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J. K. Rowling challenges new Scottish hate speech legislation, openly challenging them to arrest her for calling trans criminals men who pretend to be women:
https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1774747068944265615
#ArrestMe is, dare I say it, brave and powerful. At least she's putting skin in the game. It's also pretty well calculated in my opinion.
They can't really attack her for being a right wing extremist when her world famous books are a pretty clear allegory of Racism Bad. She even makes sure to target India Willoughby, who is apparently anti-black. Rowling has an enormous pot of money for expensive litigation and automatic worldwide attention on her. It's hard to righteously defend people such as
It's very practical politics to fish out the worst of the enemy milieu to preface one's normative statements. I think Rowling has a good shot at tactical victory - either the govt won't charge her or she'll win in court. On the other hand, only systemic change is going to change the progressive-leaning status quo. You need an Orban or some similar force to drag out the weed by the roots, rather than just pruning away when it grows particularly egregious. Rowling is no Orban, that's probably far too extreme for her.
The legislation is here: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2021/14/contents
Crimes include 'stirring up hate' by 'behaving in a manner that a reasonable person would consider to be threatening, abusive or insulting' to select groups. Looks like it allows nigh-limitless opportunities for selective enforcement. And a huge drain on police resources, given they can't even investigate all crimes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-68703684
While Rowling's crusade is admirable, I think what's really needed is a Scottish DeSantis to immediately turn these dystopian laws on the left. The only thing that stops this train is leftists being jailed for hate speech.
By the way, what's up with Scotland? What about their culture has made them go so loony, first with Covid and now with this? They honestly are starting to seem like China with worse food and weather.
See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our increasing frustration with the regressive far-left. I dislike their attitude of wanting to define reality and outlaw disagreement, but I just know that if the right gets into power they'll do the same, but harder. As an example, I have several friends who are as frustrated with the far-left as me, but who support palestine. I disagree with them about this, but I don't thing they should lose their job over it! And nor are they just getting what they're dishing out, no, now we have to take punches from both sides.
Even for cases like Claudine Gay, at least my personal conclusion is that she got her job through politics and lost her job through politics. Scientific competence was only involved as a cudgel to beat her with when it was convenient. This is a disgrace for one of the most renown universities, and the only winners of the whole affair are the people who want to control science with politics. Yes if it was up to me she shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place, but I see little indication that the right would do anything better. In fact I don't even have to look back very far to get right-wing movements such as the moral majority.
I see the far left picking fights with damn near everyone. The right, on the other hand, very rarely targets the center left- it’s usually the activist left that winds up in our crosshairs.
The most important figure of the American right spent a large portion of his winning 2016 presidential campaign demanding that his center-left opponent be locked up.
And walking back the moment he won. For which he was repaid by having actual made up charges thrown at him to try derail his political campaign.
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Right does target center-left (in US) on abortion, immigration and gun control, though.
In speech? Granted it’s a pretty major disagreement but on policy questions but actual center left rhetoric on those topics(eg ‘safe legal and rare’) doesn’t attract much ire from the right.
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I tend to regard actually existing, present threats as more relevant than an equivalent but hypothetical threat.
This is quite relevant to the UK. Our existing terrorism laws are so broad that throwing the book at Palestinian protesters would lead to tens of thousands of arrests and lengthy prison sentences. To say nothing of England's not-quite-as-strict but still menacing speech laws. But this hasn't happened. When vexatious edge-case imprisonments for terrorism happen, they happen to far-right non-terrorists. Similarly, the only time the police have chosen to start cracking skulls for our current wave of Hamas-related protesting is when there were right-wing counter-protesters. And this is to say nothing of the experience in 2020-21, where lockdowns de jure criminalized all protest, but de facto only criminalized anti-lockdown protests and one specific anti-police protest. As for our counter-terrorism efforts, Prevent is more interested in browns under the bed, hallucinating right-wing extremism where it doesn't exist while doing its best to ignore Islamism.
