We’ve got know-nothings railing about trigger warnings, which they don’t understand, and safe spaces, which they also get wrong, but what about no-platforming, in which an institution bows to pressure and denies a speaker a place to say their piece? I’m generally sympathetic to their concerns — we should be encouraging diverse views — but let’s think it through. Sometimes, maybe, there is no virtue in asking someone to present their ideas.
Having unusual (or frighteningly mainstream) ideas does not justify getting paid. You might not warrant censorship, but you are also not entitled to a $100,000 speaking fee. That one is easy.
But what about this? Brock Turner, the guy who raped an unconscious woman and got off with a 3 month jail sentence because he was a Stanford athlete, wants to do a speaking tour of college campuses, warning them of the dangers of alcohol. I am just fine with a university telling a convicted sex offender “Hell, no, we’re not going to bring you here to blame your crimes on alcohol”. He might even get invitations to speak, but it won’t because he’s presenting a valuable lesson — he’ll only be invited by assholes who want to troll feminists on campus, all under the guise of the absolute purity of untrammeled free speech.
So where do you draw the line between free speech and abuse of free speech?
Having unusual (or frighteningly mainstream) ideas does not justify getting paid. You might not warrant censorship, but you are also not entitled to a $100,000 speaking fee. That one is easy.
If you’re not the one offering to speak, and you’re not the one offering to pay, what business is it of yours?
Reginald:
The chief source of protests re: speakers on college campuses is the student body of those schools. If the speaker is being paid, and the payment (or, for that matter, the venue) are provided by the university, then the students are the ones ultimately footing the bill. They thus have ‘standing’–and it’s as reasonable for outsiders to comment on the dispute as it is for any other affair, including your decision to comment on PZ having an opinion on the subject.
He isn’t speaking at Stanford.
BTW I think the offer came before his sentencing and before the light sentence became national/international news. Has he repeated the offer since?
Yes, we do end up paying those speaker fees.
But let’s imagine a situation where we don’t. Say, the Koch brothers offer to pay everything to allow a climate change denialist to speak in the biggest auditorium on campus. Is it really free speech if only the wealthy have the privilege? Is it corrupting the function of the university if we sprinkle the place with paid advertisements masquerading as scholarly discussion?
Reg: “what business is it of yours?”
…It’s their business because it’s sickening that this piece of filth could be getting paid at all to promote himself? Every moment that he walks free is bad enough, but to actually encourage his douchbaggery by saying that he IS important enough to give a TOUR of his views? And to PAY him for them, as if he’s suddenly an expert in date rape and alcohol abuse? (ok, technically he is, but not in the way you want to promote!) His mere EXISTENCE as a free person is our business because it sends the message that what he did was ok.
Really, what can he offer except “”Don’t get too drunk, or you’ll have to deal with rapists like me, and as you can see, the law won’t protect you or even avenge you. You’re on your own…there’s your message. Drinks are on me!”
it’s none of my business in the sense that I don’t know him nor his victim nor anyone paying him, but then I don’t know a LOT of people that I have strong opinions on. Being a criminal rapist scumbag who got off because of status does that to a person.
What do you mean if?
For the main point of the post is the question whether student groups should be barred from inviting speakers who are convicted criminals? or who advocate vile positions?
My answer is no, and colleges should enforce their rules to not allow other groups to shut down the speech while also protecting protesters’ right to protest.
My answer is that no-platforming is not a thing.
You are not entitled to any specific venue and universities are not obliged to give a platform to any kook that wants one.
Turn it around: Suppose the vile person was offering to pay the 100kUSD to, say, a general scholarship / hardship fund, or Amnesty International? Or to local republicans or the KKK? (To keep things simple, also suppose there is every reason to believe the payment would be made.)
As I am (currently) reading poopyhead’s OP, one of the concerns seems to be more a mix of the amount of money, the payer, and the recipient of the money.
Teh trum-prat has used such a scam — alleged donations to veteran’s groups (not all legit, but ignore that) — to slide around his vileness.
