There is little or nothing in this agitprop essay that actually undermines or even directly confronts McCarthy's original points. There's two irreconcilable philosophical positions at play here: either you believe that there are things - like preventing people from seeing "hurtful" humor - that are more important than freedom of expression, or you believe that freedom of expression is foundational for all other human freedoms. Neither side is ever going to convince the other because they want to live in fundamentally different worlds. If you're on the former side, your only option is to silence your opponents; if you're on the latter, your only option is to resist being silenced.
It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves. Afterall, the issue at Stanford was that minority groups were being causally belittled and excluded. But hey: no one is allowed to descriminate against the right to descriminate!
>It's pretty clear from the article and anyone who cares to glance at the news today that the 'freedom of speech activists' do plenty of silencing themselves.
Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare? It works in basically all aspects of public life and things seem (more or less) alright.
There's also a major difference between someone saying "hey, no slurs please in my house" and the gov't pointing a gun at you and saying "no slurs ever".
It isn't the government that is doing that. It is society as a group that has decided that "no slurs" is the norm. If you want to use slurs, use them in a subgroup that for whatever reasons deem them acceptable. Don't use them around society as a whole as it has decided that there are social consequences for using them. Again, if you don't like it either campaign to change it or exclude yourself from society but don't conflate the social contract with government authoritarianism.
apcragg is probably referring to social mores and the social compact. Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
> Ultimately there are conventions, explicit or otherwise, that compel our social interactions.
I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.
Right, separating the social contract from the gov't was what I was trying to point out.
"in my house" can be replaced with "on my website" or "in my restaurant" for most purposes. There's some stuff about monopolies and access guarantees to utilities.... but for most purposes the discussion is far from those cases I believe.
No one's going to jail for using slurs. The rhetoric around this has gotten really heated, especially given that we have many other actual problems (North Korea, global warming) we should be spending our energy on.
Sure, if you force people to behave a certain way, the conflict can be avoided.
The problem stems from the fundamental fact that a very small percentage of people are assholes, a faction of people are intent on forcibly silencing and harming assholes for being assholes, and a faction of people are intent on not permitting that second group of people to do so.
That's the problem: two groups of people are prepared to use force to enact their contrary visions, while a third (relatively small group) is catalyzing the conflict.
Yes, the question is, why can't we? Becasue apparently we can't stop at that point. We've already gone so far past that that the slippery slope has been established in this case.
Yeah right, what's a bigger problem: not being able to say the N word or going to jail for no reason and feeling lucky that you weren't shot for no reason because you're Black?
They are related; there's a false equivalency in these arguments between the right to be a racist and the right to be free from racism. On that spectrum, our society is far better at ensuring the former at the expense of the latter, and we need to recalibrate.
Lest you think this is futile, our system of laws and the social contract itself is based on balancing rights. For example, we have the right to free expression, but perjury and fraud are crimes.
In other words, we work too hard to protect bigoted speech, and we don't work hard enough to protect Americans from bigotry and discrimination, and this is at least in part due to the false equivalency we maintain between them. I'm not saying I have a great policy answer -- although allowing civil suits for bigoted speech might work -- but we should at least be talking about it.
You are actually making the false equivalency. You have the right to live free from discrimination, but not racist speech. These things aren't on a scale to be balanced, they are orthogonal, and each are balanced separately.
The Masterpiece Bakery SCOTUS case begs to differ. The bakery owner is arguing expression whereas the couple are arguing discrimination. Actually you should read about the case; I feel like you'll learn a lot.
I guess we're both right though? It's not like some rights are never balanced against other ones, but some are more often balanced against each other than others. But expression/religion vs. discrimination is a really common balance, and we get it wrong almost every time.
But I do think I have a right to be free of some speech in some places, and most people do. When protests are organized they have to register with local governments. They don't go into homes, they don't go into workplaces, they don't go into schools or churches. Aside from homes, these are all relatively public places, but protestors don't have a right to protest in them.
In other words, this is the basic concept of negative rights. Positive rights are things like freedom to practice religion, but negative rights are things like freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, "freedom to" and "freedom from".
I also think there is a right to be free from racist speech, though it hasn't been recognized (maybe it has re: dignity). We have a right to be free from violent and threatening speech, for example, and I think racist speech is on the spectrum of violence -- if only because the history of racism is overtly violent. But aside from that, the Supreme Court has (kind of) recognized a right to dignity and racist speech in the public square clearly impugns Americans' right to dignity on a fundamental level. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/opini... .
If you mean Nazi Germany then your example is indeed quite interesting. Hitler did not come to power through mass consensus, or really any consensus. He came to power through political maneuvering. The Nazi's largest victory in anything like an open election was in mid 1932 [1] where they gained 37% of the vote. Failing to form a government, a new election was called in late 1932 [2] where the Nazis were down to 33% support.
In spite of the lack of support, Hitler gained the chancellorship through a series of fortunate (for him) events and backroom dealings. His supporters then escalated things they had already been doing which included disrupting meetings of opposition, preventing their speakers from speaking, engage in often violent conflict with supporters of other groups, and so on. This culminated then with the formal banning of speech that spoke negatively of their politics. The net effect of this was that in 1933 [3] the Nazis managed to get 44% of the vote.
After that, the ban on free speech and politics was escalated with him ultimately banning all political parties except the Nazi party. Had Germany had strong and real protections of free speech, it's very likely that the Nazis would never have been able to come to power. And they certainly would not have been able to hold onto it. And this is a recurring theme in nations that end up going down the path tyranny and oppression. The first thing to go is free speech, often started on the ground level by political supporters who work to stop people they disagree with from being able to speak.
