Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

tombot - it's 2017 we have all heard the distinction by now that "free speech" as construed by the first amendment does not mean an unfettered right to say whatever you want wherever you want but rather a way to protect speech from the government. but hopefully it has become clear by now that there are other principles that are not just the simple meaning of the amendment and include questions of what kinds of speech should be allowed in public spaces / the academy / the media.

So much loathing in this thread.

and i don't see how you can argue with the point scott is making there. we live in a country where v few ppl have a devotional relationship to free speech and so for most ppl if the argument for expansive speech everywhere infringes on their pet beliefs they'll likely sacrifice the principle before they sacrifice their own issue. and you see this all the time - ppl hate speech when it disagrees with them. nat hentoff even wrote a book on the topic called free speech for me but not for thee that pointed this out.

i happen to think that probably we should err on the side of unlimited speech bc we need to create an environment where ppl understand that they will be confronted w/ speech they don't like and it's a part of being in a healthy society w/ a lot of different perspectives, but it's v hard to ignore the idea that making the principle into an issue like this will likely lose ppl to the war and not gain allies. nb it is possible that inviting this kind of overreaction from the fringes will ultimately help convince moderates about the importance of the principle.

"We might lose; better surrender now."

i think he's saying "pick our spots," if you waste your ammo on defending fringe speech that you don't even really believe in you'll be spent when it comes to defending speech you do believe in. it's a strategic argument and one that i think has merit if you consider esp how dismissive the left has become to free speech as a principle (at least as it appears to me over the last few years)

What I'm going to do here, because I don't want to hate you, is walk away from this, and in future interactions, I'll do my best not to bring up the fact that you hold a totally bullshit position on protected speech (which seems to be that no speech can be protected anywhere, if we want to preserve certain people's ability to speak freely in the nice places) so congratulations, you have successfully gotten me to censor myself in order to continue engaging with your censorious, context-ignorant ass. Face.

excuse me for saying so but it seems like you glossed over the context of that post which is that students were explicitly bringing charles murray to speak not because they feel that race-based IQ studies are a worthy topic of interest but just to protect the principle of free speech. where you got "no speech can be protected anywhere if we want to preserve certain people's ability to speak freely in the nice places" i have no idea. or even what that means. who are the certain people and what are the nice places you think i'm trying to protect speech for? and whose speech do you think i'm saying we cannot protect?

the argument he is making is that if you want to promote free speech as a social virtue maybe don't link it in people's minds to Charles Murray

students were explicitly bringing charles murray to speak not because they feel that race-based IQ studies are a worthy topic of interest but just to protect the principle of free speech.

Do you believe this? It's not what I get from the Inside Higher Ed article that SSC is linking.

IIRC the first two classroom sessions of my First Amendment elective in college covered many salient differences between the sidewalk, the street, the bar, and the lecture hall, the library, and the cinema, and the courthouse vs. the courtroom. I'm sorry you missed all of that, it might help.

The principle of free speech is best protected by people who understand what it means and the limitations it has had placed on it. If they wanted to defend free speech, they could have challenged it by, I don't know, some analogy to wearing a jacket that says FUCK THE DRAFT to a court appointment during a time of war, maybe not obviously pissing off a bunch of fellow 20 year olds.

I'm not sure where we are disagreeing here but like I said above free speech encompasses more than it's definition in law and includes the mores of various institutions particularly the academy whose purpose for being relates to the virtue. sund4r: tbf I took his description of the event at face value - if it was something else idk

can't you see that you're in love with each other?!?!?????

now smell his hair a little

OK OK

If the argument is that we have to draw lines, then let's draw lines somewhere that matters? The academy as a bastion of free speech is a nice idea but that's right up there with Reddit or Twitter or frankly a movie theater - it's not a public place and it does not, nor should it, afford the protections that public spaces must accommodate, with the support of the law.

