Even my bigoted critics deserve free speech
spiked-online.com
spiked-online.com
We are pretty similar in age.
> I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.
Which people, and what speech?
I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
My parents stressed about petty church politics because good standing in the local church had a direct effect on their ability to get and keep (completely secular) jobs.
They put out yard signs for candidates they secretly voted against.
If you weren't a white right-of-GOP-center conservative evangelical christian, life was an exercise is constant self-censorship.
From my perspective, "cancel culture" doesn't really seem particularly new. On average, people enjoy more expressive freedom today than they did in the 1980s.
So, again: which people, and what speech? Perhaps a few major metro areas enjoyed true liberalism re: speech in the 80s; I wouldn't know. But in most of America, your golden age of free speech never actually existed.
I find very peculiar how the proponents of various version of Critical Theory and Cancel Culture simply argues that they do not exist when confronted with criticism; this reminds me of one of my college philosophy professor trying to confuse his students with "nothing really exist" instead of answering the critiques of his teachings.
To give a few high profile examples:
* People arguing that private companies should be able to do anything with their public platforms regarding politically motivated censorship
* Jordan Peterson getting warned by the University of Toronto's lawyers for making a video about how he wouldn't cooperate about being forced to use certain pronouns.
* Lindsay Shepherd got disciplined by Wilfrid Laurier University's staff for merely showing a video of Jordan Peterson.
* Brett Weinstein was confronted by a hostile mob for criticizing the College for asking White student to stay away from college this day.
* Gregg Patton from the University of Southern California was replaced for saying the very usual Chinese expression "ne ga"; while teaching a Chinese Mandarin course.
> I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
It's almost as if things have changed.
Other than an admittedly convincing demonstration that your Philosophy professor wasn't a great teacher, what is your point?
> proponents of... Cancel Culture
What in my blistering critique of 1980s Cancel Culture gave you that impression?
> proponents of... various version of Critical Theory
You have me there. I will fess up to a fondness for the elementary theory of dynamical systems. The identification of critical points is a particularly important piece of mathematics. I have no clue what my fondness of the theory of the identification of critical points in dynamical systems has to do with this thread, though.
>> I grew up in a smaller town (but not tiny), where teachers who were fired or otherwise quietly left town after coming out as gay.
> It's almost as if things have changed.
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/opinion/scott-maxwell-commen...
>>> And I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech
That's the proposition that this particular subthread is discussing.
Perhaps you don't care, but in that case I'm a bit confused about why you're commenting this far down-thread.
Which I gave prominent examples of.
The reply of which was simply examples from the USSR era (as opposed to right now in the Western World) without any other argument other than what seems to be whataboutism.
Concretely, the far stronger social reaction to slurs against gay people go hand in hand with people now being able to say "I'm gay" without repercussions.
> > I feel like in last 6-8 years, people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.
> Which people, and what speech?
I responded with people and their speech that faced intolerance with total disregard for free speech. I doesn't even look like you are following the conversation anymore.
> Concretely, the far stronger social reaction to slurs against gay people go hand in hand with people now being able to say "I'm gay" without repercussions.
You are mixing up causation. People didn't accept homosexuality because certain words were banned, people stopped using words because they didn't like what they represented. And then it has gotten to another level where even statement of facts or simply making a point involving those words, in entirely different context causes outrage can cancellation.
The idea that words should get banned to make certain ideas or concept disappear à la 1984 is a very immature notion as other words can be forged.
Yes, I'm perfectly aware.
> I responded with people and their speech that faced intolerance with total disregard for free speech. I doesn't even look like you are following the conversation anymore.
Yes, I'm fully aware of how you responded. My point is that "people facing intolerance with total disregard for free speech" is not a new thing, as evidenced by the examples given from earlier times.
Breaking this down, you seem to think that giving examples of intolerance is enough to prove the initial claim, "people have become far more intolerant regarding free speech.", but it isn't. If someone else shows equal intolerance prior to the last 6-8 years, all your examples show is that the intolerance has not changed. You haven't shown that they've gotten worse, only that they haven't gotten better.
> You are mixing up causation.
You're once again misunderstanding my comment. I'm making the opposite causality argument than the one you appear to think I'm making.
As acceptance of gay people goes up, acceptance of slurs against gay people goes down. The question is, then, did we have "freer" speech when people faced criticism for saying "I am gay" as they did in the past, as compared to now where you face criticism for calling someone a slur?
cAn U PrOv1d3 s0urc3 pLeAsE fOr YoUr AnEcDoTaL eV1DeNcE?
Edit: It's worth noting that when the commenter actually did name the examples they were thinking of, it was entirely related to right-wing YouTube personalities, so it looks like I was on to something there.
Forwards, left and not a step back! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLAAprIN6S4
Which is not limited to the right
> we'll apply the 2nd amendment to them
What does it have to do with anything? Radicals from the Left are very pro 2nd amendment too by the way.
> Politics is debating the merits of a progressive tax system, for example. Politics is not calling for violence toward your political opponents and their supporters or arguing that the world is flat or interfering with the function of the organs of government.
