Do you have a consistent argument or do you just change your position to the one that negates mine? Didn’t you previously comment that your right to own property does not allow you to steal?
Sure. “Stealing the spotlight” is a metaphor, though. Nothing has literally been stolen when a heckler interrupts a speaker. It’s rude. It’s frustrating. It’s intimidating. It’s scary.
It’s not theft.
And that is what you seem to struggle with. My original comment was directed at John, because his comments about speech rights seemed to conflict with free speech:
“You may be surprised if you look around it is the NYT and Google and Facebook and left wing groups that are decrying people being able to speak. This has reached an incredible level. This person was trying to speak in Berkeley a few months ago. Anti fa and the left staged riots.”
Antifa and the left exercised their rights. Riots are terrifying. I don’t support property damage or violence, but I strongly support protest. Neither of you seem to. I don’t have to choose between worthy activities or speakers to support that right.
It’s something I support for everyone. That’s fundamentally what rights are.
Medium is not, technically, an open platform.
Do you want to debate semantics, now? In what context is it either closed or open? The constitution? Product development? Copyright? Use case? Do you care or are you using the source that seemingly negates my point? You didn’t even bother addressing what I actually wrote and instead fell to the usual trope of using the dictionary.
I’m not debating semantics: words mean things. And the fact that Medium has created a platform that users can use with little interference is nice, but that still doesn’t meet the criteria for public use that speech rights usually define.
I don’t have to call anyone for permission to stand on the corner with a sign: I am free to do that whenever I like as long as I keep in a public space. And whatever your feelings are about online spaces, creating an account is a way of getting permission.
Well, you also need to have an internet connection and that your local law to support the use of such a platform. You’re trying to weasel your way out of addressing the point and instead try to ‘debunk’ a definition.
No, I think trying to conflate online spaces with real world spaces is really dangerous. They are not the same. And most of our laws are struggling with that. You think it is an insignificant difference, but I think actually looking at the laws and how they evolve over time is crucial for any discussion of free speech.
For example, I helped organize a rally.
And it was tough. It grew out of a Facebook post. We had no idea that 4,000 people were going to show up when we made the post, but once that became clear, we worked with the city to figure out how the logistics of our speech exercise would go. 4,000 people liking something is not the same as inviting 4,000 people to your house.
That’s a responsibility I would hope you would recognize, since you have made so many statements about protest stifling speech. We didn’t threaten or intimidate the other group we were there to protest against. And it was difficult for the police to know what to tell us. We were inside the timeline for getting the permits we needed for a group this size. We were respectful and fortunate that the city wanted to help us “catch” all these enthusiastic people.
You are destroying your own rights. You don’t need assistance. As you already defined it, the person with the most rights is the person who can shout the loudest.
Or the person with the most money. Milo definitely has more power to exercise his rights than the average Antifa member. He has a group behind him that helps student activists around the country schedule his appearances.
And that means that individual protests against him are not capable of shouting him down. You seem to want to ignore this, but no antifa rally has the power to delete Milo’s awful work from the internet.
And I think that is why it matters so much that you and John are both allying yourselves with the GOP against the First Amendment.
If you want to discuss this topic with John the TIB, then perhaps you should continue this discussion with him. We are not a hive that requires every member to think and act the same. I wonder if he is now perplexed as to the reason you ask him to defend my positions.
I already am discussing this topic with him. I just think it is interesting to compare your comments.
Stop throwing the word authoritarian around. It lost all meaning, along with racist, sexist, and the rest of those meaningless catch-all words.
Stop telling me what words to use. I’m using it because it is apt.
“of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people”
You also continuously bring Milo into this debate as it agrees with your preexisting notions about conservative speakers. I’m not really sure Milo is actually a conservative. He seems more like a liberal who enjoys attacking the perverted left.
Milo is a shitdisturber. It is genuinely pointless to try to pin down his real beliefs.
Why not talk about a speaker like Ben Shapiro, that I’ve already mentioned? A person that most of his talk is actually debating topics with the audience. Where the rule-of-thumb is that “if you disagree, you get to go first?” Of course, chanting nonsense and asserting that he is dangerous gives an emotional reward that debate won’t do.
Ben Shapiro also gives speeches in audiences where he is protected from being challenged.
And it is interesting that you want me to stop talking about Milo and talk about Shapiro instead.
