1 Mar 2012 | Uncategorized
A controversial academic paper in the Journal of Medical Ethics has triggered a torrent of abuse, including threats of violence and death.
Francesca Minerva and Alberto Giubilini, who wrote After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?, argue that given that those who accept abortion typically do so for reasons that have nothing to do with the foetus’s health (even where the foetus clearly is a potential person), then where abortion is permissible, killing a newborn should be permissible, on grounds of consistency. Not a palatable conclusion for many of us, though it could be read as a Swiftian modest proposal that ultimately attacks the morality of permitting abortion.
But should we be free to discuss killing babies at all? Is that on a par with publishing articles that are pro-pedophilia? Julian Savulescu, the journal’s editor, has defended the decision to publish on the grounds that the goal of the publication is not to present an ultimate truth or a simplistic view based on morals, but rather to present well-reasoned arguments based on widely accepted premises. In this spirit, Savulescu is equally ready to publish coherent responses to the controversial article.
This is a test case for the liberal defence of free speech so eloquently advocated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty. Mill believed that dissenting, provocative and challenging voices jolt us out of the complacency of our dead dogmas. Mill writes that “Both teachers and learners go to sleep as soon as there is no enemy in the field”. Unless we have had our fundamental views challenged, we are likely to hold them in a drowsy fashion, scarcely aware of why we believe what we do.
Most of us believe that killing babies is wrong; here’s an argument that suggests that if you think that abortion on non-medical grounds is sometimes acceptable, then you probably ought to believe that infanticide is sometimes acceptable. It’s clear from the context of presentation in an academic journal, too, that this isn’t an incitement to actual infanticide, but rather a provocative move in an ongoing debate, a plea for consistency. No doubt there will be a flurry of refutations submitted to the journal.
For Mill, as for many who defend free expression, the limit of free expression is the point where someone incites harm. But the only people directly inciting harm here are those issuing death threats. They seem to have confused a contribution to an academic debate with an invitation to kill. Here context is all and quotation out of context likely to lead to misunderstanding. Yet we can take even this category mistake as a stimulus to clarify what it is we value about freedom of expression in this context and where its limits lie.
Julian Savulescu has taken just this opportunity: “Free speech” he told me, “is not valuable in itself — hate speech, for example, is not something we should seek to protect. Rational argument that seeks to engage others — that is worth protecting.”
28 Feb 2012 | Uncategorized
The evictions of Occupy London sites at St Paul’s Cathedral and the School of Ideas show a systemic contempt for the right to protest if that dissent threatens profit.
The 80 people living at the St Paul’s site and the 40-50 living at an abandoned school building near Old Street were greeted in the small hours of the morning with police vans, bailiffs, riot cops and a gaggle of press photographers. Supporters received text messages and tweets from people on site and those who could make the post-midnight journey came down to stand in support or rubberneck over the police lines set up around it. Occupy’s tech team began a long night of tweeting and livestream broadcasts. As the sun rose over a hazy London, the bulldozers arrived at the School of Ideas and before most people had finished their breakfasts and set off on their morning commutes, the abandoned Islington school was no more. And St Paul’s was, for the first time since 15 October 2011, clear of tents and banners.
After a decision from the Court of Appeal was passed to prevent an appeal for protesters to remain encamped on the St Paul’s site, life there began to show signs of strain. The weekend before the eviction, most of the residential tents were still in place but some of the larger structures at the side of the cathedral were taken down or relocated. People were pre-empting a “dawn raid” — as in the way the Parliament Square anti-war encampments were evicted. It was no longer a case of if, but when.
So when the floodlights arrived just after midnight with its chorus of riot police and neon-vested bailiffs, they were expected. Some people chose to wear their tents instead of have them destroyed, and others built a structure out of pallets and stood on it in token resistance to the eviction. Police arrested 23 protesters but for the most part, people decamped to the remaining Occupy site at Finsbury Square and began the process of asking “what now?”
