41–50 of 421 posts
Sometime around 2014-2016, it seems like the progressive left collectively realized that they were losing certain battles in the information war on the Internet, and opted to pursue censorship, deplatforming, and outright violence (e.g., "punch nazis") instead. That's not to say that they were losing every battle, but the fact that they were losing some battles--that some portions of their narrative were just too eas…
It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different. The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to…
> In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. And this is a good thing. The commanding heights of culture should be as contestable as possible; this is what makes for an open society.
> The conspiracy theories, the lies, the distortions, the overwhelming amount of information, the anger encoded in it — these all serve to create chaos and confusion and make people, even nonpartisans, exhausted, skeptical and cynical about politics. The spewing of falsehoods isn’t meant to win any battle of ideas. Its goal is to prevent the actual battle from being fought, by causing us to simply give up.
If that’s what awaits the future “heights of culture,” if that’s how you think people will ultimately get influence in the future, I don’t think there will be much of a culture left to have lofty opinions about freedom or speech.
> In the 2010 Citizens United decision, the court’s conservative majority opened the door to allowing corporations (and unions) to spend unlimited amounts on political advocacy, as long as they donated to interest groups and political-action committees rather than to campaigns. Unsurprising to see Emily Bazelon deeply distort Citizens United. That case wasn’t about “unlimited money.” The entity that was prosecuted wa…
What was the outcome of Citizens United?
This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced. IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective. Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the…
This congregates power into the already powerful As opposed to throwing people in prison for expressing incorrect views? Who do you think will be in charge of that process? Hint: not the powerless.
This is a pretty good read and fairly nuanced. IMHO free speech needs accountability and massive increases in education resources to be effective. Without accountability, the loudest voices can set what is true to many. This congregates power into the already powerful, until new means of information dissemination are created to allow new voices. However those too will need the same accountability or will fall to the…
This is why China is the most advanced country in the world. They have entire camps set up for immersive education for people who talk about religious nonsense! How progressive!
It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different. The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to…
> In practice, it is a tool for those who don't occupy the commanding heights of a culture to push back against those who do. And this is a good thing. The commanding heights of culture should be as contestable as possible; this is what makes for an open society.
To belabor the point, what's ironic is that in the 1990s it was the right, 'the religious right', that wanted to censor free speech -- such as the speech of rap artists. Now it is the left that attacks free speech and wants to censor rap artists.
Previously it was the church that wanted to censor free speech. Now it is progressives, who 'f------ love science', who want to censor uncomfortable scientific results.
Somehow the teams, and costumes, changed.
Sometime around 2014-2016, it seems like the progressive left collectively realized that they were losing certain battles in the information war on the Internet, and opted to pursue censorship, deplatforming, and outright violence (e.g., "punch nazis") instead. That's not to say that they were losing every battle, but the fact that they were losing some battles--that some portions of their narrative were just too eas…
The downvotes ironically bolster my point.
Ideas here are ignored, down voted, flagged, shadow banned if they question the left ideology.
It's ironic that Emily Bazelon, the author of this essay, is the granddaughter of the late influential federal judge David Bazelon. Judge Bazelon was a well-known progressive and a well-known free speech proponent. Although his granddaughter shares his broadly progressive worldview, her position on this issue is different. The evolution from David to Emily reflects that of the US left as a whole. Most people like to…
> Looking back at the rise of fascism and the Holocaust in her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt focused on the use of propaganda to “make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism.”
The author uses this quote to stand for "in other words, good ideas do not necessarily triumph in the marketplace of ideas". But that's not at all what Arendt was saying. She believed that, in the end, the truth will come out:
> Under normal circumstances the liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle. This is one of the lessons that could be learned from the totalitarian experiments and the totalitarian rulers' frightening confidence in the power of lying--in their ability, for instance, to rewrite history again and again to adapt the past to the "political line" of the present moment or to eliminate data that did not fit their ideology. Thus, in a socialist economy, they would deny that unemployment existed, the unemployed person simply becoming a non-person
> The result of such experiments when undertaken by those in possession of the means of violence are terrible enough, but lasting deception is not among them.
The power required to eradicate the truth, she writes, "would amount to omnipotence". Hitler, Stalin, and other totalitarian leaders undermined their own governments in their attempt to destroy the truth and rule through terror. For Arendt, all political power flows from consensus. She believed, contrary to Mao's quip about "political power growing from the barrel of a gun," that violence and coercion cannot create political power but can only undermine it.
That sounds optimistic to me. By encouraging the citizenry to simultaneously believe everything and nothing, these regimes undermined themselves.
The article sees strong defense of free speech as naivete:
> It’s a fundamentally optimistic vision: Good ideas win. The better argument will prove persuasive.
I don't agree with this interpretation of modern liberalism. The modern liberal position on free speech is not optimistic, it's resigned. The argument is not "everything that rises must converge" but, rather, we are stupid, limited beings, so what right have we to interfere with other stupid, limited beings? This position amounts to a recognition of the limitations of human rationality, not a celebration of it.
It has been personally sad to me to witness the left turning on free speech. When I was a kid, it was the lefties who defended free speech. It was Chomsky who said "with regard to freedom of speech there are basically two positions: you defend it vigorously for views you hate, or you reject it and prefer Stalinist/fascist standards". Now that I'm a little older, I realize that, mostly, people just defend free speech when they stand to benefit from it (i.e. when they aren't in the position to censor).
These days the left has a lot of cultural power and many on the left are bowing to the temptation to use that power to censor the opposition.