Two posts on speech:
Mike Godwin, the author of Godwin's law
I sometimes have some ambivalence about the Law, which is far beyond my control these days. Like most parents, I'm frequently startled by the unexpected turn my 18-year-old offspring takes. (I'm happy to say that my 15-year-old offspring—my daughter, Ariel Godwin—surprises me at least as often, although invariably in happier ways.) When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates—but I am the one person in the world least able to draw attention to that valid comparison.Overall, though, I'm content that the Law has as much popcult traction as it does. My feeling is that "Never Again" loses its meaning if we don't regularly remind ourselves of the terrible inflection point marked in human culture by the Holocaust. Sure, there has been genocide before that point and genocide after it, but to see an advanced, highly civilized nation warp itself into something capable of creating such a horror—well, I think Nazi Germany does count as a first in that regard.
And to a great extent, our challenge as human beings who live in the period after that inflection point is that we no longer can be passive about history—we have a moral obligation to do what we can to prevent such events from ever happening again. Key to that obligation is remembering, which is what Godwin's Law is all about.
And Julian Sanchez on shouting down those you disagree with
It’s a little depressing, on multiple levels, to see Jessica Valenti and Pam Spaulding celebrating because protesters at Smith College managed to shout down some bigoted halfwit who’d been invited to give a speech to the College Republican group on campus. Apparently, the “awesome feminists of Smith forced [anti-gay speaker Ryan] Sorba out after a mere twenty minutes of speaking, when he was drowned out by protesters.”It’s sad first at a principled level, because two women who student feminists around the country look to as guides are endorsing the utterly illiberal idea that the proper response to bad speech—and after skimming a draft of Sorba’s preposterous forthcoming book, I can confirm that his remarks were destined to be both loathesome and stupid—is to silence the speaker. The man’s views may be repulsive, but the students who invited him were entitled to have an opportunity to evaluate those views and come to their own conclusions about their merits. Indeed, had the protesters sent in a couple of halfway-bright students from the biology and philosophy departments during Q&A, I’m confident they could have made the poverty of his reasoning embarrassingly clear to all in attendance. It probably would have made a hell of a YouTube clip, as well. Instead, by choosing bullying over persuasion, they handed this jackass the moral high ground, for what I can only assume is the first and last time in his life.
It’s also sad at the tactical level, because it shows how little some folks have learned from a decade of David Horowitz’s antics. Congratulations, guys: You’ve just elevated this obscure clown into the online right’s celebrity du jour. I’m glad you enjoy the video clip of the students shouting Sorba down so much, because you’re about to see a lot of it, on a hundred conservative blogs, as proof that those awful boorish feminists are so afraid of Sorba’s “ideas” that they’re unwilling to engage him in debate, or indeed, to even let anyone hear whatever “devastating” case he was planning to make. How many times does this scenario have to play out before people start to recognize that it always ends up as a PR coup for the supporters of the silenced speaker?
. . .
Conservatives think Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are “hate speech”. “Men’s rights” activists say feminists regularly engage in hate speech. Presumably they, too, would like to send a message that those speakers are unwelcome on their campuses. You can say “well, their view is wrong and the Smith students’ view is correct,” but insofar as the disagreement is still there, this is pretty unhelpful: Everyone thinks they’re right, and so everyone feels entitled to drown out the speech they dislike. You end up with the meaningless principle: “Free speech, except when we feel strongly enough about how terrible and wrong it is.”
I suppose that works out fine in Northampton: If someone’s invading your safe space, someone whose ideas and way of life are not just wrong but deeply abhorrent, an assault on your identity and community by their very presence, then the community can hound them out—at least if enough people feel strongly enough about it. But I’m guessing LGBT folks in the rest of America might be less sanguine about living under that set of rules.
I don't know if it's new, or if I'm just projecting, but why do so many people seem to be rejecting the notion of civilized discourse as a process? Too many people seem to view speech mostly as a weapon--useful only insofar as it can be used to attack your enemies. Would the world really be a better place if we all believed Marsh's adage that language was given to us to enable us to conceal our thoughts?