I’m not offering any answers here — I loathe censorship(perhaps with exceptions, such as age-appropriateness or unquestionably criminal intent (e.g., p0rn and pedophilia), plus some common examples such as of falsely shouting “Fire!”) — but wonder what the parameters are…
What’s wrong with inviting and then dis-inviting a speaker?
I think it’s unrealistic to expect places of higher education to somehow be “ideology-free” even as abstract institutions. Ideology is important, and we should make sure theirs is a good one (and based on the best available facts, which already excludes most options).
So I’m not in principle bothered by the idea of not giving a venue to people who are hostile to that ideology. It’s more a matter of degree — being welcoming is important, and controversy and debate are useful, but not to the point of overriding all other concerns.
This is a complex question. Free speech covers a wide range of speech; nearly everything, with the exception of phrases or words that would put the public in immediate danger (i.e. yelling “fire” in a crowded theater) is considered free speech. There are legal actions available if the speech causes certain damages to others. Here, this creep is free to say what he wants. He has no right to have access to any certain forum. The universities are free to decide on what and where to spend their money. And students are free to protest and disagree. All of this is considered free speech. There may be some limitations on public schools and universities, in terms of promoting religious or political views, but otherwise, they are free to spend their money as they see fit. I do not support the idea of imposing general standards and limitations, because legislating individual actions if too often disasterous and inequitable. If a party feels that another’s speech has caused harm or is likely to cause harm, then legal action should be taken, through civil suites or through some other equitable process. It should be done on a case-by-case basis. if the university or school is forcing attendance to such lectures or paying controversial speakers to speak at campus-wide functions, such as commencement speeches, there should be some form of recourse for students to express their opinions and those opinions should be taken into account. But, again, general legislation of speech and ideas is a per se violation of free speech.
Yeah… Brock Rapist Turner has every right to say whatever he wants, but he doesn’t deserve platform, and he better not be given one. I’m with Vivec on this one:
Exactly.
In the case of Turner, the current version of New York’s “Son of Sam” statue might come into play. The Koch brothers example definitely seems more problematic.
Part of the difficulty seems to be that there’s multiple frameworks involved here. The legal framework of “ought” is slightly distinct from the political, which in turn may be slightly different from the moral, and in turn from the academic.
Being a bit obsessed with Hume, my impulse is to examine where “is” transistions to “ought” —
we should be encouraging diverse views. Really? Why? I would suggest that in an university environment, this is actually means to another end: encouraging the development of “better” views. For moral topics, the measure of “better” seems fuzzier, but will thus be temporarily swept under the carpet.However, for empirical topics, “better” seems to correspond to “greater descriptive correspondence to observed evidence”; and the advantage of diversity may be addressed in more straightforward fashion. While the contemporary scientific consensus for describing the universe does a very good job describing the empirical universe, it verges on mathematical certainty that it is not an absolute ideal; there is yet room for improvement. Introducing variations into the environment allows a succession over time of competitively selected variants — evolutionary improvement of the ecology of scientific theory. The idealized academic environment allows some incubation of such variants, where new researchers (IE: graduate students) attempt to develop their models under critical guidance of “this part needs improving” before going into the wild academic jungle to fight for survival through the succession of funerals that constitutes Planckian progress in science. There’s then trade-offs — too much incubation coddling results in resources being wasted on crap crackpottery, too little results in a stifling status quo that may fail to converge toward the ideal description. There might be some mathematical analog to r/K selection theory there.
I presume PZ is better equipped to further develop this framework if he cares, being an actual evolutionary biologist and having a more intimate involvement in undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate academia. It significantly neglects the development and valuation of expertise, for example; which appears a non-trivial factor. Nohow, this skeleton seems to suffice as a scaffold for considering the questions.
Presumably, diversity has similar usefulness – and limits thereof – in development of “better” in more moral topics. This then leaves the problem of beating an acceptable definition of “better” out of the political science and philosophy departments. I will note in passing, most chemistry departments have a supply of rubber hoses for connecting burners to gas lines…
I’m not entirely sure how this works out, but it probably doesn’t point to Turner’s speaking tour being the greatest thing since sliced pound cake at the weekly departmental faculty colloquium.
