{"id":42525,"date":"2018-03-25T01:00:53","date_gmt":"2018-03-25T05:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=42525"},"modified":"2018-03-05T08:28:13","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T13:28:13","slug":"qotd-americas-read-only-activists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/03\/25\/qotd-americas-read-only-activists\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: America&#8217;s &#8220;read-only&#8221; activists"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, \u201ceven the women in there have been brainwashed!\u201d and \u201cNazis are not welcome in civil society.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>When banal observations like \u201cmen and women are different heights\u201d prompts the accusation that I\u2019m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it\u2019s clear that this was not good faith protest.<\/p>\n<p>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\u2019 responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are \u201cread-only,\u201d like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas\u200a\u2014\u200athey will not even <em>hear<\/em> ideas\u200a\u2014\u200abecause their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.<\/p>\n<p>Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we\u2019re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.<\/p>\n<p>Heather Heying, <a href=\"https:\/\/medium.com\/@heyingh\/on-the-dangers-of-read-only-activism-e4891ebacaac\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;On the dangers of read-only activism&#8221;, <em>Medium.com<\/em><\/a>, 2018-03-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, \u201ceven the women in there have been brainwashed!\u201d and \u201cNazis are not welcome in civil society.\u201d When banal observations like \u201cmen and women are different heights\u201d prompts the accusation that I\u2019m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it\u2019s clear that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"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":[79,53,41,13],"tags":[186,354,238,1020,720,764],"class_list":["post-42525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-georgeorwell","tag-offensensitivity","tag-progressives","tag-protest","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-b3T","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42525","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=42525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42526,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42525\/revisions\/42526"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}