Politics are simply the way people govern or are governed for better or for worse. "Politics is not what I consider evil" is a great political slogan but also doesn't make sense outside your own personal values.
The 80s and early 90s were the time of police riots in many cities and heavy gang activity. Neither of those indicates a good result if you said the wrong thing to the wrong people.
I don't believe that people have become less tolerant. I think that the reality of disagreement as a fact of life has just been amplified by the constant connectivity afforded to us by social media, and people (especially those who like to provoke debates) have a hard time accepting that not everyone is going to agree with them, and that there are real social costs to deliberately positioning oneself as edgy or unpopular or hateful, as there has always been.
True threats should be reported to the police. That's not intolerance, that's just plain illegal. On the other hand if by "real threats" you mean hyperbolic threats, those are also free speech.
Free speech is not a guarantee that others must listen, or that they must listen patiently. That is not now, nor has it ever been, the definition of free speech.
Platforms that have grown into de facto public squares are large enough that there is a public interest in how they regulate speech, given that the vast majority of people are on the big tech platforms while the alternatives are negligible and choked out by network effects. They are now a gray area between state and what is typically understood by private entity.
There are massive and obvious dangers in letting Google, Facebook, Twitter decree for millions/billions of people what counts as "science" or "misinformation", and they've already demonstrated getting it spectacularly wrong. It's vital to a free society to have a culture of open debate, and these platforms are now our media for such debate.
It's not clear yet what the best mechanism or remedy for this will be, but citing the First Amendment alone is not sufficient to resolve the concern. The First Amendment only applies to government, and the cultural and social issues around free speech have always been much broader than that.
There are older precedents for regulating speech on private platforms in an earlier technological period: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_fairness_doctrine. Perhaps we need an updated version of that. I wouldn't be surprised if the platforms themselves were ok with it, since I don't believe they wanted to get into the truth-regulation business in the first place. They're doing it because they're subject to intense, inner and outer, political pressure.
Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
I'm highly concerned about BigTech regulating the speech of others particularly when the others are experts in their respective fields, and BigTech has none, but is merely parroting an authoritarian government perspective.
When we normally debate a view, people present data from opposing viewpoints and we sort it out over time. Sides present data. Sides explain relevancy and over time, we determine greater accuracy. That cannot happen in an environment where gatekeepers control the speech and dictate the tone and content of it.
> Without getting into rightness or wrongness of views, I think it's factually the case that those pressures are coming from a fairly narrow band of political opinion which is far from being the entire spectrum and excludes many mainstream views, so in that sense what we're seeing is something analogous to "regulatory capture" of the big platforms. This gives enormous leverage to one cluster of political opinions over all the others. It's a distorting factor which I think is against the public interest (even though I personally agree with some of their views).
> We need debate and persuasion, not hard use of power. This understanding was commonplace, in fact bedrock, for so long that many of us are shocked at how quickly it could be abandoned, and not just abandoned or even forgotten but replaced with a narrative in which it was never that way to begin with!
I think this is very well written, and can be related to much of the modern authoritarian use of power, of compulsion, by BigTech in cahoots with government.
In the lawsuit against Trump for blocking people on Twitter, the court ruled that Twitter was a public square for the express reason that government policy was discussed and promoted there. Therefore, Trump (as a government figure) could not block people.
Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
The first situation demonstrates the gray area but the second makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government.
No it didn't. It ruled that trumps account was acting as an official government account, and so trumps account fell under stricter regulations that govern how the government can communicate. Twitter was still able to ban his account though, because Twitter isn't the government!
> Further, the current Press Secretary Psaki has described how they're directing Facebook to monitor and remove both people and content which was otherwise legal but simply unacceptable to the Administration.
No, Facebook used the government as a source of official information. They then chose to remove other information. The government wasn't telling Facebook to remove stuff. The choice to make the CDC authoritative was Facebooks choice. They aren't acting as an arm of the government.
> QUESTION: Thanks, Jen. Can you talk a little bit more about this request for tech companies to be more aggressive in policing misinformation? Has the administration been in touch with any of these companies? And are there any actions that the federal government can take to ensure their cooperation? Because we've seen from the start, there's not a lot of action on some of these platforms.
> PSAKI: Sure. Well, first, we are in regular touch with the social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 Team.
> Quote continuing: Given as Dr. Murthy conveyed, this is a big issue of misinformation specifically on the pandemic. In terms of actions, Alex, that we have taken or we're working to take, I should say, from the federal government, we've increased disinformation research and tracking. Within the Surgeon General's Office, we're flagging posts for Facebook that spread disinformation.
Unless you believe Psaki is lying which I hadn't considered.
Ref: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/07/15/psaki_wer...
The White House can make pretty much any request of Twitter and Facebook.
Twitter and Facebook, in turn, can decide whether to act on those requests.
The social media aspect is new, but otherwise, this is bog standard big corp <-> fed gov politics. Every prior president has used the bully pulpit to encourage very large companies to do things, and followed up/paired those requests with a concert of relevant activity within the executive branch.
FB/Twitter are not "acting as an arm of the federal government" except in the most sensational and hyperbolic foaming-at-the-mouth-talking-head sense; in the same sense as, for example, saying that Carrier was an arm of the federal government during the Trump years.
