There is a larger point here about being human that's not related to tech or democracy.
1. We do not know what is good for us. We only know what we like and don't like. (We know this because we can look back in our own lives to times in which we did what we liked and it was not as good as if we had did something else, sometimes disastrously so.)
2. Many times we have to be annoyed by ideas and other concepts we don't like for a while until we realize that there is some bit of great value here for us.
The logical conclusion to points 1 and 2 is this: there is some degree of being annoyed that is a normal and healthy part of living. Too much aggravation? Probably not. But you can definitely have too little. Too little aggravation would be far, far worse than too much, in fact.
So goods and services that seek to reduce/eliminate everything we don't like are not actually acting in our best interests, whether they're some social media tech or a new brand of opioid. A bit of this kind of thing at the appropriate time is great. Too much is disastrous.
I don’t know if too little aggravation is worse than too much. Admittedly I’m thinking of the edge case of legitimately harassing or abusive behavior, where your very understanding of reality is questioned with the explicit purpose to make you too insecure to engage in conversation with any confidence. I’m unsure what too little aggravation looks like, since even echo chambers result in self-aggravation to some extent?
Another larger point to consider is that what we perceive as "just politics" is a (big) business to the participants: politicians, parties, pressure groups, media organizations, journalists. These folks exploit basic human traits (outrage, fear, tribalism ...) for monetary gain. Put another way : the trolls aren't trolling because they're deranged (sometimes, ok..) but because that's their business.
>> Which ideas, if any, are beyond the pale? Is it a mistake to “normalize” some speakers? When?
Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.
Assuming the students have been appropriately educated, wouldn't they just laugh at the speakers talking about lizard people? Why would they need to be protected from that kind of nonsense?
I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.
Educated or not, framing is an important part of any arguement. Time and attention is limited so who is allowed to speak in a venue and how long they're given is an implicit endorsement. There's an appeal to authority there in all future arguments ("well I spoke here, what have you done") and regardless of how much education you have refuting a false claim is always an order or magnitude harder than making one.
It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.
That sounds like a different problem. If people are so weak-minded that they can't be trusted to hear obviously ridiculous ideas, isn't that equivalent to asserting that democracy is doomed to failure? That the majority will only "do the right thing" if some "better" people "guide" their opinions "for their own good"?
Meanwhile the people you're mockingly referring to here are running your country. Just this fact must be enough for you to tolerate what they have to say. If not, you're demonstrating exactly the problem this article is talking about.
Lol, not my country. Canada's leadership is imperfect but remains on the side of sanity. And we keep bulwarks against such things. It's actually a large part of the current NAFTA negotiations. Trump goes on about trade and money, we are concerned about protecting our culture and our politics. The "Canadian content" rules, our limitations on foreign ownership of media outlets, such things are to protect us from the raging dumpster fire.
When any bar is set for what is considered "acceptable" inquiry in areas dedicated to research, we set boundaries that will inevitably be twisted to constrain research and free inquiry when reactionaries or revolutionaries are in power. They will use those boundaries as gameable dogma to expel and ostracize minorities. The reason academic freedom both exists and is largely value-agnostic is to preserve those norms and precedents should ideologues that aren't on your side assume power over you.
Untruths and lies are rarely black and white. There was a time when the heliocentrism was considered a lie. A time when men & women being equal was considered an untruth.
If sufficient people are interested in a speaker/idea, isn't it best to let them speak and trust people to draw their own conclusions based on the information presented?
this is a persuasive argument, in a vacuum, but to the degree which some subjects are based on objective argument, I can't say I agree. In scientific academia, the expectation is that if someone is making a claim, they also have experimentation and/or logical reasoning that can be explained which supports their claim, and is verifiable with repeated tests by secondary sources. now, some of the examples you pose fall under the murkier realms of subjective reasoning and frankly, moral relativism. Geocentrism died with the rise of societies value for objective thought, in the enlightenment. So too has the idea of the value of an individual's humanity and sentience slowly eroded away the perceived legitimacy of ideas such as racism and sexism. To many, there is the perception that granting legitimacy to ideas that run counter to the concepts of objective truth and inherent human value by giving those ideas platform is not good for society. How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.
