https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.spe ... peech/amp/And though most people are too fly these days, too aware of the lurking threat of Craig Brown, to use that form of words, there's a good deal of there-I-said-it-ism about these days. In particular, when it comes to the issue of 'free speech'. To read many serious commentators on the right, and some less serious ones, not to mention very many egg-avatared Twitter-users - this foundational human right is suffering an existential threat. From, um, undergraduates, apparently.
Big, serious books about all this are catnip to major publishing houses. This autumn Allen Lane publishes Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff on The Coddling of the American Mind. There's Claire Fox's 'I Find That Offensive!' and Mick Hume's Trigger Warning. There are contributions from Timothy Garton Ash, Nigel Warburton and Erwin Chemerinsky. Niall Ferguson has been making apocalyptic noises about the suppression of conservative voices on university campuses. My esteemed colleague Brendan O'Neill, bless him, doesn't seem able to find an issue in public life, these days, where the real problem isn't that old chestnut, illiberal liberals.
The problem here is that all this is, essentially, horseshit. That lone voice in the wilderness, Jordan Peterson, has sold hundreds of thousands of books. The online 'platform for free thought' Quillette gets millions of page views a month. And the self-styled renegades of the so-called 'intellectual dark web' were profiled at length in that noted samizdat journal the New York Times.
There may be a bit of table flipping at play .. with no small agenda.
https://www.google.com.au/amp/s/www.nyt ... t.amp.html"The libertarian position has become dominant on the right on First Amendment issues," said Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the Cato Institute. "It simply means that we should be skeptical of government attempts to regulate speech. That used to be an uncontroversial and nonideological point. What's now being called the libertarian position on speech was in the 1960s the liberal position on speech."
Social understanding changes with time, evolves over time .. against the landscape of facts, evidence etc
Harms are always going to be a consideration for those possessed of social conscience. Today we see a shift in the way women are treated, how victims of sexual abuse are now considered, etc.Many on the left have traded an absolutist commitment to free speech for one sensitive to the harms it can inflict.
Such social shifts are bound to have consequences and effect the way see the world.
We once believed the world was flat, evidence proved that thinking flawed. Once it was believed that women are responsible for the corruption of men .. such a belief was tightly woven into early Christian thought and biblical commentary, we no longer believe that. Some still believe this, and require women cover themselves from head to toe lest the very sight of their flesh stir mens passions
We today would consider such attitudes ludicrous and arguably even barbaric. Take pornography and street protests. Liberals were once largely united in fighting to protect sexually explicit materials from government censorship. Now many on the left see pornography as an assault on women's rights.
I think this may provide an indication of how societies understanding of Free Speech and its proponents have evolved to what it is today.In 1977, many liberals supported the right of the American Nazi Party to march among Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Ill. Far fewer supported the free-speech rights of the white nationalists who marched last year in Charlottesville, Va.
To the contrary, free speech reinforces and amplifies injustice, Catharine A. MacKinnon, a law professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in "The Free Speech Century," a collection of essays to be published this year.
"Once a defense of the powerless, the First Amendment over the last hundred years has mainly become a weapon of the powerful," she wrote. "Legally, what was, toward the beginning of the 20th century, a shield for radicals, artists and activists, socialists and pacifists, the excluded and the dispossessed, has become a sword for authoritarians, racists and misogynists, Nazis and Klansmen, pornographers and corporations buying elections."
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be quashed or threatened .. those advocating this new evolved and irrefutably questionable perspective .. are in fact using their singular perspective as a weapon, in terms of their aggressive narrative.