To Dub or not to Dub…

It was suggested recently by the President of Spain that TV should stop dubbing films and series into Spanish, as this would help improve the level of English of young Spaniards.

Even though this is almost certainly true, and the experience over many decades in countries like Sweden, Norway, Holland and Germany is that exposure to English in TV programmes from a very early age is one of the reasons for the extremely high depth and breadth of competence in English, the government is obviously not “mulling” a ban on dubbing, nor would it be right to do so.

I doubt it has any authority to do it, for a start, but there are other reasons it’s a bad idea.

There is a very good dubbing industry in Spain, and many of the voice actors are better than the Hollywood people they replace. (For some reason Hollywood doesn’t require its stars to be able to communicate like normal human beings, let alone like performers). I often prefer to watch in Spanish because they do it better, and they turn down the background noise, too. “Let’s annoy the luvvies by stopping them working” is not usually seen as good politics, especially when they are actually doing a good job.

Also, although it might benefit, undoubtedly would benefit, suitably motivated youngsters, older people would probably be a little miffed at suddenly not being able to watch the TV because the government has said so.

Another point is that the key is motivation. If you don’t find a way to motivate the young to want to learn, playing around with what’s on the telly is only going to annoy people, and achieve nothing. That motivation is one of the major failings of government in regard to Education.

And another important point is that they are far too late. With digital television and polychannel platforms it has been possible for at least 13 years to watch hundreds of different series on dozens of different channels, in the original version- which almost invariably means English- if you so choose. Some choose to, some don’t. I encourage them to do so if they find they can still enjoy the programme that way, and explain why. Government meddling would cause a lot of harm and would, in practice, change nothing.

The fact that they are thinking about such things, however, and understand something about how the desired results might be achieved, is a step in the right direction.

Aboriginal Nimbys

I read this a few weeks ago (here, in the National Geographic), and I think it is worth a few observations from left field.

It is interesting in its assumptions,  both journalistic and anthropological. It starts off with, in fact it mostly consists of, a series of anecdotic little details, probably largely invented, about the lives of the people Michael Finkel was talking to and about. This is what journalists do, they call it human interest and learn it the first day on the job. The fact that a supposed science article is not tabloid journalism is rather lost on this chap, who probably isn't a scientist anyway. He's just a writer, he doesn't seem to have any other relevant background. He has some curiosity, which is something, but too many preconceptions and not enough ability to observe.

What is described is presented uncritically, as good, virtuous, a model for the rest of us. But if you set aside the casual racism which treats Aborigines, in the category of those who live differently and take their traditions more seriously than we do, as simple but exotic animals, and actually see them as people, they come across, as transmitted to us by Michael Finkel, as selfish and arrogant.

They do not live in harmony with nature. That is a silly idea peddled by hippies and believed by the ignorant. Primitive peoples live at the mercy of nature, and survive, to the extent that they do, by holding it off as long as possible. They live as they do because they can't live better.

The  village described is a dictatorship in which the tyrant is an old woman. Her right to arbitrarily control what happens and  what people can do is accepted not only by the villagers but also by those outside, who should know better. They appear to do no work, but live from other people's efforts, for which they show no gratitude. They have, they demand, that other people provide electricity for them, but they will not allow mining in their area. No planning process, no quid pro quo. Just the ukase of the matriarch. Classic nimbyism. They demand that others work for them and provide them with things, but it must be other people's land that is spoilt to provide it. And apparently this makes them virtuous. The writer has not thought this through.

On 'Stringvestites'

I recently wrote- rambled would be more like it- about nonce words, because of something I heard watching ‘Are You Being Served’. Well, Mrs Hickory and I like a bit of old-fashioned British comedy, so we returned last night to Mr Humphries and co., and there was he was in a sailor costume, explaining how he had had to fight off the attentions of a number of people including a ‘*stringvestite’. My linguistic antennae twitched.

From the context it appeared to mean a working-class homosexual who doesn’t look like one. Those who remember that particular piece of ill-conceived clothing, or were forced to wore one, as was my case, are unlikely ever to forget it, but I don't remember any association with homosexuality. The Urban Dictionary's definition doesn't seem quite right, but of course it's probably a much more recent use of the term.

