I appreciate your points, Jacob, but I don't see Duncan and the 5th Circuit as the issue here. If Duncan were the issue, then the question would become: What is the borderline between speakers who should be shouted down and speakers who should not be? An unanswerable and therefore unproductive question. The actual question is, How should…
I appreciate your points, Jacob, but I don't see Duncan and the 5th Circuit as the issue here. If Duncan were the issue, then the question would become: What is the borderline between speakers who should be shouted down and speakers who should not be? An unanswerable and therefore unproductive question.
The actual question is, How should people behave when a speaker is unacceptable to them? Since I was a student in the mid-'60s, people on the Left (which would include me, then and now) have often answered that question with, "Shout them down!" What has that gotten them? The illusion of righteousness and nothing more.
It's now a scripted routine. Rightwing student groups invite a controversial rightwing speaker in order to create a display of leftwing illiberalism. Right on schedule, leftwing students show up and perform the standard script that is now inevitably recorded and sent out on media showing how it is the Left and not the Right that persecutes its opponents and denies them free speech. (This time we got the bonus of a scripted propaganda performance.) The rightwing students accomplish their goal and those on the left simply can't grasp the concept. Duncan was absolutely right: That was a set-up. But he was mistaken about who was being set up. It wasn't he, as should be obvious now.
As a college student in the '60s, the issues for me were free speech and civility. I was pained by seeing people I agreed with behave in a way I thought was ethically wrong and counterproductive. Many decades later the issue for me is the stupidity: How can these supposedly smart people let themselves be used as props over and over and over? What addictive reward leads them to walk into the same trap every time? It's endless performative self-righteousness, without even a hint of an idea that actually making the world better has to be harder than shouting slogans and making speeches that true believers will applaud.
Basically, as I see it, the biggest change since the '60s is that the Left stopped reading Saul Alinsky and the Right started to, so now, instead of just making their own errors, law students on the Left can be manipulated effortlessly by the students of the Stanford Federalist Society. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the judge appears to have been less capable than the SFS students in this regard.)
All of my life, progressives have had to endure people on the right calling us "bleeding hearts" and portraying us as pusillanimous cowards whose goal is to nanny Americans, thus creating a society of soft, weak, individuals unable to withstand life's normal trials and tribulations, and who would ultimately graciously submit to an overweening centralized power if it made them feel safe. Just because we sought to use government power to care for the less fortunate.
Which is why this kind of behavior by young progressives infuriates me. When we demonstrate that we *can't even listen to someone talk* without experiencing "harm", "hurt", "pain", "trauma" (my favorite), and ultimately feeling "unsafe", we are basically copping to that time-honored right-wing caricature.
The proper term for what these students are experiencing is "offense", and it is an insult to people's intelligence to characterize it as anything worse. And if someone can't deal with offense without likening it to a debilitating, life altering psychological experience, that person is not ready to be an adult in a free society. They'd be a better fit for a religious cult.
The people who are teaching high school and college students that such egregious, performative melodrama is the best way to steward a political movement are failing our kids. And I think it's evidence that too many grown adults are unable to let go of the callow self image of a young crusader fighting the good fight against the stodgy, staid older generations. And thus leading them to want to be accepted by the young as peers, lest they experience the periodic discomfort (and reminder of their age) that comes with the duty of acting as their authority figures.
I agree, he shouldn't have been shouted down and I agree wholeheartedly that shouting down speakers, especially those brought in specifically to create "illiberal woke leftist" headlines is counterproductive (I specifically said I wasn't going to address the students' heckling in my comment - to be clear, I think it was dumb and counterproductive).
I may have gotten myself a bit wrapped around the axle with my specific animus towards the 5th circuit, but the core point is more of a meta one. Does every single person invited onto campus by any organization (or in this specific case, a right-wing organization) deserve our automatic respect? Specifically, how should we approach and frame reporting on these incidents?
I take issue with straightforwardly framing this as an "illiberal woke student" situation. When things like this happen, do we unilaterally condemn the students while noting the fact that the invited speaker is a troll/demagogue barely an afterthought?
