magicalkittycat
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User ID: 3762
magicalkittycat
13hr ago
You avoided the question, since you did not identify what free speech right is now being targeted by the government by the government not providing monetary grants.
No you asked "Which free speech rights do you believe are being targeted by the government now?"
I gave you a link to a FIRE article going over one of them. You don't get to change your question now because you don't like the answer.
magicalkittycat
13hr ago
I found Nobel-prize-winning economist Paul Krugman's post-election predictions that Trump was absolutely going to trash the market and destroy the American economy.
Krugman literally days after was like yeah ok that's too alarmist, protectionism and short term thinking on the climate are going to be economic issues in the long run but it's not like they explode everything right away https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/trump-slump-coming.html
Which yeah, protectionism is pretty terrible in the long run. We had a whole bout about it in the 1700s with free traders like Adam Smith and Hume tearing into the idea of mercantilist style trade theory. Capitalism exists with the concept that markets and trade are good.
People being hyperbolic doesn't mean real issues don't exist, it just means people are hyperbolic. I've heard plenty of hyperbolic conservatives talk about how Covid vaccines was going to be used to insert nanochips into people, heck I overheard a neighbor once say that everyone who was vaccinated will die within a year. That didn't happen.
magicalkittycat
13hr ago
I've lost count of how many times I asked you how what Trump did violates any of the principles you supposedly hold, and how many times you ignored the question.
Ok so what do you feel about a member of the Trump admin saying on video that he desires to ban pornography across the entire nation?
Sure. So back then I was pro-Rowling, and helped the left as much as I could. Then the left went full-censor, and now Trump is in power and cutting their funding for practices that are illegal in the left's own framework. How am I the one that started it, and not them?
So you carve out that you aren't a hive-mind in conservative or leftist groups and aren't responsible for the censorious behavior of others in them, but don't carve out the same thing for "them"? There are plenty of examples of powerful institutional censorship from conservatives both now and in the past, you can go check on FIRE or CATO or Reason for instances of now and pick up a history book on religion vs science for an incredibly easy view of the past censorship efforts.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
That's a funny example and something I knew from growing up as a fan of the books, not something I was sent. I live in a red rural area and remember stories of parents having freakouts about Harry Potter and Pokemon and stuff from some of the other children. One of my friends i would let play Pokemon on my Gameboy since he couldn't at home.
But yes I realize that's long ago, so I gave you a current example of something happening right now as we speak by a high level Trump executive.
But also if we're going about who started it, wouldn't the older examples be better? I don't think it matters who started it, but that seems like the proper thing to be focusing in on if it does matter.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Conservatives lost on every one of those three though, which shows they did not have any power.
They didn't actually, in fact part of the private school voucher initiative is to get kids into funded religious schools, schools that use programs like A.C.E, like my Southern Baptist friend had when she was growing up.
I live in a red rural area, I can assure you many of them don't see the fight as lost yet.
And environmental science? Odd then that the leader of the country doesn't believe in climate change and has targeted lots of funding cuts to climate science, including the termination of satellite data and missions regarding carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
If they lost, someone forgot to tell the president of the United States that.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
You can not support something existing but also believe that if it does exist it should at least be done in a fair and freedom supporting manner.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
"My own group"? LOL. When this all started I was an atheist libertarian
You don't think there's religious people who don't believe in evolution that are on your side of the left-wing/right-wing divide?
I agree with your general proposition that political alliances can not be split so easily to begin with and to blame you for the beliefs and actions of the religious evolution denier would be silly, but I also believe that of the many groups and factions that compose "the left".
You've been carefully ignoring all the examples of this that have been presented, instead demanding we ignore all that and continue to give them the maximum benefit of the principles they do not hold and did not grant to us.
Likewise I have been presented with tons of examples from leftists about conservative institutions and powerful elites censoring and oppressing people. Heck some examples are ironic, like a school that tried to ban Harry Potter due to depictions of witchcraft back in the 90s. That's of course a funny example, but there's plenty that aren't so funny.
The FCC's rules against "indecency" prohibiting even swearing. The radio stations that banned the Dixie chicks for opposing the Iraq war. Even now the director of the United States Office of Management and Budget has expressly said he wants to ban pornography through back door methods.
"We came up with an idea on pornography, to make it so that porn companies bear the liability for underage use, as opposed to the person who visits the website. We've got a number of states that are passing this, and the porn company then says 'you know what, I'm not doing business in state', which, of course, is entirely what we want," he continues. "We would have a national ban on pornography if we could."
