Comment by FloorEgg
5 days ago
I am not arguing that ideas should be free from criticism. Not at all. Not sure how you got that idea.
I'm arguing that we shouldn't censor bad ideas, or exclude them entirely from the relevant discussions. And more to the point, when we educate the next generation we should be doing so in a holistic way so that they understand why and when bad ideas are bad, and why those ideas were ever popular in the first place.
I'm arguing against ideological censorship, not justified and well constructed criticism.
Let's start from the beginning. There is, by and large, no such thing as ideological censorship in american university settings. Ideas are free to be advanced and argued with.
Certain ideas have been so heavily criticized that people have stopped bringing them up. Criticizing a speaker at a college is not censorship, it's criticism and argument. Having a protest outside a speaker's event isn't censorship either, it's free speech.
I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here since perhaps you genuinely don't know that the people you're aligning your argument with are asking for their own ideas to be free from criticism.
This might be a good starting point: https://popehat.substack.com/p/our-fundamental-right-to-sham...
> This is sheer nonsense from the jump. Americans don’t have, and have never had, any right to be free of shaming or shunning. The First Amendment protects our right to speak free of government interference. It does not protect us from other people saying mean things in response to our speech. The very notion is completely incoherent. Someone else shaming me is their free speech, and someone else shunning me is their free association, both protected by the First Amendment.
When you bring up an abhorrent idea and I call you an idiot and ask you to leave, I'm not censoring you. If I refuse to invite you over next week, I'm still not censoring you. Nobody owes you a platform and demanding one is one of the more pernicious forms of free-speech-rights violations there are.
Thank you for the benefit of the doubt. I am not attempting to align with anyone, only explore what's true. I certainly don't condone any attempt to shield ideas from criticism, or dismantling the right to free association. It doesn't surprise me that some people want that, but frankly I have seen that exact behavior on both sides of the political spectrum in the US. It looks to me like America is fragmenting into two cults with nothing but least respectful interpretations of each other. Both sides are trying to protect certain ideas from criticism and also censor aspects of the other. It's an ideological culture war.
When I criticize the actions of one of the cults, it doesn't automatically put me in the other cult.
I am not American, therefore I am not republican. I don't even consider myself politically right. I align with some right-leaning values, while aligning with more left-leaning ones.
I am here discussing these things in an effort to keep tabs on what's going on, but also because I think attempting to reconcile the differences between the two sides is a positive action. I want America to work this out without a full blown kinetic civil war. I have virtually no control over this outcome, so I will take small barely significant actions to try and nudge towards a more favorable outcome. My engagement here is an attempt to act as one tiny piece of a bridge, even if it means I am going to get trampled. It's a sacrifice, potentially in vein, and maybe even unwise, but at this point I don't know what else to do to help, and I am also afraid of making it worse.
Maybe I should just do nothing?