To be a bit more clear, I feel like when we report this and approach this in a fashion that centers the troll speaker as inherently legitimate and prop up the perspective that the left-wing students are uniquely wrong in this situation, we ignore a ton of the context. Context which frames the situation as a whole - what's a better framing, "Right-wing troll unfairly heckled (though he didn't act great himself!)" or "Everyone acted badly here. Students shouldn't have heckled, but right-wing troll was there to troll and didn't establish his/her demanded deference?"
Does the definition of a troll include those who take their substack blogging practice out on us? 25/44 of the instances of the word troll on this page are from wrapping your meta around your animus axle.
He was invited to speak by a presumably approved student group of the University. They gave him a space, as they would presumably have done for any other approved student group. I don't think it requires respect for the speaker to not trample all over another group's University provided rights (to invite people and hear them speak in University facilities).
If you don't like the speaker, protest outside. If you don't like the group for their decisions, protest them. If you don't like the University for its decisions, protest them.
Ultimately I don't think the power to shut down speech should rest with any handful of people who can shout loud and be disruptive. That power will quickly be abused (at least it would if the yellers weren't busy scoring own goals in the court of public opinion).
People want results right now, and the yellers tell themselves they got what they wanted, by stopping the speech, but hearts and minds take longer. I am reminded of the Edmund Pettus bridge which I visited a few years ago. Now it isn't the same in all kinds of ways, but those who wanted to stop the other side succeeded that day. They did not succeed in the long run.
"Free speech" is utterly beside the point here, in my view, Max. The notion of "free speech" that we consider sacrosanct concerns government constraints on it, and that's not in play here. No private institution is bound by that constraint. Nor would extra-constitutional invocations of "free speech" in the context of protest have any meaning whatever if they referred to the right of protesters to suppress speech by shouting over it, rather than to the right of suppressed speech to be heard.
As for what actually happened, this string discusses the Charlie Sykes's report: "For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him . . ."
Don’t be too hard on them TC. It’s true of the Left worldwide. I think it’s because of our worldview that puts us on the Left. We’re just not ruthless enough. And I definitely include myself in that.
I appreciate your points, Jacob, but I don't see Duncan and the 5th Circuit as the issue here. If Duncan were the issue, then the question would become: What is the borderline between speakers who should be shouted down and speakers who should not be? An unanswerable and therefore unproductive question.
The actual question is, How should people behave when a speaker is unacceptable to them? Since I was a student in the mid-'60s, people on the Left (which would include me, then and now) have often answered that question with, "Shout them down!" What has that gotten them? The illusion of righteousness and nothing more.
It's now a scripted routine. Rightwing student groups invite a controversial rightwing speaker in order to create a display of leftwing illiberalism. Right on schedule, leftwing students show up and perform the standard script that is now inevitably recorded and sent out on media showing how it is the Left and not the Right that persecutes its opponents and denies them free speech. (This time we got the bonus of a scripted propaganda performance.) The rightwing students accomplish their goal and those on the left simply can't grasp the concept. Duncan was absolutely right: That was a set-up. But he was mistaken about who was being set up. It wasn't he, as should be obvious now.
As a college student in the '60s, the issues for me were free speech and civility. I was pained by seeing people I agreed with behave in a way I thought was ethically wrong and counterproductive. Many decades later the issue for me is the stupidity: How can these supposedly smart people let themselves be used as props over and over and over? What addictive reward leads them to walk into the same trap every time? It's endless performative self-righteousness, without even a hint of an idea that actually making the world better has to be harder than shouting slogans and making speeches that true believers will applaud.
Basically, as I see it, the biggest change since the '60s is that the Left stopped reading Saul Alinsky and the Right started to, so now, instead of just making their own errors, law students on the Left can be manipulated effortlessly by the students of the Stanford Federalist Society. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, the judge appears to have been less capable than the SFS students in this regard.)
All of my life, progressives have had to endure people on the right calling us "bleeding hearts" and portraying us as pusillanimous cowards whose goal is to nanny Americans, thus creating a society of soft, weak, individuals unable to withstand life's normal trials and tribulations, and who would ultimately graciously submit to an overweening centralized power if it made them feel safe. Just because we sought to use government power to care for the less fortunate.