It's easy to condemn things in hindsight and claim people should have seen what was coming. But that's disingenuous. People generally want to do the right thing, though we all disagree on what right is. Germany and the German people were struggling and felt they were being exploited by capitalism and certain unfairly privileged groups within society. Hitler used this to gain a minority support of people by with rousing talks against capitalism and against the privileged few. Few were thinking about the implications of such rhetoric -- the dangers of when groups become mobs.
I think the GP comment refered to current german policy.
In germany there is at the moment no free speech. There is however a freedom of opinion and preservation of human dignity. The NSDAP and other, similar organizations are banned as are their symbols (except in Science, Education and Arts, game publishers seem to be oblivious to the last one though)
However, as far as I can tell, the freedom of thought/opinion is valued greater in germany than on most American campuses these days.
First of all The Daily Caller is a conservative rag started by Tucker Carlson. Second the characterization of the bill comes from "critics"; it doesn't at all do what you say it does.
Stuff like this is designed to sound absurd. It's written to get people enraged so they worry that their fundamental rights are being abrogated. Conservative media is full of articles like this, and it's started a dangerous race to the bottom where now the right and the left are struggling to enrage their bases more than the other.
Sorry I'm not yelling at you but things like this are responsible for a lot of problems. Please read the bill and you'll see it's merely adding gender identification to the list of categories you can't discriminate on.
Except that is a non-issue. We're not actually heading into a "language certified by the party bureaucracy" situation, nowhere near it. It's a fallacious claim--heh heh, the slippery slope fallacy.
Again, we can look to Germany, and see how there's actually a totally thriving and healthy culture of free exchange of ideas, that also excludes naziism and nazi imagery; no one is suffering for that exclusion unless you're a nazi. (And, if I learned the lessons of WWII correctly, fuck nazis.)
Yeah Frondo has it right; it's a slippery slope argument. Your argument is essentially an argument against all laws like, "well we can't make everything bad illegal, so we shouldn't make anything bad illegal".
Furthermore it's important to say I'm not advocating for laws that dictate what you can and can't say. What I am saying is if you get on YouTube comments, HN forums, Twitter, whatever, and start tossing slurs you get bounced. It's a reasonable place to start I think.
Legal precedent is moving from "you can say whatever you want" into "you can be thrown in jail for speaking the wrong way", where "wrong" is defined by a small unelected bureaucratic entity [for example, Ontario Human Rights Commission]. There are softer ways to handle improper language, like social shunning, up to job loss, etc. Your argument is essentially an argument to regulate every aspect of life under penalty of law.
> where "wrong" is defined by a small unelected bureaucratic entity [for example, Ontario Human Rights Commission]
This insinuates -- again -- that the government is jailing people for using certain words. That's some Saudi Arabia shit, Canada's not doing it and neither is the US.
> There are softer ways to handle improper language, like social shunning, up to job loss, etc.
I would argue those aren't really working. Our culture is still deeply sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic. You're essentially saying, "the majority should police itself" but that never happens. The majority polices the minorities -- which is exactly what democracy and the idea of human rights is supposed to prevent.
> Your argument is essentially an argument to regulate every aspect of life under penalty of law.
I don't think that an argument in favor of a single regulation or law (water quality, speed limits, sanitation standards, domestic violence) is an argument to regulate every aspect of life. If you believe that advocating for a single law means you're advocating for "regulat[ing] every aspect of life" then that's an argument against all laws which I find ridiculous.
I do think there should be civil penalties for bigoted speech though. The specific standard doesn't matter much, but maybe we'll see fewer Confederate flags if you can be sued for flying one. Maybe then we'll have a real discussion about what bigoted speech is, how it hurts millions of Americans every day, and how you can avoid it.
If adding one law is not a slippery slope argument, then removing [or not adding] one law is not a slippery slope argument either...
Very convenient to support civil penalties against speech that you disagree with. What if some people find BLM "bigoted speech". What if some people think that pro-choice argumentation is "incitement to murder". How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech?
Black Lives Matter is a political advocacy group that protests police and state violence perpetrated against Black people. Bigoted speech is speech that denigrates people based on ascribed statuses (gender identification, sexual orientation, race). These are blatantly not the same thing.
Words have meaning. If we have a law that says "killing people is illegal" and you force me into a dead-end 12 hour a day 7 days a week job for the rest of my life, I can't say "you killed me" even if spiritually you might have. That's not what "kill" means.
If your argument is that people interpret words differently and consequently laws are inherently too ambiguous, that's another argument against all laws. And even though the premise is correct - human languages are by their nature imprecise - that's why we have courts.
Most of your arguments boil down to: you can't do this perfectly, therefore you shouldn't do it. But that's not at all how law works, and if we were to apply this standard to laws we would never write one.
> How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech?
Sure, but that's not under assault here. Can we also fight together to protect the two-thirds of Americans who suffer under racism, misogyny, homophobia and discrimination?
That all depends on the majority social opinion of what defines a slur.
The problem arising at the moment is aggression. Social opinions are being divided from every angle, almost systematically, categorizing and sorting the world's thoughts, behaviors, and opinions. And we can think of these categories as tribes, and we see a sort of competition. Since each person belonging to a subset necessarily feels a connection to their category, they seek validation. Since these categories are highly specific there will inevitably be conflict between them, differences in definition, and the seeking of validation paired with such differences will arise in aggression when confronted with another "tribe".
