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And what would they do? Move to China, lol? They're too self-interested for that, and China censors even more things they'd be inclined to make noise about. Move to allied nations, maybe Australia in Tao's case? It's not such a strategic loss given their political alignment with the US. Just hate conservatives? Don't they already? If you're going to be hated, it's common sense that there's an advantage in also being feared and taken seriously. For now, they're not taking Trump and his allies seriously. A DEI enforcer on campus is a greater and more viscerally formidable authority. It will take certain costly signals to change that.
I think it's legitimate to treat them with disdain and disregard. Americans can afford it, and people who opportunistically accepted braindead woke narratives don't deserve much better treatment. The sanctity of folks like Tao is a strange notion. They themselves believe in equity more than in meritocracy.
Oh so what you're saying is that the Dems should go nuclear next election and cut funding for all conservatives unless they go woke and we should go into an arms war of being the Serious Threat each time one group is in power?
Or are only conservatives morally justified in destroying science for culture war issues?
You seem to think that there is a tit for tat MAD argument to be made for restraint. Uh, no, there isn't. A politician promising to punish the hicks for having the audacity to touch the academy is less a political platform and more the hysterical overreaction of a crazy person. There's a popular thread of argument that goes 'but imagine if it was happening to you'. In this case, I don't have to imagine: conservatives have been driven out of everything from literature to knitting to table-top RPG games. Your consequences have already happened. Deterrence doesn't work if the opposing side uses the imagined bad end as a frequently-executed goal that often succeeds.
So yes, we are justified. Oderint dum metuant.
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.
No, I want to go further then that. I fully hated it when it was done to me: and no amount of principled pleading ever got them to stop. What is happening right now is wrong and you know what? I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.
Certainly, my enemies never did.
So I abandoned the principles. "If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?" Having principled people like you on my side amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades. So why should I care?
I don't want to make peace with them. I don't want to return to 'neutrality', whatever that means. I want to make peace with the dust and the ash, with the sand of the desert: with desolation and ruin. I am Hulegu sacking Baghdad: let the rivers run black with the knowledge I am destroying. Better my rules enforced unfairly, because the ideal neutral is impossible.
This is the compromise you are seeing, a game of defunding and well-written lawfare. What I actually want is the books burned and the scholars that wrote them alongside. Anyone who even knows who Foucault is should have their frontal lobes lobotomized. But I can take what I can get. If my intellectual enemies live in fear and deprivation that is good enough.
Your attempts to appeal to liberal sensibilities fall on deaf ears because I don't have them. Not anymore.
Because there are such things as moral imperatives which you should follow even if they do not bring you material benefits; indeed, even if following them costs you dear. Having been persecuted does not give you a license to persecute in turn, any more than having been raped give you a license to rape your rapist. It's not about what it gets you - it's about right and wrong.
If you are in fact devoid of moral principles (on this topic), then so it goes. No arguing with demons. But don't say that you used to have principles, and now you don't have them "anymore" because they got you nothing tangible. If your moral principles were conditional on beneficial outcomes for you, then you never had any in the first place.
This seems to be claiming that following principles deontologically are better than doing so consequentially. Which may be the case, but not really argued for. I do think there's a strong argument for it, in that consequentialist calculations are irredeemably fraught with bias in such a way as to be meaningless, since people will always, in good faith, calculate the consequences in a way that is biased in their favor.
But the case for taking principles consequentially isn't weak, either. If naively following some principle in a deontological way provably/reliably/logically/etc. reduces [Good Thing], then how do we justify calling the principle "Good?" Well, we don't need to follow it in some naive deontological way, but rather by following consequences.
Let's say a doctor has a personal principle that he will endeavor to make his patients no worse than the counterfactual of if they never saw him. Counterfactuals are intrinsically hard to predict and fraught with bias. So he might decide to avoid his personal bias and just take the deontological position that any action that harms the patient's health is out of bounds for him. Puncturing someone's skin certainly harms the patient's health, even if it's nearly trivial, and so he never draws blood for tests or gives his patients IV (or allows his staff to). This doctor would be less effective than a doctor who follows the exact same principle, but thinks in longer time horizons and figures that the harm of a syringe prick on a patient is outweighed by the benefits of what it enables, in terms of leaving his patient no worse off than otherwise. And in society at large, people who believe in the same principle would commonly prefer the latter consequentialist doctor as fulfilling their principles better than the former deontologist one.
So we could follow the principle of free speech by just never punishing anyone for saying anything (with rare exceptions, etc.) and let the chips fall where they may. I would prefer this, personally. We could also follow it by checking how certain behaviors affect people's ability to exercise free speech in society and then take the action that seems most likely to increase it (or not reduce it or maximize some metric or etc.). I would prefer not this, personally, because, again, this sort of prediction is so fraught with bias that I don't know that there's a way to do it credibly. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to disagree with me on that.
No, not really. As I saw it, the question was more like whether moral principles like "don't persecute people for their speech" are instrumental or axiomatic. My claim was that for a commitment to free speech/intellectual freedom/etc. to count as a "moral principle", it must be an axiomatic belief, not a context-dependent one. You must believe that all else being equal, it is wrong to suppress speech, in and of itself. You can't just believe that it's inadvisable to do so if you want a certain kind of society; and you certainly can't just believe that being pro-free speech will lead to good life outcomes for you personally. You have to believe, consistently, that censorship is in itself an evil which you should try to minimize.
Indeed, you can approach that premise just as easily from a consequentialist framework (ie you may be willing to trade some censorship against a greater good) as a deontological one (ie you will hold yourself to a rule of never, under any circumstance, suppressing speech). I will recognize it as a moral principle you hold in either case.
It is not impossible to justify short-term right-wing censorship based on a consequentialist pursuit of freedom of speech. For example, we have "culture war acceleriationists" mounting arguments of that kind elsewhere in the thread, talking about the need to demonstrate MAD to return to a stable equilibrium later down the line. I'm perfectly willing to believe that they hold free speech as a moral principle, even as they advocate to suppress it in one particular context. But this is not what @crushedoranges was saying. crushedoranges was saying that he'd abandoned his (so-called) principles because holding them had "amounted to jack and squat in the past two decades" for his political tribe. That's not an argument that suppressing some speech now is the best way to maximize free speech later. That's an admission that guaranteeing intellectual freedom was never a goal he believed in for its own sake, just a means to secure unrelated goods for his "side", who naturally ditched it when it failed in that task.
Fair enough, crushedorange's comment indicates pretty clearly that in his specific case, he abandoned his principles. An excessively charitable reading would be that he learned that his naive implementation of free speech principles actually harmed free speech and, as such, abandoned those principles and replaced them with ones that would increase free speech. But there's no way to actually figure out if he's upset that following his previous principles meant that free speech as a principle was being failed, or he's partisanly upset that following those meant that his side was losing, and though the former would be charitable, the latter seems far more likely.
But on this:
This seems like a straightforward way of restating what I said:
If a commitment to free speech doesn't count as a "moral principle" if you implement it by taking action that leads to more people being more free to express themselves instead of taking action that leads to any particular instance of someone you observe speaking being unpunished, then that's just straightforward supremacy of deontology over consequentialism as a way of doing morality.
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