Free Speech – Page 8 – Maverick Philosopher

Toleration Extremism: Notes on John Stuart Mill

In the wake of the murderous rampage by Muslim terrorists at Charlie Hebdo in Paris on 7 January, many have embraced a form of extremism according to which any and all (public) expression must be tolerated. This entry questions this extremism as we find it in John Stuart Mill.

Here are two passages from Chapter Two of John Stuart Mill's magnificent On Liberty (emphases added):

But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. [. . .] We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion; and if we were sure, stifling it would be an evil still.

[. . .]

Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case. Strange that they should imagine that they are not assuming infallibility when they acknowledge that there should be free discussion on all subjects which can possibly be doubtful, but think that some particular principle or doctrine should be forbidden to be questioned because it is so certain, that is, because they are certain that it is certain. To call any proposition certain, while there is any one who would deny its certainty if permitted, but who is not permitted, is to assume that we ourselves, and those who agree with us, are the judges of certainty, and judges without hearing the other side.

Evaluation of the First Passage

As sympathetic as I am to Mill, I am puzzled (and you ought to be too) by the last sentence of the first quoted passage. It consists of two claims. The first is that " We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion . . . ." This is plainly false! The opinion of some Holocaust deniers that no Jews were gassed at Auschwitz is an opinion we can be sure is false. We are as sure of this as we are sure of any empirical fact about the past. Or suppose some fool denies that JFK died by assasination or maintains that McCain won the last presidential election. Those are fools' opinions we know to be wrong. There is no lack of examples. What was Mill thinking? "We can never be sure," he writes. A modal auxiliary married to a negative universal quantifier! To refute a 'can never' statement all you need is one merely possible counterexample. I have given three actual counterexamples. Pace Mill, we can be sure in some cases that certain opinions are wrong.

Mill's second claim is that even if we are sure that an opinion we are trying to stifle is false, stifling it would nevertheless be an evil. Mill is here maintaining something so embarrassingly extreme that it borders on the preposterous. Consider again an actual or possible Holocaust denier who makes some outrageously false assertion that we know (if we know anything about the past) to be false. Suppose this individual has the means to spread his lies far and wide and suppose that his doing so is likely to incite a horde of radical Islamists to engage in an Islamist equivalent of Kristallnacht. Would it be evil to 'stifle' the individual in question? By no means. Indeed it could be reasonably argued that it is morally imperative that such an individual not be permitted to broadcast his lies.

How could anyone fail to see this? Perhaps because he harbors the notion that free expression is unconditionally worthwhile, worthwhile regardless of the content of what is being expressed, whether true or false, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or innocuous, and regardless of the context in which the opinions are expressed. Now I grant that freedom of expression, of discussion, of inquiry and the like are very high values. That goes without saying. I have utter contempt for Islamists and other totalitarians. I'm an Enlightenment man after all, a student of Kant, an American, and a philosopher. Argument and dialectic are the lifeblood of philosophy. Philosophy is free and open inquiry. But why do we value the freedom to speak, discuss, publish, and inquire? That is a question that must be asked and answered.

I say that we value them and ought to value them mainly because we value truth and because the freedom to speak, publish, discuss, and inquire are means conducive to the acquisition of truth and the rooting out of falsehood. We ought to accord them a high value, a value that trumps other values, only on condition that they, on balance, lead us to truth and away from falsehood. We value them, and ought to value them, mainly as means, not as ends in themselves. This is consistent with holding that some public expression that is not truth-conducive has a value in itself.

So the Holocaust denier, who abuses the right to free speech to spread what we all know (if we know anything about the past) to be falsehoods, has no claim on our toleration. For again, there is no unconditional or abolute right to free expression. That right is limited by competing values, the value of truth being one of them. The value of social order is another.

Two arguments, then.

The first is that free expression while it may have some value in itself has a high value only as a means to an end, where the end is the acquisition and dissemination of truth. The second is that the value of socila order far outweighs the extremely limited value of someone's spouting falsehoods about, say, the genocide of the Jews by the Nazis. Those we abuse the right to free speech by spreading pernicious falsehoods have no claim on our toleration.

As I see it, then, Mill makes two mistakes in his first passage. He fails to see that some opinions are known to be false. Now there may not be many such opinions, but all I need is one to refute him since he makes a universal claim. I will of course agree with Mill that many of the doctrines that people denounce as false, and will not examine, are not known to be false. The second mistake is to think that even if we know an opinion to be false we have no right to suppress its propagation.

