Quotulatiousness

June 2, 2018

The Robinson Affair (that the British establishment would like to “disappear”)

Filed under: Britain, Law, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If you haven’t been paying attention to the British media, you might not have heard about Tommy Robinson and his crusade to expose the “Asian grooming gangs” that have been left almost undisturbed by the British police, prosecutors and (until very recently indeed) the media:

The controversy around him continued. In March, Robinson was suspended from Twitter, where he had almost half a million followers. The social-media site (which merrily allows terrorist groups like Lashkar e-Taiba to keep accounts) decided that Robinson should be suspended for tweeting out a statistic about Muslim rape gangs that itself originated from the Muslim-run Quilliam foundation. And it is on this matter that the latest episode in the Robinson drama started — and has now drawn worldwide attention.

Ten years ago, when the EDL was founded, the U.K. was even less willing than it is now to confront the issue of what are euphemistically described as “Asian grooming gangs” (euphemistic because no Chinese or Koreans are involved and what is happening is not grooming but mass rape). At the time, only a couple of such cases had been recognized. Ten years on, every month brings news of another town in which gangs of men (almost always of Pakistani origin) have been found to have raped young, often underage, white girls. The facts of this reality — which, it cannot be denied, sounds like something from the fantasies of the most lurid racist — have now been confirmed multiple times by judges during sentencing and also by the most mainstream investigative journalists in the country.

But the whole subject is so ugly and uncomfortable that very few people care to linger over it. Robinson is an exception. For him — as he said in a 2011 interview with the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman — the “grooming gangs” issue isn’t something that afflicts some far-off towns but people in the working-class communities that he knows. And while there are journalists (notably the Times’ Andrew Norfolk) who have spent considerable time and energy bringing this appalling phenomenon to light, most of British society has turned away in a combination of embarrassment, disgust, and uncertainty about how to even talk about this. Anyone who thinks Britain is much further along with dealing with the taboo of “grooming gangs” should remember that only last year the Labour MP for Rotherham, Sarah Champion, had to leave the shadow cabinet because she accurately identified the phenomenon.

Which brings me to last Friday. That was when Robinson was filming outside Leeds Crown Court, where the latest grooming-gang case was going on. I have to be slightly careful here, because although National Review is based in the U.S., I am not, and there are reporting restrictions on the ongoing case. Anyhow, Robinson was outside the court and appeared (from the full livestream) to be filming the accused and accosting them with questions on their way in. He also appeared to exercise some caution, trying to ensure he was not on court property.

But clearly he did not exercise enough caution, a strange fact given that last year Robinson had been found guilty of “contempt of court” for filming outside another rape-gang trial, one involving four Muslim men at Canterbury Crown Court. On that occasion Robinson was given a three-month prison sentence [PDF], which was suspended for a period of 18 months. Which meant he would be free so long as he did not repeat the offense.

Although Robinson appeared to be careful at Leeds Crown Court last Friday, to dance along the line of exactly what he could or could not livestream outside an ongoing trial with a suspended sentence hanging over his head was extraordinarily unwise. What happened next went around the world: The police turned up in a van and swiftly arrested Robinson for “breach of the peace.” Within hours Robinson had been put before one Judge Geoffrey Marson, who in under five minutes tried, convicted, and sentenced Robinson to 13 months. He was immediately taken to prison.

From that moment it was not just Robinson but the U.K. that entered a minefield of legal problems. In addition to the usual reporting restrictions on the ongoing trial, a reporting ban was put on any mention of Robinson’s arrest, swift trial, and conviction, meaning that for days people in the blogosphere and the international media got free rein to claim that Tommy Robinson had been arrested for no reason, that his arrest was a demonstration of a totalitarian state cracking down on free speech, and even (and this one is remarkably clueless as well as careless) that the recent appointment to the position of home secretary of Sajid Javid — who was born to Muslim parents — is the direct cause of Robinson’s recent arrest.

