Yes, rights are important, and we must offer them generously. But surely we can agree that Nazis don't have rights?
Can't we?
I mean, surely we can agree that we don't have to extend rights to people who, given a chance, would take those rights from us. Surely we don't have to extend rights to people who are actively arguing to take our rights away. Surely we don't have to extend rights to people who disagree with, and attack, the fundamental precepts underlying those rights: that all people are created equal and endowed with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Surely we don't have to extend rights to people who deny our humanity.
That's the argument — both viscerally appealing and idiotic — underlying some university students' fervor for censorship and even violence.
You can see it in a breathtakingly semi-literate and frankly totalitarian diatribe in The Wellesley News:
Shutting down rhetoric that undermines the existence and rights of others is not a violation of free speech; it is hate speech. [sic] The founding fathers put free speech in the Constitution as a way to protect the disenfranchised and to protect individual citizens from the power of the government. The spirit of free speech is to protect the suppressed, not to protect a free-for-all where anything is acceptable, no matter how hateful and damaging.
You can see it in the demands of students of Pomona college:
The idea that we must subject ourselves routinely to the hate speech of fascists who want for us not to exist plays on the same Eurocentric constructs that believed Black people to be impervious to pain and apathetic to the brutal and violent conditions of white supremacy.
You can see it at Berkeley, in apologias for violence used to suppress speech:
The administration, demonstrated in emails from Chancellor Nicholas Dirks, failed to problematize a thoughtless adherence to the First Amendment and thus played straight into the hands of the likes of Yiannopoulos, who deliberately use such a basic interpretation of free speech to smokescreen their toxic, sexist, white nationalist agenda. Yiannopoulos and his supporters have a track record of actively targeting people in their hate speech, and the ideology they peddle perpetuates ideas that urgently endanger members of our community. In short: The principle of freedom of speech should not be extended to envelop freedom of hate speech, for the unchecked normalization of hate speech will have real consequences.
Isn't it simple? Isn't it principled? Isn't it safe? They're not trying to silence all speech. They just don't want to allow speech that calls for their extermination, dangerous speech.
Right?
No.
First, the argument relies on a false premise: that we don't, or shouldn't, extend rights to people who wouldn't extend those rights to us. This is childish nonsense, and a common argument for tyranny. We criminal defense lawyers know it very well: why should this guy get a trial? He didn't give his victim a trial. Why should she be shown any mercy? She didn't show her victims mercy. Why does he get due process? He didn't give his victims due process. The argument is particularly popular since 9/11. You hear it a lot whenever anyone suggests that maybe people accused of being terrorists — or of being someone who might plausibly grow up to be a terrorist, or might take up terrorism as soon as this wedding is over — perhaps should be treated as having some sort of right not to be killed or tortured or indefinitely detained. Nonsense, is the response. They wouldn't give you any rights. The constitution isn't a suicide pact! It's also popular in matters of modern religious liberty. How can you argue that Muslims should have the freedom to worship here when Muslim countries deny Christians and Jews that right? In this manner, the student Left represented by the quotes below shares an ethos with the authoritarian and racist wings of the Right. A common taste for authoritarianism makes strange bedfellows.1
In fact, we extend rights to everyone, regardless of whether they support those rights or not. That's the deal, it's the way rights work. Rights arise from our status as humans, not from our adherence to ideology. If they didn't, I could very plausibly say this: Pomona College, Wellesley College, and Berkeley should expel the students quoted above, because people actively advocating to limit free speech rights can't expect any free speech rights themselves.
Second, the "Nazi Exception" is not safe or principled because it's applied by humans, and humans are ridiculous and awful. Look, we already have exceptions to the First Amendment for dangerous speech: the doctrine of true threats (which allows punishing threats meant to cause fear and objectively reasonably causing fear) and incitement (which allows punishing speech aimed at provoking imminent lawless action). Those exceptions are narrow and well-defined and zealously monitored. There's a good reason for that: if you create a free speech exception, someone will always try to stretch it all to hell.
These students and their supporters argue that the "Nazi Exception" would only allow punishment of speech advocating actual violence against others. They're lying — they can't keep that story straight for a full paragraph. Ask them! Ask the students at Wellesley:
This being said, if people are given the resources to learn and either continue to speak hate speech or refuse to adapt their beliefs, then hostility may be warranted. If people continue to support racist politicians or pay for speakers that prop up speech that will lead to the harm of others, then it is critical to take the appropriate measures to hold them accountable for their actions. It is important to note that our preference for education over beration regards students who may have not been given the chance to learn. Rather, we are not referring to those who have already had the incentive to learn and should have taken the opportunities to do so.
It's not just speakers advocating genocide, it's "racist politicians." It's not just speakers advocating violence against groups, it's "speech that will lead to the harm of others."
Ask the students at Pomona:
The idea that the search for this truth involves entertaining Heather Mac Donald’s hate speech is illogical. If engaged, Heather Mac Donald would not be debating on mere difference of opinion, but the right of Black people to exist. Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live. Why are you, and other persons in positions of power at these institutions, protecting a fascist and her hate speech and not students that are directly affected by her presence?
Heather MacDonald is a leading apologist for police violence, and I abhor her contributions to national discourse. But treating her as a genocide advocate demonstrates that these students can make anyone a genocide advocate and justify the suppression of anyone's speech. MacDonald's chief sin, in these students' view, is that she's a vigorous critic of the Black Lives Matter movement, its goals, its rhetoric, and its methods. I don't share many of her criticisms, but the notion that it is genocidal and outside acceptable discourse to criticize a protest movement is vile, un-American, imbecilic, and not to be taken seriously. These students' view that America is riddled with racism and injustice is quite arguable. But combined with their theory of permissible speech, it means that nearly anything can be identified as an instrument of genocide and therefore suppressed. I'm a Nazi. You're a Nazi. She's a Nazi. He's a Nazi. Wouldn't you like to be a Nazi too?
In modern America, we are faced with genuine aspiring Nazis who believe in genocide, and despicable hucksters who encourage them for profit. But these students — and the university cultures that produce them — utterly lack the honesty, principle, or self-awareness to identify them, or to identify true threats or genuinely actionable incitement. With few exceptions, American universities are unable or afraid to make rational, intelligent judgments about what speech is "dangerous" in any meaningful sense of the word. They've proved that again and again and again and again. Asking modern American universities "is this speech dangerous?" is like asking modern American cops "was it necessary to shoot that dude?"
Third, these students are pursuing useful idiocy in the guise of safety. Exceptions to free speech don't get used to help the powerless. They get used to help the powerful. We see that in the case of blasphemy laws: imagined by some on the Left as a measure of respect for a multicultural society, actually primarily used to oppress religious and ethnic minorities and the powerless. We see it in colleges, where the same rhetoric used by these students is also used to silence their allies. We see it in some reactions to campus violence, openly thirsting for an opportunity to suppress speech. If these students think that speech exceptions will ultimately promote their concept of social justice, they're goddamned fools. Fools have rights too, but we're not obligated to cooperate with their foolishness.
The "Nazi exception" is unprincipled, self-indulgent, and childish. Nazis and their admirers and fellow travellers ought to be called out, ridiculed, condemned, and exposed to the full array of consequences the First Amendment offers. They ought to face criminal and civil sanctions if they break the law. But I decline the invitation to help these students destroy the village in order to save it.
- "Strange bedfellows" is hate speech. ▲
Last 5 posts by Ken White
- No, Trump Didn't Argue That Protesters Have No Right To Protest or Violated His Rights - April 24th, 2017
- A Pony A Day Keeps the Doctor Away - April 20th, 2017
- Alex Jones And The Rule of Goats - April 19th, 2017
- The Seductive Appeal of the "Nazi Exception" - April 18th, 2017
- The Road to Popehat: Spring Edition - April 17th, 2017
I think the easiest argument against the "punch Nazis" philosophy is that there is no way to have a principeled limitation that excludes killing. Once you permit mob violence, that mob will eventually kill someone. It's what mobs do.
To go back to the "Nazi punching" discussion. Of course it should be illegal to assault a Nazi not in self-defense, but exactly how wrong is it? Although I agree it should be punishable as assault, it was hard for me to empathize with the argument that it is morally equivalent to being a Nazi itself.
To me, punching a Nazi is more akin to punching someone who walked up to you on the street when you're with your children and said something like "I would never do this because it's illegal, but I want child molestation to be legalized so I could fuck your children all day long, which would be great and the law should allow me to do it".
This, at least taken at face value, is probably Constitutionally protected speech, and even an expression of political advocacy, but I understand that many people would be driven to violence by this statement, because humans are humans. And that would indicate to me that they are not good at dealing with their anger and handling situations like an adult, but it would not indicate to me that they are some kind of censorious person (or at least an unusually censorious person) who doesn't care at all about the First Amendment (they're not even a government actor!)
How do others feel about the aptness of this analogy?
Communism killed far, far more people in larger, longer, more complete genocides than the Nazis.
Let's have a communist exception, too, and let the Nazis take care of the AnCom ANTIFA.
The problem with this analogy is that it isn't the situation we have here — what we have here is more like, "He looked at my kids funny and I could just tell that he was a molester because he had a Mondale button on."
This exchange from A Man for All Seasons seems appropriate:
I am a bit surprised that anybody would campaign to give to university administrators more power to suppress speech.
I'm especially surprised that students would campaign for it…
The students are the Nazis. They are the brown shirts who use violence to promote their despicable ideology. And it isn't just their violence that they have in common with the National Socialists. They too believe in a powerful government partnered with powerful corporations to rule over all.
The best con game the Leftists ever played was in convincing the American people that the progressive Nazi regime was of the Right,
Ken,
I'm a Marine judge advocate (fancy term for lawyer). We often see the "we don't, or shouldn't, extent rights to people who wouldn't extend those rights to us…" argument in the context of Law of War/Law of Armed Conflict briefs. Why do we give rights to these enemy combatants and follow the Geneva Conventions when they cut our heads off if they capture us?
I may misappropriate your response here to explain to these young Marines why our principled approach is important.
Thanks for the great post.
So, are there examples of this by people who aren't 19 year old college students or ivory tower college professors? At 40, it's been some time since I felt threatened by or took seriously anything said by 19 year olds. But apparently what 19 year olds do is, to this blog, the clearest sign of the end of free speech and the descent of American culture into totalitarianism. It's as if, while my house is on fire raining burning debris onto the sidewalk, my neighbor comes over to berate me for running my sprinklers on a water restriction day.
Ken, I'll concede, for all of liberalism, that 19 year olds are dumb. They say dumb things. They do dumb things. They have trouble with moral greys and are figuring out how to navigate the world that exists between ideology and reality. They're dumb. I'll say it again: you're right, they're dumb. No question. It's the truth. You nailed it. If I was a college student I'd get on my knees and beg, with tears in my eyes for your forgiveness. I'd issue the most heartrending mea culpa the world has ever seen. Dear god, the 19 year olds really really really really don't have it all figured out. They just don't. Really.
Ok, can we stop talking about college students now?
Another article I read recently from the Bennett and Bennett law blog put another excellent aspect to the reasons "hate speech" should not become a legal thing. Recently, police were classified in several states as a "protected class." If hate speech became an actual, punishable offense, the first (and likely only) group who would make significant use of it would be the police. This, despite protections they already have, abuses they already get away with and penalty upgrades for acting against them or appearing to act against them.
The alternative to one extreme is not necessarily another.
@MattW:
Your premise seems to be that what college students do is harmless.
