I like the Jim Jeffries “joke”:
America has the highest incarceration rate of any country on earth, so statistically it’s actually the least free.
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I don’t think Pence or any of the DeVos/Prince family should be arrested for saying something I disagree with, but I’ll be damned if I have to sit there and listen to any of them.
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I’m going to worry about the right of Mike Pence to be heard when we’ve solved the right of people to say pronouns without being beaten or killed. No more trickle down human rights.
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I can relate to that feeling entirely; however, if you are not willing to listen to anything they say and they in turn take the same tact…then no one is listening to anyone and there is zero communication going on.
And there is a difference between sitting and discussing a topic or issue and sitting and listening to a lecture or speech; so I understand why those students walked out.
Hahaha… do I think they actually want to listen to me in the first place? These people* want to commit genocide.
Besides, politics has never been about a free exchange of ideas anytime during my lifetime. Maybe the Nixon administration was the very tail end of it.
*the alt-right, and also the extreme anti-LGBT like Pence
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No they probably do not want to listen. Some may say they do, but they truly don’t or won’t actually listen.
The two wrongs don’t make a right thing applies to some degree, does it not? Stating that someone is a monster for their ideology and refusing to play the audience with the defense “Well, you don’t want to listen to me.” isn’t going to fix any problem, only make it worse.
I understand your position though and do not disagree entirely with it.
I think maybe I disagree with my position.
After some thought, I think the Nazi McPunchfaces of the world and the Pences need to be arrested for inciting violence.
The pre-TGOP Republicans I can write off as a difference of opinion, and perfectly legal. The shit that’s going on today is inciting violence.
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Sitting back passively while the extremely organized and well-funded alt-right and the extreme anti-LGBT like Pence and the racists like Charles Murray enjoy legitimizing platforms on university campuses isn’t going to fix any problem either. In fact, it would make a lot of people’s problems worse.
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Truth right there.
And I personally find it difficult to maintain my composure talking to family who support people like 45 and Pence and the views they espouse. Especially during the election cycle where all they kept saying was “but her emails”.
it can be quite maddening.
edit: @milliefink completely agree. passive disagreement is not effective in this case.
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It’s almost like they have chosen college campuses to speak since the late 80s/early 90s on purpose and have been beating the same drum for that entire time. It’s not like a private business and a public college have different requirements in the law regarding speech…
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Ironically, over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, the point is being made that the examples Zakaria brings up are actually the appropriate/open/tolerant response to speakers with whom one disagrees:
Commentaries like Zakaria’s are the byproduct of a long-running, well-funded campaign by conservative underminers like David Horowitz to convince outsiders that universities are hotbeds of radical intolerance. In fact, while university faculty and students certainly lean left statistically, these ideas are discussed vigorously on both sides on most campuses, and the fact of that is strong evidence that in fact the left is generally tolerant and open to discussion.
Of course, where there’s youth there’s often passion and maybe a little entitlement, and sometimes these combine and things go too far, but whenever this happens you can be sure that some campus conservatives are ready to funnel the event to the conservative media amplification machine, which turns it into the narrative that US campuses stifle dissent. Well, sorry, there are thousands of accredited institutions of higher education in the US, if this was really a thing then we’d be seeing several orders of magnitude more stories of speech suppression, instead of the same handful of stories that get brought up over and over. Those of us who work in the industry know that it is ridiculous.
tl;dr Zakarias has been duped by the right-wing butthurt machine.
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dang I thought maybe there was a chance this was going to be about the ways many liberals don’t fucking know that basic respect for other people is more than just “tolerating” them; sometimes it means actually giving a shit about their problems
I’m disappointed but I should’ve known to expect this
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Wait, as compared to whom, exactly?
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Did you read Zakaria’s article?
It’s about supposed liberals on college campuses refusing to listen to wealthy, well-funded speakers who want to disseminate tired, discredited, and abusive rightwing talking points. These speakers don’t have any problems that leftwing college students should give a shit about, and they have plenty of other platforms for spewing their hate speech.
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Yes, unfortunately I did.
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Liberals, in the American center-right sense, aren’t that tolerant. Fareed Zakaria and CNN keep proving that, day in day out.
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Respect is a two-way street. Offer none, get none.
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Who is that directed toward?
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The individual I replied to.
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I’m not going to respect people who want genocide.
I’m not even going to respect people who think that tokenism and glad-handing “tolerance” go far enough, either.
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