My general rule of thumb is that any standard that would mandate that David Icke be given a paid speaking gig is a shitty one.
He’s perfectly free to peddle his shit on the corner like the street preachers at my University.
If your framework would make it a moral obligation to give him a speaking gig if he wants one, and a moral prohibition to disinvite him or refuse him a gig, your framework is bunk.
We had an incident at my university in which NYC police commissioner Ray Kelly was invited to give a paid lecture by one of the university’s Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, part of an annual series of lectures. He was shouted down by protesters – including both students and people from the local community — and ultimately left without completing his speech. No biggie for him, he arrived and left in a NYPD helicopter. (For those who don’t recall, the issue was Stop and Frisk and racist policing in general.) The source of funds for the talk was an endowment controlled by the center.
The university ended up condemning the protesters actions and several students were disciplined. I would say that there isn’t any hard and fast ethical rule about an incident like this. The students and faculty of the university, with the exception of some very small number of faculty who chose the speaker, had no say in this invitation; and too many of them, it was deeply offensive. Had the invitation gone to say, David Duke, I doubt the university would have condemned the protest or disciplined the students. One really has to make a personal judgment about the egregiousness of the speaker. That’s what these fights are really about. Are you Zionist or anti-Zionist? is Charles Murray a legitimate social scientist? Does Ray Kelly have something useful to contribute to the public discourse on policing that Brown University resources should go toward making heard? There isn’t any rule that says what speakers should and should not be supported by university resources. In this case, the sponsors just didn’t like having their judgment overridden.
I don’t think colleges have an obligation to invite any particular speaker – but once they do invite someone, they should go through with it even if it generates a controversy.
no platforming is a blatantly ridiculous concept. and shouldn’t these conservatives be in agreement, and telling Brock Turner to pull himself up by his bootstraps and build his *own* platform, instead of demanding one from others like some sort of welfare speaker?
@17, brett
Why though?
I’d say that universities have an ethical duty to vet their speakers. Because universities do serve as a source of credibility. If somebody is invited or just welcome to give a certain speech at a university, this means “this university thinks those ideas are at least worth discussing” and no, not all ideas are. Many ideas have already been discussed a lot and thoroughly dismissed. We do not need to open the case on “are black folks actually people or mere piece of property” again. It’s been fucking settled.
By the way, there’s an organization called UnKoch My Campus which seeks to bring awareness to and stem the influence of Koch money in academe. They recently linked to this article – it offers a decent summary of the expansion of Koch academic projects in recent years.
As xkcd once put it, appealing to Free Speech is basically a concession that the best defense for your position is that it’s literally not illegal to say it.
The dangers of alcohol?! Why not the dangers of rapey privileged assholes?
There are some skeptics who might learn from attending THAT.
Here is a slightly warped take on Gilliel’s #20 – that someone WANTS to speak at a certain venue is an admission that the venue has value, say, above and beyond shouting at the streetcorner. Accepted that the vanue has value, it is then the controller of the venue’s prerogative to manage that value.
In other words: if you value playing at Carnegie Hall more than you value playing in an empty parking lot, you grant the management of Carnegie Hall that they may control the stage door.
Perhaps the way to handle this would be to have “shithead night” once a month and open admission. “Oh, we could fit you in for the first saturday in May 2020. Ot’s a very lively spot. You’re on after the creationist and Deepak Chopra”
Ytpos be praised!
I can’t itype on a train.
looking at this particular speaker I can see that there might be some reluctance on the part of the administration to not have this particular problem highlighted by Mr Turner coming to speak let alone paying for it. Especially as it might through too much light on their own practices, policies and history with regards to sexual assault and drinking.
Just the prospect seems to generate way more controversy than most administrators are usually comfortable with.
Personally I lean toward wanting to see the uproar and disruption rather than the idealized placid ivy covered environment of the University continue with the status-quo if that means those ignoring problems.