Let's leave aside harm to other people at college for now.
Colleges produce future citizens. Those citizens will be lawyers, judges, cops, jurors, voters. Rights only survive to the extent they have a sufficient level of support in society. Question: how long can our already tenuous national support for free speech survive a system where this is the prevailing speech culture in colleges?
Here's a challenge to anyone who gets emotionally involved in a newspaper article or blog post about the beliefs of college students: think of an organization or movement you were passionately involved in during college, be it political, marching band, or a push to get the library to stay open later. Go through your campus paper's news archives for coverage of that organization/movement. Do the articles you find there bear any resemblance to your experiences?
An alternative challenge: read Ken's criticism of legal journalism. Then assume that all coverage of campus events is equally wrong about the events in question and whether any quoted students are representing the general current of campus thought.
I'm with Matt W that there's relatively little reason to care what a 19 year old thinks. But if you are so moved (think of the children!), I'd urge a level of caution if you even imagine you actually know what a 19 year old thinks–even if you have their manifesto in front of you.
"Your compassion is a weakness your enemies will not share.
That's why it's so important. It separates us from them."
So what should one do if, instead of that, the Nazis and their associates are elected to public office en masse and given the power to rewrite the laws of the land, up to and including the Constitution?
You know, it always comes down to this:
If we don't hold to our rules, and our principles, and allow exceptions to those rules and principles to cover things we just don't like, then we are no better than the Nazi's that the students are complaining about.
I have literally heard the same (white) person assert both that "All Whites are Racist" and that "We should not allow Racists to speak on this campus!".
The unconscious hyperbole of these students statements seems lost on them.
I have long wondered where this stuff comes from, these students seem barely capable of rational thought, surely it is no original to them. Most of it seems warmed over Marxism with \various immutable characteristics substituted fro class. The Bolsheviks, Maoists and the Khmer Rouge among others set out to end class struggle by killing all of the oppressive class. These "students" have substituted supposed immutable characteristics of gender and pigmentation for class, creating a permanent struggle.
Spelling typo:
"First, the argument relies on a false premise: that we don't, or shouldn't, extent rights to people who wouldn't extend those rights to us."
Should be extend, right?
Ken, can we get you to do a regular 1 hour seminar at some of the local colleges that are mandatory to attend by freshmen? You know, in one of those 500+ people stadium classrooms or what not? Duct tape their mouths shut until the end so they can't interrupt you, then they can bitch and moan about how it's not fair and their feelings are hurt. At least a few might get it and go on to let their peers know it's fine to have speech back at someone, but taking away someones speech is not something done lightly.
A related issue, which might lead to the kinds of quotes cited above, is that often the speakers on a campus are paid to be there. This might either be directly by the university, through some departmental funds, or by a student group. This money comes, at least in part, from the money that the student is paying to be at the university.
What is the correct way for a student to keep their money being used to pay for someone who not only wants to take away their rights, but also wants to have them tortured or eradicated? (For example, a gay student not wanting to pay for an advocate of conversion therapy to speak.)
@ BadRoad "So what should one do if, instead of that, the Nazis and their associates are elected to public office en masse and given the power to rewrite the laws of the land, up to and including the Constitution?"
There aren't enough of them, and their views aren't popular with anything approaching 10% of any electoral entity. Over the last six months, as Ken points out, we've stretched the definition of "Nazi" far beyond any meaningful relationship to what actual Nazism is. Trump and Bannon are assholes, but they're not Nazis. Charles Murray is not a Nazi. Heather MacDonald is a badge licker, but she's not anywhere close to a Nazi. Ann Coulter is a bore, but not a Nazi. And so on and so on.
If you collected all of the people in the United States who had actual National Socialist views and put them in one place, you could comfortably fit them in an average minor league baseball stadium, with room to spare.
We do however, have a suspected terrorist exception. See Guantanamo Bay, CIA Blacksites, waterboarding isn't torture, etc.
Nazis have a right to free speech just like everyone else but I won't be shedding any tears if they have trouble spreading their message because their jaw is broken and wired shut. Does that make me a censorious asshat now?
@Ricky There's nothing you can do about it. If you want to have a government, you're going to wind up having to pay for things you don't agree with. There's simply no other way to have a Democracy. Fortunately, we do have rules that prevent this from getting too out of hand, but there will always be places where it's going to happen. If a government-funded university is never going to use any government funds to pay for people to speak on campus, it's not going to be a great university. And if it's going to, it can't discriminate based on viewpoint, so it will sometimes pay for speech some people vehemently disagree with.
You don't have to listen. And you can take advantage of that same mechanism to fund speech that opposes their speech.
@BadRoad If you truly believe the US government has been taken over by Nazis, you should be plotting a revolution. That would be the moral response to living in a Nazi state. If you don't think it has gone so far that the violent overthrow of the government is necessary, than tough shit, work within the framework of our established rights.
Ken, thank you for the great blog post and I personally don't think we can talk about these principles enough right now and for the reasons you articulated. This shuttering of any opinion that doesn't feel right is the exact opposite of what college used to be about.
On the lighter side:
""He looked at my kids funny and I could just tell that he was a molester because he had a Mondale button on.""
Well clearly anyone still wearing a Mondale button is dangerous!
Actually, it makes you more like a coward. You want to see them silenced, but you aren't willing to pay the physical (risk of them fighting back) or spiritual ("I still believe in free speech!") prices.
Excellent Post. Re Matt W's point, I would respectfully argue that rather than " the 19 year olds", the bigger, sadder issue is the horde of fully grown, over compensated, adult administrative and professorial enablers who cultivate and churn out successive classes of lemmings loudly parroting this dreck
A right that does not apply to everyone is a privilege. Not hard really.
The word that got me off of this way of thinking is the word "we".
What I came to realise is that there isn't a "we" – my definition of hate speech, Nazi, or really just "speech that should be banned for the greater good" will always be different than yours
If everyone agreed, then at least the laws wouldn't be abused to marginalize people. Still wouldn't be in favor of the laws as constituted but I could accept the reality. But because there is no commonly accepted definition of "speech that should be banned", it will always be the weak, and those that need to be heard.
For example, Ken discusses his criticisms of Heather Macdonald. I happen to think she does great work, but the thing is that I've rarely if ever heard good criticisms of her and critics of Black Lives Matter because that would mean acknowledging many of Heather's arguments to some extent, at which point Black Lives Matter and co. will be very displeased with you. So what are you going to do?
Ahh, Robert had already posted it, I now see.
Well, here's the YouTube:
Matt, to riff on Ken, you admit that many profs at universities act the same way as the students, like infamous Missouri communications prof who either didn't know the First Amdt or else didn't give a damn.
"Wouldn't you like to be a Nazi too? Drink Dr. Nazi. Be a Nazi."
Drinking Dr. Nazi at 10, 2 and 4 insures that you stay regular, for those sudden genocidal appointments you may have.
"It's not just speakers advocating genocide,"
To provide yet another example of how far from "nazi" some individuals targeted for censorship actually are, just look at the target of Wellesley campaign against "speech that will lead to the harm of others" – liberal, anti-authoritarian feminist Laura Kipnis, who's under attack for standing up against abuses of Title IX and questioning contradictory aspects of the dominant feminist ideas around sex and consent. I'll add that Kipnis makes a fairly nuanced critique of such policies; she's not even at the level of Camille Paglia-level provocation.
To be fair, the feminist group that originally confronted Kipnis didn't disrupt her talk, and simply asked critical and pointed questions during the QA after the talk. They also put together a fairly moronic video attacking Kipnis' views. All of this, moronic or not, is in the best tradition of free speech and counterspeech.
However, that didn't stop a group of Wellesley faculty and admins from issuing a statement saying that speakers like Kipnis must be kept off campuses for the sake of student safety, and the creepy pro-totalitarian editorial above taking that line even further.
Given such examples, one hardly needs to invoke any kind of elaborate slippery slope argument against the "nazi exception". Those advocating such policies have clearly already fallen down the slippery slope and into the abyss.
Not at all. And I doubt that much of anyone, across the political spectrum, would shed many tears over such a scenario. But if the educated part of your brain doesn't register that such a precedent's unlikely to stop with your idea of "deserving targets," and that we're likely to regret having set it, then I might call you at least a tad short-sighted.
RE: Badroad
Remember over the past nine years when right-wing idiots said things like, "Obama is a Kenyan Muslim Communist that blah blah blah blah blah."
You sound EXACTLY like them.
Political hyperbole is stupid, whether it's from the right, left, or middle.
@Jason: The Wellesley/Berkeley/Pomona pieces were op-eds and a demand letter, closer to a manifesto than inaccurate journalistic quoting. As for the accuracy of Ken's statements, as a student (a 19 year-old one, natch!) at a LAC that isn't Wellesley but frequently plays sports against them, support for hate speech laws is absolutely the majority opinion among my peers.
@Matt W: Isn't the primary ethos of college to make us less dumb? Gee, at least pretend I'm not wasting my parent's money.
My point is that it's a tired, tired cliche at this point to start a statement with "You know what's wrong with the Left these days?" and then answer with some dumb shit that just happened at a college. I totally agree with the poster above who suggested that Ken (or any others so inclined) should go to campuses and give lectures on free speech. That would be great. But colleges are not the ideological center of the Left. They're not liberal think-tanks. They aren't the origination of the Left's activism nor our agenda nor political strategy. In fact, being a college graduate does not, in any way, predict a person's political affiliation. Colleges aren't churning out little liberals. And yet these kinds of stories are invariably scolds about the excesses of identity politics or political correctness gone amok or the abject stupidity of the intolerance of intolerance. Liberals who work and raise families don't have time for that shit. We do care about peoples' well-being and treating everyone with dignity and a better future for our kids, but mostly we're trying to get by. Mostly we just want our lives to feel a little more secure. And hey look, there's an incompetent grifter in the White House who seems intent on committing the full might of the U.S. economic and military to whatever silly end falls into his brain at any instant. That actually seems like a crisis.
Minor administrative issue: you need to update your RSS template. It's still tagging posts with: "Copyright 2016 by the named Popehat author."
Banning hate speech sounds great, I just don't trust anyone to decide what counts as hate speech. Kind of my same opinion about the death penalty.
To be fair, violence is the language that nazis understand
I am a huge advocate for free speech, and I totally agree with the main normative point that Ken (and most commenters) are making, but I worry that we're getting our collective knickers in a wad over a bunch of slippery slope arguments and hasty generalizations.
Yes, college kids are foolish and short-sighted. And crotchety old curmudgeons like us love to remind ourselves of this fact. 'Twas ever thus. Every generation thinks they were sensible and that these lazy, disrespectful "kids today" are going to destroy society as we know it. Ken's response to MattW suggests that he is thinking along these lines. But c'mon. These college students will grow out of their college-idiocy into post-college-idiocy just like we did.
Furthermore, even if we (the USA) did adopt anti-hate-speech legislation (which we shouldn't), why should I buy the slippery-slope argument that it will result in fascism, or the banning of large swaths of political speech? Most European countries have anti-hate-speech laws, I believe. I think they're wrong to have them, and they are sometimes abused, but Europe still carries on as a mostly free, mostly democratic place. They seem to have banned hate-speech (and Nazi-speech in particular) without going totally off the deep-end, so it is possible.
