Remembering responsibility
The appalling shooting of US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and several bystanders may be the result of political hate-mongering, but regardless, it reinforces the need to debate the issue of the media’s rights versus its responsibilities, and of public debate — which was brought up in rather different contexts recently by WikiLeaks and the proposed child welfare law in Taiwan (“Right vs responsibility,” Dec. 27, 2010, page 13).
The central question is: How far should the fundamental right to freedom of expression go? In these days of the Internet, it appears that the right to express just about any monstrously stupid, wrong or hateful opinion is winning over the responsibility for civilized and informed debate. While I fully recognize the dangers of curtailing press freedom, there are clearly areas where rights have gone too far.
I have been, for example, compared to excrement and worse on Internet blogs just for writing about environmental issues. While the authors of such excremental writings naturally disqualify themselves, it opens up the wider question of what should be allowed to be placed in the public domain.
Often guarded by anonymity, the torrents of vicious abuse and inflammatory hate-mongering ejaculating from the Internet, the endless repetitions of obvious scientific or historical lies (eg, global warming and the Holocaust), or the seemingly limitless satisfaction of depraved desires (eg, pedophilia) that can now find an outlet on the Internet call into question whether rights and responsibilities are still balanced.
On the one side, we find the hyper-libertarians and compulsory Internet defamers who want all the rights and no responsibilities. On the other extreme, oppressive governments like China want to curtail rights, justifying their actions by emphasizing the responsibilities toward larger societal goals.
To be clear, I support as much freedom as possible, but freedom should go no further than the point where another person’s freedom is limited by that very freedom. We must realize that there is no such thing as total freedom, as it would be a terror for everyone. Whether it is traffic rules, commercial rules or rules governing the media and public debate, some rules must be obeyed to avoid sliding into the anarchy of unregulated chaos. Clearly, press freedoms should not extend to inciting murder or denying the Holocaust, for example.
Therefore, we need global governance for those common areas which affect everybody. We need a movement of global citizenry that demands global rights — universal human rights, equitable sharing of resources and opportunities and a healthy planet — but which also accepts global responsibilities — limiting consumption and waste, wealth redistribution and, as I suggest above, rules regarding what should be allowed in public debate, including on the Internet.
Every person or organization should ask themselves whether they are abusing the rights given to them by an open society without thinking about the responsibilities that they should also abide by. Balancing rights and responsibilities is never easy, but then again, no one ever said resolving complex issues should be easy.
Bruno Walther
Taipei
As Taiwan’s domestic political crisis deepens, the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) have proposed gutting the country’s national spending, with steep cuts to the critical foreign and defense ministries. While the blue-white coalition alleges that it is merely responding to voters’ concerns about corruption and mismanagement, of which there certainly has been plenty under Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and KMT-led governments, the rationales for their proposed spending cuts lay bare the incoherent foreign policy of the KMT-led coalition. Introduced on the eve of US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, the KMT’s proposed budget is a terrible opening
To The Honorable Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜): We would like to extend our sincerest regards to you for representing Taiwan at the inauguration of US President Donald Trump on Monday. The Taiwanese-American community was delighted to see that Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan speaker not only received an invitation to attend the event, but successfully made the trip to the US. We sincerely hope that you took this rare opportunity to share Taiwan’s achievements in freedom, democracy and economic development with delegations from other countries. In recent years, Taiwan’s economic growth and world-leading technology industry have been a source of pride for Taiwanese-Americans.
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed
RSS