No Offense: The New Threats to Free Speech
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
In both cases, there's a presumption that some actors will aim only to "win," and thus treachery is necessary. However, if we treat political discussions as an iterated game like that of Prisoner's Dilemma, then what we really need to know to make a good decision is, "who is saying this and are they credible?" If they are not credible, then "tit for tat" applies and we eliminate their opinion in computing upsides and downsides to a policy.
At the low level where politics are encountered, of course, we don't have visibility to that kind of information. We have lengthy texts and short zingers that build arguments that may or may not be credible, and we have to go through them one by one.
Making threats is a serious problem -- and is also not a form of protected speech. Intentionally misrepresenting foes in certain ways is considered defamation and is also not protected.
The others are lesser problems as long as there are strong legal protections in place. The problems of being shouted down or (non-maliciously) misrepresented are mitigated by having your own platform from which to speak. Discussion being poisoned from the inside is mitigated by people realizing someone is poisonous and treating them as an outsider in the future. These things are still obnoxious, but they don't tip the scales in favor of significant speech restrictions.
Any proof of this? My natural inclination is to say that this is conspiracy theorist territory that should have no proper place in the WSJ. Sure, the OIC might want blasphemy laws, but are they an actual organization with any real ability to push for this outside traditionally Muslim countries?
The OIC has historically been one key agent pushing for international declarations and laws providing a general protection against "defamation of religion", largely through the Human Rights Council, and has often been successful in declarations on this issue through the HRC, and from their into resolutions passed by the General Assembly.
The US and EU have engaged in recent years in dialogue on this issue with the OIC (mostly, a dialogue focussed on ensuring that individual rights were protected and on making that the focus rather than defamation of religion), and one result of that dialogue has been the ending the OICs campaign on the issue in 2011. [1]
So, the WSJ piece distorts the facts in two ways (the OIC has specifically sought an international ban on defamation of religions generally, not on "blasphemy" under the terms of any particular religion, and, more importantly, while the dialogue the WSJ piece points to did, in fact, occur, its purpose and effect was not to reinforce the campaign the WSJ misrepresents, but to deflect that campaign.)
> My natural inclination is to say that this is conspiracy theorist territory that should have no proper place in the WSJ.
The "conspiracy theorist territory" part is, IMO, accurate; while it may not have a proper place in the WSJ by some standards, its pretty typical of the editorial content of the WSJ even before it became News Corp property. Even when the Journal's reputation for news content was rarely questioned (which is much less the case now than it was a couple decades ago), its editorial content was generally recognized as being more than slightly rightward tilted, and often far-right fringe.
[1] http://in.reuters.com/article/2011/03/24/idINIndia-558617201...
http://www.bizpacreview.com/2014/10/27/man-spends-six-months...
[1]: See, e.g., http://xkcd.com/1357/.
[2]: I suspect the underlying reason is that "free speech" was an effective weapon against the ancien régime, but with the enemy defeated it is no longer politically advantageous.
An interesting workaround attempt I've seen some self-proclaimed liberals use is the "intolerance of intolerance" argument [0]. "Hate speech," they would argue, is an expression of intolerance, so it's acceptable (some would say necessary) to be intolerant of such speech.
I'm not a fan of the concept, because it essentially redefines the pejorative usage of "intolerance" to something more like "intolerance of things which I think should be tolerated." It becomes fairly circular, because now we're just saying that we ought to tolerate those things which we believe we ought to tolerate.
If you are offended it is your problem, and frankly lots of things offend lots of people.
I can walk into a bookshop and point out a number of books that I find very unattractive in what they say. But it doesn't occur to me to burn the bookshop down. If you don't like a book, read another book. If you start reading a book and you decide you don't like it, nobody is telling you to finish it.
To read a 600-page novel and then say that it has deeply offended you: well, you have done a lot of work to be offended.”
― Salman Rushdie"
...it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words: Your own right to hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of the other to voice his or her view.
And later, he asks who will we trust to do the censoring:
Who's going to decide? To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?
Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion (eloquent as... one of them was) to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you, what you could read? To whom you'd give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone- hands up- to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You mean there's no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear? I had no idea... but there’s a law that says there must be such a person. Or there's a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well the hell with that law then. It's inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you evidently already know already.