Finally, I happen to be one of the "fully grown, over compensated [sic], adult administrative and professorial enablers" Wrt mentioned, and I respectfully disagree with his or her generalizations about my profession. Everybody can trot out one or two anecdotal cases of professors who encourage this censorship, but I assure you that the vast majority of my colleagues are uninvolved and uninterested in this sort of stuff, and when we do take notice of it, it's to roll our eyes and join with Ken in muttering "kids today…" If you don't believe me, check out some Higher-education articles/blogs on the topic. The ones I read are mostly a contest to see who can think of the most creative insults for the students.
Great post. But after reading some of the comments, like the ones by joshuaism and MattW and Ricky and Peter, I'm moved to quote Dante: "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."
Centrist White people are the biggest cowards in the world.
I recently listened to a podcast where a 40-something year old spent 2 hours arguing why it's OK to punch Nazis. It isn't confined to the kiddies. If you're interested, it's the Lalo Dagach podcast on youtube with guest Dan Arel, and Arel not only argued that it was OK to punch Nazis, but, among other disturbing things, that it was OK to punch female Nazis, and even to kill them. I hope his views aren't widespread, but unfortunately he seems to have a lot of support on social media at least. Many of his supporters are twitter-verified college professors.
I wouldn't be shedding any tears either, but I also wouldn't want the jawbreakers as next door neighbors.
There's a SF writer who uses FB to post essays on all sort of things he's thinking about. Sometimes it's what President Caligula and his ilk are doing. During the campaign, he had a lot to say. And whenever a brownshirt would speak out at a Teapublican rally, he'd say "Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences." One of those rioters who punched a woman is now being prosecuted and expects Caligula to pay for it. Nope.
Afterward the election, the pimple on skydaddy's butt Milos what-is-name attempt to speak at UC Davis only to have protests (outsiders, so he claimed) protest, costing the UC police and the Davis PD to charge for security. And the insurance provider refused to cover any damages. So the talk was canceled. Same thing when he was scheduled to speak at Berkeley. He was more than welcome to speak elsewhere, but the UC group that paid his speaking fee couldn't cover the additional security costs.
"Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences."
However, when President Caligula said he wanted to shut down the NEW YORK TIMES because of all the bad coverage, to me that's a clear violation of the 1st Amendment. Or when he wanted to get SNL removed from the air, also a violation. The various "religious liberty" laws being passed by states that allow someone to discriminate based on a protected class (e.g. sexual orientation) are clearly unconstitutional. But who knows what the SCOTUS will rule now.
People can say whatever they want. They just have to deal with the fallout. Like the Survivor castmember who lost his job for outing another cast member. Or that florist that refused to provide flower arrangement for a lesbian wedding. Or the bakers who refused to make a cake for a gay couple's wedding. They're out of business.
The link there does not, in fact, go to an example of anyone "silencing" anyone, and by referring to the failure to provide support for something as "silencing", you're engaging in the same sort of dishonest, bullying rhetoric of the groups you decry.
@Phelps
There is the argument that people were killed not by CommunISM, but by CommunISTS. There is a difference between advocating a political philosophy that provides fertile ground for murderous dictators to take power, and directly advocating murderous dictatorship. You may not find the distinction persuasive, but you can't accuse someone of hypocrisy for doing so.
@Matt W
I don't get that analogy at all.
@Brandon
You know what else separates us from terrorists? We're not terrorists. If you can't point to how your CAUSE is better, and are reduced to claiming that your METHODS are superior, you've already forfeited the moral high ground.
@Aaron
You're advocating that students be forced to listen to a speech how great freedom is? Is this meant facetiously?
@Piper
You're parroting an uniformed meme. The Guatanamo Bay exception isn't a "suspected terrorist" exception, it's a "non-citizens not on US soil" exception. That's why it's … wait for it .. in Guantanamo Bay. Clearly, the military is not bound by the same due process restraints as civilian authorities are, and it's hardly a trivial question how much do apply.
@Iamcuriousblue
The concept of "speech that will lead to the harm of others", all by itself, is a pro-totalitarian meme. Taken literally, it can be used to ban any speech at all. If you believe that your proposed policy will improve the lives of others, then any who disagrees with you is preventing that improvement, and is therefore harming others, and thus their speech can be prohibited.
If we are to support free speech, then we MUST allow speech even if we believe that it makes people's lives worth. "I support speech as long it doesn't hurt anyone" is logically equivalent to "I support speech as long as I don't believe it hurts anyone", which in turn is logically equivalent to "I support speech as long as I agree with it".
Wow. Not only verbifies nouns, but manages to create a quintuple negative ("failed", "problematize", "thoughtless", plus the First Amendment bans banning speech, adding two more negatives).
@Encinal: somewhat meta given this post, Aaron has made the error of assuming that only the people whose speech he doesn't like would end up duct-taped into listening to a lecture from their elders and betters.
C.f., any discussion on this blog where commenters tie themselves into pretzels explaining that calling someone a racist is silencing and magically doesn't count as free speech.
I'd like to throw my hat into the all 19 year olds a moron's who eventually grow out of it camp. College age kids are full of kids that think they have things figured out but are in fact morons with a gnats grasp on any issue. In time their positions will change, they will see the other side and many of their positions will shift away from their college held positions. Heck, I'd bet more than half the guys that are at these demonstrations are only there because the girl they are interested in is there.
I'll also point out this contention on the right that campuses are bastions of Left and propaganda factories have clearly never visited a college in their life or spent their college life in a liberal arts college. Yes the humanities professors all too frequently have a tendency to be bat shit crazy but the vast majority of professors, particularly from all the non-humanities like the science, engineering and business departments are all very similar to everyone else. But those same bat shit crazy professors offer differing world views to groups of kids who think they know everything and help open the minds of students to the broad views that exist out there and all but a very small percentage will walk away with absolutely no change to how their parents raised them to view the world.
One last thing I'd like to point out, it's not just the people that want to ban hate speech and attack nazi's that are seeking to limit speech. I've seen far to many college kids arguing hard conservative views that will attack hate speech rules, not on the basis of vague speech restrictions that limit free speech but only on the content of the banned speech, they'd love to see the same rules enforced as long as they get to define the what qualifies as hate speech. Those kids on the right want their safe spaces as much as the kids on the left.
That to me is what's scary, this isn't just a fringe movement, there appears to be significant agreement that speech restrictions should exist among college age kids as long as they are restricting the content that group dislikes.
Conflate antifa with liberal resistance, take worst possible interpretation of hate speech law, serve with cup of cold sick.
Where the fuck are all these Nazis? You'd think, with the whole country apparently crawling with them, that they'd be easier to locate than in the middle of some Antifa scrum. Don't they have parades or something?
I can't help but laugh at the people trivializing this issue as "well, duh, college kids are dumb". Isn't that analogous to saying "boys will be boys" when addressing sexual harassment committed by males? Yes, it is.
Not to mention that I ended college four years ago, when I studied this totalitarian idiocy was already taking hold and the morons vomiting it haven't changed, even years after graduation. They have no reason to and won't.
It's as if college people aren't actually toddlers but fully grown adults who have already made very important decisions, are intelligent enough to keep studying after high school and whose personalities are already defined. Whudathunkit?
Well, let's look at the other dangerous ideology that's getting adherents: ISIS. Does ISIS have a right to demonstrate on our streets? Do they have a right to openly recruit, and say "hey, free speech, and we're not beheading anyone just this minute, so the fact that we do it the minute we get the chance shouldn't count against us! Heck, at the moment we're not even doing any killing in the USA, so we get free speech!"
If your answer is different for those groups, then you might want to think about why the white people groups seem somehow more privileged to you than the brown ones. Because we've all seen what the Nazis and the KKK do when given the chance, just as we've seen what ISIS does (heck, James Harris Jackson pulled a lone wolf style attack straight-up out of the current ISIS playbook).
Personally, I think when you start actively supporting a genocidal political movement you're making threats and at the very least it counts as fighting words. Additionally, being nice to Nazis and the KKK historically has been appeasement that didn't do shit to stop them.
The most compelling argument on this issue has been alluded to by Brandon above: If we go down the "eye for an eye" route, what the hell still separates us from them? How can we continue to claim any kind of superiority if we let them drag our society down to their despicable level? If anything, responding to them the way they would to us means we acknowledge they were right. They win and we've utterly lost everything we stand for.
I'm continuously amazed how many people don't get how this is not a substantial but a procedural issue. Whatever glorious ends you claim to have, they never justify all means. "Tyranny" is a concept removed from wether it happens to be our side getting oppressed. You can identify tyranny by looking at the methods employed, not by the intended goals. Tyranny with the best intentions is still fucking tyranny!
Why are people so blind to the concept cutting both ways? The right says, "You may support SJWs, but look at what they actually want – it's tyranny! So violent opposition is obviously warranted." The left says, "You may support Nazis, but look at what they actually want – it's tyranny! So violent opposition is obviously warranted." People expect the other side to take a step back from their ideology to look at issues objectively. But they don't even think of doing it for their own ideology. Both extremes have tyrannical tendencies that need to be reigned in. Spoilers: Advocating for tyrannical measures is not the way to do it.
I don't believe this. But even stipulating this arguendo, consider that historically, low-level street violence and punching Nazis appears to have done less than shit to stop them. The Nazi marching anthem opens with something like "The flag held high, the ranks closed tight, and the ghosts of our fellows killed by Reds* march with us in spirit."
(*and Reactionaries, but those don't seem quite as relevant today.)
See also: Blutfahne.
I'm not sure that song lyrics are a valid rebuttal in this case.
I'm not trying to buttle anything. I took the previous point as stipulated. I'm saying that people tried doing vigilante justice to Nazis and this failed so hard that the Nazis wound up celebrating "remember those times people tried doing vigilante justice to us, lol", so if being nice does nothing, you should probably do it anyway because it's better than doing things of negative effectiveness.
What I see behind this issue is the underlying premise that "Government is the best way to solve social issues". Considering that just about every level of public education tries to drill that very message into students, countering that message is very difficult.
The efficacy of street violence varies. The UK's local fascists were vigorously challenged with some success, most famously in the Battle of Cable Street.
My general feeling with the neo-Nazi crowd is that they offer no quarter, and should be shown none. That doesn't stop me admiring the ACLU's principled campaigns to allow them to march, but I really don't see speech advocating genocide as worthy of protection. Not least because it's had a tendency to actually prefigure genocide.
I'm not alarmed if colleges are hotbeds of single-payer-health-care, welfare-state, cradle-to-grave-big-government liberal stuff. I am alarmed if they are actively teaching to undermine values central to how we approach and discuss and resolve those things.
@Encinal
I'm not sure how you could be more wrong. A "cause" is a justification which need bear no relation to the actions committed in its name, and can easily be fabricated post hoc. It does not, and cannot, be a blanket exemption from morality.
I tend to agree: we must protect the rights of the worst of us, ESPECIALLY of the worst of us, because once we've done that, it's as good a guarantee as possible of the same rights for the rest of us. Once you've gone out of your way to say that you will not punish the speech of Nazis, you've come as close as is possible to guaranteeing that your own speech will never be punished either. And it should not be.
That being said, I think there is a difference between guaranteeing free speech and granting a platform for that speech. Berkeley did right in how it handled Yiannopoulos: because any OTHER club could invite any speaker it wanted, and use public space to listen, a club wanting Yiannopoulos had to be allowed to invite him, and use public space. Yiannopoulos is an ass-hat, but that doesn't change that rules made to exclude him wrould be wrong. However! The college was under no obligation to promote him, or say anything positive. The students were under no obligation to listen, or to not protest him.
