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Whoa. I listened to the first ten minutes and it was an authoritarians wet dream. Are you seriously advocating for zero privacy and the ability of government to snoop on anyone?Burgess and Kershaw give compelling reasons about removing content that fails community standards as we know it.
ASIO chief Mike Burgess and AFP Commissioner Reece Kershaw address the National Press Club on X's refusal to remove graphic content.
One nation cartoon morphs to real life....On a slightly brighter note X has gone absolutely nuts with Albo memes. Very funny stuff.
Bishop fears Wakeley stabbing could be ‘weapon’ to suppress free speech
The Assyrian bishop at the centre of an alleged terror stabbing says he does not want the attack be used as a “weapon” to suppress freedom of speech, declaring that he was concerned it could be hijacked to further others’ “political interest”.
Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel said he was “not opposed” to the video of him being stabbed at his western Sydney church remaining live on social media platform X, because the right to freedom of speech and religion was “God given”.
Speaking directly to his supporters in an Anzac Day message, Bishop Emmanuel explained his reasoning for supporting the footage remaining live, arguing that removing it would be a threat to “human freedom and freedom of religion”.
The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, has launched legal action to force the social media platform, owned by Elon Musk, to hide the violent content.
Lawyers representing X (formerly Twitter) told the Federal Court on Wednesday that the Bishop Emmanuel would submit an affidavit backing the tech giant’s bid to host the video.
“I do not condone any acts of terrorism or violence,” Bishop Emmanuel said in the video.
“However, noting our God-given right to freedom of speech and freedom of religion, I’m not opposed to the videos remaining on social media.
“I would be of great concern if people use the attack on me to serve their own political interest to control free speech.”
Bishop Emmanuel said threats to free speech undermined “human identity and dignity” and he did not have the right to “cause harm” to a person who attacks his faith.
“The moment we oppress this very freedom of speech and religion we are losing the very human identity and dignity as well.
“As a Christian if someone, if another human being, does not believe in what I believe in, if another human being attacks my faith and attacks My Lord, that does not give me the right to go and cause harm to that person.
“This is inhumane at a human level, it is unacceptable.”
Bishop Emmanuel reaffirmed that he had forgiven the 16-year-old alleged to have attacked him, declaring that he will “always love this person”.
“The very dignity of the human being … regardless of what our race is, our colour, our gender, our faith and religious background,” he said.
“We are human beings, and as human beings we need to love and respect everyone.
“And at the same time, (for) that human identity to be always protected and preserved.
“It is the very identity which is God-given identity and that is to have the freedom of speech and freedom of expressing their religious beliefs, or whatever beliefs they have.”
Police arrested seven teenagers with alleged links to the attack at the Christ the Good Shepherd Church on Wednesday, executing 13 search warrants across NSW over fears of an imminent violent extremist ideology attack on the eve of Anzac Day.
X Corp’s barrister Marcus Hoyne told the court on Wednesday that Bishop Emmanuel, would file an affidavit stating he was “strongly of the view the material should be available”.
He also said the Federal Court’s decision to extend an injunction sought by the eSafety Commissioner to compel X to hide the content “might be futile” due to the material proliferating online.
Yeah, I suppose Dutton cops his share too. "Potato Head" etc.If it wasn't for being scared to post things online, I think Albo would be amazed at how many funny memes are out there, my kids and their mates never miss an opportinity to be disparaging of him.
I don't post stuff up because it really is just personal perceptions and whether people like the Govt or the PM, they are the elected head of the country and taking personal pot shots doesn't further the argument especially on a forum IMO.
If they have factual argument, fine debate it, otherwise keep it for the pub. Just my opinion.
And just to show I'm not pizzing in your pockets, a meme sent during the Voice period.
View attachment 175543
Yes using personal traits, beliefs or disfigurements etc to point score IMO is just a sad idictment of the poster.Yeah, I suppose Dutton cops his share too. "Potato Head" etc.
Whoa. I listened to the first ten minutes and it was an authoritarians wet dream. Are you seriously advocating for zero privacy and the ability of government to snoop on anyone?
Here's a quick run-down of what I saw:
AI scare campaign.
We need to destroy privacy to get online Nazis.
We need access to everything to get pedophiles because doing things in real life is hard.
I've been pretty critical of musk in earlier threads.No you needed to see the whole thing I know I know these guys are bad and Musk is a freedom fighter.
Only one out of three is making money from this stuff eh.