This is not about social courtesy at all. It is a sort of social warfare that would not exist if it weren't for the very specific divisions.
A group of 100 people can get along just fine with a certain mindset-- that is, each person sees everyone else as individuals, unique and variable. To keep the peace in such a situation, each person must understand they do not hold the truth for anybody but themselves, and they also must be willing to listen to others when they speak. But a group of 10 philosophers from differing schools of thought will likely be in for many heated arguments. Our social atmosphere at this period of time is like the latter case, and there is no agreement or moderation to be had. Each "school of thought" has its axioms, which cannot be violated if one is an adherent.
I think this is fundamentally wrong. I think we haven't placed enough emphasis on understanding other people, histories, experiences, and cultures, and at this point in our history we're being forced to confront that fact. For example, when women say, "hey we're sexually harassed basically all the time", or when Black people say, "hey racism is insidiously intertwined in our culture", and we ignore them, we're failing to respect their experiences.
This isn't warfare at all. It's just hard for us to understand an experience that's so different from our own. I had a girlfriend once who used to walk to work and she'd get catcalled basically every time she did it. She told me about this and at first I didn't believe her because it was so outside my experience. No one catcalls me! And no one catcalled her when we were together.
People just want to be respected. They want to be believed. They aren't waging class warfare or social warfare. They basically just don't want to catch shit all the time.
We'll (probably?) get past this. We just have to work a lot harder at listening and respecting other people.
Everyone deserves respect. But not everyone can be accommodated in speech. As a woman, I understand the cat-calling issue. It's annoying, and is often disrespectful and uncomfortable. I do often feel unsafe. However, I do not vilify men, and I do not try to pose this issue as a "man's problem". This, for me, is not a men vs women issue, it is cultural and often personal and individual. Some women like being catcalled, most men do not catcall. So, I deal with it on a personal level with my peers.
I specify these points because I do see an "us vs them" mentality in our current social atmosphere, and this is why my comment above illustrated competitive groups.
However, going back to my anecdote above, safety is important in society and we should all work towards allowing others to feel safe. However, when it comes to speech everything goes gray. So, necessarily, some people wish to sort it and make speech black and white. But it's not so. If a man yelled to me on the street, "Hey, beautiful!" I don't feel unsafe, but I will ignore it because I'm not interested and the dude will probably get the hint. If a man comes up close to me at night and says, "hey, you're sexy, where you going?" that man has something else going on and he probably can't be fixed by society screaming at him that he sucks for being a man. But then there's the in-between-- broad daylight, walking down the street, bro yells, "Nice ass kiddo what's your name, where you going?" I'll probably feel uncomfortable (the statement is too sexual and probing), maybe I'll go to the other side of the street. BUT I'm not going to insist that men stop vocally noticing attractive women! Societies always have a sexual component, people will always express sexuality. So it's case by case.
I find your concluding statements intriguing, and suspect I'm missing part of your point.
From my interpretation, your initial thesis is that speech should, for valid reasons, be curtailed so as to spare certain groups the very real trouble of dealing with, say, racism. Seems reasonable - my main disagreement would be that such a protection would be better applied universally (apologies if I have misunderstood, and you do too).
In your closing statement, you highlight that people just want to be respected and believed. I think most people would agree that's fairly accurate.
Unfortunately, the second point often intersects the first. In that often people will seek to silence others, usually with honest intentions. This part, the idea of good intentions, is where the wheels come off. By way of analogy, look at something like religion. How many arguments and wars, personal and multinational, have, if nothing else, used differing opinions to promulgate hate?
It feels almost impossible, in my eyes, to bridge that gap. One persons well meaning censorship, is another persons disrespect.
I likely have a coloured view of this, based on a few sour personal experiences, which I've seen mimicked elsewhere. For one example, I've been abruptly and sharply belittled for offering my thoughts on the impact of rape. I was told that I shouldn't comment, and it's not something that relates to me. I actually took it quietly at the time, but later, quietly, shares with the person that I have, in fact, been a victim of rape. Twice (over twenty years apart).
If we are talking about being believed and respected, I felt anything but. But simply because I didn't fit the stereotype, I was belittled and shamed. It was effectively discrimination, but noone found issue with it, because it was perpetrated by an acceptable person.
I guess the point I'm getting at is that it would be great if people could just not he assholes (sorry for the language) and forego the need for censorship at the same time. But reality, at least for me, seems to be the ideas are mutually exclusive to some extent
Why can't we say, "hey, no slurs please" without civilization collapsing into a communist authoritarian nightmare?
Understanding that this proposal is clear, simple, and wrong is kinda the basis of reaching the Enlightenment. But because this is a bit subtle, many people -- too many people -- can't understand it. You have to think structurally, rather than emotionally.
1. Who do you think will be in charge of determining what is a "slur" and what is not? Is saying "It's OK to be white" a slur? How about "Women prefer to work with people, men prefer to work with things"? At the time of the Enlightenment, a slur was basically an insult to the King or Nobility. Which of course applied equally if you were criticizing their judgement/policies, which then grew some more. This was called "Lese Majeste" or violating the majesty of the Sovereign, and evolved into the hate speech laws, for example, in Weimar, that did absolutely nothing to prevent the rise anti-semitism in Europe. Banning hate speech has always failed to protect people against hatred. Now a lot of people think that only those who are oppressed will be protected by bans on slurs, but actually those who decide what is and is not a slur are not just going to be the oppressed. They will be also the ones who already have power, and they will use that ban as another lever to stifle dissent. So, that's one problem right there -- same problem as "Why can't we give this organization vague, broad powers and not have the powers be abused? What's so hard about that?" Well, it's not how life works, and we should know that by now. We should always think about policies with the view that untrustworthy people are in charge, rather than with a simplistic view.