And that's the thing about free speech – just because you're allowed to make it doesn't mean others can, or should, be forced to listen. And it doesn't mean others can't protest, or critique you into oblivion. That's THEIR free speech.
We must allow Nazis to talk. But we are also well served to protest their heinous speech at every junction, to show that it is no longer acceptable (and never was) in a decent society, and to encourage them to shut up and, hopefully, come to understand how wrong they are.
The right to free speech means we can't use the cops to stop the Nazis. We can't put them in jail, or fine them, or otherwise use law to punish them. But there's nothing at all wrong with tuning them out, talking over them, and reminding everybody that they are as wrong as it's possible to be. We must allow them to speak – but we sure as heck don't have to give them a microphone or an audience.
@Tom "I really don't see speech advocating genocide as worthy of protection."
Should we burn copies of Ender's Game because it could be interpreted as suggesting that genocide is an "easy" solution to conflict? The protagonist regrets his actions but others celebrate him for it.
What about South Park? Cartman routinely advocates genocide. The overall work portrays him as an ass, of course, but who draws that line?
Tons of cartoons use Nazis ironically, often presenting them as moral superiors to an anti-hero, as a commentary on means and ends. I guess that's a punch-n'-censor in your ideal world.
Nope, I don't trust you to decide what people express or why, nor do I trust legislators and courts to regulate expression with an appropriate level of nuance. We're still struggling with the details of defamation law, which is ancient. Restrictions on political expression will always be harder, since you now have to deal with imagery, metaphor, and other literary devices that can be ignored in defamation analysis.
You speak as if these problems were hypothetical, and the solutions difficult. They're not. Large parts of continental Europe have restrictions on glorifying Nazism, and they get by perfectly well.
I get that US political culture has placed free speech on a pedestal as the major political virtue, but it's not the only sane model. I wonder sometimes whether speech fundamentalism is a thing in the US precisely because there's no obvious parallel in US history to Rwanda, Cambodia, or the Nazi rise in Germany.
@Encinal
Oh, I can, and do. Nazism didn't kill anyone — Nazis did. Like corporations, philosophies only act through their agents. You cannot separate communism from communists — especially when we are dealing with 150 years of history, all of it consistently murderous and genocidal.
At least with Nazism, it has only been tried once, so it's adherents have a much better claim to the idea that it was perverted by the special circumstances of its implementation. Communism has been implemented world wide, and always ends in mass graves.
"Large parts of continental Europe have restrictions on glorifying Nazism, and they get by perfectly well."
The question, of course, is when they place restrictions on some other "-ism", such as, maybe, anti-Islamism. Which is a relevant topic in Europe today, oddly enough. There are some countries that won't let Geert Wilders in, because of such restrictions. And say what you want, a lot of what he says has merit.
Tom,
The US DOES have direct parallels, from the genocide of the native Americans as European-Americans drove westward (arguably the most successful genocide in the history of the world) to, ya know, slavery (which has created a racist culture that most Europeans have no hope/worry of ever experiencing in their own homes), the US has plenty of ugly, harmful philosophies floating around. And yet we value free speech.
Because what you call 'getting by perfectly well' we tend to consider to be somewhat horrific in terms of what becomes illegal, and what happens to people who cross the line.
And to Phelps, it's worth mentioning that you are lying. Not all instances of communism have resulted in mass graves, nor have all instances been consistently murderous and/or genocidal – certainly, at least, no more often than capitalist societies have gone there. It's also worth mentioning that communism, as written by Marx, and as imagined by most detractors, has never actually been tried. Those countries you complain about were tyrannies FIRST, and something sorta-kinda-a-bit-like-communism was dropped on top of them. They could have been capitalisms, or socialisms, or feudalist states, and they still would have been run by a bloodthirsty dictator, because that's who had already taken power.
Very well said, Tom. The only thing I'd add is the word "yet" to the last sentence.
Ahh, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy has finally arrived.
Nice collection of strawmen you've got there.
First, it behooves us to recognize that language that dehumanizes groups of people for their existence is inherently more dangerous than language that dehumanizes people for their ideas – there are many ways ideas can be changed, but I know of just one irreversible way to affect one's existence.
Further, it is entirely possible to hold a principled prosocial stance when it comes to curtailing free speech: as many posters point out, it's been done quite effectively both here and elsewhere. It's quite difficult, because sorting what counts as merely violently destructive apart from uncomfortable but serious contenders for truth is perhaps the problem of our time. As with all binary classifiers, we've got sensitivity and specificity problems, but guess what: we've already got a hell of a lot of false positives.
And therein lies the rub: Not only is Nazism a violently destructive ideology, but so too, it would appear, is the dominant neoliberal ethos to which so many of us vociferously subscribe. Realizing the need for us to readjust the classifier to increase specificity will necessarily increase the number of negatives – both true and false.
And that, more than anything else, is what I see in your post: not a principled stance on Truth and Justice and the American Way, but moreso "the gentleman doth protest too much". I think you see the writing on the wall, but you mis-assign your cognitive dissonance to those 19 year old kids urgently trying to figure out how to fix the system you've broken.
@ Tom
"Large parts of continental Europe have restrictions on glorifying Nazism, and they get by perfectly well."
Again, as Ken points out, the people here in the US who are having their speech attacked are not, you know, Nazis. The anti-speech left is defining Nazi as "anybody who disagrees with me".
Nazi has a specific meaning because there was an actual country run by a Nazi party in fairly recent history. That party had a political platform that is recorded for posterity that you can go look up. Even Spencer, who self-indentifies as a Nazi, hasn't advocated for most of those policies. He's a racist white separatist.
Or is it your assertion that people like Milo Y, Charles Murray, and Heather MacDonald are actually Nazis? If so, you're rendering the term meaningless.
@David Guild
You are equivocating between cause and purported cause.
Who said anything about a cause being a blanket exemption? I didn't say a cause necessarily provides justification, I said that SOME causes provide justification to SOME acts, and merely pointing out that two sides employ the same methods is insufficient to show moral equivalency.
@Guest Poster
Except Berkeley didn't treat him the same as other speakers.
@Phelps
Anti-semitism was an integral part of Nazism. Stalinist purges are not an integral part of communism. There is a clear difference here.
Yes, I can.
That's hyperbolic. What if someone points to Rwanda, Haiti, Liberia, Zimbabwe, etc., and says "When black people run a country, murderous despots take over. Therefore, anyone advocating for black rule is advocating murderous despotism"?
@ William the Stout, et. al.
Before I say this, let me reiterate my position that anti-hate-speech laws are stupid and unjust, and we should absolutely reject them. Our almost unlimited free speech license is one of the main reasons I'm still (mostly) proud of my country.
That said…
The worry that banning Nazi speech will result in banning "speech college students don't like" is a silly slippery slope argument. If such laws existed, college students and liberal activists wouldn't decide what is or isn't Nazi speech. Ultimately, the Judges would. And judges are generally not emotional, irrational idiots. A few of them are, but that's why there are appeals courts, etc.
Maybe college students can use these measures to enforce their will on college campuses. (Probably not–most (all?) colleges are still under the control of the administrators). But that's not totalitarianism (or whatever "ism"). Not unless college campuses cover more of America's territory than I thought.
So long as we have and enforce federal "obscenity" laws I don't find this kind of posturing very useful or honest. The US does and always has censored ideas and speech. Right now I can't put up a billboard depicting a full-disclosure 50-something Florida swinger's orgy to promote polygamy. But I can put up one calling to make America White again. Does that seem like rational free speech is currently protected in the country, because it doesn't to me. I'm sorry, but the village Ken is claiming to defend was burned down long ago, and this zealous interpretation of freedom of expression, where important facts such as this are ignored in a fervor to condemn others and place a fiction on a pedestal is no more or less a coherent argument than the examples provided.
Encinal, Berkeley treated him EXACTLY like any other speaker, much to their credit. If you're going to be wrong on the internet, try to do at least the 10 seconds of research it takes to not say something so obviously incorrect – try to at least keep us guessing a bit, eh?
That's the history. I certainly won't move to an African country for that reason.
Guys, I think we found the much discussed 19 year old college student.
Seeing a whole lot of Trope Three, "some speech isn't protected," here.
Here's something that seems to be glossed over since Robert brought up A Man for All Seasons —
Eventually people who like Nazis are going to get into power.
Why are you handing them not only the authority, but the precedent, to ban your speech?
Nothing lasts forever in America — not the Reagan Revolution, not the Democrat Majority in Congress, not Obama's Fourth Reich — nothing. Eventually, the other side's Nazis will get power. What will they do with the new banning mechanism you've decided was oh-so-important?
@Bad Road
Then those jerks would be subject to the 2nd Amendment.
Also everyone advocating violence. You keep talking like you'll win. What if you lose? You do realize there's a big gulf in the stakes between having debates and a fight?
@ Peter –
"The worry that banning Nazi speech will result in banning "speech college students don't like" is a silly slippery slope argument. If such laws existed, college students and liberal activists wouldn't decide what is or isn't Nazi speech. Ultimately, the Judges would."
Well, first the state legislatures would. So in California, New York et al (where the liberal activists are actual, you know, legislators) banned speech would that speech that "harms" minorities, gays, etc. You know, their approved, protected groups. Meanwhile in Alabama, Missouri, et. al., (where the conservative activists are legislators) banned speech would be that speech that contributes to the "War on Christianity" or the "War on Cops". You know, their approved, protected groups.
And yeah, hopefully the courts would eventually sort it out – eventually being in a few years – but that wouldn't be perfect either given that there is at least some politicization of the various courts, as you point out. And eventual sorting would be of little solace to me if I had spent several years in a hell hole because I said the wrong thing. Not to mention if I was dead because the cops got a little frisky when they came to take me away. Dead people don't feel solace.
So, really, which one of us is headed down a slippery slope?
Actually, it's even likely that they will lose. There's a strong correlation between the alleged "nazis" and RKBA support, while the inverse is true for the alleged ANTIFA types. Once it escapes this "get together and have a tussle" stage and bullets start flying, the left is going to be massively outgunned.
Remember, the last time there was a series of physical melees with the Nazis for control of the state, the Nazis won.
Been worrying that there is a significant number of people in the USA who have been reading too many comic books, and not enough history books.
Then again, I'm not as young as I used to be, and have become slowly but inexorably preoccupied with younger people and the amount and duration of contact they've had with my lawn. So pinch of salt there.
@Tom The episodes of South Park I referenced are not shown in Germany. Ironic Nazis are also verboten unless they're expied. So, no, they aren't "getting along just fine," so much as "indiscriminately censoring valid, socially positive messages due to stupid people applying ideology blindly," which is precisely what I worry about in America.
And in the "clueless comment of the day," someone misses that the characteristic in the first sentence may be related to the characteristic in the second sentence.
Why do we think that spending four years immersed in a rigidly hierarchical pseudo-society, with a governance structure borrowed from the Middle Ages, should be good preparation for life as a free and equal citizen of a democratic republic?
@Anonymous
See, paragraphs like this are why I do not take the modern Left seriously. An honest radical would be able to critique the "dominant neoliberal ethos" without succumbing to Godwin's Law.
Also, the moral obtuseness it takes to even compare neoliberalism with Nazism… I really have to wonder what the victims of Nazism would think.
That's easy for you to say.
Anonymous:
(bolding mine)
At least you've got the honesty to admit that distinguishing which language "dehumanizes groups of people for their existence" and which language "dehumanizes people for their ideas" is an extremely hard problem, one that hasn't been solved. Religious beliefs are just another type of idea – is it not inherently dangerous to dehumanize people for their religious belief? What about sexual orientation or gender identity? Those are all ideas based on the contents of a person's thinking and feelings, after all. Or do those ideas count as "existence," and if so, why don't political beliefs count as well?
