"This is relentlessly grim. Nobody in this story makes me optimistic about America." Nope. There are very clear good guys and bad guys here. The protesters at least have the right intentions: defeat right-wing fascism. True, they should think more creatively about their tactics. There are much better ways to weaken the power of a bully t…
"This is relentlessly grim. Nobody in this story makes me optimistic about America."
Nope. There are very clear good guys and bad guys here.
The protesters at least have the right intentions: defeat right-wing fascism.
True, they should think more creatively about their tactics. There are much better ways to weaken the power of a bully than by giving the bully an easy way to play victim. The best response is utter mockery, and Judge Duncan provides them plenty to work with. They could have held a mock trial accusing him of gross incompetence on the bench. They could have dressed like Trump and yelled "You're fired!" They could have done anything to accentuate his basic weakness: he's an unqualified troll who was appointed by a crook.
But they missed their chance. They fed the troll. It's not so difficult to understand: fascists make people afraid for their lives, and fear causes anger.
But the protesters at least have honorable intentions. They are literally trying to protect the lives of vulnerable people who are under attack by sadistic bullies. They are literally trying to protect democracy from a fascist power grab.
There are a lot of good guys in America. But nowadays not a single one of them is on the Right. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
Well, kind of. I much prefer the students' core value of "let's treat gays and trans people as humans and stop pretending they're oppressing us." But "bad speech shouldn't just be countered, it should be suppressed and shut down" is a dangerous, shitty value that's core to their approach. Not cutting them any slack on it.
Fair enough. But I will cut them a little slack, since they need education in the finer points of countering fascist narratives. It's not like they have a whole TV network feeding them their talking points every day.
They're college students. Free speech norms (and the importance thereof) should have been part of high school civics, and "don't feed the trolls" should have been hammered into their heads since they were old enough to google "boobs". How much more education do they need?
Okay, let's really talk about feeding trolls. You know what fascist trolls really want? It's not just to provoke the left into acting intolerantly. It's to provoke the left into acting intolerantly, and then have "moderates" respond predictably by talking about civility and moderation and "letting all voices be heard."
So instead of everyone focusing on the fact that the Federalist Society is a well-funded right-wing astroturf tool of fascism, we're here talking about civility and the finer points of the First Amendment.
Trolls have more than one goal, and you might be feeding them without even realizing it.
Did they teach you that in high school civics class?
"They meant well to shut down speech and be a mob because it was mean fascist speech." Um, no. The braying mob shutting down speech ARE the fascists. That's definitional.
You're getting "predictable" responses because they are the correct responses to the argument of "suppressing speech is ok as long as it's the right kind of speech"
Except I never said suppressing speech is ok as long as its the right kind of speech.
My point, let's be clear, is simply this: there ARE good guys and bad guys in this situation. The bad guys did what the bad guys always do, flex their bullying power; the good guys chose a dumb response, anger and shouting down, which fell right into the bad guys' trap.
The secondary point I made, which you have now helped me demonstrate, is that the trap laid by the bad guys not only traps their obvious opponents, it also traps "neutral" bystanders who want to appear "reasonable."
By this logic, people advocating for threats and the eradication of others are just as legitimate as those who want them left alone and want peace. This didn’t work with the Nazis and it won’t work here either. Some boundaries about what is acceptable need to be set.
You are mistaking protection of speech and strong free speech norms with endorsement or approval of the speech in question. It's not a matter of who is "legitimate" or not. It's a matter of that historically whenever any group has been given unilateral power to decide who is and isn't "legitimate" that has resulted in acute human suffering, and I don't believe we are any more advanced today than we were any of the other times in the past to know for sure what speech is or isn't "legitimate" or to keep our governments and other levers of power under control enough to give them the authority to decide that either.
Consider that I find your views on suppressing speech to be abhorrent and dangerous. Is the world better of if I am able to restrain you from speaking your views? Arguably yes. And yet there is always a possibility that you're right, after all enlightenment thought processes haven't been the default for most of history, or even a good part of the modern age. So what if you were right? By forcibly suppressing your speech, the discussion will never happen. The status quo will continue and the world will be worse off as you imagine.
On the other hand, you could be wrong. But if I suppress your ability to speak, again this discussion and debate will never be had. Other people who think the same as you, or even who are on the fence may never hear a robust (or even this mediocre) defense of free speech values. In such a world, people with your views might eventually become a majority because with no articulated defense of free speech, it could become viewed as a relic of "old white men", and that majority might even change the laws eliminating free speech and again we'd be worse off.