April 24, 2018

Sweden’s free speech problem

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Hugo Brundin explains why the social unrest Sweden is experiencing over immigration issues today is made much worse by restrictions on free speech:

Few in Sweden have escaped the circus of its migration politics. During the migration crisis of 2015, we had the somewhat dubious claim to fame of receiving record-breaking numbers of asylum-seekers. A year later, in Spring 2016, the ruling Social Democrats closed the borders. For a while, calling attention to problems in Sweden’s immigrant-dominated suburbs would have you branded an alarmist or a racist. Then in January 2018, the Swedish PM Stefan Löfven said he would consider using the military to curb gang violence in those same suburbs (a comment he later retracted). More recently, the Social Democrats have proposed a ban on all religious schools, clearly aimed at those of the Muslim faith. No party in the Swedish parliament supported such a ban a couple of years ago.

Those concerned with immigration have held Sweden up as a warning of the consequences of open-door migration. But the deeper problem in Sweden is one of public discourse, debate and freedom of speech. You see, Sweden has a consensus culture. The Overton Window is so notoriously narrow that it has been termed the ‘opinion corridor’. And when you’re hurtling down the corridor, unable to see what is around the next corner, much less the one after that, you never know where its twists and turns will take you. Opinions that would have had you vilified a few years ago are now part of the political mainstream, and frankly this can feel downright creepy. Sweden should not be a warning of how not to handle migration – it should be a warning of how not to handle public discussion.

Proposals such as the one to ban religious schools, a deeply intolerant and authoritarian idea, are exactly the sort of thing you get when public opinion changes on a dime, when conflicts have not been properly hashed out in public debate. It used to be said that open-door migration would save the economy and welfare state (rather than put strain on them) and that talk of cultural differences between the Middle East and Sweden was just racist myth-making. Yet now, Islamism is the issue du jour, and the political class is desperate to signal that it is doing something about it, with little thought paid to civil liberties.

April 19, 2018

Freedom of speech and scientific inquiry

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

Adam Perkins on the critical importance of free speech in the scientific world:

A quick Google search suggests that free speech is a regarded as an important virtue for a functional, enlightened society. For example, according to George Orwell: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Likewise, Ayaan Hirsi Ali remarked: “Free speech is the bedrock of liberty and a free society, and yes, it includes the right to blaspheme and offend.” In a similar vein, Bill Hicks declared: “Freedom of speech means you support the right of people to say exactly those ideas which you do not agree with”.

But why do we specifically need free speech in science? Surely we just take measurements and publish our data? No chit chat required. We need free speech in science because science is not really about microscopes, or pipettes, or test tubes, or even Large Hadron Colliders. These are merely tools that help us to accomplish a far greater mission, which is to choose between rival narratives, in the vicious, no-holds-barred battle of ideas that we call “science”.

For example, stomach problems such as gastritis and ulcers were historically viewed as the products of stress. This opinion was challenged in the late 1970s by the Australian doctors Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, who suspected that stomach problems were caused by infection with the bacteria Helicobacter pylori. Frustrated by skepticism from the medical establishment and by difficulties publishing his academic papers, in 1984, Barry Marshall appointed himself his own experimental subject and drank a Petri dish full of H. pylori culture. He promptly developed gastritis which was then cured with antibiotics, suggesting that H. pylori has a causal role in this type of illness. You would have thought that given this clear-cut evidence supporting Warren and Marshall’s opinion, their opponents would immediately concede defeat. But scientists are only human and opposition to Warren and Marshall persisted. In the end it was two decades before their crucial work on H. pylori gained the recognition it deserved, with the award of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

From this episode we can see that even in situations where laboratory experiments can provide clear evidence in favour of a particular scientific opinion, opponents will typically refuse to accept it. Instead scientists tend cling so stubbornly to their pet theories that no amount of evidence will change their minds and only death can bring an end to the argument, as famously observed by Max Planck:

    A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

April 13, 2018

The free speech views of “Gen Z”

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt argue that despite many nay-sayers, there really is a freedom of speech crisis on university campuses:

In our first post responding to the skeptics, we showed that the skeptics support their skepticism primarily by relying on data about the Millennial generation (those born 1982-1994). The skeptics are correct that Millennials are not much different than previous generations when asked about free speech issues. We also argued that this debate has nothing to do with Millennials; it is about CURRENT college students, who are not Millennials. By the fall of 2015, most college students (especially at elite four year schools) were members of iGen, the “Internet generation” (sometimes called “Gen Z”), which begins around birth year 1995, and which first arrived at college around 2013.

We noted that the new attitudes about speech — including the idea that speech can be violence (even when it includes no threat), and corresponding requests for safe spaces and trigger warnings — only began to appear on select campuses around 2013 or 2014, and we noted that these ideas only became widely known after the wave of student protests that began at the tail end of 2015. Therefore, we pointed out, it is unlikely that nationally representative samples, drawing on students in America’s 4,700 institutions of higher education, could have picked up any changes before 2015, when colleges were still full of Millennials who had never heard of trigger warnings and microaggressions. We proposed that the best way to evaluate whether or not things have changed on campus is to examine data collected on current college students in 2016 or later, and compare it to data on current college students from 2014 and before.

When we performed such comparisons, we found some evidence that in fact things are changing. There is not yet much data available to make direct comparisons, but the GSS does show a change for the little bit of iGen data that it has (see figure 1 in post 1), and the larger Knight study showed a change just from 2016 to 2017. In this post we do a much deeper dive. We present far more data on current college students and we assess whether the campus climate has changed in the last few years with regard to speaking up and sharing one’s views.

The key question is this: are students and professors today more reluctant than they were a few years ago to share their views or to question dominant views? If so, then there is a climate or culture problem on campuses where that change has occurred. We note that the overall climate can change rapidly even if there has been no change in average attitudes about speech. All that needs to happen is that a small group of students begins imposing social costs on those who say things they don’t like, while at the same time college administrators do nothing to stop them. (For a fuller explanation, see this essay by Lee Jussim, or this one by Nassim Taleb, whose title explains the key point: The most intolerant wins: The dictatorship of the small minority.) If college students are more likely to report the feeling of “walking on eggshells” in the years after 2015 than they did in the years before 2015, then there has been a change in the campus culture, even if the average student’s support for free speech has not changed.

April 12, 2018

QotD: “Hate” speech

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

The whole idea of ‘hate speech’ needs to be removed from our legal system immediately. Aside from the numerous problems involved with deciding what is and what isn’t ‘hate speech’ (and who gets to define what it is), allowing the most timorous snowflakes to set the boundaries is a surefire recipe for tyranny. And besides all that, the expectation that you somehow have a right not to be offended is ludicrous. Being offended is good. Being offended is healthy. Being offended leads to self-examination. That’s how discourse progresses. Anything new is bound to offend at least one person. If nobody is offended, then nobody is thinking.

“OregonMuse”, “The Morning Rant”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2018-03-21.

April 5, 2018

Mark Steyn on the YouTube shooting in San Bruno

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

The shooting at the YouTube offices in San Bruno, California may not be in the headlines for long, as the story is so off-beat compared to other recent events that it doesn’t easily fit the model the media prefers for reporting gun crime (or high tech stories). Mark Steyn calls it the “grand convergence”:

The San Bruno attack also underlines a point I’ve been making for over a decade, ever since my troubles with Canada’s “human rights” commissions: “Hate speech” doesn’t lead to violence so much as restraints on so-called “hate speech” do – because, when you tell someone you can’t say that, there’s nothing left for him to do but open fire or plant his bomb. Restricting speech – or even being perceived to be restricting speech – incentivizes violence as the only alternative. As you’ll notice in YouTube comments, I’m often derided as a pansy fag loser by the likes of ShitlordWarrior473 for sitting around talking about immigration policy as opposed to getting out in the street and taking direct action. In a culture ever more inimical to freedom of expression, there’ll be more of that: The less you’re permitted to say, the more violence there will be.

