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From the Vox:
Many American pundits seem to firmly believe that the country stands at a precipice in which young, left-wing college students and recent graduates are the leading edge of a rising tide of illiberalism that comes in the form of “political correctness” and poses a clear and present danger to free speech and rational discourse.
[...] The alarm about student protesters, in other words, though not always mistaken about particular cases, is generally grounded in a completely mistaken view of the big-picture state of American society and public opinion, both on and off campus.
[...] Since the 1970s, the General Social Survey has posed a question about whether five hypothetical speakers should be allowed to give a speech in your community — a communist, a homosexual, an opponent of all religion, a racist, and a person who favors replacing the elected government with a military coup.
Justin Murphy of the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom aggregated trend data about all five kinds of speakers and found that public support for free expression has been generally rising
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday March 25 2018, @11:42PM (23 children)
One of the tactics all speakers try to use to get themselves listened to is "Help, help, I'm being repressed! You saw him repressing me, didn't you?"
The notion is that if somebody is trying to prevent you from hearing an idea, the idea must be something valuable enough to be worth censoring, and therefor (according to rubes) assumed to be true. A nice ancillary benefit of making this argument is that any countervailing evidence is part of The Man's efforts to censor the idea in question, and thus said countervailing evidence does not need to be discredited or disproved or demonstrated to be a misinterpretation.
This faulty argument tactic is limited to no single faction or even topic of debate: Racists claim they're censored by SJWs. Unions claim they're censored by big business. Moon landing hoaxers claim they're censored by NASA. Etc etc.
The right way to approach "radical" ideas is the same way you'd approach "mainstream" ideas: 1. What's the evidence in favor of your claim? 2. What's your answer to the evidence against your claim? Most times I've encountered really wacky ideas like flat earth belief, they're stumped when you ask that first question, and the conversation proceeds something like "Google it." "I'm not going to do your research for you. What sources did you find when you Googled it?" "Well, they keep changing. But I'm entitled to my belief. Why you so mean, attacking me?"
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:05AM (22 children)
This is asinine, speakers are regularly attacked* on college campuses by the intolerant left and we have plentiful, public video evidence of it being done. It's not even just public speakers, conservative students are even excluded from public meetings. [youtube.com]
* Usually limited to disruption via obnoxious and childish temper tantrums
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:15AM (1 child)
Poor, poor conservatives! It must be so painful to be so mocked and reviled for being so stupid. It gets better!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:40AM
No, it doesn't get better, study some history. If you seriously think a 190lb male thug intimidating a 140lb female at a public meeting she had every legal right to attend is acceptable then you're a piece of shit! You really are a complete piece of shit aren't you? Hahaha!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @12:30AM (19 children)
None of which makes those speakers or students any more correct about anything than if they had never been the victim of obnoxious temper tantrums.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @12:44AM (18 children)
To assess correctness, the debate must take place. The fact that one 'side' is incapable of debate and need resort to de-platforming and immature behaviour to prevent the debate should tell us there's at least some validity or else why bother with the shit show? And if a speaker were so completely wrong, they could easily be defeated at the Q&A huh?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday March 26 2018, @01:12AM (7 children)
Now you see, this is the problem right here. The right has lost. It has lost since time immemorial. But they are not intelligent enough to see that they have lost. The American Civil war is a great example. The Confederates were done after Gettysburg, but they kept fighting for the "Lost Cause". Why? The only thing it could be is stupidity. They thought that if they could just keep fighting, their "point of view" would prevail.
The point is, all these "conservatives" who find themselves having to force their way onto the campuses of higher learning are doing the same thing. The "debate" has been over for more than half a century, some of it back to the Civil War. There is no point in rehashing it, other than to provide an "intellectual safe space" for conservatives too dumb to realize that they have lost, and that the ground has shifted under their feet. College students are more tolerant of different opinions than at any time in history. But, perhaps, they are also because of that less tolerant of idiotic bigotry and arguments made in bad faith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @01:30AM (6 children)
Fixed!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday March 26 2018, @01:48AM (5 children)
You seem to have made an historical error. Perhaps you were thinking Confederates, many of whom were Democrats, and if they were not before the war, they certainly were after it, thanks to that Republican (former Free Soil Party) President! That is, until Tricky Dick Nixon got all the racists to leave the Democratic Party and become Republicans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @01:58AM (4 children)
No, I already corrected your historical error but please do keep back peddling on the racist party [snopes.com] of the KKK that currently runs welfare plantations across the US. Fact!