>How people determine which arguments fall under those criteria is the sticking point.
Yes, and whoever is making that determination gains great power. It is very easy to use this power of censorship to push an agenda. Arguments have many nuances and are rarely completely true or completely false.
Until we have a benevolent oracle that can determine whether an argument represents objective truth, free and open speech is our best option.
> Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights
Telling that you're so quick to hyperbole here - of course nobody has actually been invited to speak at a college who believed that Obama was a "lizard person". People like Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson have been invited and subsequently disinvited due to backlash, though, and I'm pretty sure those are the people you're backhandedly referring to. But they don't say that Obama was a lizard person. They do say that he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, that he's a muslim rather than a Christian, and that he's a socialist rather than a capitalist. Ironically, because these things are, at least, believable, when you say that they're no longer up for debate and won't even discuss whether or not their up-for-debate status is up for debate, you actually make it look like they _are_ true. Suppressing plausible conspiracy theories makes them seem more plausible, which is doubly distressing when they're conspiracy theories that are so easily debunked.
I want to speak specifically to two paragraphs from the article, taken together.
Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center.
...
Nor did Buckley think that all ideas deserve a forum. He did not host defenders of astrology, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism or Soviet-style Communism.
Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?
If the worst views he can conjure from the left are a right-wing scare story and astrology, whereas the worst on the right are murderous ideologies, then I think the first paragraph kinda explains itself.
There needs to be a pithy phrase for this kind of debate. Kind of like "form over function". Except here it's the desire to focus on the "form" of an argument, over the actual content of the argument. Similar to both-sides-ism. "Is the earth round? Views differ." Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure.
Some kind of pithy phrase, when repeated, will exhort people to look at the content of the argument rather than just the structure.
I understand what you’re saying, but if this unequal silencing is so obviously a real phenomenon and isn’t simply a reflection of the views being espoused - then it should be easy for the author to come up with examples. And it’s not just this author. It’s every author I’ve read commenting on this ‘phenomenon.’ They always say that it’s right-wing voices being silenced, but never suggest what left-wing voices should be silenced that aren’t.
So I invite anyone to suggest the left-leaning equivalents of Nazism and white-supremacy.
(And by equivalents I don’t just mean viewpoints, I mean comparable levels of influence. Some random bloke on the web claiming to be left-leaning and saying that their race is superior to whites isn’t the equivalent of white-supremacy as a movement.)
"Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?"
It would depend on exactly how precisely you define "Soviet-style Communism". If you mean, matching the exact same structure and the exact same beliefs and the exact same propaganda and national narrative, no, of course not. If you mean "people advocating for the State to be the one and only source of authority over everything economic, social, and cultural", then, yes, absolutely there are people on the left advocating for this. Quite a few explicitly, and even more people who do not quite entirely realize they are advocating for it, but when asked any specific question about who should have some given authority, the answer is always the State, even if they hypothetically believe that there must be some question for which that is not the answer.
I'm a leftist and pretty widely read and I've yet to read anyone explicitly advocating for state control of the whole economy. For pieces of it, such as Health Care or Education? Sure. For better regulation and wider redistribution? Yep. For municipal control of public utilities? Yep. Even for municipal or state level public alternatives to certain pieces of the economy, like banking.
For the whole thing, Soviet-style? Nope. I haven't seen this anywhere.
Pretty weak argument. Once you admit that certain views deserve to be taken off the able (astrology, the KKK, Nazis, and "Soviet-style communism," unclear whether Mao-style communism is permissible), you need to have principles about where the line is.
I know a lot of people who would absolutely describe Bannon as similar to Nazis or Soviets, who feel very strongly that his "white nationalist" views are likely to lead to a genocide. It's pretty widely know that the last subject of these "free speech" uproars, Milo Yiannapolous, flirted pretty openly with Nazi-style beliefs--and that Bannon was the one who gave him a platform in the first place.
