Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Maybe he could change the conversation to aether as a proposed fifth element.

yeah, maybe

Maybe he could change the conversation to aether as a proposed fifth element.

Depends on context: e.g. in a philosophy of science course or any theory course reading e.g. Thomas Kuhn, this might not be amiss.

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

http://reason.com/blog/2015/03/19/male-students-non-pc-views-on-rape-stati

goole linked that only a few posts ago

Reason's history on race relations might influence how willing an African-American student is to engage with them in good faith, tbf. Not that this kid doesn't sound like a nightmare on all other fronts.

http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2015/03/the-joke.html

By contrast the body of Wolinski's work, I believe, shines with humanity and sensitivity: virtues that are rooted in his experience as a Jew in France in the '68 era, and for which he was assassinated. Honestly, I read Wolinski and I do not think of the Front National. I think of Gargantua, and the Decameron, and Don Quixote: works that face up to the absurdity, fragility, and grotesquerie of human existence and of social life, rather than trying to screen these out, as authoritarians do. I'm an anti-authoritarian, and in this I take myself to be defending a particular strain of leftist politics. I think by contrast that the dominant strain of leftist politics at present, at least in the anglophone world, is frighteningly authoritarian, and deeply misguided.

the dominant strain of leftist politics at presentthroughout history, at least in the anglophone worldacross the globe, is frighteningly authoritarian, and deeply misguided

fixed that for ya

I have an essay in the current issue of Harper's Magazine on the Charlie Hebdo attacks, on the disgraceful reaction of the so-called left in the anglophone world, and on the importance of satire. It is behind a paywall, unfortunately, and I can't reproduce it here.

gutted about that bro

ngl, Kind of very slightly warming to True for that response to Reason.

On a somewhat related note, I recently talked to one of the people responsible for marketing American Sniper (and other Warner Bros. productions) to French audiences. "That must have been a challenge," I said, "with all the American jingoism and so on." Her reply? "French audiences appreciate films by talented directors that show the world from the perspective of morally compromised characters. They recognize that this is one of the highest aims of the cinematic art, and are mature enough to engage with a film at this level without agreeing with the political views of its maker." Honestly there are moments when I think to myself, "At last, I'm in a country for grown-ups."

first dispatch from the country for grown-ups:

http://tabletmag.com/scroll/188412/french-mayor-bans-oscar-nominated-muslim-film

how is french law set up such that a mayor can force a privately owned theater to pull a movie?

(it looks like an isolated and kind of abortive incident.....sorry actually, not sure it's terribly relevant)

Something about smugness of the French cineastes sent me out looking for trouble.....looking forward to that Harper's article, with which I expect to disagree.

fuck this 19 year old creep for thinking he can get away with acting like real life is reddit or 4chan

Adam Bruneau's edit otm, of course, but as leftists, we have reason (and perhaps an obligation) to be especially wary of the authoritarianism that arises from within our own ranks.

some leftists are pro-authoritarianism

https://dov5cor25da49.cloudfront.net/products/383/636x460design_01.jpg

And 19 year-old creeps were playing amateur Socrates in class discussions long before the internet existed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnQ_WDtBhvI

I think you would be hard-pressed to find a leftist that was 100% anarchist in their beliefs. People generally think murder being illegal is a good thing, for instance. But it would be a mistake to infer this means every leftist is pro-authoritarian.

Just wish these guys would pick more important issues. Shutting down guantanamo or enacting banking reform or campaign finance reform. Instead we are talking about 19-year old trolls and essayists that wish they lived in France.

tbf, this thread is specifically dedicated to low-stakes nonsense

It's going to take some serious work to convince me there was some uniform "leftist" response to the CH shootings. It was just a few months ago and I recall plenty of disagreement. The closest thing to a consensus WAS the "always defend free speech, dammit!" response --- those who argued anything else had to tread carefully instead of just making one good principle the sole guide.

No authority figure in the Occupy Wall Street either.

Contenderizer, thanks for reminding me!