Shapiro experienced the very same paradox of tolerance reckoning that he likes to inflict on liberals:
““Indeed, Breitbart News, under the chairmanship of Steve Bannon, has put a stake through the heart of Andrew’s legacy. In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew’s mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump’s personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut [Fields] in order to protect [Lewandowski].”
Breitbart is a pro-Trump paper. It has now shed both Shapiro and Milo.
Yet you won’t ever challenge that decision, will you?
Of course, they are not required to give a debate or care what the overgrown children actually want. As long as they are not interrupting, they can stand outside and shout until they lose their voice. You seem to think they are entitled to the platform of the speaker for a reason you refuse to give.
I never said they were entitled to the platform. But you seem to think the speaker is entitled to a respectful audience.
Why aren’t Milo and Shapiro entitled to the platform on Breitbart? Oh that’s right: it’s a private business! They are allowed to fire gay writers who have videos where they talk about being gay. And that’s not bigoted, it’s just business.
But Universities are different. They can’t say no. So that’s where the fight is, even though the audience at a university is comparatively tiny.
You have a right to take the platform from someone else? That’s news to me. I guess this is why Sanders was such a popular figure: he was supporting stealing from the rich (A.K.A evil) and giving it away to those he deemed worthy. A real modern day Robin Hood.
Why don’t you fight for Milo’s right to use Breitbart’s platform?
I mean, if you care about speech, why don’t you care about the fact that both Ben and Milo have lost access to a conservative platform, but you only think they have a right to invade liberal platforms.
Why? Because you don’t think the students have the right to object to being used as props.
Well, it is your right to challenge them on those lies. To find and expose them, and in some instances, make them accountable for promulgating them. However, you don’t have the right to barge into the studio and interfere with their normal broadcasting.
You’re correct.
You keep saying “free speech” but the way you use it doesn’t really make much sense. As far as you’ve written here, you seem to think “free speech” refers only to people who can command an audience. In other words, celebrities.
You keep repeating that point and although I clarified it on multiple occasions, you refuse to actually address it. Let’s turn it around, shall we: are the agitators the only ones with free speech?
No. The speakers are free to yell with them. They don’t all have to yell the same things or together. But fundamentally, free speech rights are not the same as paid appearances to pimp your book.
What about the conservative group that is being marginalized and silenced with their word being labeled bigoted and them being guilty of hate speech, who therefore needs to be silenced.
I have the right to call you names and accuse you of saying hateful things.
The conservative group is still made up of people and they have rights. There is no right not to be criticized for the things you say you believe.
Once in a while, they find a speaker that will not treat them like human garbage and that can educate them a bit about politics, and you support those who try and silence them, while continually talk about free speech as a way to take down dissenting opinions.
And there is the crux of the issue: this is not about free speech.
This is about conservatives who feel like victims. Of course they prefer to talk to people who agree with them and make them feel smart. Everyone prefers that.
But here’s the problem: you and John have both presented that speaking engagement as if it was meant to educate people. And Milo and Ben have already shared that content. It’s why they get invited. So this is circular: the conservative students read Milo’s work and liked it and wanted to invite him to speak at the university. It wasn’t because they didn’t already know what he was going to say. Watching a movie you have already seen because you love it isn’t challenging: it’s comforting.
Thank you for admitting it.
How? Do you mean all the conservatives in the faculty? The administration being wholly progressive? Or maybe insane groups on campus who shout down any conservative viewpoint?
What is your evidence that all conservative viewpoints are shouted down?
You have none. The administration protected a professor who harassed female students for years. Welcome to the reality of progressive politics, where you can say all the right things without ever meaning them. That’s not a secret.
That’s discrimination, not authoritarianism.
Noooo… anyone can discriminate. You have to have authority to wield to be an authoritarian. So a gay student who is harassed by his peers suffers from discrimination. A gay student who is harassed by his peers while his teacher, his principal and his president supports his harassers? That’s discrimination with authoritarianism.
That is how it works for LGBT communities in Russia.
It’s just the current buzzword, so everyone likes to use it. An authoritarian will take control of the media and education, much in the same way the left did.
In what way does “the left” control the media and education?
The authoritarian will also make certain words and expression immoral and illegal like is being done currently by the left, and overall try to silence voices of descent, which didn’t happen yet.
What words and expressions have been made illegal?
I mean, you just argued that it is not a big deal for students to be banned from schools and told who they can date because they are gay. You said that was just discrimination, but it also has the force of law. That’s legal. That’s supported by our current government.