*Google knows almost nothing else about the word, but I have found some comment on its use in the series. There is probably no subject that someone is not prepared to make an idiot of himself over in the Guardian, and there is certainly no subject in or out of this world that doesn't have dedicated Internet forums. Here Matthew Parris is quoted at length, speaking more intelligently (scroll down to the end). Neither sheds much light on John Inman's use of the word, but their reactions to it are interesting in themselves. I don't call Stuart Jeffries an idiot, by the way, or Mathhew Parris intelligent, because I agree with one or disagree with he other. Matthew Parris gives a personal interpretation of the character of Mr Humphries, and some similar characters and performers, from his memories of being a secret homosexual in the 70's. He doesn't claim that everyone should share his experience or accept his arguments, he just explains how it was for him. The Guardian writer, on the other hand, appears simply to tell his readers what they want to hear. He might be right, and Matthew Parris wrong, but he hasn't helped us to understand anything.

When a footnote becomes longer than the entire post, some editing may be required. Stopping is also a good idea.

On Acting and Hypocrisy*

ABC has published this amusing and instructive article, about the wealth and business methods of the performers who apparently went through their routine of denouncing capitalism at the Goya awards last week. They include Javier Bardem and Willy Toledo, who I have spoken about before, and Maribel Verdú and Penelope Cruz, who are worse hypocrites than I had realized. That they are ignorant and say whatever they people want to hear is not a new discovery, nor is the extent of their hypocrisy in most cases. It is unusual to see it so clearly exposed by the press, which usually prefers to use them to sell papers or adverts and to kiss their feet. Apparently at the Oscars there was less of this than usual.

I suppose we should expect people who live by their image to construct and perpetuate a false image of themselves. Perhaps they realize that the people who pay to watch them could easily find out the truth if they wanted, but they prefer to believe the lies. I just wish I had a platform like that for my own ideas. So, my moaning is just jealousy, really.

The development of prestige among actors is a curious social phenomenom, one which has, I imagine, been carefully researched by competent social historians. Lack of time constrains me to sketch a few lines based on memories from things I have read or seen over the years:

In Greek theatre the actors were not important. Playwrights who won major prizes became famous, and could become wealthy, and their Mecenas also acquired prestige, but I have never heard a reference to any social role or recognition for the performers. Not even a name seems to have survived. They didn't matter, is the conclusion. They were not craftsmen, much less artists; they were just workmen.

In mediaeval Europe the theatre was a very different matter. A popular entertainment at courts and in the square, no one involved in it had any prestige, although some of the poems have survived and are acknowledged now. At a later stage actresses were often prostitutes, and travelling players would scrape a few pence from any crowd they could find before being thrown out of town by the authorities.

In the 19thC there were some famous actors, with social pretige, but mainly because they had the patronage of some wealthy figure in society. At the start of the motion picture the actors were simply fodder for the camera. The pioneers of the medium discovered there was money to be made from magic lantern shows as there was from other shows. They also discovered, some time later, that with many more people watching the same show than could watch a live performance, milage could be made out of the general public's love of gossip. By giving greater prominence to the names and faces of the performers, and by manipulating information about alleged events in their lives, a whole secondary industry was derived from film, probably more lucrative than the films themselves, and it has grown ever since, as have the egos of those involved. From there to performers telling everyone else how to run the world is not a particularly long journey.

*Or as I saw in a comment at the Guardian the other day- Hippocracy. I think Jonathon Swift wrote about that.

Press Freedom and all that

The press like to think they are special, that they safeguard democracy, that they have specific rights and freedoms that set them apart from ‘ordinary people.’ The government is looking for ways to control the press, and ‘abuse’ is a good excuse to do it. They could just the laws they’ve already made, but apparently that isn’t enough.

That they are so looking is clear, I think. The Internet frightens them because it gives enormous power to people who are not themselves.

The freedom of the press is the freedom of all of us. Not because they use it well, in the interests of public freedom. They do nothing of the kind. Newspapers and broadcasters are large, often international corporations who want to make money, like anyone else. Journalists have a living to earn and frequently an ego to stoke. The way to make money from journalism is, as with any other business, to find a market and give it what it wants. This may mean sex and celebrities, turgid book reviews, fluffy tales of the columnists daily life pretending to be news, ill-informed ranting disguised as background or comment, support for one or other powerful interest, pictures of the footy, or even intelligent, well-researched stuff about things that actually matter. The point is that the customer does not demand truth, and so the seller has no interest in providing it.

