I am very taken with XtraNormal, a website for making free animations online. It is perfect for school projects and the like, and will be instantly employed for satire in the Get Your War On style. but I think it might also have a use in serious political debate. Here is a video I made using a robot, who explains more:
Reagan quote from here.
Tag: Human Rights (Page 28 of 40)
Sam Leith on the Bulger killers:
it is precisely when the crimes are terrible that you most need the law. if anyone harmed my daughter, I would want them tortured to death – which is why I am the last person who should sit on thy jury.
This is a point that can never be reinforced enough, and I am glad Leith’s sub-editor chose this turn-of-phrase as the article’s ‘pull’ quote in the print edition of the Evening Standard.
Human Rights are inconvenient and much maligned, as I have said before. I wonder whether they could do with a bit of a freshening up, a rebrand? They are the perfect issue for a Sir Humphrey-style poll, where the phrasing of the question pre-determines the answer. Ask people whether we should strip all rights, protections an anonymity from child killers, many would answer in the affirmative. Ask the same people whether we should introduce Deep South Style lynch-mobs, they would certainly answer in the negative.
Perhaps it’s time for politicians to talk less about ‘Human Rights’ and more about ‘Anti-Lynching’ measures. They would be referring to the same laws, of course, but spun in a way that emphasises their key purpose, which is to maintain a level of human decency in times of intense human emotion and popular outrage.
That, and more comprehensive teching of Human Rights issues in schools, as part of citizenship classes. These principles need to be at the core of what we tell our youngsters about politics.
I was talking about free expression at an event the other day, when the subject of incitement to violence cropped up. I mentioned the formulation that Aryeh Neier (President of the Open Society Institute) gave at GFFEx last year, regarding whether the person doing the violence agreed with the person whose speech provoked it.
Blasphemy or religious defamation are essentially insults against a person or group of persons on the basis of one’s religious, or it could be another form of group defamation, where one is attacking or insulting members of a particular race or a particular nationality. But it doesn’t have the effect of inspiring the supports of the speaker to engage in violence; rather it is the opponents of the speaker who might engage in violence. So hate speech incites; blasphemy and religious defamation provoke.
That seems to me very important. I think there limited circumstances in which it may be appropriate to punish those who engage in hate speech. I think there are virtually no circumstances where it is appropriate to punish those who engage in in blasphemy or religious defamation, that is the circumstances in which they have provoked others to attack them.
An interesting retort to this, was to ask whether King Henry V was engaging in incitement to violence when he gives his famous, rousing speech?
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
My only response was to suggest that, yes, the French would probably consider Henry’s speech an ‘incitement to violence’ and worthy of censorship, if only they could! But in practice, such political speech is usually seen as exempt when matters of war and national survival are at stake. Governments and their populations are usually comfortable with placing extra restrictions on our human rights during times of crisis.
However, there are times when this special exemption might not be as clear cut as we think. Who, on 14th September 2001, objected to President George W. Bush giving a memorial speech for those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Centre just three days earlier? Yet it was in that speech that he first used the phrase ‘War on Terror’, a formulation that has become hugely problematic and inciting. The following week, when America was still reeling from the shock and in need of rousing leadership, the word ‘crusade’ slipped into the President’s remarks, which not only provoked the Islamic world, but certainly had the effect of inciting certain elements of American society to violent, disproportionate action. The last film I went to see, My Name is Khan, deals with the aftermath of such words.
On Tuesday I was at the demonstration for Simon Singh outside the Royal Courts of Justice. He is being sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association, and the latest court appearance was an appeal over meaning.
Here’s a slideshow of my photos from outside the court, all with a Creative Commons Licence:
Inside the court, the judges apparently became quite exhasperated with some of the arguments put forward during the hearing. Padraig Reidy from Index on Censorship reported first-hand:
Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge said he was “troubled” by the “artificiality” of the case. “The opportunities to put this right have not been taken,” Lord Judge said.
He continued: “At the end of this someone will pay an enormous amount of money, whether it be from Dr Singh’s funds or the funds of BCA subscribers.”
He went on to criticise the BCA’s reluctance to publish evidence to back up claims that chiropractic treatments could treat childhood asthma and other ailments.
“I’m just baffled. If there is reliable evidence, why hasn’t someone published it?”
…
Rogers conceded that had Singh written that there was “no reliable evidence”, the defamation suit might never have happened.
But Lord Justice Sedley suggested “isn’t the first question as to whether something is evidence that it is reliable?”
I see that the assassins of the Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh used fake British passports while plotting the deed. The Daily Mail has an interview with one of the people who had his identity cloned.
A British man in Israel with the same name as an alleged member of a hit squad that assassinated a top Hamas militant in Dubai said his identity had been stolen.
Melvyn Adam Mildiner said he was ‘angry, upset and scared’ over what he called a misidentification.
During the recent debate about MI5 complicity in torture, I noted with dismay how many people used the phrase ‘terror suspects’ quite comfortably when discussing people they might put on a waterboard. This incident in Dubai is a timely reminder that ‘terror suspects’ covers day-tripping British tourists. Anyone who endorses torture due to a hypothetical ticking bomb scenario must also endorse the torture of innocent British holiday makers. That a British tourist might be mistaken for a terrorist is also a hypothetical – but one that is just as probable, if not more probable, than the ticking bomb thought-experiments.
Endorsing the water-boarding of innocent tourist is the only consistent position for those who would justify the torture of other ‘suspects’ such as Binyam Mohammed. It is this internal consistency, taken to its logical conclusion, which highlights the ultimate absurdity of the pro-torture posturing.