SubJeff on 26/8/2019 at 07:54
Quote Posted by june gloom
I used to think TTLG would be better off with the likes of him banned, but to be honest you're probably preventing a mass shooting by keeping him busy. Keep up the good work.
Ha ha, come on Tony, this is a hilarious burn. It's clearly a joke so don't take it so seriously. It
is a hilarious burn though, and I'm suspicious re: it's origin. june - did you steal this from Dave Chapelle or something?
june gloom on 1/9/2019 at 09:54
No, I haven't stopped being funny after 2006.
PigLick on 1/9/2019 at 12:42
charlie murphy!
Tony_Tarantula on 1/9/2019 at 18:07
Alan Dershowitz...
Yes, THAT Alan Dershowitz (the Harvard Law Professor who was flying out to Epstein's Island and sending hired thugs to intimidate the victims), has weighed in.
(
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14794/the-dangerous-stalinism-of-the-woke-hard-left)
Quote:
Civil liberties are in greater danger today from the intolerant hard-left than from the bigoted hard-right. This may seem counterintuitive: There has been far more violence — mass shootings in malls, synagogues and other soft targets — from extremists who identify more with the hard-right than with the hard-left. But the influence of the hard-left on our future leaders is far more pervasive, insidious and dangerous than the influence of the hard-right.
People on the "woke" hard-left seem so self-righteous about their monopoly over Truth (with a capital T) that many of them see no reason to allow dissenting, politically incorrect, views to be expressed. Such incorrect views, they claim, make them feel "unsafe." They can feel safe only if views they share are allowed to be expressed. Feeling unsafe is the new trigger word for demanding censorship.
o university student has the right to be safe from uncomfortable ideas, only from physical threats, and any student who claims to be in physical fear of politically incorrect ideas does not belong at a university. The most extreme example of this distortion of the role of higher education took place at my own university when a distinguished dean of a Harvard residential college was fired from his deanship because some "woke" students claimed to feel unsafe in his presence because he was representing, as a defense lawyer, a man accused of rape.
We often forget that the concept of "political correctness" originated in the Stalinist Soviet Union, where Truth — political, artistic, religious — was determined by the central committee of the Communist Party and any deviation was regarded as unacceptable. To be sure, there is a vast difference between how Stalin treated political incorrectness and how the "woke" generation treats it. Stalin murdered those who deviated from his Truth, while "wokers" generally shun and discredit, though there has been occasional violence from elements of the hard-left toward those who deviate from their Truth. But both produce a similar result: less dissent, less reliance on the marketplace of ideas and more self-censorship.
For many "wokers," freedom of speech is nothing more than a weapon of the privileged used to subjugate the unprivileged. It a bourgeois concept that emanates from an anachronistic white, male constitution that is irrelevant to the contemporary world. Free speech for me — the underprivileged — but not for thee — the privileged. That is what the "wokers" want. Affirmative action for speech!
The other dangerous similarity between the Stalinists and the "wokers" is that both disdain due process for those they deem guilty of political incorrectness or other crimes and sins. They reject any presumption of innocence or requirement that the accuser bear the burden of proof. These bourgeois concepts are based on the recognition of human fallibility and uncertainty. For Stalinist and "wokers," there is no uncertainty or fallibility. If they believe someone is guilty, he must be. Why do we need a cumbersome process for determining guilt? The identities of the accuser and accused are enough. Privileged white men are guilty perpetrators. Intersectional minorities are innocent victims. Who needs to know more? Any process, regardless of its fairness, favors the privileged over the unprivileged.
When I was in college in the 1950s, it was the McCarthyite right that was censoring and denying due process. It was the liberal left that was defending free speech, dissent and due process. But for some on the left, this stance was self-serving, because it was people on the extreme left who were being denied these protections. Now that it is conservatives who are being censored and denied due process on campuses around the country, many on the left have remained silent. Civil liberties for me, but not for thee.
That is why I make the controversial claim that today the "woke" hard-left is more dangerous to civil liberties than the right.
To be sure there are hard right extremists who would use — and have used — violence to silence those with whom they disagree. They are indeed dangerous. But they have far less influence on our future leaders than their counterparts on the hard-left. They are not teaching our college age children and grandchildren. They are marginalized academically, politically and in the media. The opposite is true of hard-left Stalinists. Many have no idea who Stalin even was, but they are emulating his disdain for free speech and due process in the interests of achieving the unrealizable utopia they both sought. They also have in common the attitude that noble ends justify ignoble means.
