Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
New York Times opinion column explains why shutting down conservative speakers on college campus is perfectly consistent with freedom of speech. The key is the kind of speech being shut down; i.e., speech that offends people. This is not a new idea, it’s a bad old idea dressed up in fancy new credentials.
You see, some speakers say things that are simply is wrong, like denying the Earth is flat. We know the Earth is flat, so we know the speaker is wrong. We’ve told Galileo so, repeatedly, but he keeps speaking the same falsehoods. Speaking a falsehood once is a mistake but repeating the falsehood after being corrected makes it an intentional falsehood: a lie. There is no right to speak a lie. Listening to lies and rebutting them repeatedly is tiresome and serves no public purpose; therefore, prohibiting the speaker from telling his lies is not a violation of his rights. Free speech, in this analysis, doesn’t mean you can say what you think; it means you can say what I want to hear.
Milton criticized the notion of intellectual “safe spaces” being more important than freedom of speech when he wrote: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and un-breathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.” Areopagitica was written in 1644 but the battle is still being waged today.
In Liberal minds, you already are free. You are free to criticize Trump in any way you choose. You can express your disgust with Conservatives in words or gestures. Your choice of interpretive dance to decry tax rate reductions will never be questioned. Liberals will defend to the death your right to agree with the Narrative in your own special way.
Reminds me of a joke Reagan told. The American says “We have free speech in America. I can stand in front of the White House and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan.’” The Russian replies: “That’s nothing. I can stand in front of the Kremlin and yell ‘To Hell with Ronald Reagan’ too.” He still could, on any college campus.
There was an episode of The Prisoner in which The Village held an art contest, no limits, express yourselves freely. Every painting and sculpture was an homage to the greatness of the dictator, Number 2. Nobody thought it the least odd. It was completely sensible that they’d take this opportunity to express their love of Number 2 in their own individual way.
I wonder if modern Liberals could understand the joke Reagan told and that episode of the Prisoner were meant to be ironic, but Milton was not. Is there that much learning remaining to be found on campus these days?
Joe Doakes
I was in a discussion about evolution with a group of liberals several years ago. They were all demanding absolute fealty to the theory of evolution. I asked why. They responded “it’s just weird that people are allowed to believe things that are such nonsense”.
I replied “What difference does it make if the person refinishing your countertops is a young earth creationist, as long as your countertops get done?” They phumphered something about it being important that people not completely “deny science”.
To which I responded “Science? You mean, like brain surgery? Something none of you “Science-based” people can do, but this utterly faith-based creationist has mastered? Are you going to lecture him about science, or are you going to get your brain fixed?”
The response had something to do with me being a misogynist or something.
Creationism violates all kind of laws of physics and chemistry. People like that have to be kept out of the management of public education. I think the highest creationist in government ever was John Ashcroft.
How about we keep the GOVERNMENT out of public education? Wouldn’t that be better?
As for your discussion with liberals, all you have to remember is that the truth is whatever they say it is, at the moment they say it. Never mind what they said 5 minutes before, or will say 5 minutes after. The truth does not even need to be consistent with other stated “truths.”
‘Member when Campus Speech Crusaders made a point of being respectful and attentive when then Iranian President Mahmoud Amadinnerjacket (sp?) spoke at Columbia University and 1. Denied* the Holocaust happened and 2. Stated that Iran had no homosexuals.
Campus Speech Crusaders won’t let people who: might praise capitalism; question climate change ‘theory’; or state – like Bill Nye did – that chromosomes determine the sex of a being speak or even debate on campus without going into Klan mode (Democrats gonna Democrat, amirite?) and shutting down the proceedings.
Funny thing is, creationism and evolution are not mutually exclusive. It is not as clear cut as flat and round. Yet, ScienceTM!
It’s interesting that the column starts with a confrontation that didn’t need to be. A Holocaust movie director is confronted by a survivor who points out, perhaps rather bitterly, that he didn’t fully encompass the experiences of survivors.
The director responded that what he had was an anecdote, but not an argument, but it strikes me that the better response would be “absolutely, I couldn’t cover the experiences of survivors well enough–I had about ten hours to cover the atrocities of twelve years involving tens of millions of people, six million of whom could not be interviewed. Talk to me after this, and I’ll point you to someone who will help you record it for the future.”
You can’t undo the public ***funding*** of K – 12. You ***can*** atomize the rest of it, and they should.
Regarding creation violating physical laws, of course; the very hypothesis is of an omnipotent Creator speaking things into existence. That’s the whole point. The physical system does not seem consistent with itself at the extrema, therefore we assume an outside influence. No?
But to build off something we’ve been discussing here and elsewhere, it’s a great point for true liberal education–not the kind that gives one a smattering of larnin’ about everything and indepth knowledge of nothing, but rather the ability to apply principles of logic, mathematics, and rhetoric to any situation.
Not too much true liberal arts being done in this country, sad to say, these days.
Regarding creation violating physical laws, of course; the very hypothesis is of an omnipotent Creator speaking things into existence.
It could be argued “speaking things into existence” is metaphorical and not literal. As such, the hypothesis itself is not formulated correctly. Add to this ambiguity of physical laws as we know them today. Every day we discover something new, and none of it gets us closer to an answer. So how can something we cannot fully comprehend violate something that is not written in stone?