It's stupid because if your ideas really are that obviously superior, you oughtn't to need to shout someone else down--the act betrays a certain sneaking suspicion that your ideas mightn't be good enough to succeed through persuasion. And might I add that personally, I'm kind of sickened by the notion that women need a special "safe space" for discussion. All discourse should strive to be civilized, but my delicate little female psyche doesn't need protection from stupid ideas, thank you very much. Having not ridden on a fast train or engaged in vigorous athletics recently, my feminine mind is still (just barely!) strong enough to withstand their assault.
It's also stupid because you can't run a country this way, especially when you're in a small minority. There is no shortcut to consensus; you can't muscle your way to political legitimacy. Indeed, that's why dictators are so keen to shut down dissent.
I don't know if it's new, or if I'm just projecting, but why do so many people seem to be rejecting the notion of civilized discourse as a process? Too many people seem to view speech mostly as a weapon--useful only insofar as it can be used to attack your enemies. Would the world really be a better place if we all believed Marsh's adage that language was given to us to enable us to conceal our thoughts?
There is a western tradition of 'treasonous words'. Why was Socrates made to drink Hemlock by order of the state? The wars of religion between catholic and protestant come to mind too, where the wrong pamphlet or wrong words could lead to a fiery end.
In modern American political history I would take a close look at Nixon and the RNC under him and how they set out to make as much liberal thought and speach as possible taboo. A steady process which you can watch nightly on FOX. (FDR did the same thing to isolationist ideas if you want an example from the DNC)
The trend today is towards freer speach. The internet has led the way as a model to emulate. But many media institutions are comfortable with the old ways; 'playing' the arbitrer of right and wrong.
I think Godwin is right to be ambivalent about the effects of renouncing comparisons to Nazis on political discussion. As he says, the Holocaust was an "inflection" -- that's a very good way of putting it, highlighting the difference from "singularity". Many of the most morally revolting aspects of modern political society come to the fore in Nazism, and being able to identify aspects of that political experience present in other political experiences, be it Israeli discourse, Palestinian discourse, Abu Ghraib, or tolerance for factory farming, can be a very helpful way to look at things. So we lose something by banishing that from discussion.
I never thought the utility of Godwin's Law had to do with protecting the uniqueness of our revulsion at Nazism. I always thought it was an admission of the very limited ability we all have to sustain reasoned debate. The universal consensus we in the democratic West share about the extreme evil of Nazism is a sort of discursive WMD which no one can be trusted to use wisely in political debate. There was a time when the word "Communist" was similarly useless and toxic in political debate. Fortunately that has faded somewhat since '89, and that word isn't such poison to discussion anymore; though, predictably, the people who are still using Communism as a reference point tend to be the people who understand the least about it and are least interested in drawing useful conclusions by using it.
Civilized discourse requires attention and focus on the other person. You have to listen to them at least enough to understand what they are saying; extra credit if you can actually project yourself into the other person's mindset, and really grok why what they say makes sense to them. This requires considerable effort, even for someone who has the skill. It burns a lot of calories; the brain has to consume a lot of energy to handle new stimuli consciously.
Alternately, uncivilized response requires an appeal to lines of thought you've already practiced in your own mind, triggered by words here and there in what you've heard. It's motor memory; learned response. It's much, much more efficient; the brain can handle it at the subconscious level.
In short, people avoid civilized discourse because we're lazy.
Not that I think this is a final condemnation. We're not always lazy; we're just that way most of the time. Or, we're diverting our energy to things that will actually put food on the table. "Discourse" is what we do on our break.
It's far from new. Shouting down speakers was commonplace in the radical '60s era, for example. And it is routine in modern talk radio and what passes for television news. It's not as if Rush gives opposing viewpoints uninterupted time in order to hold constructive conversations.
The trend at this particular moment in history is for the right to do this more than the left. Or rather, the extremes tend to do this, but the extreme left is marginal while the extreme right is considered mainstream. These feminists doing this is newsworhty because this behavior bubbles up from the left side so much less frequently. When the pendulum swings the other way, this will change. That's why I prefer the sensible center (which nowadays means Democratic, but has in the past meant Republican and could well again).
