I Hope my Kids have Professors Like This: Freedom and Dissent

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
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There’s going to be a pop quiz on Monday, @SkyzykS .

Most of the rest of us have nothing up on you. Seriously, if you graduated more than a decade ago, there have been a lot of changes in the way people are talking about all of this. My mind is a little blown too.

@ lesser used parts of the brain, I had a funny conversation with my cousin a couple of weeks ago. You know that construction math like, “Here are two pillars. The kitchen island needs to be centered between them, but we’re going to flip the sink so it’s on the right instead of the left side of the island. Where should the plumbing be?” Yeah, we would both be getting out a pad of paper to figure that out and checking and double checking, while our husbands would be doing some quick mental math, and shaking their heads wondering how we manage to get around in the world. Haha.

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@ActivitiesGuy, I didn’t want to get into the train wreck of the Trump thread, but I wanted to say something about this cartooon.

I like it, and I also really dislike it. Mostly, it’s really, really wrong in the way it defines free speech.

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The First Amendment to the constitution says that “Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech”. This wording is important. It doesn’t say that congress shall pass laws protecting our speech, but that congress shall not abridge it. “Free speech” is not a right given to us by government. Instead, “free speech” is a right we have – the stipulation is only that government should not infringe it. Source, Errata Security: xkcd is wrong about "free speech"

Censorship of free speech often comes not from government “arresting you for what you say,” but from people intent on censorship. I don’t like the idea of censorship “showing people the door.” I’d rather let people like Richard Spencer live over in his little corner of the internet, than try to silence him, even if his views really offend me. Of course, I don’t have to go hear him speak. I don’t have to interact with him, or people like him on a forum. I can debate him if I wish. That’s a great form of protest, debate. I like it far more than trying to silence dissent. President Obama came to speak here, and guess what? This will really shock you. I didn’t get tickets to go see him. Wow, I really showed him! Ha! I tend to avoid the crowds and traffic of these things anyway.

Mobs silenced Socrates and Jesus Christ because of what they said. Today we have mobs shouting down intellectuals who disagree with their politics. Heather MacDonald, an intellectual who has written about the war on cops and the Ferguson effect, recently got shouted down by a mob at Pomona college, accusing her of racism. If I’m a person who has paid money to go hear her speak, and have traveled to a venue to hear her, should an angry mob be able to “show her the door” because they think she’s an “ass?” They were successful in shutting down her talk.

Both Madeleine Albright and Condi Rice have been “uninvited” to speak at colleges because of the political views of a very vocal minority.

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What do you mean by “shutting down her talk?” I’m not well versed on the incident you’re talking about.

Did they forcibly remove her or did she cave to pressure and leave?

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Thanks for the reply, and good choice doing so here instead of there.

:slight_smile:

I think that’s precisely the point of the cartoon, though - if you want to behave like an asshole, no one else is obligated to host you while doing so just because the government said they will not pass a law abridging the freedom of speech. Personally, I think the cartoon is mostly for a laugh at people who act like complete asses in Internet-comment wars, then act aggravated when the forum moderator removes or bans them from posting (imagine therajraj being banned from PWI and posting on his Twitter page: “Got banned from the T-Nation forums today…I thought this was America, what about my freedom of speech? I guess this forum isn’t comfortable with TRUE PATRIOTS”)

That said, it seems like your central complaint with the cartoon’s presentation is the application to more serious, real-life situations:

I have to finish some work, haha, but I will try to carry this on later.

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Yes. We had a situation here where the Jewish Student Union invited an Israeli diplomat to come speak. They paid to fly this person in, rented out a room, and people traveled to see him. Members of the Muslim Student Union came into the auditorium, stood in the aisles and shouted them down. They effectively silenced the speaker. We could interpret the cartoon as condoning this. “Apparently, you are an asshole, and we’re showing you the door.”

