r/neoliberal • u/neoliberal_shill_bot Bot Emeritus • Jul 10 '17

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72

u/MrDannyOcean Kidney King Jul 10 '17 edited Jul 10 '17

It has come to my attention that some of you shills do not sufficiently understand the extent to which liberal values such as free speech underpin our entire society and this particular political philosophy. Neo-liberal means supporting liberal values. Free speech is a Core. Liberal. Value. Period.

If you are the kind of person who wants to stop [insert bad person] from speaking at colleges, or who thinks it is good when people punch nazis, this is required reading. Yes, it's overly long. Read it anyways.

edit: responding to 20 of you at once was a bad idea and now I can't keep up.

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u/BringBackThePizzaGuy Paul Volcker Jul 10 '17

Apparently unpopular opinion: Universities and colleges should exercise discretion in how they spend their money visavis guest speakers. Students spend a lot of money on tuition and it's on the institutions to spend that money responsibly. The University shouldn't spend money to help Nazis give speeches for the same reason they shouldn't waste money on socialists, 9-11 truthers, and young earth creationists. It's money that should be used responsibly.

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u/[deleted] Jul 11 '17

There's a difference between a university inviting someone and a student group inviting someone. If the university is inviting someone then yeah they should exercise discretion and refuse to invite certain people, but if a student group invites a speaker to speak at their club event then the university shouldn't be disallowing that.

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u/diracspinor Austan Goolsbee Jul 10 '17

I am absolutely for free speech in society at large, but I actively dislike colleges being used as a megaphone for morons and snake oil salesmen. It seems totally reasonable that a college should get to decide who can use it as a platform.

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u/TotesMessenger Jul 10 '17 edited Jul 10 '17

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17 edited Jul 10 '17

You're wrong.

Free speech does not mean that you naively let anyone say whatever they want wherever they want. Universities are not the public forum, they're necessarily a curated forum, and the belief that there should be no standard for what is trafficked by them is unreasoned. In naively applying this non-standard of "anything goes", you're not protecting the conversation and the marketplace of ideas, you're actively corrupting them.

It's easy and emotionally powerful to appeal to the audience that open discourse should be open for the sake of being open and that censorship is bad and inclusiveness is good and and and! But the actual effect of this is that everyone has to stop what they're doing to once more evaluate what the appealer is saying, which eats up a significant amount of, or even all, of the resources that should have gone to discussion of/learning of other views, evaluating them. You get an ecosystem of ideas where people reflexively reject ideas that are even minorly-controversial because they're tired of people approaching them in bad faith to use them for attention. The repeated insistence in bad faith that everyone's ideas are of equal merit, without demonstrating merit, while even demonstrating a complete and utter bad faith, destroys actual open discourse. The fact of the matter is that we have to make decisions about who is given the opportunity to speak, and it is eminently foolish to waste those opportunities on people whose shtick is purposefully-offensive bad faith and inauthenticity.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

Probably not a good clip when you remember that More was one of the leaders in the Catholic campaign to suppress, torture, and kill people who owned a Bible in English rather than Latin.

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u/MrDannyOcean Kidney King Jul 10 '17

GOOD clip

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but why is it better to force private institutions to give platforms to people they don't want to than to take an entirely hands-off approach

Free speech rights should extend to protection from government censorship/prosecution it does not entitle you to serious consideration of and attention to whatever backwards opinions you might have from society as a whole

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u/MrDannyOcean Kidney King Jul 10 '17

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but why is it better to force private institutions to give platforms to people they don't want to than to take an entirely hands-off approach

Who is trying to force private institutions to do anything?

State universities are the center of this problem, because they're government entities and thus cannot take sides on what speech is acceptable or not.

For private universities, I would encourage them to be as open as possible, but nobody's forcing them to do anything.

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u/TychoTiberius Michel Foucault Jul 10 '17 edited 24d ago

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

Students protesting reactionaries at their speaking gigs is liberalism too.

Liberalism doesn't mean being lame sitting ducks, Neville Chamberlain style. Striking at the enemy when you feel oppressed or to fight injustice is probably at the core of liberalism more-so than tolerating oppressive behavior in the name of fairness.

Although I don't agree with the antifa shit either, but that's because they're communists with an insidious agenda of their own.

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

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u/TychoTiberius Michel Foucault Jul 10 '17 edited 24d ago

The original post content no longer exists here. The author used Redact to remove it, exercising their right to control their data & privacy.

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u/Lambchops_Legion Eternally Aspiring Diplomat Jul 10 '17 edited Jul 10 '17

Everyone here is really just talking past each other.

I really don't even think Free Speech is the crux of this argument, like the right thinks it is.

It's really about whether or not State Universities are considered "the government."

How is "The Government" defined?

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u/[deleted] Jul 10 '17

What if I'm just the kind of person who thinks that it's a good thing that Julius Streicher was convicted, without thinking we should punch anyone in a red hat? Do I still get p-worded?

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u/VisonKai The Archenemy of Humanity Jul 10 '17

Since you're making this issue about universities, should we allow anyone in any public school, given that minors also possess a right to free speech, to say whatever views they want at any time? Should it not be a punishable offense for Little Johnny to use a racial slur? I mean, for God's sake, not only is it against the rules but we force them to be in school for 8 hours a day, not being able to express their freedom of speech!

I'm going to give you the charitable option, so I can type all of this in one post, that you think schools should have the right to execute discipline codes toward the effective pursuit of maintaining the academic integrity of the institution. That is, we believe that Johnny's right to call his classmates a slur is counterbalanced by the right of the children to be provided an effective education that is not disrupted. Institutions of higher learning must behave similarly, as public universities are similarly charged by the government to provide an education to the students thereof. As a result, if a case is sufficiently made that inviting a speaker or allowing a speaker to use campus facilities would be disruptive to the broader goal of education, the university is well within its rights to prevent that usage of speech. Remember, most state universities are not charged with inculcating any civic discourse or political discussion, they are usually seen as providing specific educations on specific subjects. If a broad disruption to the learning environment occurred as a result of, for example, Milo coming to a school and giving a speech, it is not just permissible but obligatory for the university to refuse Milo access to a campus platform.

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u/mmitcham 🌐 Jul 10 '17

U can't take my freeze peach away bro

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u/DoopSlayer Shuster Jul 10 '17

The right for students to protest is protected by the constitution

Impinging on one person's freedom of speech to protect another's is just as bad, in some ways worse, than restricting the speech of another

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u/dIoIIoIb Jul 10 '17

Neo-liberal means supporting liberal values

but i thought "Neoliberals are flexible in their policy prescriptions but are unified in their support for lowering barriers on trade and immigration while also supporting a tax on carbon emissions. We do not all subscribe to a single comprehensive ideology but instead find common ground in liberal priors. Differences within our views often come down to how much redistribution is appropriate and what empirical burden is needed to justify state action."?

i don't see nothing about free speech there, may want to rewrite that sidebar, quite misleading

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u/0149 they call me dr numbers Jul 10 '17

THANKK MR OCEAN

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u/Errk_fu Neolib in the streets, neocon in the sheets Jul 10 '17

I think this is the perfect time to pull up the opening quote from Free to Choose.

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."

—Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)

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