Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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?

@Dowd, also it feels like the Enlightenment version(s) of freedom of speech assumed a lot of duties and a certain ... way of doing things, I suppose, on the part of the speaker, that tend to be forgotten today?

I mean I've got no source for this, but the impression I've always had is that in the 18th century various thinkers and writers from across the religious and political divides were engaged in an effort to resolve the wars of religion and could kind of rely on their peers to be working towards this same general goal. A conscious turn against what they saw as barbarism and misrule - in other words containing an element of ideology, positive belief even if disagreeing about details. They mostly weren't nihilists. This could all be wrong, like I say I can't source any of it.

It never ceases to amaze me how confused many Americans are about the concept of free speech.

xp And you were supposed to be fluent in at least Latin, if not Greek and Hebrew as well, adhere to all kinds of gentlemanly codes of conduct, shave head and wear a wig, etc, etc, which means when you go and look at what these Enlightenment people were actually like, it's really a very alien culture.

Am definitely on board with making powdered wigs a precondition for political speech.

yeah. fucked up speech is fucked up. the problem is how to delegitimize it.

you can try to do it through making rules or laws against it, but if the rules or laws are unenforceable then you've created an empty gesture that does nothing, while deceiving people into regarding the problem as solved.

if the rules or laws are enforceable but are not enforced equitably, then you've just created a vehicle for inequality that can be used selectively by authority only against the speech they are most pleased to suppress.

if you dedicate the massive amount of time, money and force required to enforce the rules or laws against illegitimate speech everywhere equally, then you've created the necessary structure for massively oppressive social institutions far beyond just suppressing illegitimate speech.

delegitimizing speech through relentlessly exposing its inherent lack of legitimacy may not eliminate illegitimate speech, but at least it avoids the other problems noted above.

― a little too mature to be cute (Aimless), Monday, December 21, 2015

I'm still kinda proud of this succinct summary of the basic problem. I think it drives right to the heart of it.

feel like restating the dilemma makes it clear what the problem is

how do we stop people from talking about things that we don't like?

or even more perniciously how do we stop people from thinking about things that we don't like?

maybe we shouldn't be in the business of telling ppl what to think or say.

fwiw, both alcohol and drug prohibition have suffered from similar problems of unenforceability, unequal enforcement targeted at the less powerful, and the creation of a massively oppressive apparatus that can be abused for ends other than its stated purpose.

@Mordy but most of the people who end up 'against' free speech would say they weren't in that business, rather in the business of protecting people from the impact of what other people think and say

Unless we want to proceed as if speech and the expression of opinion actually don't change anything, don't have any impact on what events actually unfold in history?

Which is an interesting position that we don't often hear articulated, but probably lies behind a lot of I suppose trolly 'Who fucking cares if it's offensive?' attitudes that one encounters in the wild.

If true it would mean the sensible thing to do would be to give up and spend energy elsewhere I suppose.

There might be something to it - perhaps in the political spaces of today's world it's never any longer one person's speech act that makes any difference, only hugely orchestrated campaigns with lots of money and resources behind them?

i was just wondering tho whether that leads to a dilemma/paradox - if speech has no power/importance, why would freedom of speech be worth (legally) protecting?

i think it's reasonably clear tho that some speech acts can have power, can be considered as actions. most legal systems have always taken some account of this.

They're wrong tho

I'm not as extreme as deems on this issue but I admire his internal consistency

Well at this point we're sort of back at not-protected-speech 101 - fire, theater, crowded, you know the rest. Or "I'm going to kill you" which I think most of us accept as something you can prosecute as assault, or, I'd say, Milo inciting people to harass famous people or defenseless members of the community where he's speaking. Whereas most of the trolly "Who fucking cares if it's offensive?" cases, I think, concern speech that the defender sees as mere opinion, not a speech act at all, but just a reflection of one's inner self, so that placing restrictions on the speech is placing a restriction on selfhood.