Now of course I am not claiming that all, or even most, known falsehoods are such that their propagation ought to be suppressed. Let the Flat Earth Society propagate its falsehoods to its heart's content. For few take them seriously, and their falsehoods, though known to be falsehoods, are not sufficiently pernicious to warrant suppression. Obviously, government censorship or suppression of the expression of opinions must be employed only in very serious cases. This is because government, though it is practically necessary and does do some good, does much evil and has a tremendous capacity for unspeakable evils. It was communist governments that murdered 100 million in the 20th century. And when the Nazis stripped Jews of their property and sent them to the Vernichtungslager, it was legal. (Think about that and about whether you want to persist in conflating the legal and the moral.)

Mill's mistake, as it seems to me, is that he allows NO cases where such suppression would be justified. And that is a position whose extremism condemns it. Toleration extremism, to give it a name.

Evaluation of the Second Passage

Mill only digs his hole deeper in the second passage. "Strange it is, that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free discussion, but object to their being "pushed to an extreme;" not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Surely the bolded principle is a bizarre one. Consider respect for human life. Respecting human life, we uphold a general prohibition against homicide. But it is not plausibly maintained there are no exceptions to this 'general' prohibition where the term does not mean 'exceptionless' but 'holding in most cases.' There are at least five putative classes of exceptions: killing in self-defence, killing in just war, capital punishment, abortion, and suicide. Now suppose someone were to apply Mill's principle (the one I bolded) and argues as follows: "Unless the reasons against killing humans are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case." Would you not put such a person down as a doctrinaire fool? He holds that if it is wrong to kill human beings 'in general,' then it is wrong to kill any human being in any circumstance whatsoever. It would then follow that it is wrong to kill a home invader who has just murdered your wife and is about to do the same to you and your children. The mistake here is to take an otherwise excellent principle or precept (Do not kill human beings) and remove all restrictions on its application.

There are plenty of counterexamples to Mill's bizarre principle that "unless reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case."

We conservatives are lovers of liberty and we share common ground with our libertarian brethren, but here we must part company with them.

Je Suis Charlie?

In reaction to the murderous attack by Muslim terrorists on Charbonnier and Co. at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris, many have jumped on the "I am Charlie" bandwagon. It is quite understandable. But perhaps a little thought should be given to the question whether one ought to endorse a political pornographer who publishes stuff like the following. Might there be something called toleration extremism? Might it be that while one has a legal right to publish almost anything, one has a moral obligation to exercise restraint? Why do we value freedom of speech? Is it valuable as an end in itself or only as a means to valuable ends? Is it reasonable to maintain that any and all public self-expression is a good just in virtue of its being self-expression? I hope to say something about these questions in the next few days. Meanwhile, please think a bit before trumpeting your identity or rather solidarity with 'Charlie.'

My point in posting the following, needless to say, is not to mock the Christian Trinity but to raise in a graphic manner some very serious questions that require careful thought.

Intolerance for Free Expression Rooted in Classical Islam

Andrew C. McCarthy maintains.

A Dog Named ‘Muhammad’

There is a sleazy singer who calls herself 'Madonna.' That moniker is offensive to many. But we in the West are tolerant, perhaps excessively so, and we tolerate the singer, her name, and her antics. Muslims need to understand the premium we place on toleration if they want to live among us.

A San Juan Capistrano councilman named his dog 'Muhammad' and mentioned the fact in public. Certain Muslim groups took offense and demanded an apology. The councilman should stand firm. One owes no apology to the hypersensitive and inappropriately sensitive. We must exercise our free speech rights if we want to keep them. Use 'em or lose 'em.

The notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one. So if some Muslims are offended by some guy's naming his dog 'Muhammad,' their being offended is not something we should validate. Their being offended is their problem.

Am I saying that we should act in ways that we know are offensive to others? Of course not. We should be kind to our fellow mortals whenever possible. But sometimes principles are at stake and they must be defended. Truth and principle trump feelings. Free speech is one such principle. I exercised it when I wrote that the notion that dogs are 'unclean' is a silly one.

Some will be offended by that. I say their being offended is their problem. What I said is true. They are free to explain why dogs are 'unclean' and I wish them the best of luck. But equally, I am free to label them fools.