I did not say there were "acting as an arm of the federal government" to quote myself: "makes a case that Facebook was acting as an arm of the government"
"Makes a case" means literally "make an argument in favor of" and not "definitively is"
The argument you're making is akin to "Its illegal for Psaki or a white house staffer to ask for airtime on CNN, because that violates CNN's first amendment rights" (or perhaps more subtly "because then CNN is acting as an arm of the government", but that's still wrong).
I'd love to understand your point but I'm not going to engage further with someone pedaling misinformation.
And they weren't telling it to remove stuff. They were asking it to, after fb set up a way for the government (among other groups) to flag misinformation. You're glossing over those difference, but they matter.
Again, I suspect you missed a bit:
"U.S. District Judge Naomi Reice Buchwald in Manhattan ruled on May 23 that comments on the president’s account, and those of other government officials, were public forums and that blocking Twitter Inc users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."
Ref: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-twitter-idUSKCN...
When governments use social media as a way to communicate, it changes their standing as at least one court has ruled so far.
Twitter is still allowed to block people who reply to the president, or, as they did, ban the president.
Was there a more recent case+ruling that is more relevant and clarifying? Can you share a reference on that? Thanks.
Yes, hence they provided a brief asking the court to rule a certain way, and the court did, by keeping the ruling particular to Trump's government account.
There isn't any newer or better ruling, you're just misunderstanding this one.
From the article I cited:
"The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University on August 10 sent the Justice Department a list of 41 accounts that had remained blocked from Trump’s @RealDonaldTrump account. The seven users who filed suit had their accounts unblocked in June."
aka Not his government (@POTUS at the time) account. Once again, misinformation from you. :(
If you look at the actual ruling[0], you'll see that on page 9-11 of the ruling, they outline ways in which the @RealDonaldTrump account was used in an official capacity, and on pages 42 and 43, they outline how this is governmental control of the account (but not of twitter as a whole).
Quoting the ruling:
> First, to potentially qualify as a forum, the space in question must be owned or controlled by the government...Here, the government-control prong of the analysis is met. Though Twitter is a...company that is not government-owned, the President and Scavino nonetheless exercise control over various aspects of the @realDonaldTrump account...The President and Scavino’s control over the @realDonaldTrump account is also governmental...the President presents the @realDonaldTrump account as being a presidential account as opposed to a personal account and, more importantly, uses the account to take actions that can be taken only by the President as President
So please, stop crying "misinformation" when you're just wrong about the legalities of the situation. You may disagree with the ruling, but my description of it is factual.
[0]: https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000163-8e16-dd91-abe7-8f3f5...
Google, Facebook, and others do not require a license to operate. Anyone can establish their own website to counter points made on those platforms. The Fairness Doctrine would seem (even if it still existed) to be non-applicable to the various web platforms.
A more updated version of it might be more expansive, but would probably run into issues with compelled speech. Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
This is a canard though:
> Since the internet is pretty wide open, again anyone can make a website if they want, it's hard to justify compelling a platform to host content.
Anyone can make a website that no one reads, but not anyone can make a public square. As I said above, the alternatives are choked out by network effects, so the internet is not "pretty wide open" in any way that counts for public debate. It used to be, but that was before it consolidated into an oligopoly. That is why the public interest and free speech questions necessarily shift to these platforms. In the world we now live in, it's distracting to offer the prospect of "anyone can make a website" as if it were a realistic alternative.
Starting up a website is even easier than publishing a newspaper so it would be very bizarre for that precedent to somehow not be applied in this instance.
They have the ability to limit your use of their resources, which is well within their rights.
I believe the best I saw it was in the 80s. I worked in an environment where people of all races worked and played together, everyone got along well. I had high hopes that racist behavior was mostly in the past and still diminishing. Sadly, it was not to be.
The world would be a much better place if we all took a deep breath and listened to Thomas Sowell, Tim Scott, Ben Carson, Benjamin Watson, and others that seek true reconciliation.
― George Orwell
It was omitted from the novel under ironic circumstances (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm#Preface - "For reasons unknown, no preface was supplied, and the page numbers had to be renumbered at the last minute") and only rediscovered in 1971.
It is Chomsky's favorite Orwell piece, one he mentions all the time (e.g. https://chomsky.info/20101010_2/) and has probably done the most to popularize. https://www.google.com/search?q=chomsky+animal+farm+preface
Say, someone with a new brand of Nazi-ism is actually converting most of the people they talk to, using a combination of half-truths? Or even what if they are converting people by using celebrity endorsements and charismatic language? So no misinformation, but rather salient anecdotes, facts, and science?
What if someone's speech is effective at making people afraid of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's speech convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they don't plan the attack itself, and it's merely implied that the state of the world is completely unfair in a way that only a revolution and changing of constitutional rights, could a better world be restored?
> What if someone's speech is effective at making people afraid of exercising opposing speech? What if someone's speech convinces people to attack the capitol? Maybe they don't plan the attack itself, and it's merely implied that the state of the world is completely unfair in a way that only a revolution and changing of constitutional rights, could a better world be restored?