These feminists doing this is newsworhty because this behavior bubbles up from the left side so much less frequently.
Not spending much time on campus these days, eh? This sort of thing is a pretty routine staple of conservative news sources, although usually the protesters are not as successful because campus security does something about it.
As much as I dislike shouting people down, however, I can't help but endorse the bikers who rev their Harleys to drown out Fred Phelps at soldiers' funerals.
Richard, your sense of the dominant "downshouters" strikes me as anecdotal. Where I nest - which includes not just where I live and work, but also the places I visit on the web - I see much, much more of this behavior on the left than on the right.
You could probably point to why I feel this way, if you were to follow me around on a typical day. For starters, I almost never listen to Limbaugh; he's simply not on the radio when I am. (I tend to get NPR.) I don't read DailyKos, but I get more reports of stuff from there than I do from, say Little Green Footballs. And, I live on the east coast, as opposed to the heartland.
Not to mention, what views you're used to can influence your perception. If I heard a rabid left winger and a rabid right winger talking, and wasn't paying special attention, I'd probably be more likely to remember the left winger days later.
It's perspective. Honestly, I don't really know who's got the upper hand in the nastiness department.
Who was the last lesbian speaker invited to speak to the Liberal Students' Association at Oral Roberts University, and what kind of reception did she get? There are lots of ways of shutting out debate.
The debate seems to be one of principle against practicality. That is, a question of when repressing speech is wrong for any reason, versus a question of when repressing speech is detrimental to an end.
I can think of situations when it is both immoral and impractical to suppress speech, as well as some when it is both moral and practical, and for good measure, immoral yet practical.
Are there situations when shouting down a person within one's rights, but not wise to do?
Northern Observer wants to lay the kind of shout-downs we see all too often in academia at the feet of Nixon, Fox News, and the RNC. Does this make any sense at all? Do we in recent years see the type of physical and verbal aggression frequently used to block speech on campuses more often coming from the right or the left? And even if the RNC and Fox News have conspired to make liberal ideas taboo, has there not been a parallel trend on college campuses and in the media to make the discussion of many ideas on the right effectively taboo?
And certainly, no respectable conservative thinker that I'm aware of has made audacious claims that the New Left deity Marcus made with his theory of Repressive Tolerance. I'm at work so have limited resources, but I found some relevant quotations from Reason's website:
For a revolutionary theorist, Marcuse was refreshingly frank. The "reopening" of the channels of true toleration and liberation, now "blocked by organized repression and indoctrination," must be accomplished sometimes by "apparently undemocratic means." Marcuse suggested that these would include "the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements which promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or which oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc."
"Liberating tolerance," Marcuse wrote, in contrast to "indiscriminate tolerance" or "repressive tolerance," would be "intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left." This duality "would extend to the stage of action as well as of discussion of propaganda, of deed as well as of word." It was important that intolerance apply to regressive words as well as to regressive deeds, because, for Marcuse, words had real consequences, and if the consequences were to be avoided, the words must be silenced.
The actions of these feminists seems to be a direct application of Marcuse's ideology. But apparently, with the special tinfoil hat issued to folks like northern observer, you can discover that it's really all Richard Nixon's fault.
Who was the last lesbian speaker invited to speak to the Liberal Students' Association at Oral Roberts University, and what kind of reception did she get? There are lots of ways of shutting out debate.
brooksfoe: So you're down with my equating the level of scholarly inquiry and intellectual tolerance at Smith College with that at Oral Roberts University, are you? Glad to hear as much. I'm always amused when folks on the left make this kind of tu quoque argument. It's an attractive fallacy because it can in fact be quite effective, but it's effective only if the two persons or institutions being compared are roughly comparable. Thus, it can be effective, if still fallacious to respond to criticisms of the NYT by saying that the WSJ does the same thing, but you've got to pity the poor liberal who responds to criticisms of the Times by pointing to the foibles of Fox News. As a conservative who loathes both the Times and Fox News, I'm all too happy to grant my opponent's point, but you'd think that liberals would be a bit more . . . self-aware?
