Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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?

petitions and protests are forms of speech too I've been told

Clover was never properly punished for his writing as "Jane Dark" so I'm OK with this.

I think that many stupid people on the internet (forums and Facebook and Twitter etc) probably can be found who are all for letting murder advocates speak but would then change their tune as soon as someone advocates killing 'goodies' instead of baddies

I don't know how often that obvious hypocrisy is enacted by paid and official conservative politicians and journos though so I can see what mordy's saying

I think a v common stumbling block is for people to advocate general freedom of speech without thinking through or acknowledging all those kinds of speech they, in fact, don't agree with

coulter's comment mostly offends me because it's completely fucking factually wrong.

She has no interest in actual WW2 history or how that might relate to USA versus Islamists in our century

Sometimes you see people who advocate for free speech not based on the importance of speech, but because they believe it's completely impotent.

tangent, but the jarring thing about this for me is that the photo they're using is the Wikimedia Commons photo (i.e. why they're probably using it) of his 2015 EMP Pop Conference panel that I was also on

right wing idiots conflate freedom of speech with freedom from
consequences of being asswipes

The mayor of Old Forge, PA said on FB that Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Chuck Schumer "should be shot"

https://wnep.com/2019/03/06/old-forge-mayors-facebook-post-calls-for-high-profile-democrats-to-be-shot/

He still has his job. And conservative response is "obviously this is not an actual threat" which surely is equally true of an English professor.

but his influence over the young

jeez. i find clover to be an insufferable (but very clever) ass (and the internet hardman comments that inspired this whole fiasco are sadly totally in character), but seeing what is happening to him is terrifying. i wouldn't wish this sort of fascist pogrom on my worst enemy.

it doesn't help that of all the mundane fascistic details of everyday american life, i find cop-worship the most despicable.

yeah clover is exactly the sort of dumb tankie asshole i can't imagine defending in any other context but this one.

coulter also said that the only bad thing about tim mcveigh was that he didn't blow up the NYT building. she's made some thinly veiled anti-semitic remarks too iirc. right-wingers basically never suffer any consequences for this shit.

he has an incredible way with words. he's incredibly sharp and pointed. i actually enjoy, for a certain amount of time, reading his poetry and prose. but it all sours quickly because the common denominator -- the thing that really seems to animate his work, beyond his putative political commitments -- is self-regard.

it'd be easy to accuse him of performative radicalism, because i do think that's what a fair bit of his writing is, but it'd be too easy, because he's definitely put his own privilege on the line at times, by design and (seemingly, now) by accident.

whats his login