It is precisely because the ends sought by the "wokers" are often noble — racial and gender equality, a fairer distribution of wealth, protection of the environment, a women's right to choose, gay marriage — that liberals find it harder to condemn them for their intolerance toward civil liberties. But we must always remember that it is not only the road to hell that is paved with good intentions. It is also the road to tyranny.
Alan M. Dershowitz is the Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law Emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of The Case Against the Democrats Impeaching Trump, Skyhorse Publishing, 2019. He is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at Gatestone Institute.
Starker on 1/9/2019 at 20:33
Oh, look, Tony, he almost strawmans "The Left" as hard as you do. Almost. What a coincidence. Is that why you crept under his gaberdine?
Here's a more substantive rebuttal to the entire premise (bolding mine):
Quote:
(
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/are-liberal-college-students-creating-free-speech-crisis-not-according-ncna858906)
It's currently politically correct to say college students are “against free speech.” Embracing this belief signals to the left that you're a nonpartisan rationalist concerned about classical liberal values, while signaling to the right that you oppose “crybully” campus “SJWs” in a time when Republican support for higher education is in decline.
[...]
The only problem with this thesis is: It's not true. As new and better data on the attitudes of young people toward free speech becomes available, the argument that college students are increasingly against free speech becomes harder and harder to sustain. There will always be anecdotal examples of overzealous and even reactionary young people, but the idea that such beliefs have overtaken a generation is overblown.
[...]
Today we have even better data. As Acadia University political science professor Jeffrey Sachs points out, according to a General Social Survey (GSS) dataset, “young people aged 18-34 are the most tolerant of potentially offensive speech and trending upward,” meaning
not only that young people are already the most tolerant of offensive speech, but that they're getting more tolerant. (Sachs points out one exception, which is tolerance for racist speech, where the 18-34 age group is about 4 percent below the national average).
Sachs also breaks down a recent Knight Foundation study looking specifically at free expression on campus, and finds that college students are more likely than U.S. adults in general to support an open environment for free expression. Further, echoing my hunch about the 2015 Pew Center data, Sachs points out other evidence that shows
going to college actually makes people more tolerant of offensive or opposing views.
[...]
The point, then, is that while we can point to some worrying trends worth keeping an eye on, we also have several positive trends in young people's attitudes toward free speech, particularly college graduates. The question remains, however, whether this data will change the minds of those still claiming broadly that college students are against free speech. I want to be optimistic, but I'm not holding my breath.
I'm not optimistic for two reasons in particular. For one,
the attempt to paint college students as “against free speech” is expressly partisan in how it targets students and faculty. That is, while people on the left and the right lament the supposed decline of free speech on campus, they're placing blame almost exclusively on left-leaning students (and occasionally on left-leaning faculty).
A Heterodox Academy analysis of the FIRE disinvitation data shows that
the most successful attempts to shut down speakers have come from right-leaning groups shutting down speech with which they don't agree, but this hasn't stopped pundits and politicians from seeing the student left as the gravest threat to free speech.
I've also pointed out numerous instances of right-wing political correctness that stifles speech, yet the partisan desire — especially on the right — to manufacture fear of a particularly “illiberal left” is an important part of the conservative playbook in the Trump era. This despite the fact that President Donald Trump has openly attempted to use the power of the presidency and the resources of government to silence athletes and journalists he doesn't like. Data is unlikely to change this attitude.
The second reason I'm not optimistic is that being “anti-PC” is now effectively a form of tribalist identity politics. When I draw attention to right-wing threats to freedom of speech, these counterexamples — whether data-based or anecdotal — tend to threaten anti-PC identity and cause membership to close ranks. In a particularly insightful article on “why fake news thrives online,” media researcher Judith Donath explains that the main function of sharing news on social media isn't to share information, but to bolster our ties to social groups by demonstrating affinity with the preferred ideas of the group.
[...]
Because of such propaganda, conservatives who see themselves, in some ways rightly, as victims of “the elite” are able to position themselves as fighting a scary, authoritarian, left-wing caricature. Indeed, the only way it's possible to see left-wing college students as a group whose power rivals that of the presidency or the billionaire donor class is by embracing the cartoon image of lefty students as little authoritarians, and promoting it despite counterevidence. The political investment in the myth of the authoritarian college student is simply more powerful than even the most comprehensive data analyses on the subject.
[...]
