Delicious LiveJournal Links for 7-21-2009

[andrewducker]

• Irelandâ™s bizarre war on blasphemy
  (tags: religion speech)

Comments

[natural20.livejournal.com]

andrewducker, I know that you just post links without any bias, so I'm definitely not directing any of these comments at you!

Wow, that's quite impressive. Obviously all of this is opinion, but he seems to have taken a point of view and extrapolated it out, with a sprinkle of misunderstanding along the way, leaving him with a view of the situation which, imo obviously, is quite skewed. For instance the Greens, right now, are just doing what they're told, which is bad for all sorts of reasons, but not the ones he suggests. And the Labour move was to try and water down a Bill which was going to be passed due to the government majority, the party very definitely voted against the measure.

Equally, to suggest that the Irish government is trying to regulate thoughts/speech to any level is, frankly, laughable. The new 2 year limit on traffic data is just that. It's traffic data, not content. I do believe that Ahern is trying to court the conservative voters, but I also believe that this is one of many acts of a cowardly, on the ropes government who have critically mis-judged the mood of the people again and again. Never ascribe to malice what you can ascribe to incompetence and I think the whole Blasphemy laws, horrid as they are, comes down to cowardice and incompetence.