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.
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