Quotulatiousness

May 11, 2019

Jonathan Haidt – Social media has altered a fundamental constant of the universe

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Katie Herzog attended the first Heterodox Academy conference and reports on Haidt, the academy’s founder, and other attendees at the event:

Jonathan Haidt at the Miller Center of Public Affairs in Charlottesville, Virginia on 19 March, 2012.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I told three people that Jonathan Haidt will be speaking in Seattle this week. One is a left-leaning university professor, another is an apolitical meditation teacher, and the last is a conservative talk radio host. Despite the chasm between their personal politics, they were all equally enthusiastic to hear Haidt speak. He seems to have that effect on people, and is one of the rare political thinkers who manages to both appeal to (and occasionally enrage) people across the political spectrum.

A professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Haidt is also the author of best-selling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, which he published with First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff last year. That book grew out of an article of the same name that the duo first published in the Atlantic in 2015. As anyone who was paying attention back then may recall, the article made quite a splash, and it brought some emerging trends at university campuses into the public consciousness, including the rise of trigger warnings, deplatforming speakers, and university administrators’ attempts to protect students from any perceived harm. The article, and the subsequent book, didn’t exactly make Haidt popular in some hyper-left circles, and Haidt is occasionally accused of being a conservative in disguise. What he actually is, is a centrist, which gives him a perspective outside the typically left/right binary, and much of his recent work is about tribalism and division in the U.S. It’s a trend he thinks is getting worse.

[…]

“If you are in a university that puts you into interaction with diverse ideas, that makes you smarter,” Haidt says. “You can solve more problems. You become a more critical thinker. The more you hang out with people who think like you, especially if they enforce orthodoxy, the lower your IQ gets.”

In other words, only engaging with ideas you already support can actually make you dumber. It can also damage your cause. As an example, Haidt sites student attempts to deplatform both outside speakers and faculty on campuses over the last few years. Video of protests at schools like Evergreen State were widely shared on conservative networks, and while the students may have seen themselves as warriors in the fight for social justice, those who don’t already support their ideals were more likely to see hysterical students screaming at befuddled adults. The backlash was inevitable. “The antics on campus did a lot, I think, to elect Donald Trump,” Haidt says. “Most people on the left have not seen those videos but most people on the right have seen them. And so even if you think it’s virtuous to always be fighting, in the long run, you are harming your own side.”

In an effort to reverse the trend of ideological homogeneity on campus, Haidt founded the Heterodox Academy, an organization that advocates for universities to embrace viewpoint diversity (even, yes, when those viewpoints are conservative). Last year, they hosted the first Heterodox Academy Open Minds Conference in New York, which I attended. (Full disclosure: I moderated a panel, for which I was compensated.)

The conference was remarkable: Everyone I spoke to seemed to have some story about what made them first see that the world isn’t cleanly broken up into good versus evil, from professors who’d been the subject of protests to journalists who’d been canceled. Still, this was a conference mostly made up of academics and writers, and I doubt there was a single stereotypical Trump voter or social justice warrior in attendance. For the sake of viewpoint diversity this is probably a failure, but the organization still managed to bring together a crowd that included conservatives like Bret Stephens and liberals like Alice Dreger and libertarians like Kmele Foster all in one space. There were heated discussions, to be sure, but no one called for anyone else to be fired. This, I am sure, would be appalling to a certain subset of leftist Twitter, but as Haidt reminded me, social media may be loud, but it’s not representative. “We have to distinguish between the average and the visible anecdote,” he said. “This is another thing social media has done to us: We used to have a sense of the mood in a room or the mood in our social network, and now we have no idea.”

Still, he’s not optimistic that we’ll work our way out of these divisions, at least without significant disruption in the process. “Things feel so strange to me,” he said. “It feels as though a fundamental constant of the universe has been altered. I think social media has done that.”

March 29, 2019

Barbara Kay on Islamophobia

Filed under: Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Is all hate speech the same?

One of my favourite Seinfeld episodes had Kramer joining an AIDS walk. But he refuses to “wear the ribbon.” People keep urging him to take it, and he keeps politely refusing. They become more importunate. He won’t budge. Finally, they get ugly and turn on him with menace: “Who doesn’t want to wear the ribbon?” one walker yells accusingly, as others press in on him.

