
Free speech is last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ - ps4fanboy
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/
======
yzzxy
I think this is an important discussion to be had. The question of whether
ideas like "trigger warnings" should be implemented in academia have good
arguments on both sides. On a few of these issues I'm not sure where I stand
yet and I'm very interested in hearing intelligent discourse from both sides
over the next few years.

However, I don't think this is a particularly good article on the topic. It's
riddled with character assassinations and complaints that fall low on the oft-
cited-by-HN Graham hierarchy of argument[0]. Ironically this comment falls
nearly as low because of what it is making reference to, but that's an
existential issue for another day.

The author's writing paints "Stepford students" in a herdlike way, and many
paragraphs open with imagery taking shots at their character. I generally love
a bit of prose in an op-ed or news article, though I seem to disagree with a
lot of HN readers there. But I think casual, drive-by insults are a bad idea
when you're trying to point out something like group hypocrisy or make
legitimate criticisms of a social movement.

[0]
[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Graham%27...](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement.svg)

~~~
chrismcb
What are the good arguments FOR "trigger warnings?"

~~~
xnull2guest
We impose limitations on Free Speech for libel, slander, obscenity,
pornography, sedition, hate speech, incitement, fighting words, classified
information, copyright violation, trade secrets, non-disclosure agreements,
right to privacy, right to be forgotten, public security, public order, public
nuisance, and campaign finance reform. (This incomplete list scraped from
Wikipedia). The means by which we decide these exceptions are by applying the
principle of harm and the principle of offense, so named by John Stewart Mill.
Specifically, we determine whether the speech actively causes, or is likely to
cause, actual harm or whether it merely only has the capability to, but may
not, cause harm.

On one side proponents will suggest that 'trigger warning' discussions are
merely offensive to those who may possibly but will not necessarily be harmed
- they are offensive but not harmful and this then is not enough to limit it
as speech. Furthermore ample forewarning can be given to limit the exposure of
someone sensitive to what is going to be spoken and a choice can be made in
advance by someone who is sensitive to possible trigger warnings to
participate.

On the other side, arguments can be made that (A.) exclusion from the debate
based on the possible presence of trigger warnings legitimizes a paternalism
because victims can not then show up to the debates (B.) the size of the class
of potential victims and the scope of some discussions make it inevitable that
harm will be done to someone or (C.) that the affects of open discussion on
certain topics themselves have societal affects that cause harm as they
institutionalize harmful norms (there are many examples from history).

There are topics and scenarios that exist on the boundary between the
principle of harm and the principle of offense. Good arguments can fit these
issues squarely into one or the other.

~~~
angersock
What is _done_ and what is _right_ are not identical sets. Most of those ways
that we restrict free speech, for example, don't actually hurt anyone. The
"fire in a crowded theater" is usually taken out of historical context, where
it was being used for authoritarian purposes.

~~~
xnull2guest
Most? It seems to me that there are a couple where it's arguable. I'm curious
which ones you think don't cause harm to others and why it is you think they
do not.

~~~
angersock
So, in case it isn't clear, I'm ardently for unconditional free speech--with
the obvious observation that that is not easily practicable in our current
society.

Obscenity and pornography don't necessarily hurt anyone. Sedition laws are, by
definition, used only to support the current ruling class and government. Most
of the trade secrets, NDAs, etc. are just to help entrenched interests--
something many here have rallied about when signing contracts. Public order,
public security, and public nuisance are additional laws mainly used to censor
and justify the persecution of people who are in disagreement with the
establish government.

Frankly, regulation of free speech has pretty much always favored the majority
at the expense of the minority.

~~~
xnull2guest
The first thing I will note is that you didn't specify 'most' of the things on
the list. I think that's okay, but I do want to suggest that perhaps you
aren't ardently for free speech as many of the items in the list appear to
make some sense to you.

I'm of a similar mindset but don't hold such extreme views.

Allow me to try to provide some justification for the items you listed.

The types of pornography that are made illegal (here we are talking about
America, you would get my agreement about recent laws passed in the UK) are
snuff films - rape and child pornography or pornography that permanently
disables or disfigures the subject - because they do necessarily hurt the
subject. Once the pictures/videos are already taken, they continue to hurt the
victims as their suffering is publicized and available to the fantasy of
clients (and of course they won't see any proceeds), and this media will hurt
future victims by institutionalizing a demand for new content. Limits on
pornography (despite what religion institutions yell loudly about) are not
about harm to customers but harm to subjects.

