5 ms·

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who

Sensible adults have long been a proponent of free speech. It’s the call to censorship for comfort that is new and seemingly coming from younger generations who don’t have experience with why that may be a bad idea. The ACLU has long defended all speech: https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-free-speech https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/why-we-must-defend-fre...

prophesi 9y ago
The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.
- attalus 9y ago
  Muh safe spaces
  - ebiester 9y ago
    I started to explain why safe spaces are necessary, but I realize that "Muh safe spaces" isn't an argument. In a world where my rights are debated, my family is attacked, where I've been afraid for my life and well being in public spaces, where some of my acquaintances have been murdered in public spaces, and where some of my safe spaces have been bombed, I don't understand why my request for a place where I don't have to fucking deal with that shit is so bad.
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Nobody should have to deal with violence or threats of violence. But that's way different than trying to shut down a speaker who holds political views different from the students or professors doing the protesting. College should physically be a safe place as much as possible, but intellectually, it's fair to ask students (and professors) to be challenged by a variety of views.
      - ebiester 9y ago
        That's a separate argument, however. We can disambiguate the "Safe places are necessary for non-privileged groups to have an area where they are predominant members and the space is catered to them rather than the predominant culture" - examples would include a place like a gay bar or youth group, or a club that is only of one ethnicity - and "we should expect a college to be a safe space." A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space." The redefiniton, then, is that college spaces should be a place where one's group should be default be treated with respect. That is, we make it "more safe" to exist without prejudice. If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect, that's an argument that can be made, but it's not germane to the original argument that people expect to have private, safe, spaces to communicate via the web. The "friends" or friends-subset restriction that Facebook makes is that private/semi-private "safe" space. The open web does not have a great equivalent. (Password-protecting is insufficient - we would need some sort of Mozilla Persona system and for various reasons, that never caught on.)
        goatlover 9y ago
        > A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space." I disagree with this line of thinking. College shouldn't culturally be a "safe place". It should be physically safe, but culturally? You should be challenged when you go to college. This "safe place" idea could apply to anyone. Should the highly religious, sheltered home schooler feel culturally safe at college from the predominate culture that went to schools with other kids and were exposed to different views? Of course not. > If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect Treating people with respect is different from exposing them to ideas that might challenge their beliefs, or might be culturally different.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        "You should be challenged when you go to college." Challenged is an entirely different beast than being told that you don't deserve to be there, that you don't deserve the same basic human rights of others, or being told that you shouldn't exist. THOSE are the things that "safe spaces" are meant to provide respite from.
- untog 9y ago
  That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have been student protests about anything ever since there have been students. > More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them. Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-students-hate-free-speech-so-much https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-... "college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".
  - prophesi 9y ago
    If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years, plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0]. There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill-prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a part-time job (And on a positive note, less likely to drink or have premarital sex). [0] https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy-Adulthood/dp/1501151983 https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy...
    - untog 9y ago
      Yeah, about that: > For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self-absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most people say "I love myself." And lo, if you search "I love myself" (as I would guess Twenge did first), you find that the phrase fluctuated with much less satisfying results, and in fact occurred at a higher frequency in, for instance, the 1770s, than in the early 2000s. So, Twenge discovered a grammatical shift and disguised it as a cultural one. > It's a small example, but the book is dizzying with this brand of deceptive spin. https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennials-here-comes-igen-or-maybe-not' https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennia... I'm not arguing that the book is without merit, but I really don't think it comprehensively and inarguably states that the "younger generation" are as damaged as the "older generation" might suspect (and "the coming generation are wrong about all the things!" is a trope as old as time)
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  No, they didn't. The sad part is people apparently believing that minorities being subjected to a bunch of hate speech directed toward them are "challenging ideas."
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I think it's funny you were immediately downvoted for this. It betrays this crowd as a population that largely hasn't experienced the kind of the politely-expressed but openly hateful things that are passed off as challenging. Or how quickly people berate groups as delicate because they meet for the purposes of not feeling like shit for a few hours.
    - s73v3r_ 9y ago
      I don't find it funny. I find it rather sad, but unfortunately rather predictable for this crowd. Fortunately, at this point, the comment has been upvoted into the positive.
groby_b 9y ago
Sensible adults have long been aware that censorship is something the government does, and that private individuals (and by extension, corporations) are perfectly fine restricting what speech they're willing to accept in their environment. The rule commonly known as "my house, my rules". The problem many people have with the open web is that many people don't step up and spell out house rules, which others interpret as "sure, we can pee on the carpet" And you'll note that even the ACLU is perfectly fine with the government restricting speech in some well-defined circumstances[1]. [1] Visible if you see the full text of the blog post you linked: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still-defend-free-speech/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still...
- TuringTest 9y ago
  Uh, that's not quite exact. That may be something americans think, but at least here in Europe we have rules that control the speech that happens at private venues that enable public speech (like, newspapers). For example if a newspaper publishes inaccurate information about a person, that person has the right to publish a correction[1] explaining their point of view on the subject; and the newspaper is forced by law to publish the correction in the same venue and same prominence. This is considered quite sensible to us. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply
- Rylinks 9y ago
  This is wrong, even in the United States. There are rare circumstances where a company's property is open to the public to such an extent that they become subject to first amendment restrictions (e.g. Marsh v. Alabama). Some states, such as California, have even greater restrictions on private parties in their state constitution. CA's constitutional speech protections prevent shopping malls from expelling petitioners from their premises, even if the mall disagrees with the speech. Extending this body of law to, say, Facebook would have problems, of course. But I don't think it's so clear that all sensible adults know that censorship is only something the government does, and are happy letting any corporate behavior, no matter how extreme, pass without scrutiny.
  - 9y ago
temp-dude-87844 9y ago
It's a manifestation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs among a certain cohort that's allied with targets of discrimination and feeling politically cornered by the opposition's shift to the right. They see that the Overton window about certain types of discourse being mainstream has shifted because the opposition has moved further right -- both in terms of leadership and the views of the membership. They see radical positions working for their opponents, and escalate in turn. There's a lack of nuance about whether they wish to push certain viewpoints underground and out of the mainstream, or if they wish to silence them altogether. Some probably don't care, which is troubling, but not altogether hard to understand. The effort is internally justified by invoking the 'paradox of tolerance', where they propose that the discourse of their opponents is fundamentally intolerant and presents a clear and present existential threat to society at large, and must be reactively suppressed for the health of diverse and open discourse to continue.