With some people being conciliatory is a mistake. They interpret your conciliation and willingness to compromise as weakness. These people need to be opposed vigorously. For the councilman to apologize would be foolish.

Conservative Marquette Poly Sci Prof Suspended for Blogging

Via John Pepple, I just learned that John McAdams, a tenured associate professor of political science at Marquette University, has been suspended with pay and barred from campus for criticizing a graduate student philosophy teacher who shut down a classroom conversation on gay marriage. As McAdams puts it at his weblog Marquette Warrior:

It created more controversy than any blog other post we have done: an account of a Philosophy instructor at Marquette who told a student that gay marriage could not be discussed in her class since any opposition would be “homophobic” and would “offend” any gay students in the class. Not only did the story echo among Catholic outlets and sites dedicated to free speech on campus, but it created considerable blow back among leftist academics, who pretty much demanded our head on a pike.

This incident further illustrates what I mean when I say that the universities of the land, most of them, have become leftist seminaries and hotbeds of political correctness. The behavior of the philosophy instructor illustrates the truth that there is little that is classically liberal about contemporary liberals.

I will add Marquette Warrior to my blogroll.

The New Threats to Free Speech

Here.

The Orwellian Inversion of the Free Speech Movement

We are coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement spearheaded by Mario Savio at the University of California, Berkeley. Sol Stern remembers in The Unfree Speech Movement.

What Ever Happened to Mario Savio? From Free Speech to No Speech

Some of us are old enough to remember Mario Savio and the 1964 Free Speech Movement. But then 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. Unfortunately, power has corrupted them. Former radicals have hardened into dogmatic apparatchiks of political correctness and unbending authoritarians. What began as a free speech movement has transmogrified into a no speech movement, as Ron Radosh shows:

At the very start of the early New Left — circa the 1964-65 academic year — students in Berkeley, California, started what was called the Free Speech Movement (FSM). Back in those days, university administrators did not allow early supporters of the civil rights movement to try to gather support on campus or solicit donations to various civil rights organizations. The police were called in to arrest the offenders, mass arrests were made, and giant rallies surrounding the Sproul Hall steps had nationwide repercussions, including a backlash to the protests from California residents who backed Ronald Reagan’s campaign for governor of California a few years later. Reagan emphasized his opposition to the actions of the student radicals.

It also led to a speech by a young student named Mario Savio, whose following words sound today like a clarion call by a libertarian:

But we’re a bunch of raw materials that don’t mean to be — have any process upon us. Don’t mean to be made into any product! Don’t mean — Don’t mean to end up being bought by some clients of the University, be they the government, be they industry, be they organized labor, be they anyone! We’re human beings! … There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious — makes you so sick at heart — that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

How times have changed. The very New Left students of that era — so many of whom now run the universities against which they once protested — have moved from support of free speech to what might be termed the “No Speech Movement.” Or, perhaps more accurately, speech for which only those whom they approve should be allowed. Nowhere has this been clearer than in the various incidents surrounding invited graduation speakers at some of the most well-known private liberal arts colleges as well as one state university.

Read it all.

Safe Speech

"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 harrassment. 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 punk'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

Copy Editors and Political Correctness

Tribal America

Empty Chair, Empty Suit, Empty Speech

Speech and Guns

UW should resist feds' speech code

Gun Control and Speech Control

A reasonable person advocates both, but limited versions of both. Liberals, however, tend not to be reasonable. If they interpreted the Second Amendment in as extreme fashion as they do the First, gun ownership would be mandatory.

Should Newspapers ‘Out’ Those With Whom They Disagree?

Which is morally worse, killing a pre-natal human being or keeping a loaded gun in the house for self-defense? The former, obviously. Both abortion and gun ownership are legal, but one would have to be singularly benighted to think that the keeping is morally worse than the killing, or even morally commensurable with it, let alone morally equivalent to it. It is the difference between taking life and liberty and protecting them. One is wrong, the other is permissible if not obligatory. Therefore, if it would be wrong — and certainly it would be — for a newspaper to publish the names and addresses of abortionists and of women who have had abortions, then a fortiori what The Journal News of White Plains, New York did is wrong. According to the NYT:

Two weeks ago, the paper published the names and addresses of handgun permit holders — a total of 33,614 — in two suburban counties, Westchester and Rockland, and put maps of their locations online.

