{"id":25188,"date":"2014-11-19T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2014-11-19T05:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=25188"},"modified":"2014-11-15T10:54:24","modified_gmt":"2014-11-15T15:54:24","slug":"qotd-celebrate-conformity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/11\/19\/qotd-celebrate-conformity\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Celebrate conformity"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian \u2018human rights\u2019 commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it\u2019s a question of how you \u2018strike the balance\u2019, where you \u2018draw the line\u2019\u2026 which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, too. But in reality the point of free speech is for the stuff that\u2019s over the line, and strikingly unbalanced. If free speech is only for polite persons of mild temperament within government-policed parameters, it isn\u2019t free at all. So screw that.<\/p>\n<p>But I don\u2019t really think that many people these days are genuinely interested in \u2018striking the balance\u2019; they\u2019ve drawn the line and they\u2019re increasingly unashamed about which side of it they stand. What all the above stories have in common, whether nominally about Israel, gay marriage, climate change, Islam, or even freedom of the press, is that one side has cheerfully swapped that apocryphal Voltaire quote about disagreeing with what you say but defending to the death your right to say it for the pithier Ring Lardner line: \u2018\u201cShut up,\u201d he explained.\u2019<\/p>\n<p>A generation ago, progressive opinion at least felt obliged to pay lip service to the Voltaire shtick. These days, nobody\u2019s asking you to defend yourself to the death: a mildly supportive retweet would do. But even that\u2019s further than most of those in the academy, the arts, the media are prepared to go. As Erin Ching, a student at 60-grand-a-year Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, put it in her college newspaper the other day: \u2018What really bothered me is the whole idea that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.\u2019 Yeah, who needs that? There speaks the voice of a generation: celebrate diversity by enforcing conformity.<\/p>\n<p>Mark Steyn, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.spectator.co.uk\/australia\/australia-features\/9187741\/the-slow-death-of-free-speech-2\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;The slow death of free speech&#8221;, <em>The Spectator<\/em><\/a>, 2014-04-19<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I heard a lot of that kind of talk during my battles with the Canadian \u2018human rights\u2019 commissions a few years ago: of course, we all believe in free speech, but it\u2019s a question of how you \u2018strike the balance\u2019, where you \u2018draw the line\u2019\u2026 which all sounds terribly reasonable and Canadian, and apparently Australian, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,53,41],"tags":[459,186,46],"class_list":["post-25188","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-censorship","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-hrcs"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6yg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25188"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25189,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25188\/revisions\/25189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25188"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25188"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}