So I have evidence from both sides, strong evidence of both sides. Both of them yelling "we didn't start the fire" as they both throw Molotovs.
Good news, you can know you didn't start the fire if you don't throw molotovs and side with principled free speech organizations like FIRE.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
On the other hand, one way to assess one's understanding of reality is to make predictions about what one thinks is likely to happen next. I think I've done tolerably well at that, and so my confidence in my model has increased over the years. On this topic in particular, I think I have a great deal of reasonably solid evidence at hand to support the conclusions I'm drawing. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm entirely deluded. But I've made a considerable effort over a considerable period of time to get as good a picture as possible, and I don't think either is the case.
That's a great way to go about it, but it still has an issue. I'll call it the "9/11 truther effect" because I see it in conspiracy theories a lot. People will have some sort of low evidence idea in their head that is disagreed with because of a personal bias or issue of theirs, and then update later with the claim of "Ahah, I was right all along. This proves 9/11 was manufactured!" because of course, the standards and biased thinking that led them to believing 9/11 was fake to begin with also lead them to judge they are proven correct later.
I'll give you the same thought experiment I came up for with someone else.
With your knowledge as a rational actor aware that this self perception bias is both extremely common to the point of being basically universal and it's hard to see one's own bias, what would you place the odds of the neutral alien reality knowing arbiter choosing your side being correct when they check reality?
Ok, how about if we replaced you and your side with a third party discussion, with say a flame war between PlayStation and Xbox gamers or a flame war between Twilight fans. What is the odds the alien will say the Edward stans have the underdog bias vs the Jacob stans having the underdog bias?
I'd say equal, even if I'm one of the participants. Maybe my side started the shitslinging all along and I didn't know.
But good news, the answer doesn't even matter anyway if you choose the option to have principles! If you stick up for freedom no matter when and who, the alien won't rule against you no matter what. You can't be the one who started the shitslinging if you aren't slinging shit. Join the side of keeping your principles and you'll always be a winner in this alien court.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Ok, now imagine a leftist just said the exact same thing to me (or how about instead of me, it's an alien arbitrator, a completely neutral third party so you don't even have to imagine you're dealing with someone possibly biased.) about the right. That obviously reality is the right struck first and how absurd it is I suggest they could possibly exhibit an underdog bias.
Certainly you can see in this scenario how to the alien arbitrator, you might not look any different than the leftists claiming the same thing. Maybe they go and look at the world and say "Ok, right wing you were correct and the left started everything". But maybe they look and say the right started it all and the leftist is correct.
With your knowledge as a rational actor aware that this bias is both extremely common to the point of being basically universal and it's hard to see one's own bias, what would you place the odds of the alien choosing your side being?
Ok, how about if we replaced "left and right" with say a flame war between PlayStation and Xbox gamers or a flame war between Twilight fans. What is the odds the alien will say the Edward stans have the underdog bias vs the Jacob stans having the underdog bias?
Good news, the answer doesn't even matter anyway if you choose the option to have principles! If you stick up for freedom no matter when and who, the alien won't rule against you no matter what. You can't be the one who started the shitslinging if you aren't slinging shit. Join the side of keeping your principles and you'll always be a winner.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Interesting example given that conservatism is generally the one associated with denying evolution. And hey wait then, did you just show there was something about your own group you were accidently blind to?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Well, good luck with that. It won't work. If you're young as you say, you haven't yet experienced the crushing disappointment of realizing that the institutions that ostensibly protected these things have all been hollowed out and taken over by illiberal enemies. There's no going back. It sucks.
Why not? Trump won two elections, this second one being the popular vote win and a majority in Congress so it seems like the backlash against woke/Covid lockdowns/etc did bring about a change.
But as polling suggests, this seems to be fading away pretty quickly as he makes the same mistakes Biden did last admin. A lot of your supporters as a politician aren't dedicated idealogues, they're moderates or have their focus on other issues especially ones like prices and economic security.
I think that's part of why we see such swings between parties, they get into power and see an idealogical mandate that they don't truly have and then get pushed for it.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
The shifts on this one over time are fascinating and not addressed well enough that the ostensibly pro-evolution side shifted to anti-genetics
I agree it is really interesting. The left generally accepts evolution while somehow being opposed to the idea that different races could differ in other ways and I know plenty of religious folk on the right who accept genetics as an explainer for differences but can't seem to accept that divergences could add up over long periods of time for evolution. The "micro evolution not macro evolution" crowd. One of my college friends was a Southern Baptist who believed that.