It often seem that every time some complaint comes to light and it is not swept out of sight rapidly enough other complaints begin to surface to great surprise. fox news and Roger Ailes being a current example.
uncle frogy
@unclefrogy
That’s a pretty good point. Campuses already have widespread cover up policies for sexual assault. Turner is one (of many) consequences of that. Inviting him to speak might remind people that post-secondary institutions have mostly been absolute garbage when it comes to responding to complaints from their women students…
Conservative students should be allowed to host conservative speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos.
Hearing diverse and dissenting opinions is one of the best ways to measure the validity of your own beliefs. Free thought is a good thing.
I don’t think anyone’s saying that they shouldn’t – just that the university should be free to block or dis-invite speakers at university events or functions, and that doing such is not some breach of freedom of speech.
If said students are renting out a lecture hall and paying Milo’s speaking fee themselves, sure, its no different than renting it out for a Rabbit breeder’s convention.
IF “dangers of alcohol” is explained as “too easy to blame being a predator on drinking too much”.
let him follow with how he used alcohol for his defense and the judge bought it. what could be more dangerous than this freely available beverage as the excuse to get away with sexual assault.
that would be worth paying him for admitting, publicly.
as if
yuk
oops Brock was just an example, not the real subject of the OP.
“no platforming” is a complicated policy, difficult to codify specifics. I’m sure boardroom discussions of who to invite or not could burn-the-midnight-oil. As I doubt there are few who would be instantly banned (NB, there are a few), nor to be invited without question.
Free thought does not mean anything you think must be taken seriously.
Wiki:
Milo has no empirical evidence that holds up to scrutiny. He should be dismissed as an irrational mouthpiece for a dogma.
Okay, sure. But a university should be a place of learning. Part of that involves discussing and debating a wide variety of diverse opinions. So it may not violate the constitutional rights of conservative students if you refuse to allow them to host a conservative speaker on campus, but it does undermine what the university should be aspiring to promote.
I’m generally more of the opinion that a university should promote the best and most accurate information as possible.
If there are multiple contenders for that position, sure, teach the controversy, but it’d be silly to obligate them to promote crank speakers to balance out the actual ones. Otherwise, you’d be obligated to give a platform to any crank with a manifesto in the name of ~diversity of opinion~
Also, I think I was pretty clear with it being fine for a conservative student group to host a speaker, as long as they’re the ones footing the bill for the honorarium and facility fee.
Actually, I’d even be fine with them doing it with University backing, as long as the University reserved the right to disinvite the speaker as they saw fit.
That depends. Science, for example, is just a matter of facts and data. You’re not really discussing opinions.
But discussions around political and social issues are obviously much more subjective in nature.
I’ve never understood why people seem to think that “I was drunk” is an acceptable defense. We don’t do this when people are drunk and commit other violent crimes. If you get drunk, drive a car, and kill somebody with it, you don’t get to claim that your being drunk was the root cause of the problem. We certainly understand the message behind “Don’t drink and drive,” but someone coming to talk about it isn’t going to pretend that it was the alcohol that did it. They’re going to say that they killed someone and the reason not to drink and drive is because people die.
This, however, seems more like him saying that you shouldn’t drink and rape because his life was ruined (briefly) because of it. The woman he raped will have nothing to do with it.
Nope, opinions can be fact free. Like the existence of any deity, creatory, intelligent designer, liberturdism actually working, etc.
Opinions can be dismissed if not backed up by empirical evidence, and should be, every time.
You are discussion the evidence BEHIND the opinions. Which makes the scientific opinions more valuable than ideological opinions (like the Marxist radicals during my college days) opinions based on slogans and rhetoric, without a citation in cite.
We exist in a reality that can be measured and investigated empirically, or at the very least have to treat it as such given that the problem of solipsism isn’t really solved.
If some speaker wants to come and rant about how teh ebil feminazis run the government or how the ancient jewish conspiracy owns the media and the banks, they’re still making claims that can be empirically shown to be untrue, and can be written off on those grounds.
Here’s an example.
