Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Time was when leftist termites were found mainly in government, the media, schools and universities, Hollywood, and the churches, Now they have come to infest huge corporations that control the flow of information. The times they are a'changin.'
Here is another reason why the libertarian notion of a minimal 'night watchman state' is untenable. The Federal government has to have power sufficient to punish rogue corporations.
"No man speaketh safely but he that is glad to hold his peace. " (Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Chapter XX.)
Excellent advice for Christian and non-Christian alike. Much misery and misfortune can be avoided by simply keeping one's mouth shut. That playful banter with your female student that you could not resist indulging in – she construed it as sexual harassment. You were sitting on top of the world, but now you are in a world of trouble.
In this Age of Political Correctness examples are legion. To be on the safe side, a good rule of thumb is: If your speech can be misconstrued, it will be. Did you really need to make that comment, or fire off that e-mail, or send that picture of your marvellous nether endowment to a woman not your wife?
Part of the problem is Political Correctness, but another part is that people are not brought up to exercise self-control in thought, word, and deed. Both problems can be plausibly blamed on liberals. Paradoxically enough, the contemporary liberal promotes speech codes and taboos while at the same time promoting an absurd tolerance of every sort of bad behavior. The liberal 'educator' dare not tell the black kid to pull his pants up lest he be accused of a racist 'dissing' of the kid's 'culture.'
You need to give your children moral lessons and send them to schools where they will receive them. My mind drifts back to the fourth or fifth grade and the time a nun planted an image in my mind that remains. She likened the tongue to a sword capable of great damage, positioned behind two 'gates,' the teeth and the lips. Those gates are there for a reason, she explained, and the sword should come out only when it can be well deployed.
The good nun did not extend the image to the sword of flesh hanging between a man's legs. But I will. Keep your 'sword' behind the 'gates' of your pants and your undershorts until such time as it can be brought out for a good purpose.
Companion post: Idle Talk
'Liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate. Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you. And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'
More here.
A tough bunch of issues. You figure it out. For me to expatiate further would require doing homework I don’t have time for. No job, no kids, no social commitments, no time!
Related: Free Speech: PragerU sues Google
It is surely an outrage that Google would limit access to PragerU videos on YouTube given their high quality and educational value. So it is good news that Dennis Prager is punching back with a lawsuit:
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California, details upwards of 50 PragerU educational videos that YouTube has, in PragerU’s view, unjustifiably slapped with “restricted mode” or “demonetization” filters, violating its First Amendment right to free speech.
What is not clear, however, is how the First Amendment comes into this. As I understand the free speech clause of the First Amendment,it protects the citizen against the federal government. "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech or of the press . . . ."
Google and its subsidiary YouTube, however, are in the private sector.
If I don't allow your comment to appear on my weblog, that is no violation of your First Amendment rights. You have no First Amendment rights here. This is private property. It is the same as if you came into my house spouting leftist drivel. I'd throw you out. Why should I give some macro-aggressive destructive leftist a forum?
Google could argue similarly: why should they give a forum to the 'racist,' 'sexist,' 'homophobic,' etc. views of Dennis Prager and his associates?
Note the difference between Google and Cal Berkeley. If Alan Dershowitz is prevented from speaking there by Antifa thugs, he could argue with some plausibility that since Cal Berkeley is the recipient of federal monies, he does have First Amendment rights there.
But it will take rather more involved legal reasoning for Prager's lawyers to make their case.
There are a number of wickedly difficult issues here.
All the political issues are rooted in philosophical conundra. My metaphilosophy, however, teaches that the problems of philosophy are, all of them, insoluble. Ergo, etc.
The following from a London correspondent:
Quite incredibly, Spencer is still banned from visiting the UK because of what he says in this short (2:07) YouTube video. The letter from the Home Office, then under the auspices of Theresa May, said:
You are reported to have stated the following:
>>It [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society … because [of] political correctness and because of media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.<<
The Home Secretary considers that should you be allowed to enter the UK you would continue to espouse such views. In doing so. you would be committing listed behaviours and would therefore be behaving in a way that is not conducive to the public good.
You are therefore instructed not to travel to the UK as you will be refused admission on arrival. Although there is no statutory right of appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision, this decision is reviewed every 3 to 5 years.
Astonishing. So it is "not conducive to the public good" to speak the truth because some people (Muslims) will be offended by it and others (ordinary Brits) will be inspired to commit acts of violence against members of a minority? Is that the Home Office reasoning?
Lord have mercy!
