--- jf noonan <jfn1 at msc.com> wrote: >
> Don't forget banning anti-McDonald's literature --
> that's pretty
> kewl too.
I don't think that's a valid objection. If you look at the anti-Nazi statutes of France and Germany, they're very closely worded with regard to the events of 1934-45. It's the Nazi Party which is banned, not any particular viewpoint or set thereof. The idea that all anti-Nazi laws will eventually be used against people who aren't Nazis isn't as easy to sustain as one might think.
--- Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> wrote:
> Let's just ban the use of force.
I think we can do better than that. If we don't like force, then we might also want to consider banning a few things that repeatedly and predictably lead to the use of force. One wouldn't want to turn this into a generally illiberal stance, but there are some small number of activities that have literally no redeeming qualities, and forming Nazi parties is one of them.
--- Justin Schwartz <jkschw at hotmail.com> wrote: >
> Now that Blair and Thatcher have undermined the
> Labour Party, what do you
> predict for free speech in Britain?
Dunno. The libel laws will remain bad, but not as bad as France. And I'd bet a dollar to a doughnut that we get some sort of privacy statute, and that it will be horrible when it arrives. The Official Secrets Act will continue to make us a global laughing stock. And Freedom of Information will never arrive. Oh yeh, and every spook on earth will read our email.
Basically, everything that happens in the US will happen to us, except we'll still have more protection for celebrities and less stultifying consensual politics.
dd
===== “It is necessarily part of the business of a banker to maintain appearances and to profess a conventional respectability which is more than human. Life-long practices of this kind make them the most romantic and the least realistic of men” -- JM Keynes
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