This doesn’t mean I want shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater, making a credible death threat, deliberately lying to destroy a reputation, or making false claims about a product to be legal. You don’t have free speech on someone else’s property or on someone else’s website, and the other examples cover force or fraud, i.e. deliberate violations of rights to which the speech component is incidental.

BTW, when trying to persuade a libertarian the old “he knowingly broke the law and deserves to suffer the consequences” argument is just doomed to failure…

What is important is the cumulative effect of this law and the many others like it. Freedom does not go down screaming in a ball of fire, it dies because of a thousand tiny law changes which all take away a little bit of our freedom.

We are never going to be able to point to one law and say, this is where it happened; this is where NZ crossed the line and became a fascist communist state.

What we can do it hold up each little law as it becomes clear that it chips away at freedom of speech and make sure that everyone knows about it (even if they deny the cumulative effects of such laws).

Quite aside from that, Andrew Moore openly flouted the law, baited the authorities and now he and much of the politial right are loudly playing the victim …excuse me for not being sympathetic.

We probably have hundreds of restrictions on free speech in our society – basically because that is the will of the political mainstream (and I don’t mean that in the Don Brash sense). Most voters (and even most national voters) simply do not believe in unrestricted free speech and the would find the idea (along with the rest of the ideas of the strange libertarian cult as loopy as I do). This doesn’t make us Zimbabwe or North Korea.

There is a lot not to like about the current government but you really need to get a sense of perspective here.

A degree of privacy which Idiot/Savant jealously guards for himself, yet would deny others – even though there is no substantive difference between what he and Andy do, i.e. express political opinions online.

Note that we have not revealed Idiot’s identity, nor threatened to. We do not hide behind the mask of anonymity, although we support everyone’s right to do so online. For that matter, we could have picked any closeup of houses on Google Maps and just said it included Idiot’s address (as it is, it could be any of about 25 houses in the photo).

I personally think that the electoral commission should have the address details for ads, but I don’t think they need to be publicly known. As long as we have the name publicly stated on any web political advert, I would be satisfied.

Since Idiot Savant isn’t advertising, there is no need for anyone to know his address. Should he put up a big ad saying VOTE FOR… then I’m sure he would abide by the law.