Or moving out of the very abstract into the more concrete, one doesn't have to go back very far to find us jailing, fining or suppressing people for:
* advocating against the draft (Schenck v. United States)
* establishing communist organizations (Whitney v. California)
* advocating the "violent overthrow of the government" by way of distribution of the Communist Manifesto (Dennis v. United States)
* general communist advocacy including at times "violence" (Yates v. United States)
* calling law enforcement officers fascists (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire)
* "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] tumultuous or offensive conduct" (Cohen v. California)
* "endeavoring to arouse the Negro people against the whites, urging that they rise up in arms and fight for equal rights" (Feiner v. New York)
* Selling erotica (Roth v. United States)
* Selling more erotica (Miller v. California)
* Saying 7 words (FCC v. Pacifica Foundation)
* Distributing "obscene or indecent" messages to anyone under 18 (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union)
* Publishing material that depicts "depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion" (Beauharnais v. Illinois)
* Taking out an ad criticizing the police (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)
* Antagonizing a judge (Sacher v. United States)
* Antagonizing the police (Hess v. Indiana)
* Criticizing a congressman (Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus)
* Lying about military service (United States v. Alvarez)
* Protesting wars (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District)
Not all of those cases went in the way of maximal freedoms, but in every single one of those cases, the people who were suppressing the speech thought it was dangerous, or abhorrent or otherwise illegitimate. In many cases, it's likely the speaker themselves was viewed that way. Back to those communist/socialism cases specifically and that was viewed by all "right thinking people" at the time as about as bad as being a Nazi. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that's for each individual listener to decide, not for some authority from on high to forcibly stop.
Whatever happened to "stand up to bullies?" I guess that fighting back is just bad american values. Far better to give the bullies whatever they want as soon as you can or else you might be undermining their first amendement rights.
Or do only these things apply when its the liberals fighting back? Hmmmm.....
Nothing happened to it. Stand up to bullies. But proportional force is also called for. One doesn't get to shoot their bullies because they called them a "four eyes". Heck I'm sure our recent president thought many a media organization were being bullies. I don't know about you but I'm awful glad we have strong free speech rules and norms that prevented him from shutting down everyone and everything that didn't kowtow to him.
Well sure, if there's one thing extremists of all types can agree on, it's those damn moderates and their calls for civility and free speech that are the true problem.
Or less sarcastically, the reason we're talking about "civility" and the finer points of free speech is because actual incivility and suppression of free speech took place. If we wanted to discuss well funded advocacy of fascism, there are many ways to do that without using actual fascism to accomplish it. In the hierarchy of "things that are important to stop" actual suppression of free speech is higher on the list than advocacy of suppressing free speech.
It's funny how I keep getting comments that I'm advocating suppression of speech. That's telling. That shows how effective this trolling tactic is. The bullies get sympathy because they were shouted down, just as they hoped they would be, because they knew it would actually increase the reach of their sick message. It's so easy, and so many otherwise intelligent people fall for it every time.
My original most made very clear I believe the protesters chose a dumb tactic. Shouting down the bully doesn't work. Humiliating the bully with mockery works. One of the reasons it works is because it humor gets to the heart and truth of the matter, and when "neutral" observers are compelled by humor to laugh at the bully, it deflates the bully's power instantly. The neutral observer realizes that the person they were giving the benefit of the doubt to does not deserve it--that they're simply a bully who deals in lies and aggression.
And once again--the protesters' response was the wrong tactic, but an understandable one. They feel that they and their friends and loved ones are under attack--and they are correct. The bullies we are talking about are sadists who want to inflict pain on vulnerable people simply to score political points and fleece money off of rubes.
They don't have a whole TV network? Sorry, was MSNBC founded this morning? I guess that (to a lesser extent) CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN are also brand new? I just this second invented late-night comedy and forged from raw geneseed the likes of John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers. I might have also just founded every major news and opinion page in the nation and peopled them with every over-educated, overly affluent midwit in existence, with the (lukewarm) exception of the Wall Street Journal. I'm god, is my point.
And here we go, predictably. "But what about MSNBC?!!" False equivalencies are the lifeblood of fascist propaganda. Sorry, but Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson. Not even close. You aren't comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with strychnine.
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they don’t. The main problem is that progressives don’t communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people don’t automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual “fascists” end up looking reasonable, not just to “WWC” but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now aren’t “better luck next time” as it might have been in the 1980s. When you’re facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like “they meant well” don’t cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is “ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.”
The second is “people who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the left’s social and economic agenda) are ‘bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,’ and don’t deserve the right to free speech.”
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because it’s adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
“I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
They’re a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and Murdoch’s NY Post. I wouldn’t lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but they’re also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think it’s probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, I’d say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said Tucker’s point was that the “right” at the time (and even less now) doesn’t have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless it’s a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. “They worry about things like making sure they spell a person’s name right”. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didn’t then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede Tucker’s point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And that’s why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use “left leaning” msm as their main source for reliable information.