Pfury, if you read the reason article, it refers to the Middlebury incident. Very similar situation, where the liberal Dem professor who was trying to moderate the thing ended up in the ER with a neck injury, while the mob attempted to “show her the door.”

One at Berkeley where some of the Cal professors actually encouraged and sympathized with mob violence. Note the comments by Professor Blocker, and the San Fran Chronical reporter.

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Thrilled. Wesleyan has a new 3 million dollar endowment devoted to intellectual diversity outside the “liberal consensus.” Interestingly, some of this was brought about by an influx of often conservative veterans on the campus.

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/05/11/the-opening-of-the-liberal-mind-wsj-op-ed-by-wesleyan-president-michael-s-roth/

And a great interview on the Charlie Rose show really getting at the problem of the lack of tolerance of real political diversity, and how we do a disservice to students when we create homogeneous enclaves where students have no experience with understanding or relating to the other half of the population who may be conservative or libertarian.

The link below has a wonderful 30 minute clip. Frank Bruni and Jonathan Haidt, talking about political diversity. Just wonderful.

http://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/03/09/jon-haidt-with-frank-bruni-on-charlie-rose-middlebury-viewpoint-diversity-and-the-academy/

@pat, I’ll tag you since you brought up political diversity and freedom of dissent on college campuses on another thread recently.

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I think also as technology advances kids now communicate completely different. They don’t know how to voice their opinions or thoughts because it’s all memes and texts messages. Before everyone and their two year old had a phone we actually spoke to each other.

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Yes. Social media is certainly changing the way we communicate, no doubt about it. They talk about this a bit in the Charlie Rose interview above where they notice young people know how to use a slur, or call names, but are often unable to write well or engage in a reasoned debate. They talk a bit about how the social media generation is different.

Certainly, things we say have the potential to go everywhere very quickly.

Edited to add: Very nice to have you here!

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This is absolutely a fantastic lecture. Set aside your lunch hour. Soooo worth watching. Please let me know if any of you get into it. I’d LOVE to hear what you all think, pro and con.

A guide -
The first 25 minutes really hit on the topic of this thread, but he hits on many of the big politically charged topics we talk about in this forum. Gender and sexism in at around 40-45 minutes or so. He’s deep into it by 50 minutes, so back up at least 10 minutes there. Lots of things relative to the gender thread. More info about women in science, vs women in tech fields. Then by about 57 minutes in he’s talking about social justice in the public schools, k-12.

For some of you who have countered Zep on his various threads, he gets into “motivated reasoning” I believe between 11-18 minutes. Also the correlation of Autism and Organic food sales at about 51 minutes, and some other correlations just for you @ActivitiesGuy. Very funny correlations.

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Was very insightful. It explained many of the issues I have with social justice and intersectionality better than I ever could. For a while now I’ve seen it as a “white men” vs. “everyone else” stratification system that really serves to divide us more than create equality.

I would have loved to see him at Duke, that’s not far from here.

Biggest takeaway → disperate outcomes =/= disperate treatment, along the same lines of correlation =/= causation as he stated. It is absolutely assumed right now in certain instances.

I really liked these examples: the panel they created on poverty and the Obama admin’s attempt to crackdown on disparate suspension rates.

Both are huge problems which are difficult to speak candidly about in our current state.

The difference in interest in technology of high school girls and boys was perusing too. Definitely changed the way I will view and assess many issues in the world.

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Oh, I’m so glad you liked it. Thanks. I enjoyed reading your thoughts.

I know he’s given this talk at Duke and also at Harvard. I’d love to see his ideas gain some momentum. I think our hopes of going back to some kind of civility/ moderation/ mutual respect will come from these kinds of efforts from thoughtful people like Haidt.

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Thank you for posting this. This was not only thought provoking but really got deep into the psychology of social justice. It’s very apparent to me that most would agree we all seek truth but it’s also our schism. It seems like such a simple question. What is truth? Well what is a lie? When we can answer the latter the answer to the first question becomes more clear. Unfortunately not everyone’s truth is the same.