The scene is, of course, played for laughs, but it nevertheless reveals a dark truth about ritualized compassion. If your sympathy for a good cause has to meet a “compelled speech” standard to be considered sincere, then who is the more admirable character? In this parody of bullying virtue-signallers (not a trope in use at the time), we see that often those “wearing the ribbon” are more concerned about showcasing the “correct” public expression of their sympathy than the plight of the actual victims they are marching for. Bullying those who eschew conforming symbols thus provokes contempt for the bullies and respect for the genuine sincerity of the non-conformist.

I was reminded of this episode last weekend, after a talk I gave as part of a panel at the Manning Conference in Ottawa. My subject was the normalization of anti-Semitism in the progressive playbook. Afterward, Reyhana Patel, Head of Government and External Relations for Islamic Relief Canada came up to the stage with a few companions to interrogate me (and I use the word advisedly). Every one of their questions struck me as — politically — more than the sum of its parts, and delivered with an undertone of menace that was not the least bit funny.

The first question (the gist, not having recorded the exchange): “Your talk was about hatred. Why did you not mention Islamophobia?” My response: “My talk was not about hatred in general; it was about a very specific form of hatred, anti-Semitism.”

My answer did not please them, I could see, and they asked the question a few more times with different wordings. They really didn’t get it: Even though most people today have internalized the “correct” notion that one cannot mention anti-Semitism without “wearing the ribbon” of Islamophobia, ages-old anti-Semitism and the newly coined Islamophobia are apples and oranges.

Many people actively dislike Islam tenets, and a whole lot of people are uncomfortable with the cultural norms in Islam-ruled regions, especially with regard to women’s and gay rights, but hatred of Muslims for being Muslims has simply not been a systemic form of hatred in the west. By contrast, few people actively dislike Judaic tenets, but millions of people, even those who have never met a Jew, hate Jews. Would it have annoyed Ms. Patel & co if I had added that nowhere is Jew hatred more pronounced or vicious than in Islam-dominated societies?

March 17, 2019

QotD: McGill University

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… if the freedom to speak harsh truth and engage in adventurous social critique means nothing at McGill, it is doomed at younger universities — especially those that have materialized, or been promoted to new feudal rank, during the ongoing academic bubble era.

The stakes are high. We all enjoy a laugh at McGill’s perception of itself as the Canadian Harvard, but if there is one university from which others in our country are bound to take ethical and stylistic cues — well, McGill probably is Harvard.

Colby Cosh, “Scary Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: an alternate view of the storm engulfing McGill”, National Post, 2017-03-27.

March 15, 2019

QotD: Gender correctness

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Five years ago, if someone had told you it would soon become tantamount to a speechcrime to say ‘There are two genders’, you would have thought them mad.

Sure, we live in unforgivably politically correct times. Ours is an era in which the offence-taking mob regularly slams comedians for telling off-colour jokes, demands the expulsion from campus of speakers who might offend students’ sensibilities, and hollers ‘Islamophobe’, ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ at anyone who transgresses their moral code on anything from same-sex marriage to respecting Islam. (A phobia, we should always remind ourselves, is a mental malaise, a disturbance of the mind. How very Soviet Union to depict your opponents essentially as mentally diseased.)

And yet for all that, surely it would never become a risky business to utter the opinion: ‘There are men and women and that’s all.’ Well, that has now happened. It is now looked upon as hateful, sinful and phobic, of course, to express a view that has guided humanity for millennia: that humankind is divided into two sexes, and they are distinctive, and one cannot become the other.

Say that today in a university lecture room packed with right-on millennials and watch their faces contort with fury. Write it in a newspaper column or blog post and witness the swift formation of a virtual mob yelling for you to be fired. Say it on TV and there will be protests against you, petitions, demands that you and your foul, outdated ideology be denied the oxygen of televisual publicity.

Brendan O’Neill, “It isn’t TERFs who are bigoted – it’s their persecutors”, Spiked, 2019-01-28.

March 8, 2019

Stephen Fry on Political Correctness and Clear Thinking

Filed under: Britain, Education, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rubin Report
Published on 4 Apr 2016

Stephen Fry (actor and comedian) joins Dave Rubin for a quick discussion about political correctness, clear thinking, V for Vendetta, free speech, and his decision to quit Twitter.