There is a myth that the practice of journalism in the US is protected by the First Amendment. This is a myth that Hollywood is quite happy to perpetuate. (In Hollywood land journalists are always good and brave, while pharmaceutical companies are always evil. I wonder why this might be.) At the time that Amendment was passed the press as we know it did not exist. The text was intended to specifically extend the protection of speech to the printed word. It does not make journalists special.

It’s important to the rest of us that journalists, the press in general, have no more nor  less freedom than the rest of us, because they are the rest of us. We are all free to write about the world and the people around us, or anything else we choose. In Britain and other civilized countries we still are free to do it. A journalist is surely nothing more than someone who thinks of himself as one. There are plenty of people who call themselves journalists but only ever give their own opinions, or restrict their output to material that is not, by any definition, news. Likewise, many people who provide genuine, researched news stories, many bloggers, for example, do not think of themselves as journalists, and are not recognised as such by others.

A journalist, I suspect, is someone who is paid by a (large) media company to produce content for it. This has nothing to do with the public interest, freedom or anything else. The fact that the government would rather like to control them (and Cameron’s spokesmen are denying it, which tells you all you need to know), combined with the fact that they themselves would like to control those who are not them, suggests that this is just more power games, politicians and big business arm wrestling over who gets what part of our money.

The danger is not from a mild regulation of the press, but from the inevitable trade-off, the distinction between what ‘licensed’ journalists are allowed to do, and what the plebs are permitted.* The freedom of the press is our freedom, not because they defend us, but because it allows us to defend ourselves.

*There seems to be some semi-legal protection for ‘official’ journalists who refuse to disclose the sources of their information. The rest of us do not have that privilege. We don’t want the gulf to widen.

It's Just water

I am reminded once again that the latest object of the crazed, obsessive hatred of the ‘Person who knows that anyone who does anything he doesn’t enjoy or understand, however trivial, is evil and must be denounced with great frothing and drumbeats’ is a bottle of water.

I don’t know who Andrew Martin is, but apparently he has a book to sell, so we mustn’t expect too much. Even so, you would have thought that, having been offered a column in the Independent to attach to the advert for his novel, he would take the opportunity to find something intelligent or interesting to say. He sees things differently.

He starts by belittling someone who thoughtfully put a bottle of water beside his place when he was speaking at an event. Maybe he hasn't spoken in public much but there has always been water available to speakers, because they often like to moisten their mouths as they speak. (Personally I prefer whisky, but they you are.)

He goes on to insult entire classes of people who he has never met, whose motives he makes no attempt to understand, whose 'offence' should eb beneath the notice of any intelligent person, and whose behaviour he has, in any case, invented himself for the occasion.

Water is essential to the human body. How much is a matter probably left to the judgement of the individual body, which has ways of making it very clear when it needs more (or less). It is probably better to err on the side of overhydration than dehydration, since the body suffers far fewer ill effects that way. They aren’t so great anyway, the body is good at recovering from most imbalances.

Prolonged exertion in hot weather can cause considerable loss of fluid, which will need to be made up, at least in part. Dehydration can lead to headaches, nerve inflammation, muscle weakness and pain, aging of tissue and damage to organs. Of course, few people need to be told when they should drink water. If you don’t feel thirsty you probably aren’t.

On the other hand, a lot of people have acquired the habit of carrying a bottle of water around with them, and sipping regularly from it. In so doing they have gained the opprobrium of the sort of people who cannot allow anything, anything at all, to escape their criticism and sneering condescension.

Why these critics are prepared to show their pettiness and meanness of spirit in this way I couldn’t say, but they clearly are. And they can refine it further, too. They can criticise the use of bottled water as against tap water, ‘ethical’ versus ‘unethical’ brands, bottle size, mineralization levels, the apparent physical condition of the bottle carrier.

People drink water. They drink when they feel the need or the desire to drink. Sometimes they act for no particular reason. Sometimes they are influenced by the words or actions of others. It really isn’t a big deal. It’s just water.

hrrummph>

Pinched from the unimaginatively but informatively named Language Log (see blogroll)

'Decades ago Robert Warshow wrote an essay on "The New Yorker" that explains what Pinker is grappling with in trying to understand their need to create a false dichotomy in which they are the side of the Prescriptivists/Angels and Civilization itself, as well as their inability to understand that you can describe reality, recognize operative rules, and still acknowledge there are standards of usage that are useful and socially significant although entirely arbitrary from an linguistic point of view.