They didn’t take control over the lives of gay students but discriminated against them. They didn’t force them to date nice straight girls but requested they don’t show the affection around the school.
And you seem to support that.
I agree. Discriminatory and hypocritical but not authoritarian. There is a difference.
Why don’t you try explaining that difference?
Do you need me to find a video where the crowd can clearly be seen? There are far more than “10 guys.” There are women, people who are not white, ethnically or by the color of their skin, and even Muslim fans of those speakers. You just seem to follow the “only white nationalists like X.”
And some of them are brought by Milo:
“As the evacuation gets going, the young men in Yiannopoulos’ gang seem scared. They’re right to be — these protesters aren’t playing, and there has already been real violence at these events. One week earlier, in Seattle, a Yiannopoulos fan shot an anti-fascist protester in the stomach. The victim is expected to survive. The impression that this is all an exciting adventure in pranking the left, a giddy game of harmless offense where nobody actually gets hurt, is not holding up so well. Over the next few hours, I get to watch Yiannopoulos’ teenage entourage wrestle with the fact that this game is, in fact, deadly earnest, and the win conditions are changing, and they are not players, but pieces on the board.”
even though they had broad access to all his published content in the form of videos and articles.
What a magnificent advocacy for free speech you have here. “You can talk, certainly. Apart from here, there, over there also, everywhere there are millennials who can get their feelings hurt, and overall anywhere someone who leans to the left is present. You see, plenty of places you can speak at!”
Do you not support the right to choose what content you consume?
This is why I said before, you don’t seem to support the right to challenge speakers:
“Put it simply, understand it or not, the right to free speech ends when you try to take it away from someone else.”
You seem to literally be saying that if you’re not allowed to speak everywhere, then you have no right to speak.
But as you earlier pointed out: if we all speak all the time, in every space, no one can be heard.
Thank you for demonstrating that your definitions of free speech are very very weird.
I didn’t assert that a school has rights. You are the one who initially suggested it with the topic of Trump threatening to take the funding from universities for restricting free speech.
Irony:
That’s discrimination, not authoritarianism. It’s just the current buzzword, so everyone likes to use it. An authoritarian will take control of the media and education, much in the same way the left did. The authoritarian will also make certain words and expression immoral and illegal like is being done currently by the left, and overall try to silence voices of descent, which didn’t happen yet. So, it seems you are the one supporting authoritarianism.
Not applicable to free speech so I didn’t much care to branch the discussion even further. Like I mentioned, if you expect DeVos to fight schools who discriminate against the gay then you should also support Trump threatening universities.
This is you, expressing that schools should have rights while students do not. Gay students ought to have rights to go to school, just like straight students do. You seem to really struggle with the idea of equal rights.
Students have the right to be conservative, liberal, gay or straight. But you argue that they should have no expectation not to be punished for being gay. I mean, was anyone at Berkeley telling the conservative students who to date? What not to read?
Nope.
That’s a misdirection that has nothing to do with the topic. On a side note, no matter what they will give them, the students will want more and more, like an oversized pig stuffing himself with food.
Kids, amirite?
Already answered that point but just to clarify: You don’t decide where a person can or cannot speak, you don’t decide on what that person can or cannot say, and you certainly don’t have the right to liable a person just because it makes you feel good.
I think you must mean libel. And you’re right: I don’t make those decisions. But I always have the right to my opinions. Even when those opinions upset you.
They were interviewed in the national media, yet they did not use those opportunities to share the presentations they planned to give at Berkeley.
Yes, the media gives them the platform to do Q&A and speak uninterrupted without adding some progressive pundit that they need to answer to. Those are different platforms, with different aims, and like I said over and over, are not there to limit a pundit freedom of speech.
No, they expand their access to audiences. So if the right is not genuinely interested in reaching people who don’t already read Breitbart, what are they interested in?
All you do is push your own version of reality where only the voices you support have the right to express themselves, all the while turning it on me and trying to assert that I support things I don’t really support. Of course, the people who shout and bemoan don’t really have a worldview, other than continually convincing themselves that they are good and honest, while their opposition is evil and deplorable.
They are interested in stoking this feeling of oppression you like so much. And it works. Every time some conservative speaker is protested by students or yelled at, you watch those videos and read those articles and you get angry at the left.
Because you do not consider protest a right.
