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Is Your Council Free Speech Compliant?
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- Category: Free Citizen
- Hits: 56
2024-04-01
Free speech used to be taken for granted, thanks in large part to sensible legal precedents set by sensible judges in times past, who opined that the right to speak only without offending was not worth having. Now a quick internet search for "the right to speak only without offending was not worth having" pulls up a myriad of articles about how to speak without causing offence, but none about the status quo ante, so far has the needle been pushed away from previous precedent.
And yet, whilst offence may or may not be "offered", it doesn't instantiate unless "taken" - and these days it doesn't even have to be offered to be taken, it can be taken anyway. Therefore in principle, the party that "gives" offence isn't able to judge whether or not "offence" will be taken. One can guess, but one cannot be reasonably sure either way.
Laws based on such a subjective definition of the alleged "offence" (in its legal sense of falling outside legal/lawful behaviour) are not ideal. In practice it simply brings the law into disrepute.
Of course there are well-established legal limits to speech - one may not slander anybody (ie: defame verbally by telling fibs) - that may also offend but the offence of slander is already a civil matter that can be settled for damages in the Civil Courts. One may not incite criminal activity or civil unrest, and whilst in some cases there may be a narrow dividing line between civil protest and civil unrest, unrest and protest have never been equated in law.
So it comes to pass that numerous guidelines have to be written by numerous organisations simply in order for members of those organisations to stay out of trouble for speaking one's mind.
Personally, I would opt for the status quo ante: that free speech is far more important than the notion that somebody might take offence, and in a free society people should be robust enough to take any minor but legal offence on the chin and move on - after all, if slander is committed you can take them to court for damages, but if no criminal activity is incited you are never obliged to take offence, better to put it down to experience and get on with your life.
Remember the law works both ways - if you can take offence at the speech of others, others can also take offence against yours ...
"Many months of work alongside the Free Speech Union have gone into getting this policy right, and this is only the beginning – the many years of local authorities getting free speech wrong need to be put right"
And finally, guidelines cost money, unnecessarily complex guidelines cost excessive amounts of time and money to write and to administer, and we wonder why our standard of living is going down the drain whilst everybody is investigating what in times past never needed to be policed and investigated.
Wireless Roll-Out Woes
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- Category: Free Citizen
- Hits: 58
2024-03-30
Richard Vobes in an earlier video investigated some seemingly dubious wireless masts with Ian Jarvis.
Now Colchester Council Watch brings us news of not dissimilar goings-on in Gloucester, where activists have been taking their council to task for lack of public consultation, not to mention "malfeasance in public office" ...
(41 minutes)
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Down with those Dreadful Populists!
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- Category: Free Citizen
- Hits: 57
2024-03-29
The EU is notoriously dismissive of its populist parties, and the UK is well out of it (at least legally out of it - politically it is obviously still a work in progress, that some suspect may outlast the EU itself).
I suppose that the British have a bit of a reputation for independent thinking - although not always right-thinking. I suppose that our struggle for independence (ie: getting out from under) has been going on ever since the Romans invaded, and for all I know it may even predate those times.
But it is now clear that independence is a multi-layered concept - we regained our legal nationhood from the legal clutches of the EU, but not yet our political independence from their top-down political thinking - that very plainly still has to be resolved, and that resolution is a battle not only for our nationhood but also for fundamental truth and integrity within our governing institutions. We need to recognise and understand who really governs us, and how they do it, before we will be able to wrest back our right to govern ourselves as we see fit.
That is a wholly different struggle from the historical battles that were fought for our "independence" and "freedom" in past ages.
Or is it? Perhaps it is just another battleground of the same struggle, a battleground that in past ages we didn't perceive as clearly as we are beginning perceive it today.
Nick Hubble from Fortune and Freedom reviews the events in Europe that preceded and in some ways set the stage for the English Civil War, which was indeed a battle over how we were to be governed, and has parallels with our modern world.
Whilst those parallels are indeed apposite, our struggle for truth, integrity, and bottom-up governance is now coming to the fore as never before. And it is being fought, indeed must be fought, on a global scale.
What will success look like?
When we can provide a different answer to that old joke: "How do you know when a politician is lying?" we will know that we have made progress.
The Moscow Attack According to Scott Ritter
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- Category: Free Citizen
- Hits: 73
2024-03-26
Many people will have a view about the recent deadly attack on the Moscow entertainment venue, but Scott Ritter is a well-informed commentator with a life-time of experience. Always worth listening to.
Sadly the sound quality is poor, but it's not disastrous.
"The Russians know everything".
Watch and weep - the perpetrators never stood a chance, rather like their victims. Will this go down as an object lesson in how not to mount a terror attack?
(67 minutes)
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Russia Russia Russia
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- Category: Free Citizen
- Hits: 73
2024-03-23
This is a mighty long article that in effect seeks to unravel how the Great (Political) Awakening will emerge from the current course of global geopolitics.
It's a big sweep and requires some determination to get through, but does it make sense?
Yes, it majors on the political situation in the USA, a situation which even we Brits, observing from our remote homeland across the pond and beset with all our own problems (perhaps pale shadows of the problems of USA Inc), recognise as both improbable and intractable.
Yet we share largely the same problems with many countries around the globe (immigration out of control, cretinous corporate/self-serving and yes dishonest and fundamentally unelectable politicians, dubious inordinately slow and expensive justice systems, local and national governments mesmerised by the WEF and Israel, etc).
"They" want us to continue on the old old Left vs Right (now "Extreme" Right) ideological battleground, whilst "We" the people have increasingly graduated to fight on the Right vs Wrong, Bottom-up vs Top-down, Freedom vs Coercion, Spiritual vs Material battleground.
To fight on that battleground we (on both sides of the pond) are rejecting the false narratives and insisting as best we can on the truth, no matter how ugly, no matter how glorious or inglorious, even when found within ourselves.
The truth may not set us free, but it is the prerequisite and we know that Right, even Extreme Right, beats Wrong hands down.
"I think my friend Chris Paul summed it all up quite nicely when he said, 'Joe Biden's fake presidency is so meaningless at this point that the State of the Union counts as noise and not signal.' "
" ... not to explore and explain the truth of the Russian Federation and its future role in the emergence of the multi-polar world order and the war on the Globalist Deep State, but rather to consider the story of Russia that the Collective Western Mind has been told and sold seemingly for time immemorial"
Ready?
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- How did we get from Freedom to Public-Private Dictatorship?
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- End of the Old, Start of the New?
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