Here's the thing: I've attended Bob Jones University, a standard PC liberal arts graduate school at a private, non-sectarian university, and one of the nation's top professional degree programs in my field. Thankfully, there was little of the PC mindset at the third institution, but I always got a kick out of the eerie parallels between the fundamentalist mindset at Bob Jones (which I have come to loathe) and the PC mindset at my graduate school, and I was all too happy to point that out to folks, most of whom were not amused. But now brooksfoe has brought joy to my heart by effectively admitting that the fundamentalist Bible college and Smith College are essentially identical and that one can't expect any more from the latter than from the former.
Dirty Sanchez doesn't like it when students exercise their right to free speech by shouting down a bigot. Get Dirty some smelling salts and a fainting couch!
Free speech for Dirty, but not those he doesn't agree with.
(Yes, Dirty ostensibly sides with the protestors on the merits, but in a concern-trollish, Miss Manners-y way. Screw politeness. Shouting down an a##hole doesn't make David Horowitz less of an a##hole either.)
Richard: no. There is no left-wing educational institution equivalent in its explicit ideological commitments to Bob Jones or Oral Roberts. Proof? Ryan Sorba was invited to speak at Smith College by the College Republicans. No open lesbian has ever been invited to speak to the College Democrats at Bob Jones University, in part because...there are no College Democrats at Bob Jones University.
That was the point of my post, which appears to have escaped you. For there to even be an equivalently closed-minded academic institution on the left to those on the right, there would have to be a Vladimir Lenin Atheist Homosexual University in Provincetown, MA, explicitly affiliated with the Communist Party USA, or something along those lines. Perhaps they could compete against Bob Jones in a cappella sing-offs.
My problem here is with the false equivalences. Rush interrupting someone who called HIS show is entirely different than protestors disrupting an invited speaker to a campus.
Those protestors interfere with public discourse, and people going to hear a speaker on campus have the right to do so. You don't have the right to get phone-time on Rush's show.
Same with the comparision of death camps to Abu Gharaib. That's such an incredible leap it's shocking. The DEATH camps didn't exist to humiliate jews, and if that was all the Nazi government did it would barely make a footnote in the history books. The jews were humiliated like that throughout the 1930s, and without the eventual holocaust existing to draw poignancy to it, it would just be another mostly unremarkable pogrom of slightly unusual severity.
And no one ever shouted Wright down either. This whole discussion needs more analysis before drawing any conclusions. More distinctions are necessary.
As Clive James elegantly put it: "The role of the freelance man of letters … is to accept — and to act on the acceptance — that he is engaged in a perpetual discussion, an interminable exchange of views in which he cannot, and should not, prevail. If he could prevail, and the discussion did terminate, he would become his enemy, the dogmatist whose only answer to opposition is annihilation."
there would have to be a Vladimir Lenin Atheist Homosexual University
1) What a great name! If I'm ever a billionaire, I'll offer a bunch of money to some school to change it to that.
2) There used to be Antioch.
Brooksfoe: The idea that ORU "shuts out debate" by being a conservative Christian school and not attracting "liberals" that want to invite lesbians is... well, no nice terms come to mind, so you can fill in what you wish.
Shall we assert that the Democratic Party shuts out debate by not inviting Alex Jones or Pat Buchanan to speak at their Convention? It would be about as ludicrous and off the point.
Rob: Perhaps some of the sympathy for the anti-Phelps bikers (which I share) comes from the way that the Phelps protesters are themselves simply shouting out their views rather than debating or having a conversation about them. They are, in a reasonable view, themselves "shouting down" the attendees at a funeral service, which is not a place for debate in the first place.
But back on the main post, I was somewhat irked by Godwin saying When I saw the photographs from Abu Ghraib, for example, I understood instantly the connection between the humiliations inflicted there and the ones the Nazis imposed upon death camp inmates.
