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National Coalition Calls for Campus Censorship of "Offensive" Speech (washingtonpost.com)
schwit1 writes with this opinion piece from Eugene Volokh, who teaches free speech law at UCLA School of Law, about the push to ban "offensive" speech and censor websites on campus. He writes: "A large coalition of advocacy groups has asked the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights to pressure colleges to (1) punish students for their speech and (2) block student access to certain Web sites — especially sites such as Yik Yak, which allow students to anonymously post their views..... Yet another example of today's Anti-Free Speech Movement for American universities — unfortunately, one that fits well into the Education Department's attitudes. Fortunately, courts have firmly rejected these kinds of calls to restrict college student speech, though the OCR and the college administrations it pressures can get away with a lot of restrictions until the lawsuits are actually brought."
... how very European of them.
STFU. What was that? Rights. Well...
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Liberals are all about freedom, expression, tolerance, etc. until you do or say something that they don't like.
Tolerance and acceptance only apply to those they tolerate and accept. Everyone else gets branded a bigot hate monger, racist, misogynist, etc. the instant they exercise their own right to speak their mind or utter any un-PC truths. This behavior by liberals, of course, is the very definition of bigotry.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/
goes into more details...
This is the worst possible thing to do, not just for the basic liberties. The Atlantic published an article explaining why.
We can't cocoon people and then let them out into the world. This is elementary-school treatment at a University Level.
Free speech only means anything if it's the freedom to say things that are dangerous or unpopular.
It shouldn't mean the freedom to only say what is benign, acceptable, trivial, or politically correct.
During the 1960s college and university campuses were the birth places of free speech for students. Times have certainly changed with students demanding censorship.
political correctness offends me.
OMG, if we let people say whatever they want, they might say something that conflicts with my worldview and gives me a boo-boo or a tummyache.
Wah Wah Wah!
SJWs, please help protect me from hearing anything I don't like!!
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
You know, I was just struck with how like vaccination this whole thing is - these students grew up in a much more 'free speech' era than, say, the 1960s. As such, they aren't used to seeing the harm that anti-free speech laws and regulations cause.
Much like anti-vaxxors today who feel free to refuse vaccination because they haven't experienced the outbreaks and plagues that happened in history.
I mean, I understand because I'm old enough to have a grandfather who was permanently affected by polio. So I grew up with that. But those much younger than me?
I don't read AC A human right
Upon considering an idea, the first question ought not to be, "Is it offensive?" but rather, "Is it true?"
has ended by fiat.
Bad Car Analogy in 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
Have gnu, will travel.
Thats the true power, those who get to make the list of "Offensive" things to ban/censor. Might be the crazy reason we have a first amendment, and a 2nd to make sure we keep it.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I remember when it was the religious right that was trying to impose its values on society using the government (eg: abortion rights). The left was positioning itself as supporting the live and let live attitude, especially concerning sex. Now, today's left is all about campus 'rape tribunals' that model soviet show trials and pushes out tons of fear-mongering propaganda to create neurotic behavior in young people (mostly men) about sex. Now this 'coalition'... I guess like the neocons censored for jesus, the New Left censors for marx. Yay for big statists!
How about we just let individuals speak their minds and deal with the fact that not everyone will agree? That is a required cornerstone of learning, right? Free thought? Free expression that includes criticism? What a bunch of pissant crybabies this society's become.
It may not be, but when it's super easy to expand the definitions of 'harassment' to include criticism, suddenly the law becomes a tool to censor speech.
STFU.
So what you are saying is that you find this idea highly offensive and would like to have the people who suggested it censored. ;-)
Mind you I think you have hit on by far the most educational response to this request which is to immediately censor the idiots who made it. This would of course trigger a huge backlash from them against the injustice of them being silenced which would be the perfect time to point out that you found their ideas highly offensive and were just giving them exactly what they asked for.
Hopefully that would teach them a valuable lesson on the importance of free speech but sadly I doubt it if they were stupid enough to come up with the request in the first place.
"What what what!" - Kyle's Mom
Knowing it all since the late 70's.
