Where do you draw the line?
We live in the information age and yet we have books being banned, cancel culture closing down views, and disinformation brainwashing people from vaccinations to politics.
This week there is a controversy in the UK, Jimmy Carr told an awful joke on Netflix and Boris Johnson’ spokesperson say he should be boycotted as a result.
Compare that with politicians like Johnson who preyed on the prejudice against foreigners in the community to get Brexit voted for. This resulted in some immigrants feeling so unwelcome and unsafe they left the country. That seems a bit more important than merely being offended by a joke, however off colour.
A school board in the US bans Maus, a dark satirical work about the Holocaust. After reading the minutes of the board meeting, the author said he got the impression that the board members were asking, “Why can’t they teach a nicer Holocaust?”
Comedians and satirist come right up to the line of what is acceptable, and certainly at times cross it, in order to provoke thought. We do want to think don’t we?
If Joe Rogan’s interviews were satirically mocking the lies of anti vaxxers that would be just fine. But presenting false information about a deadly virus at the time of a pandemic as if it were just an alternate viewpoint? Yeah Nah.
Clearly there is a line to be drawn, but where is it drawn and by whom?
Should someone like Stefan Molyneux with his white supremacist views have been permitted to use a public building to spill his awful bile here in Aotearoa? Personally I don’t think so, no doubt others might disagree.
What about Shock Jocks like Mike Hosking? His show is a one sided stream of misinformation to achieve a political goal. Is there any onus on a station, especially one with “News” in their name, to tell the truth? Or is Mike free to lie to people as when he stated you could only vote for the Maori Party if you were on the Maori role, right before an election?
There are limits, the likes of John Banks, Peter Williams, and Sean Punket said things so racist, so repugnant, and so downright crazy that even a right wing platform like Magic Talk decided they needed to be cancelled.
Should J K Rowling be allowed to express her views on womanhood without being labeled and deemed persona non grata, she who shall not be named, as a result?
Is it healthy in a society that some views, and I don’t mean things that can clearly be shown to be factually inaccurate like some of Joe Rogan’s interviews, be deemed unacceptable to even voice?
There is a clear line. Most of us can tell the difference between those spreading obviously fake information like “masks give you lung cancer”, as seen on the protest march yesterday, versus those expressing an opinion on mandates.
In an ideal world, a fully liberal society, people would be able to say whatever they want, no matter how ridiculous and untrue.
What we have seen though, particularly in the 2016 US election and the Brexit referendum, is that the amount of targeted propaganda can result in people being so swamped with disinformation that they lose the ability to distinguish the truth, no matter how absurd the lies are.
By all means have different views, dislike the policies of your opponents, but if people will buy into a lie like Hillary Clinton running a pedophile ring from the basement of a pizzeria they are no longer capable of being part of a functioning democracy.
More so if their views and vote can be manipulated for the interests of would-like-to-be dictators then scarily it isn’t going to be much of a stretch for those people to signup as camp guards to imprison others with different views, or worse.
We all have an opinion. Whether or not Joe Rogan, and Spotify, should be able to profit from lies about vaccinations. Whether a comedian should be able to tell a joke – no matter how distasteful some may find it. Whether JK Rowling or Stefan Molyneux should be allowed to express an opinion or be shut down.
To quote the Dead Kennedys, a band familiar with record bans, “Where do you draw the line. I’m not telling you, I’m asking you.”
Where do you draw the line?