Now, seeing "a connection" between the two is not invalid - both involve the abuse of prisoners and reveal the temptations of power - but to ignore that the people who did that at Abu Ghraib were doing so in contravention of orders, and are serving time in prison for it, while the humiliations (not to mention mass-murder, medical experimentation, etc.) performed by the Nazis were done under orders and at the direction and with the approval of the State, shows blindness to the actual import of both.
The horror of the death-camps was not that individuals can be brutal, cruel, or even murderous to prisoners in their power - that is neither new, nor exceptional - but that an entire state apparatus was designed and used for that specific purpose, and that a huge number of people were perfectly happy to go along with it.
In other words, "connecting" the two without further comment tends to suggest an utterly un-justified equivalence between the US and Nazi Germany - exactly the sort of thing that loses you an argument under Godwin's Law.
It's stupid because if your ideas really are that obviously superior, you oughtn't to need to shout someone else down--the act betrays a certain sneaking suspicion that your ideas mightn't be good enough to succeed through persuasion.
Unfortunately, this is an unrealistic assumption. It would be nice if people were rational and the best ideas always won out, but they aren't and they don't. People are plagued with cognitive biases that at times corrupt the reasoning of even the best and brightest among us, to say nothing of what they do to those further to the left on the bell curve.
One of those biases is social proof. Merely to hear someone make a statement, particularly someone with high social status, tends to make that statement more plausible.
I'm not saying that shouting people down is necessarily the right answer, but I don't share your faith in the power of calm, reasoned discourse to sway public opinion.
In line with Brandon, as we have seen with intelligent design and arguably global warming, the spectacle that sitting quietly and listening to points of view that are obviously on their face false or at least not worthy of debate is in itself furthering the poorly thought out ideas of the speaker. These ideas then become something that are now worthy of debate and reasoned discourse instead of wholesale dismissal - partly the reason that I need to say "arguably" regarding the "debate" on global warming.
or, as Whiskey Fire writes about bloggingheads:
"More than that, the site ends up reinforcing the ridiculous notion that every issue, like torture, or unprovoked war, or global climate change, has "two sides." The high school debate model of public discourse has been so perverted as to become itself a perversion. I shit on it from a great height. Fucking Erick Erickson telling Jane Hamsher "I don't believe watrerboarding is torture"... Jane did a great job cornering his smarmy Cracker Barrel night manager ass, but what the FUCK! Why is this even the topic of "polite" conversation, online or anywhere else?
Nobody is ever outraged, passionate, venomous -- it all reinforces the asinine and debilitating notion that political debates are some sort of polite parlor game. Or some sort of spectator sport, waiting for someone to totally lose it in a comical fashion (see Althouse, Ann).
Fuck civility, fuck Bloggingheads, fuck this taming of the shrill. Notice how no one on a Bloggingheads ever says "fuck"?
If you can't say "fuck," I'm not coming to your new media revolution."
Now of course the problem is figuring out in advance what debates don't need to be had. . .
If what Brandon Berg has to say was literally true, then freedom and democracy should not exist.
If you accept even a smidgen of any theory that asserts that anyone else's beliefs are the result of false consciousness, your views are incompatible with even basic human freedom.
But I guess it's OK for me just to ignore him, since after all his views are tainted by cognitive biases.
Oh, and by the way, Paul - maybe the reason you don't think you see people being shouted down at Little Green Footballs is because the cowards who run that site shut down registration long ago, and since no one can join the site to voice unpopular opinions, they have no one to shout at.
false consciousness meaning that one's ideas are influenced if not completely overlapping with motivations or assumptions of which they are not aware?
I would say that defines most of us, including me, but I'm usually right anyway.
and in reference to Paul's point, the reason there's not so much snarkiness from the right at the moment is that they're in power. As long as we are involved in an endless war, arguing about flag pins, going to barbecues, and longing for robot sex, what are they really going to complain about anyway?