The government should not be censoring this. Private companies, as always, should feel free to censor what they want, regardless of positions.
And what about when the government threatens private companies with new regulations or other actions if they don't suppress certain types of legal speech? Is there a point at which extralegal government pressure to suppress speech violates the first amendment?
What about when companies "voluntarily" decide to supress anything that disagrees with the offical stance of the government and thus grants the government indirect control over that entire category of speech?
Giving companies a complete free pass for censorship creates a huge backdoor that allows government censorship thrive with plausible deniability.
They aren't merely censoring, they are also libeling them by attaching a misinformation/disinformation type of label, or adding their own speech to it.
And I'm really trying to get at the point that this speech is actually effective. Not sure why people are downvoting, because I don't think this has been discussed before.
It doesn't matter whether the speech is effective or not. The root of your problem is that what has happened traditionally is that governments will censor left-leaning views while leaving the right free. The problem, then, is not that the right is not being censored, but that the left is.
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/20/695941323...
As much as I deplore their views I don’t think they should be legally barred from expressing them. Of course MSG has every right to decline hosting the above event, but the government shouldn’t be the arbiter of who can say what when in public.
And, am I obliged to listen and/or give a thoughtful response to anything I do not want to hear?
Characterstically, Facebook and other media companies didn't suffer any consequences for suppressing public discussion on this matter.
(I don't hold any view about this theory. Comment is about absurdity of the idea of claiming that something is an outright lie, and also about hypocrisy of a so-called "fact-checkers")
Was it? I remember hearing plenty about the theory for a while. Sure, a lot of it (if not most) was saying that the theory is wrong - but not that it was a lie or anything, just giving evidence against.
(And to be clear, saying a year ago that it is for sure a leak was probably really a lie - just as saying it now, cause afaik there is no conclusive evidence either way).
Umm, to put it mildly, that was beyond obvious.
Lies, yes. People are free to utter them. Nobody is obliged to listen, or let them go without a response, as may be appropriate.
Credible threats and defamation are legally defined and have criminal or civil consequences because we recognize that they overtly cause harm. Fraud too. What in your mind is the fundamental difference between causing harm by defamation, which is literally just lying in a particular context, and causing overt harm by other kinds of lying? In order to credibly differentiate them, saying that one is ok and the other is not ok, we must have some distinguishing essential characteristic. Significantly broader categories of lying definitely and overtly cause harm, so what to your mind brings a moral imperative to allow one but not the other?
I think our court system does a good job of defining this already. Our court system is extremely conservative regarding the types of speech that it allows the government to punish people for.
If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
I'm not sure that it does. Short of "I know it when I see it" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it) what definitions of the essential characteristic of good speech vs bad speech do we actually have if not overtly causing harm?
> If you disagree, you are going to have to repeal the 1st amendment, I guess.
The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed when we got consumer protection laws, so I don't think so.
By definitions, I am simply referring to how courts have ruled in the past on this stuff. Which is to put very strict limits on what the government can do.
> The 1st amendment wasn't suddenly repealed
The courts have traditionally ruled pretty darn strictly on what the government is allowed to do.
You should compared the supreme court precedents that we have in the US, to other countries, and you will see just how much more strict the US is, regarding what the government can ban.
So yes, based on how strict courts have been in the past, if you want to redefine how speech laws work in the US, you are going to have an uphill battle.
Based on what, though? What specific essential characteristics define the cases where it is deemed acceptable to restrict speech and how do the same exact criteria not also apply to many other scenarios as well?
Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true:
1) No such essential characteristic exists, which means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
2) Some essential characteristic does exist, but we just look the other way sometimes, which similarly means that our regulations are applied arbitrarily.
3) Some essential characteristic does exist that is actually applied everywhere that somehow morally differentiates "fraud" from "deception with intent".
I don't see truth in 1 or 3, so I think we must be doing 2.
If you are actually looking for the answer to that question, there are a multitude of supreme court cases that you can read.
Just go google supreme court, 1st amendment cases, and reach the actual primary sources.
People teach whole classes on this stuff, and the specific reasonings that our courts give, for their strictness.
It is a complicated, but we'll established topic, for which you could read many many books on.
And if you truly are looking for the answer, as to the many nuances to that question, you need to read the actual court cases yourself.
> Restrictable speech either has a clear essential nature or it doesn't, so one of three things must be true
Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
There are people who spend their entire lives studying it. And you are not going to come up with some clever insight to it, in an afternoon.
Instead, you are going to have to actually do the work, and study the topic, for you to understand it fully.
Such as the case that gave rose to the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" idiom
The reason why it takes a lifetime of study to understand what sorts of speech are actually protected is because the Supreme Court has had some very inconsitent decisions (such as the one I mention above) that require tortured reasoning to align with the first amendment and other case law.
Id there are indeed some clear criteria, you should be able provide a reasonable summary of them; it should not require a lifetime of study. If the average american can't be said to understand what their free speech rights are...can you really say that they have thoae rights in prqctice?
Yes, because the court system has traditionally been extremely strict, most of the time, in defending free speech, compared to other countries.
So yes, I can confidently say that the court system has defended free speech in the US, much more than in other countries, most of the time.