The Islamists have learned how to use our values against us. We value toleration and they exploit our tolerance. That ploy is structurally similar to what Communists did and their leftist successors do. Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Theresa May plays the role of 'useful idiot.'
And then comes the Orwellian twist: when Spencer points out that Islam is incompatible with Western values such as toleration, and speaks up in defence of toleration, he is denounced as intolerant! So you are intolerant if you won't tolerate your own destruction?
There are many deep issues here, and it is very difficult to set them forth clearly in a few sentences. One issue is whether there is truth at all, or only politically correct opinions. Note the obvious: what is politically correct need not be correct in the sense of true.
For the Left truth doesn't matter since it is all about power in the end and those narratives that are conducive to the gaining and maintaining of power. As I have said more than once, a story does not have to be true to be a story.
One of the subterranean links between leftism and Islam concerns the denial of absolute truth. On Islamic voluntarism, truth is subject to Allah's will, which of course implies that truth is not absolute. That's just a hint. More later.
To understand the Left you have to understand that central to their worldview is the hermeneutics of suspicion which is essentially a diluted amalgam of themes from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.
Thus nothing has the plain meaning that it has; every meaning must be deconstructed so as to lay bare its 'real meaning.' Nothing is what it manifestly is; there is always something nefarious at work below the surface. (These last two sentence are 'in French': they sport universal quantifiers and thereby exaggerate for effect; you know how to dial them back so as to not give offense to your sober Anglo sensibility.)
Suppose a conservative says, sincerely, "The most qualified person should get the job." Applying the hermeneutics of suspicion, the leftist takes the conservative to be speaking 'in code': what he is really saying is something like: "People of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race."
But of course that is not what the conservative means; he means what he says. He means the the best qualified person should get the job regardless of race, sex, or creed.
Or suppose a conservative refers to a black malefactor as a thug. What he has actually said, according to the hermeneutics of suspicion, is that the malefactor is a nigger. But 'thug' does not mean 'nigger.' 'Thug' means thug. There are thugs of all races.
Leftists often call for 'conversations' about this or that. Thus Barack Obama's first Attorney General, Eric Holder, famously called for a 'conversation' about race. But how can one have a conversation — no sneer quotes — about anything with people who refuse to take what one sincerely says at face value?
One of Donald Trump's signature sayings is "Make America great again!"
To a leftist, this is a 'racist dog whistle.' It doesn't mean what it manifestly means; there is a latent sinister meaning that we can thank Bill Clinton for exposing. It means — wait for it – “That message . . . make America great again is if you’re a white Southerner, you know exactly what it means, don’t you. What it means is I’ll give you an economy you had 50 years ago and I’ll move you back up on the social totem and other people down.”
The irony is that Slick Willy used the same sentence himself!
Here we come to the nub of the matter. The typical liberal is a morally defective specimen of humanity who refuses to treat his political opponents as rational beings, as persons. He dehumanizes them and treats them as if they are nothing but big balls of such affects as fear and hate bereft of rational justification for the views they hold.
Now read this entry on the genetic fallacy.
We are a politically diverse group of social scientists, natural scientists, humanists, and other scholars who want to improve our academic disciplines and universities.
We share a concern about a growing problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” When nearly everyone in a field shares the same political orientation, certain ideas become orthodoxy, dissent is discouraged, and errors can go unchallenged.
To reverse this process, we have come together to advocate for a more intellectually diverse and heterodox academy.
Your humble correspondent would suggest that advocacy is not enough. We have to learn how to punch back at the fascist bastards, using their own tactics against them in some cases, and hitting them over their feculent heads with their own book of rules, Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals.
In some cases we will be 'punching down' at losers and screw-ups, a justified procedure given that the bums have freely chosen their status.
Well, he died at age 53 in 1996.
Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement. Unfortunately, the young radicals of those days, many of whom had a legitimate point or two against the Establishment, began the "long march through the institutions" and are now the Establishment, still fancying that they are "speaking truth to power" even as they control the levers of power. As might have been expected, power has corrupted them. Former radicals have hardened into dogmatic apparatchiks of political correctness and unbending authoritarians. Those who stood for free speech and civil rights have become enablers of and apologists for left-wing fascism. What began as a free speech movement has transmogrified into a no speech movement, as Ron Radosh shows . . . (Read more).
By the way, it is important not to forget that the rights enshrined, not conferred, by the First Amendment find their concrete, real-world, back-up in the rights, not conferred, but enshrined in the Second Amendment. This is why it is so important who sits on SCOTUS. Donald Trump and his team have accomplished a lot in their first 100 days, with the appointment and confirmation of the 49-year-old Neil Gorsuch being the premier achievement.