The threat that the right will fall down a slippery slope is not as strong an argument as the observation that the left already fell down it and hit the spike pit at the bottom.
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I don't understand. The right would not have given her the job in the first place, thus completely comporting with your ideal. What's the problem?
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This seems to imply that you have the following preference cascade when it comes to jailing people for speech:
Whereas my cascade is this:
The left defected in a major way by inventing this super weapon. For the right to now hit the "cooperate" button just ensures further defection from the left.
As a center-leftist, you seem to want the right to not actually fight against the left. This is in effect ensuring far left victory. Instead, in my opinion, you should tactically support the right when they are weakest.
Edit: I read your comments below. Maybe you are actually doing in this in which case I apologize for the misreading.
The left didn't invent this super weapon though. Assuming you are talking about governments creating laws regulating speech. It's been around for about as long as governments. Same with what we call cancel culture today, its entirely recognisable as the same behaviours in early societies around shunning, shaming and sub-judicial social sanctions.
From a leftist point of view they are repurposing an already existent super-weapon for their own purposes. I don't think they should be, but I think they are correct in the view that they are picking up a weapon that has already been used many times in the past in many different places. Including within the UK, from the Ministry of Information, to blasphemy to prior restraint to political censorship to the Profumo affair, super injunctions, saying British soldiers should go to hell getting you fined, or saying murdered police officers deserved it getting you jailed and so on.
Like it or not the UK has a long history of being much more authoritarian on what can be said than the US. Most often historically used against anti-establishment voices in general.
This isn't a new weapon. So creating it can't have been a defection. Though using it might still be of course depending on your pov.
Interesting. Can you give an example post WWII of leftists being jailed by rightists for political speech in the UK?
I am aware that the UK is not a free speech zone, but I wasn't aware of anything coming close to what's happening now. Perhaps I'm misinformed.
Jailed doesn't happen often for speech, fined and community service is more normal. In 94 LGBT protestors (including Peter Tatchell, protesting an Islamist group) were arrested for having placards, and took 2 years to be acquiited. In 98 Tatchell was found guilty under a law from 1860 outlawing protest in a church for mounting the pulpit to give a speech opposite the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 2012 Azir Ahmed was fined and sentenced to community service for speech about soldiers who should go to hell. In 2012 Barry Thew was jailed for 8 months for wearing a T-Shirt that approved of cops being murdered.
Whether you would call them leftists I don't know but, being pro LGBT, anti colonial (or neo-colonial) use of soldiers and being ACAB, seem pretty left coded.
To me these examples seem vastly different in scale and scope to what is being proposed with the new law.
8 months for a t shirt?
And note Rowlings comments are bring said not to contravene the law, so it may be narrower than you think.
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I think jeroboam's claim is that high-profile cases of leftists being jailed for hate speech would cause SJers to realise what a bad idea the laws are and undo them - the lesson of "I never thought the leopards would eat MY face".
I think that this claim is false because my read is that most SJers would react not with "oh shit this sucks, guess this gun's a bit dangerous to have available" but with "how dare they defile our gun and use it on us, we must destroy them so utterly that they can never use it again"*. But still, it seems to be coming from an assumption of Free Speech Good.
*To ironman this argument: a lot of the more-wingnut SJers believe that they have already essentially bet their lives on winning the culture war; that failure already means they literally get executed. This means that there is actual zero capability to deter them from escalation; if they win, then you can't punish them, and if they lose, (they think) they'll be killed either way, so the only thing that matters is P(win). And to be fair to them, in the main situation where I see them losing (voter base existence failure due to nuclear war) I would fully expect my prime political activity to be yelling "please no White Terror" for the next few years. But that's something of a special case due to the suddenness and the lopsidedness of power in the aftermath.
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For Claudine Gay I feel like “politics” is a bit of a euphemism. It’s truthy but the politics in question is that on the lefts social oppression pyramid a black female sits at the top. If you say politics, Chris Rufo says DEI, and redneck Billy says because she’s a black female they all mean the same thing. And it does seem correct to say she was thrown out on politics. Turns out rich Jewish donors can go head to head with modern leftism and win politically when they feel they are being hurt. You can call it politics but you would be equally true to say she was fired for being antisemitic. All are politics and this case the Jewish vote not liking antisemitism was stronger than the lefts oppression wheel politics.