[. . .]

But the article, which left gun owners feeling vulnerable to harassment or break-ins, also drew outrage from across the country. Calls and e-mails grew so threatening that the paper’s president and publisher, Janet Hasson, hired armed guards to monitor the newspaper’s headquarters in White Plains and its bureau in West Nyack, N.Y.

Personal information about editors and writers at the paper has been posted online, including their home addresses and information about where their children attended school; some reporters have received notes saying they would be shot on the way to their cars; bloggers have encouraged people to steal credit card information of Journal News employees; and two packages containing white powder have been sent to the newsroom and a third to a reporter’s home (all were tested by the police and proved to be harmless).

Note the double standard. Hasson hired armed guards. Two points. First, she apparently grasps the idea of guns being used defensively when it comes to her defense. Why not then generally? Second, these armed guards are not agents of the government. They are in the private sector. Why didn't she simply rely on the cops to protect her? After all, that's the liberal line: 'There is no need for civilians to have guns; their protection is the job of the police.' Hasson's behavior smacks of hypocrisy.

Threatening and harrassing the editors and writers at the newspaper is obviously wrong. But publishing their names and addresses cannot be wrong if what the paper did is not wrong. I say both are wrong. The publisher and the editor exercised terrible judgment in a misguided attempt to drive up circulation. But now it has come back to bite them, and one hopes they will be driven out of business for their rank irresponsibility.

Responsible people consider the consequences of their actions. Not everything one has a right to do is right to do. Responsible people also consider the consequences of their speech. Contrary to what some foolish civil libertarians think, speech is not just words. Not everything one has a right to say is right to say. To say or do anything that is likely to incite violence is ceteris paribus wrong, whether it is legal or not.

Example. Blacks as a group are more criminally prone than whites as a group. That is true, and one certainly has a right, in general, to say it publically. But is is easy to imagine circumstances in which saying it publically would incite violence. In those circumstances the saying of it would be wrong despite the truth and indeed the importance of what is said.

One might accuse me of being too reasonable with our enemies. One might remind me of one of my own aphorisms:

Time to be unreasonable. It is not reasonable to be reasonable with everyone. Some need to be met with the hard fist of unreason. The reasonable know that reason's sphere of application is not limitless.

Applied to the present case, one could argue, or I could argue against myself, that if the leftist scumbags at The Journal News want a civil war, they ought to get one. What they do to us we should do right back at them. For all's fair in love and war. They ought also to consider, for their own good, that is is foolish for a bunch of candy-assed liberals to take on armed men and women.

Speech and Guns

It is time to trot out my old gun posts to counteract the tsunami of leftist Unsinn washing over us because of the recent massacres in Oregon and Connecticut. Here is one from December of 2010, slightly revised.

…………….

How should we deal with offensive speech? As a first resort, with more speech, better, truer, more responsible speech. Censorship cannot be ruled out, but it must be a last resort. We should respond similarly to the misuse of firearms. Banning firearms is no solution since (i) bans have no effect on criminals who, in virtue of being criminals, have no respect for law, and (ii) bans violate the liberty of the law-abiding. To punish the law-abiding while failing vigorously to pursue scofflaws is the way of the contemporary liberal. The problem is not guns, but guns in criminal hands. Ted Kennedy's car killed more people than my gun. The solution, or part of it, is guns in law-abiding hands.

Would an armed citizen in the vicinity of the Virginia Polytechnic shooter have been able to reduce his carnage? It is likely. Don't ask me how likely. Of course, there is the chance that an armed citizen in the confusion of the moment would have made things worse. Who knows?

But if you value liberty then you will be willing to take the risk. As I understand it, the Commonwealth of Virginia already has a concealed carry law. Now if you trust a citizen to carry a concelaed weapon off campus, why not trust him to carry it on campus? After all, on campus there is far less likelihood of a situation arising where the weapon would be needed. Conservatives place a high value on self-reliance, individual liberty, and individual responsibility. Valuing self-reliance and liberty, a conservative will oppose any attempt to limit his self-reliance by infringing his right to defend himself, a right from which one may infer the right to own a handgun. (As I argue elsewhere; see the category Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms.) And appreciating as he does the reality and importance of individual responsibility, he will oppose liberal efforts to blame guns for the crimes committed by people using guns.

