method. After all, Cheney’s chosen exercise regime of torturing all and sundry doesn’t seem to have panned out too well.

What are your favourite methods for preserving some flexibility, readers?

What we are trying to do is shifting … to a much more proactive role for the user and reader where the reader is not only going to learn from reading the article but by modifying the article and - importantly - by maybe creating his own content or her own content

The reader is going to “learn… by modifying”? So the people modifying the articles don’t actually need to know anything about the subject before they start modifying? The modifying itself is supposed to be the way they learn? That’s “proactive”!¹ Oh, but luckily, edits won’t go live until approved by “one of the company’s staff or freelance editors”. I suppose they can always check whether the new material looks correct by, er, going to Wikipedia.²

But it ill behoves me to carp at this exciting news. We can at least be very confident that, in time, Britannica will become a much more reliable source of information than it has hitherto been about old videogames and science-fiction TV series. Everybody wins!

1. But what, dear readers, does the horrible term “proactive” actually add to the sense of, um, “active”? «
2. I confess that I have never edited my own Wikipedia article so as to make myself look more important and central to the critical intellectual debates of our time, etc. Do you think I should? «

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?” Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water?

(Via Daring Fireball.)