Right wing response was an undivided & unambiguous defense of free speech (with a large side of Muslim-bashing). Leftists were more inclined to hedge, e.g. ILX thread.

max tweeted out the final bit of that reason post

michelle shocked answered him

https://twitter.com/mshockedrox/status/578814639858810880

sup internet!

XP don't forget the Bill Maher liberals

Anyway, after a browse down memory lane on the CH thread here, I just want to pay tribute to my favorite post from that discussion:

its just so... french. they can't even have normal racism like the rest of us loser countries. they have to have some refined triple-distilled artinsinal grown from only one village with special soil you-can't-even-understand-the-flavor sophisticated racism.

― celfie tucker 48 (s.clover), Saturday, 10 January 2015 16:59 (2 months ago) Permalink

Yeah that is classic

http://nyti.ms/1IbzI2F

Nice enlightenment praxis. Good article, too.

i had a classics class with the columbia student quoted in that article. he was pretty knowledgeable but never seemed to be responding to anything anyone else said and just launched on long, righteous speeches any time he was given the opportunity to talk. we're still friends on facebook, and he posted his response to the safer space thing. it was really awful, i don't think it's a coincidence that the author chose not to quote it. someone slips a flyer under your door saying "hey, let's try to challenge homophobia in our dorms when we encounter it" and you launch into an epic essay about the defence of intellectual liberty. iirc it ended with the phrase: "this is a dangerous space... a very dangerous space." such an asshole. his facebook posts are half about how atheism is the biggest problem facing the world today, which he ties into some great thesis he has about a crisis of morals and faith in western society, and half your typical mordy ilx posts.

goes without saying that the illiberalism is wrong and has no place in universities, but i wonder if articles like this & that chait one are blowing it up for spin. i wonder if the illiberal stuff is a trend or if they're just the extreme (and unfortunate) outliers in the general trend of universities trying to make more inclusive spaces. these articles all have a suspicious lack of voices from members of the groups themselves. i suspect they're mostly pretty reasonable (modulo college). everyone i have ever talked to about trigger warnings basically has the same opinion, that there's no hard or fast rule about it but it's something teachers should keep in mind. someone enrolled in a university english class should be able to read anna karenina without "tw: suicide," but a teacher should warn their students before showing a film with a graphic rape scene. that kind of thing.

the safe space at brown described in that article sounds like a right-wing caricature of safe spaces; puppies and pillows and soothing music. granted i've never gone to an american LAC but that's not at all representative of what the term referred to at my alma mater, or in the other public spaces that use the title that i've encountered. ime it just means the people who run the space hold themselves accountable to the people who use it, and will kick someone out who is making members of oppressed groups uncomfortable. again, no one thinks every space should have that policy, but it makes sense for some spaces to, right? as long as there are large numbers of ppl who use racist or homophobic language & humour, it kind of makes sense for there to be spaces for queer people & poc to go where they don't have to hear it. can we assure that rules are never applied overzealously? no, of course not. but i question the motives of these articles highlighting a subset of incidents where they are and calling it the norm

How come these trollwavers never do this in public school, these are all private universities?

i've never been in a 'stress relief zone', which i believe they've been having on campuses more and more often (esp. around finals time) since i went to school in the late 90s, but i got the impression from the description of that safe space that it was combining the no-triggering no-aggression function of a safe space with a de-stress function, probably because they had the puppy videos and whatever around from their already existing de-stressing student wellness office?

yeah they had the play with puppies thing during finals when i was in college, but it had nothing to do with safe-spaces

I see the article as pushing back against a set of related arguments:

1) We are made unsafe by exposure to ideas & language that trouble us.

2) A student's sense of threat or offense in response to such exposure therefore requires administrative intervention.

3) For safety's sake, public discourse on campus should be carefully moderated to ensure that no one feels threatened or offended.

4) In pursuit of this, it is reasonable to exclude or otherwise censor controversial voices.

