At a Library Near You

[At a library near you]

Briefly noted:

  • David Harsanyi is not shy about pointing a finger: We’re Slowly Killing The First Amendment.

    The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things.

    Technocrats, “journalists,” the president, and self-styled experts often view unfettered speech as a cancer that threatens “diversity” or “social justice” or “democracy” or “the environment” or “safety” or “unions” or dozens of other issues that are perched high above speech in the hierarchy of modern values. The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters.

    The denigrating terms "free speech fundamentalis(m|t)" has been rife on the net for years, and it seems to be invariably tied to an argument for forcing people you don't like to shut up. A few Google hits picked at random:

    • "The damage a fundamentalist approach to free speech can cause our educational systems should be …" [Inside Higher Ed, 2021]
    • "In advocating an absolutist view of free speech, the Free Speech Fundamentalists bear many similarities to the Gun Rights Fundamentalists." [ Harvard Political Review, 2018]
    • "Six facts free speech fundamentalists love to ignore" [Humanist Voices, 2017]

    You get the idea. All the Right People know that "fundamentalism" is bad; it's linked with those kooky Christians who probably speak in tongues and deal in fire and brimstone. So… yeah, free speech fundamentalism is just like that other icky thing. It's the same cheap trick used in appending "deniers" to link People Saying Disagreeable Things About a Topic: Holocaust denial is bad, hence: "climate deniers", "election deniers"…

  • Everyone's giving Elon advice, so why should Jacob Sullum stay off that bandwagon: Elon Musk Should Take a Clear Stand Against Censorship by Proxy.

    From the outside, Twitter's content moderation decisions look haphazard at best. From the inside, they look worse, especially because government officials play an unseemly and arguably unconstitutional role in shaping those decisions.

    The internal communications that Elon Musk, Twitter's new owner, has been gradually revealing to a select few journalists show that the company's former executives arbitrarily applied the platform's vague rules and surreptitiously suppressed content from disfavored accounts. The "Twitter Files" also confirm that the company had a cozy relationship with federal agencies, allowing them to indirectly censor speech they deemed dangerous.

    Musk, a self-described "free speech absolutist," is trying to signal that things will be different under his ownership. He faces a daunting challenge as he attempts to implement lighter moderation policies without abandoning all content restrictions, lest Twitter become a "free-for-all hellscape" that alienates users and advertisers.

    Oh yeah: please pretend I made the same comments about "free speech absolutis(t|m)" as I did about "free speech fundamentalis(t|m)" above. As we geeks know, "only a Sith deals in absolutes."

  • John Sexton asks and answers: Does diversity training work? No one can really say.

    A professor of psychology named Betsy Levy Paluck wrote an opinion piece Monday about her research into corporate diversity training. As she points out, corporations have invested massively in this kind of DEI training especially over the last two years but no one can really say if it’s doing any good or, alternatively, doing more harm than good.

    Let me be cynical here: of course it "works". Because it achieves its actual goals: (1) employing a bunch of people who lack otherwise marketable skills; (2) keeping "activists" quiet, out of the offices of university presidents and CEOs, away from Boards of Directors/Trustees meetings.

  • At the Dispatch, Kevin D. Williamson notes a sad trend: Living Under ‘Marshall Law’.

    Here at The Dispatch, we are mostly anti-snark and anti-sneer, so I will try to consider this question earnestly: What does it say about our country that we are governed by illiterates?

    One “Marshall Law” is a typo. Two is a trend. And the recently published trove of January 6-related texts is a testament to the illiteracy of the people who represent millions of Americans in Congress.

    During the attempted coup d’état following Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene texted Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to say that she had been discussing the possibility of the president’s declaring “Marshall law” with her fellow Republicans. “I don’t know on those things,” she said—she would cop to being only Marshall-law curious, not a full-on advocate.

    One full-on advocate was Rep. Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who also texted Meadows: “Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!”

    Norman’s prose has all of the hallmarks of Drunk Facebook Uncle: multiple exclamation points!!! LOTS OF ALL-CAPS EXCITEMENT! Random Capitalization of Such Words as “Republic.” Generally poor grammar. And, of course, “Marshall Law.”

    I hope I've avoided that here, but you don't have to look hard to find it among us lowly bloggers.


Last Modified 2024-01-30 7:11 AM EDT