prophesi 9y ago

The saddest part is how the younger generation turned college campuses, the place where radical & worldview-challenging ideas could thrive, into places wherein you're protected from any such challenging ideas.

attalus 9y ago
Muh safe spaces
- ebiester 9y ago
  I started to explain why safe spaces are necessary, but I realize that "Muh safe spaces" isn't an argument. In a world where my rights are debated, my family is attacked, where I've been afraid for my life and well being in public spaces, where some of my acquaintances have been murdered in public spaces, and where some of my safe spaces have been bombed, I don't understand why my request for a place where I don't have to fucking deal with that shit is so bad.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Nobody should have to deal with violence or threats of violence. But that's way different than trying to shut down a speaker who holds political views different from the students or professors doing the protesting. College should physically be a safe place as much as possible, but intellectually, it's fair to ask students (and professors) to be challenged by a variety of views.
    - ebiester 9y ago
      That's a separate argument, however. We can disambiguate the "Safe places are necessary for non-privileged groups to have an area where they are predominant members and the space is catered to them rather than the predominant culture" - examples would include a place like a gay bar or youth group, or a club that is only of one ethnicity - and "we should expect a college to be a safe space." A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space." The redefiniton, then, is that college spaces should be a place where one's group should be default be treated with respect. That is, we make it "more safe" to exist without prejudice. If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect, that's an argument that can be made, but it's not germane to the original argument that people expect to have private, safe, spaces to communicate via the web. The "friends" or friends-subset restriction that Facebook makes is that private/semi-private "safe" space. The open web does not have a great equivalent. (Password-protecting is insufficient - we would need some sort of Mozilla Persona system and for various reasons, that never caught on.)
      - goatlover 9y ago
        > A college that is governed by the predominant culture cannot be a "safe space." I disagree with this line of thinking. College shouldn't culturally be a "safe place". It should be physically safe, but culturally? You should be challenged when you go to college. This "safe place" idea could apply to anyone. Should the highly religious, sheltered home schooler feel culturally safe at college from the predominate culture that went to schools with other kids and were exposed to different views? Of course not. > If we want to argue that a college space isn't a place where people are by default treated with respect Treating people with respect is different from exposing them to ideas that might challenge their beliefs, or might be culturally different.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        "You should be challenged when you go to college." Challenged is an entirely different beast than being told that you don't deserve to be there, that you don't deserve the same basic human rights of others, or being told that you shouldn't exist. THOSE are the things that "safe spaces" are meant to provide respite from.
untog 9y ago
That's a very common and entirely overblown hypothesis. Sure, there are student protests about a tiny number of speakers each year. But there have been student protests about anything ever since there have been students. > More importantly, though, we can see here why reaching broad conclusions from sets of anecdotes is inadvisable. There are around 2,600 four-year universities in the United States. Friedersdorf tried to compile all of the most outrageous instances from a single year, and found about 10 of them. Those 10 were probably roughly evenly distributed according to the political affiliation of the students; i.e. there are more shutdown attempts by liberal students than conservative students, but students are also more liberal. And among those high-profile incidents, a bunch of the speakers ended up coming and speaking and the petitions went nowhere. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-students-hate-free-speech-so-much https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/02/why-do-those-college-... "college campuses" are quite safe from the "younger generation".
- prophesi 9y ago
  If you want a book that uses national polls conducted over the past 40+ years, plus a little bit of anecdotal evidence to make the data tangible, I recommend iGen by Jean M. Twenge[0]. There's a noticeable trend that the kids of this upcoming generation are ill-prepared for college and expect the authorities to protect them. In highschool, they're less likely to go out without their parents or work a part-time job (And on a positive note, less likely to drink or have premarital sex). [0] https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy-Adulthood/dp/1501151983 https://www.amazon.com/iGen-Super-Connected-Rebellious-Happy...
  - untog 9y ago
    Yeah, about that: > For instance, Twenge argues that young people have become increasingly self-absorbed since the advent of the Internet. One piece of evidence she uses is a search she ran through Google's Ngram (which searches through printed books) for the phrase "I love me." She found a sharp spike in the phrase in the last few decades. But "I love me" sounds slightly off — surely most people say "I love myself." And lo, if you search "I love myself" (as I would guess Twenge did first), you find that the phrase fluctuated with much less satisfying results, and in fact occurred at a higher frequency in, for instance, the 1770s, than in the early 2000s. So, Twenge discovered a grammatical shift and disguised it as a cultural one. > It's a small example, but the book is dizzying with this brand of deceptive spin. https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennials-here-comes-igen-or-maybe-not' https://www.npr.org/2017/09/17/548664627/move-over-millennia... I'm not arguing that the book is without merit, but I really don't think it comprehensively and inarguably states that the "younger generation" are as damaged as the "older generation" might suspect (and "the coming generation are wrong about all the things!" is a trope as old as time)
s73v3r_ 9y ago
No, they didn't. The sad part is people apparently believing that minorities being subjected to a bunch of hate speech directed toward them are "challenging ideas."
- Spivak 9y ago
  I think it's funny you were immediately downvoted for this. It betrays this crowd as a population that largely hasn't experienced the kind of the politely-expressed but openly hateful things that are passed off as challenging. Or how quickly people berate groups as delicate because they meet for the purposes of not feeling like shit for a few hours.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    I don't find it funny. I find it rather sad, but unfortunately rather predictable for this crowd. Fortunately, at this point, the comment has been upvoted into the positive.

