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No. I would be perfectly happy to live in a world where some woke professors and some conservative professors sniped at each other at conferences and from offices across the quad, but otherwise left each other alone. This, in theory, is what tenure and the notion of academic freedom are.*
The Left was not content to live in this world, and across the generations took over the universities, installed their own apparatchiks in administrations, systematically discriminated against disfavored demographics, anathematized and drummed out opposing voices, instituted political litmus tests in hiring and publishing, and created a climate of fear on campuses where the vast majority of students parrot political lines they do not believe in order to avoid social and personal blowback.
If we cannot have an academy run according to our preferred rules - academic freedom, properly understood - then at a minimum we will live according to the woke's rules applied evenhandedly. Perhaps with enough rounds of tit-for-tat, we will be able to reach a new harmonious equilibrium.
So how do you feel about a situation like this? https://x.com/pjaicomo/status/1958124476001861948
Do you believe the left would be justified with removing Tom Macdonald for his "the devil is a democrat" speech because the right wing started with saying legal residents don't have protections?
I don't think so because I have principles about free speech that apply regardless of who started it, but if I understand you correctly revenge is a perfectly suitable argument for going against one's words.
Face tattoos, white guy dreds, mediocre taste in music... are there any examples that aren't quite so literal regarding the old maxim about defending scoundrels?
"Legal resident" is an extremely broad category. It's not clear to me under what policy Macdonald resides in the US, but if there are Congressionally-approved restrictions on the speech of certain categories, then yes, this applies under "your rules, applied fairly."
I'm not a free speech absolutist, but I care about fairness and equality before the law. Unilateral disarmament of letting one side do whatever and the other side only gets to wag the finger and say tut-tut does not improve the status of the principle at hand.
Then don't go for unilateral disarmament, use your power to enact fair rules for government. Groups like FIRE, and in the past stuff like the Free Speech League, the First Amendment coalition and other groups protect our rights by fighting for them legally in all cases.
And they failed.
Principled free speech defenders strongly benefit from the shoe on the other foot.
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This is advice for the last conflict - when the ACLU wanders around as a shambolic corpse that refuses to support the rights of "those people" you know the old institutions can no longer help.
The modern ACLU continues to employ a prominent lawyer who has literally gone on the record supporting banning certain books.
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It appears nobody has attempted to deport Tom Macdonald for that video. As I understand the law, one may only be deported for First Amendment protected activity on the personal (that is, not delegated) determination of the Secretary of State that it compromises a compelling US foreign policy interest. This means that "The Devil is a Democrat" is not deportable -- Macdonald would in fact be on thinner ice if he criticized Canada, as that would implicate US foreign policy interests, though it is unlikely Rubio would make such a determination.
This has nothing to do, however, with the Tao situation. And that particular law seems like it's going inevitably to head to the Supreme Court.
Yes it's a hypothetical. Would it be ok if the future Dems declared him to not have first amendment rights as a legal residents in the US and deport him based off political speech they find insulting?
This is the culture war thread, not the random hypothetical thread.
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The Left already is doing such things while mouthing banal principled platitudes, and has been for decades. It has won them near-complete control of the knowledge-making and -legitimating institutions in the country, including academia, journalism, with significant inroads into corporations and the legal profession. It has enabled the Left to take its social program from radical fringe to state-enforced orthodoxy. They have hijacked bureaucracies, lied about their intentions, ignored or subverted laws they did not agree with, including court decisions, and more.
They did these things not even for such a good reason as revenge, but instead out of pure will-to-power.
Remove the beam from thine own eye before complaining about the mote in another's.
Is revenge a good reason to do things you find immoral? I think a lot of us more principled folk would disagree.
If I am attacked, it is good to use force against my attacker to both defend myself but also to establish future deterrence. If I am cheated, it is good to sue not just for the value of what was denied me but also for punitive damages - to take the cheater's money. If I am stolen from, it is good not just to retrieve what was stolen, but also to incapacitate the thief to prevent their ability to do these things again.
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?
If I started beating my wife to the point that she snaps and starts physically assaulting me while holding a gun, am I able to then accuse her of "underdog bias" and talk about how I'm actually the one being attacked when she strikes back? Are you sure she's not just failing to see the ways her own side holds institutional powers/firearms unfairly?
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.