Which is why this kind of behavior by young progressives infuriates me. When we demonstrate that we *can't even listen to someone talk* without experiencing "harm", "hurt", "pain", "trauma" (my favorite), and ultimately feeling "unsafe", we are basically copping to that time-honored right-wing caricature.
The proper term for what these students are experiencing is "offense", and it is an insult to people's intelligence to characterize it as anything worse. And if someone can't deal with offense without likening it to a debilitating, life altering psychological experience, that person is not ready to be an adult in a free society. They'd be a better fit for a religious cult.
The people who are teaching high school and college students that such egregious, performative melodrama is the best way to steward a political movement are failing our kids. And I think it's evidence that too many grown adults are unable to let go of the callow self image of a young crusader fighting the good fight against the stodgy, staid older generations. And thus leading them to want to be accepted by the young as peers, lest they experience the periodic discomfort (and reminder of their age) that comes with the duty of acting as their authority figures.
I agree, he shouldn't have been shouted down and I agree wholeheartedly that shouting down speakers, especially those brought in specifically to create "illiberal woke leftist" headlines is counterproductive (I specifically said I wasn't going to address the students' heckling in my comment - to be clear, I think it was dumb and counterproductive).
I may have gotten myself a bit wrapped around the axle with my specific animus towards the 5th circuit, but the core point is more of a meta one. Does every single person invited onto campus by any organization (or in this specific case, a right-wing organization) deserve our automatic respect? Specifically, how should we approach and frame reporting on these incidents?
I take issue with straightforwardly framing this as an "illiberal woke student" situation. When things like this happen, do we unilaterally condemn the students while noting the fact that the invited speaker is a troll/demagogue barely an afterthought?
To be a bit more clear, I feel like when we report this and approach this in a fashion that centers the troll speaker as inherently legitimate and prop up the perspective that the left-wing students are uniquely wrong in this situation, we ignore a ton of the context. Context which frames the situation as a whole - what's a better framing, "Right-wing troll unfairly heckled (though he didn't act great himself!)" or "Everyone acted badly here. Students shouldn't have heckled, but right-wing troll was there to troll and didn't establish his/her demanded deference?"
Does the definition of a troll include those who take their substack blogging practice out on us? 25/44 of the instances of the word troll on this page are from wrapping your meta around your animus axle.
He was invited to speak by a presumably approved student group of the University. They gave him a space, as they would presumably have done for any other approved student group. I don't think it requires respect for the speaker to not trample all over another group's University provided rights (to invite people and hear them speak in University facilities).
If you don't like the speaker, protest outside. If you don't like the group for their decisions, protest them. If you don't like the University for its decisions, protest them.
Ultimately I don't think the power to shut down speech should rest with any handful of people who can shout loud and be disruptive. That power will quickly be abused (at least it would if the yellers weren't busy scoring own goals in the court of public opinion).
People want results right now, and the yellers tell themselves they got what they wanted, by stopping the speech, but hearts and minds take longer. I am reminded of the Edmund Pettus bridge which I visited a few years ago. Now it isn't the same in all kinds of ways, but those who wanted to stop the other side succeeded that day. They did not succeed in the long run.
"Free speech" is utterly beside the point here, in my view, Max. The notion of "free speech" that we consider sacrosanct concerns government constraints on it, and that's not in play here. No private institution is bound by that constraint. Nor would extra-constitutional invocations of "free speech" in the context of protest have any meaning whatever if they referred to the right of protesters to suppress speech by shouting over it, rather than to the right of suppressed speech to be heard.
As for what actually happened, this string discusses the Charlie Sykes's report: "For about ten minutes, the judge tried to give his planned remarks, but the protestors simply yelled over him . . ."
Thanks. You have a good evening too!
Don’t be too hard on them TC. It’s true of the Left worldwide. I think it’s because of our worldview that puts us on the Left. We’re just not ruthless enough. And I definitely include myself in that.