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Ten+ years ago this happened with Nick Griffin at Durham Union Society. NUS bused in people from other universities to protest/stop the debate, successfully. A few weeks later he appeared on BBC Question Time and was utterly demolished, leading to the BNP being utterly wiped out in the election shortly afterwards.
Sunlight is the best medicine.
(See also Ye on Timcast yesterday.)
And that's totally fair and part of the game we call "democracy".
> A few weeks later he appeared on BBC Question Time and was utterly demolished, leading to the BNP being utterly wiped out in the election shortly afterwards.
It is totally irrelevant, but his party was phagocytised by the UKIP, which made his ideas mainstream. These ideas later infected the Conservative Party and finally they've made it to the very recent Starmer speech to the CBI conference.
Griffin's insanity is ruling the UK.
Like it's the funniest thing to watch.
campaign: "I'm gonna launch myself into orbit and destroy the Jewish space lazers with my freedom fists"
elected: "Yeah I think we should increase the budget allocation to the department of transportation next fiscal year in anticipation of the harsh winter we're about to have."
We're not even on our first go around this University "free speech" game. A previous Conservative government put anti-no-platform clauses into the Education (No. 2) Act 1986[0] during the previous 'politically correct' moral panic. The practical effect is to require universities themselves to make sure that there are facilities for speakers etc. that their students union refuses to host for political or moral reasons. These duties are still in force.
[0]: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1986/61/section/43
Weird, I figured it would be the opposite. I get if students wanted to host someone then the University can't tell them no, but when would the opposite happen. What University is that bad at reading the room? Who are they expecting the audience to be?
I think part of the 'menace' fought by the Act when introduced was the anti-apartheid boycott of South Africa. Many SUs wouldn't platform pro-apartheid speakers, while student Conservative Party clubs generally took the British government line against the ANC and in favour of the SA government.
Which is part of "PREVENT": https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/prevent-duty-guid...
After all, these policies of 'shoot first, ask questions later' are precisely the opposite of science-based approaches.
We can't ever forget that these policies led to the censorship of topics that later turned out to credible, or true. The atrocious record of this censorship is the stifling of the scientific process.
These policies that you champion not only stifle free speech, they censor credible theories if they happen to not be politically correct.
That's just from one perspective, there's also the massive issue of creating what amount to blasphemy laws. Criticism of certain religions has regularly been punished as "hate speech" in the UK and Europe.
The opposite was evidentially proven, multiple times. Vaccines stopped the virus transmitting from infected individuals in many if not most interactions:
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-pfizer-vaccine-tra...
If you're saying it doesn't 100% eliminate the chance of infection or transmission, no one who knew anything about vaccines ever claimed that.
(As for the lab leak hypothesis, there's still only circumstantial evidence, not enough to conclusively priviledge it above the zoonotic hypothesis. There was even less evidence at the time, and anyone discussing it was only serving to distract from the conversation to blame China, a country that was already doing more than any other country to stop the spread (arguably too much)).
> There was even less evidence at the time, and anyone discussing it was only serving to distract from the conversation to blame China
is both a very strong assumption about the motivations of those you disagree with, and a very political opinion of yours that many might not agree with.
If anything, this comment of yours seems to contain an example of the exact thing being criticized: limiting certain domains of speech (including certain positions within some domain) for the reason that you don't think it's right, or dangerous, or it doesn't agree with your politics or int'l relations, or w/e.
That said, I do believe those who promote actively false or intentionally misleading information (misinformation), especially that which has significant negative impact on the public, do deserve moderator actions, up to and including being banned in some cases.
(Also, discussion of "important, unresolved issues" is rarely resolved by letting random twitter conspiracy theorists say whatever they want.)
Like when Fauci and the CDC told people not to wear masks because they weren't effective (because they failed to stockpile enough masks in case of a health emergency)? Or when the US government insisted that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11? When you give the power to any central authority to unilaterally silence anyone they declare is engaged in "false or intentionally misleading information" you aren't eliminating false and intentionally misleading information, you are merely giving the central power a monopoly on disseminating false and misleading information that nobody else is allowed to challenge.
Except it was: saying you can transmit the virus after having been vaccinated was indeed categorized as misinformation and suppressed for at least several months until breakthrough infections become common enough that the government couldn't keep a lid on it. The official line was that if you were vaccinated you could not spread the virus and diverging from this line would be met with censorship.
- Hunter Biden's laptop being genuine - The COVID Lab Leak theory
Which has what exactly?
> - The COVID Lab Leak theory
Still not proven.
b) COVID La Leak - I never said it was proven, just that it couldn't even be discussed.