Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/03/22/pc-gone-sane.html
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Popular speech needs no protection. The protections exist precisely so people can say unpopular things and not worry about being jailed for it.
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Sad that people (closet racists) think racists still deserve the commons. Nazis keep talking, antifa keeps stomping. We’ll win in the end just like in 1945.
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Roger That!
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There is a little sleight of hand going on here. The article is talking about the groups of people that are acceptable in speaking more, but not what they’re talking about.
Notably the graph on racists (assuming people of the group ‘racists’ are talking about racist subjects) undermines the article’s conclusions. While the college educated group is most likely to support the racist making a speech, the percent of college educated people who would support it has dropped over time from ~86% to ~77% since 1975. This shows that college educated people are becoming less tolerant to racist speech.
The only other example of speech content is the anti-american muslim person which has remained roughly flat since recording started in 2008. It would have been interesting to see what the graph would look like if it started before 9/11.
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The free world won in 1945 at least in part because the USA, isolated from the conflicts by the oceans, came to its aid.
Who will come to the aid of the USA as it corrodes from within?
The scale of the possible interconnected failures dwarfs that of the fall of Rome. It may rival the simultaneous collapse of the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Canaanites, the Cypriots, the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, the Assyrians and the Babylonians (not to mention the remnant Eblaites, Akkadians, Sumerians, Mitanni, Amorites and Ugarites). Most of those cultures were extirpated entirely in less than a century, to be replaced by Aramaeans, Phoenicians, Thracians, Dorians, Neo-Hittites, Suteans, Chaldeans and eventually Neo-Assyrians.
In the collapse of the 12th century BCE, up to 90% of the towns were abandoned. The entire Mediterranean world was thrown back from Late Bronze Age civilization into the Neolithic. Literacy in several of those cultures was forgotten, leaving ancient writings that can no longer be read. A centuries-long dark age followed.
All the Mediterranean legends of a lost Golden Age, and indeed the cultural belief that each age of the world will be more corrupt than the age before it, may arise from this singular catastrophe. It may have given rise to the legend of Atlantis, as well.
And nobody knows what caused it. Civilization simply fell apart, in many places at once.
And it feels as if we’re playing for similar stakes in our own time.
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OK, this is kind of vague. Fox News has a way of defining anyone they don’t like as “anti-American”, so who gets to decide if it’s hate speeh or not? I would have to judge the cleric on a little more than this imprecise description. In a perfect world everyone, even a complete monster, would be allowed to speak, but there would also be rational people on hand with facts and figures they could cite to question his/her conclusions; I don’t mind Richard Spencer speaking, I just also want someone there to put the screws to him intellectually. This is a far better outcome than just banning him, which leaves his ideas out there unchallenged.
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Yeah but, fingers crossed.
(Either way I wouldn’t read anything into people’s varying support for Free Speech in the abstract. It’s a silly question, because people react to particular speech acts, not abstracts. Unless you count sanguine, thoughtful judges, that is. Public support for them is an indicator to take seriously).
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Wow. I did not know this was a thing. Thanks!
A well-done summary:
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“Every great empire that ever existed eventually fell, especially if it was based upon a crumbling infrastructure.”
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The tables will turn, we can but stall them.
Every empire on this Earth has fallen.
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My guess is climate issues causing a large scale famine. We do know that the Santorini/Thera eruption around 1600BCE ended Minoan civilisation.
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contrary to the vision of a generation of young authoritarians brainwashed in elite universities, there is very little age polarization on these issues — 56 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds support the right of the racist to give a speech, versus 60 percent of the overall population.
34-year-olds finished college 12 years ago…I think the point is that the “intolerance” is on campus right now, in the last several years…not in 2006 or 2010. It would be helpful to see a survey of just 18-22 year olds, since that is who the critics are talking about.
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So they’re saying, in effect, that kids these days are no damn good? If we had a “national lawn” it would be the Capitol Mall, and I have heard commentators saying those kids should get off it, too.
For how long now have we had an entire teevee network instructing the olds to value authority over free speech? Is it any surprise “young people are free speech advocates?” It’s only relative - 56% is shockingly low.
In 1939-1945, the Nazis weren’t talking - they were stomping, and this is why people eventually stomped back. Tiki-torched, polo-shirted idiots aren’t the Schutzstaffel and antifa isn’t the White Rose. The justification of violence does not depend on the rightness of a cause (who decides what’s right?), but on whether you risk receiving more violence than you are capable of dishing out. Marching for causes that have become unquestioned in polite, middle-class society, for instance, is very different to marching for the same causes at a time or in a place where these causes provoke polite, middle-class outrage. It does not become wrong to do so, of course, it just stops being heroic.
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You’re right that including the Minoans on that list was a mistake - they’d been gone for 400 years. But the Minoan collapse was not a collapse of civilization - Crete was conquered by the Mycenaeans, and civilized life (with sophisticated sea trading, cities, professional artisans and scribes) went on.
It’s been a falsely attributed meme since the 1980s (it was a plank of the first George Bush’s campaign), my college class was absolutely equally criticized for limiting free speech in the early 00s.
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White supremacy is violence no matter if it is direct or not. Suppressing it by any means necessary is self defense.
Taking care of them before they start stomping just makes sense. We already know that is their end goal because we already had a world war about it, why wait for them to get any power before we try to stop them?
The Nazis were stomping with the backing of the state as early as 1933. Before that the earliest stomping that they couldn’t plausibly deny was the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. At the time the beer halls were where the Nazis did their talking. Hitler marched in to a meeting one day with his supporters and turned it into a revolution against the Weimar government.
People knew who the Nazis really were for ten years, but they got elected anyway.
For some of us inaction leads to us being beaten or killed by fascists. We don’t fight because we can win, we fight because we cannot afford to lose.
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