2. In every society, there is an overton window of acceptable views. Society has many, many ways of punishing those who step outside of that window. Everything from social ostracism, to getting fired, to losing customers, etc. You don't really need to worry that society has no way of punishing those who offend them. In fact, it's really a silly thing to worry about. We don't need additional ways of enforcing thought-discipline and speech discipline beyond informal ostracism. Few can stand up to it, and when someone is saying something obviously hateful, those who disagree tend to be strengthened in their resolve against that view.
3. If society already has informal ways of curtailing offensive speech, what is the harm of additionally formalizing more policies or laws that (according to 1.) will curtail speech that elites find offensive? And what is the benefit of not formalizing them? This is what the Enlightenment thinkers understood, but which many have now forgotten. The benefit is when the overton window as espoused by the elites doesn't match with the overton window of society as a whole: in normal situations (both overton windows are the same), you don't need to exert additional pressure on the person engaging in transgressive speech, because they wont find an audience. But what if they do find an audience? That's usually the "emperor has no clothes" scenario, where those in charge of the institution have an overton window that is different from members of the institution, or a sizeable minority of members. In that case, people will listen to the transgressor and say "hey, the emperor is naked!" while the emperor will accuse the transgressor of making slurs. That's the situation in which freedom of speech is so crucial -- when it will resonate and the normal social pressures don't quash the transgressor. This is the example of "It's OK to be white."
So freedom of speech serves as a safety valve from the elites enforcing their bubble. No one cares about actual slurs -- those that don't find an audience -- society will always punish those people. No one cares about freedom to remain within the overton window of...
That depends on what you mean by slur. If you just mean "bad word" then we can certainly replace some, but I am not convinced saying "John is feeble-minded" rather than "John is an idiot" is really different, although saying "John has a learning disability" may be more correct (and does offer the chance that is can either be worked around or fixed).
The world "nigger" is essentially completely banned from society, so much so that people call it the n-word, but has that changed attitudes? Or is the person just going to say racist stuff with African-American instead of Nigger?
It isn't a binary decision and it is incredibly dishonest for you to frame it like it is. Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right. In consenting to governance and inclusion in society one forfeits some absolute freedom that society has deemed unacceptable. That is the nature of society. The argument should lie in what and how society deems things acceptable because there is certainly a debate to be had there. Concerns about oppressive governments or censorship of thought are valid and just but do not and should not require declaring expression limitless. Society has deemed some expression harmful and participating in society requires accepting that. I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
Society is not a force of nature such that its decrees carry the weight of natural law.
People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance.
> I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you.
Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship.
> Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.
These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
> You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you.
That is a fair criticism. A counterpoint to my own post would be that pushing what is acceptable and questioning the norm is what has always driven progress, be it abolishing slavery, accepting other sexualities, religions, scientific views, etc. My point was rather that rights like expression are not absolute by the nature of the social contract. Requiring that they be unimpeachable is not compatible with living in a social structure.
> These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts are just begging the question.
There are people that disagree for sure. The point isn't that those, in particular, are universally agreed upon but that there exist limits to absolute freedom.
> > Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.
> These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
I am among the ones who radically disagree. I want to live in a society where all of those things are allowed, but people are just smart enough to ignore them. I think this is a much better prospect since it decentralizes responsibility.
>Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or ... do not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.
Abstract advocacy of illegal violence (as distinguished from inciting imminent illegal violence) is constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).
Freedom of certain kinds of speech is foundational to a society like America that has always been quickly changing demographically, technologically, and economically.
We are making up the rules of society as we go along, and we are going to make mistakes, and circumstances will change such that old rules don’t work anymore. In order to figure out what new rules should be, we must be able to discuss them. If the proponents of one set of rules are able to prohibit the discussion of anything else, you had better hope they have the best possible set for all time, because you’re stuck with them. Collapse is inevitable if anything significant ever changes.
The reason to hold the line and do things like defending Illinois Nazis is because two sides on a contested issue will always want the other side to shut up. The powerful side will always come up with some excuse as to why the weak side must urgently be silenced in the name of safety. Strong principles are powerful because they give moral authority to help the weak stand up against the powerful. If there are obvious, clear exceptions like yelling fire, it’s probably OK, but it still gives the strong side a toehold to draw an analogy and silence the weak.
In the US it seems that the first amendment's principle is very, very clear in that regard. This was the draft proposed to Congress here below, which is longer than the final version but clearly represents the thinking behind it without ambiguity:
> The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed. The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.
In other words, the first amendment is clearly against censorship of any kind.
That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has-rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the book looks good.
The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing. Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what real power looks like in a democracy!
The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their kids will be discovering the actual Internet.
I get a sense from this article of being slightly satirical (while also being blatantly critical).
The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly.
From the article:
"newsgroups...that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums."
"I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide."
Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection. Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking (censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology.
One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd share.
I am a fan of Cyberspace Manifesto. I think one reason where normal people don't appreciate freedom of speech and computer experts do is the analogy between our own thought processes and communicating with other people.
We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology). But why should the government then censor willing communication between two people? From a computing perspective, those are the same.
Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this point.
I disagree with absolutely everything in this article, and while the whining that "nobody responded directly" to various complaints is likely an exaggeration, I will nonetheless offer my piece:
>Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful
Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities.
>Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media.
It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you.
That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are private spaces. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as public communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her private communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises.
