David Irving and Free Speech

Free Speech is a logical extreme. Free Speech can only truly exist without censorship, without limitations. The problem is that human beings want both free speech and censorship, they desire the ideal as well as its negation. Human beings, as always, want to maintain their cake and at the same time consume their cake. This brings us to David Irving and the Oxford Debating Society.

The Oxford Union Debating Society invited David Irving and Nick Griffin to speak at a debate about Free Speech. This pissed off many, many people. Among those who were pissed off and so protested was one David Block, co-president of Oxford's Jewish Society, who supplied this delightful quote:

"My main grievance about this debate is the accusation that we want to deny people free speech. We just don’t want to give them any more platforms to air their views, which are disgraceful."

At the risk of invoking the wratch of David Block's schmutz'd schmeckle I'm going to go ahead and call him a dipshit, or "putz". Why? If you don't want David Irving to spout his idiocy at your university then you don't want free speech. Censorship denies free speech. And everyone wants censorship.

No? Think about it. I am fine with an absense of censorship in many ways: I think a person ought to be able to yell "fire!" in crowded mall if they so choose (it will make the mall less crowded). I think people ought to be able to say "fuck" and "nigger" if they so choose. But I do not think creationism ought to be taught in science classes. I want to limit what a science professor says in a science class. Granted, the position that science professors ought to only teach science in science class is reasonable and, dare I say, correct. But it is a limit to free speech; it is censorship.

I think humanity ought to rid itself of the rhetoric of "free speech". No one wants free speech. No one wants everyone to be able to say anything they want at any time. Even the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States doesn't really mean "free speech". Slander and Libel, for example, are not protected.

It is possible to want a reasonable degree of "free" speech; one can argue for the ability to say things within a context of limitations. But no one wants "free speech". No one wants absolutely no limits, ever, on what a person can say. So qualifying your protest of free speech by saying that you really do want free speech is simply idiotic. You do not want free speech.

So fucking say so.