@berbatrick what's your take on this article -
https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/cancel-culture-harpers-letter-free-speech
Points I specifically agree with in this piece
It's mostly a good article. I've already said what i feel about people getting fired, and about the hypocrisy of the public faces of the free speech movement, so of course i agree with those part. I also like that it goes from left to right and finds the inconsistencies in all positions. That's pretty much what i've seen. Every one has their own lines about what is good or isn't. Liberals and libertarians will not see the power of non-governmental organisations (like corporations), the left and right will draw morality based lines.
The thing is, i don't know what that is supposed to lead us to. The online mobs are exercising their free speech rights. The corporations and employers are exercising theirs.
Ok, now onto what i disagree with. I think free speech absolutists are naive. The example in the article is the ACLU Jewish lawyer defending nazis, my example is 4chan. /pol/ had pretty open speech rules, outside a ban on some hentai. It was also a nazi haven. I'm generally skeptical that fully uncensored "debate" leads anywhere productive. I think Nehru and Patel should have used their powers to squash one particular organisation after January 30 1948, that would surely have been an act of censorship and state repression, and I also believe that we would be a healthier nation if they had. I think Bal Thackeray should have been prosecuted just for his words- his editorials in Saamna in December 1992 and January 1993, as his party members killed people on the streets.
I think it's funny that people think speech is so important and fundamental, and at the same time "words cannot hurt me" etc is a defence for hate speech. No, words can induce people to hurt you, that's why free speech is so important and fundamental in the first place. It has real world effects, otherwise there is no reason to fetishise free expression so much if it can't do anything at all. If the Nazis in Chicago were better organised and the conditions more favourable, we would be living under the effects of that. They didn't march because they felt like it, they exercised their rights with an aim in mind.
And this goes beyond politics. Eugenics ideas started to leave biology (they didn't really leave) only after the Nazis lost WW2 and that kind of talk became un-PC. Otherwise there was relatively free discourse, and the greatest biologists wrote extensively about racial superiority and inspired forced sterilisations. Today there are once again eugenics conferences, race deteminists, and "race realists" in psychology and genetics. There are publications with IQ claims that imply half of sub-Saharan Africans are clincally retarded.
An online mob managed to successfully cancel a professor in Michigan. He is a physics professor who went to talk about race and IQ with Stefan Molyneux. He was also in charge of all hiring for all natural science departments. The mob wanted and got him removed from his post in charge of recruitment (he still has his tenured position in physics). They also got the journal to remove some of those papers with those IQ numbers.
If twitter likes mean anything, I participated in the Michigan professor's cancellation, and I think we the mob got it exactly right. Many of the free speech people in the letter and elsewhere (like Quilette) have defended him and the research quite vehemently. The guy who started the petition to temove him has deleted his account.
Do you think a person who believes that, on average, black people are inferior, and on average, women disinclined for scientific work, should be in charge of recruitment? Or do you think an online mob should dictate a university's staffing decisions and remove someone just for his views?
A lot of the concept of free speech is about the impossibility of drawing lines, and who draws lines. It' always going to be a sliperry slope, etc, hence the right to free speech must be absolute. Ok, let's see where that takes us.
Tucker Carlson's speechwriter, in his private time, under a fake name, wrote stuff online that is more racist than what he wrote for his boss. His employer was embarrased that he crossed a line and they fired him. But I don't like employers having this power! What to do? I am ok with drawing a line around explicit, hateful, racism. But then, a principled free speech defender must ask, who defines racism? Why racism against blacks and not reverse racism against whites? Why Nazism and not socialism? What about sexism and transphobia, etc etc etc.
So, what do you think should happen to him? Do you support the online mob, the privacy invading press, and the crushing power of the employer that worked together to remove his livelihood? Should one's political viewpoints make one unemployable? Won't they come for you next, having come for him?
There are many parts to this problem - online discourse, free speech on both sides, corporate free speech rights, corporate monopoly power, and the real-world implications of speech. I don't think there's an easy answer.
