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I'm not keen on safe spaces, the harsh reality is your going to run into a broad range of people with varying views and a variety of degrees of sanity, better t

I'm not keen on safe spaces, the harsh reality is your going to run into a broad range of people with varying views and a variety of degrees of sanity, better to let them have a shitty little backroom at UW and not give them a good story to take to the media that an insane mofo got banned from a college for spreading hate down there. Throwing media attention at those who seek to push us gays back into the closet is counterproductive, akin to fanning a flame. Milo and his ilk love to be no platformed, as it makes for great PR when they can say "Blah college banned us, how dare they!". Suppression of ideas doesn't work, let them die in the brutal, harsh light of public discussion and debate. With free media attention and a stunted discussion, this will only continue to snowball. Building walls never works, unless you prop them up!

anon1385 9y ago
>Throwing media attention at those who seek to push us gays back into the closet is counterproductive, akin to fanning a flame. Milo and his ilk love to be no platformed, as it makes for great PR when they can say "Blah college banned us, how dare they!". Quite a few of the people involved already have a 'platform' writing for major national or international publications[1], or regularly featuring on TV. So yes it does give them something else to moan about in their regular newspaper column, but I'm not sure it makes all that much difference to how much attention they get. The media is already pretty much saturated with people like Germain Greer, and they are all very adept at generating controversy to promote themselves without outside help - that's how they got where they are today. That's the irony of this really - it's a bunch of people with the biggest megaphone imaginable complaining that they have been silenced because people didn't want to come to/host their utterly insignificant student debate. The fact that such an insignificant thing has become a major story is evidence of just how loud their voices are, sadly. [1] there are other people being 'no platformed' as well, but I'm not sure the government/Daily Mail is really suggesting they want to force universities to host Abu Hamza al-Masri or face fines
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Mountain_Skies 9y ago
My university allowed both Milo and Richard Spencer to give talks with minimal fuss. The end result is a few days afterwards they were totally forgotten there, with the outrage bandwagon having setup shop at the next location. I saw a bit of the livestream for both and without a circus about, it was rather boring stuff.
emn13 9y ago
I think this is a misunderstanding of what's going on here. The issue isn't hiding away messages - notably you can still find whatever they're saying fine, the ban only applies to public speaking events. The point is that particularly antagonistic speakers attract attention not for the debate on the subject matter proper, but precisely for the rousing antagonism itself. So you're not necessarily going to get any real debate; nor will these speakers suffer in the brutal harsh light of public discussion - they'll thrive (regardless of the details of the message itself - that doesn't actually matter!) on public anger. That's not constructive, nor is it what free speech is about. You're not helping everybody find truth, or any approximation thereof: you're holding a shouting match. You might think that's not so harmful. After all, people should be able to enjoy a kind of shared inspiration, and rational people wouldn't let that affect the conceptually unrelated issue of what was said. However, people - including you and me - aren't actually very good at separating serious message from noise; the way you consume information has an impact on your ability to process it usefully. It's not some hypothetical risk that whatever extreme standpoint the hostile speaker takes will can gain traction because people agree with their anger - misattributing their shared worries to whatever coincidentally happened to be the message used to spark controversy. This has happened many, many times before - and even though that's easy to see in retrospect, that didn't prevent the people caught up in the heat of the moment from going along with it. I wouldn't want to suggest that controlling the message doesn't have its own risks - but that just means this is a tricky balance to make. What's certain is that fully unrestricted speech is harmful. Note that every society takes that for granted: they all have rules about incitement to violence or even terrorism, rules about deceiving others in various situations (fraud, perjury, truth in advertising), and rules about libel, and probably more. Getting the best out of free speech takes some tuning; it's not black and white. I think the no-platforming rules seem perhaps somewhat excessive, by the way. But I don't think it's an issue of yay! free speech! either.
PrimHelios 9y ago
Allowing people arguing that child rape and genocide is fine isn't creating a safe space or suppressing an idea, Jesus Christ. Milo has literally argued that men in their late 20's should be allowed to rape young teenagers, if a university wants to ban him, why shouldn't they be able to? Should they allow NAMBLA to have on-campus talks and gatherings?
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anon1385 9y ago

>Throwing media attention at those who seek to push us gays back into the closet is counterproductive, akin to fanning a flame. Milo and his ilk love to be no platformed, as it makes for great PR when they can say "Blah college banned us, how dare they!". Quite a few of the people involved already have a 'platform' writing for major national or international publications[1], or regularly featuring on TV. So yes it does give them something else to moan about in their regular newspaper column, but I'm not sure it makes all that much difference to how much attention they get. The media is already pretty much saturated with people like Germain Greer, and they are all very adept at generating controversy to promote themselves without outside help - that's how they got where they are today. That's the irony of this really - it's a bunch of people with the biggest megaphone imaginable complaining that they have been silenced because people didn't want to come to/host their utterly insignificant student debate. The fact that such an insignificant thing has become a major story is evidence of just how loud their voices are, sadly. [1] there are other people being 'no platformed' as well, but I'm not sure the government/Daily Mail is really suggesting they want to force universities to host Abu Hamza al-Masri or face fines

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Mountain_Skies 9y ago

My university allowed both Milo and Richard Spencer to give talks with minimal fuss. The end result is a few days afterwards they were totally forgotten there, with the outrage bandwagon having setup shop at the next location. I saw a bit of the livestream for both and without a circus about, it was rather boring stuff.

emn13 9y ago

I think this is a misunderstanding of what's going on here. The issue isn't hiding away messages - notably you can still find whatever they're saying fine, the ban only applies to public speaking events. The point is that particularly antagonistic speakers attract attention not for the debate on the subject matter proper, but precisely for the rousing antagonism itself. So you're not necessarily going to get any real debate; nor will these speakers suffer in the brutal harsh light of public discussion - they'll thrive (regardless of the details of the message itself - that doesn't actually matter!) on public anger. That's not constructive, nor is it what free speech is about. You're not helping everybody find truth, or any approximation thereof: you're holding a shouting match. You might think that's not so harmful. After all, people should be able to enjoy a kind of shared inspiration, and rational people wouldn't let that affect the conceptually unrelated issue of what was said. However, people - including you and me - aren't actually very good at separating serious message from noise; the way you consume information has an impact on your ability to process it usefully. It's not some hypothetical risk that whatever extreme standpoint the hostile speaker takes will can gain traction because people agree with their anger - misattributing their shared worries to whatever coincidentally happened to be the message used to spark controversy. This has happened many, many times before - and even though that's easy to see in retrospect, that didn't prevent the people caught up in the heat of the moment from going along with it. I wouldn't want to suggest that controlling the message doesn't have its own risks - but that just means this is a tricky balance to make. What's certain is that fully unrestricted speech is harmful. Note that every society takes that for granted: they all have rules about incitement to violence or even terrorism, rules about deceiving others in various situations (fraud, perjury, truth in advertising), and rules about libel, and probably more. Getting the best out of free speech takes some tuning; it's not black and white. I think the no-platforming rules seem perhaps somewhat excessive, by the way. But I don't think it's an issue of yay! free speech! either.

PrimHelios 9y ago

Allowing people arguing that child rape and genocide is fine isn't creating a safe space or suppressing an idea, Jesus Christ. Milo has literally argued that men in their late 20's should be allowed to rape young teenagers, if a university wants to ban him, why shouldn't they be able to? Should they allow NAMBLA to have on-campus talks and gatherings?

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