Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

sadly the latter, sorry

the real me only wrote the last sentence

tbh feel free to delete all but the last bit, mods

Wait I'm confused

Is someone trying to arrest Guy Benson for his opinions and throw him in jail? Or are people just insisting that he ought not be invited to speak at a particular institution which they pay large amounts of money to, because they think that what he says is actively harmful? Cuz, only the first of those scenarios touches on "the right to free speech".

this guy is on to something

Brown University -- a private university, unbound by the First Amendment like, say, mine is -- hasn't yet rescinded the invitation either. It's 18 students and one Jonathan Chait causing the trouble.

tbh it's funnier if the speaker shows up and no one is there but it's hard to get that situation in play

http://jmrphy.net/blog/2018/02/16/who-is-afraid-of-free-speech/

That is interesting and I read the entire thing but could have guessed the outcome

this entire sham is a cottage industry at this point etc.

https://www.gq.com/story/free-speech-grifting

As Adam Serwer in The Atlantic and Jamelle Bouie in Slate have pointed out exhaustively, there are many more deeply disturbing threats to free speech, namely those enforced by the state. (Technically, First Amendment protections apply to guarding against the state imposing on the free speech of people, not the battleground of ideas at universities.) Examples include laws that ban positive portrayals of homosexuality in public schools, and police unions urging their members to retaliate against private citizens who have lodged complaints of misconduct. At Trump's inauguration last year, an anti-capitalist and anti-fascist march called J20 resulted in mass arrests, including of journalists, medics, and legal observers. Originally, 239 people were charged with felony inciting to riot, facing up to 60 years in prison. Houses were raided. The ACLU got involved. And not a peep in an entire year from any of the so-called free-speech warriors. Ditto this past week, when a Wisconsin school administrator was fired for allowing black students to hold a discussion about white privilege in a district that is 90 percent Caucasian. How peculiar.

...
Jordan Peterson, a psychology professor turned conservative provocateur, said he's figured out "how to monetize social justice warriors." Ben Shapiro, who rose to fame "owning" liberals on college campuses, sells "Leftist Tears" mugs and a book entitled How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them. Andy Ngo, a conservative activist who followed Sommers around to her Portland engagements, asked for donations after he published a video of the Lewis & Clark episode, notably edited down to just the protesting rather than including Sommers's ideas. Sommers vouched for Ngo's plea for money, tweeting that "he works tirelessly promoting free expression in Portland area. Often for no compensation. Help him out if you can."

I think it’s a pretty good article and stating these things in real terms as opposed to overly dramatic readings is a good way to defuse

My reaction to half the Sommers-style hustlers is to just spread the word they’re dumbasses with weak arguments. If you think whatever demographic they’re claiming is threatened is actually at risk it’s demonstrably false, and their entire base hinges upon some fear they might have to change. They won’t.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DYvlNiaVQAEWddU.jpg:large

For some background on that the Scottish parliament recently repealed the "Offensive Behaviour at Football and Threatening Communications (Scotland) Act 2012" which allowed police to arrest you if you were either at or on your way to a soccer match if you did anything the police judged could be "offensive to a reasonable person". You can still be charged for sectarian breach of the peace

meanwhile also in scotland http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/homenews/16099568.Free_speech_row_as_Scots__Nazi_dog__film_maker_found_guilty_of__being_grossly_offensive_online/

a lot of people forget we don't live in america, and don't have absolute freedom of speech. I'm not going to contribute to making this alt-right sack of shit a cause celebre

we already send so many ppl to jail in the US it wouldn't be good to start jailing ppl for talking

can't help but feel that having Baddiel and Gervais on your side probably doesn't help but

obviously it's fucking madness but in the context of a scotland where teenagers get the jail for singing about the provos it's par for the course

Don't even get why that guy is whining, surely his going to prison will wind up his girlfriend real good

either at or on your way to a soccer match

in some way, aren't some people always either at or on their way to a soccer match?

i certainly am

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/

A good article, which is unfortunately struggling against a populist tide. But 'radical professors are brainwashing students' has been a claim since at least the '30s, it's just unfortunate that the Right has found a new audience to sell that nonsense to.