With exceptions for torture, humiliation, dismemberment and execution
(including the same to animals) I won't defend obscenity restrictions as the
arguments are quite different than those for restricted forms of pornography.
These listed exceptions of course are great examples of harm coming from
obscene content and again are illegal (though lacking in the case of animals)
under obscenity laws under the harm principle.

Other forms of obscenity restrictions seem to me to fall directly in line with
the offense principle and should not be restricted. Take for example the
Supreme Court decision Miller v. California. The resulting 'Miller Test' for
obscenity decisions:

1\. Whether the average person would find that the work, taken as a whole,
appeals to a lewd curiosity;

2\. Whether the work depicts or describes, in an offensive way, sexual conduct
or excretory functions, specifically defined by applicable state law; and

3\. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic,
political, or scientific value.

Compare this test against Mill:

"That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any
member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to
others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.
He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear _because it will be better
for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of
others, to do so would be wise, or even right_... The only part of the conduct
of anyone, for which he is amenable to society, is that which concerns others.
In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right,
absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is
sovereign."

Obscenity, when it is victimless, and it is almost always victimless, clearly
fails the harm principle test. For the most part, this is the case in America.
There are cases where obscenity laws prevent things such as expressions of
homosexual affection, for example, and it is harder to find clear victimhood
in these cases even when the law agrees to prohibit them. A note that this
Supreme Court decision was made by a conservative majority court.

Regarding sedition I understand your point - that speech critical of the power
elite ought to be protected in the strongest terms. I have a lot to say with
regard to restrictions on sedition. I'll advocate for a devil for a blurb and
then comment briefly in an attempt to sum up more than I can defend into a few
sentences.

With very few exceptions (the velvet revolution?), successful seditious
overthrow of a ruling class and/or government have in almost every single case
caused great harm both to the ruling class and to those who are caught adrift
in the following power vacuum. Furthermore the ruling class/governance
structure _have_ to be convinced that alternatives to their administration is
harmful. Other mechanisms for change are (supposed to be) available in Western
democracies so that seditious change is not necessary, as the JFK quote "those
who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."
One additional item - I can't actually find (in America) a modern use of
sedition laws, though I merely performed an internet search.

Summing more than I can defend into a few sentences: presumably if a
government were harming its citizens (the power elite abusing their position)
this is a prior wrong and in alignment with the JFK quote violent revolution
is inevitable. Presumably at the point where seditious speech is required for
freedom from government by implication the government is unjust and its laws -
those restricting seditious speech and otherwise - hold no justifiable weight.

In short I agree with you very wholeheartedly regarding sedition.

Because this is getting long, and because your analysis for the final items
occupy a similar space - allow me to respond to them in tandem.

You suggest in the final five (trade secrets, NDAs, public order, security and
nuisance) that harm may in fact be done to specific individuals - those whose
income relies on the keeping of certain secrets/formulas/processes, or those
who occupy certain streets/neighborhoods/townships - but that additional harm
can be done to other individuals (dissidents and political activists) by a
state seeking to weaponize these laws and to abuse them. I would suggest here
that the problem is not with the laws but with the abuse. Any law can be
abused by the state to harass or detain critics. The worry here is that by
targeting laws that protect the public security ("fire!") one would throw the
baby out with the bath water.

------
omegaham
I don't like the tone of his writing, but he's got some excellent points.

I think that one of the greatest strengths of the university system is the
idea that "offensive" ideas can be debated. An enormous amount of knowledge
has been gotten from heresy, and I would argue that universities have been so
central in the spread of knowledge precisely because they encourage (or at
least tolerate) people who go against the grain.

This has disappeared, and I think that it leads to bad ideas winning.

One of the reasons why the US has such a strong protection toward speech,
especially political and ideological speech, is that the Founding Fathers and
their successors recognized the unpalatability of conflicting ideas and gave
them the strongest possible protection. They recognized that such protection
would give assholes the ability to say horrible, offensive things, and they
believed that such a side effect was far better than the alternative -
stifling free expression and allowing bad ideas to win because their
proponents were better represented, better connected, or just flat-out more
willing to suppress the other side's viewpoints.

