Soapbox: How “closed minds house their own prisons”, or the illiberality of liberalism…

From reader Dean Sterling Jones… I disagree with what you say, but will fight to the death for your right to say it – if by “fight” you mean “surrender,” by “death” you mean “live comfortably” and by “your right to say it” you mean “your right to shut the hell up.” Don’t bother reading the revised sentence back, it makes little sense. But you get the picture. For some, the right to freedom of speech means little more than “the …

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“Peter Robinson poses as a unionist….”

I get the feeling Trevor has been itching to say something like this for a while. Here’s the presser from the Northern Ireland Conservatives’ Trevor Ringland on the First Minister’s queasy defence of Pastor Jack McConnell’s remarks on Muslims: “The DUP can present a modern face when it needs to court moderate voters”, Trevor said. “But underneath the facade, with the old guard like Robinson, hate-mongering is never far away. In a free society Pastor McConnell had a right to …

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“all of this demagogic simplification leads to a cynical view of politics…”

I’ve just watched the public shaming of Father Pastor Jack McConnell on Nolan this evening. Actually, that’s not meant to be funny. I sometimes wonder where seriousness ends and pompous solemnity begins… I spotted this quote on Paul Evans’ Facebook page a few days before this story broke, but it seems pretty well met to the occasion that’s in it from Pierre Bourdieu’s 1996 classic, ‘On Television‘… …the journalistic field produces and imposes on the public a very particular vision …

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