I appreciate your optimism and will try to adopt some of it as my own, rather than my knee jerk pessimism. Thank you for taking on the challengers and not getting irate in this thread.
This is the internet, there are far far worse people I've dealt with.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
What are the consequences for a NYT or New Yorker journalist, or Yale speaker, or children's book author, that refers to white people as a cancer, as goblins, as a deal with the devil?
It depends!
One thing that most first amendment scholars and libertarians will agree on is that private action and government action are different things. While we should still embrace freedom of speech in private proceedings, there's a difference between say, your boss firing you for your speech criticizing they had an affair and a city council gaveling you down for alleging one of them had an affair.
For a private organization like NYT or New Yorker, the consequences for such speech is on the owners of the private organization. Do they want to fire the employee? They can if they want. Do readers want to boycott over the employee? Also fine.
I would expect the same if someone said blacks were animals or Jews were parasites or anything else. The owner of a private company has editorial control over their company.
What are the consequences for a 14 year old that sang along to the wrong rap song in a Snapchat video and is trying to get accepted to college 4 years later? I assume he got in somewhere, eventually. But not his top choices.
For a public university? There should be none. For private universities it's a more difficult question. https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/private-universities
I would hope they hold themselves to the standards of free speech as they often claim they do, and they should be bound to any promises they make regarding such freedoms but ultimately as FIRE puts it
It is important to note, however, that if a private college wishes to place a particular set of moral, philosophical, or religious teachings above a commitment to free expression, it has every right to do so.
And if you think about it, groups like private Christian/Jewish/Muslim religious universities wouldn't be able to exist if they were legally bound to the same standards as public ones since they would not be able to select off religion as they do.
Again I would hope that private institutions embrace free speech and free expression on their own accord, but they have every right not to.
I hear that kind of thing, but up until Trump's re-election they didn't bother providing any evidence. After, they just point at Trump, which I don't find convincing but it's better than a huffed "obviously!"
I can name two pretty big examples of the top of my head, the targeting of evolution and the targeting of climate science.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Interesting enough, I get the same exact sort of thing from censoring leftists! I was constantly hated on and accused of secret hypocrisy and conservatism for pushing back on things like cracking down on protestors in colleges for saying that people who do crime while protesting should be arrested while people who don't do crime shouldn't be.
It's interesting I've held the same belief and had people on both sides get angry at me.
lol, lmao even like, you can have that self-narrative for yourself, and that's cool but where were you in the past twenty years? you haven't done anything. Now the right has the stick of power and you retreat to principled liberalism?
20 years ago I was a young child, I'm not sure what I could have done. Too busy with stuff like Pokemon ya know, but I don't think I can blame kid me for not paying attention to the greater world much.
But if you're asking what I've done before about leftist censorship, it's the same thing I'm doing here. Encouraging my fellow Americans (assuming you are one) to embrace free speech and free expression even of ideas they don't like.
Censorship doesn't make dissent go away, it just makes it hide in the shadows. The leftist war on ideas didn't win, and if you have a right wing war on ideas you won't be winning in the long run either. The censors tried to silence heliocentrism, they tried to silence evolution, germ theory, genetics, atomic theory, etc, they lost. The books can burn yet ideas can always be reborn.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Falling back to "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" is not particularly convincing. Many of the people you have been arguing with have been observing or participating in (voluntarily or otherwise) the culture war for over a decade. And most of the evidence is there, and a good bit of it has been posted.
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it.
Because of course we wouldn't, all those other groups are blind to their bias and there doesn't seem to be any other exceptions. Why would we be so special?
That doesn't mean we aren't and can't be an exception, but "I don't see it" is a weak response. Of course not, none of the other groups see theirs.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Organizations like FIRE are a great resource to find ongoing attacks against free speech and free expression by government https://www.thefire.org/
For example the most recent one in the "cumulative theory of harassment" https://www.thefire.org/news/findings-against-harvard-are-blueprint-national-campus-speech-code and the censorship of legal anti-semitic speech.