This is a bonus edition of ‘The Sit Down’ on The Rubin Report, filmed on the set of Larry King Now.

What are your thoughts? Comment below or tweet to Dave: https://twitter.com/RubinReport

Watch more on Ora TV: http://www.ora.tv/rubinreport

Find us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/rubinreport?ty=h

******
Stephen Fry
Actor, Author, and Comedian
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Care about free speech? Tired of political correctness? Like discussions about big ideas? Watch Dave Rubin on The Rubin Report. Real conversations, unfiltered rants, and one on one interviews with some of the most interesting names in news and entertainment. Comedians, authors, and influencers join Dave each week to break down the latest in politics and current events. Real people, real issues, real talk.

February 22, 2019

QotD: The basic intellectual freedom

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s centre. With the feeling that he was speaking to O’Brien, and also that he was setting forth an important axiom, he wrote:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949.

February 20, 2019

What to do when you’re suddenly the star of the latest online witch-hunt

Filed under: Business, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Reason, Nancy Rommelmann gives a handy guide to what you need to know when a social media witch-smeller points at you and the masses start baying for your blood:

I am a pro-choice, aqua-haired, middle-aged liberal living in Portland, Oregon. I probably disagree with Nicholas Sandmann on every major issue. But we have something in common. In the last month we have both endured what is fast becoming an American ritual: our 15 minutes of hate.

Sandmann’s crime was a smirk while wearing a MAGA hat. Mine was a YouTube series I launched in December with another journalist in which we discussed the excesses of the #MeToo movement. This and the show’s name, #MeNeither, inspired an ex-employee of my husband’s coffee company to send an email to staff, characterizing the series as “vile, dangerous and extremely misguided” and adding that it “throws into question the safety of Ristretto Roasters as a workplace.”

She also sent an email to the media.

Within days, a quarter of the Ristretto staff quit and the company lost major accounts. I was repeatedly called a c*nt and was challenged to at least one fist fight. My husband was told to leave his wife or lose his business.

As someone who covers this stuff, I thought I knew how rough it might be to get dragged in public. It’s different when it’s tearing up your life.

If you do not think this can happen to you, you have not been paying attention. Here’s a guide for how to survive it…

January 10, 2019

Patreon’s changing role

At Quillette, Uri Harris outlines how Patreon has changed over the last year or so and what those changes mean for both content creators and financial supporters:

On December 6, crowdfunding service Patreon removed the account of popular YouTuber Carl Benjamin, who is better known by his YouTube moniker Sargon of Akkad. In a statement, Patreon explained that Benjamin was removed for exposing hate speech under its community guidelines, which prohibit: “serious attacks, or even negative generalizations, of people based on their race [and] sexual orientation.” The incident in question was an appearance on another YouTube channel where Benjamin used racial and homosexual slurs during an emotional outburst. (The outburst was transcribed and included for reference as part of Patreon’s statement.)

Patreon’s reaction sparked immediate accusations of political bias from many centrists and conservatives, as Benjamin—who identifies as a classical liberal—is a frequent and outspoken critic of contemporary progressivism, receiving hundreds of thousands of views on many of his videos. The fact that Benjamin was removed from Patreon for an outburst on another YouTube channel almost a year ago, when he produces hours of content every week on his own channels and appears regularly on many others, suggested that this was a targeted attempt to remove him due to his politics, either by Patreon employees themselves or as a response to outside pressure.

This belief was bolstered by the fact that Patreon’s CEO Jack Conte had appeared on popular YouTube talk show “The Rubin Report” last year to explain the removal of conservative YouTube personality Lauren Southern, where he seemed to suggest that Patreon’s content policy had three sections and that hate speech was in the first section, meaning that it only applied to content uploaded to Patreon’s own platform. (Southern was removed for off-platform activity because she had “crossed the line between speech and action,” Conte maintained, which he implied was covered by the more severe second and third sections of their content policy.)

There’s nothing unusual about a company revising its content policy, of course, but it seemed suspicious that Benjamin was being removed for a different set of rules than those Patreon’s CEO had previously articulated. In fact, several people pointed out the prevalence of similar slurs on Patreon’s own platform as further indication that Benjamin was specifically targeted for his political views.

