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
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS