Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

well now

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fake-outrage-machine-right-radical-professors/

There’s no reasonable defense for Clover to call for the death of cops. And, by the way, there’s no reasonable defense for Carlson calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys.” Criticizing or condemning Clover and Carlson is proper and justifiable. As I tweeted when the Carlson story broke, if the trending hashtag was #CriticizeTucker, then I was all-in, but since it was #FireTucker, I was all-out. Similarly, attempts to fire Clover (absent concrete evidence of on-the-job misconduct) are not just improper, they’re almost certainly unlawful.

Who really cares what an English professor at Davis thinks about police violence? Who really cares about what a random Fresno State teacher thinks about Barbara Bush? No one does. Not really. They have no meaningful impact on any public debate.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

I've never seen a political analogy that actually works though.

French basically right about the difference between being dragged for your expression of personal views and getting harrassed or fired. Honestly, if I were Clover's department chair or dean and saw that tweet, I would feel fully within my professional responsibilities to say "hey I can't tell you what to say on Twitter but please remember that some of your students could be police officers or people planning to be police officers and you might be compromising your ability to be an effective mentor to those students, so I would prefer if you toned it down" and you know what, maybe his department chair did say that, because it doesn't seem like Clover has tweeted that stuff particularly recently, and maybe it's not because he's under a chilling threat of losing his job for his free speech, maybe he just realized he was being kind of a dick.

Who really cares what an English professor at Davis thinks about police violence? Who really cares about what a random Fresno State teacher thinks about Barbara Bush? No one does. Not really. They have no meaningful impact on any public debate.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, March 19, 2019 10:01 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right. Tucker deserves to be out of a job far less for what he said on a radio show 10 years ago than for what he says to millions of TV viewers every night in 2019.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

lol the commenters see this in the exact opposite way--Tucker is just a opinionator, Clover is TEACHING OUR CHILDREN and being PAID WITH OUR TAX MONEY

a local woman who i have only encountered as a server at a bar apparently also does art. she did a book with poems in it, like a small, diy type thing. it was for sale at the art book fair here.

she's been cancelled because in the text r kelly raping/peeing on girls is mentioned, and she doesn't specify that the girls were black (therefore this is erasure)

she is white

Move to Montreal. I swear it's worth it.

What does cancelled mean? The art book fair will no longer sell it? That sounds nuts.

What does cancelled mean? The art book fair will no longer sell it? That sounds nuts.

― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), Monday, October 21, 2019 10:25 AM (twenty seconds ago)

nah, the book fair is finished. "cancelled" as in is being subjected to criticism by various people on social media or whatever.

There's this quote from somebody about removing the mote from your neighbor's eye that may apply here.

lest ye be nudged off shelves

this is striking me as pretty nuts

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/article/3033839/japanese-brand-uniqlo-pulls-ad-after-accusations-defaming?

sorry is there a region thread I should take that to instead? On the face of it the story sounds like a stretch but it is crazy how long Japan denied its behaviour

I'm not sure if this is the right thread for this, but I thought that this Osita Nwanevu piece, taking aim at a George Packer speech in praise of Christopher Hitchens, was very sharp:

This, it’s implied, is how discourse ought to be. Writers should argue fiercely about issues that matter, yes, but not so fiercely that they can’t grab drinks, settle up, and nominate each other for the Hitchens Prize. The world of ideas, as rendered by Packer, is a very different kind of place than the world where most human beings reside. Above them, the wise -- people like Packer, people like Hitchens --busy themselves with the ideas that shape, and occasionally end, the lives of the rest. This is a profession made noble by abstraction. When an idea is simply an idea, things can be civil. And when things are civil, things are pure.

That, anyway, is how things appear. Underneath, as Hitchens proved, esteemed writers are possessed of exactly the same impulses and biases -- the same rage and grievances -- as anybody else. Moreover, one can see in Packer’s ideal not only the emotional and moral distance that makes breezy punditry about distant wars possible, but also the roots of Packer’s preoccupation with social media, which has collapsed the gap between writers and the rest of the world. It subjects them to the anger and ridicule of people who haven’t a clue how charming Hitchens was in person and have no particular reason to care -- an untenably threatening development for those who believe social dynamics, more than the content of arguments themselves, are the infrastructure of their intellectual lives. For them, moral condemnation violates the sanctity of discourse itself, particularly if the target of criticism has had their intelligence established in all the usual ways -- the right degrees, the right bylines at the right places -- and particularly if the criticisms are made in strident tones.

https://www.chronicle.com/article/When-the-Culture-War-Comes-to/248016?key=6GN5vbBTWeO_wOewtnTLTtUPVP-vMc2s6ddnpGFShlC614HfRYgPtTGG5NjVlGkCSVMtc0dxVVNYbVV3TGZCYmM4eUkzcHdqYTJ0dnYxaTVHdzNyU2NwUHJmWQ

"Family Policy" was switched to an online format. Chidozie, the student who thought it "weird" that Anderson had asked about her professor’s Christianity in the sexuality class, was also in "Family Policy." Chidozie said she enjoyed attending Stone’s classes in person but was nevertheless relieved when the course moved online, because "it became difficult to learn when dealing with that kind of person in the classroom."

Some students vented in their course evaluations about their "frustration" that the last few weeks of class were held online because of the behavior of one student.

And other students, according to Stone, incorrectly assumed that the change to online was the professor’s prerogative. They complained in course evaluations that she "gave up on the class." The sexuality course had guest speakers scheduled, so online teaching wasn’t an option there. Instead, a police officer stood silently inside the classroom for several sessions.

Infuriating article.

http://www.oudaily.com/news/ou-gaylord-college-professor-uses-racial-slur-during-class-in/article_ddf0496e-4cff-11ea-9e80-fbaf7ab99bc3.html

i would say he 'spoke' it i.e. mentioned it rather than using it, but obviously that's impossible

this must be burning up someone's charts, because my university present used it one day alter to provide an urgent reminder of how committed the campus is to diversity and inclusion. and i would say this is the least woke place i have ever taught

name of that college is triggering

eclectic group of big names on this board
https://www.persuasion.community/p/our-board

rogues gallery of arseholes and mediocrities

mediocrities like kasparov?

I used the word and

is this gonna be one of those things where we find out two days from now that half those people didn't consent to being listed as 'advisors'

I found out about it from mcwhorters twitter feed so at least he is really on board

haha well yeah they do all seem pretty simpatico but