In fact, it seems to me that it's an inherently unsolvable problem, because distinguishing the 2 is entirely dependent on the opinion of the person making the judgment call, and history shows us that people can make judgment calls in completely arbitrary ways to suit their needs.
But even if this were a solvable problem, fact remains that it is not yet solved, even for the most trivial cases. Given that, shutting down people we've labeled as Nazis on the basis that their speech is dangerous is putting the cart before the horse. It's akin to demanding that we imprison someone before holding the trial.
Given that, it's dishonest to claim that we've got a hell of a lot of false-positives. You don't know that.
I'm gonna be honest. I didn't expect me using a Batman Begins quote which I threw out there since it seemed to echo Ken to get anything other than a wry quip on this forum.
You really have no idea how universities actually operate.
"What do we want?!"
—— "The classifier readjusted to increase specificity!"
"When do we want it?!"
—— "Now!!!"
@Encinal
I don't think this reasoning works as well as you think it does. Terrorists rarely self-identify as terrorists. There is only a very small subset of people who set out to do bad things. Most people want to do good. They just horribly disagree on what constitutes "good".
People we call "terrorists" might just want to fight oppression and are in the eyes of their comrades and families heroes, not a villains. People who are die-hard nazis, think getting rid of jews is a very moral thing to do. After all they're convinced they're evil and harmful to their loved-ones and everyone else.
Humans not only disagree on what is good or bad, we even fundamentally disagree on which metrics to use to settle the dispute (deontology vs utilitarianism, individualism vs collectivism, etc, etc). Even the nazis in large parts had serious backing by top philosophers (Heidegger, some readings of Nietzsche, etc).
So I have to disagree with you. I think not using violence to suppress a different way of life is what gives us the moral high ground over terrorists. Because our different causes simply pit two unreconcilable views against each other. Heck, your example is strangely fitting in that the people the US likes to call supporters of terrorism regularly accuse the US of being a terrorist regime themselves (what with meddling in sovereign states, extrajudicial killings, drones audibly circling above cities and such). I agree with you that intent does matter, I just caution that a lot of bad shit has been justified with supposed good intentions.
But I'm happy to broaden my horizon. How would you figure out which theoretical cause is fundamentally superior to another? Or as an example to get away from nazis: Who has the moral high-ground between people who bomb for islam, people who bomb for democracy and people who bomb against capitalism? How would they show each other which cause is superior and which kind of bombing is thusly justified? They all seem pretty morally equivalent to me, being the bombers they are, disregarding the safety of innocents but claiming to only target enemy combattants who deserve it.
"I really have to wonder what the victims of Nazism would think."
Also have to wonder what they'd think if they could ride a time machine into American now and hear about the hard-core "Nazi" Spencer.
"Wait, the guy thinks we should just voluntarily leave?" Oh, that's nothing. Fuck that guy".
That's the amusing thing about this event. Both sides think they are punching Nazis.
Which, I guess, proves Ken's point.
@Encinal
Have you perhaps considered that a persons political ideology is a choice that they have made based on their own values and principals, and this forms a much stronger basis for association with the actions taken by members of that same ideology as something as arbitrary as the color of a person's skin?
@Encinal
US citizens can be detained as enemy combatants under essentially the same procedures and systems as non-citizens in Guantanamo. Or at least the differences that do exist are a creation of statute by Congress after enemy combatants started being detained.
(Caveat: remember, I think these laws are idiotic too)
@Jordan
Yes, I do think that the US court system would prevent anti-hate-speech laws from devolving into fascism. If that makes me a naive 19-year old, I'll take it.
@William the Stout
Regarding the fact that legislatures are stocked with partisan idiots, and that serious injustices would be committed before the courts sorted it out, correct. I agree. That's one of the (many) reasons we shouldn't have such laws. But that's going to be the consequence of ANY stupid criminal law (and even many non-stupid laws). Out of a population of 300 million it would be naive to imagine that any serious change to the laws wouldn't cause serious (life-ruining) problems for somebody. And anti-speech laws would continue to cause problems even after the courts sorted them out because the laws themselves are unjust.
My point is just that there's a big difference between "country with serious problems and some injustices" and "country that's a fascist, totalitarian state." Again, I point to Europe. Their hate-speech laws are stupid and doubtless result in serious injustices, but they have not shut down all political discourse.
I think consequentialist arguments against hate-speech laws fail because consequentialist arguments fail in general. We shouldn't ban speech because speech is a fundamental right. That's it.
"We shouldn't ban speech because speech is a fundamental right. That's it."
Oh, I agree. I responded to your post as I did because I apparently misunderstood your meaning.
@Rosenfeldt
Did you just equate civil rights with ethnic cleansing?
@BadRoad
How do you jump from me stating "the right says" to my personal opinion? I obviously think both sides are misguided. But since we apparently have to head down that road – yes, far-right racists do think that SJWs promoting diversity is an ongoing ethnic cleansing against white people. Why do you think they came up with the ludicrous term "race war"?
Goes to prove exactly my point of people being oblivious to the concept cutting both ways. One group's treasured civil right ("staying pure" or "becoming diverse") can be another group's ethnic cleansing. That's why I want to draw the distinction at the means employed to further the cause. Advocating for either in politcal discourse? Sure, I don't have to like your opinion, but who am I to tell you how to live your life. But using violence? No thanks! "Racial" purity and "racial" diversity enforced with violent means both seem like the same kind of tyranny to me. And ultimately futile, since violent opression rarely changes deeply-held opinions.
@Jordan
The irony just occurred to me. You thought I was a 19-year old college student because I have some faith that the court system will generally administer justice. I certainly admit that that might be naive of me, but I consider it to be my (relatively) mature view of the matter, 19 years after being 19.
The 19-year old me thought that the courts we like the cops (or "pigs" as he would say): just another arm of the fascist government in the pocket of big corporations, hell-bent on screwing over the little guy.
The simplest point of all this is "who decides who gets the exception".
Some people would except Nazis.
Some other people would except "Libtards" or women, or (n-word), or (religious minority).
No, equity is the only way to keep the field safe.
I do wonder, however, about the question of "free speech" without responsibility for that speech, for instance now-fired Bill O-really, or Hannity, or any of Murdoch's Minions, or some of the crazier lefties, …
There must be some kind of penalty for repeated, outright lies, no matter how convincing.
But that's for another discussion.
GuestPoster says
APRIL 19, 2017 AT 9:18 AM
Cite?
In what way is it obviously incorrect?
It's getting more an more difficult for me to not believe that you're not a fucking troll. You seem to have no interest in responding to my posting with idiotic statements devoid of any support. Berkeley charged the College Republicans for security, then cancelled the event anyway. You're the one who needs to do some fucking research.
If you look at the political spectrum as a circle, the communists and nazis are right next to each other.
@Peter
Assuming I understand your position correctly, that might be better phrased as "The reason we shouldn't ban speech is because speech is a fundamental right" to eliminate the possible parsing "The reason we should ban speech isn't because speech is a fundamental right".
Phelps wrote:
Good work, Sean Spicer. Those Nazis weren't REALLY that bad.
I think we know why you won't move to an African country, it doesn't have anything to do with violence.
"People who like Nazis" DID get elected.
How about the building of communism? Lenin certainly was a theoretician of revolutionary violence and terror; and when in power, he practiced whereof he spoke.
Stalin's application of revolutionary terror was justified by the alleged existence of "opportunists" and "counter-revolutionaries": it isn't like the Great Purge lacked ideological underpinnings.
@Colonel Jessup
You raise a good point – in the future I will endeavor to more clearly delineate the degree to which I see neoliberalism as harmful. We have not yet reached the heights of Nazism: I think we can all agree that stopping ourselves before we reach that extreme is a worthy goal! Perhaps one even well served by recognizing the ways in which Nazis slowly normalized more and more extreme deviance until they were able to co-opt large numbers of people into participating in a system of mass murder?
@lvlln
Thank you for your thoughtful critique! We definitely agree that sorting out prosocial from antisocial behaviors is a hard problem, and I welcome your help in devising new strategies! A few thoughts:
This point about religion is a very interesting question. As you say, people very often feel that their political & religious beliefs are integral to their existence – there is a question, though, as to whether that feeling is equally accurate. I think not, as a political belief is (ideally) a hypothesis to be tested and falsified. It is a statement about the structure of the world and therefore subject to change from new information, whereas religious beliefs are rather resistant to such modification.
You may suggest that frequently a person's religious feelings are intended to be statements about the structure of the world – the data has not proven that standard to be anything other than arbitrary, however, so I'm not sure that we should take those statements literally.
In the words of the poet, there is no justice; just us. Still, we make do with what we have – and it seems a bit nihilistic to say that we shouldn't begin if we can't achieve perfection, no?
I'm not sure I follow you – in my understanding, there's quite a lengthy and effortful trial in Germany to outlaw a class of speech as unconstitutional. Indeed, it seems to me the rigorous pursuit of such a trial could be a solution to our problem?
The trouble is that there are many more ways to be wrong than there are to be right. I don't see a way to adjust that asymmetry, but it seems to me that our current plan of "well, let's just let the unbalanced flywheel keep spinning faster and see if it sorts itself out" lacks a certain empathy.
@Tom:
Apart from the Battle of Cable Street, you could look at the punk scene here in the USA to see how they dealt with Nazis (also WWII, if we're going to bring that up).
For all the talk of Nazis, they have remarkably little popular support. Here's some of the groups referred to by academia as "Nazis".
4chan trolls (because every meme signals the deepest political conviction)
13-year-old edgelords (Those trying to excuse college students for immaturity suddenly take a dim view)
White nationalists (certainly not far off, but very much distinct from nazism)
Racists (as if nazism had no other components)
Republicans (yup, half the political spectrum, nazis)
White people (now we're talking a majority of the country)
to include Liberals (a bit of Antifa graffiti declared recently "Liberals get the bullet too")
So let's be clear here. If there were some sort of principled rule to allow violence against everyone's favorite bugbear ideology, there is no way to keep the definition narrow. The only people in the whole damned country that AREN'T Nazis are a couple hundred Antifa communists. In this environment, it is no wonder that the people unwilling to be shamed by that epithet are making their voice heard. And it's even less surprising that the group of "people not worried about being called Nazis" includes a few actual nazis.
Think of "Nazi" like "Rapist". It's a word that used to denote a truly terrible group. But then the definitions got stretched, and now the definitions of rape include any sex where the partner has had even a sip of alcohol, "non-physical behavior", "unwanted glances" and the like. We're all rapists now! And we're all nazis.
The discussion of "Nazi punching" is really the direct desire of the hard left to justify violence against quite literally the entire population of the world.
Of course the Constitution is a suicide pact. Specifically, it's a concrete embodiment of the revolution's sentiment: "Give me liberty or give me death."
(But suicide pacts can be abrogated, and so in theory could the Constitution.)
@Encinal
Ah, structural ambiguity. Gotta love it.
Yes. Your first disambiguation is the one I intended: "Speech is a fundamental right. That's why shouldn't ban it."
Please keep saying things like this. It lets everyone know you are too stupid to debate.