"The New Yorker has always dealt with experience not by trying to understand it but by prescribing the attitude to be adopted toward it. This makes it possible to feel intelligent without thinking, and it is a way of making everything tolerable, for the assumption of a suitable attitude toward experience can give one the illusion of having dealt with it adequately."


[(myl) Thanks for pointing to this essay, which I had not read. The citation is Robert Warshow, "E.B. White and the New Yorker", originally published in 1947 in Partisan Review under the title "Melancholy to the End", and reprinted in a 1962 collection Immediate Experience. It's a review of White's collection of essays on world government, The Wild Flag. I discussed my own encounter with The Wild Flag here.]'

This is very well put. It articulates the sense of hopelessness, of swimming through treacle, that I experience whenever I try to discuss anything remotely controversial,  or anything at all connected with economics, politics or what we might call general morality with almost anyone at all. I only tend to do it with the sort of people who throw in their own opinions on such subjects, uninvited and often unwanted, with the obvious assumption that a) whatever they just heard on the TV news is a complete and accurate analysis of the subject, and b) no reasonable person could possibly disagree with them.

The reasons for this are probably not hard to find. There are many subjects on which people feel they should have an opinion, indeed they may well feel that they are defined by their opinion on certain matters, and the more such subjects there are, and the more rapidly they appear and disappear as fashionable topics of conversation, the more difficult it is to do any real thinking or research. People take their opinions, their identity, off the peg from the sources they find at hand.

It doesn’t mean they are always wrong, just that they are not capable of having any real discussion, or of going deeper into the subject. They think they are arguing, but in fact their responses tend to be random dogmatic assertions, which they make no attempt to defend, other than by shouting, and most of the time seem to not even understand.

As you’ve probably guessed, I got drawn into an argument about the Spanish economy a couple of nights ago. And the quote I came across sums up the reason I should not have bothered: the media, or others with the help of the media, give people little bags of opinion, decorated with sequins of apparent explanation. People grab them gratefully and believe they have understood a difficult subject, when all they have done is adopt a second-hand attitude towards it, because it happens to fit their prejudices. The range of subjects to which this applies is enormous.

The response of most people to anything new- be it an idea, a person, a culture, an object, a practice, a place…- is defensive; they want to know if it will hurt them. Then they want to know how they can make it old as painlessly as possible, they want to know how it fits into the stuff they already know. It’s much easier to dismiss it as bad than to try to understand it, and if they feel that they must understand it, they have the New Yorker and a thousand other publications to tell them that they have understood it, without going to all the trouble of thinking about it. Once they are persuaded they have the orthodox attitude to it then they can relax and life for them can go on as before. The New Yorker and its brethren provide an invaluable service.

The Unpolitics of Car Racing

I’m glad the Bahrain Formula 1 Grand Prix went ahead as planned, simply because I like Formula 1 and I would have missed the race.

The protests were against the government. The unrest was nothing to do with the race. But the protesters, who have far more serious things to worry about than a car race, have used it to give themselves an international audience, because the press don’t care about Bahrain, but Formula 1 sells. The Sunni opposition in Bahrain is not stupid.

A lot of people said that the race should not go ahead. A lot of other people said that it should. These latter include the people whose opinion is actually relevant and who have some idea of what they are talking about, and so the race will go ahead. And the opposition, who may well be the good guys here, will be heard.

The leader of the Labour party has said something that he thought he was expected to say to get the headlines which would benefit his party. His opinion, based, I imagine, on monumental ignorance, is of no interest to anyone who has to make commercial decisions and safety decisions about the race. Milliband does not know and does not care what is happening to the people of Bahrain, he only wants to gain some political mileage. It is extraordinary that there are people who do not appreciate this, but if too many people understood the trick, the magic would be gone and it wouldn’t work. ‘We’ would have to invent new ways to fool ourselves, and they might be even worse.

But the race was run, the FIA are happy, and the opposition was heard, in that confused and partisan way in which the international media transmits these things. Now more people know that Bahrain is run by an oppressive minority which denies representation to the majority, and that that majority is desperate to change things. This is probably a good thing.