Not to be super reductive but the issue might be understood as speech which overlaps these categories, or which some people view as A while others view it as B, and the definitions of the boundary become super important but very difficult. Possibly related: how attenuated or multi-step the logical chain is between the statement and the harm. It's easy to track how "Fire!" places the speaker in a position of responsibility for bodily harm; there are other cases that look like "Fire!" to some parties but to others it's too many steps removed and it just seems like gratuitous censorship or "oversensitivity" that should not trump a fundamental liberty.

yeah you might look at an analogy to actions which might be legally considered reckless or negligent

don't believe darragh seriously thinks that there's no legal point at which e.g. sending threatening communications to somebody should not be criminal

Direct link threats I'll hear arguments in chambers

Statements that diminish responsibility of other adults for their actions i remain a hardliner, or at least return to that stance between arguments

yeah fairer

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/24/opinion/what-liberal-snowflakes-get-right-about-free-speech.html?_r=2

The idea of freedom of speech does not mean a blanket permission to say anything anybody thinks. It means balancing the inherent value of a given view with the obligation to ensure that other members of a given community can participate in discourse as fully recognized members of that community. Free-speech protections — not only but especially in universities, which aim to educate students in how to belong to various communities — should not mean that someone’s humanity, or their right to participate in political speech as political agents, can be freely attacked, demeaned or questioned.

so fucking creepy these ppl.

My work sent out an email to be on the lookout for people posting pro-fascist fliers

Then the next day they sent out an email to be on the lookout for people posting anti-fascist fliers

What's the precise creepiness? The institutional language or the proposition itself?

I didn't know we had to show "creepiness" work here, but I found it a little odd since the administration had sent out an email earlier that had same basic content as the "anti-fascist" fliers. Though the fliers used the the phrase "will not be tolerated" which sounds a little intolerant imo.

http://images5.fanpop.com/image/photos/25200000/Tuxedo-mask-sailor-moon-25225153-498-370.gif

this is kind of interesting. rebecca tuvel, an academic philosopher, publishes an article in hypatia, a well-known (in the field) journal of feminist philosophy, titled "in defense of transracialism," about how arguments encouraging acceptance of transgender identities should apply similarly to "transracial" identities. the article passed peer review and was published. here is link to the paper - http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hypa.12327/abstract and here is the abstract:

Former NAACP chapter head Rachel Dolezal's attempted transition from the white to the black race occasioned heated controversy. Her story gained notoriety at the same time that Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner graced the cover of Vanity Fair, signaling a growing acceptance of transgender identity. Yet criticisms of Dolezal for misrepresenting her birth race indicate a widespread social perception that it is neither possible nor acceptable to change one's race in the way it might be to change one's sex. Considerations that support transgenderism seem to apply equally to transracialism. Although Dolezal herself may or may not represent a genuine case of a transracial person, her story and the public reaction to it serve helpful illustrative purposes.

lots of people thought the article was rubbish, but not just in a scholarly sense; they claimed it was deeply offensive on a number of levels and that its continued existence in the journal actively harms transpeople and people of color. an open letter calling for its retraction was created: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1efp9C0MHch_6Kfgtlm0PZ76nirWtcEsqWHcvgidl2mU/viewform?ts=59066d20&edit_requested=true and over a hundred academics and others sign it. here is a quote:

As scholars who have long viewed Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy as a valuable resource for our communities, we write to request the retraction of a recent article, entitled, “In Defense of Transracialism.” Its continued availability causes further harm, as does an initial post by the journal admitting only that the article “sparks dialogue.” Our concerns reach beyond mere scholarly disagreement; we can only conclude that there has been a failure in the review process, and one that painfully reflects a lack of engagement beyond white and cisgender privilege.

then "a majority of the hybatia board of associate editors" post a formal apology on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/astas/posts/10158553472075537)
and state that "clearly the article should not have been published" and promise a review of their editorial and peer review processes. here is a quote:

We, the members of Hypatia’s Board of Associate Editors, extend our profound apology to our friends and colleagues in feminist philosophy, especially transfeminists, queer feminists, and feminists of color, for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused. The sources of those harms are multiple, and include: descriptions of trans lives that perpetuate harmful assumptions and (not coincidentally) ignore important scholarship by trans philosophers; the practice of deadnaming, in which a trans person’s name is accompanied by a reference to the name they were assigned at birth; the use of methodologies which take up important social and political phenomena in dehistoricized and decontextualized ways, thus neglecting to address and take seriously the ways in which those phenomena marginalize and commit acts of violence upon actual persons; and an insufficient engagement with the field of critical race theory. Perhaps most fundamentally, to compare ethically the lived experience of trans people (from a distinctly external perspective) primarily to a single example of a white person claiming to have adopted a black identity creates an equivalency that fails to recognize the history of racial appropriation, while also associating trans people with racial appropriation. We recognize and mourn that these harms will disproportionately fall upon those members of our community who continue to experience marginalization and discrimination due to racism and cisnormativity.
It is our position that the harms that have ensued from the publication of this article could and should have been prevented by a more effective review process. We are deeply troubled by this and are taking this opportunity to seriously reconsider our review policies and practices. While nothing can change the fact that the article was published, we are dedicated to doing what we can to make things right. Clearly, the article should not have been published, and we believe that the fault for this lies in the review process. In addition to the harms listed above imposed upon trans people and people of color, publishing the article risked exposing its author to heated critique that was both predictable and justifiable. A better review process would have both anticipated the criticisms that quickly followed the publication, and required that revisions be made to improve the argument in light of those criticisms.