@Ken
Every institution has batshit crazy people. What you're doing is painting an institution with 40,173 active students and 1522 faculty and painting them by the actions of a couple hundred people many of whom weren't even students or faculty. I'm concerned by this anti-speech trend we've seen with the rise of the internet and apparent censorship supporting views among the young but lets not start yelling fire over some stupid protests with interactions between violent groups of people.
This was almost a setup with the attendance of violent neo-nazi groups and black-block protestors showing up to counter. Since the Milo bullshit there seems to be a trend for lots of outside groups that want to make trouble to show up to any protests at Berkley and if the cops aren't careful it's going to get worse each time and will go full blown riot with lots of bad people on both sides. But lets not blame Berkley or colleges in general for this.
ISIS has been labeled a terrorist organization, protesting as a member or supporter would likely get you indicted for trying to offer support to a terrorist organization. You might choose a better example but the answer is yes, if all they are doing is parading and talking they should have the right to do so regardless of ideology. But at the same time they shouldn't be immune from the social consequences of that speech and that means losing jobs, housing or anything else where people no longer want to do business with you because of your views.
If only that were actually true.
Right back at you.
We have reached a situation where very few people support freedom of speech for those who hold different opinions.
And it's even debatable whether you need the "as a circle" preamble.
Seems to me that the most reasonable thing a person could say about invitations to controversial speakers is that the cost to ensure security needs to be considered alongside the merits (or lack thereof) of the speech.
Usually, the group inviting the controversial speaker is doing it to be controversial, not to increase the totality of knowledge in the world/on the campus. What on earth is that Milo twit likely to say that has any objective value (for any meaning of the word objective)? But if there is some value, then (per the American Capitalist system), surely someone could be found to foot the bill for security… and if that happens, speak on!
Some guy lacking self-awareness posted
So you're okay with violence so long as the ideology being promoted is one you agree with?
Also, the Nazis were right wing in terms of many concrete policy positions. They were also left wing in terms of many other concrete policy positions. They were conservative in the sense that they promoted a Germany first, make Germany great again, pro-militarization stance. They were liberal in the sense that they were selling the idea that the status quo of the past two decades weren't working, and that it was time to throw out not only the old policies and the old government, but even the old system of government. The real greatest con is when people like Anon trick themselves into thinking they're libertarians, when in fact they're just they're merely the chumps who oppose the left-wing authoritarians because that's what their right-wing authoritarian masters tell them to.
Also, the problem with the Nazi exception is that even people who have a reasonable definition of Nazi (one that doesn't mean "everyone I disagree with") aren't necessarily thinking the same thing when they their arguments. If a Nazi is someone who promotes the ideology espoused by a bunch of war criminals and terrorists, then merely being a Nazi doesn't merit a free speech exception. If a Nazi is someone who was actively involved in the organizations that carried out the war crimes (unlikely now from a longevity standpoint) or terrorist acts (also unlikely because the neo-Nazis generally lack the ability and the balls to commit acts on the scale of the Islamic terrorists), then the free speech exception is irrelevant, because they're aiding and abetting, or participating in a criminal conspiracy, or violating some other law, and have a lot more coming to them than a punch to the face.
@Rosenfeldt
That people disagree on what actions are good hardly contradicts the claim that some acts are good.
Then the central issue is that their cause is bad. Their tactics are secondary.
Only with a bunch of qualifications, such as "some parts of Nazism" are supported by "some readings", is this true.
What do you disagree with, and why? Your argument is far from clear.
If that were true, then we would not, in fact, have the high ground over terrorists. We use violence against different ways of life all the time. The Nazis were not defeated by the Allies going around giving speeches about how bad the were. They were defeated by the Allies imposing their anti-Nazi views on Germany by force. If you want to be a moral nihilist and claim that there was no difference between the two sides, fine, but I'm going to continue believing there is a difference.
That people make bullshit claims is irrelevant.
I'm not going to try to explain morality to you.
Those are rather vague characterizations. You would have to be more specific for any determination to be made.
If someone has a fundamentally different moral foundation, then you can't "show" them that they're wrong.
The US doesn't disregard the safety of innocents, and terrorists do not target combatants.
@YoSup
Only one US citizen has been held in Guantanamo, and that was before it became known he was a citizen. And certainly no one captured in the US has been held in Guantanamo.
@Malc.
That sounds rather like a heckler's veto.
Increasing the totality of knowledge is generally not the primary consideration for speakers in general, and frequently not a significant one. When Bill Clinton gives a speech, the audience isn't there because he has anything important to say, they're there because being in the audience of a speech given by Clinton makes them feel special. How many speeches impart knowledge that couldn't be just as easily be imparted by taping one Youtube video, rather than having the speaker touring the country?
Why do you get to decide what has value?
Someone has: the university.
@ MIchael Vilain
"One of those rioters who punched a woman is now being prosecuted and expects Caligula to pay for it."
This would be the same woman who posted to facebook earlier that day that she was planning on purposefully disrupting the protest and bringing back 100 nazi scalps, yes? That's going to make for an interesting trial.
https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/04/18/boys-punching-girls-feminisms-big-win/
Oh, and she was throwing glass bottles. Can't forget that part.
It seems quite rational to believe that though traits may be present in all ethnic groups that they aren't necessarily evenly distributed among all groups thus allowing for a continuum of group talents, of whatever sort, ranging from high to low with the groups alternating in high or low placement depending on the aggregate expressed talent or trait. That the jargonization of the word 'supremacy' leads to some imagining the existence not to mention recognition of these differentials to constitute denying someone's existence shows how any group binding concept, including equality, can be made toxic when some commercial, employment or ideological leverage or desire for political dominance is thought to be at stake.
It is time wiser minds note this trend towards forced imbicility and take it seriously. Overly romanticized notions of material as opposed to legal equality can and are mestasizing at a ferocious rate and need to be addressed head on and not indirectly.
So, in this version of the left, the population is divided into two groups: The privileged, who are secure, powerful, and dominant, and therefore must constantly be challenged; and the vulnerable, whose vulnerability is so total that the wrong word might cause their utter destruction, and so words that could be wielded against them must be suppressed, and speech that they make from their position of weakness must be considered carefully and protected.
One thing this does that I don't see commented on much, is that this world-view massively deforms your understanding of actual power dynamics. Look here:
Heather Mac Donald is a fascist, a white supremacist, a warhawk, a transphobe, a queerphobe, a classist, and ignorant of interlocking systems of domination that produce the lethal conditions under which oppressed peoples are forced to live.
Like, dog, you're really comfortable explaining that a woman is "ignorant of interlocking systems of domination"? You understand that feminism was massively influential in creating the very rhetoric you're using, right? That those systems of domination include pervasive sexism?
Heather Mac Donald a woman. Milo Yiannopolous is gay. I have never, ever seen anybody ask what it means that an angry mob of presumably mostly straight kids chased a gay man off of the Berkely campus because they didn't like his opinions.
Because Milo Yiannopolous is a giant shit-head. If he was oppressed and a member of a vulnerable population that has been subjected to massive prejudice and legal sanctions, we would have to listen to him; since we don't want to listen to him, he must not be oppressed.
The clearest demonstration I ever saw of this was Garry Trudeau accusing Charlie Hebdo of "punching down". He really thought the best way to understand the power dynamics of that situation was to think of the writers of Charlie Hebdo inflicting violence on helpless Muslims. That is a god-damned Orwellian reversal of the direction of the actual violence.
But he had to do it, because he didn't like what Charlie Hebdo had to say, and if they were punching up or punching sideways or not punching anybody at all, he would have to accept their views.
He didn't have a vocabulary for criticizing the vulnerable, so he had to cast anybody he wanted to criticize as invulnerable.
@Encinal
I agree. But they don't, which is the point I'm trying to make. You claim that moral superiority in terms of your cause matters. I claim that moral superiority is subjective and thus unfit as a general metric. If the nazis had won the war, it strikes me as very likely that you would (ceteris paribus) be arguing that the allies' cause was obviously bad.
But who gets to define which of two competing claims is bullshit? You say, "I'm not going to try to explain morality to you", but it seems integral to your argument. I don't see how a nazi, a sharia advocate and a US libertarian could ever agree on what causes are moral.
Exactly. That's my main point. You two would be at an impass. You're convinced they're wrong, they're convinced you're wrong and you can't reconcile the two positions. Neither of you could ever be sure their view is right, but you both would adamantly feel that way.
But if I understand you correctly, you claim that the moral superiority of a cause can legitimize violent means. So it may well happen that these two people both find themselves justified in using violence against the other. You might be okay with that, but I'm not. That's no way to run a society.
"…In modern America, we are faced with genuine aspiring Nazis who believe in genocide."
Who are they? Richard Spencer and Anne Coulter?
*popcorn*
Anyway, just wanted to throw in another facet: the annoying co-worker who proclaims loudly "Well, the guy on the shift before me didn't do it, why should I do it?"
People only consider something fair when it benefits them.
Dude, it's a metaphor. Trudeau didn't think they were committing literal violence against Muslims. Yeesh. Next up, are you going to criticize football commentators for mounting fullscale armored assaults against their enemies? ("It's time for a blitz" says Phil Simms. "Evil!" says Christopher).
The Nazi exception also assumes that we are not tyrants of some kind. But this is a nation that puts whites (and especially straight white Christian males) at significant advantages over everyone else.
Here's where that matters: suppose you (a white person) are talking to a black friend who looks at the history of our nation and concludes: "blacks are always going to be victims of racism until whites are no longer in power, and sooner or later it's going to come to a fight. I know which side I'll be on." So, are you justified in punching him? As for myself, I say he's making a lucid point (which may or may not be right), and to punch him would only prove him right.
Ken,
I'm disappointed that you didn't sneak a "Blues Brothers" reference in here somewhere. (But if you did, and I missed it, then I'm disappointed in myself for missing it.)
Modern, ad hominem driven political rhetoric like this makes me pessimistic about the future. One side makes statements like this in good faith and good conscious. The other side, also in good faith and good conscious, thinks it's absurd to view anyone lower class (e.g., white trash) as "privileged." That is, treating one individual as "privileged" just because some other, completely unrelated individual has property, social capital, etc is unjust. And worse, the fact the two individuals are grouped together based on skin tone is, to be blunt, blatant racism. Circling back around to the Berkley riots, from that perspective, the Antifa crew appear to be violent racist thugs… at best, just a small step from the KKK (they even wear masks!) and the nazis.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not accusing you (or the political left) of anything. I know the 'left' and the 'right' have different definitions of fair, just, etc. I guess my point is that we really shouldn't use emotionally laden labels like racist, nazi, etc until we can explain the others' position with such clarity and precision that they would accept our characterization. Much less punch people based on those labels.
@total
It's not a problem that he used a violent metaphor.
it's a problem that Trudeau thinks the power dynamics of that whole situation are best expressed by saying "Charlie Hebdo goes around hurting weak people who can't fight back and they do it with impunity."
That's fucking crazy; a bunch of them got shot.
I guess those Muslims were shooting up?
I know Trudeau doesn't think they deserved to die, but he does seem to think that the risk of being murdered horribly doesn't factor into things at all. That a guy can be shooting at you while you cower in fear of your life and you're still the powerful one in that situation.
The power dynamics surrounding Muslims in Europe are complicated, okay? Muslims often face discrimination of various kinds, but the people who work at Charlie Hebdo clearly are not immune to pushback. When saying something puts your life in danger, I have trouble seeing it as "punching down".
That thing you say might be incorrect, bigoted, and monstrous,.but that doesn't mean it's punching down.
