Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I love everything about this proposal for a conservative, Omaha-based Saturday Night Live rip-off https://t.co/4dNnE3BDtw pic.twitter.com/3o9lhsbUvl

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 7, 2018

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further and (2) somehow a bunch of comedy writers and performers will just materialize in omaha, along with all of the crew needed to produce a high-quality television show. Well thought out

I think they first need to create a conservative UCB and Groundlings from which to snatch up and coming wingnut comic performers. It will take maybe 3 months if they are motivated.

That whole thing is itself a perfect SNL sketch about beleaguered right wingers trying to create their own late night comedy show.

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further

yes its a SNL copy

Oh joy, Jonathan Haidt has gotten worse, and has apparently doubled-down on fetishized reasonableness against all else

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review

The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. The fact that Lukianoff and Haidt claim the authority to police discourse becomes clear the first time they discuss the role “overreaction from the right” has played in recent campus wars – at least halfway through the book. They quote death threats that Princeton professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor received in 2017, including “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum” put in her head. “One might conclude,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, that if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”.

fetished reasonableness is actually an innate foundational human value

a-a-and some ELBOW PATCH jackets too!!

if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence, your honor.

The assumption here is that the anger directed at these professors was grounded not in a violent disagreement with their positions, but was merely an overreaction to the tone in which they were presented. Observation of current political discourse will quickly uncover thousands of examples which contradict this assumption.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anthony-ekundayo-lennon-black-white-theatre-director-job-people-of-colour-actor-artist-tawala-a8617011.html

In which a new Dolezal contender emerges.

My best friend's daughter attends the preeminent NYC arts high school. Let's call it Fame HS.

The big musical production opening tomorrow is The Sound of Music. What has the new principal decreed? I guessed.

No swastikas.

...

But yeah, liberal fascist thought-policing is just a delusion on the part of ol' Dr Morbius.

(for those who don't know, the show takes place in 1930s Austria, and the Nazis are the villains)

What about armbands with two thick black Xs instead?

It's just not TSOM without the swastikas, is it? For me they are absolutely key to its enduring appeal.

So the Von Trapps decide to flee what? Austrian Grinches?

I mean Liberal-fascist thought-policing is kind of a delusion, it would be more reasonable to say "there's a cadre of well-meaning idiots in the world" and they've always been with us

Should be "well"-meaning but too many quotation marks

I can’t believe you are defending these people who changed a play so it wouldn’t stigmatize Nazis.

the chances that that was their motivation as basically zero

lol

Perhaps it would be helpful to change it completely because I don't want to support nazis but otoh by the end of TSOM I am sort of rooting for anyone who can stop the Von Trapps continuing to sing and they are in the best position to make that happen.

xp. damn it, i thought you were being earnest, that's your MO

If you hate TSoM you *are* the Nazis basically

This sounds a bit silly.

This sounds fine with me. I don't really need the Nazis in The Sound of Music to have authentic period uniforms for me to know they're Nazis.

yes, plus TRIGGERS! OOOH, TRIGGGERSSSSSSSS

sensssssssitivity > history

pick a different fucking play

I understand instead of goose-stepping, they'll be popping and locking

*'knuck if you buck' plays* smile if you heil

lollll

:D that's gonna be stuck in my head all day

this is fucking wild, and I imagine many around these parts are familiar with Clover (he wrote for Spin in the 90s, right?)

THREAD: I'm on record as saying that there are a lot of sincere and principled people working the campus politics/free speech beat, but lately I've grown much more cynical about the entire thing. I'd like to give you an example of why.

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 18, 2019

and he did the Sugar High blog

that's nuts

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

I agree. I kinda doubt the left is going to rally around him since white guys talking about killing a bunch of people are not a popular groups nowadays

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

― Mordy, Monday, March 18, 2019 2:33 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

the police are not a protected class

I'm also not really outraged or anything, seems like the only people who care about this are republicans, let them wear themselves out and if he gets fired I'll be mad

i don't see why they're being a protected class or not has to do with anything and i don't think clover should lose his job. but i don't think it's some terrible hypocrisy that the right is going after this guy for calling for police to be killed while defending right wingers for less dramatic statements. if you can show me right wing media rallying around someone calling for anyone to be killed (protected class or not) as a free speech issue then i'd agree w/ the original tweeter's conceit.

the point of free speech is that it's supposed to not be dependent upon the content of the speech, so calling for his head for this speech while defending other speech is kind of by definition hypocritical

I think maybe we agree broadly that there is a lot of cherry-picking that goes on whenever people write these sorts of "why isn't anyone paying aTtEnTiOn to tHiS" pieces. often there are people 'talking about it' that the writer chooses not to highlight. also, not every example is interesting or worth writing about (this one prob is tho!)

sorry just talking to myself now

You guys are right on the question of the will to defend Clover, but of course it's hypocrisy. Sure, swapping in "minorities" for cops makes it seem real bad, but how about: “People think that terrorists need to be reformed. They need to be killed.”

bad analogy. people talk about killing terrorists all the time

At first I read that as 'People that think terrorists need to be reformed should be killed.'

xpost that is exactly my point? If a professor were fired for saying that about terrorists, right-wing "free speech" advocates would obviously be outraged. I don't see any difference in 1A terms.

"terrorists should be killed" isn't quite the same since "terrorist" is essentially synonymous with "bad guy," but if they said, "liberals should be killed," i imagine there'd be a good chance they'd be fired and a small chance republicans would try to defend it as protected speech.

even tho both "cops should be killed" and "liberals should be killed" should both be protected speech and also both should be protected vis-a-vis academic freedom. but the hypocrisy charge in general is a lazy one and here seems particularly dumb to me.

Mordy, my dude -- there's a conservative provocateur who literally called for gunning down journalists

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/06/28/milo-yiannopoulos-confirms-his-gunning-down-journalists-comments/743561002/

and who SPECIALIZES in showing up on college campuses and complaining that his free speech is being shut down by liberals, including a few months ago at NYU:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/students-call-nyu-cancel-milo-yiannopoulos-lecture-181030170250806.html

The professor who invited him to talk has the Twitter handle "antipcnyuprof" for the love of God

I still don't get why this doesn't count as hypocrisy, but I would def agree that hypocrisy is an ineffective line of attack

I mean here is Ann Coulter's famous quote on the Muslim world and she, too, is someone college students are widely counseled to welcome to their campuses lest they deprive themselves of the benefit of exposure to her ideas:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

tbc they're gross + often hypocritical but also milo and coulter have both lost jobs bc of their comments

Free speech, in the "anti-PC get over it snowflakes" sense, has ALWAYS included "speakers have the right to advocate the killing of disfavored classes of people and if you don't like it you should argue against it in the marketplace of ideas." ALWAYS.

iirc coulter lost her NR job specifically bc of the invasion comment above?