Google/YouTube and Facebook do not, of course, make laws, but their algorithms have more real-world impact than most legislation – and, having started out as more or less even-handed free-for-alls, they somehow thought it was a great idea to give the impression that they’re increasingly happy to assist the likes of Angela Merkel and Theresa May as arbiters of approved public discourse. Facebook, for example, recently adjusted its algorithm, and by that mere tweak deprived Breitbart of 90 per cent of its ad revenue. That’s their right, but it may not have been a prudent idea to reveal how easily they can do that to you.

What happened yesterday is a remarkable convergence of the spirits of the age: mass shootings, immigration, the Big Tech thought-police, the long reach of the Iranian Revolution, animal rights, vegan music videos… But in a more basic sense the horror in San Bruno was a sudden meeting of two worlds hitherto assumed to be hermetically sealed from each other: the cool, dispassionate, dehumanized, algorithmic hum of High Tech – and the raw, primal, murderous rage breaking through from those on the receiving end.

March 25, 2018

Policing speech

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

British police forces don’t seem to have enough resources to track down and disrupt organized rape gangs, but they do have a burning desire to clamp down on what you say on social media. Priorities, I guess: it might be dangerous to tackle actual criminals, but it’s as safe as can be to bring the full force of law down on orange-fingered basement-dwelling keyboard warriors, critics of transgender policies, and other clear and present threats to the social order.

Patrick West sums up the situation:

It’s been a strange month for free speech. First comes the news that a stay-at-home mother of four has been contacted by the police for making comments critical of transgender ideology on Twitter.

Then, we read that the Canadian vlogger Lauren Southern was refused entry to the UK because, according to the Home Office, her presence was ‘not conducive to the public good’. Then, most absurdly, we hear that ‘self-confessed shitposter’ Markus Meechan – known on YouTube as Count Dankula – was found guilty in a Scottish court of hate speech for teaching his dog to perform a Nazi salute.

It doesn’t matter if the Count Dankula incident seems innocuous, or that he has many unpleasant supporters online. Nor does it matter that Southern is a leading ‘alt-right’ figurehead. Free speech means standing up for people you don’t care for, because if your enemies aren’t safe from the encroaching powers of the state, then you and you friends won’t be safe, either. You don’t have to be a libertarian fundamentalist to be worried about the state now prosecuting people for jokes.

But these incidents have been thrown into even sharper relief, owing to the fact that this week has also seen supporters of Tommy Robinson – not a particularly endearing character either, but an important one nonetheless – clash with extremist Muslims at Speakers’ Corner in London, of all places.

At a time when there are an estimated 20,000 Islamists at large in the country – 3,000 of whom are deemed particularly dangerous – it is perverse that the police and the courts are instead pursuing such soft targets. Because it’s far better for a police force’s profile to be seen as an ‘anti-Nazi’ rather than ‘Islamophobic’, the scandal of grooming gangs in Telford and elsewhere is ignored or brushed under the carpet. For similar reasons of denial and sheer cowardice, the issue of Sharia Patrols in London, threatening gay people with violence, is met with a proverbial fingers in the ears. If only the police and courts had been so vigilant about those who planned and then executed last year’s atrocities in London and Manchester.

The first duty of a state is to protect its citizens and their safety. The last duty of a state is to tell them what they can and can’t say. Being offensive should never be a crime.

QotD: America’s “read-only” activists

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.

Heather Heying, “On the dangers of read-only activism”, Medium.com, 2018-03-02.