That's my point though. Universities should strive for academic excellence and political independence. However, it got increasingly taken over by leftist politics, got (mostly correctly, then) labeled an enemy by the right, and is correspondingly now a target. I've been a critic of this process from the start, precisely because this was the only logical outcome. Nevertheless, as far as I can see the right has always been more interested in using the same tactics of silencing and outlawing disagreements, just now for their position, than in restoring some semblance of academic excellence.
This is probably just the nature of politics as a tribal competition. If your team controls a set of institutions or part of society it's in your political interest to use that power to suppress dissenting voices and advance your agenda, which is what most people care about. I think the best argument that increasing right wing representation in universities will benefit free speech is less that right wingers care more about free speech in principle and more that by establishing a rough balance between political factions neither side will be able to completely stifle the ideas and opinions of the other (or get professors fired if they don't like their research etc).
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If the center left had proven even vaguely able to resist this sort of thing, the Right would also find them to be a more attractive option than tit for tat. Or would not have needed to get involved at all.
People like Rufo & DeSantis exist because attempting to appeal to universal principles or allowing the academy to police itself has utterly failed. A lot of this stuff (especially in America, in the UK the Tories take a lot of blame since they were in power) happened under their eye. They not only refused to do anything about it, they often attacked both right and left critiques of it.
And then, when someone goes "too far" in response, they lament that there's no partner for common sense and sanity and they definitely would have done something if not for those crazies who made it too tense to get involved.
Yeah, uh-huh.
I mean, I push hard enough against left-wing orthodoxy both in person and online that I'm regularly reflexively labeled right-wing, and I have the same frustration as you with plenty of other allegedly centrist politicians who fall hard for the "no enemies to the left, all enemies to the right" fallacy. You're really throwing this at the wrong person, sorry.
You still seem willing to prefer as allies the left-wing orthodoxy over the right-wing ("See, this is why center-left people don't feel like allying with the right, despite our [...]", emphasis mine) so I think you are indeed the right person.
If you want to know, my last vote went to the FDP, which is the german libertarian party. Unlike the US, the FDP is not consistently on either side, but has coalitioned with both sides (currently it's in fact part of a broad left-leaning government). Myself I'm not even a straight-ticket FDP voter, I've considered the CDU (originally center right, though nowadays probably just pure centrist), due to their family-first focus which I find appealing, and the SPD (center left), since I'm in favour of broad redistributive policies if done right. My vote ultimately went to the FDP however since it's the closest thing to free-speech absolutism on the menu and because they currently appear to be the party most concerned with imo common-sense concepts such as "having a functioning economy".
Privately, at work, and online, I primarily push back against left-wing orthodoxy since it's quite common among my acquintances.
Nevertheless, and yes this is precisely what I mean, if you try to force me into a binary left-wing orthodoxy vs right-wing orthodoxy, both enforced equally, I'll choose the left everytime. The right needs to be significantly less orthodox for me to consider it.
The FDPs milquetoast false-centrism position on the coronavirus response, and it's involvement in the current German coalition as that government seeks to disrupt, harass, or even outlaw political opposition in the AFD, makes me skeptical that they'd be a good match for your claimed political goals.
Of course, the centre-right refusing to ally with the right pretty much defines the entire current German political climate, not just you in particular.
What you call milquetoast false-centrism, I'd call regular centrism. I know Corona is your hobbyhorse, but the FDP was if anything overly critical compared to the center (which suits me, since I also was on the critical side).
On the AFD, the FDP is explicitly on the record as being against the Verbotsverfahren. Privately, I've argued multiple times that the AFD has a point, and that as long as the german political establishment is unwilling to tackle the dysfunctional, barely existent border and immigration politics, they will only get stronger. This is reasonably close to the stated position of the FDP, though I suspect that being libertarians they're more in favor of open borders than I'd like, but unfortunately we don't have a topic-based voting law.