groby_b 9y ago

Sensible adults have long been aware that censorship is something the government does, and that private individuals (and by extension, corporations) are perfectly fine restricting what speech they're willing to accept in their environment. The rule commonly known as "my house, my rules". The problem many people have with the open web is that many people don't step up and spell out house rules, which others interpret as "sure, we can pee on the carpet" And you'll note that even the ACLU is perfectly fine with the government restricting speech in some well-defined circumstances[1]. [1] Visible if you see the full text of the blog post you linked: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still-defend-free-speech/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/28/why-we-must-still...

TuringTest 9y ago
Uh, that's not quite exact. That may be something americans think, but at least here in Europe we have rules that control the speech that happens at private venues that enable public speech (like, newspapers). For example if a newspaper publishes inaccurate information about a person, that person has the right to publish a correction[1] explaining their point of view on the subject; and the newspaper is forced by law to publish the correction in the same venue and same prominence. This is considered quite sensible to us. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_reply
Rylinks 9y ago
This is wrong, even in the United States. There are rare circumstances where a company's property is open to the public to such an extent that they become subject to first amendment restrictions (e.g. Marsh v. Alabama). Some states, such as California, have even greater restrictions on private parties in their state constitution. CA's constitutional speech protections prevent shopping malls from expelling petitioners from their premises, even if the mall disagrees with the speech. Extending this body of law to, say, Facebook would have problems, of course. But I don't think it's so clear that all sensible adults know that censorship is only something the government does, and are happy letting any corporate behavior, no matter how extreme, pass without scrutiny.
- 9y ago

temp-dude-87844 9y ago

It's a manifestation of Maslow's hierarchy of needs among a certain cohort that's allied with targets of discrimination and feeling politically cornered by the opposition's shift to the right. They see that the Overton window about certain types of discourse being mainstream has shifted because the opposition has moved further right -- both in terms of leadership and the views of the membership. They see radical positions working for their opponents, and escalate in turn. There's a lack of nuance about whether they wish to push certain viewpoints underground and out of the mainstream, or if they wish to silence them altogether. Some probably don't care, which is troubling, but not altogether hard to understand. The effort is internally justified by invoking the 'paradox of tolerance', where they propose that the discourse of their opponents is fundamentally intolerant and presents a clear and present existential threat to society at large, and must be reactively suppressed for the health of diverse and open discourse to continue.