I believe that a mother’s right to bodily autonomy trumps the right of a fetus to be born.
I cannot prove this statement to be factually correct by using empirical evidence because I’m not discussing an objective representation of reality (the sky is blue, evolution is true, 1+1=2, etc).
Rather, I’m voicing my opinion, which is based on my personal values. Which means it can be debated and discussed, but not factually evaluated for how well it conforms with reality.
And if someone wants to rent out a speaking facility and pay your honorarium, I’m fine with them hosting you, no questions asked. Hell, I’m even fine with the university hosting you and paying your honorarium.
But if the university is going to pay you using the money we’re contributing to the university, we should get a say in whether or not the university is going to host you. If we say no, pay for the venue yourself just like the hypothetical Rabbit Breeder’s convention.
Wrong, you are discussing a full human being with basic right to bodily autonomy. That is an empirical fact.
You are a delusional fool, unable to tell delusion (and opinion based on delusion) from factual reality.
“basic right to bodily autonomy. That is an empirical fact.”
lmfao
Yeah, I’m not too sure how you’d empirically demonstrate the existence of a right either. I think you could discount most supposed arguments for or against that right (ie “Because god said we have that right/that babies shouldn’t be aborted”).
Damn it, deleted the last sentence.
*But I’m not sure how you could empirically prove that right exists. Rights largely exist either as social conventions in a code of law or through supposed divine fiat, not as a thing you can point to or measure.
Universal Human Rights Declaration by the United Nations.
QED, women are equal to men before the law, with bodily autonomy.
Your evidence women should be treated different. Put up, or shut the fuck up.
I’ve been waiting ever since Roe v. Wade for the EMPIRACAL evidence that a woman loses her full humanity upon becoming pregnant, and that the fetus is more of human than she is, without any religious fuckwittery being invoked. I think I’ll die waiting for that evidence….
Well, okay, it is demonstrable that there are codified rights protecting bodily autonomy, but that’s trivial and doesn’t actually answer the debate. Said right isn’t an existent “thing” that you can measure or empirically demonstrate, it’s just a legal concept.
Nope, show me where the woman becomes less human upon pregnancy. No legality, just reality.
As far as being human, HGP.
Now, what gene(s)make a a woman less of a full human being than a man…
Don’t equivocate, show the evidence, and don’t accept the presuppositions of misgynists.
Jessie is being a troll.
Whether or not she’s a human is a separate question to whether or not she has rights. Rights, as mentioned above, are legal constructs, not existent things.
@51, Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls
Your name is coming back to bite you. You’re trolling.
Specifically, you are confusing a moral position (“Show me where the woman becomes less human upon pregnancy”) with a factual one (“Rights aren’t an existent ‘thing.'”) This difference has been explained to you, but you continue to ignore it.
There is no way to empirically demonstrate this because values such as good, bad, what is right and wrong, etc. are constructs that we make. They don’t exist outside us. We may all value the need for women to have access to full reproductive healthcare which includes abortion, but there is no “empirical” data for that. It’s just a value that we hold. According to your logic, before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it was empirically true that women did not have bodily autonomy.
I hesitate to speak for others, but I should think that most of us here would claim that women had that right before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UDHR didn’t spontaneously create the right to bodily autonomy. It simply codified it.
That’s because rights aren’t physical things. That doesn’t make them unimportant or without effect or somehow not “real.” We can only measure if a right has been abrogated by first understanding what that right is and agreeing to what it means.
The only factual thing you might be able to debate regarding Jessie’s direct statement that “I believe that a mother’s right to bodily autonomy trumps the right of a fetus to be born” is whether or not Jessie’s actions and other statements live up to that ideal.
You can’t debate the ideal itself because it is completely constructed by Jessie.
No argument from me.
The right to bodily autonomy is abrogated by any antiabortion argument. That isn’t up for argument.
Either women are fully human or not. Either the fetus is more human than the pregnant woman or not. If the woman is more human (my position based on evidence like this ), where the extra oxygenation upon birth is necessary for the brain to fully turn on, making the fetus fully human.