Quote:
(
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/31/17718296/campus-free-speech-political-correctness-musa-al-gharbi)
The status of free speech on college campuses is one of the most heated controversies in American public life today — and, in my view, somewhat overblown. In a couple of recent essays, my colleague Matt Yglesias and I surveyed the research on the topic and found little support for the claim that free speech rights are seriously imperiled at American universities.
In my piece, published earlier this month, I examined three data sources that I argued supported the view that
incidents of speech by students or professors being suppressed are relatively rare. When they do happen, these incidents often target liberals and leftists, despite the breathless media coverage of conservative speakers being run off campuses. Yglesias looked at polling on student attitudes toward free speech and found little evidence that they were particularly hostile to free expression.
A review of my essay and the underlying research — including conversations with the authors of the two studies in question — affirm the thesis of my piece: that
incidents of conservative speech being suppressed on campus are rare and do not add up to a national crisis.
[...]
Let's start by recapping the central thrust of my argument. Here's what I wrote:
There are well over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. And multiple attempts to catalog free speech incidents on campus, from different sources, keep coming up with numbers in the dozens. And of those dozens, a fairly large percentage of the targets are liberals, and a fairly large percentage of the others were conservative speakers who seem to have come to campus with the intent of provoking students.
[...]
Given that there are 4,583 colleges and universities in the United States (the bulk of which are four-year institutions), dozens of incidents is ... not a lot. When you limit it to just conservative targets, the number becomes even smaller. Now, some might consider a few dozen incidents a year in a country of 4,583 higher education institutions a national crisis; I would consider it perhaps unfortunate, but not a crisis.
[...]
Twist on 3/9/2019 at 18:15
Quote Posted by june gloom
You know I have to commend you guys for giving Tony the time of day. I used to think TTLG would be better off with the likes of him banned, but to be honest you're probably preventing a mass shooting by keeping him busy. Keep up the good work.
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Is there anything more cringeworthy than using your dick as a bungee cord for your insecurities when someone questions your credibility as a sentient being? Read the rest of Tony's post to find out!
I know these are a weeks-old posts, but I'm just reading them now and together they perfectly encapsulate Tony's identity on these forums.
Tony_Tarantula on 4/9/2019 at 18:28
[video=youtube;HtRKWphB30s]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtRKWphB30s&t=46s[/video]
Watching this now. Talk from an old UK Whisteblower.
Quote:
not only that young people are already the most tolerant of offensive speech, but that they're getting more tolerant.
Well no shit. Again doesn't have anything to do with anything. The moderates aren't driving the train here.
That little factoid also goes hand in hand with your paranoia about seeing "Nazis" everywhere. You conflate that attitude with people being actual Nazis or White Supremacists.
Quote:
the most successful attempts to shut down speakers have come from right-leaning groups shutting down speech with which they don't agree
I've already said the grassroots right tends to be more successful and I've pointed out why several times. The left is more prevalent and entrenched within instutional power.
your own fucking link disproves your assertionI downloaded the source data and ran a percentage analysis.
The percentage of right wing speakers disinvited is higher.
Inline Image:
https://i.imgur.com/wMUO0Ar.pngThe reason why the number is higher is because almost twice as many speakers were left wing.At least actually check source data. Fact-checking your "facts" took me all of about 90 seconds.
There's also no way in hell that whoever was doing this didn't know what they were doing. I'm not a professionally trained statistician. I am trained in basic analytical and statistical techniques that are necessary for working in finance. If it took me under two minutes to figure out the statistic cited is bullshit then it's beyond ridiculous to believe that the person who does that for a living just missed it by accident.
sidenote: if you filter the data by the topic there are some interesting disparities in which ones attract attention. There's only a few where there's enough examples to be worth looking at (you need 28), but among those at or near the threshhold discussions of contraception and abortion were the most likely to be cancelled.
Quote Posted by june gloom
No, I haven't stopped being funny after 2006.
In your own delusional mind.
I'd offer to buy you a beer and some joints to help you chill out, but you'd probably show up and shoot me instead.
Starker on 5/9/2019 at 00:28
Way to miss the point.
Quote:
Meanwhile, the “disinvitation database” created by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a watchdog group that promotes and protects free expression on campus, tracks the attempts of students to disinvite or prevent campus speakers. The database contains just 35 disinvitation attempts in 2017, down from 43 in 2016. At this point in 2018, there have been just five attempts, one of which was spearheaded by a conservative campus group. As Sachs rightly points out, in a country with roughly 4,700 colleges and universities, disinvitation attempts — let alone successful disinvitation attempts — remain quite rare.