If you disagree with Bannon being put in that category, you have a responsibility to at the very least explain why he's not there. Otherwise you're just cultivating willful ignorance, deliberately refusing to engage with others' arguments. Creating your own echo chamber, one could say.
- There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale.
- It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers.
- A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present.
Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me.
I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.
It's hard to take your source seriously when they say in reference to conservative speakers on campus "In other words, they’re trolling." Apparently the free speech project being cited by the source you posted is quite biased on the subject.
> colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me.
It's not just you. There are plenty of fascist minded extreme leftists who are working hard to censor everything they don't like. Luckily, most americans can see through that. It's pathetic to label everything you disagree with as "trolling and bigotry". And it's fascistic to try to silence them.
I find it so ironic that the "anti-fascists" are the real fascists in today's america.
If these conservatives are so laughable, let them speak so that we can all laugh at them. But I guess free speech and intellectual honesty is a bit too much to ask nowadays.
Do you have any counter argument to the actual article? It cites a study of events that could be described as censorious and evaluates the political stance of the people being censored. Can you produce evidence showing that this is untrue?
The first is that echo chambers are a terrible disservice to readers, to listeners, to students and to democracy. The second is that with respect to political issues, a degree of humility is essential.
It's weird that this is the point of the opinion piece in this context. We're talking about a guy who built his fame on selling sensationalism to his own echo chamber and never showed one iota of humility.
I agree we could all use a little bit more humility, but we're not going to get there by hearing from someone whose talking points are not based on fact, but on appealing to emotion.
If you want someone with an opposing viewpoint at the festival, find someone more sincere. To borrow an example from the article, even if you disagree with Noam Chomsky, you can still trace back his opinion to the facts that informed it. You didn't see Buckley debating people on Firing Line who completely fabricated stories.
Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy coexist with as many "echo chambers" as you please. (In fact, in a healthy democracy, you would have "echo chambers"). The reality is that "echo chambers" created the conditions that allowed Trump to be elected. But, he was ELECTED. The democratic process worked fine.
What I'm trying to, gently, point out, is that "echo chambers" not giving you the democratic results you want, is not the same as "echo chambers" being an "enemy" of democracy. Everyone can say whatever they please. Everyone can listen to, or indeed, ignore, whatever they please. Simultaneously, along a completely different and orthogonal axis, everyone can vote however they please. Now obviously in such an environment, if there really is complete freedom of choice and freedom of association, "echo chambers" will develop. This doesn't show a lack of freedom, rather it shows an abundance of freedom. Any person is free to position themselves wherever they please in the space defined by that democratic environment.
Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of association etc, these are some of the most important features of a democracy. So "echo chambers" don't represent a threat to democracy. Quite the contrary, their existence actually indicates the presence of healthy environment in terms of democratic freedoms.
Now of course people won't like this, because it allows the ill informed to remain ill informed as long as they choose. But that goes back to freedoms. As horrible as this is going to sound, it's the democratic right of the ill informed, to remain ill informed.
The US already puts limits on who can vote (have to be a citizen, have to be 18+, can't be a felon), would it be so terrible if we also had a test to see if you actually knew what was going on?
It would have to be worded carefully, e.g "what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements) and it would of course have to be applied equally to everybody (no grandfathering).
But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
The questions don't even have to be unbiased, they just have to be something you would know only if you have actually looked into it. They aren't meant to ensure that you have equally read all sides, just that you have done some research.
Each question would be assigned some score, and you would need a certain minimum to pass.
As long as everybody is given the same test, and that the questions are objective, the same determination would be made for everybody, no matter what their political leanings were, so in a sense whatever knowledge you require your opponents to know, you would also your side to know.
Even if it is so blatantly biased that every single question is a positive statement about Hillary (say), wouldn't you want somebody voting against her to do so on an informed basis, and so as a minimum they should know her platforms/positions?