>One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.”
>Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel.
Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, Breitbart, even though the author presents no evidence of such an association.
>That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted.
If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Be...
The attitude this piece bemoans is something that used to be widespread in Internet culture, and I am sad to see it dying out.
I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces to keep it from getting "too big for its britches."
Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up. Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadIt's not clear to me. How about a few examples?
Society is not a uniform group with a single way of thinking.
I agree, but as far as I know in the US the spirit behind such interactions is pretty much described in the constitution, and the first amendment makes it very clear that freedom of opinion/expression is paramount, no matter what.
"in my house" can be replaced with "on my website" or "in my restaurant" for most purposes. There's some stuff about monopolies and access guarantees to utilities.... but for most purposes the discussion is far from those cases I believe.
One of literally dozens if not hundreds of incidents
The problem stems from the fundamental fact that a very small percentage of people are assholes, a faction of people are intent on forcibly silencing and harming assholes for being assholes, and a faction of people are intent on not permitting that second group of people to do so.
That's the problem: two groups of people are prepared to use force to enact their contrary visions, while a third (relatively small group) is catalyzing the conflict.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/middleb...
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/berkeley-riots-...
Man, if I had to pick a side I'd stand up and fight for, I know who I'm out there defending.
Lest you think this is futile, our system of laws and the social contract itself is based on balancing rights. For example, we have the right to free expression, but perjury and fraud are crimes.
In other words, we work too hard to protect bigoted speech, and we don't work hard enough to protect Americans from bigotry and discrimination, and this is at least in part due to the false equivalency we maintain between them. I'm not saying I have a great policy answer -- although allowing civil suits for bigoted speech might work -- but we should at least be talking about it.
I guess we're both right though? It's not like some rights are never balanced against other ones, but some are more often balanced against each other than others. But expression/religion vs. discrimination is a really common balance, and we get it wrong almost every time.
But I do think I have a right to be free of some speech in some places, and most people do. When protests are organized they have to register with local governments. They don't go into homes, they don't go into workplaces, they don't go into schools or churches. Aside from homes, these are all relatively public places, but protestors don't have a right to protest in them.
In other words, this is the basic concept of negative rights. Positive rights are things like freedom to practice religion, but negative rights are things like freedom from unwarranted search and seizure, "freedom to" and "freedom from".
I also think there is a right to be free from racist speech, though it hasn't been recognized (maybe it has re: dignity). We have a right to be free from violent and threatening speech, for example, and I think racist speech is on the spectrum of violence -- if only because the history of racism is overtly violent. But aside from that, the Supreme Court has (kind of) recognized a right to dignity and racist speech in the public square clearly impugns Americans' right to dignity on a fundamental level. See https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/576/14-556/opini... .
In spite of the lack of support, Hitler gained the chancellorship through a series of fortunate (for him) events and backroom dealings. His supporters then escalated things they had already been doing which included disrupting meetings of opposition, preventing their speakers from speaking, engage in often violent conflict with supporters of other groups, and so on. This culminated then with the formal banning of speech that spoke negatively of their politics. The net effect of this was that in 1933 [3] the Nazis managed to get 44% of the vote.
After that, the ban on free speech and politics was escalated with him ultimately banning all political parties except the Nazi party. Had Germany had strong and real protections of free speech, it's very likely that the Nazis would never have been able to come to power. And they certainly would not have been able to hold onto it. And this is a recurring theme in nations that end up going down the path tyranny and oppression. The first thing to go is free speech, often started on the ground level by political supporters who work to stop people they disagree with from being able to speak.
It's easy to condemn things in hindsight and claim people should have seen what was coming. But that's disingenuous. People generally want to do the right thing, though we all disagree on what right is. Germany and the German people were struggling and felt they were being exploited by capitalism and certain unfairly privileged groups within society. Hitler used this to gain a minority support of people by with rousing talks against capitalism and against the privileged few. Few were thinking about the implications of such rhetoric -- the dangers of when groups become mobs.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_July_...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_Novem...
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_federal_election,_March...
In germany there is at the moment no free speech. There is however a freedom of opinion and preservation of human dignity. The NSDAP and other, similar organizations are banned as are their symbols (except in Science, Education and Arts, game publishers seem to be oblivious to the last one though)
However, as far as I can tell, the freedom of thought/opinion is valued greater in germany than on most American campuses these days.
http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/16/canada-passes-law-criminal...
Edit: That sounds quite absurd to me, happy to be educated otherwise.
Stuff like this is designed to sound absurd. It's written to get people enraged so they worry that their fundamental rights are being abrogated. Conservative media is full of articles like this, and it's started a dangerous race to the bottom where now the right and the left are struggling to enrage their bases more than the other.
Sorry I'm not yelling at you but things like this are responsible for a lot of problems. Please read the bill and you'll see it's merely adding gender identification to the list of categories you can't discriminate on.
The fundamental issue with the "ever expanding slur list" remains, until we all speak the language certified by the party bureaucracy.
Again, we can look to Germany, and see how there's actually a totally thriving and healthy culture of free exchange of ideas, that also excludes naziism and nazi imagery; no one is suffering for that exclusion unless you're a nazi. (And, if I learned the lessons of WWII correctly, fuck nazis.)
Furthermore it's important to say I'm not advocating for laws that dictate what you can and can't say. What I am saying is if you get on YouTube comments, HN forums, Twitter, whatever, and start tossing slurs you get bounced. It's a reasonable place to start I think.