The point being that the numbers are so small that they are statistically insignificant. Your percentages don't show in any way, shape, or form that there is a massive, or even significant, effort by liberals to shut down conservative free speech. The only thing they show is that of a very small number of disinvitations, a very slightly higher percentage of conservatives are likely to be disinvited. From the article:
Quote:
Let me be clear on this: I was not arguing, and do not believe, that liberal speech is more imperiled than conservative speech on college campuses. Rather, my aim in citing Sachs's data was to show that there is no epidemic of repression of conservative speech on college campuses — that liberal speech is repressed too, and that the absolute rate of incidents of speech suppression is so low that the issue can't be considered a major crisis.And you also completely seem to ignore the larger and much more salient point, that these insignificant amounts of incidents that are almost equally likely to happen to the liberals are used by conservatives to paint a picture that is not true.
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
That little factoid also goes hand in hand with your paranoia about seeing "Nazis" everywhere. You conflate that attitude with people being actual Nazis or White Supremacists.
Nice little projection there. Nowhere have I ever claimed that there was a massive effort to suppress liberal speech or link to articles to that effect. In fact, my articles show the opposite -- that there isn't such an effort. But there is a large amount of propaganda to portray the left (and only the left) as authoritarian bullies, especially on college campuses, when in fact the data shows it isn't true.
Tony_Tarantula on 5/9/2019 at 02:50
For the "There's no censorship and it's totally biased" crowd:
(
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4811966/robert-epstein-answers-sen-cruz-questions)
I look forward to hearing TTLG collectively declare how a handful of tech billionaires effectively controlling our elections is OK, but Citizens United is simultaneously horrible.
Quote:
The point being that the numbers are so small that they are statistically insignificant. Your percentages don't show in any way, shape, or form that there is a massive, or even significant, effort by liberals to shut down conservative free speech. The only thing they show that of a very small number of disinvitations, a very slightly higher percentage of conservatives are likely to be disinvited. From the article:
The discrepancy is statistically significant given the sample size. Contrary to your assertion a 15% difference isn't insignificant.
While we are at it we should point out that you've just significantly backtracked.
The point you had highlighted in bold(which, by virtue of you so doing, we can safely assume was your actual point)
was that "right wingers are more effective at shutting down free speech". That claim is patently false. The actual environment is one where not only are left wing speakers dramatically over-represented but they're also significantly less likely to get shut down (even before controlling for the effects of non-domestic issues like Israel lobbyists shutting down pro-BDS speakers).
Either way that over half of speakers get cancelled (even assuming that data set is valid....which is unlikely because the total number of events is about 1/10th the number of colleges in the US and we can safely assume that on average most of those colleges will have multiple events per year), is a very, very, bad precedent and reflects extremely poorly on the state of affairs.
Quote:
Nice little projection there.
Observations based on behavior. Not projection.
Quote:
But there is a large amount of propaganda to portray the left (and only the left) as authoritarian bullies, especially on college campuses, when in fact the data shows it isn't true.
If you actually believe that, then put your money where your mouth is. I'll wear a hat for a Democrat candidate of your choice and you wear some gear for a Republican candidate (I'll go easy on you and make it not Trump). First one to be experience harassment or assault loses the bet.
So far nobody has actually offered to take me up on that or even acknowledged that said offer exists. Not just here either. I've offered it in a couple places such as a Facebook wall where we have some professions led by a NEC professor. Every single time I make the offer people suddenly stop participating in the argument or suddenly change topics.
Starker on 5/9/2019 at 03:50
Over half the speakers don't get cancelled. Rather, of the small amount of disinvitation attempts, even a smaller amount succeed. Let's put those numbers in perspective, shall we. There were 18 disinvitation attempts logged in the FIRE database for the year 2018. 11 of them were successful. Given that the US has roughly 4700 colleges and universities and that there are multiple speaking events per year, that's peanuts. Less than peanuts. Way less to warrant the amount of scaremongering and hyperbole.
Also, if you completely make up my arguments on my behalf, then there is no way I can backtrack from them, is there? The point I highlighted was very simple:
Quote:
Speaker disinvitation attempts have a higher success rate when they come from the right of the speaker (54.64%) than when they come from the left of the speaker (32.89%).
And the overall point the articles were making is still that conservatives shut down liberal speech just as much as liberals shut down conservative speech on campuses. Which is... very rarely. The attempt to paint this as some sort of liberal trend is highly deceptive, especially given that it's not really a trend at all, but a very small number of incidences that get blasted way, way out of proportion by conservatives.