{"id":351794,"date":"2017-07-31T10:00:03","date_gmt":"2017-07-31T14:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?guid=db2dc87fea62e849db1ef6b20cae0efd"},"modified":"2017-07-31T10:00:03","modified_gmt":"2017-07-31T14:00:03","slug":"anonymity-scoundrels-and-free-speech-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=351794","title":{"rendered":"Anonymity, scoundrels, and free speech"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Christoph Bezemek of the Institute of Public Law and Political Science, at the University of Graz, Austria, tells a tale of his school history teacher who purported that only &#8220;scoundrels&#8221; sent letters to a newspaper anonymously. His teacher&#8217;s argument being that public discourse as a democratic society&#8217;s bonding agent and so those who wish their voice to be heard should not hide behind a veil of anonymity. And yet, in a free society, surely one should have the right to a voice whether anonymous or not, after all throughout history often the messenger was at the lethal end of the phrase: the pen is mightier than the sword.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Christoph Bezemek of the Institute of Public Law and Political Science, at the University of Graz, Austria, tells a tale of his school history teacher who purported that only &#8220;scoundrels&#8221; sent letters to a newspaper anonymously. His teacher&#8217;s argument &#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-351794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=351794"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351795,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/351794\/revisions\/351795"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=351794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=351794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=351794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}