I don't like it, but honestly I feel like they should be able to say what they want so long as they don't get in my face about it. Most people are jerks anyway, so it makes sense that Yik Yak would be used to release all that pent up jerk-steam anonymously. Being a gentlemen in public, but a racist backwoods hick on your own time? That's fine by me. You can even have your little pseudo-intellectual conversations about it on Storm Front, call yourself a European American, and a "Paleo-conservative". I don't care. I'll defend your right to be a jerk and to have your online discourse come back to haunt you when you fail to be anonymous about it one day.
The FACT is that, using the federal govt's own stats, HIV in the US is primarily a male homosexual disease. It's common in the English-speaking world to say that a bad thing affecting a particular group is a "curse" (with no witch or witchdoctor implications - it's a figure of SPEECH, which I guess the left cannot tolerate).
When ALL the stats, even those collected by people with a political agenda contrary to the results, say that a particular thing is associated with a particular subset of the population it is completely dishonest/ignorant/childish to insist that the objective stats are true. HIV prevalence in all Western societies is primarily among those who engage in male homosexual acts (both homosexual men and bisexual men). HIV affects IV drug users to a lesser extent, and to a lesser extent the sexual partners of the afore-mentioned three groups. The African continent is the outlier in having HIV as a large problem in the "normal" population because the cultural norms are very different and ignorance in many "at-risk" populations is stunning; There are ares of Africa, for example, where men believe they can be cured of AIDS by having sex with young virgin girls. That sort of stuff pushes HIV into the non-gay population in a way that simply will never happen in the Western world.
Bill Buckley was right on this, as on many other things.
Oh, and the Democrats in California passed a law in 2000 making it illegal to teach anything like this in the schools - anything that can be construed as "anti-gay" is illegal in the public schools - so much for "free speech" and liberals supporting truth and science.
fight stupidity with more stupidity
It seems like you've already started
Nothing to see here - budding student political types are always looking for causes to make noise about and be noticed. Some causes are valid, some just look like they are an easy option. I suspect this is the latter. Saying "be nice to each other" is so much easier than building a child care centre, sorting out transport hassles for students with the local government, or doing something for depressed students.
To be fair, anyone who identifies themselves as leftist or rightist are utter idiots. Intelligent people evaluate each issue individually and make choices (if necessary) to address those issues based on what they believe is the most productive and constructive (or in some cases, the easiest) option.
....
The real problem isn't the left or the right... it's the left AND the right and every other damn option out there.
While I am entirely aware I risk making the same mistake, you apparently have a gift of making impressively stupid comments without applying thought or reason to what you say and instead simply spout some populist nonsense that is little more than finger pointing.
Take responsibility for yourself, this article identifies a REAL problem. The problem is, we've (I am not even in America, yet I recognize "WE" is accurate) have established a "civilization" that contains some very clear and identifiable problems.
1) There are knuckle-draggers in our higher education system that clearly are in desperate need of an education but are also clearly not likely to obtain one as they have shown they're as ignorant as you by stereotyping based on some trait they believe makes another person less than they are... based on a group... which generally has no actual genuinely common characteristics.
2) There are fools in the higher education system who lack the intelligence to simply ignore the knuckle-draggers and steer clear of them if needed. While I can't identify from the article if the targets of the hate-speech are those who are complaining, I will assume at least a few of them are. The fools (like yourself and likely me for rising to the bait) making the hateful comments are a waste of time, food and air. What they say has utterly no relevance to anything. These fools who take offense to knuckle-draggers making such comments are a major problem.
3) There are fools who seem to believe the solution to the problem is to try and hide it. People who I don't believe are left, right, lib, conservative, etc... but instead are truly the most dangerous people I know, the PC enforcement crowd have identified a long list of causes they "feel strongly about". They want to the be the mommies of us all and instead of attempting to identify and resolve the issues progressively... devising an intelligent solution, they instead want to make us cover our ears and eyes and pretend like it will go away if we just sweep it under the rug and come up with punishments for people who say naughty things.
Fact 1) Thank goodness for the Internet... Racism is 100x better today than it was 10 years ago. Racists who talk on Facebook and Twitter have been learning that they have lots in common with all those people they used to hate for skin color and religion and now have learned that they can hate people no matter what their skin color or religion. So as a result, now a formerly racist person who desperately needs to believe that some group of people must be responsible for why their lives aren't better... they can point fingers at all kinds of other groups of people. It's like Christmas in July.