The fact that these students are completely ignorant of this history is
amusing because our modern academic tradition was based entirely off of this
belief in a "marketplace of ideas."

Ben Franklin said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

I'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing
attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus
politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to
self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things.

~~~
thenmar
_I 'd love to see what those exact same students would say if the prevailing
attitude changed and a massive wave of right-wing ideology took over campus
politics. I'm sure that they'd be crying about how their self-evident right to
self-expression was being horribly violated. Poor things._

This kind of attack is completely unnecessary. How is anyone supposed to
respond to this comment when you've already constructed a straw man for your
opponent and trivialized it?

~~~
MrDom
It's not an attack, it's what's happening to the public discourse right now.
There are areas of the internet that are right wing. Left wing people go to
those areas to debate ideas, but when they see the comments sections aren't on
their side, they claim harassment. This harassment may or may not come with
requests for the moderators to make the comments a "safe space".

------
im3w1l
My problem with "the right to be comfortable" is that it gives creates
lopsided debates. One side can be argued everywhere, whereas the other, the
offensive one, can only be argued very carefully in the right places.

The solution, as I see it, is to disallow the inoffensive side too. For
instance if there were a forum, that didn't allow attacks on whole classes of
people, then it is best if they don't allow defenses either.

------
woqias
Good job for the students painting their peers as weak, and unable to have a
well thought position for themselves. Thought paternalism at its finest.

------
jschwartzi
The Robin Thicke song mentioned in the article is so tame, it's pretty
ridiculous that it's been banned anywhere.

------
chroma
I've made this point before, but I feel compelled to repeat it in response to
this post. The late Christopher Hitchens, in one of his greatest orations[1],
made some excellent points about free speech:

 _...it’s not just the right of the person who speaks to be heard. It is the
right of everyone in the audience to listen, and to hear. And every time you
silence someone you make yourself a prisoner of your own action, because you
deny yourself the right to hear something. In other words: Your own right to
hear and be exposed is as much involved in all these cases as is the right of
the other to voice his or her view._

In other words, freedom of speech is really about freedom of hearing. Later,
he asks who should be trusted with the job of censoring:

 _Who 's going to decide? To whom do you award the right to decide which
speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker, or to determine in advance
what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in
advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to
award the task of being the censor?_

 _Did you hear any speaker in opposition to this motion (eloquent as... one of
them was) to whom you would delegate the task of deciding for you, what you
could read? To whom you 'd give the job of deciding for you, relieve you of
the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone-
hands up- to whom you would give this job? Does anyone have a nominee? You
mean there's no one in Canada good enough to decide what I can read? Or hear?
I had no idea... but there’s a law that says there must be such a person. Or
there's a subsection of some piddling law that says it. Well to hell with that
law then. It's inviting you to be liars and hypocrites and to deny what you
evidently already know already._

And finally, he notes that religious texts contain passages that would need to
be censored, yet religious conservatives often call for censorship.

 _Look anywhere you like for the warrant for slavery, for the subjugation of
women as chattel, for the burning and flogging of homosexuals, for ethnic
cleansing, for antisemitism, for all this you look no further than a famous
book that 's on every pulpit in this city and in every synagogue and in every
mosque. And then just see whether you can square the fact that the force that
is the main source of hatred is also the main caller for censorship. And when
you've realized this you'll therefore this evening be faced with a gigantic
false antithesis. I hope that still won't stop you from giving the motion
before you the resounding endorsement that it deserves. Thanks awfully. Night-
night. Stay cool!_

(If you haven't watched the whole speech, I recommend doing so. I've only
transcribed a few choice passages, but the whole thing is great.)

And of course, there's the absurdity factor. Nobody thinks that censoring
actually stops people from endorsing verboten opinions or talking about banned
topics. Everything just gets driven underground. This gives the holders of
censored beliefs an excuse to behave more extremely than they otherwise would.
After all, they're being persecuted.

1\.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY#t=1240](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QIyBZNGH0TY#t=1240)

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
There is no absolute right to be heard.

