Leigh, I don’t know what that is. As I said, I wouldn’t make a judgement on Mark Steyn’s case unless I knew the full context. I mentioned that I hadn’t read any of Albrechtsen’s columns and I saw a few posts in my greader but didn’t read them either. I’m not prepared to offer a view unless I understood the context, and I really think I’d be wasting valuable moments of my life if I spent them reading anything Mark Steyn wrote. But, again, I don’t hold the position that any speech in any context is defensible at all times under the claim of a right. As I said, that should be fairly clear from what I wrote above.

I think she’s referring to the Salam Cafe discussion on one of the Saturday Salons’

http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/05/10/saturday-salon-139/

I made it clear that I do not believe there should be an unconstrained right to free speech, if the intent and effect of that speech is to vilify and demean others particularly if they have less power and in particular less power to respond. That has nothing to do with “the free circulation of ideas” or whether arguments can and should be challenged on their logic (and their apparent motivation and context) – and note I don’t use the metaphor of the market. It should be very clear why I adopt this position from the comments I’ve previously made and that I do not accept the framing of speech in terms of rights – at least not without some understanding that such rights are contextual. Debate and argument are to be encouraged and facilitated but there are much better frameworks for so doing than rights claims.

Nothing in what I have written implies any desire that the state should be arbiter in these matters, though in some limited circumstances it may be desirable that it should be. It’s too late at night, I’m sorry, for me to be prepared to explain further or argue this out.

On matters of Australian law, I must defer, since obviously different countries have different codes. Some of them worry me more than others, but unlike Mr. Bush, I don’t think it’s my brief to transform all humanity. We seem to be straying into a fundamental difference of conception of liberty between Australian and American law, and since those are uncharted waters for me, I can go no further.

laura — what’s your point? (or as a character in a Dashiell Hammett book might say, Is that a threat?)

In Australian law, if I defame you, and you sue me successfully, I have to publish a retraction. I’d also suggest that you might be more attached to “property rights” than many folks in this country (except for the alleged libertarians who are very selective in their love). It would be easy to make an argument in principle that where people are misrepresented and vilified they should have a right to reply to the same audience who’s read the offensive article.