I’m thinking of universities mostly. They have become so insular in recent years: even the echo chamber is closely watched. Someone like Hitchens would have been cancelled 100 times over by now, and would be persona non grata at the most meaningful fora for his speech: college campuses. I find that…troubling, even if he could still blog or whatever.
lolz
Private institutions are not public fora. And there are approximately 50 million different private alternatives if your viewpoints are too toxic for the chosen privately owned fora.
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A lot of this is just conservative fiction.
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Is sincere debate always good, then?
That people are allowed to express viewpoints different than mine without having silly awards taken away from them I guess. I mean, what are people so afraid of if a renowned scientist asks a simple question on Twitter? As if he his body of work over decades somehow becomes irrelevant because he offended people
I really don’t care what offends people. If you’re religious I probably think your beliefs are silly and stupid and I’m not concerned if that offends you. Let’s talk it out and discuss it. If someone thinks me and people like me are dumb because we hold liberal or even socialist views you have every reason to say so without worrying about offending me. Do you know how many offensive names I’ve been called on this site? I don’t care. But what I do care about is the attempt to shame or worse, silence people because they hold a different view instead of letting them speak out and then arguing using logical discourse on why their position is wrong
Oh they do. Like all conservative arguments, they’re in bad faith. They just want to be bigots without people caling them bigots. To them, free speech is freedom from consequences of that free speech but not for anybody who disagrees with their bigotry.
They’re so damn good at playing the victim that even when they held all of the power in the government they still acted as though they were being personally victimized.
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Like this. What does this add to a conversation? Does the poster think he’s being clever? Has he made any kind of counter argument that contributes anything? No. It’s just stupid and designed to insult
I don’t think they even care about being called bigots any more. Trump made it okay for them to crawl out from their rocks en masse. Which just goes to show that all the shaming and identity politicking of the years prior didn’t do a damn bit of good at changing these people’s minds. Now it could be I’m wrong. We do seem to be winning the argument. At least in cities and it just might be they will be shut out. But we’re also dangerously close to another Trump-like figure winning again and then the whole shit house goes up in flames. I doubt this country survives another Trump
Can you give examples of what you mean?
The fora and florna of the internets.
I can’t speak for all of them but the deplorables in my family would like snap back that Democrats are the real racists or some shit like that. So they’d definitely take offense to it.
Over time, the racists do lose. It’s not the straight line downward that we are taught in school but in the long run it does trend downward. Problem is that those racists will find a new group to marginalize (trans people are an easy target) and start all over again.
It’s just my go to phrase when asking a question. Take out of the word so if you like and respond accordingly
Democratic policies ARE racist (more so in the past) and they cover it up with identity politics. Liberals eat it up and become complicit with smiles on their faces. This is exactly why I’m advocating to allow people to hang themselves with their use of free speech but be shown wrong thru reasoned argument and discourse rather than shouted down or shamed
Giving someone an award (and taking it away) is a form of speech.
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You seem to conflate Democrats with liberals. The current Democratic Party is not liberal. They are centrist, perhaps center-right with a few stray lefties like AOC in the mix trying to change things from within.
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I mean the dude is obviously welcome to say whatever toxic shit he wants but that doesn’t mean we have to invite him to our house for dinner or to award him a medal for our science club afterwards. It’s pretty reasonable to expect a voluntary science association to kick someone from their association after said person states toxic unscientific views through the ‘just asking for a friend’ lens and likely he was asked to apologize but instead choose to double down on being an asshat. Anyways noone is suggesting that he be censored by the state, if he wants to spew his dumb shit on one america news then so be it.
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This is my go to whenever some right wing conservative complains about a company caving to public outcry. But CAPITALISM!
I suppose it works for free speech too. I just worry about free speech becoming thought police. Again Dawkins gave no opinion on his query. He just offered it and said discuss. You are assuming he had other motives