January 1, 2019

QotD: The hallmark of civilization

Filed under: Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The true mark of the civilized society is not that it defends the rights of people who are loved by the bulk of the population, for those people need no defense. No one, after all, will arrest a popular person for saying or doing popular things. The true mark of the civilized society is that it defends the rights even of those who are universally reviled.

Indeed, in a truly civilized society, there would be no question but that you would defend the rights of people who disgust you provided they do no violence to others.

Our society is not civilized.

Perry Metzger, “On Civilization”, Samizdata, 2017-03-30.

December 31, 2018

7 Things You Should Know About Free Speech in Schools: Free Speech Rules (Episode 1)

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018

Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law. The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools, from black armbands to ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus.’

——————–
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Reason is the planet’s leading source of news, politics, and culture from a libertarian perspective. Go to reason.com for a point of view you won’t get from legacy media and old left-right opinion magazines.
—————-

Watch the first episode of Free Speech Rules, a new video series on free speech and the law that’s written by Eugene Volokh, the Gary T. Schwartz Distinguished Professor of Law at UCLA, and the co-founder of the Volokh Conspiracy, which is hosted at Reason.com.

The first episode looks at the seven things you should know about how the First Amendment is applied in schools:

1) Political and religious speech is mostly protected.
Students, from first grade to twelfth, can’t be punished based on their political or religious speech. As the Supreme Court ruled in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: “It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gates.”

2) Disruptive speech is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that “materially disrupts schoolwork” — for instance, because it prompts fights.

3) Vulgar or sexual speech is not protected.
Schools can also punish students for using vulgarities or sexual innuendos.

4) Praising drugs is not protected.
Schools can punish speech that seems to praise drug use, and probably also alcohol use and other crimes, at least when the speech doesn’t seem political.

5) Official school newspapers are the school’s own speech.
Courts see the newspaper as the school’s own speech, even if students are the ones who write it.

6) This only applies to public schools.
Under the so-called “state action doctrine,” the First Amendment doesn’t limit private schools, even those that get tax breaks or government funds.

7) California is different. Some states, like California, have passed laws that provide more protection to students.

Written by Eugene Volokh, a First Amendment law professor at UCLA.
Produced and edited by Austin Bragg, who is not. This is not legal advice.
If this were legal advice, it would be followed by a bill.
Please use responsibly.

December 15, 2018

Twitter cannot hold her back – Titania McGrath speaks!

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Despite the patriarchal oppression of a Twitter permanent suspension, Titania McGrath will be heard:

My name is Titania McGrath. I am a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. In April of this year, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

This week the powers-that-be at Twitter hit my account with a “permanent suspension” (a semantic contradiction, but then I suppose bigots aren’t known for their grammatical prowess). This was the latest in a series of suspensions, all of which were imposed because I had been too woke. The final straw appeared to be a tweet in which I informed my followers that I would be attending a pro-Brexit march so that I could punch a few UKIP supporters in the name of tolerance.

Don’t get me wrong. I have always supported censorship. Major social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure that we are expressing the correct sort of free speech. Twitter’s decision to suspend Alex Jones, host of American website InfoWars, set the right kind of precedent. I fully supported this action because Jones is known for disseminating fake news and wild conspiracy theories. But the fact that I was also banned makes me think that Twitter were being secretly controlled by InfoWars from the very start.

Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.

The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.

They may have silenced the great Godfrey Elfwick, but thank goodness Titania McGrath can continue to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies of the wider world.

December 7, 2018

The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter

Filed under: Books, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 6 Dec 2018

JK Rowling’s wizarding world isn’t all wands, charms, and transfigurations. The magical universe inhabited by characters like Harry Potter and Newt Scamander is rife with the dangerous incompetence of adults, unchecked corruption, and appalling abuses of power, and not just by Voldemort or Grindelwald.

_____________
Written & Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Arash Ayrom & Sean W. Malone

November 20, 2018

Remy: The Legend of Stan Lee

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published on 19 Nov 2018

Remy recalls a time when experts were claiming “Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry,” and how Stan Lee took a stand.

Written and Performed by Remy
Video Produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg
Music tracks and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom

November 16, 2018

QotD: Defining hate speech

Then, of course, there is the question of where hate-speech ends and legitimate commentary starts. It is generally easy to recognise the vilest abuse that is intended only to inflame and not to argue, just as it is easy to recognise pure pornography (I use the word ‘pure’ in its chemical, not its moral sense, of course). But often matters are much more complex than this.