The idea that ORU "shuts out debate" by being a conservative Christian school and not attracting "liberals" that want to invite lesbians is... well, no nice terms come to mind, so you can fill in what you wish. - Sigivald
Well, there are College Republicans at Smith. If you can find a notoriously left-wing gay-friendly educational institution that's more lefty and gay-friendly than Smith, I congratulate you. I can't think of a single university in America that is as exclusionarily leftist as ORU is rightist. That's all I'm saying.
Behaving like a censorious bully is not "impolite"; it is censorious bullying. Permitting people with appalling views to have their say at an event where they've been invited as a speaker is not some kind of point of subtle etiquette, it's a fundamental obligation of anyone who wants to be regarded as a citizen of a democracy and not a thug.
I agree Julian, but why doesn't the old "fresh air and sunlight" being the undoing of false or inferior ideas seem to apply any more? Seriously. It seems that no sooner than someone makes a point in a prominent outlet, that idea now becomes something with weight and the fact of it only having been said is enough for it to be taken as a serious position. Holocaust deniers or minimizers for instance?
FYI - according to collegedems.com and democrats.org
http://www.democrats.org/page/group/CDAOralRobertsUniversity
ORU has a college dems club, and while most likely a conservative dem club at that. So we can stop the preening that CR's at Smith is some credit to Smith.
There seems to be some confusion on this thread about the correct analogy to what happened at Smith. The issue is not that liberals attempted to engage in discussion while excluding opposing viewpoints from that discussion. Holding private discussions, where all the participants are understood to have already agreed on certain issues (and excluding those who disagree), is both legitimate and, to some extent, necessary. Talk shows, party conventions, websites with limited registration, and universities with ideological missions all fall into this category. Allowing at least some of these makes it possible for ideas to be honed without arguing every issue from first principles at each step, and also make it possible to discuss matters like strategy. (Of course, this can be taken to excess--intellectual laziness makes everyone, to some degree, inclined to overassociate with those who agree with them, so participating exclusively in such fora, never venturing out to see some of those agreed upon principles questioned, is certainly a bad thing.)
But that's not what happened at Smith. What happened at Smith is that people attempted to prevent ideas they disagree with from being discussed at all. This is not like operating a comments page which allows only conservative comments---it's like launching a denial of service attack on a website because it does allow liberal comments. It's not like running a talk show where the host doesn't allow dissenting views to participate, it's like drowning out the signal so that show can't be heard. And it's not like running a university where everyone who attends agrees in advance to start by believing certain ideas, it's like blockading that university so people can't attend it.
"My problem here is with the false equivalences. Rush interrupting someone who called HIS show is entirely different than protestors disrupting an invited speaker to a campus."
The situations aren't quite the same, but the underlying principle is: opposing viewpoints are not to be discussed, but shouted down or cut off.
Talk radio nowadays seems to be based on the premise that its role is as soap box, so exchanges of differing views doesn't really enter into it. This isn't peculiar to the right, but whereas right wing talk radio is pervasive, its left wing equivalents such as Air America or Pacifica are marginal. (I won't be surprised if someone claims that the left wing equivalent is NPR. I proactively point and laugh.)
Let's not pretend this is about censorship. Anyone in the crowd who wanted the speaker's ideas to be communicated to him or her can easily obtain them. This was not about rights. The state was not involved, so no first amendment issues are in play.
This was about power.
They didn't invite him to hear his speech. They invited him so that he would be speaking at Smith. They wanted to demonstrate that they had the power to give any odious twit a pulpit ensconced in the heart of liberalism. He would then no longer be "Ryan Sorba, odious twit" he would be "Ryan Sorba, who gave a lecture at Smith". This was not an attempt at dialogue. Those who shouted him down did not prevent his ideas from being conveyed, they countered the idea that he would be given acceptance.
I won't be surprised if someone claims that the left wing equivalent is NPR. I proactively point and laugh.)
Thanks so for the pointer. Rose petals before your approach. Can Uncle tom get you some cold water?
Njorl--what credibility, exactly, does Sorba gain from speaking at Smith? Who, left or right, would find the fact that he was invited by some student group to give a talk at Smith a meaningful contribution to his importance.