This was also a pretty good distillation of the hypocrisy: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/04/college-kids-need-suck-stop-wh-mean-trump-supporters-like-conservative-op-ed-columnists-need-safe-spaces-avoid-bring-triggered

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/nyregion/fordham-students-professor-harassment.html

So at the beginning of this semester, two seniors, Samantha Norman and Eliza Putnam, decided to do something about it. On the first day of class in January, they visited two of Dr. Jaworski’s Philosophical Ethics classes, taught at the university’s Lincoln Center campus, in Manhattan, before the instructor arrived. Standing in front of a white board with about two dozen students folded into desks in front of them, they delivered a warning.

“We introduced ourselves and said, ‘We just want you to know that there’s a history of allegations against this professor and multiple Title IX complaints,’” Ms. Putnam said.

They told the students to take care of themselves and take care of each other, they said. They were in and out in less than five minutes.

Just a few days later, the women received an email asking them to meet with the department of public safety.

Mr. Miltenberg suggested that Dr. Jaworski was being targeted because “the cultural leftists are intolerant of traditional morality.” The professor had intended to teach a course on “sexuality and morality from a traditionalist perspective,” his lawyer said.

This seems like a bad legal strategy...

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/magazine/why-have-we-soured-on-the-devils-advocate.html

not sure if this was posted and discussed elsewhere, but I enjoyed this essay from nabisco (though I wish it were about 5x longer)

someone on twitter discussing the essay drew the distinction between speech-as-inquiry and speech-as-activism, which I think gets at the heart of the matter. personally, as my professional life becomes more ‘inquiry’-based, I’ve struggled a bit to adapt to the new boundaries of discourse, though I’ve grown to accept that this is what is best for the people to whom it matters the most

america elected the devil president. he does his own pr these days and neither needs nor wants "advocates".

That photoshop is really perfect accompaniment though

I read it

It is a proper length

The nature of the fora is exactly the problem - he could have looped around back to the simile of the addled stranger at the bus stop, imo - but it takes a lot of cognitive calories to figure out if a person is competent or qualified to debate / deliberate with on a topic, but hardly any time to figure out if their perspective seems antithetical to your own.

The anybody-can-edit/post/commit ethos works for things like StackExchange, Wikipedia and GitHub because the goal is The Right Answer and of yours doesn’t work, downvote or whatever. For shit without an “easy” answer, the completely public meeting with no rules of order is a grease fire.

We need to sorta-professionalize moderators, I guess. And to do that we need to figure out what Robert’s Rules look like for our era.

Bump because more people should read the thing k3vin linked

it’s good but should we be encouraging nabisco to post offsite

my non-research supported opinion is that the rise of twitter and 'ratioing' have something to do with this too fwiw

I have turned on people wanting to defend positions that they supposedly don't believe in, which is just a total cop out and waste of time. I loved that Nabisco piece.

it is certainly not a 'waste of time', but part of the point of nabisco's piece is that the nature of today's discussion forums makes it seem that way

I need to know the person's intent/good faith. Everything right now is just people amplifying bs bot talking points. I don't need that amplification if you don't have a personal stake in the game.

I haven't read that nabisco piece since it came out so may have to re-read later.

I have turned on people wanting to defend positions that they supposedly don't believe in

ILX has its "Defend the indefensible" threads, which are a variant of this.

The way I am talking about it is that they use this as a shield of protection.

Basically like how trump uses the "people say..." routine.

ILX has its "Defend the indefensible" threads, which are a variant of this.

I think most of these start with an OP who dislikes something and then people who like that thing respond?

Oh, I totally switched the defend the indefensible and the name something you don't care about thread in my head in my response.

nitsuh very much otm

This is not a result of some sea change in human psychology. It’s an issue of infrastructure. The types of arguments we once venerated — the kinds of critical-thinking dialectics that educators tell us hone the brains of students — make sense in orderly, deliberative settings, places like classrooms and courtrooms and Platonic dialogues. But that is not where online speech takes place anymore. Social-media platforms knocked out the walls of an infinite series of salons, turning them into one gigantic city square teeming with protests and counterprotests, each faction equipped with slogans and banners, each trying to command space and crowd out the opposition. They turned all speech into public pronouncements, and thus all conversation into a strange form of activism, part of a zero-sum battle over which ideas will find a foothold in our collective attention. In the midst of an information war, to express any opinion, sincerely or not, is seen as giving it space and therefore material support. Nobody stands in the middle of a march holding a sign that says, “What if One of Our Demands Is Unwise?”