The place to defend free speech is the public sphere, where AFAIK cops are still standing tall doing their job to preserve the rights of hateful bigots and assholes to shout loud and clear exactly what they think should happen to all the other citizens who aren't like them. If you believe students kicking pseudointellectual bullshit mongers off their campus is ultimately going to lead to the end of vocal anti-authoritarian protests taking place on public grounds during taxpayer-funded ceremonies, I would like to introduce you to the Trump inauguration.

Can we fight the real enemy now?

I mean our fucking President would obviously love nothing more than to drive out of business any news organization that occasionally forgets to bathe him in praise; so let's talk about how college undergraduates yelling at Charles Murray is a threat to free speech? SHEE ZUSS

otm

Yes he's 70 and yes they're 21 and they could be our future!!! but we've all been 21 and passionate to a fault about silly, hyper-local shit at school, most of us maybe have a shot at being 70 and none of us are going to be the goddamned POTUS. The kids will be all right, but not if we spend all our time ignoring what's right in front of us that's going to ruin their entire lives

: tbf I took his description of the event at face value

I just have my doubts, given Healy's taste in controversial speakers so far and his comments about the "established ideologies" and "left-leaning values" that the university promotes. Maybe it really is completely innocent free speech zealotry.

I've been thinking of starting a Jordan Peterson thread btw. He comes up a lot on the National Post thread.

Tombot I think you agree with Scott's post.

OK well if we can disagree to agree then I can go to bed in peace I guess

nat hentoff even wrote a book on the topic called free speech for me but not for thee that pointed this out.

ha ha Hentoff once wrote a column attacking my former boss as the face of Liberal Censorship after she was quoted saying that she wouldn't stock Anne Coulter or Sean Hannity books at her liberal arts college bookstore.

the academy whose purpose for being relates to the virtue

This is not ftr the case, the academy doesn't require this insane fundamentalist version of free speech, I submit as evidence the entire rest of the world.

it doesn't require it but i think there's a strong argument to be made that an expansive allowance for speech is central to the academy's mission. it is even enshrined within the tenure paradigm whereby a scholar's speech can be professionally protected as a recognition that such protections are good for the academy.

i think the whole idea of "academic freedom" is intrinsically linked to the virtue of "free speech"

You're presuming it's a virtue

no just using sloppy language bc i couldn't be bothered to find a more precise term for how to describe it. i don't think it's a "virtue" virtue, but i think it's a "good thing" and something that is "valuable" esp to the academy.

This is not ftr the case, the academy doesn't require this insane fundamentalist version of free speech, I submit as evidence the entire rest of the world.

― Andrew Farrell, Wednesday, April 12, 2017

I'm not wading into this argument, but ftr we have a First Amendment and a Bill of Rights, which would prevent what the entire rest of the world has.

That's the thing. Freedom of speech, where it exists, exists because it is protected by the state & should be enshrined as a principle of the state; from there, it is adopted as something the academy can strive for, and the academy can choose to take pride in being really good at encouraging the exchange of unpopular ideas, or not.

If people "in charge" don't like speech they shut it down and prohibit it all the time. This happens constantly all over the place, tacitly, through all manner of mechanisms for enforcing norms and rewarding conformity. It's when those young folks start trying to tell people to shut up that everybody gets upset and scared for the future.

Tombot otm, also Mordy stop reading sl4test4rc0d3x

silby, tombot is literally arguing scott's point and pretending like he's disagreeing with something. don't encourage him.

that's as may be! Doesn't mean anything with any hint of association with the LessWrong/rationalist/nrx spectrum of nonsense is worth linking to

(their premises are wrong, doesn't matter whether I agree with their conclusions)

https://media.giphy.com/media/L29fiOMSDhhvi/giphy.gif

ok that's a good gif I'll go do like…work now

Please point me to the part where I agreed that freedom of speech is turning into a right wing cause that knee-jerk liberals - what all college kids inevitably grow up to be, as history proves!!! - will inevitably turn against it

SSC is pretty decidedly anti-nrx, surely?