For example, I recently saw the following statistic in a serious article on the internet: that Nigerian immigrants to Switzerland are seven times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. Surely no one who wrote such a thing could think that it was calculated to create warm feelings in the hearts of the Swiss towards Nigerian immigrants, except those very few of Fabian mentality, who see in serial killers a cry for help (from the killers, of course, not from their victims).

The statistic – let us assume – is true. But then let us ask whether it has been corrected for the different sex and age structures of the two populations, that of the Nigerian immigrants and that of the Swiss population.

If it has not (and the article does not say), it is easily conceivable that a better, or at least different, statistic would be that Nigerian immigrants are only twice or three times as likely to be convicted for a crime as Swiss citizens. And if this were in fact the case, would the man who published the article be guilty of hate-speech, or merely of intellectual error? Is the test of hate-speech to be whether something does in fact bring a group into hatred, ridicule and contempt, or whether it is intended to do so?

It is easy to multiply examples. In this country, young Moslem men far out-fill their quota in prison, while young Hindu and Sikh far underperform where criminal conviction is concerned. Is this an interesting and important sociological fact, or an incitement to hatred, ridicule and contempt, or perhaps both?

A further problem is that of judging how sensitive people actually are or should be to perceived slights and insults. Just as the expression of hatred can be self-reinforcing, so can the sensitivity to slight and injury. The more you are protected from it, the more of it you perceive, until you end up being a psychological egg-shell. The demand for protection becomes self-reinforcing, until a state is reached in which nobody says what he means, and everybody infers what is not meant. Temperatures, or tempers, are raised, not lowered. The disgracefully pusillanimous (and incompetent) Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence demonstrated the risks we run: it suggested that a racial incident should be defined as an incident which any witness to it believed to be racial, without there being any need for objective evidence that it was. Where a British judge can be so pusillanimously unattached to the rule of law, we can be sure that one day hate-speech will be defined as any speech that anyone finds hateful.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, Salisbury Review, 2011-06.

November 7, 2018

Bonfire Night hate “crime”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have to say that I agree with Brendan O’Neill here … it was an offensive, idiotic, and totally tasteless act: but it was not — or at least should not be — a crime:

I cannot be the only person who finds the Metropolitan Police’s promise to investigate the Grenfell Tower bonfire video more chilling than the video itself. Yes, the video is repulsive. But what crime has been committed here? Being a wanker? Being a scumbag? Saying disgusting things in your own back garden? Those are criminal offences now? If they are, then Britain has far greater things to worry about than the fact that a handful of dreadful people decided to burn an effigy of Grenfell Tower for Bonfire Night.

First things first: the video is horrible. I am going to make a wild guess that the people featured in it, laughing and cheering as their cardboard Grenfell Tower goes up in flames, are not very nice. Some of them are probably racist. In the windows of their Grenfell effigy, there are notably non-white paper figures, waving for help. The effigy-burners say ‘This is what you get for not paying your rent!’ as the paper figures are consumed by the bonfire flames. Gross.

But criminal? That would be even more gross. Living in a society that criminalises people for what they say in their own back gardens would be worse, infinitely worse, than living in a society that has small numbers of prejudiced twats who think mocking the Grenfell calamity is funny.

And yet it looks like we live in that society. The commander of Scotland Yard, no less, issued a plea for information about the video, declaring himself ‘appalled by the callous nature’ of the people in it and by their ‘vile’ comments. I’m sorry, but I don’t want the police investigating videos in which no crime has been committed. In which no one’s property has been damaged or stolen and no person has been harmed. In which there is merely an act of expression. That way the police state lies. If we allow speech in one’s own home to become a police matter, we will regret it. Profoundly. What next: telescreens?

The police are upping the ante. This morning it is reported that five men have ‘surrendered’ to the cops and have duly been arrested. Some are saying they committed a public-order offence. In their own private residence? That’s a fascinating, and disturbing, definition of public disorder. Others are saying they committed a hate crime. Even though there were no victims? Even though they did not utter their words to anyone but themselves? Even though – once again for the people at the back – they were speaking among themselves in their own private space?

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