Political Correctness

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

If you take out the “Racial Discrimination Act” and replaced it with “Discrimination and Deceitful Act” we wouldn’t even be having this debate.

Bolt could’ve written the article with an honest approach and not have to add the factual errors. He didn’t even need to name people and simply done the research behind the scenes. Bolt gets enough coverage that without the naming of individuals he would’ve got the same amount of coverage.

Some of the factual errors were fairly pedantic, ie Person X was 8 years old and not 9 years old or Person Y came from Colac and not Warrnambool.
People get hung up on the factual errors but it was more sloppiness than anything else. There were probably only one or two errors that I would consider pejorative. I don’t think they were deliberately deceptive. My opinion only though.

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

If you take out the “Racial Discrimination Act” and replaced it with “Discrimination and Deceitful Act” we wouldn’t even be having this debate.

Bolt could’ve written the article with an honest approach and not have to add the factual errors. He didn’t even need to name people and simply done the research behind the scenes. Bolt gets enough coverage that without the naming of individuals he would’ve got the same amount of coverage.

Some of the factual errors were fairly pedantic, ie Person X was 8 years old and not 9 years old or Person Y came from Colac and not Warrnambool.
People get hung up on the factual errors but it was more sloppiness than anything else. There were probably only one or two errors that I would consider pejorative. I don’t think they were deliberately deceptive. My opinion only though.

Job done then. He’s a bit more careful before throwing his facts and figures around. He has had a lot of opportunity to try to write an article like that again but hasn’t. He wasn’t barred from writing on the topic again.

If as you say it was only minor discrepancies he shouldn’t be afraid to keep pushing the subject.

Of course this is my opinion as well.

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

Seriously - who names their child ‘Mordecai’???

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

Seriously - who names their child ‘Mordecai’???

A jewish family.

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

Seriously - who names their child ‘Mordecai’???

A jewish family.

Now I’m outraged.

Can’t believe what started so well has devolved into a discussion about Andrew farking Bolt.

If I could ask this as genuinely as possible, G, how you would feel about people being taken to task about how much they looked like they belonged to your culture when accepting positions, rather than their actual connection to it.

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

If you take out the “Racial Discrimination Act” and replaced it with “Discrimination and Deceitful Act” we wouldn’t even be having this debate.

Bolt could’ve written the article with an honest approach and not have to add the factual errors. He didn’t even need to name people and simply done the research behind the scenes. Bolt gets enough coverage that without the naming of individuals he would’ve got the same amount of coverage.

Some of the factual errors were fairly pedantic, ie Person X was 8 years old and not 9 years old or Person Y came from Colac and not Warrnambool.
People get hung up on the factual errors but it was more sloppiness than anything else. There were probably only one or two errors that I would consider pejorative. I don’t think they were deliberately deceptive. My opinion only though.

Errors like the age or hometown of the person would only have been considered relevant by the court as further evidence that Bolt did not care about truth or do reasonable research when writing his article. If those were the only lies he told, he would never have been charged under 18c because 18c requires the lies to be racial in nature. 18c is not just a clause that allows you to lodge a generic ‘you said something incorrect about me’ complaint. It was his massively false statements about the aboriginal heritage of the individuals concerned, their professional achievements, and their honesty in claiming aboriginal scholarships that mostly matter.

As I have stated, in the particular case of my friend, the lies he told were multiple, major, easily disproven with a simple google search, and focused on matters of race and culture.

1 Like
Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

Seriously - who names their child ‘Mordecai’???

A jewish family.

Anti-semite

I dunno what it's like in the USA, but in Australian terms I'll take all this pious concern for free speech rights seriously when their proponents are just as loud in defence of someone like Scott McIntyre as they are in defence of people's right to be racist.

Who was Scott McIntyre? He was the sbs reporter who a while back went on a huge twitter rant about how much he hated Anzac Day, and that it glorified war and imperialism, and that many Australian soldiers serving in war were thieves or rapists. The silence from the ‘free speech über alles’ brigade was deafening, and everyone clamoured for sbs to sack him, which they promptly did.

‘Free speech’ in modern politics is very very very often just a code word for ‘I want to be a racist or bigot and not get criticised for it’. I’ll start taking it seriously when ‘free speech’ advocates start getting serious about demanding defamation law reform, or increased whistleblower protection, or opposing the runaway use of judicial suppression orders in legal cases of public interest, or promoting anti-SLAPP measures. But they never do. In the Australian context, it’s always all about 18c and the right to be racist. In the US it seems to be more about the right to abuse gays, but it’s really the same phenomenon.

As a brief aside about 18c, something that gets lost in the cloud of bullshit is that not only is is truth a 100% valid defence against 18c charges, but so is good faith - the reasonable belief that what you are saying is true, even if it turns out you were mistaken. 18c targets very narrowly, and it targets deliberate or blatantly negligent lies. I know one of the people who brought suit against Bolt under 18c. What he said was racist lies, plain and simple, and a quick google could have proved it, but Bolt either didn’t bother doing this or else he didn’t want to let the truth get in the way of his determination to write racist lies. The complainants against Bolt had the option to sue him for defamation (and they would have won, easily) but chose to sue under 18c instead because they wanted to make it clear they weren’t acting out of self interest. In a fantasy world where journalistic integrity is a real thing, immefiately after the verdict bolt would have been sacked and have his carrer killed inmediately and permanently FOR MAKING UP LIES IN HIS COLUMN and his editor would have been sacked for letting him get away with it. He and the paper utterly discredited themselves.