Fact 2) We don't need mommies and we really don't need PC enforcers. It's better to simply avoid/ignore people who we find offensive. Which leads us to...
Fact 3) People like you are a waste of time to make any effort on. It's just simply built into your system to pick some group to blame without actually even taking the time to identify whether those people are in fact a group or not. There is nothing me or any other person could say to teach you to think intelligently and objectively about each scenario and then make productive recommendations. Which leads us to
Fact 4) Finger pointers really aren't a necessity and are actually generally not even wanted. We have Fox, CNN, ABC and BBC to do that for us... we don't need anyone else to do it. I tend to find the shows on the news networks tend to spend a lot of time constructing groups of people who agree with e
Yes, because, you know, truth (or lack of it) is defined by the number of people who believe relative to the number that believe something else, right? Galileo is spinning in his grave..
So, lets see, your post boils down to argumentum ad populum, and ad hominem. Your statement about universities is also wrong. While places like liberty.edu are censorious, Yale and Harvard are no better. Don't forget Duke.
https://youtu.be/im25MN5AwIc?t...
What the? Can someone please explain to me how colleges have become havens for the very net nanny's we were all sky-is-falling about back in '90s? Don't F with free speech. Period.
College is about expanding your mind (and your alcohol tolerance, if you're into that sorta thing); not growing more closed minded and intolerant. Holy crap, I fear for our future and for these nimrods coming into the workforce. As if the current brand of entitled millenials weren't bad enough. It's going to take kids of us Gen-Xers to clean up this mess (do they even have a generation name yet? let's skip it.).
FFS!
Best professor I had, at the beginning of a History of Science course, said that some of us will be offended in his class, in fact, he HOPED we would be offended by something or he didn't do his job correctly. He stressed that university is for free thought and that even offensive thoughts should be talked about and debated, We are there to have our ideas and sensibilities challenged by a whole world of thoughts, we are not supposed to be indoctrinated in any one school of thought. Universities are not 'safe havens' they are a place that gathers ALL knowledge, no matter the politics or religions of the people there.
The entire course came back to this point over and over, showing that through history science and politics are entwined but how universities were places where offensive ideas had a way of cutting through that. Some ideas were eventually discarded, others were able to thrive. His entire last 3 hour lecture was about offensive ideas and how they should be protected in universities. Wonderful course and I hope lots more people take his course, though it's a very small class of 12 to foster discussion better.
I know plenty of Republicans and Libertarians that despise the extremism of the Tea Party. The Tea Party makes them look like idiots.
The progressive/liberal side of the spectrum has their own "Tea Party" and they are frequently referred to as "SJWs" or "Social Justice Warriors". They need a better name, though, because there are genuine social justice "warriors" that do good-- you know, like fighting against gerrymandering and police brutality. The "SJWs" that mess it all up are those that attempt to change the meanings of words. Examples:
Violence: Violence used to mean action that caused physical harm. Today, SJWs (the bad ones) are trying to change the common vocabulary so that speech that makes someone uncomfortable can be described as "violence".
Triggering: Triggering is a medical term regarding the genuine overwhelming emotions and memories that come flooding to one's forethought after being reminded of an extremely traumatic experience. Today, SJWs (the bad ones) are attempting to make everything a potential "trigger" for someone because it reminds them of something bad. It's not the same.
Racism: This one's pretty bad. Racism has a very specific definition. It's the belief that one race is better than another. However, SJWs (the bad ones) are attributing racism to just about anything that touches the topic of race, ethnicity, culture, etc. People accuse things without the capability of having beliefs of racism ("Is science racist?").
The examples go on and on... these (bad) SJWs are the Tea Party of the left. They tear down anyone who isn't as extreme as they are. But here's the rub-- since they fight for things that are generally accepted as good (reducing harm, protecting people, etc.), you just can't come out as against them or their tactics. And THAT is why schools are bending over backwards to not fight them. Schools are horrifically liability averse and they will almost always give in to the extremists on their side(s) rather than fight them and risk being slandered as rape-cultured and racist organizations.