Why imagine? I am a leftist and just said that to you. I'm opposed to the social justice movement because I think it is both bad, ineffective politics and morally wrong (poor white kids should not pay the price for the crimes of robber barons in years past), but I am still a left-winger. To make my perspective clear, I believe that the optimal move would have been for the left to not actually go on the long march through the institutions precisely because of the incredibly predictable blowback that is currently taking place.
I have seen it happen in my life time. There's no absurd conspiratorial thinking here - this was done in the open and people loudly spoke about it. The Long March Through the Institutions took place and we have the statistical evidence with regards to discrimination against conservatives. The discrimination wasn't just pervasive, it was openly celebrated - there's no point denying it now. You're going to need much more rigorous evidence if you want to make the case that the right wing has been in control of academia for the past 40 years.
Ok, my principles are that if you try to politicise academia in order to purloin the social credibility it has for partisan aims you deserve to be punished badly and cast out into the wilderness for the real harm you're doing to legitimately important societal mechanisms. So I actually do get to support the current punishment - though admittedly I do have to switch back when the conservatives start deporting people or getting them fired for voicing mild criticisms of the ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
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Ok, I'm imagining it. It looks no different than the husband in his scenario striking first.
Tell you what why don't you show us how we should wrestle with our biases, by leading by example. How do you that everything you're saying isn't the result of bias? What steps have you taken to counteract it?
Why do you keep saying some principle was broken, and then ignoring any response indicating that this did nit take place, or questioning you about it?
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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?
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.
What are the consequences for corporate HR departments putting out there "don't hire white people"?
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!"
At best, one might get complaints of disparate impact, but that's a lot weaker IMO than plain-letter discrimination. Alas, they have different moral foundations than I do, and at this point the conversation hits a dead end.
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.
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
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 can name two pretty big examples of the top of my head, the targeting of evolution and the targeting of climate science.
Well yes, say anything within 10 degrees of the first and you'll be jettisoned immediately and the company will put everyone left behind through
endless punishmentsensitivity training. Reaction to the second depends if it was before or after 10/7.This attitude is what turned so many Mottezans away from being principled on this topic, noticing the massive gap between what people say they will do and how they behave in practice. Turns out very few people are really bothered by racism or sexism or discrimination in general, there's several populations that are totally fair targets. Alas, "your rules applied fairly" is not a stable point and assumes people are honest about what their rules are supposed to be.
The Harvard kid was more famous but it happened at NC State too. No consequences for the university afaict, and I haven't turned up the kids' names to see if they went elsewhere.
Are they allowed to select by religion? Hmm... looking at FIRE's page I may have been remembering that CLS v Martinez case, that student groups at public universities can't. Vaguely recall some other exception but maybe not.
I'd consider the the evolution complaint petty in comparison, but fair enough.
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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.
One example:
The University of California system, in particular, was up until March of this year requiring "diversity statements" for prospective faculty, which were statements demonstrating the applicant's dedication to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. These statements were in many cases not merely one factor among many, but used as an initial screen to exclude non-politically-aligned candidates.
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.
This is just a fancier way of saying "How can you really know you know anything, maaan??" And if you believe in perceptual bias that severe, you might as well give up on science anyway because you cannot trust any of the observations.
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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?
I would hope that others in a rationalist community would, having examined their own biases and framed their efforts in a prudent level of epistemic humility, then proceed on to engage with what evidence is available to them.
I do not claim to be uniquely immune. I know that I have been wrong in the past, and that biases have played a part in my previous errors. I aim to be less wrong in the future, and I make considerable efforts to minimize my own bias as much as I can.
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.
I've considered the possibilities you've raised, and discarded them as incompatible with my understanding of the best evidence available. I'm open to substantive arguments that I've discarded them prematurely, but that would require something with a bit more to it than you're offering so far. If you would like to see that evidence, by all means let's examine it. But if you're wedded to meta-epistemic doubt for its own sake, after more than a decade of fairly intensive conversation on this subject with a variety of opposites, that doesn't seem like a very fruitful avenue to me. I'm much more interested in trying to get the best picture possible of what happens next.
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"Look, Charles, I know you look at those organisms there and note their similarities and differences and think this is good evidence that they arose via natural selection of variations among the offspring of some parent organism. But Archbishop Wilberforce, he's looked at the same 2500 organisms and he sees in them the hand of God. How are you so sure he's the biased one and not you?"
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