[Peace-discuss] Free speech

[C G Estabrook]

I have a great deal of respect for David Prochaska, who’s written well on a number of political topics, many of them related to the university. 

But in this case, I think he’s wrong, and Jim Dey (if it is he) is right.

“If you don’t believe in free speech for people you despise, you don’t believe in it at all.”  [Noam Chomsky]

Some subsidiary points:

1.) I don’t have too much sympathy for universities (especially, given how they in fact spend their money) that have to bear the cost of doing what they're meant to do - provide space for discussion; even "if this cost to schools is part of the alt-right plan to attack and criticize public universities and liberal education across the board."

2) “Hate speech” is a specious category, designed to evade the canons of free speech.

3) Free speech can’t be abridged because a speaker has an evil motive (e.g., " to throw a verbal firebomb in the public square”).

These matters were supposed to have been decided in the Enlightenment: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."  



> On Oct 13, 2017, at 6:20 PM, David Green via Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:
> 
> This comment by David Prochaska, a retired history professor, appeared in response to an editorial the other day by the NG board, with the assumption that it was written by Jim Dey:
> 
> http://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2017-10-09/campus-conflict.html <http://www.news-gazette.com/opinion/editorials/2017-10-09/campus-conflict.html>
> 
> 
> "Dey is a free speech absolutist.
> 
> What that means is that if someone wants to speak, you let him or her. No matter the message. No matter the cost. You are either in favor, or not. It’s black and white.
> 
> In theory, it’s simple, straightforward. In practice, it’s difficult, fraught.
> 
> Absolutists like Dey talk about free speech as if it existed in a theoretical vacuum divorced from real life. They don’t discuss the way it actually works in practice. Because to do so undermines their purist argument.
> 
> But it’s not as simplistic and easy as true-believer absolutists like Dey make it out. It’s gray, it’s complicated, it’s fraught.
> 
> What if someone wants to come not with a message to impart but to provoke, to throw a verbal firebomb in the public square?
> 
> Alt-right provocateurs do that regularly.
> 
> What if a person on stage throws out the name, photo and personal contact information of a person with a minority sexual orientation?
> 
> Milo Younnapoulis does that regularly.
> 
> What if a small but well-organized, national group with deep pockets with a systematic agenda to flood campuses with alt-right provocateurs pays all their costs?
> 
> That’s what the Young America’s Foundation does regularly.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/us/college-conservative-speeches.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article
> 
> The Conservative Force Behind Speeches Roiling College Campuses By STEPHANIE SAULMAY 20, 2017
> 
> What if due to the provocative nature of these appearances universities are forced to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on police and logistics?
> 
> It cost Berkeley $600,000 for Ben Shapiro recently. They were looking at having to spend $1 million for Milo Yiannopoulos’s “Free Speech Week” at Berkeley.
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/us/milo-berkeley-free-speech.html <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/23/us/milo-berkeley-free-speech.html>
> Free Speech Week at Berkeley Is Canceled, but Milo Yiannopoulos Still Plans to Talk By JACEY FORTINSEPT. 23, 2017
> 
> What if this cost to schools is part of the alt-right plan to attack and criticize public universities and liberal education across the board?
> 
> http://www.starvingthebeast.net/ <http://www.starvingthebeast.net/>
> What if some people, some students – women, minorities -- feel more physically threatened than whites, especially males, in the presence of alt-right speech provocateurs?
> 
> Free speech absolutists and provocateurs like Dey respond to such concerns mostly by attacking and denigrating the messenger. Get a life. Suck it up. Quit being a wussy snowflake.
> 
> Easy for male, white-privileged Dey to say. He doesn’t know what it’s like. Free speech absolutists like Dey exhibit the very same lack of empathy as… Donald Trump.
> 
> What if this is not about “free speech” so much as hate speech? Dey and his ilk don’t want to talk about hate speech. They want the conversation to stick to “free speech” – as if it occurs in a political and moral vacuum.
> 
> The question is not that free speech guarantees speech to those who say things we don’t agree with. The question is whether a free speech platform should be extended to those who say and believe things completely inimical to the aims and values we hold as a society, even when we don’t live up to them.
> 
> It’s one thing to give free speech to someone who attacks individuals and individual beliefs. It’s something else entirely to give free speech to someone who attacks entire groups, or classes of people based simply on their ascribed identities.
> 
> “Speech that questions the very humanity of any person on campus has no place in a university. Let’s call it what it is: hate speech. There are people claiming that certain members of our community are not fully human, and we’re being asked to legitimize this as an admissible argument?
> 
> This is speech that attempts to limit the free speech rights of entire categories of people by virtue of their ascribed identities. It’s the ultimate irony: suppressing free speech under the banner of free speech.”
> 
> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/berkeley-free-speech.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=articlehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/berkeley-free-speech.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/berkeley-free-speech.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage%C2%AEion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=articlehttps://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/us/berkeley-free-speech.html?action=click&contentCollection=U.S.&module=RelatedCoverage%C2%AEion=EndOfArticle&pgtype=article>
> Would you, Jim Dey, let an avowed neo-Nazi speak?
> Would you, Jim Dey, let an avowed Holocaust denier speak?
> 
> Yes, and yes, because Jim Dey is a free speech absolutist.
> 
> Elsewhere in the western world, free speech exists, as both conservatives and liberals would agree, but there are also strictures on hate speech.
> 
> In Germany, Nazism and Holocaust denial is considered hate speech, and not allowed. France, too, has strictures on unlimited free speech.
> 
> But for free speech absolutist Jim Dey, hate speech is just fine."
> 
> 
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