Nothing I have written will convince a committed liberal. As I have argued elsewhere, Left-Right differences are rooted in value-differences that cannot be rationally adjudicated. But my intention is not to try to enlighten the terminally benighted; my intention is to clarify the issue.

Persuasion and agreement are well-nigh impossible to attain; clarification, however, is a goal well within reach. We must be clear about what we believe and why we believe it and how it differs from the beliefs of the benighted. And in the light of that clarity we must carry the fight to our enemies.

Am I a Raving Liberal? The Problem of Ideological Extremism

I happened across a post from a couple of years ago on a defunct blog named Throne and Altar. For some reason the post's title drew me in: Another Casualty: Maverick Philosopher Embraces Tolerance. The author, one "bonaldo," claims that Islam has turned me into "a raving liberal." The entry of mine that drew his ire was a defense of the Pope entitled Pope Benedict's Regensburg Speech and Muslim Oversensitivity. The post so offended bonaldo the extremist that he removed me (or rather a hyperlink to my weblog) from his blogroll. What got his goat were the final two paragraphs of my entry:

That is why both leftists and Islamists must be vigorously and relentlessly opposed if we care about our classically liberal values.

The trouble with the Islamic world is that nothing occurred in it comparable to our Enlightenment. In the West, Christianity was chastened and its tendency towards fanaticism put in check by the philosophers. Athens disciplined Jerusalem. (And of course this began long before the Enlightenment.) Nothing similar happened in the Islamic world. They have no Athens. (Yes, I know all about al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, et al. — that doesn’t alter the main point.) Their world is rife with unreasoning fanatics bent on destroying ‘infidels’ — whether they be Christians, Jews, Buddhists, or other Muslims. We had better wake up to this threat, or one day soon we will wake up to a nuclear ‘event’ in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles which kills not 3,000 but 300,000.

Now one would think that such a ringing statement would be greeted by two cheers of approbation, if not three, from anyone on the Right. To a fanatical right-winger, however, anyone who sees a scintilla of value in anything the least bit classically liberal is an enemy to be banished to the blogospheric equivalent of Siberia. For these ultra-reactionary extremists one cannot be Right enough. And so bonaldo the fanatic says the following:

After affirming his commitment to liberalism, MP asserts that Christianity is a false religion. Truth doesn’t need to be “chastened” or “checked”. Since truth never contradicts itself, the only thing that can check truth would be falsehood.

I have never asserted anywhere on this blog that Christianity is a false religion. The benighted bonaldo, however, takes this to be an implication of what I do say because he fancies himself to be in possession of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So fancying himself, he is blind to the importance of toleration, the touchstone of classical liberalism, and blind to the murderous intolerance that religions can breed. He quotes from a second post of mine, How Far Does Religious Toleration Extend?:

To the extent that Islam takes on jihadist contours, to the extent that Islam entails its imposition on humanity, it cannot and ought not be tolerated by the West. Indeed, no religion that attempts to suppress other religions can or ought to be tolerated, including Christianity. We in the West do, or at least should, believe that competition among religions in a free marketplace of ideas is a good thing.

Bonaldo sees something "ironic" in my position: "What about the belief system that suppresses all belief systems that would suppress other belief systems?" He ignores the fact that I have repeatedly said that toleration has limits. I am not advocating universal toleration. That would be incoherent. If one were universally tolerant, one would have to tolerate those who reject the principle of toleration. Said principle, however, is not a suicide pact. A toleration that tolerated every belief system would undermine itself. What I am saying, from the point view of my conservatism, is that:

No religion that attempts to suppress (by killing, imprisoning, or in any way harming) adherents of other religions ought to be tolerated. Toleration has limits. No religion or nonreligious ideology may be tolerated if it doesn't respect the principle of toleration. And so we ought not tolerate a religion whose aim is to suppress and supplant other religions and force their adherents to either convert or accept dhimmi status. Proselytization is tolerable but only if it is non-coercive. The minute it becomes the least bit coercive we have every right to push back vigorously.

Bonaldo speaks of "irony," but I think what he means is that my position is internally inconsistent. But it would be inconsistent only if I were advocating universal toleration – which I am not. It would be inconsistent to maintain both that one ought to tolerate every belief system and suppress the belief system that suppresses other belief systems. But there is no logical inconsistency in maintaining what I do maintain. It is true: I want to suppress radical Muslims when their murderous beliefs spill over into murderous actions. And I extend that to radical religionists of any stripe who act upon murderous beliefs.