I’m a scientist, not a philosopher. I look at reality, not just thinking based upon fallacious presuppositions. If Jessie can’t show women are not fully human, they need to stop this discussion.
Cool, but a “right” is not an existent thing that you can measure, any more than a “law” or a “verb” is an existent. All of those things are legal (or grammatical) concepts that do not exist seperate from a legal system or a language. You can’t hold, see, or physically investigate – it’s just a byword for a guaranteed legal protection.
I’m one of the ones that don’t.
Legal protections, and rights are a function of legal systems, not some nebulous quality that humans have qua humans. In current society, we have what rights are guaranteed by law.
In, say, hypothetical Zombie Apocalypse world, we have no rights, because there’s no legal authority providing the guaranteed legal protections we call “rights”.
Being a scientist doesn’t give you carte blanche to strawman others’ arguments. Jessie never said that women are not fully human, and your insistence that they did just shows that you are deliberately misreading their argument.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to expect that of you.
I disagree with the notion that rights need legal backing; rights are an emergent property of social interactions between organisms and don’t even require sentience to exist. Male sea lions have the right to mate with any females within their territory. In an African wild dog pack, the young have the right to feed first on prey. Our rights are simply more complex and codified versions of such examples.
I either disagree that the things you describe are “rights”, or disagree that we are using the same definition of “rights”.
Either way, the general thrust of my point is the same – rights aren’t a tangible thing that can be measured, they’re a descriptor of either a social allowance (ie “we’ll let the young dogs feed first”) or a legal protection (ie “all people in our jurisdiction will be treated equally under the law”)
@Kreator
We only tend to discuss “rights” within the context of a social situation involving conscious intelligent agents. A toddler accidentally shooting a parent has not violated that parent’s rights. A hurricane destroying a city has not violated the rights of it’s inhabitants.
You lose quite a bit of context when you discuss rights merely in terms of social animal behavior.
Regardless and on topic, my stance is pretty much this:
If you’re paying out of pocket for the speaker and locale, go wild and host whatever speaker you want.
If the university is paying for the speaker and locale, they should strive to promote the most accurate and well-established knowledge in a field, and when that is impossible, should have the right to dis-invite someone depending on the views of the people paying the tuition that funds said speaker.
I don’t like the idea of a powerful majority silencing a minority, especially in a place of learning. I agree that a university should have the right to dis-invite any speaker, I just think that they should be very cautious with how they exercise that right (such as if the invited speaker has advocated for violence). Again, the primary goal of a university should be to foster intellectual growth. If dissenting opinions are blocked because a student group can’t afford to host a speaker, that goal is being undermined.
Not a huge fan of the tuition model – all stakeholders should get a say, and ultimately the administration has to make the decision.
I don’t like my tuition money funding cranks and bigots. If you want to have whatever speaker you want, do it in a way that doesn’t appropriate funds from people who are opposed to it.
That’s true, but if you’re going to take an absurd amount of people’s money for the privilege of attending that university, they should get a say in how it’s spent.
I suppose the argument could be made that if you don’t like how the university spends your money, you could take your money elsewhere – but that ultimately runs into the same problem at whatever University said hypothetical person transfers to.
Its not like I think this system is great – I think education shouldn’t cost money – but as long as you’re going to require large monetary contributions to attend, I think that the people making said contributions should be able to voice their opinion on how the money is spent, and said university should be able to agree with said people if they so choose.
No platforming is a terrible idea. Anybody who invites Brock Turner should have to answer for it, especially if the money came from the general student fund. He should be greeted by protesters and hopefully, an empty house because nobody wants to hear him. But, he should still get to speak. It’s one thing for a University to have set policy on who can and can’t be a speaker, it’s quite another to give some members of the student body veto power over the speaker list. Which groups can get a speaker cancelled? The Zionists? The Anti-Zionists? The Feminists? The MRAs? What happens when a student group tries to stop a Black Lives Matter speaker because they claim it’s a hate group against the police? In what should be a huge red flag, in Great Britain, ex-Muslims are blocked from speaking by Islamic Student Unions. Once you give out that sort of power you can’t guarantee it’ll only be wielded by those you agree with. So, who gets to decide?