Also just to be frank, I’m really tired of this new “victimhood culture” in freaking adults who need trigger warnings and cry rooms to deal with life. I refuse to raise my boys like this and I hope more parents see what kind of adults this coddling is producing.

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I’m so glad you liked it. Yes, about social justice, he gets into the good ideas that fueled things like civil rights, and then talks about the intolerance and identity politics that we’ve seen really take off in the last 5 years. Really, I’m so heartened to see people from the left speaking out. It really is much more effective if it comes from respected academics and intellectuals who lean left politically. They’re much more effective since they’re more likely to already have some established trust.

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I think a lot of you will love this story. This is in the current edition of Imprimus, in an article by Kim Strassel.

"I like to introduce the topic of free speech with an anecdote about my children. I have three kids, ages twelve, nine, and five. They are your average, normal kids—which means they live to annoy the heck out of each other.

Last fall, sitting around the dinner table, the twelve-year-old was doing a particularly good job at this with his youngest sister. She finally grew so frustrated that she said, “Oliver, you need to stop talking—forever.” This inspired a volley of protests about free speech rights, and ended with them yelling “shut up” at each other. Desperate to stop the fighting and restore order, I asked each of them in turn to tell me what they thought “free speech” meant.

The twelve-year-old went first. A serious and academic child, he gave a textbook definition that included “Congress shall make no law,” an evocation of James Madison, a tutorial on the Bill of Rights, and warnings about “certain exceptions for public safety and libel.” I was happy to know the private-school fees were yielding something.

The nine-year-old went next. A rebel convinced that everyone ignores her, she said that she had no idea what “public safety” or “libel” were, but that “it doesn’t matter, because free speech means there should never be any restrictions on anything that anybody says, anytime or anywhere.” She added that we could all start by listening more to what she says.

Then it was the five-year-old’s turn. You could tell she’d been thinking hard about her answer. She fixed both her brother and sister with a ferocious stare and said: “Free speech is that you can say what you want—as long as I like it.”

It was at this moment that I had one of those sudden insights as a parent. I realized that my oldest was a constitutional conservative, my middle child a libertarian, and my youngest a socialist with totalitarian tendencies."

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The ironic aspect of this story is that it shows how the process of maturing coincides with one’s truth and character.

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I had the same thought after the video. It is a point that is often confused when social justice is involved.

I agree and I think there is some pushback to what we’ve seen lately at universities. He mentioned the rest of the USA is “laughing” and that employers don’t want to hire the snowflakes. But maybe I’m just hoping that people value truth, but as we’ve seen even here on PWI, once people dig their heels in on an issue it is very challenging to get them to be objective and it becomes a sort of religious following to the cause.

Thanks for posting the lecture, very interesting.

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This is off the religion topic, so I’ll put this here. This is more about why Jordan Peterson has attracted controversy for speaking out about pronouns. I don’t agree with everything he says, but this lecture really gets to some of the issues going on with free speech and the problems with the current college protests. He’s pretty blunt in saying it’s about neo-marxism.

@zeb_1, I’m glad you liked the Jordan Peterson clip I put up in the Reasons Why I’m a Christian thread. I’m putting this here to try to not threadjack that into talking college protests and free speech.

@xXSeraphimXx, I’ll tag you as well. The couple of Rogan podcasts I’ve watched have just been fantastic. Long, but worth the time.

He talks about some of the college protestors carrying the hammer and sickle banner. Yep. And 100 million people died in the 20th century thanks to that ideology. Just stunning the disconnect.

Harvard Talk: Postmodernism & the Mask of Compassion 1:30 min.

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A wonderful article from The Atlantic.

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Words that are rarely genuinely spoken :wink:

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“People do not react to the world as it is; they react to the world as they interpret it, and those interpretations are major determinants of success and failure in life.”

Money. Thanks for the article.

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