March 22, 2018

The social media mistake

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

Robert Tracinski explains why the move to social media was dangerous to free public discourse despite the otherwise-attractive nature of TwitFaceTube and other factions of the social media Borg:

Was social media a mistake? Two recent events crystallized my answer to this question. First, conservative comedian Steven Crowder had his Twitter account suspended for a week because he posted a video on YouTube that was critical of “gender fluidity” and used a Bad Word. The video was also pulled from YouTube, which you might not think of as a social media platform, even though it definitely is.

Then Brandon Morse noticed Twitter was preventing him from tweeting a link to an article by a controversial conservative columnist. This follows stories of Google-owned YouTube “demonetizing” videos by conservatives, unplugging them from the ability to make money from ads, and Facebook and Google targeting conservative sites for hilariously inaccurate and tendentious “fact checks.” It’s becoming clear that the big social media companies are targeting ideas and thinkers on the Right, and not just the far-out provocateurs and trolls like Milo Yianopoulos, but everyone.

What strikes me most is the contrast between this and the Internet era before social media, before Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube swallowed up everything. I’m talking about the 2000s, the great era of the blogs. Do you remember what that blog era was like? It felt like liberation.

The era of blogging offered the promise of a decentralized media. Anybody could publish and comment on the news and find an audience. Guys writing in their pajamas could take down Dan Rather. We were bypassing the old media gatekeepers. And we had control over it! We posted on our own sites. We had good discussions in our own comment fields, which we moderated. I had and still have an extensive e-mail list of readers who are interested in my work, most of which I built up in that period, before everybody moved onto social media.

But then Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube came along and killed the blogs. There were three main reasons they took over.

I have various social media accounts, but in most cases I just use them to link to my blog posts. The old saw about never reading the comments applies with even greater force to most of the social media platforms. I don’t do “breaking news” on the blog, because that’s one thing social media can do better — most of my regular visitors come here once a day to see what I’ve posted since their last visit, not to check for smoking hot takes on something that happened in the last fifteen minutes. For immediacy, the social media sites will win over the blogs (and even the mainstream media, in many cases).

H/T to American Digest for the link.

March 21, 2018

Free speech at risk on campus

Filed under: Education, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sean Stevens and Jonathan Haidt on the claims and counter-claims about the threat to freedom of speech in today’s universities:

Over the past two weeks, Jeffrey Sachs (a political scientist at Acadia U; not the economist at Columbia) has made the argument that There Is No Campus Free Speech Crisis, as he put it in a long twitter thread on March 9. Matt Yglesias then expanded on Sachs’ argument in a post titled Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong, and Sachs expanded his case in a Washington Post Monkey Cage essay with a similar title: The ‘campus free speech crisis’ is a myth. Here are the facts. Sachs and Yglesias both draw heavily on analyses of the speech questions in the General Social Survey, which were plotted and analyzed well by Justin Murphy on Feb. 16. In this blog post we will show a reliance on older datasets and the failure to formulate the question properly have led Sachs and Yglesias to a premature conclusion. Something is changing on campus, but only in the last few years.

Sachs and Yglesias claim that the current wave of concern about speech on campus that began around 2014 (with media reports about safe spaces and trigger warnings), and that intensified in 2015 (after the Yale Halloween controversy, and the earlier publication of The Coddling of the American Mind, by Lukianoff & Haidt) is a classic moral panic. They believe it is merely a media frenzy in response to a few high profile incidents. In a typical moral panic, people on one side of the political spectrum get riled up because stories about outrageous incidents appeal to their desire to believe the worst about a group on the other side. Sachs and Yglesias claim that conservatives and conservative media have gleefully exploited a handful of campus stories to fuel hatred of left-leaning students, or “social justice warriors,” when in in fact nothing has changed on campus.

Given how frequent moral panics are, especially as political polarization and cross-party hatred increases, and as social media makes it easy to whip up a panic, it is vital to have skeptics. It is important for people with different biases and prior beliefs to dig into survey data that bears on the question. It is also crucial to formulate the question properly. What exactly is it that has changed, or not changed, on campus in recent years?

