Crimadella wrote:
People need to come together, not divide themselves. Also, one black guy spoke out with a powerful message, he said, when I look at this majority white crowd, I don't see a room full of white people, I see a room full of individuals. So the guy on stage replies with just more racist thoughts, "you may not think you are seen as a black man but that is what you are seen as", all that is is racial paranoia, the root of racism. These people seem rather ridiculous to me, she claimed they needed to ban hate speech while it was pointed out that they already do that on campus, you can't get up on a college platform and start preaching about white supremacy(if they do in any schools I can understand banning that), but what they are doing is trying to silence speech they do not agree with and attempt to false label particular ideas or even facts that they disagree with as racist. Anyway, it was a pretty good talk.
I get the impression that it's destructively gainful to those who play it and that's part of why it's a game that will never go away, and likely no bad-faith games are likely to go away anytime soon, possibly ever at all.
RushKing wrote:
Although I don't necessarily agree with Jonathan Sacks on platforming, he brought a refreshing take to this discussion.
A lot of the people who advocate for "free speech" in college campuses, tend to describe free speech as a "marketplace of ideas".
The problem with this is that markets are competitive, and competition creates distortions. We end up with hordes of bad faith actors; people who aren't interested in finding and expressing the truth, but who are only interested in wining debates. Sacks, unlike most people in his camp, appears to put weight on this issue.
Yeah, it's the whole 'life's a pissing match and anyone who wants to be more convivial can be our human foot stools'. Different people have different ways that they want to play that game. I think the best way to spot and identify it is when people want to turn the world into a vastly subjective thing and either keep any traceable lines of logic in an argument hidden to avoid being vulnerable to scrutiny or simply scrap logic altogether to pull random pieces out of the air and use them at will. Spotting the opposite is pretty easy as well, ie. it's the person or people who are showing interest in broader human welfare and want to ask questions that lead to maximizing the good stuff, like liberty and ease of life, to as many people as possible.
RushKing wrote:
We don't live in a socialist utopia. Debate in our society is a spectacle where it's the loudest, most charismatic people who win. Human beings in competition don't value reason, rationality -its all about validation and triumph.
The only thing that has me not thinking quite that dark about the whole thing, albeit I see plenty of what you just mentioned, is that I used to think - from how my friends are, how most people seem, that no one wanted to listen to a deep sane discussion between two eloquent thinkers who have positive goals and slightly disagree but they're all over the loud, raucous, brash, and crass because it's sexy and entertaining. Then, somehow, people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, Bret and Eric Weinstein, Michael Shermer, etc. started filling auditoriums, became intellectual celebrities, it was all those things I thought only poor outcasts (the only people who supposedly should care about big issues) were supposed to pay any mind to and I'm not sure if that just says there's millions of geeks, losers, and outcasts who hold up a big enough corner of society to make a notable economy for good ideas or whether it's just the loudest, brashest, and shallowest in culture who demand to set the metronome of life for everyone else and be the arbiters of what's okay, what's not okay, what's cool, and what's deemed socially inferior.
RushKing wrote:
Because of this, truth doesn't always win in "the marketplace of ideas". We end up gambling with the lives of marginalized and oppressed groups. Germany was a free speech liberal democracy before the Nazis took power.
Here's the only thing I'd honestly disagree with you on. The Treaty of Versailles was really, really bad. We took what were already a very proud people, uniting as a country under the Kaiser, excited about their future, and beat everything out of them, then put them through a few decades of austerity which we also tied into the Great Depression, the lure of Communist ideology in Europe, it was *so many* really corrosive ingredients coming together with a lot of hopelessness that pretty much set Germany on the path to either go communist or go fascist at that point and, like Italy and Spain, the later happened albeit it happened under the leadership of such a flamboyant mad-man that people barely even think of Moussolini, Franco, Pinnochet, etc. when the word 'fascism' gets used - ie. their minds quickly go to Hitler and the weaponized swaztika.
The really interesting thing about Germany's slippage into Nazi control is that there's a lot that's reminiscent of Russia's capitulation to the Bolsheviks. Listening to Eric Metaxas's Bonhoeffer was a lot like listening to Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago in that it clarified just how many people will bow to any flag of power and as long as you can slowly turn up. The adage 'they came for x and I said nothing' describes the process pretty well.This is part of why every idea needs thorough, and constant, criticism. The moment people can silence dissent it seems then that a struggle for power starts forming among increasingly vile and autocratic groups ultimately leading to one form of military dictatorship or another.
That said I don't necessarily know if anything can stop that movement, just that I do think a lot of free speech from a wide variety of opinions is about the best antidote we can muster. There's also the issue of 'sunlight is the best disinfectant', ie. what you aren't familiar with is much easier to project one's hopes and fears on and in the scariest moments of that dynamic people end up making a 'secular hero' of the sort that Napoleon and Hitler were.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.
03 Apr 2019, 6:07 pm