> If the average american can't be said to understand
Courts protecting a right that someone doesn't understand is still better than the courts not protecting it.
Sometimes our rights only matter to us when we really need them, and it is still better that they are protected in those cases.
We'll see if the Supreme Court has anything to say when the US finally get Assange extradited and puts him on trial for his speech. I don't have a lot of confidence he'll get any protections.
If one's position is "I think our court system does a good job of defining this already", one should be able to point to an established definition that doesn't also apply equally to many other antiregulated contexts. Otherwise what the court system is doing a good job of is not "defining".
> Unfortunately, speech laws are not a topic that you can learn in an afternoon.
Laws are numerous and capricious. I'm not asking about laws. I'm not even asking about history. I'm asking about any existing philosophical position that differentiates what we _should_ restrict from what we _should not_ restrict. If we start from the notion that capital-F Fraud is bad, which we must since we regulate it, surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere.
The stated position is that you are going to be completely unable to understand, in an afternoon, the nuances of a topic, for which people spend their lives studying.
Thus, if you actually care about the topic, you need to read the supreme court cases or the numerous literature on the topic.
Otherwise, you are not going to be able to understand what the supreme court even does, or why they do it, when there is thousands of pages of reasoning, on this stuff.
> surely we should be able to say why it is so and apply the same reason elsewhere
And I am saying that such discussions require you to actually read the primary sources here, which is books and books, and court case after court case.
Sorry, but complicated topics are not solved by people debating a paragraph here and there.
Yes, you will actually have to take a class on this, or read books on this, to understand it.
Sorry, that's just life. When you ask extremely general and expansive questions, about philosophy, such as "what is the difference between different speech", unfortunately these are topic for which there is lifetimes of work discussing it, and you are not going to be able to have a debate in a couple paragraphs on it.
I don't think that is free speech related?
But the point is that we only see the people who claim to promote free speech as a general rule showing up to defend roughly one side of the education process (conservative students) and largely being silent when faculty are attacked.
Public schools having to avoid topics such as this. Private being free to teach what ever they want?
The problem I see is that this puts parents at odds with their children. If the parents are conservative should the schools challenge that? Or if the parents are liberal should the schools challenge that?
It becomes difficult becomes some academic topics can't be separated from politics.
Courses such as "Women in Medieval Europe" and "18th century Native American History" are decried as political. A friend of mine had a student complain that there wasn't enough discussion of the presidents in their course on Native American History. The "apolitical" approach that many people want means the almost total exclusion of subaltern voices from the historical record, and that is obviously BS.
The textbooks themselves are political. If you are approaching anything like history or sociology, your politics and worldview matter. And you cant strip it entirely out, because it affects what you teach.
The bigger problem is the curriculums being set in a way that precludes coverage of ideologically inconvenient topics.
History teachers in big government states simply don't have the time to pay more than lip service to jim crow and the government screwing the natives. Biology teachers in the bible belt are going to made to teach a requirement where the most realistic way to do their jobs is to give scant coverage to the evolution adjacent topics.
Was it the war of northern aggression or the civil war? Was it fought over slavery? Or states rights? Is one of those ways of teaching history more political than the other?
The problem is that propaganda is political, and how history is taught is propaganda.
And these laws are literally all about scaring schools and teachers from saying things that make some people a bit uncomfortable.
So, yes, the way we use term free speech, it falls into that.
Censorship concentrates state power and should always be carefully exercised and limited to an absolute minimum. It is a tool that has never been exercised by a government or institution for the betterment of a society. It has been universally corrupted and used for authoritarian control throughout history. Trusting modern corporations to somehow competently manage such a historically treacherous and corruptible means of social manipulation is naive at best.
So yeah, that means your signal to noise ratio is gonna have to be lower than you'd prefer, and you're going to have to trust yourself and others in society to muddle through. It's the least bad because it doesn't preclude intellectual and ethical advances via morals and tastes of the day.
Strangely enough, the more liberal and unconstrained speech is, the better quality of life gets for that society. The clearest example of this is the abolitionist movement that led to the end of slavery. If the US had exercised censorship and projected the majority views as the filter of appropriate speech, history may have gone much differently. Instead, loud people made annoying speeches in public that offended and provoked society to address the problem. If the ability to overcome great evils like that means that society has to put up with qanon, anti vaxxers, and flat earth dweebs, that is a price we should be happy to pay.
No one has the right to force to you to listen.
Typically the the limits on free speech are base on the injury they cause another. If you lie about someone and it causes you harm you can sue them. If someone harasses you you can sue them.
The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth without actually having to prove it's wrong in its entirety.
I don't think the usually is well placed on that one. If I call something a lie, it rarely is about denial of the nuggets of truth in the big sentence - it's about the damn thing being a lie.
You don't have to prove things are wrong in their entirety. Arguments/statements are like house of cards or long Mathematical transformations - if any subset of the thing is wrong, the whole thing is wrong.
If you care about truth and correctness, you should stick to short sentences and properly using abstractions.
Your generalization is a bad one, not because it has exceptions, but because it likely has as many as confirmations.