(Score: 4, Informative) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 26 2018, @02:21AM (3 children)
Your historical knowledge seems to end in the late 50s. After the civil rights act, the Democrats and Republicans neatly switched sides over the course of a few years with regard to which one was full of cross-burning lunatics.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @01:39PM
The first real rumblings of a racist revolt within the Democratic Party was when Strohm Thurmond formed the "Dixiecrats" and ran against Harry Truman in 1948. Why? Because Truman had desegregated the military. The racists got even more upset with Kennedy's backing of the Civil Rights Movement, and when Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act the racists were basically done with the Democrats and looking to bolt. So when Nixon actively embraced the "southern strategy", a.k.a. inviting the racists into the Republican Party, they had been primed for that move by the Democratic leaders ignoring them.
As for how racist the Republican voters are now, in 2006 they ran a black candidate for governor in my state, and about 25% of the people who normally vote Republican voted for the white Democrat.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @11:38PM (1 child)
Ahh, so a Goldwater Girl [snopes.com] with a mentor like Robert Byrd [wikipedia.org] who called black kids "super predators" as recently as the mid '90s [thehill.com] is not a racist. Meanwhile, a lifelong democrat who became a republican president is racist? [snopes.com]
The left embraced identity politics and the political flip happened again. They just haven't finished with the memo yet, they still think making absolutely everything about race makes them "unracist".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 27 2018, @02:13AM
Oh shit yes Hillary is a racist. Most wealthy people are, I find.
That sure as hell doesn't mean the modern GOP is any less racist than it has been for the last 50-odd years. You WISH there had been a flip. What's really happened is both parties got worse, and now there really *isn't* a mainstream party that isn't at least somewhat racist.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Monday March 26 2018, @01:19AM (9 children)
Robust public debate has been lost to delicate egos. People who hold beliefs ought to know precisely why they hold them, and be able to support them with evidence and thoughtful argument. Vague notions and handwaving and tantrums debase the commons and render us all, collectively, stupid, timid, and incurious. When we stop probing and challenging and exploring, we stop progressing as a civilization.
That is what is at stake with all this: civilization and civilized Man. And before we blithely chuck it all out, let's remember that we tried barbarism for a long time and arrived at civilization because everybody loses under the rule of the strong and the cruel.
Civilization and ideas and freedom are worth defending. So to liberal snowflakes I say, grow a pair and brave the mean words of people who disagree with you. To bigots I say, handwaving does not an argument make: strong claims require strong evidence.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @01:39AM (7 children)
Wise words but I am a centrist liberal. We're not talking about "liberal snowflakes", we're talking about self-entitled, narcissistic, neo-Marxist snowflakes who's egotism is based on lies. All the hero's of the far-left were mass-murders yet they insist on denying this history and claim they have some kind of moral high ground. It's pure sociopathy, the far-left has never helped the oppressed, it has systematically murdered them in greater numbers than every other political philosophy combined*.
* Excluding Islam.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday March 26 2018, @02:22AM (2 children)
Don't confuse economic left/right with social left/right. One of those is the communism---laissez-faire axis, and the other is the libertarian---authoritarian axis. You're trying to smear socially-left people with the brush that is (rightfully!) used to tar the hard-authoritarian collectivists.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @12:02AM (1 child)
No, I was not. I am myself a left leaning liberal, one who is disgusted with the far-left labelling people with center left views as "fascist". Liberals can not be fascists because they are not Marxists. [spectator.co.uk]
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 27 2018, @02:10AM
So ignore the nutbars. Most Christians ignore Westboro, most feminists ignore the "PiV is rape!" crowd, and you can ignore the frothy fringes.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 26 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
No, you are not! You are a fucking Republican! Own it, you America destroying bastard!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @12:08AM
Yeah, imagine someone living in a constitutional republic being a small "r" republican. The horror!
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday March 26 2018, @05:37PM (1 child)
The real story of political sociopathy is this: Once you have it in your head that the right way to deal with people who disagree with you is to kill them, the main limitation on the size of the ensuing massacre is technology and the cost. Every political philosophy that exists on the planet has gotten to that point at some time in its history, excepting those political philosophies that have never been implemented on enough of a scale to find out whether it would do this.
That's why I can't take seriously any ideas along the lines of "My political philosophy is pure and good and would never murder anybody, whereas other political philosophies are evil and kill innocent people."
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 27 2018, @12:21AM
Herbert Marcuse [rudd-o.com] and Saul Alinski [americanthinker.com] were sociopaths yet they murdered nobody (that we know of). This is the real socio-political problem.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday March 26 2018, @05:11AM
Sometimes I think the only reason we have these political topics here on the SoylentNews is so that Phoenix666 can embarrass us all with reasonableness and level-headed argument. Well done yet again, Phoenix!!