Much more likely, assuming the conservative students at Smith think the same way we did at my alma mater, the students partially were interested in hearing him speak, because hearing a talk and having the chance to interact with the speaker (the inviters probably had a private diner or something similar arranged as well), and in the hopes of provoking a controversy by inviting someone they knew would irk the liberal students.
Njorl: "This was about power."
Of course it was. This is a bunch of feminists using their power to censor. Maybe it's not official censorship or anything, but the net effect is that people who wanted to listen to him and make up their minds about what he was saying, couldn't.
And on the front of "Anyone in the crowd who wanted the speaker's ideas to be communicated to him or her can easily obtain them." - that may be true, but the feminists made that more difficult, didn't they? Instead of spending an hour and a walk across campus, for a clear summary of his views and strongest evidence, now they have to go find his website or book or something, in addition to the hour they already spent. And they have to accept the risk of the protesters getting physical, or yelling at them while they want to study, or otherwise harassing them for just wanting to listen. It's still censorship even though it's not complete.
Honestly, though, this makes me believe there must be something to him, and I'm going to at least go read his website now. It's only worth censoring people if they're convincing, after all, and the best way to be convincing is to be correct. If he were wrong, that would be pretty self-evident just listening to him. That's my general view on censorship - powerful people suppress the truth in order to keep their own power in place.
Sorry, Sanchez, but you're the bully and thug. You want people to shut up when someone else is spouting crap. In fact, you want to censor those people from expressing their disapproval in a way you don't like. The people who attend the event are also invitees, and they have as much right to speak as your hate-filled buddy.
No one gives a shit about your conception of acceptable behavior. If you want to have a tea party with your dolls, stay at home.
as we have seen with intelligent design and arguably global warming, the spectacle that sitting quietly and listening to points of view that are obviously on their face false or at least not worthy of debate is in itself furthering the poorly thought out ideas of the speaker. These ideas then become something that are now worthy of debate and reasoned discourse instead of wholesale dismissal
Meaning, unfortunately, you don't like having your preconceptions challenged by evidence that can't be hastily dimissed. That is the basis of all fanaticism, regardless of whether it claims religion, philosophy, or science as its inviolable mantle. Down that road lies the path to intellectual stagflation -- the ego grows even while the mind does not.
Confronting ideas contrary to one's existing knowledge base, especially ones with a mound of apparent evidence, takes heavy spade work. As an example, last year some relations of mine somehow stumbled across the Aaron Russo tax-denier documentary, and left it utterly perplexed regarding the role of the Federal Reserve and the legal structure of federal income tax.
Since I happen to like my relations and wanted to see what constructive response was possible, I finally watched it myself, with the DVD remote, my laptop, and a notepad all close at hand. I took pages of notes, researched key elements online, and then condensed out what I felt to be the three most glaring errors. These formed the basis of my summary response, which I then sent back with references to some supporting reference material.
That blew away almost five hours before the evening was up.
Now, which puts me in a better position to respond to tax deniers: Walking around in the confidence that I know they're wrong, burning the DVDs wherever I find them, and then hoping others will believe me on the basis of my own credibility? Or alternately, what I actually did? Seriously, how will you convince people who have already heard the other side if you can't respond intelligently to what may, in fact, be a lot of convincing arguments?
Seriously, how will you convince people who have already heard the other side if you can't respond intelligently to what may, in fact, be a lot of convincing arguments?
It depends on whether you want to be right or to convince them. You can spout your facts while I use sketch verbal pictures of big bullying government, of shadowy conspiracies that explain why my audience hasn't received the rewards they deserve, of foreign perils that would steal their hard-earned money. I'll shout down half your arguments and heckle the rest until even those who want to understand your arguments can't tell what you're trying to say.
Okay, a little overly harsh, but if you're playing to win, then the rules are only "what can you get away with". For the protesters (on either side), they want to *win*, not be right.
(And yes, as someone who wants to be right more than I want to win, I've been told more than once to get lost by those who I tried to support. As someone pointed out, if I was willing to acknowledge a weakness in my position (and all positions have weaknesses), then I've already lost the ability to convince the majority in the face of a half-competent orator. And sadly, as was vividly demonstrated later, he was right.)