That's not what he said. His main point was that satire traditionally went after the powerful, not the powerless (and by powerless, he doesn't mean that they can't commit violence — but that they were politically powerless in the French system). Charlie Hebdo went after people who were already under attack from a broad range of folks, already marginalized in France, and Trudeau thinks that's wrong.
"Charlie Hebdo went after people who were already under attack from a broad range of folks, already marginalized in France, and Trudeau thinks that's wrong."
Yeah, man, I know. Like, they went after the Pope and the Catholic Church. Talk about marginalized……….
Oh, brother. Your point does not negate Trudeau's
Shame on Trudeau – a guy who made millions by virtue of drawing cartoons featuring sarcastic ridicule of political and social events – for excusing the murder of people who did exactly what he did. A classic example of political considerations trumping logical consistency and objectivity. I came of age during the time when he was an up-and-coming cartoonist and used to love his stuff. Too bad he turned out to be just another politically blinded dumbass.
You really paid no attention to his point, did you?
I'm seeing a lot of pro-censorship arguments here, or at least defensive of those who call for censorship, but very little of that includes defining what a "Nazi" actually is. Just as bunch of fuzzy feel-good-isms in lieu of rigorous thought.
An extremely important point is being left aside: What if /you/ are the one being called a "Nazi", and being censored? That you believe that you are not a Nazi is irrelevant. The people they are wanting to censor believe that they are not Nazis, and with plenty of justification. Milo Y. not only is not a Nazi, but couldn't have been a Nazi. He's just hated by the Left, and that's enough, it seems, to brand him as a Nazi and making him subject to censorship.
Another salient point being overlooked is that /the Nazis were notorious censors/. they burned books, banned speech, and disappeared people as means of censorship. Those who advocate for censorship are acting in the same way that Nazis did.
And finally, since I have to stop somewhere, for some silly reason, people have spoken about how in Europe, where they censor speech, everything is hunky-dory. Tell the satirist who was censored for making the wrong kind of fun of the dictator of Turkey, and ask how ok things were for /him/. He is banned from using the original satirical ditty /because it hurt the feelings of a totalitarian dictator**/.
*I'd try making a case that yes, elements of the Left control the social culture on most campuses., but those who agree with me need no convincing, and those who do not cannot be convinced otherwise, in the here and now. Let's just bear in mind that many controversial speakers have been lionized by colleges and their students, and were not subjected to a special hate-tax in order to speak. College activists don't shut down their heroes, but they do shut down those who they view as villains. The Left supported Melissa Click, the notorious censor who wanted some muscle to make it stick.
**Call him a president, if you wish, but he walks like a dictator and quacks like a dictator.
After some time, I have decided to address the position regarding the Campus Left's influence. and how it is of no consequence. It's right here for all to see. People arguing in favor of censoring people they dislike*. Absent the agitation of college students on the Left, and the environment created to produce such actions and beliefs, no one would be here taking a pro-censorship stand. Ok, perhaps the odd crank, now and then, but not to this extent.
This is not the product of the Right. It can't be blamed on the Kochs, or Fox News, or GOP leadership. College faculties are so loaded with Leftists as to create controlling majorities. Even if the numbers were equal, those professors who favor the Right are in the sciences, not the social engineering departments, so their voices have little bearing on campus activists. Science depends on facts, not feelings, and on getting correct answers down on the test sheet, something that isn't "fair", for some reason.
*It's /always/ the other bloke who should be censored. Those calling for censorship never want their team censored, only the opposition. This demonstrates how they feel about human rights. If they cared about the rights of others, they wouldn't be calling to infringe on those rights. QED. (Their own rights, however, are sacrosanct.)
@ Total
No, I understand his point. I'm saying he's full of shit. And a hypocrite.
Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Though I'd still burn me some Lutherans.
Well, let me rephrase then: your comment is so non-responsive to his actual point, that it seems like you didn't understand it.
But, in any case, I didn't actually say you didn't understand it, I said you paid no attention to it.
The point is too stupid to deserve attention.
My point, in my original response to someone bringing Hebdo into this, was to point out that they made fun of the goofiness that the secular see in ALL religions. Is the expectation that they were to ignore Islam because you and Trudeau think that Muslims are marginalized?
Not to mention that they weren't actually making fun of the Marginalized Muslims. Their death-worthy offense was making fun of Muhammad. Muhammad is not marginalized – you don't get much more powerful than that guy.
It's a bullshit point and your smug defense of Trudeau's backdoor way of saying "they asked for it" is offensive. You would find "they asked for it" offensive in other circumstances.
See? You can actually respond to the point of Trudeau's argument. Not well, but responsive, at least.
And your response is undercut by Charlie Hebdo's own logic: they did what they did to provoke, and they weren't to provoke the powerful (Muhammad's dead, as you should know, so they're not targeting him), they wanted to provoke Muslims in France, Muslims who are relatively powerless. Hebdo's aim was to provoke and it worked.
That doesn't mean, and Trudea nowhere argues nor would I defend, that they deserved to be killed.
His basic logic, however, that they were deliberately provoking the powerless, is entirely accurate.
Gary Trudeau punches down.
Gary Trudeau punches down.
Yeah, no, good try, but unless Charlie Hebdo had an arabic language translation, the Muslims they were aiming at were in France, where they are a disenfranchised minority.
You've just made this argument: racist satire of African-Americans is perfectly fine because Robert Mugabe has been mean to people.
Was that the logic you wanted?
Trent says: " the vast majority of professors, particularly from all the non-humanities like the science, engineering and business departments are all very similar to everyone else…"
Would that this was true. I did some research. I went through the FEC's database of political donations. I extracted donations to presidential candidates, made from 9/1/2015 to 4/30/16, by employees of the 93 colleges and universities with the highest average entering SATs and at least 5,000 undergrads. These donations totaled $3.5M.
92% of the donations were to Democrats: Clinton, Sanders, O'Malley, Webb, and Lawrence Lessig. Lessig got more donations from this pool than Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Rand Paul, Rick Santorum, or Scott Walker.
This is not "very similar to everyone else".
I'm pretty sure that just shows good judgment, as opposed to partisanship. I mean, even if you were a Republican, would you really want to be associated with Rick Santorum?
@Total:
So, so far you've claimed/implied that:
The intended audience of satire is always the people being satirized.
Muslims in France are not allowed to vote. That, or else it's okay to take a word that literally means "not allowed to vote", and debase it to the point where it has no objective meaning, and instead is thrown around as a contentless epithet.
Charlie Hebdo has engaged in racist satire of French Mulims, or at the very least satire that is suitably analogous to racism.
The relationship that Muslims in France have to Mohammed/Islam is somehow analogous to the relationship that black people have to Mugabe's regime.
Muslims in France are powerless. Or "relatively" powerless, whatever the fuck that weasel term means. Despite the fact that they, you know, wiped out the staff of Charlie Hebdo.
Your entire argument resets on premise after premise that only leftwing nutjobs accept.
And of course, you have refused to admit that you were wrong about Berkeley treating Milo the same as everyone else.
Whoops, I've gotten Total confused with one of the other trolls here.
@Rosenfeldt
I'm not seeing what point there is here.
The term “subjective” is itself a rather vague term, and a poor basis for criticism. And claiming that moral superiority is poor metric is a bizarre claim. Any “ought” claim is a claim of moral superiority. Any metric on which we base our moral decisions is, by definition, a claim of moral superiority.
It does not strike me as likely. And even if I am doing so in some alternative timeline, that's irrelevant.
That's not a well-formed question.
It's integral to the implementation, but it's irrelevant to my argument.
How is that a point?
That other people disagree with me does not stop me from being sure that I'm right.
Why would I be okay with that? If they were both following my morality, they would agree on the moral course, and would not feel justified in using violence to advance any other cause. If they refuse to accept my morality, then my position on violence is irrelevant. You seem to be engaging in fallacious thinking here. You seem to be implicitly relying on some Kantian type reasoning, but applying it only partially. You can't take one part of my moral system, strip it away from everything else, glue it onto some other moral system, and then criticize it based on what results.
Again, you seem to be engaged in some confused thinking. What is this “run a society” thing? To run a society presumably is to impose one standard on it. So this would not be endorsing the situation you describe. (Also, running a society means using violence, so apparently you are opposed to all ways of running a society).
If African Americans were fans of Robert Mugabe–if one of their defining traits were being Mugabe fans–then yeah, they'd deserve the cruellest, most scathing, and most hurtful forms of satire at one's disposal. In such a COUNTERFACTUAL (I must stress) scenario, they'd be boils upon the country's hinder, fit only for mockery and not for a moment to be treated like normal, functional, welcome members of society. Their powerfulness in America, or lack thereof, wouldn't change that.
Of course, this scenario is 100% fictional, and doesn't begin to describe the African-American demographic (quite the contrary). But it's the only way in which your example would be germane to the issue of Muslims in France.
@ Total
Trudeau during the Iranian Revolution punching down on Muslims in a series of cartoons that goes on for a good two weeks:
http://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1979/04/02
So a guy who got rich and famous using his free speech rights to draw cartoons containing sarcastic observations related to world events criticizes somebody else using their free speech rights to do the same thing. If only there were a word in the English language to describe that type of attitude……….
@Encinal
Your style of "debating" is very arduous to follow. You expect people to understand your position without ever explaining it, but don't extend the same courtesy to anyone else and get side-tracked in minor details and formalisms. Any half-way decent argumentation class should have taught you the principles of charity and context. If you are unwilling to make an effort to understand my position we might as well stop, as we are wasting both our times.
A true statement in general, but missing the point, as you damn well know we're only talking about causes legitimizing violence and not "any 'ought' claim". I'm presenting a moral argument about why they should not, but I'm not basing it on the moral superiority of any particular one of them (as I believe no such thing exists outside of my irrelevant personal view). My ideal system should provide guidance without even looking at the contents of any of the causes.
Then you have been presenting a completely irrelevant argument the whole time. The very basic premise of this whole discussion is, there are competing causes with very different standards of morality out there (in terms of the original post by Ken: left wing radicals wanting to punch nazis and nazis now wanting to punch left wing radicals). Then you came in and claimed everyone's cause needed a moral high-ground and given this had the potential to justify violent means.
In the context of whether punching political opponents is a good rule to generalize, I'm taking the position that your system leads to bad outcomes. Your opponent not accepting your full morality system does not lead to your opponent completely disregarding everything you do. Your opponent will rather disagree with your cause, but use your violent means to legitimize their own violence, be it in self-defense or in repaying you in kind. Your position on violence is most decidedly not irrelevant, as you'll be the one opening the door on it.
Well, what do you think we are arguing about? Ken's last sentence is "But I decline the invitation to help these students destroy the village in order to save it." We're talking about the rules that govern our co-existence.
Yes, if everyone were to subscribe to one system of morality (yours for example) we wouldn't have an issue. But this is not what reality (or this blog post) presents us with. People have many causes, many positions and most hold them dear to their heart and will not give them up. Accepting that one or some of these causes have an inherent property by virtue of their moral superiority that allows them to justifiably use violence against other causes will lead most causes to assume, they too have that property as their cause is obviously the most superior one.
In recognizing this plurality of positions, I want to take a step back and uncouple opinions from actions. Everyone can have their cause and advocate for it, but even out of sheer self-preservation, everyone should adhere to non-violent means, regardless of how superior they feel. Because they should recognize that everyone feels superior about their own cause.
You brought up Kant… I'm not a big fan, but my line of reasoning should somewhat mesh with the categorical imperative. Both are based on the golden rule after all.