There is a fair chance Asio and the AFP are working for the benefit of Australians who do you think Musk is working for?
They had problems with accessing encryption and content that increase violence etc.
Asio wasn't asking for greater powers they would still have to have a warrant to access data same for the AFP unlike stop strip search and kill like the NSW police force.
I've been pretty critical of musk in earlier threads.
Police would have us all on 24/7 surveillance if you let them. Given how many psychopaths are on the force and their overreach during covid. I wouldn't be in a rush to increase their powers.
Warrants don't need much these days.
Wakeley is merely Islam’s latest attack against Christianity
The guilt or innocence of the 16-year-old accused of stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and three others at Wakeley’s Assyrian Church of Christ the Good Shepherd last week will ultimately be tested in court, as will that of any accomplices. But what the incident confirms, were further confirmation needed, is the continued vehemence of Islamism’s hostility to Christianity.
Islamist attacks on churches are scarcely isolated incidents. In France alone there were more than 600 attacks on Christian places of worship in 2020, culminating in the murder of three parishioners at Nice’s Basilica of Notre Dame by an Islamist carrying a Koran.
Meanwhile, violence against Christians remains endemic in the Arab Middle East, where the share of Christians in the population has, over the course of the past century, collapsed from around 14 per cent to barely 3 per cent.
Seen in the longer term, the eradication of Christianity from its regions of birth appears even more starkly. In AD732, when Islam consolidated its hegemony over what later became the Arab lands, Christians were by far the majority of the population in the Oriental patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem, as well as in North Africa.
Now, after centuries of persecution, those ancient churches are becoming an insignificant presence, with their Middle Eastern congregations accounting for less than 1 per cent of Christians worldwide.
Whether that persecution has a clear basis in the Koran is controversial. It is, however, indisputable that the Koran directly condemns Christianity, claiming that Christians “accept two gods”, will not “tolerate you (Muslims) until you follow their religion” and wilfully lie about the Bible.
Moreover, the so-called “verse of the sword” – which, according to many Islamic scholars, abrogates the Koran’s more tolerant affirmations – enjoins Muslims to “slay the idolaters wherever you find them”, sparing them only if they “repent, perform the prayer and pay alms”.
And according to a tradition authoritatively reported by Malik ibn Anas (711-795), the Prophet’s last words were “May God fight the Jews and the Christians! Two religions will not remain in the land of the Arabs.”
It is therefore unsurprising that the Muslim conquest was viewed by Mesopotamian Christians as an apocalyptic disaster, with the first substantial Christian commentary warning that there is “no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men’s blood”.
The construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, with the explicit denunciation of Christian belief in its magnificent gold leaf inscriptions, merely heightened their fears, which were confirmed when sweeping restrictions on Christian worship, along with deliberately humiliating rules of conduct and punitive taxes, were formalised in the mid-9th century.
Where those impositions were strictly enforced, as they were against the Copts in Egypt (the largest and most enduring Christian congregation in the Arab lands), the consequences were devastating – and they became even more severe as successive fiscal crises led to ever higher taxes being imposed on a shrinking population. After an endless series of massacres that decimated the Coptic dioceses, it was only in the 19th century that the modernisation of the Ottoman Empire, and the reforms enacted by Muhammad Ali Pasha’s dynasty in Egypt, brought significant relief.
But liberalisation did not prove durable anywhere in the Middle East. To begin with, the growing prosperity of the relatively well-educated Christian communities provoked resentments that were fanned by Muslim clerics, triggering a wave of violence that began with the Damascus riots of 1860.
At the same time, as Muslim rule tottered in the face of Western challenge, Muslim rulers increasingly relied on Islam to define national identity and galvanise popular opposition to Western pressures, effectively excluding non-Muslims from the emerging nations. And just as Islam became central to legitimating governance, Islam itself became ever more intransigent, reinvigorating Koranic theology’s most intolerant aspects and demolishing the hopes of reformers – such as the brilliant mid-19th century Young Ottomans – who sought to reconcile Islam with constitutional liberalism.
The consequences of those 19th-century developments ran through the 20th century like a blood-soaked thread. In the Ottoman Empire, they underpinned the Hamidian massacres of the Taurus Mountains’ Christian minorities in 1894-96, the genocide of the Chaldean-Assyrian Christians in 1914-15 and the Armenian genocide of 1915-16.
