Again, not the problem. The problem is the neo-nazi speakers bringing their own violent followers to the audience. Who, you know, shoot at the others and kill them with cars and stuff. This is worlds away from thoughtcrime. They bring conventional violent crime.
I will admit there is a real problem with some of these types that maintain the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability and pretend to be respectable. I think it is unlikely that Spencer actually arranged in advance for some neo-nazis to show up and fire into the audience, but I doubt it really shocked him.
Straddling the line of illegality is something that these right line trolls have really mastered, or at least the public leaders have. People like Spencer or Milo can factually claim that they are peaceful even as their entourage engages in tremendous violence and mayhem. It proposes an interesting problem that I see no clear solution to. Jettisoning 1A protections on campus doesn't strike me as a good solution though.
The meta-debate about to what degree society should tolerate/encourage "bad" speech (shelving how we define it for the moment) gives a proxy bit of legitimacy to the bad speech.
We don't have to bend over backwards to have the "Where is the line, slippery slope, who watches the watchmen" hand wringing everytime Johnny Nazi stands up and does the whole "Hey I'm just exercising my right to talk about annihilating Jews like animals" routine.
Putting me effort into keeping the "What do we do with bad speech?" debate away from the actual bad speech so it doesn't turn into a bunch of try-hard edge-lords defending the worst of the worst would help.
Yes it is. A microphone a platform does not make if the microphone is unplugged. A stage does not a platform make if students opposed to your speech make so much noise that nobody, not even your supporters, is able to hear it...or if you become so frustrated that you eventually stop trying to give it. (Both of which happened in Florida)
But this is silly, quite frankly. If you want to personally insist that kind of behavior can't be called "deplatforming", then don't - call it whatever you want, and my position will easily conform to "approve of various methods, including deplatforming and (whatever name you decide is the only name that action can be called)". The end result is the same - and it certainly isn't "sunlight". Spencer's message was completely buried by the masses who refused to let it be heard.
I'm seeing this differently. Deplatforming based on content is worlds away from denying a venue to do the speaker bringing along violent elements. One is ideological censorship, the other a demonstrable public safety concern.
Richard Spencer was banned from Europe in 2014 for trying to host a white nationalism conference in Hungary. There was no violence, or threat of violence, involved - only the fact of the subject of his event. His banning there is functionally identical to David Icke's banning from Australia earlier this year. It was deplatforming, even by your exclusive definition.
Richard Spencer was banned from Europe in 2014 for trying to host a white nationalism conference in Hungary. There was no violence, or threat of violence, involved - only the fact of the subject of his event. His banning there is functionally identical to David Icke's banning from Australia earlier this year. It was deplatforming, even by your exclusive definition.
Is this a joke? I'm sure he wouldn't be welcomed in Germany either. But this is the US, not the EU or AU. Our interpretation of freedom of speech is a tad different. And I think you know that. Didn't your Spencer Fan Club (that most of us hadn't heard of) go over that?
Deplatforming is plus or minus denying someone a soapbox, and in context here, based on the ideological content of their speech. Heckling is not deplatforming. Public safety concerns are not deplatforming. Refusing to let unpopular ideas be heard at all in public is.
Yes it is. A microphone a platform does not make if the microphone is unplugged. A stage does not a platform make if students opposed to your speech make so much noise that nobody, not even your supporters, is able to hear it...or if you become so frustrated that you eventually stop trying to give it. (Both of which happened in Florida)
But this is silly, quite frankly. If you want to personally insist that kind of behavior can't be called "deplatforming", then don't - call it whatever you want, and my position will easily conform to "approve of various methods, including deplatforming and (whatever name you decide is the only name that action can be called)". The end result is the same - and it certainly isn't "sunlight". Spencer's message was completely buried by the masses who refused to let it be heard.
The sunlight was the protesters themselves, showing what they thought of Spencer and his ideas. And good for them. He was allowed to appear and speak his drivel.. And hecklers are allowed to heckle. I call that a satisfactory solution.
I will admit there is a real problem with some of these types that maintain the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability and pretend to be respectable. I think it is unlikely that Spencer actually arranged in advance for some neo-nazis to show up and fire into the audience, but I doubt it really shocked him.
Straddling the line of illegality is something that these right line trolls have really mastered, or at least the public leaders have. People like Spencer or Milo can factually claim that they are peaceful even as their entourage engages in tremendous violence and mayhem. It proposes an interesting problem that I see no clear solution to. Jettisoning 1A protections on campus doesn't strike me as a good solution though.
Agreed, their facade makes it difficult. It comes down to sticking to our values or practicality, much like the ACLU with the Spokie nazis, which a certain large canine is wont to frequently remind us of, and with which I reluctantly agree. I search for workarounds like hecklers vetoes and the like, or the less legal approaches and trying not to get caught. Just not comfortable with abandoning 1A principles when we don't like their outcome.
Isn't this a little presumptuous of a statement? You and one other person in this thread hadn't heard of him prior, so "most of us".
Spencer catapulted to national attention during the Trump campaign when it became apparent that white supremacists and nationalist were, increasingly openly, stumping for Trump within their sphere of influence and even dictating the direction of his campaign to an extent when Trump began taking their allies on-board. The largest spotlight was shone on this connection by Hillary Clinton in August of 2016 with her "basket of deplorables" speech, which I suppose you also haven't heard about.