There has been plenty of debunking of the specific claims. If you have some specific claims that you don't think have been debunked, I'd like to hear them.
There are indeed examples where calling something a lie (or conspiracy theory) is a bigger lie. If this is one of those, you should have no trouble finding specific supporting claims that aren't also lies and haven't been expressly debunked.
I am not claiming the election was stolen or that Trump should have won. What I am saying, is that when you state "Trump's lies about a rigged election", you are labeling his comments as "lies" to dismiss any discussion of the very real problems with mail-in voting. And that denial is your attempt to "dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth", just what I stated in my first comment.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
If this had happened at large, or really at all, there would be (thousands of) accounts of this, which there weren't.
I'm labeling his lies about a rigged election as such because he specifically claims things that aren't true, demonstrably not true, or simply impossibly true.
Discussing any problems with mail-in-voting is very much still possible, but entirely beside the point.
[0] https://ballotpedia.org/What_happens_if_someone_votes_by_mai...
Or the 'c-word'?
This is a misapropriation of Orwell.
Why do people have difficulty with the difference between 'slurs' and 'ideas'?
And the difference between 'civil rights' and 'private organizations'?
-> An academic, talking about a 'challenging idea' maybe using data points that challenge public norms or 'trigger' people - should be allowed to do so. Probably, using a word - any word - to talk about that word - or in historical context, said by a character in creative expression - should be fine.
-> But using racist slurs against other people in civil discourse is totally inappropriate. If I called a co-worker a 'negro' or 'slut' I would expect to be fired.
And neither of those things have to do with Free Speech.
If you're quoting Orwell, do it in the right moments, because the more oppressive types will point out that using the Orwell defence in these scenarios is literally tantamount to supporting intellectuals calling each other the n-word in public, which is plain rude.
Then they can discretid the entire range of people concerned about 'Free Speech' as just irrelevant radicals.
When media companies, governments, corps and universities are banning people for having ideas they don't like (or saying 'verbotten words' even in a legitimate context) then you trot out Orwell and issues of Freedom of Expression.
Please explain how this could be "literally tantamount"? I don't understand that phrase or how this statement could be true.
Obviously, that has nothing to do with Orwell, or even 'Free Speech'.
As for 'literally tantamount' - the phrasing is poor, and would work better with only one of the two words, probably better just 'tantamount' or frankly neither. But it's completely moot. It doesn't change the fairly obvious implication of the statement.
Free Speech is important, Orwell is important - but neither have anything to do with arbitrary ad-hominem slander among intellectuals in public.
The author of the article is effectively making a personal plea, not really an intellectual one. Really what he's saying is 'I'm not that offended, don't dump this woman because she said something really raw'.
Even if you remove the slur, the a statement such as "People think you're an idiot" is just terrible, playground rhetoric. Why would a University want to work with someone who makes arguments such as that that wouldn't even work well on Reddit?
Use Orwell for where it was meant to be used.
You keep sayong it is obvious but not explaining. If it is obvious, then it should be easy to explain what you meant by it. As far as I can tell you are conflating "i support their ability to say these things without laoing their job" with "i support them saying these things".
> Really what he's saying is 'I'm not that offended, don't dump this woman because she said something really raw'.
I think that is an extremely poor paraphrasing that puts words in the author's mouth. It's clear that the Author support this woman's freedom of speech despite any offense at the comment (the level of which is not specified, but some is implied). I don't see how saying the argument isn't "intellectual" isn't just an ad hominem attack itself.
> Even if you remove the slur, the a statement such as "People think you're an idiot" is just terrible, playground rhetoric.
I don't think "idiot" is at all synonymous with "house negro", especially in that context. I can't speek for whoever wrote that tweet, but I interpret it as implying that people think the author is failing his race because due to his priveleged position he lacks a personal understanding of the challenges that most face. It also can carry the conotation that the author is not "really" black. It's a pretty offensice thing to say, even if you say it without using slurs.
> Use Orwell for where it was meant to be used.
Which is?
Why would you ask about those two specific words, if the thrust of your questions was essentially the thrust of my argument?
There is nothing in Orwell, or anything he wrote, that would suggest he has anything to say about people distancing themselves from those who use racist childish ad-hominem attacks in polite company and getting culled for it. (The author's own word for it was 'bigotry').
Just it's the opposite: an Orwell quote in this context makes no sense.
The onus is on the OP to justify their use of the quote.
You can say 'House Negro' is not very offensive, but obviously a lot of people are going to be offended by that, it's unequivocally offensive to call a Black person that in most circles, ergo, if an organization is going to err on the side of civility, they'll just move on from that person. That's reasonable.
Let's do a thought experiment: go and call your local campus Black Republican a 'House Negro' and consider the reaction. Do you think your arguments here are sufficient? Do you think you really think it's appropriate for you to do that under the banner of some Principled issue of Free Speech?
This has nothing to do with Orwell's concerns about newspeak, thought police, language, controlling minds by controlling words.
If the University had forbidden a professor from ever using that term, i.e. reading aloud in class, banning all books with that term etc. - that would be Orwell.
The person who used the term could have used any other kind of language (even if 'idiot' is a poor substitute) - to make her point, she was resorting to crude racism for no reason.