Just leaving this here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_dirty_words
> where "wrong" is defined by a small unelected bureaucratic entity [for example, Ontario Human Rights Commission]
This insinuates -- again -- that the government is jailing people for using certain words. That's some Saudi Arabia shit, Canada's not doing it and neither is the US.
> There are softer ways to handle improper language, like social shunning, up to job loss, etc.
I would argue those aren't really working. Our culture is still deeply sexist, misogynistic, and homophobic. You're essentially saying, "the majority should police itself" but that never happens. The majority polices the minorities -- which is exactly what democracy and the idea of human rights is supposed to prevent.
> Your argument is essentially an argument to regulate every aspect of life under penalty of law.
I don't think that an argument in favor of a single regulation or law (water quality, speed limits, sanitation standards, domestic violence) is an argument to regulate every aspect of life. If you believe that advocating for a single law means you're advocating for "regulat[ing] every aspect of life" then that's an argument against all laws which I find ridiculous.
I do think there should be civil penalties for bigoted speech though. The specific standard doesn't matter much, but maybe we'll see fewer Confederate flags if you can be sued for flying one. Maybe then we'll have a real discussion about what bigoted speech is, how it hurts millions of Americans every day, and how you can avoid it.
Very convenient to support civil penalties against speech that you disagree with. What if some people find BLM "bigoted speech". What if some people think that pro-choice argumentation is "incitement to murder". How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech?
Black Lives Matter is a political advocacy group that protests police and state violence perpetrated against Black people. Bigoted speech is speech that denigrates people based on ascribed statuses (gender identification, sexual orientation, race). These are blatantly not the same thing.
Words have meaning. If we have a law that says "killing people is illegal" and you force me into a dead-end 12 hour a day 7 days a week job for the rest of my life, I can't say "you killed me" even if spiritually you might have. That's not what "kill" means.
If your argument is that people interpret words differently and consequently laws are inherently too ambiguous, that's another argument against all laws. And even though the premise is correct - human languages are by their nature imprecise - that's why we have courts.
Most of your arguments boil down to: you can't do this perfectly, therefore you shouldn't do it. But that's not at all how law works, and if we were to apply this standard to laws we would never write one.
> How about we fight together to preserve our freedom of speech?
Sure, but that's not under assault here. Can we also fight together to protect the two-thirds of Americans who suffer under racism, misogyny, homophobia and discrimination?
The problem arising at the moment is aggression. Social opinions are being divided from every angle, almost systematically, categorizing and sorting the world's thoughts, behaviors, and opinions. And we can think of these categories as tribes, and we see a sort of competition. Since each person belonging to a subset necessarily feels a connection to their category, they seek validation. Since these categories are highly specific there will inevitably be conflict between them, differences in definition, and the seeking of validation paired with such differences will arise in aggression when confronted with another "tribe".
This is not about social courtesy at all. It is a sort of social warfare that would not exist if it weren't for the very specific divisions.
A group of 100 people can get along just fine with a certain mindset-- that is, each person sees everyone else as individuals, unique and variable. To keep the peace in such a situation, each person must understand they do not hold the truth for anybody but themselves, and they also must be willing to listen to others when they speak. But a group of 10 philosophers from differing schools of thought will likely be in for many heated arguments. Our social atmosphere at this period of time is like the latter case, and there is no agreement or moderation to be had. Each "school of thought" has its axioms, which cannot be violated if one is an adherent.
This isn't warfare at all. It's just hard for us to understand an experience that's so different from our own. I had a girlfriend once who used to walk to work and she'd get catcalled basically every time she did it. She told me about this and at first I didn't believe her because it was so outside my experience. No one catcalls me! And no one catcalled her when we were together.
People just want to be respected. They want to be believed. They aren't waging class warfare or social warfare. They basically just don't want to catch shit all the time.
We'll (probably?) get past this. We just have to work a lot harder at listening and respecting other people.
I specify these points because I do see an "us vs them" mentality in our current social atmosphere, and this is why my comment above illustrated competitive groups.
However, going back to my anecdote above, safety is important in society and we should all work towards allowing others to feel safe. However, when it comes to speech everything goes gray. So, necessarily, some people wish to sort it and make speech black and white. But it's not so. If a man yelled to me on the street, "Hey, beautiful!" I don't feel unsafe, but I will ignore it because I'm not interested and the dude will probably get the hint. If a man comes up close to me at night and says, "hey, you're sexy, where you going?" that man has something else going on and he probably can't be fixed by society screaming at him that he sucks for being a man. But then there's the in-between-- broad daylight, walking down the street, bro yells, "Nice ass kiddo what's your name, where you going?" I'll probably feel uncomfortable (the statement is too sexual and probing), maybe I'll go to the other side of the street. BUT I'm not going to insist that men stop vocally noticing attractive women! Societies always have a sexual component, people will always express sexuality. So it's case by case.
From my interpretation, your initial thesis is that speech should, for valid reasons, be curtailed so as to spare certain groups the very real trouble of dealing with, say, racism. Seems reasonable - my main disagreement would be that such a protection would be better applied universally (apologies if I have misunderstood, and you do too).
In your closing statement, you highlight that people just want to be respected and believed. I think most people would agree that's fairly accurate.
Unfortunately, the second point often intersects the first. In that often people will seek to silence others, usually with honest intentions. This part, the idea of good intentions, is where the wheels come off. By way of analogy, look at something like religion. How many arguments and wars, personal and multinational, have, if nothing else, used differing opinions to promulgate hate?
It feels almost impossible, in my eyes, to bridge that gap. One persons well meaning censorship, is another persons disrespect.