But why must we be tolerant? I explain this in On Toleration: With a Little Help From Kolakowski. I also explain there why toleration must not be confused with indifference to truth or relativism about truth. There are too many knuckleheads on the fanatical Right who cannot distinguish between fallibilism and relativism, a distinction explained in: To oppose relativism is not to embrace dogmatism.

I'll be having more to say about ideological extremism later. Lawrence Auster is another prime offender. For just a small taste of his fanatical hostility to conservatives that don't toe his exact party line, see The Trouble with Larry.

The Danger of Appeasing the Intolerant

What follows is a slightly redacted post from three years ago whose message bears repeating, especially since Barack the Appeaser, Barack the Bower-and-Scraper, has been reelected.

………….

Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,

. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)

Read that final sentence again, and again.

Kolakowski concludes that "movements which aim to destroy freedom should not be tolerated or granted the protection of law . . . " (Ibid.) and surely he is right about this. Toleration has limits. It does not enjoin suicide. The U. S. Constitution is not a suicide pact.

And just as we ought not tolerate intolerance, especially the murderous intolerance of radical Muslims, we ought not try to appease the intolerant. Appeasement is never the way to genuine peace. The New York Time's call for Benedict XVI to apologize for quoting the remarks of a Byzantine emperor is
a particularly abject example of appeasement.

One should not miss the double-standard in play. The Pope is held to a very high standard: he must not employ any words, not even in oratio obliqua, that could be perceived as offensive by any Muslim who might be hanging around a theology conference in Germany, words uttered in a talk that is only tangentially about Islam, but Muslims can say anything they want about Jews and Christians no matter how vile. The tolerant must tiptoe around the rabidly intolerant lest they give offense.

Has there been a NYT editorial censuring Ahmadinejad for his repeated calls for the destruction of the sovereign state of Israel?

National Public Radio and Big Bird Need Your Support!

This is something I wrote 10 March 2011. The points still hold and the piece is relevant because of Governor Romney's 'attack' on Big Bird in his first debate with President Obama. Lefties have a hard time understanding why we mean-spirited conservatives would want to deny such a loveable critter Federal bird seed. Maybe this will help.

……….

If you like NPR programming, as I like some of it, write them a check! Just don't demand that they receive taxpayer support. At least not now. We are in fiscal crisis, and budgetary cuts must be made. If such inessentials as NPR, PBS, NEH and NEA cannot be defunded, where will the cuts be made? Think about it. If these small allocations cannot be zeroed out or placed on moratorium, how are we going to tackle entitlement reform?

So one good reason to defund NPR is that we cannot afford it.

Some think that a refusal of sponsorship amounts to censorship. But that is stupidity pure and simple and duly refuted here.

But even if we could afford it, NPR in its present configuration should not receive Federal support. And this for the simple reason that it is plainly a propaganda arm of the Left. Now that should be obvious to anyone who has been following current events, including the firing of Juan Williams, the exposure and sacking of the two Schillers, etc. If you deny the Leftward tilt of NPR in its present incarnation, then you are delusional and not worth talking to. So let's assume that you are sane and admit the bias. The next question is whether you think it is morally right that tax dollars be used to push points of view that most of us in this conservative land find objectionable. I say that it it is not morally right that you take my money by force and then use it for a purpose that is not only inessential and unconnected to the necessary functions of government, but also violates my beliefs.

Perhaps, if NPR were balanced like C-SPAN, it could be tolerated in times of plenty. But we are not in times of plenty and it is not balanced.

So that is my second reason for defunding NPR.

Note that a reasonable liberal could accept my two reasons. I am not arguing that government must not engage in any projects other than those that are strictly essential such as those connected to the protection of life, liberty, and property (the Lockean triad). I leave that question open for the space of this post. I am arguing that present facts dictate that defunding NPR is something we ought to do.

I love Garrison Keillor and his "Prarie Home Companion" and tune in whenever I can. "Guy Noir" is one of my favorite bits. So I hope NPR stays on the air — on its own fiscal steam. Hell, if they wean themselves from the mammaries of massive Mama Obama Government I may even send them a check myself! And the same goes for PBS.