The bias I am referring to is not favoring one candidate over another in the wording of the questions, but rather to disqualify voters who may not vote the same way as you. An example might be "what did candidate XYZ say 3 years ago on this random radio talk show", and only die-hard supporters would be able to answer it correctly. (There are likely much better examples of what I am trying to convey here, but my caffeine level is dangerously low)
Restricting the voters like that could easily sway the voting pool in such a way that it no longer represents the views of all Americans proportionally, which is the whole point of the voting system
That's actually how they stopped black people from voting in the south in the late 19th century - they asked easy questions of the white voters and hard (to impossible) questions of the black voters.
>"what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements)
You're giving people too much credit. When showed the controversial comparison photos of Obama's and Trump's inauguration crowds and asked which photo depicted a larger crowd, some Trump supporters indicated the Trump inauguration simply because they recognized the controversy and refused to give any credence to the perceived insult, even going so far as to give an obviously false answer on an ostensibly objective poll.
> But he was more than willing to provide a forum for people whose leftist ideas he despised, a group that included Noam Chomsky, Muhammad Ali, Saul Alinsky, Allen Ginsburg and John Kenneth Galbraith.
That's revisionist history.
Buckley allowed Noam Chomsky on his show once, sure. But I'd hardly call him "more than willing" to let Chomsky get his ideas across. He was constantly interrupting him. At the end of the interview Buckley even went so far as pressing a button to go to commercial in order to keep from having to answer one of Chomsky's questions.
"Providing a forum" would be what Amy Goodman did by allowing the 9-11 truthers to debate the Popular Science guys on Democracy Now. That's the standard, and Buckley's interview of Chomsky on Firing Line doesn't live up to that standard.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 77.1 ms ] thread1. We do not know what is good for us. We only know what we like and don't like. (We know this because we can look back in our own lives to times in which we did what we liked and it was not as good as if we had did something else, sometimes disastrously so.)
2. Many times we have to be annoyed by ideas and other concepts we don't like for a while until we realize that there is some bit of great value here for us.
The logical conclusion to points 1 and 2 is this: there is some degree of being annoyed that is a normal and healthy part of living. Too much aggravation? Probably not. But you can definitely have too little. Too little aggravation would be far, far worse than too much, in fact.
So goods and services that seek to reduce/eliminate everything we don't like are not actually acting in our best interests, whether they're some social media tech or a new brand of opioid. A bit of this kind of thing at the appropriate time is great. Too much is disastrous.
Long watch but quite relevant and interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg4IqrIpuQU&t=2440s
Untruth. Lies. Total fiction mascaraing as fact. Such things should be denied the dignity of a university podium. People who want to poke holes in climate models are one thing, people who believe the earth is getting warmer due to a giant dragon hiding behind the moon are another. People who believe Obama was a lizard-person sent by Bin Laden to undermine gun rights ... such "alternative facts" deserve no place on a campus dedicated to learning.
I laughed. Back in 1998 I attended a lecture that I though was about evidence of aliens messing with our DNA. What I got was intelligent design as proof that the bible was literally correct. Most laughed, but many did not. Students believe what they are told. Not all of them all of the time, but a significant percentage will believe anything they hear so long as it reinforces their world view.
It's not so much protecting people, is ensuring their mental energies can be put toward productive measures rather than swimming through falsehoods for the sake of it.
If sufficient people are interested in a speaker/idea, isn't it best to let them speak and trust people to draw their own conclusions based on the information presented?
Yes, and whoever is making that determination gains great power. It is very easy to use this power of censorship to push an agenda. Arguments have many nuances and are rarely completely true or completely false.
Until we have a benevolent oracle that can determine whether an argument represents objective truth, free and open speech is our best option.
Telling that you're so quick to hyperbole here - of course nobody has actually been invited to speak at a college who believed that Obama was a "lizard person". People like Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones and Jordan Peterson have been invited and subsequently disinvited due to backlash, though, and I'm pretty sure those are the people you're backhandedly referring to. But they don't say that Obama was a lizard person. They do say that he was born in Kenya rather than Hawaii, that he's a muslim rather than a Christian, and that he's a socialist rather than a capitalist. Ironically, because these things are, at least, believable, when you say that they're no longer up for debate and won't even discuss whether or not their up-for-debate status is up for debate, you actually make it look like they _are_ true. Suppressing plausible conspiracy theories makes them seem more plausible, which is doubly distressing when they're conspiracy theories that are so easily debunked.