I likely have a coloured view of this, based on a few sour personal experiences, which I've seen mimicked elsewhere. For one example, I've been abruptly and sharply belittled for offering my thoughts on the impact of rape. I was told that I shouldn't comment, and it's not something that relates to me. I actually took it quietly at the time, but later, quietly, shares with the person that I have, in fact, been a victim of rape. Twice (over twenty years apart).
If we are talking about being believed and respected, I felt anything but. But simply because I didn't fit the stereotype, I was belittled and shamed. It was effectively discrimination, but noone found issue with it, because it was perpetrated by an acceptable person.
I guess the point I'm getting at is that it would be great if people could just not he assholes (sorry for the language) and forego the need for censorship at the same time. But reality, at least for me, seems to be the ideas are mutually exclusive to some extent
Understanding that this proposal is clear, simple, and wrong is kinda the basis of reaching the Enlightenment. But because this is a bit subtle, many people -- too many people -- can't understand it. You have to think structurally, rather than emotionally.
1. Who do you think will be in charge of determining what is a "slur" and what is not? Is saying "It's OK to be white" a slur? How about "Women prefer to work with people, men prefer to work with things"? At the time of the Enlightenment, a slur was basically an insult to the King or Nobility. Which of course applied equally if you were criticizing their judgement/policies, which then grew some more. This was called "Lese Majeste" or violating the majesty of the Sovereign, and evolved into the hate speech laws, for example, in Weimar, that did absolutely nothing to prevent the rise anti-semitism in Europe. Banning hate speech has always failed to protect people against hatred. Now a lot of people think that only those who are oppressed will be protected by bans on slurs, but actually those who decide what is and is not a slur are not just going to be the oppressed. They will be also the ones who already have power, and they will use that ban as another lever to stifle dissent. So, that's one problem right there -- same problem as "Why can't we give this organization vague, broad powers and not have the powers be abused? What's so hard about that?" Well, it's not how life works, and we should know that by now. We should always think about policies with the view that untrustworthy people are in charge, rather than with a simplistic view.
2. In every society, there is an overton window of acceptable views. Society has many, many ways of punishing those who step outside of that window. Everything from social ostracism, to getting fired, to losing customers, etc. You don't really need to worry that society has no way of punishing those who offend them. In fact, it's really a silly thing to worry about. We don't need additional ways of enforcing thought-discipline and speech discipline beyond informal ostracism. Few can stand up to it, and when someone is saying something obviously hateful, those who disagree tend to be strengthened in their resolve against that view.
3. If society already has informal ways of curtailing offensive speech, what is the harm of additionally formalizing more policies or laws that (according to 1.) will curtail speech that elites find offensive? And what is the benefit of not formalizing them? This is what the Enlightenment thinkers understood, but which many have now forgotten. The benefit is when the overton window as espoused by the elites doesn't match with the overton window of society as a whole: in normal situations (both overton windows are the same), you don't need to exert additional pressure on the person engaging in transgressive speech, because they wont find an audience. But what if they do find an audience? That's usually the "emperor has no clothes" scenario, where those in charge of the institution have an overton window that is different from members of the institution, or a sizeable minority of members. In that case, people will listen to the transgressor and say "hey, the emperor is naked!" while the emperor will accuse the transgressor of making slurs. That's the situation in which freedom of speech is so crucial -- when it will resonate and the normal social pressures don't quash the transgressor. This is the example of "It's OK to be white."
So freedom of speech serves as a safety valve from the elites enforcing their bubble. No one cares about actual slurs -- those that don't find an audience -- society will always punish those people. No one cares about freedom to remain within the overton window of...
The world "nigger" is essentially completely banned from society, so much so that people call it the n-word, but has that changed attitudes? Or is the person just going to say racist stuff with African-American instead of Nigger?
People can (and often should) resist what society decrees, because it's only through that dynamic tension of conflicting forces in society that we can reasonably advance.
> I believe it is a good thing that there are things society has deemed unacceptable and acknowledge that I give up some of my absolute freedoms to live in such a society.
You buried the lede -- your whole post is really dressing up why we shouldn't resist a societal decision you personally heavily agree with, while not giving real credence to people who disagree with you.
Pitching society-uber-als when society has made the choice you like is really cheap partisanship.
> Freedom of expression is not foundational. Certainly inciting violence, advocating genocide, or engaging in targeted and repeated harassment does not fall under the auspice of an unalienable and foundational right.
These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
That is a fair criticism. A counterpoint to my own post would be that pushing what is acceptable and questioning the norm is what has always driven progress, be it abolishing slavery, accepting other sexualities, religions, scientific views, etc. My point was rather that rights like expression are not absolute by the nature of the social contract. Requiring that they be unimpeachable is not compatible with living in a social structure.
> These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts are just begging the question.
There are people that disagree for sure. The point isn't that those, in particular, are universally agreed upon but that there exist limits to absolute freedom.
> These are also things on which many people radically disagree with you. Stating them as facts is just begging the question.
I am among the ones who radically disagree. I want to live in a society where all of those things are allowed, but people are just smart enough to ignore them. I think this is a much better prospect since it decentralizes responsibility.
Abstract advocacy of illegal violence (as distinguished from inciting imminent illegal violence) is constitutionally protected speech under the First Amendment. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969).
We are making up the rules of society as we go along, and we are going to make mistakes, and circumstances will change such that old rules don’t work anymore. In order to figure out what new rules should be, we must be able to discuss them. If the proponents of one set of rules are able to prohibit the discussion of anything else, you had better hope they have the best possible set for all time, because you’re stuck with them. Collapse is inevitable if anything significant ever changes.