This is a complete non-sequitur and strawman argument. We've never talked about abolishing all violence. But violence should never by legitimized by an ideology, only by violent actions. Self-defense, i.e. physical violence in response to physical violence, is an integral part of running a society. Whoever threw the first punch is fair game (within proportionality of course). But the very concept of self-defense shows, how initial aggression can never be legitimized with moral superiority – it always justifies the victim's self-defense regardless of their political leanings! Frankly, I don't see how initiating violence is necessary to run a society.
“Whoops, I've gotten Total confused with one of the other trolls here”
I do enjoy it, Encinal, when you pour an entire bucket of sewage over your own head and sit there blinking and smiling.
“If African Americans were fans of Robert Mugabe–if one of their defining traits were being Mugabe fans–then yeah, they'd deserve the cruellest, most scathing, and most hurtful forms of satire at one's disposal”
You do realize that the Mugabe parallel is not Muhammad, it’s Islamic terrorists, right? Because lots of French muslims have condemned violent Islam, and thus are not friends of “Mugabe.” So the analogy is perfectly fine, thanks. But thanks for playing.
“Trudeau during the Iranian Revolution punching down on Muslims in a series of cartoons that goes on for a good two weeks:”
Wow, dude, had to go back to 1979 to get that one, and one where Trudeau wasn’t going after marginalized Muslims in the United States, he was going after ones who were, you know, actually in power in Iran at that time. So, still punching up.
(Hey, folks? Part of the embarrassment of the analysis in the original post and in a lot of comments, is that y’all are treating Muslims as one giant bloc of people who have the same ideas, experiences, level of power, and outlook, as opposed to several billion people across the globe with a range of different lives.)
But — even if your example wasn’t silly — it illustrates another thing about Trudeau, who said in his comments that:
“And I’m still trying to get it right. Doonesbury remains a work in progress, an imperfect chronicle of human imperfection…”
It’s almost as if he himself recognizes that he’s failed at his goals at times, and has thus tried to think more thoughtfully and deliberately about them; that he’s tried to recognize that he has a responsibility to think about what he’s doing, and that he’s suggesting others should think about that responsibility.
Much good those condemnations did the Charlie staff, or have done the Frenchmen who've died since then. If insulting a particular religious minority is as likely to result in violent payback as it allegedly is in France, then don't back down, and to the depths of South Hell with their feelings. Don't just punch down; stomp down. Hell, put a roll of quarters in each fist, and punch down with everything you've got until your arms get tired. Get some rest. Resume punching.
"Hey, the guy who assassinated Rabin was Jewish! Yay! Now we can fire up all the anti-semitic stuff we want to!"
@Total
Right, not keeping track of which idiots posted what idiocy is “pouring sewage”, and posting an embarrassed acknowledgment of error is “blinking and smiling”. And to top it out, you followed a quote from me with a quote from Dictatortot without any acknowledgment that the quote are from different people. Unlike you, I admit it when I'm wrong.
Charlie Hebdo attacked Mohammed, which you then turned into them attacking Islam, and since CH is French, it must be French Muslims, but then in your analogy we're back to Mohammed rather than Muslims. Surely you can see how it's difficult to keep track? How is " its okay to attack Mohammed if his followers do bad things" analogous to "attacking black people is okay if another black person did bad things"?
Oh, and just to be clear, these “Islamic terrorists” are MAINSTREAM MUSLIMS. In some cases, we're talking about actions by democratically elected Muslim governments.
But French Muslims who are okay with Mohammed being criticized are by definition not the people being “punched”.
No, the analogy is crap. You haben't shown how CH engaged in racism, or in any way shown how the analogy is in way appropriate.
But it wasn't written in Farsi, so according to YOUR OWN LOGIC, it must have been directed towards American Muslims.
And according to Leftist ideology, the entire country of Iran was a victim of Western Imperialism, so it was punching down.
Oh, please. YOU are the one who insisted that any criticism of any aspect of Islam is an attack on all Muslims.
@Rosenfeldt
This paragraph strikes as quite rude. I have been acting in good faith, and if you're going to ascribe my actions to bad faith simply because you don't understand my thinking, then you're the one acting uncaritably.
An implicit accusation of bad faith, which is quite uncivil. I really don't see how YOU are acting in good faith here. We are discussing whether causes legitimize violence. That is an ought claim. Any ought claim is a claim of moral superiority. Therefore, you are making a claim of moral superiority. It really looks to me that you are mistaking an inability to follow a logical argument on your part for a lack of logical argument on my part. But out charity, I'm willing to entertain other hypotheses.
Nonsense. You are claiming that your position that violence should not be justified by a cause is morally superior to my position.
How so?
Hold on a second. Are you literally referring to “punching political opponents”? If yes, then you are attacking a straw man, as I never endorsed that. If you are speaking metaphorically, then you are adding unnecessary obliqueness and confusion to this discussion.
Yours leads to worse.
We are arguing about the claim that some causes justify violence.
No, it will not lead “most” causes to do so. The percentage of causes that claim the right to violence, but wouldn't if only I would renounce violence, is tiny.
It would be one thing if everyone subscribed to that position, but that's not the choice. The choice is between evil people using violence and me not, or both of us using violence.
Just to show you how charitable I can be, I won't call you a liar, even though this whole discussion started with you taking issue with my claim that there are situations where violence is justified, thereby established that you take the opposing point of view, which can only mean that you think that there are no situations where violence is justified.
If you think that violence should be justified by violent actions, then THAT is an ideology, and thus violence is being justified by an ideology.
Self-defense, i.e. physical violence in response to physical violence, is an integral part of running a society.
So then you're claiming that self-defense is a cause that can justify violence.
You're the one attacking a straw man: I never said anything about INITIAL aggression (although, if you're not a libertarian, then arguably you do support initial aggression, but that's an argument we probably shouldn't get into).
Remember Encinal: the only thing that all these debates you keep losing have in common is you.
But it did give me a laugh that you called someone ELSE an idiot, and someone ELSE a troll. Just taking all the adjectives that apply to you, and hoping the 'I'm rubber, you're glue' tactic will actually work, eh?
You post that Berkeley treated Milo the same as everyone else, a claim that is clearly false, and I'm the troll? Just because you refuse to admit that you're wrong doesn't mean I'm losing the debate. Do you have a rebuttal to my pointing out that Berkeley treated Milo differently, or are you just going to once again simply ignore my post and declare yourself the victor?
You don't see the hypocrisy of accusing me of "I'm rubber, you're glue"? I've acting proved that you're wrong. You've done nothing but declare me to have lost the debate, as judged by no one but you, and perhaps your fellow idiots like Total.
You keep claiming that the Berkeley claim is false, yet have presented zero evidence of this. Probably because it's true that Berkeley treated Milo just like anyone else. The best you've done is talked about how he was treated and then ignored that that isn't actually any different from how others have been treated, except in your imagination.
You keep claiming that you've proven people wrong, despite consistently providing zero proof. Of much of anything. You simply claim things, then act like that is all the evidence you need.
Hence why it's so funny when you accuse people of adjectives that better describe you – like any other time, you lack any evidence at all to support your claims.
Yes, yes, it is.
(Unlike you, Encinal, I never claimed I was responding to single person in my posts, so good try on the false equivalency there)
Blinking and smiling is not a bad look for you, actually. Pity about the smell.
The sad thing is having educated people argue for the Nazi clause, and claim some sort of quasi-legal basis for it, despite the fact that the 1977 NAZIs vs. Skokie Supreme Court ruling was quite clear about how low (or high depending on one's perspective) the bar is set for protection of said speech. To me this undercuts all of the current discourse that seeks to condone the increasingly common "the ends justifies the means" mentality when it comes to shutting down those who voice perspectives that others find abhorrent. As pointed out, the vast majority of people being attacked for being Nazis or Facists are neither. And even if they were, Nazis vs. Skokie "77 applies. The horse has been dead for 40 years, time to quit beating it.
@GuestPoster
1. You're the one claiming I'm wrong, so you're the one with the burden of proof.
2. You had no problem with Ann claiming that a senator tried to ban gender-neutral pronouns and refusing to provide evidence.
3. I presented the claims that Berkeley charged him security fees and then canceled the event anyway.
So every single proposed speaker at Berkeley has been charged security fees, then had their event canceled? You are making no sense at all.
Pot, kettle.
I don't have evidence that you're an idiot? You just claimed that Berkeley never allows people to speak at the university. Unless you're going to make some speculative counterfactual argument.
@Total
Yeah, you just presented the quotes in a manner that any reasonable person would interpret as being from the same person, and then fell back on a bullshit "I didn't *actually say* that" excuse when called on it.
Also, I acted in good faith and acknowledged my error once I noticed it. You deliberately implied a false statement and pretended to have not done so. I never said these are equivalent; on the contrary, I think your actions are worse than mine. So calling this a false equivalency is yet another example of your dishonesty.
Since I was responding to you rather than a reasonable person, I think I'm okay.
APRIL 23, 2017 AT 4:01 PM
Total compares criticizing Mohammed to the Holocaust.
You are fucking disgusting excuse for a person.
This is what I said on 04/23 at 4:01 PM (first sentence is a quote from someone else; second sentence is my parody of that comment):
If insulting a particular religious minority is as likely to result in violent payback as it allegedly is in France, then don't back down, and to the depths of South Hell with their feelings
"Hey, the guy who assassinated Rabin was Jewish! Yay! Now we can fire up all the anti-semitic stuff we want to!"
There's nothing there about the Holocaust (for those who need a history refresher, Rabin was assassinated in 1995).
Another bucket of sewage over the head for you, Encinal, and more blinking and smiling.
"Holocaust", as anyone with half a brain understands, is a subset of "all the anti-semitic stuff". You're the one with the bucket of sewage.
After you pour the sewage, Encinal, don't put the bucket on your head, there's a good lad.
Total, Encinal, get a room already, will you?
@Rich Rostrom
"This is not 'very similar to everyone else'."
Trent's point was that most professors are not anti-free-speech or, to use his expression, "bat-shit crazy." I'm sure you're right that the majority of professors who are affiliated with a party are affiliated with the Democrats. But (and I hate to break this to you) being a Democrat falls very much within the range of normal. You may have forgotten, but the Democrats actually took the plurality of the vote in 6 out of the last 7 presidential elections, so they are not a fringe group in any way.
You will object that your point is that any group whose members are way-more-likely-than-average to be members of a particular party is not a "perfectly normal" group. But that argument goes way too far. It would imply, for example, that evangelical Christians and African Americans aren't normal, because they are very likely to be Republicans and Democrats, respectively. Probably most people are members of at least one group with such a strong affiliation (e.g. "white Southerner" or "urbanite")
College professors (generally) have shared views about the importance education. They (generally) believe in civil rights. The institutions they work for rely (directly or indirectly) on public support. Why would I be surprised that they are mostly Democrats?
And if your data come from this last election-cycle, I could add one more thing: college professors do not gladly suffer fools and charlatans. They get enough "alternative facts" from their undergrads, and they don't need any more from what's-his-face.
6 out of 7? Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, bush, Reagan, Carter… I don't see six democrats there.
These students condem violence, yet they turn to it to silence their foes much like the Nazis they declaim.
@Cecil
I said 6 out of the last 7 ELECTIONS, not presidents. Count 'em. The plurality of the popular vote went to:
Clinton
Clinton
Gore
Bush
Obama
Obama
Clinton
Since 1992, Republicans only won the plurality of the vote in 2004.