“They used to pay lip service to the Voltaire argument,” [“I disagree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it”] says Steyn, “but now they say that every other right trumps freedom of speech. The rights of identity groups take precedence. Since there is no document in the British Commonwealth to support free-speech absolutism, as you have in the United States, what’s happened in our time is that there is a view of competing rights. Section 13 in Canada. Section 18 in Australia. Human rights commissions everywhere. And it’s all done in the name of ‘striking a balance’. The minute you talk about striking a balance, you are on the wrong side of the line, because that cure is worse than the disease. We have to take chances with repellent and repulsive speech in order to retain free speech.
“And actually it’s no better in the United States. On the one hand you have the absence of a monarchy and free-speech absolutism, but on the other hand you prostrate yourselves before judges. I’m in the fifth year of a lawsuit that started with a 140-word blog post — there’s not much of a First Amendment when that happens. And then, on your college campuses, you have the debate about ‘acceptable’ and ‘safe’ speech. You have a tiny little Canada on each campus, with the same sort of shrunken, shrivelled public discussion. ‘Safe speech’ is a road to hell. Their goal is the abolition of hate — the abolition of a human emotion. They want everyone to have this glassy-eyed look, celebrating diversity. And they don’t recognise their own totalitarianism.”
Mark Steyn, interviewed by John Bloom, “Mark Steyn, Cole Porter and Free Speech”, Quadrant, 2017-05-11.
June 4, 2019
QotD: Freedom of speech and “balancing” competing rights
June 2, 2019
A rare word in favour of free speech from the PM
Chris Selley on an unusually free-speech oriented comment from Justin Trudeau, who is more commonly heard making threats to shut down speech he doesn’t like:
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said something interesting this past week, in a conversation with Vox journalist Liz Plank at the Open Government Partnership Summit in Ottawa. When it comes to regulating social media giants like Facebook, he suggested, governments like Canada’s have to be very, very careful.
“We recognize that the solution doesn’t lie in government’s heavy hand over our internet (and) public spaces,” he said. “Freedom of expression, freedom of speech, is so fundamental to our democracies that … as soon as we say we have to limit hate speech, we have to protect citizens, there are some really tricky decisions we have to (make).”
It’s interesting primarily because Trudeau and various of his ministers have been threatening for what seems like forever to bring the hammer down. “The platforms are failing their users and they’re failing our citizens,” a full-thesp Trudeau intoned in unveiling the government’s buzzword-laden Digital Charter. “They have to step up in a major way to counter disinformation. And if they don’t, we will hold them to account, and there will be meaningful financial consequences.”
Indeed, Trudeau warned Plank that if “partnership” with social media companies doesn’t yield the desired results — whatever those might be; the government has been studiously vague — “we will take measures that we will regret having to take.”
Still it’s nice to see freedom of speech get a shout out from the top. The sabre-rattling act is wearisome, but it’s vastly preferable to the government speech-regulation power trip that a remarkable number of mainstream Canadian voices have been demanding. Perhaps Trudeau realizes that while the government can and should encourage and work with social media companies to weed out national security threats and illegal material, it has no legal grounds to compel those companies to prohibit “disinformation” or “hate speech” as loosely defined by many people calling for serious regulations — which is to say nasty stuff they don’t like.
May 22, 2019
May 11, 2019
Jonathan Haidt – Social media has altered a fundamental constant of the universe
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
March 17, 2019
QotD: McGill University
… 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
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
The Rubin Report
Published on 4 Apr 2016Stephen 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
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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
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
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
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)
ReasonTV
Published on 13 Dec 2018Watch 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.’
——————–
Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://youtube.com/reasontv
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Subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts: https://goo.gl/az3a7aReason 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
December 7, 2018
The Anti-Authoritarian Politics of Harry Potter
Foundation for Economic Education
Published on 6 Dec 2018JK 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.
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Written & Produced by Sean W. Malone
Edited by Arash Ayrom & Sean W. Malone