The reason to hold the line and do things like defending Illinois Nazis is because two sides on a contested issue will always want the other side to shut up. The powerful side will always come up with some excuse as to why the weak side must urgently be silenced in the name of safety. Strong principles are powerful because they give moral authority to help the weak stand up against the powerful. If there are obvious, clear exceptions like yelling fire, it’s probably OK, but it still gives the strong side a toehold to draw an analogy and silence the weak.
> The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, infringed. The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, to write, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.
In other words, the first amendment is clearly against censorship of any kind.
That is unfortunate though, because the book it is based on looks really really interesting. I am thinking that The New Yorker (although is seems with Mr. Cohen's help) just chose the most "out-of-touch-liberal-that-only-has-rich-people-for-friends-way" to spin the book. That is sad because again, the book looks good.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1620972107/
The ultimate problem is that so much power has been centralized by the surveillance industry, that the politicking gadflys can't not come buzzing. Google, Twitter, Reddit et al are already turning over every rock hunting for our time's communists, but according to this article they still aren't prostrating themselves hard enough! The choosing of the losing strategy of appeasement never cease to amaze me - this is what real power looks like in a democracy!
The obvious answer is to let these centralized surveillance cesspools wither and die, assisted by the blight such as this article. The Free world will move past the sinkhole of "web 2.0" and on to uncensorable decentralized communications. As the identity politickers (aka racists) turn grey, their kids will be discovering the actual Internet.
The following quotes illustrate my intuition a little more clearly.
From the article:
"newsgroups...that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums."
"I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide."
Along with the retro-looking GIF, the specific mention of Usenet's age, as well as the use of the word "terminal" seem to make a connection. Specifically, it seems to be drawing a parallel between this type of thinking (censoring free speech to protect certain groups) and old technology.
One may find this analysis off-base, but it caught my eye immediately so I thought I'd share.
We certainly don't want society to censor our own thoughts (with technology). But why should the government then censor willing communication between two people? From a computing perspective, those are the same.
Sadly, as was already noted, the article is nowhere close to arguing this point.
>Whether disguised as free speech or simply stated as racism or sexism, such humor IS hurtful
Lots of things are hurtful; that doesn't mean we ban the expressions. Usually the social environment is supposed to play the role of discouraging harmful speech. Excessive intervention by the authorities causes a series of negative reactions: people go find somewhere else to talk, and if you stop them from doing that, they start to distrust the authorities.
>Once you come down from the high-flying ideals, it boils down to someone insisting on his right to be cruel to someone. That is a right he/she has, but NOT in ALL media.
It's not considered acceptable to send a threatening letter to someone's house, for sure. But this is a messageboard that you have to access intentionally. It's not one of just a few available channels on the radio spectrum, which is limited by the physics of electromagnetic communications; it's one of potentially billions of addresses in a made-up space with more possible "locations" than humans can readily comprehend. There is more room on the Internet than in any library. If you seek out a website where people are being mean to you, and choose to read their posts specifically, that's on you.
That's the potential that McCarthy was defending: the idea that websites are private spaces. There's an impasse in this article's attacks on McCarthy: Brown's argument fundamentally depends on the characterization of websites as public communications, whereas McCarthy casts as his crowning achievement the assertion that a student or professor's website constitutes her private communications, and yet the New Yorker expects us to believe that McCarthy did not respond to Brown's complaints. Far from this, McCarthy spent decades fighting against one of Brown's key premises.
>One of the leaders of the right-wing insurrection was Peter Thiel, who would go on to co-found PayPal and the software company Palantir and make millions of dollars as an early investor in Facebook. At the time, he was an undergraduate philosophy major and the editor of the Stanford Review, a sort of collegiate Breitbart News for the late eighties, dedicated to bemoaning what it saw as political correctness run amok. The Review, with Thiel at its helm, yearned to make Stanford great again. As he observed in “The Diversity Myth,” his 1995 polemic co-written with David Sacks, another Review editor who later became a Silicon Valley bigwig, “Multiculturalism caused Stanford to resemble less a great university than a Third World country, with corrupt ideologues and unhappy underlings.”
>Banning rec.humor.funny was the Stanford I.T. team’s attempt to calm campus nerves; only a few months earlier, there had been a polarizing case of two white freshmen drawing racist graffiti on a poster of Beethoven. But the backlash was immediate and extreme, and it went well above Thiel.
Peter Thiel and the Stanford Review do not play an integral role in the events that follow. In fact, Thiel is never mentioned again in the article. The inclusion and position of this paragraph in the article are obviously an attempt to associate McCarthy and the pro-free-speech professors with Thiel and, apparently, Breitbart, even though the author presents no evidence of such an association.
>That environment sort of sparked the attitude that yes, if you came from a refined enough background, you could say whatever you wanted.
If you were born in a barn in Uzbekistan and your provider connects to 4chan, you can post "Death to America!" or whatever it is a pissed off Uzbek might want to say (I don't know very much about Uzbekistan), assuming your government doesn't find out about it, that is. Be...
I suppose the goal to make a freer world out of the Internet was always destined be lost. The battle against the Clipper chip was a huge victory for that culture and the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA were a huge loss. But it was a loss the culture was conscious of, a bid by outside forces to keep it from getting "too big for its britches."
Now it feels like that culture has been entirely swallowed up. Google/YouTube/Twitter/Facebook are beholden to advertising dollars and their internal speech mores look, from outside Silicon Valley, to be indistinguishable from other circles of their location and social class.