brian leiter, an academic philospher who manages a well-known (in the field) blog on happenings in academic philosophy, suggests that tuvell, the author, sue for defamation because of the damages this will have on her career as a tenure-track philosopher - http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2017/05/the-defamation-of-rebecca-tuvel-by-the-board-of-associate-editors-of-hypatia-and-the-open-letter.html - here is a quote:

I confess I've never seen anything like this in academic philosophy (admittedly most signatories to the "open letter" are not academic philosophers, but some are). A tenure-track assistant professor submits her article to a journal, it passes peer review, it is published, others take offense, and the Associate Editors of the journal declare that "Clearly, the article should not have been published" and that the abuse to which the author is being subjected is "both predictable and justifiable." Even the Synthese fiasco in 2011 did not involve behavior this egregious by the editors (and all the editors there stepped down not long after that fiasco).

I hope that Prof. Tuvel consults a lawyer about this defamation; and while it looks to me like defamation per se (i.e., damages are presumed since the critics are impugning her competence in her profession), I would imagine showing damage would not be hard. How can Prof. Tuvel, for example, now use this repudiated but allegedly peer-reviewed article as part of her tenure process? Indeed, how can her department or college support her for tenure when she has been so vilified as a scholar and professional by people who work in her fields? I wonder did any of those professing solidarity with those who specialize in taking offense consider the very tangible harm they are doing to the author of this article?

I would encourage someone to set up a petition to denounce the outrageous treatment of Prof. Tuvel by the Hypatia editors. I would be happy to correspond via e-mail about some draft language, though I will be off-line much of the rest of the day today.

We have been living with an "atmosphere of reckless attack" in philosophy (as one correspondent put it to me in 2014) for awhile now. I hope this proves to be the final straw, and that the community will finally stand up and denounce this misconduct that should be anathema to a scholarly community. If Prof. Tuvel does decide to seek legal redress for what has happened to her, I will organize fundraising on her behalf. It really is time to stop this madness.

and finally the author herself issued a statement - http://dailynous.com/2017/05/01/philosophers-article-transracialism-sparks-controversy/ , excerpt below:

I wrote this piece from a place of support for those with non-normative identities, and frustration about the ways individuals who inhabit them are so often excoriated, body-shamed, and silenced. When the case of Rachel Dolezal surfaced, I perceived a transphobic logic that lay at the heart of the constant attacks against her. My article is an effort to extend our thinking alongside transgender theories to other non-normative possibilities.

I don't understand, I thought a tenured scholar's speech can be professionally protected as a recognition that such protections are good for the academy.

she's tenure track not tenured

It does seem weird for her to lead off an article about trans people describing them as "changing their sex" when (as I understand it) almost all trans people would not describe themselves as having "changed their sex" but rather as having come to terms with the gender they always possessed but were mistakenly not assigned? I mean, I guess she doesn't have to be on board with that account, but she should at least acknowledge that it's the standard account if she's going to come out firing against it!

The whole thing seems like a mess. If the journal qua journal wants to retract the paper, it should, but if it doesn't, and if a lot of editors think the paper shouldn't have been published, maybe they should resign? At the same time, Leiter's idea that Tuvel should sue the pants off the journal seems like a nearly Trump-level case of "I'll crush you if you dare say bad things about me."

well, he doesn't seem wrong about the potential for major damage to her career; and given the way promotion review and hiring work in academia, she's not likely to be able to remedy it in any other way

"she should sue them" is more of a proxy for "we need to take a stand against this kind of behavior" esp if you read the post he links to - http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/12/2014-the-year-the-philosophy-profession-went-mad-at-least-on-social-media.html -- within the context of this thread i don't think the over the top reaction is a surprise but if ppl like leiter have skin in the university game u can't really blame him for wanting an intervention. it's v poor behavior.

also, he is a lawyer, and is not shy about suggesting (or threatening) litigation as a strategy for having a real impact in academic employment contexts

various academics on FB calling her article "harmful, violent, actively ignorant", that it "enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways" etc.

the article itself was not good i guess but the response is ott