Disturbingly, most of the controversies involve people whose views are to the right of center.
...
Nor did Buckley think that all ideas deserve a forum. He did not host defenders of astrology, the Ku Klux Klan, Nazism or Soviet-style Communism.
Does anyone of any note to the left of center advocate for Soviet-style Communism?
If the worst views he can conjure from the left are a right-wing scare story and astrology, whereas the worst on the right are murderous ideologies, then I think the first paragraph kinda explains itself.
I understand what you’re saying, but if this unequal silencing is so obviously a real phenomenon and isn’t simply a reflection of the views being espoused - then it should be easy for the author to come up with examples. And it’s not just this author. It’s every author I’ve read commenting on this ‘phenomenon.’ They always say that it’s right-wing voices being silenced, but never suggest what left-wing voices should be silenced that aren’t.
So I invite anyone to suggest the left-leaning equivalents of Nazism and white-supremacy.
(And by equivalents I don’t just mean viewpoints, I mean comparable levels of influence. Some random bloke on the web claiming to be left-leaning and saying that their race is superior to whites isn’t the equivalent of white-supremacy as a movement.)
It would depend on exactly how precisely you define "Soviet-style Communism". If you mean, matching the exact same structure and the exact same beliefs and the exact same propaganda and national narrative, no, of course not. If you mean "people advocating for the State to be the one and only source of authority over everything economic, social, and cultural", then, yes, absolutely there are people on the left advocating for this. Quite a few explicitly, and even more people who do not quite entirely realize they are advocating for it, but when asked any specific question about who should have some given authority, the answer is always the State, even if they hypothetically believe that there must be some question for which that is not the answer.
I'm a leftist and pretty widely read and I've yet to read anyone explicitly advocating for state control of the whole economy. For pieces of it, such as Health Care or Education? Sure. For better regulation and wider redistribution? Yep. For municipal control of public utilities? Yep. Even for municipal or state level public alternatives to certain pieces of the economy, like banking.
For the whole thing, Soviet-style? Nope. I haven't seen this anywhere.
So who, exactly, is advocating for that?
I know a lot of people who would absolutely describe Bannon as similar to Nazis or Soviets, who feel very strongly that his "white nationalist" views are likely to lead to a genocide. It's pretty widely know that the last subject of these "free speech" uproars, Milo Yiannapolous, flirted pretty openly with Nazi-style beliefs--and that Bannon was the one who gave him a platform in the first place.
If you disagree with Bannon being put in that category, you have a responsibility to at the very least explain why he's not there. Otherwise you're just cultivating willful ignorance, deliberately refusing to engage with others' arguments. Creating your own echo chamber, one could say.
Some key takeaways:
- There just aren't many instances where people are actually being uninvited or censored on an absolute scale.
- It's actually spread across the ideological spectrum, not solely limited to conservative speakers.
- A tiny handful of conservative speakers are responsible for a significant number of these events, and in fact it appears that to some degree the point of inviting them is trolling, intended to draw protest and press attention, rather than a genuine attempt to present.
Personally, I think major news organizations offering their imprimatur to self-proclaimed fascists who advocate for limiting or destroying democratic governance might be more harmful to democracy than colleges refusing to host talks by people who traffic in trolling and bigotry. But that's just me.
I also think it's useful to consider Sarte's quote about the utility of "debating" anti-Semites:
> Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and how that same pattern plays out frequently in the high-profile interviews and debates with people like Bannon and Spencer.
It's not just you. There are plenty of fascist minded extreme leftists who are working hard to censor everything they don't like. Luckily, most americans can see through that. It's pathetic to label everything you disagree with as "trolling and bigotry". And it's fascistic to try to silence them.
I find it so ironic that the "anti-fascists" are the real fascists in today's america.