Here are the three major positions in the current debate, along with our proposal for how each should be operationalized.

H/T to Claire Lehmann for the link.

March 20, 2018

Free speech on the ropes

Filed under: Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

J.D. Tuccille says the right to freedom of speech isn’t dead, but it might not qualify for a new life insurance policy:

We have an environment in which the president of the United States is dismissive of the free speech rights of his opponents, prominent constitutional scholars sniff at free speech unless it’s used by the “right” people for their favored goals, and the country’s leading civil liberties organization is suffering an internal revolt by staffers who oppose “rigid” support for free speech protections.

Last October, President Trump said “It’s frankly disgusting the way the press is able to write whatever they want to write.” That came just hours after he tweeted, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” And even before Trump took the oath of office, he’d huffed that protesters who burn American flags should face loss of citizenship or jail.

So if you’re an academic with expertise in constitutional law, and you have months to watch a populist politician who commands the power of the presidency fulminate about punishing those who criticize him, what do you do? If you’re Georgetown Law’s Louis Michael Seidman, you suggest that the president might be on to something.

In a forthcoming paper, Seidman’s main complaint is that free speech doesn’t inherently favor progressivism — it allows too much voice to people who disagree. “At its core, free speech law entrenches a social view at war with key progressive objectives,” writes Seidman.

Sure, “the speech right has instrumental utility in isolated cases,” he adds. But “significant upside potential”? Nah.

[…]

In its early days, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) viewed free speech as a tool of social justice, suited to particular purposes under particular conditions,” wrote Weinrib, calling on the modern organization to rededicate itself to progressive political goals over civil libertarian advocacy.

The ACLU may be close to taking her advice. Last fall, about 200 of the organization’s staff members signed a letter objecting to the groups’ “rigid stance” on the First Amendment. The letter was characterized by former ACLU board member Michael Meyers as “a repudiation of free-speech principles.”

Huh. With a president who openly chafes at criticism and suggests media naysayers should be punished with the force of law, now seems like a perfect time for opponents to rally around unfettered debate and the First Amendment. Instead, lefty academics and activists are lining up to agree with Trump that a free press and individual rights to freedom of speech, belief, and association are indeed overrated overall.

March 17, 2018

“Schedule 7 of [Britain’s] Terrorism Act … effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence”

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

Brendan O’Neill on the British government’s decision to refuse admission to Canadian videographer Lauren Southern:

In Britain in the 21st century you can be punished for mocking gods. You can be expelled from the kingdom, frozen out, if you dare to diss Allah. Perversely adopting medieval Islamic blasphemy laws, modern Britain has made it clear that it will tolerate no individual who says scurrilous or reviling things about the Islamic god or prophet. Witness the authorities’ refusal to grant entrance to the nation to the alt-right Christian YouTuber Lauren Southern. Her crime? She once distributed a leaflet in Luton with the words ‘Allah is gay, Allah is trans, Allah is lesbian…’, and according to the letter she received from the Home Office informing her of her ban from Britain, such behaviour poses a ‘threat to the fundamental interests of [British] society’.

This is a very serious matter and the lack of outrage about it in the mainstream press, not least among those who call themselves liberal, is deeply disturbing. For what we have here is the ringfencing of Britain from anti-Islam blasphemy. The purification of the kingdom against those who would take the mick out of the Muslim faith. In refusing leave to enter to Ms Southern because she handed out those leaflets, the UK authorities are making it clear that this is a nation in which certain things cannot be said about Allah. They are sending a message not only to Ms Southern but to Britons, too: trolling of Islam is a ‘threat’ to society and counter to ‘the public policy of the United Kingdom’. They haven’t only banned one woman; they have sought to chill an entire sphere of ‘blasphemy’.