Sadly, I do have to agree with a previous poster: The left tends to use the shout-them-down technique far more than the right. On the other hand, if you're going to get arrested and jailed for your views, it's probably because it's the right trying to shut you down.
Both sides understand that denying your opponent a voice *is* effective. It's why both sides use the technique.
Luckily, democracy survives because there's enough of us arrogant people who really do believe that our views are so superior, we can convince the majority that we're right simply using facts. Let's here it for such arrogance in our politicians.
I wonder if the above people would have the same opinion if a student group had invited, say, a radical Muslim to come talk on campus? Or a Holocaust denier?
Considering all the foofaw when the President of Iran came to this country, I suspect that the above approval/disapproval of dissent depends entirely on whose ox is being gored at the time....
The fundamental asymmetry here is that closed-mindedness is basically, by nature, a right-wing authoritarian attribute. Even in closed-minded "leftist" societies, like the USSR, what happens pretty quickly is that "leftism" is drained of almost any meaning and becomes more accurately described as authoritarian conservatism.
The fundamental asymmetry here is that closed-mindedness is basically, by nature, a left-wing totalitarian attribute. Even in closed-minded "rightist" societies, like the Nazi Germany, what happens pretty quickly is that "rightism" is drained of almost any meaning and becomes more accurately described as totalitarian leftism.
See, easy to win arguments if you define anything bad as actually being done by your ideological opponents.
A less flippant response would note that the term for extreme right regimes is "authoritarian" and that the term for extreme left regimes is "totalitarian". The right just cares that you don't step out of line, the left demands that if you count, you have to think properly. The left will then tend to be much more harsh on opposing speech (although neither will get a very good response). These come from the nature of the right and the left; the left is endemic in journalism, academia and government bureaucracy, the right in police, business, and the military. Talking is a big threat when your power is talking and your arguments aren't sound; actions are a threat when you control the levers of force and there is significant competing force.
A real-world comparison could be done between Sweden and Singapore; both are pleasant places to live, the latter is clearly extreme right, the former extreme left. Although Sweden is a pleasant place to live, good luck if you want to publish an anti-muslim screed. To a lesser extent, compare the US and Canada. In Canada, you can go to jail for publishing certain things because of the content of the ideas. In the US, you cannot (not yet anyway).
Northern Observer wrote "In modern American political history I would take a close look at Nixon and the RNC under him and how they set out to make as much liberal thought and speach as possible taboo. A steady process which you can watch nightly on FOX. (FDR did the same thing to isolationist ideas if you want an example from the DNC)"
Sadly, you, just like many others, have heard only one side (the liberal side) of things in the media for so long that when a balanced approach is used in reporting it is immediately dismissed as being too one-sided (to the right) simply because it is balanced. While there is a lot I don't like about Fox News, to say they are one-sided is ridiculous, especially when compared to the vast majority of media outlets.
Feminism has tended to view truth as solely a construction. Dialog is based on the idea that one's opponent may know some part of the truth that you don't. If you believe that truth is constructed then the goal must be to control the construction of truth in the public square. This is done with violence, as demonstrated by the bullying tactics of these lesbian groups.
The solution of course, is the rule of law. If the civil authorities are unwilling to keep the public square open to free debate, then with regrets, measured violence is justifiable in keeping it open. In the future, person's who agree with free speech have some ethical justification of using measured violence in shutting these types of people down. This said, resorting to violence may just escalate the response from these groups, however other than government authorities exercising the rule of law, this is the only alternative to capitulation to bullies. This said, its is often the case that bloodying the nose of a bully will often given him/her pause, the next time they attempt to abuse the inherent dignity of another human being to simply speak the truth as they see it. Sad, but true.
I my world, I'd have a good ol' debate, since ironically I think feminists have a few truthful points to make. Alas, feminism generally is just will to power.
As Nietzsche said, "Masters have a natural right to do whatever they please, for since there is no God, everything is permissible."