Spencer in particular first appears in mainstream media in the months leading up to the 2016 election and has a prominent place immediately after the election proper, as Nazis and allies began making a public show of celebrating Trump's election. Spencer claims to have invented the term "alt-right"; whether he did or not, he did create one of the earliest and largest alt-right websites. I realize that news sources like USA Today, The Huffington Post, Salon, and The New York Times are rather rather obscure outlets with relatively small readerships; but I hope you will at the very least concede that they have some nation-wide exposure.
The New York Times article, which is dated September 2016 - two full months prior to the election, and no less than four months prior to the inauguration at which Spencer was so lovingly caressed in a manner most befitting, seems to be where he truly reached national attention for the first time.
The term was coined in 2008 by Richard Spencer, a white supremacist whose National Policy Institute says it is “dedicated to the heritage, identity and future of people of European descent in the United States, and around the world.” Through his online writings and YouTube channel, Mr. Spencer is a key player in the social-media universe where this core group of Trump supporters get their “news,” from sources with which most people aren’t familiar. A quick scan shows that immigration is not only their most important issue, it’s pretty much their only issue.
Now, all joking aside, it's certainly possible that if you were utterly oblivious or apathetic to the rising threat of the alt-right and its connection with Donald Trump, and simply didn't read anything in the media related to them, you may indeed never have heard of Richard Spencer until he was punched. But the way you insist on ridiculing the idea that anybody would've heard of him before you did except his "fans", is really making you look ignorant.
...the bolded being precisely what was accomplished by the crowd in Florida. If you don't believe this, try seeing how many mainstream media articles covering the night you can find that contain quotes from Spencer's actual speech - you know, that contained his unpopular ideas - compared to the articles that only quote his complaints about the crowd, if they quote him at all.
Look, I already said you don't have to agree about the definition of "deplatforming". Call it whatever you want. The fact is, shutting down Spencer's message - preventing it from being heard at all whatsoever - is what happened. Figuratively, the hecklers unplugged his microphone. And the effect it created helped lead to Spencer's fall back into obscurity. Not "sunshine", not debate, not free and unrestricted access to the "marketplace of ideas". Just an absolute shutdown.
The protesters didn't say anything about his ideas. That was the beauty of it - if they had allowed him to articulate his ideas and then argued with those, that would've been allowing him access to the marketplace. But they didn't. He was drowned in a tsunami of "Go Gators". Not one of Spencer's ideas saw the light that night; the stage he was standing on meant nothing.
Nobody is saying that ANTI-nazis should be denied platforms. I'm happy with only the white-whatevers being denied. Let the antis get all the platforms they want. If you want to define "sunshine" to mean "so thoroughly and utterly drowned out by opposition protesters that the racists literally can't get a word in edgewise", well in that case
You seem to have forgotten that you've already lost the war, regardless of what battle you engaged in the past. All the countries in the "developed world" at least have decided that some speech is prohibited. All we can discuss is exactly what speech can be prohibited.
For myself I am happy with speech that attempts to have me killed I.e.Nazism being prohibited. We know what happens when Nazism is allowed to flourish , literally people like me are among the millions of people that are killed.
That very well may be true however the association is out there in medialand and MRA speech is classified by some as objectionable speech and I'm just trying to get a bit of a handle of what people would like to see removed from "the marketplace of ideas". Other than nazis, that is.
As an aside, I wonder what ever happened to Big Red.
We KNOW that marketplaces don't work without a regulatory framework and ways to enforce them.
And we know they still go off the rails from time to time. And we know that some things have to stay off the market for the sake of society as a whole.
So I see zero problem with making it really hard for some opinions to enter the marketplace, if they are dangerous for the day-to-day operation of the place.
Do you think there is a potential for the abuse of this power? Whoever goes about regulating the marketplace of ideas will be in a position to empower some ideas at the expense of others. That seems very easily subject to abuse to me.
Do you think there is a potential for the abuse of this power? Whoever goes about regulating the marketplace of ideas will be in a position to empower some ideas at the expense of others. That seems very easily subject to abuse to me.
If you have the power.... and regulators usually don't.
As in any market place, power rests with those who know more than others about how the market works.
Free Speech has the drawback that it wants to be free instead of asking for a price upfront. This is why it needs protecting, because if you don't pay to hear someone speak, someone else is, which means someone has a financial or political interest in you hearing something.
I believe the Marketplace of Ideas could work much better on a Subscription basis.
Had you bothered to read, rather than composing page long diatribes, I said that I had heard of him, but that he wasn't the celebrity you make him out to be. It was your fan club I hadn't heard of. Just read it again, you'll get it. At the time of ye olde punch, his name had trended once- for the 'Hail Trump' speech he gave in DC. Looky, I even have a google trendy thing:
Yeah, no, he didn't. Kind of no one had any interest at all in him, according to google, till that DC speech. Then, his popularity actually peaked at the Punch. A spike again at Charlottesville, and the final hurrah at UFla.
However, I'm not doing this with you again. It's ridiculous to keep correcting your gotchas when you don't read the posts. See ya on the next one.
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