In case it is not clear what the image depicts, it shows a leftist thug trying to blow out the light shed by free speech, a value held aloft by Lady Liberty.
Glenn Reynolds talks sense against such liberal knuckleheads as Howard Dean:
The other hallmark of constitutional illiteracy is the claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect “hate speech.” And by making that claim last week, Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and Democratic presidential candidate, revealed himself to be a constitutional illiterate. Then, predictably, he doubled down on his ignorance.
In First Amendment law, the term “hate speech” is meaningless. All speech is equally protected whether it’s hateful or cheerful. It doesn’t matter if it’s racist, sexist or in poor taste, unless speech falls into a few very narrow categories — like “true threats,” which have to address a specific individual, or “incitement,” which must constitute an immediate and intentional encouragement to imminent lawless action — it’s protected.
The term “hate speech” was invented by people who don’t like that freedom, and who want to give the — completely false — impression that there’s a kind of speech that the First Amendment doesn’t protect because it’s hateful. What they mean by “hateful,” it seems, is really just that it’s speech they don’t agree with. Some even try to argue that since hearing disagreeable ideas is unpleasant, expressing those ideas is somehow an act of “violence.”
I would add that 'liberals' have a strange tendency to conflate dissent with hate. Obviously, if I dissent from what you maintain, it does not follow that I hate you. And if I express my dissent in speech, it does not follow that my speech is 'hate speech.'
I suspect most 'liberals' have the intellectual equipment to grasp these simple distinctions. So what ought we conclude? That they are hate-filled individuals?
And another thing. If a liberal claims that the Great Wall of Trump is 'hateful,' then I will put to him the question: Is it 'hateful' when you lock your doors at night? No? But doesn't anyone have the right to 'migrate' anywhere he pleases? You just hate people that are different from you, you xenophobe!
Here:
It’s been exactly 40 years since my late wife and I quit as English profs at Middlebury College, where hundreds of screaming students wouldn’t allow Charles Murray, one of the nation’s foremost conservative intellectuals, to speak to them yesterday, as a campus conservative group had invited him to do.
See also The Middlebury Meltdown.
Pussy riot, American style. An impotent response to Inaugural balls.
Cultural polluter Madonna has crowned herself poster girl of the pussy riot. Destructive leftists will justify as free speech her border-line incitement to violence. But the right to free speech is not absolute. Observations on Free Speech, #9:
9. To say that the right to free expression is a natural right is not to say that it is absolute. For the exercise of this right is subject to various reasonable and perhaps even morally obligatory restrictions, both in public and in private. There are limits on the exercise of the right in both spheres, but one has the right in both spheres. To have an (exercisable) right is one thing, to exercise it another, and from the fact that one has the right it does not follow that one has the right to its exercise in every actual and possible circumstance. If you say something I deem offensive in my house, on my blog, or while in my employ, then I can justifiably throw you out, or shut you up, or fire you and you cannot justify your bad behavior by invocation of the natural right to free speech. And similarly in public: the government is justified in preventing you from from shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater, to use the hackneyed example. You are not thereby deprived of the right; you are deprived of the right to exercise the right in certain circumstances.
This important point is explained clearly here:
We do not derive our right to freedom of speech from the Constitution. More specifically, it does not “come from” the First Amendment.
[. . .]
The Constitution is not the source of our right to freedom of speech because freedom of speech is an unalienable right. What the First Amendment can do is recognize that already existing unalienable right by forbidding the government from abridging it. And that is precisely what it does.
We could put it as follows. The First Amendment does not confer, but protects, the right to free speech, a natural right that is logically antecedent to anything conventional such as a human document or the collective decision of a legislative body. It protects this right against government infringement.
There are two points here that ought to be separately noted. One is that the right is protected, not conferred, by the Constitution. The other is that the right is protected against government infringement. The government may not infringe your right to free speech, but that is not to say that I may not.
Suppose you leave an offensive comment on my weblog. I delete your comment and block you from my site. You protest and cite the First Amendment. I point out that said amendment protects your speech against government infringement only, and that I am no part of the government.
If you insist that you nevertheless have a right to express yourself, I will agree, but add that your right to free expression does not entail any obligation on my part to give you a forum.
Finally, to speak of the right to free speech as a 'constitutional right' or as a 'First Amendment right' can be misleading inasmuch as someone might be led by these words to suppose that the right derives from the Constitution. So it is best to speak of it as an unalienable or natural right.