I think it's worth opposing (or at least interrogating) every part of this construction.

is anyone making those arguments though? like, is there a group represents any or all of those arguments? like, is this an argument actually being had, outside of inside the minds of journalists who write these pieces? all the articles i've read about this take isolated incidents of students overzealously applying social justice principles and extrapolate from that a movement of people who want to limit public discourse on campus.

because there are none mentioned in that article, or in the jonathan chait one. i just reread it and checked.

the afrofunk band with too many white people in it was lols though

naw the theory i think is the chilling effect on discourse that happens when someone disagrees w u

lol

I don't think anyone has to explicitly argue the position for the argument(s) to exist & gain traction in the world. A group of well-intentioned people "overzealously applying...principles" is more than enough to justify a few skeptical articles.

I mean, if this construct were held more closely in mind, most of these incidents would never have happened:

1) We are not made unsafe by exposure to ideas & language that trouble us.

2) A student's sense of threat or offense in response to such exposure rarely justifies administrative intervention.

3) There is no pressing need to moderate discourse on campus in the name of public safety.

4) It is not acceptable to exclude or otherwise censor controversial voices.

how is it going to gain traction if no one is explicitly arguing for it? it seems to me that what is gaining traction is universities making more inclusive spaces. which is... good? and then some fuckhead reactionary journalists come along and write this softserve anecdotal condescending garbage about "self-infantilizing millenials." it's just a cop out. look within yourself. we're inherently reactionary. we're just looking for a good reason to spout reactionary shit that doesn't make us seem like dicks. so if jonathan chait comes along and tells us we are defending _liberalism_ cause a white funk band couldn't play a concert or a panel of 2 men couldn't discuss abortion at some college in england, that makes us feel good.

There is no pressing need to moderate discourse on campus in the name of public safety

http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/almost-link-mental-health-gun-violence
http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/actually-know-connections-mental-illness-mass-shootings-gun-violence-83103
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/11/25/report-sandy-hook-shooter-adam-lanza-was-obsessed-with-mass-shootings

Law making bodies have declined to do anything in response to recent school shootings, passing the responsibility off on the faculty. Brain policing has been the one of the more sensible suggestions.

3) There is no pressing need to moderate discourse on campus in the name of public safety.

what are the facts? there may or may not be people who want to moderate discourse on campus in the name of public safety. their existence has been posited, but we haven't heard from them yet. my personal theory from having interacted with people who get painted with that brush is that it's a social justice bogeyman.

so who do we know? we know that there are people who don't like the fact that certain people are entering the discourse on campus. they don't like the fact that there are now people in the discussion who criticize their universities for booking panel discussion between two men about abortions, who criticize profs for ridiculing victims of sexual assault in op-eds.

*WHAT do we know

You're constructing this as a conflict between meddling reactionaries and the expression of sensible voices that have heretofore been excluded, good vs. bad. In Jeremiah True's case, I don't think that's a satisfactory description of events and motives. As I understand the situation, True's exclusion from the conference portion of Prof. Savery's class was initially justified by the suggestion that his ideas - not his manner of presenting them, but the ideas themselves - made others in the class feel unsafe. I believe we set a terribly dangerous precedent when we habituate ourselves to thinking of the expression of ideas in terms of threat, safety and harm. While there are certainly cases where such framing is appropriate, they're relatively rare, and outside that context, it's intrinsically hostile to the free exchange of ideas.

Of course, it's possible that True's manner in class was aggressive, threatening or otherwise actionably disruptive. But Professor Savery didn't make that claim in justifying his decision. He instead went with the assertion that True's ideas simply made people feel unsafe. That he thought this appropriate is troubling, and doubly so the administration's apparent support. I reject the suggestion that this is an isolated non-incident, irrelevant in the larger scale of things if not for the shit-stirring interference of a few online "reactionaries". It's part of a larger pattern and the natural product of ideas and strategies that have gained sway in recent years. That they emerged from social justice movements and seek to protect/empower the less privileged does not oblige us to uncritically support them in all applications. Good intentions are no guarantee of good ends, after all.

Again, these are private institutions. Try this shit in a Walmart and see what response you get.