Free Speech

(Inspired by a link at England Expects)

I believe in free speech, but…

Many people say this who do not believe in free speech, they believe only in the freedom to say the things they want to hear, and in nothing else.

But others have difficult articulating what they presumably mean, which is simply that they disagree with what has been said. We have become so used to the idea that what is considered offensive must not exist, that it becomes difficult to say that you dislike or disapprove of something without there being an implication (you hear it yourself in your own words) that it should be banned. We are so used to imagining that the state will use its power against anything which is held to be ‘inappropriate’ or ‘unacceptable’ that even many who do understand freedom and believe in it are moved almost by instinct to clarify that by criticising someone’s words they are not trying to ban them. They often seem to be so clumsy at making this clarification that it appears they are doing the opposite.

Is it not possible to take issue, to address, to criticise, to dissect, to despise, the ideas of others, without wanting to call on the law to shut them up? And without even appearing to do so? It is surely not beyond the wit of the average man or woman to disagree, vehemently, viscerally even, with someone else's ideas, without demanding that they be prevented from having those ideas.

On The Motivations of the Guilds of Craftsmen

When people in the same business are apart they are plotting against each other. When they get together they are plotting against the rest of us. There are plenty of professions where entry needs to be controlled to some extent. You wouldn’t want just anyone putting a sign on his door and calling himself a doctor. The business of finding out whether he had actually learned anything other than a flick through Gray’s online and what he remembered from ‘playing’ with his cousin in the airing cupboard years ago is likely to be quite exhilarating, but possibly rather short. No, we really want to know that when we go to a medical practitioner he has been weighed in the balance by an expert group of his peers who would have liked nothing better than to keep him out of their club, but couldn’t find a reason to do so.

We can add a number of other professions in which it is essential that a certain expertise be demonstrated before one is allowed to practice. Some where it might be considered useful or helpful to the customer. These might include many of the artisans’ guilds. After all, the mechanical quality of a mediaeval clock cannot easily be judged by a layman. But then there are many professions and trades in which the customer requires no such protection, and the only reason practitioners have for restricting entry is to protect themselves.

The first group that comes to mind are journalists. They have created for themselves a complex mythology, the illusion that they are special, a cut above the rest of us, and so entitled to cheat and lie and act abominably in circumstances where mere mortals would be criticised and punished. At times we seem to take them at their own evaluation. A bad idea, as well as a wrong one.

They have always been attempts to decide who could and could not be employed as a journalist, to limit the numbers who were called journalists as opposed to commentators or whatever, and the powerful groups were keen to keep certain people out, but in Britain at least it doesn’t seem to have been particularly successful, perhaps because it wasn’t easy to define criteria which weren’t transparently interpretable as ‘so-and-so’s son’, and ‘his uncle handles the free tickets for Wimbledon’. But it has never stopped them trying. In Spain you can do a degree in journalism. There doesn’t seem to be any real point, not in terms of what you learn, but it’s still the best way to get into the club.

The Internet will soon kill print journalism and the legal and practical limits on the number of news outlets have ceased to exist. Anyone can do news reporting now, all that is needed is something to report on, something to say about it, and some idea of how to communicate. We will see a huge number of major news gathering organizations come to prominence in the next few years, some of them with familiar names, and many will disappear again quickly. There will be turnover as there is in music and fashion, but it won’t just be yesterday’s edition wrapping the chips, it’ll be yesterday’s journalists.

There is clearly no need for the law, or the union, to establish criteria for whom a news outlet may choose to employ. Someone looking to hire a writer will have available all the information they require to make that choice. Insisting that they can’t employ someone who doesn’t have the right degree, or the right experience, or the approval of the Head Boy and Girl, serves no one but those who already have power within the trade. It doesn’t help the paper or the reader in any way. It’s not only the unions who like the idea of deciding who is and who is not a journalist. Governments would love to licence journalists, privileging the tame ones and making life difficult for the outsiders.

The same is true of acting and music. I have an actress friend who often complains about ‘intrusismo’, which I don’t know the English word for, but what she means is that, despite having gone to drama school, she loses out on TV roles to people who have little formal training, but are younger and better looking than she is (I should say, even though she is unlikely to read this, that she is in fact young and attractive, but so are a lot of other aspiring actresses). What she fails to appreciate is that the laws and customs which prevent just anyone from calling himself a doctor or an architect or whatever, are there to protect the customer, not the worker. In stage and TV the customer is the producer/director, and ultimately the viewer, all of whom are interested only in the actual performance the performer is capable of giving, don’t need to be told how by a piece of paper, because they can see for themselves.