Ms Southern was stopped at the border in Calais. She was reportedly questioned under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act. This is an extraordinarily broad and illiberal part of the law. It can be used to stop anyone at Britain’s borders, even if there is no suspicion that they are involved in terrorism. The individual can be detained and questioned for up to nine hours. There is no right to silence. There is no right to a publicly funded lawyer if the person is at a border. That such a repressive measure was allegedly deployed in the questioning of someone for distributing leaflets, for speech, should horrify anyone who cares about liberty. This effectively treats speech as terror, ideas as violence, mere words as things to be kept out of the nation, setting a terrible precedent for free speech in this country.

H/T to Perry de Havilland for the link.

March 1, 2018

Penn & Teller – The Right Not to be Offended

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

DeadJ0ker27
Published on 19 Feb 2010

I’m personally offended by people who get offended.

February 28, 2018

QotD: Words as “physical violence”

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

Berkeley. Evergreen. Middlebury. Missou. Yale. Brown. McMasters. Wilfred Laurier. The list goes on. One must wonder where this trend will ultimately take us. There have been several justifications given for this increasing rash of no-platforming, shaming, and at times, physical violence on North American campuses. In essence, these justifications can be distilled into a triad of well-meaning but ultimately flawed theses, namely, 1.) that all discourse is about power and that any speech that renders a listener physiologically uncomfortable therefore rises to the level of a physical attack upon that individual, thereby justifying actual physical violence in response, 2.) that for the sake of historically marginalized voices, persons who are members of historically privileged groups should forfeit their right to free speech or ought to remain silent, 3.) that certain assertions, even if possibly true, are nonetheless morally impermissible to make since to do so will likely create conditions whereby bad-intentioned persons will inevitably and successfully advance their morally heinous projects.

This first thesis — that all discourse is fundamentally about power — finds its philosophical origins in the likes of post-modernists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. To quote Foucault, “Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations.” Thus, on Foucalt’s view, if all discourse is, at heart, really just veiled force relations between competing groups; if language isn’t fundamentally capable of being about objective truth or about the world in any meaningful sense, then the ink symbols written on the page and the shaped air admitted from one’s mouth in the forms of ‘rationality’, ‘facts’, ‘knowledge’, and ‘truth’ are just another set of weapons in a person’s overall arsenal to seize and maintain power, no different in kind from weapons of a physical sort. To speak then, on Foucault’s view, is to wield a weapon, albeit a subtler and refined one. The uncomfortable physiological feeling of hearing offensive speech, it would then seem, vindicates this view that one is being attacked. One might thus conclude, “Why not attack back with heavier, more effective, and more expedient weapons?”

Michael Robillard, “In Defense of Offense”, Quillette, 2018-02-05.

February 9, 2018

John Perry Barlow, RIP

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Gareth Corfield on the death of John Perry Barlow, author of the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace:

John Perry Barlow, a co-founder of the US Electronic Frontier Foundation, and also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, has died aged 70.

Barlow passed away “quietly in his sleep” yesterday, according to the EFF, which he helped set up in 1990.

“It is no exaggeration to say that major parts of the Internet we all know and love today exist and thrive because of Barlow’s vision and leadership. He always saw the Internet as a fundamental place of freedom, where voices long silenced can find an audience and people can connect with others regardless of physical distance,” said the foundation’s executive director, Cindy Cohn.

The BBC reported that Barlow had been ill for several years but “few details were given about his medical problems”.

In the history of the Internet, Barlow will be forever remembered for his 1996 Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.

“I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear,” wrote Barlow, a bold vision of the future that, sadly, did not come to pass.

The EFF defended Barlow against the inevitable criticisms of the Declaration, with Cohn acknowledging that he was “sometimes held up as a straw man for a kind of naive techno-utopianism” but insisting that he understood “new technology could create and empower evil as much as it could create and empower good”.

I wasn’t a fan of the Grateful Dead, but I read his Declaration soon after it was released and found it inspiring (if not particularly realistic, even then). Few people can have a significant role in a single endeavour, but Barlow was undeniably prominent in the music scene and the early internet community. We’re all poorer for his passing.

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