There's nothing principled to stand for here.
It makes complete sense. Something that is "offensive" literally falls in the category of "don't want to hear". Thus the quote seems to be explicitly on topic and should need no explanation, regardless of if you agree.
> If the University had forbidden a professor from ever using that term, i.e. reading aloud in class, banning all books with that term etc. - that would be Orwell.
> This has nothing to do with Orwell's concerns about newspeak, thought police, language, controlling minds by controlling words.
Firing someone for using a word isnt "controlling minds by controlling words"?
Even so, Orwell did far more than just criticize goverments and autocracy. He was a complicated person (e.g. both an athiest and a dedicated curch goer), so I don't see why you think you can so easily decide on a "definitive" Orwell.
What about the racial abuse hurled over twitter at the black soccer players in the Euros who missed their pens?
If you argue that people need to just suck that up, then you'll find that most people won't buy what you're selling. We're going to see freedom of speech curtailed because of problems like this where people won't self-regulate their bigotry at all.
And I don't think its a good thing and you don't have to convince me that after they're done with the bigots that they'll come after the socialists. There needs to be a better argument than Absolutists-vs-Censorship though because I'm pretty sure censorship is gonna win that one.
But then on the other hand you have, to give a random example, someone like Andrew Wakefield - he might be bat shit crazy but he is smart enough and functional enough to gain a medical degree and become a qualified doctor, a seemingly well respected one until he went off the rails and committed fraud in his research in order to claim an autism link to mmr vaccines.
To me it seems he’s not stupid, he’s not crazy. He’s passed the same qualifications as his peers, but he is a fraud.
A fraud that has caused who knows how many child deaths, albeit indirectly.
From https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/vaccination-covera...
It took circa 10 years for the “system worked” outcome. Can 10 years of excess child deaths due to fraud be counted as “worked”? Surely beyond a couple of years to refute the findings is failure?
Since then this study has been repeated 10s if not hundreds of times. That fact checking doesnt change minds is not in question. It simply does not work to change someone’s mind.
We can't amplify only approved thoughts. If we do, we'll wake up in a world where many of the things we think and feel are wrongthink and used against us.
Edit: We're not done improving the world. Putting control structures in place now will freeze progress and make us slide backwards.
We already had a "common carrier" model in the form of usenet, which turned into an absolute shithole when the average person was given access to post whatever he wanted.
This isn't true.
1. Private colleges and universities that receive federal funds (e.g., the form of Pell Grants, government-originated student loans, or even research grants) have no obligation to offer faculty any amount of intellectual freedom. (Tangentially, this is highly unlikely to change as long as evangelical Christians are a non-trivial bloc within the GOP; tons of bible colleges, religiously affiliated colleges/universities, and seminaries rely on federal funds in one form or another. The evangelical world has a vested interest in maintain the financial viability of these institutions without sacrificing their character.)
2. Even at public universities, this still isn't true. Government employees enjoy asoundingly expansive free speech rights compared to private sector employees, but, crucially, only in their capacity as private citizens! Public statements made in pursuit of official duties are not generally protected under 1A. NB: the tweets came from an official account.
Frustratingly, the article offers no evidence for this claim.
I understand the argument that censorship and deplatforming are bad because they are morally wrong - that it doesn't matter the effect they have because they are inherently bad tools to use.
But I don't really understand the argument that they're bad because they're ineffective. When you drive something underground, it thrives less than it would on the surface, no?
We have plenty of examples of censorship being effective. Take opposition to the US invasions of Iraq, for instance. Anyone who opposed it - even the Dixie Chicks, famously - was deplatformed and attacked in the media. There was no reasonable debate about whether it was a good idea. And it turned out it was not a good idea, and there were no WMDs, and it was a quagmire. But because opposition was pushed underground, it had no political power.
Or take another superpower. The PRC has no moral objection to censorship. And certainly there are non-moribund underground dissident political and religious movements, coded ways of referencing 4 June 1989, etc. But could any argument be made that the PRC has made a tactical mistake in pushing these movements underground, that they're thriving because they were underground and would be less successful above ground?
Decades later, the most common position among Americans is increasingly that the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea. Censorship did not work in the medium-run.
There is still places where you can buy "Freedom fries" in the US (until at least fall 2019, i've not been back in the US for obvious reasons)
You don't need it to work in the long term, you need it to work short-term and hope that you're right. Until the myth you created is deconstructed you are good. I'm not a huge fan of Baudrillard, but the point he raised in "The Gulf war do not exist" (he talked here about the first war) was basically unchallenged, and the myth of this war still stands. And i think Baudrillard have been well received in the US, no?
It worked perfectly. No one is preventing you saying it was mistake, because it literally does not matter.
It made War possible and the soldiers are still there.
I know of lots of people who participated quite vocally on protests against that war. None of the were fired or kicked out of any organization. I don't think I would consider that opposition "underground".
> But could any argument be made that the PRC has made a tactical mistake in pushing these movements underground, that they're thriving because they were underground and would be less successful above ground?
I think it is a tactical mistake. I think that trying to censor such a widely known and iconic event made the rest of their censorship and propaganda less effective because it makes the censorship so much more obvious.
