Past Present & Future

and what is heckling?

“To try to embarrass and annoy (someone speaking or performing in public) by questions, gibes, or objections; badger”

surely this term is being used incorrectly.

well it sounds to me like the whole point of politicians speaking in public is to be “cross-examined”. now obviously it suits the establishment to refer to comments that they don’t like - as heckling. actually anyone who is not prepared to be cross-examined ought not to be on a public stage. fuck off. next time i give some speech or other and i dont like what someone says to me i will cry -and say - ooh dear, im being **heckled** oh please oh won’t some big beefy man throw this person out- i’m only little and i can’t deal with it..sob sob

ha ha.

now some very strange person on the BBC ‘have your say forum’ on the latest Labour debacle( by the way - the link is to an article by the China Daily - hee hee) - has this to say:

” I don’t see the point. Heckling is very annoying. It is not the right way to object or accept a point. The Prime Minister’s apology could lead to subsequent poor comportment in the House of Commons - a great advocate of democracy. Barah Nicoline Yinyuy, Bamenda, Cameroon”

dear me - you don’t see the point? ah yes we should let our party leaders say what they like - why bother having a party conference then. just say this is how it is if you dont like it fuck off.

at any rate, at least most of the other comments on this forum seemed to indicate some modicum of common sense. though there are the usual weirdo’s. who are these people!?

- take a look at this one -

“Maybe there’s a right time and place to heckle. If he doesn’t agree with his party’s policies then maybe he should think about joining another party. Chris, Birmingham, UK” -

yeah buddy Chris - i think the poor fellow thought if he wanted to ask questions then the party conference is the place to do it - confer- you know. the point is that if you think that - if you dont agree with something then join another party - why - you’d never :

a) find the party to join ( which is why so many of us aren’t in one)

and b) you’d always have to chop and change when you disagreed, and you weren’t allowed to register ‘dissent’ - why? oh because that would be heckling - which is not done in polite society surely!!

doesn’t this all boil down to the same old bloody question - what the hell is democracy about if we ( whatever ‘group’/ ‘party’/ ‘nation’ ) think that the group’s leadership has one idea and no-one can challenge that. !!!!

and this one –oooh:

“It was totally right for Wolfgang to be ejected. He is typical of the old lefty image New Labour want to get rid of. He has no place in a modern party like ours and I only wish the stewards had chucked out the rest of them. Better still, we should send them off to Iraq to see how they would solve the situation. Jeff Graves, Bromley, England”.

and then - my my - does anyone know this person??why dont they have a “party no-one else can join”.

its democracy within a group that’s so overlooked - people only think of democracy in the context of a nation-state. how stupid is that. like a nation-state ain’t a ‘group’.