There is a movement among musicians here for some kind of licence. You can’t charge for a performance unless you’ve got a diploma from an official music school or some such nutty idea. That one will never see the light of day, but it’s difficult to explain to them that you earn the right to be paid by playing something that someone actually wants to hear, and playing it well.

Another angle on this is offered by my physiotherapist, properly trained and competent to do all kinds of things, including treating muscle and bone injuries, some of it with machines, that you wouldn’t want an incompetent playing around with. He complains about ‘intrusismo’, and in this case he’s right to do so, as there are loads of people who’ve learnt to do a basic massage and then call themselves physiotherapists, wasting people’s money and sometimes doing them harm. But my physio also complains about all the rules, on equipment, training of staff, inspections etc, that the association makes him follow. He doesn’t quite grasp that it’s all part of the same thing. You keep out the incompetent (in this case legitimately, I feel) by demanding high standards of the competent.

It’s all rent-seeking of one kind or another, and it’s part of being human. But it pays to be aware of it, and of what’s behind it.

More on Advertising

Talking of advertisements, as I was the other day, there’s another type of advert which really shouldn’t work, but apparently does, because you see it regularly. I refer to the ‘new, improved’ concept, in which the advertiser more or less admits that the product they’ve been selling you for years was a load of rubbish, but now they’ve got a better version that really is worth the money and does what they kept telling you the other one did.

On Spanish TV the last few weeks I have seen an advert for a cleaning product in which they compare the new version with the old (traditional) version, and show you how ineffective the stuff you’ve been using really is. Which makes the new one look terrific, of course, but do we really want to trust these people again? Apparently we do. It must work.

Our Spiteful Press

One of the ways in which England differs from Spain is the extent to which the English are prepared to be told what to think by the media. Every time I visit England, which is usually for a week or so every summer, I have fun identifying the new groups that the media (in general, including the BBC and the Guardian. It must be general or it wouldn’t work) have given people permission to hate.

The hatred of anyone connected with banks is not part of this, by the way. That is a much bigger hate campaign successfully promoted by politicians around the free world to hide the fact that the recession is largely their fault. (Discuss).

No, I’m talking about minority pursuits, people who have interests which can’t seriously be thought to threaten anyone, but who have some reason have drawn the spiteful venom of the press. You can tell these things are not natural, not based on anything real, because they are usually given a convenient handle, everyone complains about exactly the same things, and they are unique to the UK, the same groups of people in other countries apparently never managing to annoy anyone.

In Spain, you either ride a bike or you don’t. Or you sometimes ride a bike, or you have one but don’t use it anymore, or you intend to buy one as soon as your son is old enough to ride. That sort of thing. In England it appears society is divided into Cyclists on the one hand, and the people who call them lycra louts on the other. (Yes, I know some riders can be inconsiderate to pedestrians but car drivers can be a menace on the roads and they don’t get vilified collectively. It’s an invention of the media. Really it is.)

Hands up anyone who has ever had a problem with a Google Street View car. Yes, as I thought. But mention the subject to an English person and they will immediately splutter about all the trouble they have caused for some indeterminate other people who no one seems to know.

Drivers, or cyclists, who use GPS navigators in their vehicles. Could someone explain to me why possession of a perfectly ordinary, and extremely useful piece of equipment, which has greatly simplified travelling and made it a lot safer at the same time, should come to be a diagnostic tool for finding people to look down your nose at and metaphorically spit upon?  A tough one, isn’t it? But in the land of my birth it was so, at least for a time.

Drinkers of bottled water suffered the same fate a few years ago. Now it is users of electronic cigarettes. I have seen references to ‘vapers’, clearly a code word for ‘someone to whom I am vastly superior’, being used in supposedly respectable newspapers to describe people who use this harmless, odourless, non-polluting device in order to adapt their customs to the convenience of those around them. Why are we being told to hate them? Perhaps the Guardian can tell us.

I am an Englishman, and shall always be rather proud of the chance that got me born there, but a lot of our journalists are petty, ignorant and provincial, and are lucky that in a free country they rarely have to answer for their words.