I do think censorship can be effective, especially against ideas and knowledge that are just starting to spread. I think the more brutal and authoritarian you can be, the more effectively you can censor things.
However,I also think that there is clearly truth to the concerns about censorship with high personal consequences pushing widely spread ideas under ground. I think whether underground ideologies grow or shrink has a complicated dependency on network topology and state of spread. I think it's pretty clear that underground ideologies tend to become more extreme and harder to reconcile without violence.
> Frustratingly, the article offers no evidence for this > claim.
See Gab, Rumble, Locals, Bitchute et al ... that's where people banned/censored by big tech can still be found.
And that is enough. People argue against deplatforming as if the point is to somehow cure or enlighten the people who get kicked off.
The actual point is to destroy the material means they require to operate. If you can diminish their audiences and revenues it will impact their reach and that means their influence and the financial incentive to keep going decreases.
There's no evidence they're 'thriving' in the underground, and as long as they marinate in the underground that is good enough.
It’s like putting a petty thief in with hardened criminals. They’re not coming out better than they went in, they’re coming out much, much worse.
It’s the difference between seeing people say racist things on Twitter, and having someone shoot up a church. Extremists aren’t created out in public.
Opposition to the Iraq war was a very similar story, where many and perhaps most people were hopeful that promoting democratic values in the Middle East would actually work, and nip the root causes of Islamofascist terrorism in the bud. Of course the reality was very different.
(I am just trying to point out how much this type of things depreciate the value of writing something meaningful)
Yes, yes. You were a racist in public, you got fired, and something something first amendment
Can we stop acting like this would pass muster in a grade school? It's downright embarrassing
Polite request that if you believe in free speech at any cost, don't downvote this comment.
I do listen to their podcast, and can say I don't agree with everything they talk about (especially around lockdowns, mask wearing, etc). Spiked is very critical of CRT, wokeism and big government - which does go against the current left ideology. It seems strange that a former Marxist publication is now right leaning...or have I misunderstood the situation?
So formerly Trotskyist turned humanist libertarian, i can already tell you that their permanent revolution ideals failed when they stopped caring about emancipation.
It behooves us, in such a situation, to create valuable discussion of said context, rather than focusing on the negative aspects of the parent comment, thereby creating yet more negativity.
Not surprising, to be honest. The mainstream left is increasingly less libertarian (especially because of cancel culture).
Can't say HN feels particularly pro free speech though.
Speaking as someone is is on the libertarian end of the British left, these guys are not our allies.
Author wrote this on twitter:
》Black Lives Matter and Critical Race Theory are political and do not belong in schools.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Whatever it is that has attracted the critics attention to the author for them to resort to name calling and ad hominems which are also racist, they have now realised that they have to see themselves out.
Very ironic for the Twitter account of the Race Trust.
> The real shame is that Khanom or the Race Trust did not try to challenge my politics or arguments. .... These attacks haven’t persuaded me to alter my worldview...
To resort to ad hominems probably means that they can't challenge the author or change his mind with convincing and logical arguments. They have done an own goal and proved the author's point once again.
EDIT: You do realise that they deleted their Twitter account? That's why I said 'they have to see themselves out.' Also I don't see 'name calling' or 'ad hominems' as a useful way of a convincing someone else since that is not an argument [0]. Instead, that was the first own goal.
Now the second own goal by the 'Race Trust' is in the main argument that the author makes which is cancel-culture which he disagrees with. This issue has now transcended into real life and the university cancelled the author of the tweet.
Regardless of the viewpoints of the 'Race Trust', such cancellations just makes the situation even worse than it was before.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the rules more to heart, we'd be grateful. Note this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Edit: we've had to ask you this numerous times before. Eventually we ban accounts that keep ignoring these requests.
Perhaps you'll now find that my comment is more 'thoughtful and substantive' and the rest of the comments in this thread have already descended further into mini flame wars.
The worse thing about it is that some don't even have any evidence to substantiate their own comments. Oh dear.
Maybe. Either that, or people actually working in social science, or on critical race theory already read his points, responded to the ones that were new (ahah) and left it there, ignoring him and fellows commentator as they should.
Again, you can be conservative and sociologist. Baudrillard did inspire a lot of those (they seems to become more and more marxist as teihr theories are refined but still). I don't understand why people take thos "journalist" seriously.
Did he at least read the classics?
And i mean, not even CRT author ( did not read them, this subject does not interest me). But i think the minimum you can do before trying to critic CRT is read Marx and Hegel (you have new book with integrated critics that are quite good) and obviously Derrida and Foucault. Bourdieu and Baudrillard maybe if you want some context for the first one and if you want more "conservative" views for the second, Wittgenstein because everybody needs to read Wittgenstein, and i'm forgetting Habermas who should have been the first one.
Its really not interesting to debat such people, i did try. I spend two hours on trying to explain some core principles and left it here. At least now my friends understand what deconstruction is and stopped putting this under "leftist stuff". I think most conservatives agreed with Baudrillard hyperrealities (the liberals posting as conservatives did not but were still interested). It is just not worth the time.