The High Court’s decision in favour of the City of London Corporation was an attempt to put the nail in the coffin of the Occupy movement’s protest and dissent. The swathe of evictions across all Occupy sites is the state’s way of trying to bury it. Ahead of the London 2012 Olympic Games, the erection of tents and the possession of sleeping equipment on Olympic sites were declared unlawful. Reports that government ministers are drafting legislation loosely based on part 3 of the Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 and that they will invoke the London Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Act 2006 to protect Olympic branding and sponsors make this government’s position on what matters crystal clear. This is legislation for the short term that will carry the weight of precedent against your human right to protest in the long term. Do not mess with the money machine. You can have “peaceful protest” but the minute you start cutting near the bone, you will be stopped. Your free speech ends where the profit margin begins.
The bleary eyes of the occupiers are dead today. Their bodies are slumped in exhaustion on a muddy plot of land next to a car park and the Bloomberg building. But their heels are digging into the soil as they vow to carry on.
It matters little what you personally feel about the global Occupy Movement and London’s part in it. You could be devoted to it as a zeitgeist, you can maintain that occupation should be a political tactic used to achieve tangible change or you could say that the sight of riot police on the steps of St Paul’s cathedral at 2am was the most radical thing to come out of that plot of land. The truth is this — gambling by financial institutions around the world has crippled the many for the benefit of the few. The blind eye turned by governments to this wanton destruction of lives shows that our will as the people to form the basis of authority of government has been raped. We are no longer equal before the law.
14 Feb 2012 | Middle East and North Africa
The Bahraini government spends thousands and thousands of dollars on PR companies every month. Their purpose of using such companies is simple: to project a positive image of Bahrain while also tempering any negative press coverage.
One such company is Qorvis, a Washington D.C. Based PR firm that receives a monthly stipend from the Bahraini government of 40,000 USD. They operate by attempting to influence journalists or opinion makers through the strategic placement of favourable reports defending the actions of the Bahrain government. Their methods range from circulating articles on outlets such as PR Newsire, to emailing journalists directly in order to defend the actions of the regime.
Some PR companies are also suspected of engaging in more clandestine activities, such as creating sock puppet accounts on Twitter to spread pro-regime propaganda. The revelation that BGR Gabara, yet another British PR firm reportedly working for Bahrain, planned to organise a Twitter campaign on behalf of Kazakh children exacerbated such concerns. Given that the US government are also involved in such sock puppetry, there is no reason the private sector won’t seek to profit from it.
Another dimension of PR work is minimising negative publicity. For example, the Guardian recently took down an article from its Comment is Free section after a British PR firm representing the Bahrain International Circuit made a complaint. The article, which Dragon Associates argued contained “considerable inaccuracies”, threatened to derail Bahrain’s plans to host the F1 Grand Prix this year. It has yet to be put back up, either in its original or altered form.
Perhaps the most worrying players in the murky world of PR are the likes of Olton, a British intelligence firm who officially have a contract with the Economic Development Board, but who also appear to work for Ministry of the Interior. As well as providing “reputation management”, their software is reported to be able to identify “ringleaders” through using social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Given that dozens of students were dismissed from university based on evidence garnered from their Facebook profiles, many are demanding to know who is doing the watching.
The threat posed by unscrupulous PR companies to freedom of speech should not be underestimated. It is bad enough that they distort the public sphere in exchange for money, yet it is the rise of companies like Olton that is the most alarming, for when does intelligence gathering become ‘evidence’ gathering? Furthermore, when does “reputation management” involve facilitating the silencing of those narratives that oppose the desired rhetoric of the paying client?
Marc Owen Jones is a blogger and PhD candidate at Durham University. He tweets at @marcowenjones
3 Feb 2012 | Index Index, minipost
The United Nations Human Rights Committee have found that the defamation conviction of a Philippines journalist violated the journalist’s right to free expression. In the landmark ruling, the UN committee said that the prison sentence handed to journalist Alexander Adonis of Bombo Radyo, following his reporting on an alleged affair between a Philippine congressman and a married woman, was “incompatible” with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UNHRC has given the Philippine government 180 days to provide “information about the measures taken to give effect to the Committee’s views”.