The university, ultimately. It’s their platform, they decide who can use it.
I’d rather risk speakers I like being disallowed than having the university forced to allow any crank with a manifesto to speak because ~teach the controversy~ or whatever.
I’d also prefer students to have some say over how their tuition is spent. If I’m going to bankrupt myself for an instution, I’d like some say over how it’s spent.
@Brian Pansky
Because then you really are engaging in censorship, blocking someone you invited to speak because their speech generated controversy.
For example, back in 2004, Utah Valley State College (now Utah Valley University) invited Michael Moore to come give a speech on campus. This generated a major controversy, with conservatives in the area organizing efforts to pressure the university into revoking the invitation, removing the people at the university who made the call to invite Moore, and so forth. They failed, and had to settle for paying Sean Hannity to come out and give an opposing speech a day or two before Moore came and spoke.
The community that UVSC/UVU is located in is overwhelmingly white, Mormon, and conservative – and was only more so back then. I’m talking 90% white, 77% of registered voters are Republicans, etc. Was the university wrong for choosing to keep Moore as a speaker in such a place?
No, but they would not have been wrong if they had chosen to dis-invite him. They’d be no more engaging in censorship than I am by not inviting my conservative friends to use my house as a platform.
My suspicion is that one of the putative ‘dangers’ of alcohol is that you might have your ’20 minutes of action’ met with accusations of rape.
If we want to measure the health of free speech by whether bigots are getting access to prestigious platforms, we should take their failure to be a positive sign, not a worrying one.
Free speech is supposed to be about ideas duking it out to establish merit. But we make a major mistake in thinking that controversy and debate are necessary to cultivate in order to have free speech. It’s the opposite. If we cultivate free speech we’ll have those things as a consequence. But we have to keep free speech linked to other values like prioritizing truth and equality or it becomes meaningless.
Those who espouse losing ideas (ones that fly in the face of fact, etc.) should be refused support. Those people’s ideas should be marginalized, not thrown back into the ring for infinite rounds against the winning ideas. We’re not going to lose diversity of views by acknowledging winners and retiring losers. The content of controversies and lines of debates will simply change and develop.
Hopefully for the better.
I tend to disagree with both sides.
This should turn into a debate(ish) conversation. Rapist on one side, one ready to discuss sociological issues, male entitlement, substance abuse and assholes in detail on the other side.
I’m well known to have a few dozen too many. What I *do* is say something wrong, not cause someone harm biologically or cause that level of psychological harm.
What surprises me slightly is, not only did he accept that mere ethanol turned him into a monster, but a major institution accepted that bullshit!
That bullshit shouldn’t be supprressed, it should be exposed as bullshit.
Before I reached his age of legal offense, I had repeatedly driving peer females home and ensured that they entered into the care of their parents. I never dreamed of doing anything with them beyond driving their drunken asses home. But then, back then, it was acceptable to have a designated drunken driver.
No, I’m not really joking.
Our culture hadn’t matured that much, especially at our youthful level and our elders didn’t consider a designated driver notion. One simply was elected via consensus to be trusted to drive drunken peers home and well, being immortal at our age, being sober wasn’t part of the equation.
Hell, my wife of nearing 35 years, while on a blind date with friends and an interesting conversation ensued, drank too much port wine and quite literally passed out in the middle of the street.
I picked her up, carried her into the apartment we were partying in and waited until she sobered enough to be driven home. Never even considered raping her.
Yet, as peers, I drank enough to be quite drunk and irritated at ignoring her so long as to have driven her so into passing out and having to collect her, I never considered raping her, but he thought it was a good idea to do a dumpster side rape.
Nope, somebody is broken, some society is broken, repair is needed.
Even if the destruction of one man’s ego is required.
I’d happily sit watching him for the next week on suicide watch.
Maybe then, he’d learn enough to actually speak on the subject intelligently.