If these conservatives are so laughable, let them speak so that we can all laugh at them. But I guess free speech and intellectual honesty is a bit too much to ask nowadays.
https://heterodoxacademy.org/vox-consistent-errors-campus-sp...
It's weird that this is the point of the opinion piece in this context. We're talking about a guy who built his fame on selling sensationalism to his own echo chamber and never showed one iota of humility.
I agree we could all use a little bit more humility, but we're not going to get there by hearing from someone whose talking points are not based on fact, but on appealing to emotion.
If you want someone with an opposing viewpoint at the festival, find someone more sincere. To borrow an example from the article, even if you disagree with Noam Chomsky, you can still trace back his opinion to the facts that informed it. You didn't see Buckley debating people on Firing Line who completely fabricated stories.
Democracy is a political system. You can have a democracy coexist with as many "echo chambers" as you please. (In fact, in a healthy democracy, you would have "echo chambers"). The reality is that "echo chambers" created the conditions that allowed Trump to be elected. But, he was ELECTED. The democratic process worked fine.
What I'm trying to, gently, point out, is that "echo chambers" not giving you the democratic results you want, is not the same as "echo chambers" being an "enemy" of democracy. Everyone can say whatever they please. Everyone can listen to, or indeed, ignore, whatever they please. Simultaneously, along a completely different and orthogonal axis, everyone can vote however they please. Now obviously in such an environment, if there really is complete freedom of choice and freedom of association, "echo chambers" will develop. This doesn't show a lack of freedom, rather it shows an abundance of freedom. Any person is free to position themselves wherever they please in the space defined by that democratic environment.
Freedom of speech, freedom of choice, freedom of association etc, these are some of the most important features of a democracy. So "echo chambers" don't represent a threat to democracy. Quite the contrary, their existence actually indicates the presence of healthy environment in terms of democratic freedoms.
Now of course people won't like this, because it allows the ill informed to remain ill informed as long as they choose. But that goes back to freedoms. As horrible as this is going to sound, it's the democratic right of the ill informed, to remain ill informed.
It would have to be worded carefully, e.g "what does THINK_TANK believe will happen to the economy under Trumps tax plan" (as opposed to "what is likely to happen under Trumps tax plan", so there would be no political disagreements) and it would of course have to be applied equally to everybody (no grandfathering).
But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
1. If it's the ruling party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions.
2. If it's the opposition party, then there's no way they would write unbiased questions.
3. If it's a combination of the two, then no questions would get written in time.
4. If it's a third party, then who vets/selects them, and who can be a part of it? GOTO 1
> But the question I am really asking is, would it be so bad if the number of eligitable voters were smaller, but they were more informed?
That's incredibly dangerous. Who decides who is 'informed' and not? I bet most (all?) voters think they are informed.
Each question would be assigned some score, and you would need a certain minimum to pass.
As long as everybody is given the same test, and that the questions are objective, the same determination would be made for everybody, no matter what their political leanings were, so in a sense whatever knowledge you require your opponents to know, you would also your side to know.
Even if it is so blatantly biased that every single question is a positive statement about Hillary (say), wouldn't you want somebody voting against her to do so on an informed basis, and so as a minimum they should know her platforms/positions?
You're giving people too much credit. When showed the controversial comparison photos of Obama's and Trump's inauguration crowds and asked which photo depicted a larger crowd, some Trump supporters indicated the Trump inauguration simply because they recognized the controversy and refused to give any credence to the perceived insult, even going so far as to give an obviously false answer on an ostensibly objective poll.
That's revisionist history.
Buckley allowed Noam Chomsky on his show once, sure. But I'd hardly call him "more than willing" to let Chomsky get his ideas across. He was constantly interrupting him. At the end of the interview Buckley even went so far as pressing a button to go to commercial in order to keep from having to answer one of Chomsky's questions.
"Providing a forum" would be what Amy Goodman did by allowing the 9-11 truthers to debate the Popular Science guys on Democracy Now. That's the standard, and Buckley's interview of Chomsky on Firing Line doesn't live up to that standard.