he says that if right-wing conservatives continue to invite provocative speakers for the sole purpose of riling up left wing students it risks becoming in the eyes of some potential allies a "right-wing" cause. not that it's literally a right-wing cause and right-wingers are good guys who are pro free speech. he's talking about why it's a bad idea to invite charles murray to a campus just to get ppl upset if you're really pro free speech and somehow you got from that that he's a) pro charles murray coming to speak and b) worried that left-wing protestors are stopping him from doing so. when in fact he's making the exact opposite argument - that people of all ideological groupings are going to protest speakers who disagree w/ them politically and that should mean that if you're really looking to promote free speech you shouldn't do so in a way that alienates potential allies.

i mean he only wrote like a definitive anti-nrx FAQ but anything with even a whiff of evil should be avoided lest it contaminate our pure minds

Defo don't want to get in between tombot and Mordy here but to look at this:

The more often people hear about free speech being used to defend NAMBLA, the less that anti-paedophiles are going to like free speech. The more often people hear about free speech being used to defend the KKK, the less anti-racists are going to like free speech. The more often people hear about free speech being used to defend radical Islamist mosques, the less anti-Muslims are going to like free speech, and so on.

I think this is a good point and I'd thought it for a while but not quite been able to phrase it as pithily as this. Or at least it feels true to my own little set of biases - because I go on the internet, and lots of people on the internet like free speech and far right ideas, I do associate the term 'free speech' with those ideas. If I hear the one being mentioned I expect the other to come along next. Of course am aware that most of this lot don't really care about free speech in the slightest (only for them, so not free speech), that there's a 'real' or substantial free speech tradition separate to and hopefully outliving them; but the association is def there in my head.

yeah, that association was why you originally started this thread iirc

Absolutely. Think I've expressed here my opening post up there is now something I find cringeworthy but there we go.

So yeah - rather than paedos and Nazis, I think a much better example to use to show the importance/functional value of free speech would be something totally banal. A group of people trying to build a shed? Some of them want to put it uphill, some downhill, some make it out of wood, some out of plastic, etc; they all have a round-table discussion about it and at the end hopefully the shed ends up in the best place and built the best way because everyone's had a chance to express the virtues of their preferred way of doing it.

Or a meeting in an office about whether to have a coffee machine on-site, and if so what kind? Family discussions about whether to get a pet? Etc.

i think he picked those 3 examples in particular bc one of them is non-political (NAMBLA), one is left-wing politics (KKK) and one is right-wing politics (radical Islam) so it shows how this is a pan-political phenomenon

1. His treatment of a political right as being like a commons is not new so I find that irritating

2. The idea that freedom of speech is under a unique existential threat today, after constant corrosive assaults for centuries, is absurd and ahistorical

3. Obviously the championship of the right to say unpopular shit is cyclical which a cursory examination of famous SCOTUS hFirst Amendment cases seems to support

4. Maybe my real problem with the "argument" being made is that I find it really lame, even if we all just agree that free speech is important

one is left-wing politics (KKK)

In the Jeffrey Lord "the KKK was a Democratic organization" sense of "left-wing"?

no in the sense that lefties will be inclined to complain about the KKK

Oh, that makes more sense.

The enlightenment ideal of free speech, as separate from the US political right, was to allow people to have their own prayer books, and publish radical newspapers. It wasn't an absolutist doctrine, really, and the idea of a separate 'principle of free speech' is kind of modern. The conception people had in the 17th and 18th century didn't involve churches having to let atheists preach in their church, or compelling student organisations to use their resources to host propagandists they don't agree with.

Such a conception that claims a support group for rape victims is infringing on free speech if they ban pro-rape speakers (an unfortunately common opinion in some places) is worthless.

There's maybe a distinction between those who wish to maximise such a freedom, and those who wish it to be an absolute rule e.g. Their treatment of anti-freedom ideas.

or compelling student organisations to use their resources to host propagandists they don't agree with.

often what is happening is that student organizations are inviting speakers and other students are protesting / no platforming their decision. has there been a case where a student organization has been compelled to use their resources to host propagandists they don't agree with? how would that even work - who forced them?