>Date: Tue, 05 Mar 2002 05:54:19 +0000
>From: "Justin Schwartz"
>Subject: Re: Too Fucking Many Good Books, was Re: David >Lynch
>keeping the police out of it is
>only a beginning, and not a very substantial beginning, in >"freeing" the
>public to choose among all those conflicing >standards/decorums.
>
>Quite true in general, and a point insisted upon by J.S. Mill, >who made
the
>pressures of convention and conformism almost as much a >target in On
Liberty
>as he did state repression
There's certainly a case that can be made that Mill put it more strongly than this; locally in time and place, it can easily be the case that the police are very far down your list of worries in getting the kind of society that Mill liked. One only has to consider the examples of France versus the USA to see that it can be entirely possible to have freer speech in a country which has many more state restrictions on what can be said.
[...]
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2002 08:55:18 -0500 From: Doug Henwood Subject: RE: The Sopranos
>. And there
>are the moments like after Dr Melfi's rape, when you sort >of wish
>that she'd tell Tony so Tony would get the creep whacked.
GAH! We're about three series behind you lot in the UK, goddammit! See, that's the kind of speech that a sufficiently diligent secret police force ought to be able to stamp out. :-)
>Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 13:44:41 +0000
>From: "Justin Schwartz"
>Subject: Re: Superceding liberal democracy?
>But I oppose bourgeois property relations and support >substantive
equality.
>I don't see what this has to do with whether we should >have free
competitive
>elections in which everyone gets to vote for for >representive leaders, a
>limited government and a free press, andthe like. At the >risk of sounding
>end-of-history-sh, what have you got that is better?
I can't resist the old joke; representative leaders, a limited government and a free press might not be the answer to everything, but they'd sure as hell be better than what we've got now.
dd
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