Free speech is powerful, and is a powerful weapon. Without stuff like 18c, how do you fight back against people in the media, or in politics, willing to make up deliberate racist lies to attack enemies and invoke prejudice against people they don’t like?

Firstly you have fallen into the same trap as many others. “I want to be a racist and a bigot” No I want to be able to speak without fear of being charged because someone takes “offence”. Nothing about being a bigot.
But But… there are all those defences. Of course there are. The problem is that it can take three years and hundreds of thousands of $ for those defences to work. Not because someone suffered a damage or a loss, but because someone took “offence”. You don’t have to be racist ---- for instance booing at Adam Goodes because he is a Prima Donna, someone just has to be offended because they perceive you to be racist.

And how can you “cause” offence? You cant. I can insult someone as much as I like, hit them with every politically incorrect and racist slagging I can think of, but if they don’t “take offence” I cant make them.

Its a rubbish law, stifling debate on all number of issues, with massive unintended consequences with a very very poor administrative process.

Also just to be clear, Bolt was never found guilty of being 'racist'. The judge found;

"Today Federal Court Justice Mordecai Bromberg found Bolt had breached the Racial Discrimination Act (18C) because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors.

He said the articles would have offended a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community."

Seriously - who names their child ‘Mordecai’???

Pretty sure he played for St Kilda.
I think by and large people aren't racist. And if they are, they will be dealt with by the court of public opinion. When you police ideas and thoughts, you shutdown genuine discourse and sow the seed of discontent.

I generally believe that most people are racist. It is a matter of degree perhaps.

I watched at the Airport once a large black dude waiting at the gate with a bunch of flowers. He was a really well-built unit with tight shirt and a handsome guy. Out came the super-model, tall blonde with blue eyes, a very beautiful lady. Everyone stared; was it because such a handsome couple in a loving embrace, or was it a black bloke touching a white women. I thought about this all the way home, and still not sure my motivation in staring.

You always tend to favour what you know, so a response maybe to treat a white person different (better) than a coloured. Treatment may be marginal and not noticable to anyone, but it is still a form of racism.

They would have stared if it were two white people and they would have stared if it were two black people. You have said why people stared. Well built unit, tight shirt handsome guy… carrying a bunch of flowers? Of course people are going to stare. Then the super model tall blonde a very beautiful lady. Whats not to stare at? People like looking at nice things. Its what my mother always said about Marilyn Monroe. People like to look at beautiful things.
If you want to get into the racist part of it you would be asking what different races consider beautiful, or more to the point what different nationalities consider beautiful. Because the concept of beauty not only changes through the ages but changes with the social mores of culture.

Yet there’s been an ‘offensive language’ law on the books for 30 years and there’s never been a whisper of a campaign to repeal it. Every time you hear about free speech law reform it’s all about repealing 18c, which expands the definition of racial discrimination to include racially offensive language.

Funny how only the law about RACIALLY offensive language is the subject of interminable free speech crusades in the media and in parliament, and never the more generic one (which I suspect is used mostly as a catch-all when a copper is Fed Up With This ■■■■ and wants a perfectly legal excuse to lock some PITA up for a bit to dry them out/stop their protest/give their wife time to pack her bags and flee/let them & their friends know who’s boss/let the drugs wear off/whatever.

As I’ve said before, the fanatic focus of many free speech warriors (FSWs?) on repealing protections against racist or bigoted speech, vs their relative silence on many many other laws and conventions that either impinge on free speech directly or fail to respect it, makes me profoundly skeptical of their motives.

Wasn’t this thread about gender pronouns and gender politics in particular?

But sure, Andrew Bolt and racism…

Bolt's contention wasn't racist by the way. At least in my understanding, he was questioning a system that's setup to allow certain people to claim special treatment based on very tenuous ancestral ties. Should someone be able to label themselves aboriginal on the basis of some distant ancestor, despite the vast majority of their relatives being white and the opportunities afforded them the same as a regular white person? Does this not undermine such a system existing in the first place - one that ostensibly was created to remedy a perceived imbalance between white Australians and indigenous Australians?

He lied about so many things, about so many people, in those articles.
Knowingly.
To push an agenda based on race.
If he’d argued along the lines that you have, without completely making things up, he wouldn’t be a rightly convicted racist.

NAME TEN.

Wasn't this thread about

It’s gone mad.

There was talk a little while ago that in universities, lecturers/tutors have to specify in advance if they were going to use a word that could possibly give offence, and some clown walked out of a lecture where the word prostitute was used, saying it was ■■■■■-phobic.

LOL. Wasn’t one going around that some book couldn’t be read as it talked about ‘privilige’? Hahah ■■■■.

Those who think “political correctness gone mad” should listen to this entertaining podcast. Play the drinking game, and take a swig every time you hear that phrase.

There was talk a little while ago that in universities, lecturers/tutors have to specify in advance if they were going to use a word that could possibly give offence, and some clown walked out of a lecture where the word prostitute was used, saying it was ■■■■■-phobic.

LOL. Wasn’t one going around that some book couldn’t be read as it talked about ‘privilige’? Hahah ■■■■.

Nor should it… they misspelled ‘privilege’