A fire-and-brimstone preacher on a street corner is a nuisance to me, and I
won't want to hear him. But it's a public place, so I would just move on to
avoid being annoyed by listening to him. Were he to knock on my front door I
would tell him "no" and close the door again. Were he to be granted a lecture
at the local university I would not bother to attend.

Yes, my mind is already closed and made up on the topics that this
hypothetical preacher would like to re-open with me. Both of us think that we
know better than the other. So what?

~~~
chroma
Then it sounds like we agree. Freedom of hearing refers to people being able
to decide for themselves what they should hear.

I would behave like you in your examples. To go with your university case, the
line is crossed if one tries to get the disliked speaker uninvited from the
university. Or if one attends the lecture to disrupt it. This has happened
many times with prominent speakers, and it's a shame that some people consider
it acceptable behavior.

~~~
SideburnsOfDoom
Yes, it would be wrong to try to prevent other people from hearing things that
I disagree with. It is very tempting, as it is easier than trying to argue
them out of it again afterwards. But wrong.

------
kuni-toko-tachi
The culture of comfortableness is exactly what Vaclav Havel described in "The
Power of the Powerless"

Comfortableness is a misnomer. What it is conformity. Havel.correctly
identifies this as "post-totalitarian". It is the same sick mindset of
communism and the Salem witch trials and Inquisition. It is political control
and it is used by malicious actors to manipulate and destroy.

Millions have suffered and been killed and imprisoned under such regimes, and
Havel describes the casual brutality of it.

The endpoint of this is obvious. And learning about it is important.
[http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html](http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html)

------
rayiner
An interesting message that was expressed better by Allan Bloom, 30 years ago
and with less rape/misogyny-apologism:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Min...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind).

~~~
turbostyler
What part of that article did you construe as rape/misogyny-apologism?

~~~
rayiner
The whole piece is dreck, a defense of bare-faced bullying of women and gays
clothed in the pretense of the first amendment. The social value of speech has
always been a factor in the first amendment analysis, and e.g. flyers
insulting ugly women and gays don't have any.

The worst thing about the article isn't the defense of misogyny and
homophobia. It's that it makes it that much more difficult to argue socially-
conservative viewpoints that really matter without getting lumped in with guys
like these and their vacuous assertions.

~~~
bzbarsky
Just to be pedantic, the author of the article is British, all the students
involved are British, and hence the First Amendment (to the US Constitution,
as I assume you meant) is irrelevant.

Of course the UK has its own concept of freedom of speech, albeit quite
different from the US one.

------
astazangasta
Why is this sneering garbage on HN?

Look, none of this is new. Universities have always been contentious places,
students have always been belligerent and uninterested in hearing the views of
their opponents. This is what it is to be young: to believe fully, with or
without justification. A generation ago in the US, SDS would have barricaded
themselves into the room with both these master debaters and held them hostage
with a list of demands for the administration. The verbs have changed, but "We
demand" has not.

This is a screed from a man who is upset that he is not being handed a
platform to speak. Yes, guy. People don't like you. That doesn't make this a
free speech issue. No one invited me to speak at Oxford either. Just go home
without your rattle.

~~~
morgante
I don't think it's fair to say that nothing has changed.

In previous generations, students absolutely would have protested. But
administrations wouldn't have been so quick to give in to social outrage and
to ban speakers. One of the unfortunate effects of social media is that
allowing controversy of any sort has become much more dangerous. What might
once have garnered a few feminist protestors outside a church (or evangelicals
protesting outside a school) now elicits thousands of angry reactionaries on
Twitter and Tumblr.

------
comrh
Author arguing for free speech complains about people exercising their speech
to disagree with him speaking?

~~~
PauloManrique
He's arguing about people not allowing him to speak. Did we read the same
article?

~~~
boomlinde
As far as I understood the article, a student organization made a big fuzz
about the abortion debate, prompting the organizers to cancel it. The way I
see it, no rights were denied in doing so, and both the students and the
author are and were exercising their right to free speech.

Although I don't fully agree with the post you responded to, no one was not
allowing someone to speak.

~~~
PauloManrique
He also mention examples on how conservatives are being shut in universities
all the time.

------
PauloManrique
Nice article. It looks like, in the UK they're only on universities. On Brazil
they're in charge of the nation.