Even after the collapse of the empire, the formation of the Turkish republic and the Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923 (which reduced the non-Muslim share of Turkey’s population from 20 per cent to 2.5 per cent), they continued to reverberate in the murderous riots of 1934, the discriminatory Wealth Tax of 1942 (that expropriated the remaining Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Jewish communities) and the explosion of violence against minorities in 1955.
Those incidents in the Turkish republic echoed throughout the Middle East. Nowhere, however, were the impacts more durable than in Egypt.
Having expropriated and expelled the Jews, who had lived in Egypt for millennia, Gamal Abdel Nasser robbed the Copts of 75 per cent of their assets and shut their schools. Nasser also modernised and enormously expanded al-Azhar, entrenching the ancient, and extremely conservative, Islamic university’s control over the country’s religious life, which was relentlessly wielded at the Copts’ expense.
It was, however, under Anwar Sadat – who made the promotion of Islam central to maintaining his fragile grip on power – that widespread religiously sanctioned violence against Christians started escalating.
After increasing in each decade, that violence reached a peak in the period immediately prior to, during and just after the short-lived rule of the Hamas-affiliated Muslim Brotherhood, when at least 150 Copts were murdered, many thousands rendered homeless, and Coptic churches and monasteries stormed – with 64 churches being attacked, and 23 incinerated, in a single day.
It is therefore unsurprising that 100,000 Copts fled Egypt between March and September 2011 alone; and since then the haemorrhage has continued, as have the murders, the kidnappings, rapes and forced conversions of young women, the destruction of homes and the coerced evacuations of Coptic villages.
Nor is that pattern confined to Egypt: its latest manifestation is the expulsion from their ancestral home of Karabakh’s entire Christian population, and the demolition of one of the Caucasus’s most iconic churches, by the Muslim government of Azerbaijan – all without a peep being heard from our keffiyeh-touting protesters.
Egyptian security forces inspect the scene of a bomb explosion at the St Peter and St Paul Coptic Orthodox Church in December 2016. Picture: AFP
No doubt, some attacks on Christians are the work of extremists; but many are not. All too often they are sustained by the rhetoric of highly regarded clerics who demonise reformers (such as Egyptian Farag Foda, who was assassinated after being denounced by Islamic scholars linked to al-Azhar) and condone, or refuse to firmly condemn, religious violence. As Turkish intellectual Mustafa Akyol recently argued, “Islam’s problem is not just the Islamists; it’s the mainstream.”
Bernard Lewis famously stated some years ago that “for Christians and Muslims alike, tolerance is a new virtue and intolerance a new crime”. The great historian was only half right: Christianity has changed, but tolerance has scarcely made its mark in the Islamic world, and when it has, it has invariably struggled. With religious and ethnic diversity – and hence genuine religious freedom – vanishing in the Muslim countries, while Australia’s diversity inexorably rises, our much vaunted multiculturalism cannot be an excuse for tolerating a fanaticism that, still today, so readily morphs into murder.
You can hide your data on X and on Facebook, Instagram you would need a burner.OK try this Musk has your data without a warrant...
Social media giants have you full stop.
Warrants are a process that's recorded and enforced, NSW police don't require them to stop, strip search, and kill you.
Note there are no increase in powers.
You can hide your data on X and on Facebook, Instagram you would need a burner.
Saying there is no increase in powers is simply not true. They don't need warrants for multiple things and a lot of these laws have been increasing.
Where did you get the idea there were "no increase in powers"?
One recently was that they can search those people with a drug supply conviction for up to a decade after. This is just to do with warrants.
People sharing drugs can get caught up in the above law.
Then you have a raft of DV, traffic offences where police can walk in and charge you in their name not the "victims".
The Anti-consorting laws that were supposed to target bikers (didn't really agree with those laws either) have been found to target aboriginals.
I think I've misunderstood the angle you are coming from?
If he said that then we are already up Shts CreekBurgess (ASIO) made it clear repeatedly he didn't need increased powers or new laws.
To look at data he needed a warrant hence there was process.
If he said that then we are already up Shts Creek
The creeping authoritarianism is unfortunately not a conspiracy. It's leaving a terrible legacy for our kids and a very red tape society that's become robotic.Haha maybe but I don't buy that Musk or any other billionaire / social media owner some how have our interests as much as Asio and AFP.
The current institutions (Government) have got us thus far for better or worse (US is the same) I know there are faults and failings along the way but there are over sights of some sort unlike social media which has become let's face it a cesspool that is telling us what we want I think that's total BS.
But then I don't buy right wing conspiracy's
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