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Freedom of speech
Please be careful, my strawmen are highly flammable:
"I should be able to say everything I want everywhere, but people's negative reactions are censorship."
"Freedom of speech is a concept that favours those in power, and is highly problematic, thus we should lobby for more laws problematizing certain modes of speech, because that's sure not to backfire."
"You just can't handle people's negative reactions, freedom of speech goes both ways and going after your sponsors, family and employers, death threats and fabricating stories about you clearly fall under this banner."
"You not wanting me to call something retarded will lead to IngSoc."
"I'm going to ignore freedom of speech as an ideal and tell you the definition only applies to gubbermint censorship like I'm a clever fuck pointing out something new."
"I'm saying edgy stuff in a social circle where this is taboo and got kicked out for it, clearly this situation is representative of the national climate and I'm a free speech martyr."
Fuck all the drama(*proceeds to create more drama*).
Comments
There's far too many examples on the internet of people who are told to shut up one way or another on a forum (be it literally "shut up", or being banned, or being mod-edited, etc.) and they claim in response that it's an infringement of free speech rights.
No, free speech rights are a government thing.
I think it's more that, while a person is allowed to say what they want, nobody is obliged to provide them a platform, in this case being the forum.
Yeah, freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from criticism. What's amusing is how the people that accuse everyone else of being oversensitive are the ones who get really butthurt when someone calls them idiots in return.
Anyone who has a projector and a computer available in a college hall should just switch to typing out his or her talk if they're drowned out by chants.
I liked this blog post.My stock responses to "Can't you take a joke?" are these two videos.
If someone calls you an idiot for thinking retarded is funny, summon the powers of the slippery slope fallacy("if I have to censor that word, where does it end?"): http://disabledfeminists.com/2009/10/11/ableist-word-profile-idiot/
His reponse was horribly boring, but to say that it wasn't funny is overestimating the standards people have for laughs. The "harhar retarded" and "show that PC pansy" segment is probably larger and easier to please than the "yay, he punched upwards" and "we can make a reaction GIF out of this with too little frames" crowd.
Wait, people are seriously arguing "idiot" is ableist now?
There is someone seriously arguing is , yes.
I suppose.
Anyway, just to throw in my two cents, I think that, while free speech is not the same as freedom from consequences, preemptively silencing your opponents is itself antithetical to the principle of free speech.
For example, there have been several protests that have attempted to shut down men's issues conferences at the University of Toronto on the part of feminists, and a lot of non-feminists have become convinced that this means feminists don't care about men's issues at all (and accusing them of being sexist themselves).
Now, I'm not personally all that fond of MRA arguments myself, but in this case I think that attempting to shut down the event before it's even able to get off the ground is extremely poor PR for feminists (just look at the outrage on pretty much any part of the internet), and in this case only serves to strengthen MRA public appeal by making them look like the victims.
Basically, there's a key difference between exercising your free speech rights to criticize how your opponents exercise theirs and publicly harassing them so that they can't speak at all.
Not to mention if they let the MRAs actually speak and recorded it(for right-wingers this is normal procedure when exposing some of the more loony stuff that gets spouted at leftish conferences) they'd have plenty of material to mock. These folks are basically self-defeating.
It's more than just about free speech. MRAs are a known hate group, and providing a venue for them to talk implicitly validates their views. It's the same reason Ann Coulter wasn't welcome after telling a Muslim girl to "Take a camel!" I don't see how the "Blurred Lines" rhetoric of MRAs, for instance, adds anything to the university discourse that isn't actively damaging to people's perceptions of the world.
Obviously, it would be ideal to ignore them, but the people in the audience certainly aren't.
^If that worked, Rush Limbaugh would be off the air right now. Also, your smugness with regards to being a male talking about women's issues is quite irritating.
The self-defeating remark was aimed at MRAs, not at feminists. They are on the level of Limbaugh's remarks to Sandra Fluke at the least. The backlash against him was enormous: http://thinkprogress.org/media/2012/03/10/442048/breaking-98-major-advertisers-dump-rush-limbaugh/
His current show caters to a largely static audience that is already decided on political perspective anyway, as far as I can tell from here: http://www.politicususa.com/2014/05/01/rush-limbaughs-ratings-state-complete-collapse.html while MRAs bring something seemingly new to the table that looks promising and progressive on the surface level(suicide rates! draft! parental issue! domestic violence against men!) and then proceeds to veer into whining about feminists and obsessing over false rape accusations and paternity fraud once they open their gobs. But you won't know that until they actually open their gobs and make a complete mess of themselves(I mean, this is priceless: http://mensrightsactivism.com/post/91465528238/maxofs2d-hahaha-mens-rights-activist-and . There is enough of a PR mess already without 'feminists shut down conference that talks about male suicide rates, combat deaths and as victims of domestic violence' spin.
On smugness: I have that nauseatingly flippant 'seemingly sane outside observer' tone with everything I post here and have for years now. You know the areas in which I'm biased without me needing to point them out, but I'm pretty confident that the data on the most recent topic is largely impossible to misinterpret through privilege filters and will gladly source-dump to show that.
Sorry about that. I've seen so much mansplaining that I get a little impulsive (it was actually why I took an extended break from the forums).
Actually, I remember when I first heard about the men's rights movement and thought it was a good thing because I wasn't aware of the hokier crap. I agree that to those not in the know, it looks like a valid concern, so yeah, it's easily spun as male persecution to protest them. On the other hand, there's a cult-like undercurrent in the way they lure in unsuspecting young boys and men, so I think the protesters have a case in not wanting that on campus. I believe the best solution to that issue is to engage and debunk the student group that invited the speakers onto campus in the first place.
No prob, I've always felt the Socrates trap works the most glorious on that type of person, so it would have worked out either way.
It reminds me a little of Chanology and how spreading counter-info on flyers about them always had people give a more sympathetic response from the public than trollish antics towards the ronbots. A counter protest with flyers with implicating quotes from the actual speakers could work too, I'd wager.
If I may play devil's advocate? I think the issue with false rape charges isn't that they're common, it's that there's not enough in the way of due process to protect the accused. Hell, I've even heard someone make a convincing case that false rape charges are in many ways a racial issue due to the prevalence of racial profiling against African-Americans.
Granted, the MRAs I've seen don't really seem consider the issues of anyone other than heterosexual white men, and they seem largely complicit in letting the idiots, bigots, and kooks run the show, so...