Another problem with the cumulative theory of harassment is that it holds current speakers responsible for creating a “hostile environment” based on the previous statements and activities of people to whom they may be entirely unrelated. This means anyone can find themselves in the position of perpetrator of hostile environment harassment without himself or herself actually engaging in harassing behavior.
Consider, for example, the following account said to “highlight the hostile environment created for Jewish and Israeli students at Harvard,” according to HHS:
On May 12, 2024, a crudely drawn image of Interim President Garber was also displayed [during an encampment protest] depicting him as a devil with horns and a tail, recalling “medieval antisemitic tropes of Jews as Satan’s minions.
Like posting a political cartoon to Instagram, simply displaying such a picture simply cannot be deemed harassment by any rational measure, let alone be taken as serious enough to deny the person seeing it “equal access to an educational program or activity.” The Supreme Court’s decision in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education established the standard for peer harassment under Title IX, holding schools liable only when they are deliberately indifferent to harassment that is severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and even warns of “the amount of litigation that would be invited by entertaining claims of official indifference to a single instance of one-on-one peer harassment.”
Under the cumulative theory of harassment, that’s out the window. A school like Harvard must consider each individual student’s choice to display this picture as part of a pattern of behavior that consists of everything everyone else is doing on campus during some undefined period of time, whether or not the student knew anything about it.
As they conclude
Real discrimination deserves a real response. True threats, vandalism, and violence are not protected speech and schools should act when they occur. But they must do so with the precision the Constitution requires — punishing conduct, not ideas, and respecting the robust political debate that higher education exists to nurture.
Harvard’s case should be a warning. Unless we properly respect the line between speech and misconduct, Title VI risks becoming not a shield against injustice, but a sword for enforcing the orthodoxy favored by whatever political forces wield it, now or in the future.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
It's more showing that Conservatives can also destroy them and their ability to do science, similar to their progressive coworkers that force them to add the line of text in order to not be destroyed currently.
I think the history of religious conservatives waging war on evolution, environmental science, and the new embrace of anti vaccine beliefs has shown that already has it not?
And yet, all this seems to have done is just further hurt scientific research instead of counteracting any sort of left wing attacks.
This is true. Is not the proper response to look at the evidence available and draw one's own conclusions?
I would hope others in a rationalist community are aware of how our own biases can impact our perception. Maybe you haven't read things like the lens that sees it's flaws and other parts of the sequences before, I recommend it
When we examine the world and we see a common self-perception bias about one's self and their own groups, one that all those other groups are blind to for themselves it stands to reason we might also have that same bias even if we don't see it. How sure are you that you're uniquely immune?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
How certain are you that you're actually being attacked and it's not underdog bias?
I know and see plenty of leftists online who say similar things in the way you're saying now. That the powerful conservatives are attacking everyone and that their left wing censorious behavior is justified in defense. They're just as convinced as themselves as you are.
Knowing that people delude themselves into the very same style of bias perceptions you currently hold, knowing that there are studies and evidence suggesting that this happens on both sides of pretty much every topic, how certain are you that you're not just experiencing an underdog bias and failing to see the ways your own side might hold institutional powers unfairly? And how does any answer you give look differently than what a leftist under the bias would give?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Libertarians are non-entities though, and it would be an odd one if they complained about government grants being cut.
You can be against government grant funding as a concept and be against unconstitutional anti free speech idealogical selection in grant funds if it does exist.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Well if you no longer believe in freedom, ironically that's your free right to do so. American society is powerful enough to withstand anti-American values such as yours as we have been since the foundation of our country.
Far more powerful threats to freedom have tried to take down the constitutional rights, the freedom fighters who don't give up keep pushing it back up.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
Oh ok, are you gonna use force to start enforcing free speech rights being targeted by the government now?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
This really does seem to be the basic "it's ok when I do it, crazy when the enemy does it" statement. Not uncommon, but as a principled person who has fought against censorship from all directions I disagree with it.
See the issue otherwise is that editorial control is removed for business owners. Take that LGBT cake incident a while back. If business owners do not have editorial control under the first amendment, then the bakery would likely not have had legal protection over what speech they can and not produce for a client.
Edit: Or even worse, imagine you have an employee go on TV and start insulting your customers. Your customers stop buying from you, but you can't fire the employee. You are compelled to give him a job no matter how much he sabotages your company because to do so otherwise would be violating his free speech, despite the fact that it's your private company!
Yes, student groups at public universities are not the same as a private religious university.
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