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I feel I should note that there is such a thing as "being neutral", and thus that RenOS' note that he doesn't want to ally with you is not the same thing as declaring alliance with your enemies.
You might consider neutrality naïve, and you might very well be right, but you can't just treat naïveté as malice - not if you want to be intellectually honest, anyway.
I probably was harsh, and RenOS rightly accused me of venting my frustration here.
But I don't think my OP implied it was just malice. There are many reasons (few of which I respect) for this behavior on the part of the actual left-wing liberals who're now disillusioned.
If I had a problem with your post, I'd have replied to it. It was Nybbler's "You still seem willing to prefer as allies" that pinged my "objectionable inference" radar.
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It's an awfully one-sided neutrality that supports the left when it agrees with the left, and refuses to support the right when it agrees with the right.
We see that in the United States a lot. People who, when asked, are closer to Republicans than Democrats on most issues but still vote blue.
Voting is more about tribal affiliation and personal purity than about issues.
Voting Republican gives some people the "ick". So even though they hate homeless encampments, drug overdoses, crime, and broken public schools, they still vote for far left candidates in their city election.
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The other side to it is that the right wanted Gay fired precisely because she was a DEI hire and the right doesn’t want DEI.
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I mean, presumably the fundamental reason you don't feel like allying with the right is because you're center-left. If you were center-right instead, you'd probably feel more comfortable with the right!
I don't think there's much point in speculating what a rightist censorship regime would look like right now, because the right doesn't have the power to enforce those policies on a national scale and I don't realistically see that changing any time soon. So I'm fine with just trying to push back against leftist censorship for now, and if rightist censorship ever gets out of hand we can cross that bridge when we come to it. (Of course, part of the reason why I'm comfortable saying that is because I'm apt to find the right's policies more hospitable in the first place - someone of a more leftist bent might say that current leftist censorship is really no big deal after all, but rightist censorship is a lurking omnipresent danger that we must be on constant guard against).
For what it's worth I think I'm about as close to a free speech absolutist as you can get. I don't think anyone should be punished for supporting Palestine, or questioning trans ideology, or anything else. But if I have to make a choice, I'll go with the side that is less censorious on the issues that are closer to me personally.
I do. It's called nuclear war. I don't, y'know, want nuclear war, but it's pretty obvious that the small-town conservatives comprise a much-larger percentage of the population immediately following one because nobody nukes farmhouses or small towns.
Assuming that nothing flips the table is potentially assuming your way out of reality.
In a post-nuclear world, do you really think issues of free speech and wokeness at Harvard will be primary concerns? I’m pretty close to a free speech absolutist, and that is a value I hold pretty dear, but even I wouldn’t expect to care about it much at all in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear attack.
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Might I gently suggest that in case of a nuclear war the finer points of hate speech laws and college campus environments may no longer be a particularly urgent concern.
(this doubles as a reply to @Lewis2)
I quoted what I thought was wrong; the idea that the right will not have the power to do censorship any time soon.
Indeed, one would not need to worry about "wokeness at Harvard", because my whole point is that Harvard would be a smoking ruin. I would be concerned about White Terror, both immediately (in cases of supply-chain interruption and government disruption causing hungry chaos, I don't imagine that being the HR lady would do wonders for one's survival chances) and in the months and years to follow.
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I consider myself primarily a pragmatist, not ideologist, so I can see myself allying with a broader right coalition in principle, if I had the impression that I can fit in under a live and let live paradigm. In particular I'm probably more center than left, so it's not even inconceivable that I'll someday identify as center-right. But nevertheless, I just do not have the impression that free speech absolutism is really something the right is dedicated on (nor the left, which is key to my frustration with them, but at least I agree with them on more other things). Currently I do push hardest against left-wing orthodoxy because it's the only realistic threat to me at the moment since the right-wing has no power whatsoever in science, but I have no illusions that life would be better under the thumb of the right.
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