At the end, he notices that if you're going to censor hateful speech, you'll need to ban religious texts. Yet most proponents of laws against hate speech and blasphemy seem to be devoutly religious.
Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjugation of women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic cleansing, for antisemitism, for all this you look no further than a famous book that's on every pulpit in this city and in every synagogue and in every mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that is the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when you've realized this you'll therefore this evening be faced with a gigantic false antithesis. I hope that still won't stop you from giving the motion before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully. Night-night. Stay cool!
I highly recommend watching it, as it's arguably the best recorded oration of Hitchens.
Which has actually been sitting on my to-read list for a while. Has anyone read this?
It seems to me that the author is actually advocating the right to offend, which is quite a bit different.
And what is "True belief"? This statement seems wrong in its core. A belief is by definition the opposite of evidence, certainty and rationality. So debate and free speech have nothing to do with it. It does not need it.
groups have become adept with identity politics, they use it to stop debate. When your ideas are unpopular you instead lay claim that the attack is bigoted because the disagreement stems from the the identity of the person's whose idea was debated, not their idea. This allows one side to effectively stifle debate and run amok
Or you need a third party that defines what is offensive and what isn't.
The "right to offence" is like an arms race to me. But in arms races, it's not rightness or truth that win. It's power.
The only case where power should win is when it's people's power, id est democracy. That's why I accept, at least in principle, laws and courts as the "third party".
No, it is not. A belief may be unjustified, or it may be justified by evidence and/or reason, or, in certain schools of thought, it may be justified by other means, but, in any case, belief is not the opposite of evidence, certainty, or reason.
• it starts with a personal attack—apparently giving any credence to conservatives is embarrassing?
• it completley ignores the underlying principles of individually liberty
• in fact, it completely steamrolls individual concerns in favor of abstract social groups
• it's unabashedly populist: instead of making a real argument, it's about "not embarrassing ourselves"
• it implicitly inserts the speaker as a defender for some nebulous "marginalized" groups, with no real basis
Of course, in this case, the marginalized groups are using social and legal pressure to suppress any dissent. Which isn't a product of being marginalized—and can't be justified by it either.
But I guess your views are so obviously correct that we shouldn't countenance any disagreement at all.
Long on pathos, long on populism and short on substance. And yet it's all too indicative of much of the discussion I hear in Berkeley, at the very least. (Fancy that.)
It's also disturbingly unwilling to consider any contrary opinions. Apparently that would be letting someone (other than you, of course!) "set the narrative".
The scariest thing is that this is exactly the sort of reasoning used to justify taking away people's rights. And, at least for now, it seems to be working.
I can't even tell if you're being entirely serious, or I'm just missing the parody and tearing down a straw man.
Sorry I'm ruining your HN by challenging that many of the articles posted here are about marginalized groups, rather than by marginalized groups.
Edit: I reread this and note that this is NOT a threat. You would face no aggression coming to my house, I meant that if Berkeley's discussions are too progressive for you, perhaps my house where I live is not your kinda thing.
Also, he did not attack those groups. He accused them of trying to censor disagreeable opinions, which in fact they often do.
Why did you "[...]" out "patriots, foreign despots"? By removing that, and leaving only groups you considered to be marginalized, you make it look like he is focusing on marginalized groups rather than focusing on groups that try to censor disagreeable opinions.
Furthermore, he explicitly says a couple paragraphs down that conservatives are not "free from sin on this issue", and gives examples of conservative attempts to censor provocative art, further weakening the claim that the article is an attack on marginalized groups.
Okay! I'll definitely not read this. I don't want to let a hateful person set the narrative. If they set the narrative, they win.
I don't know/understand HN etiquette, but it seems to me that we 'ought' to accomplish such edits with addenda, rather than replacements, so as not to present a misleading context for earlier responses.
For me, 'discouraging reading of A' is radically different from 'discouraging spreading A'.
Identity politics are doomed to anachronism and detriment.
To add to that, he references the groups the author mentions and claims they should be setting the narrative because they're "marginalized". Among those "marginalized" groups are American Christians (around 3/4 of the population!), patriots, and foreign despots. It seems he either misunderstood or mischaracterized the list; it's not about groups that are marginalized, but about groups that have tried to silence opposition through the courts and legislatures. The commenter missed the point badly by focusing on the idea of marginalization.