It’s often argued that this makes our conversations increasingly polarized, dogmatic, intolerant of complexity and logically sloppy. It’s less often pointed out that this might be because they aren’t really “conversations” in the first place.

^^^ Yeah there is no baseline, foundational level of knowledge in these discussions. You have 20 year old bots from arguing with niche experts in their field. Or people saying that these are inarguably shithole countries even though they have never been outside the 48 states.

kevin that "speech-as-inquiry" vs "speech-as-activism" distinction is interesting and makes sense to me.

also this resonates a lot w/ me:

personally, as my professional life becomes more ‘inquiry’-based, I’ve struggled a bit to adapt to the new boundaries of discourse, though I’ve grown to accept that this is what is best for the people to whom it matters the most

there are a lot of moments when i want to say to folks "i'm not really sure about that" or "is this really how we want to talk?" or "i think things are more complex than that" and i decide not to say anything. "do i really need to say this" is something i ask myself a lot, and often the answer is no. sometimes it is hard to ask a question or express an opinion without seeming like an asshole with a shitty opinion or giving credence to assholes with shitty opinions, and in those moments i decide not to say anything

a big part of it is meaning. half the time discussions are going on where everybody is coming at it with different meanings. one person spends all day reading about X and they come into a thread to talk about it and there is all this context they are bringing in that nobody else knows. or that only like minded media consumers know.

then there is the "responding to trolls" horrible shit that clogs things up, where someone makes a stance against an imagined stance that isn't even being made itt. then you end up arguing against someone who is arguing against an imagined viewpoint nobody actually stated. it's almost entirely pointless.

like i think a big problem with the US 2016 election was you constantly had the entire world is weighing in on US politics and what is typical left for the US is not typical left for the world so those kind of discussions inevitably caught on fire and careened towards the sun

In real life I gauge a lot about whether to say anything and usually lean towards always saying something, but this likely comes from being a woman and wanting my opinion always heard. I may temper my response but I try to make sure it's clear. Like the last time this occurred was during a dinner in a european country with a Russian colleague of my spouse. He was complaining that the private music (and regular education) school his kids went to was going to start busing in lower income students and he wanted them to switch schools. This type of socialism HE DID NOT LIKE. The whole country was becoming too socialist. I thought about it and couldn't let it go and just said "well, part of going to school and education is learning to relate to people of different classes and backgrounds. It's something that only helps us later." The guy just nodded and switched the conversation. Ha! Oh, but I also asked "isn't Russia kind of socialist???" (i had no clue).

I have very strong opinions but I try to be a “cooler head” which sometimes actually means I just don’t say anything. I don’t really enjoy or revel in getting riled up about much of anything for whatever reason, I enjoy debating ideas but maybe in a way that does give that room to the other side in a way I also don’t enjoy for the reasons marcos mentions.

Like my folks (especially my mom) get doom and gloom about everything Trump does. Even this Roseanne thing this morning. I find it all absurd in a terrible way but I also think getting extremely offended by Roseanne in 2018 is weird, I don’t want to simply dismiss things like that as meaningless but getting up in arms about everything seems a but counterproductive.

I had a brief moment recently where I got pissed at an alt-right dude I know and I hated that I showed my hand like that, I don’t want to let it get to me. That may also be part of it. I don’t think of it as self-censoring but maybe more strategic in a sense. Idk.

It's weird right. Because sometimes I think people's bad hardcore opinions are because no one ever challenged them or told them they were wrong as a youngster. Or maybe they are rebelling against always being told they are wrong. Which one is it?

sometimes both. some shitty opinion could be one person's iconoclasm and another's received wisdom.