Here's a TED Talk by a pediatric endocrinologist about a 12 year old raised as trans from birth, started on blockers and estrogen at 10, and sterile at 12. So why not surgery?
Nonsense. Just absolute tosh. None of that is true, it’s pure fabrication in the service of moral panic. If you’re reading this with the idea that there might be some truth in any of these slurs, please remember: being trans is not actually a political position, it’s a gender identity. There are trans people with many different ideas about sexual politics, but just like in every other group, trans people overwhelmingly understand that sex without freely given consent is not OK and any hint of coercion in that process is creepy and awful at best and rape at worst. Just as in any other group of humans it is possible to find one or two examples of someone who has expressed horrific views. To state the bleeding obvious, the assertion that such a view is generally held is pure bullshit.
Nonsense? A Stanford affiliated pediatric endocrinologist defends a mother's choice to raise a child as trans from birth and sterilize it with cross sex hormones. Maybe it's a moral choice, maybe not. Tell us what you think.
---Clinicians were seeing increasingly mentally unwell kids, including those who didn’t just identify as a different gender but as a different nationality and race: “Usually east Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,” Dr Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, tells Barnes. But this was seen by Gids as irrelevant to their gender identity issues. Past histories of sexual abuse were also ignored: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe,” Bristow says. But, clinicians point out, any concerns raised with their superiors always got the same response: that the kids should be put on the blockers unless they specifically said they didn’t want them. And few kids said that. As one clinician told Barnes: “If a young person is distressed and the only thing that’s offered to them is puberty blockers, they’ll take it, because who would go away with nothing?
Then there was the number of autistic and same-sex-attracted kids attending the clinic, saying that they were transgender. Less than 2 per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, however, more than a third of their referrals had moderate to severe autistic traits. “Some staff feared they could be unnecessarily medicating autistic children,” Barnes writes.
There were similar fears about gay children. Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe,” and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys. When Gids asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”. When gay clinicians such as Bristow voiced their concerns to those in charge, they say it was implied that they were not objective because they were gay and therefore “too close” to the work. (Gids does not accept this claim.)---
You know an article is reliable, trustworthy, and not pushing an agenda when it very badly misdefines common medical terms ("Gids treats children and young people who express confusion — or dysphoria — about their gender identity," - that is not even a slightly correct definition of dysphoria,) proceeds to make incorrect claimword, originally formulated to treat prostate cancer and to castrate male sex offenders," - at no point were puberty blockers used to 'castrate' anyone, except in the most hyperbolic and sensationalist use of the word. They reduce libido and can lead to erectile dysfunction while they are being taken, but the effect passes once the medications are discontinued,) then continues with bad science ("It is generally accepted now that puberty blockers affect bone density, and potentially cognitive and sexual development." This makes it seem like these are shocking new discoveries, when in fact standard of care for use of GnRH in children has always included regular bone density tests because this is something we've known for a very long time, and it is neither "generally accepted" nor remotely supported that the use of puberty blockers causes absolutely any long-term issues with sexual or cognitive impairment.)
But these are just things that popped out at me from a cursory skim of your source. And these are just the quantitative, objective signs that an article may not be interested in truth so much as in agenda. There is also plenty of qualitative evidence, such as beginning the piece with the radical but entirely unsubstantiated claim that someone with a published book and multiple high-profile interviews is somehow being censored, but we'll ignore those as being too wishy-washy and subjective.
Long-story short, Gids had issues. Mainly, being sadly underfunded and understaffed. What they didn't have was an issue with the medication itself, or frankly most of their prescription of it. It's telling that when the long-term study came out, it showed that most of the people put on puberty blockers ended up fully transitioning and that this was somehow spun into being an indictment of puberty blockers and the clinic, instead of a running endorsement that despite their troubles they had actually mostly got it right. And they did, because despite the very public lawsuit from someone unhappy with their transition, long-term trans satisfaction rates are actually significantly higher than long-term satisfaction with plastic surgery, bunion surgery, hip replacements — basically any kind of medical procedure. Think about that: more people regret getting hip surgery, something we typically call a medically necessary procedure, than regret their transition.
If only there was a body of peer reviewed, published research on the topic so that we didn't have to take the word of a single genital reconstruction surgeon. Oh, wait, we do!
You can ignore the author as a biased source, but do browse the excellent collection of citations. And best of all, it's actual research and not a carefully couched, wishy-washy opinion in a video!
"Here's a TED Talk by a pediatric endocrinologist about a 12 year old raised as trans from birth, started on blockers and estrogen at 10, and sterile at 12. So why not surgery?"
Jesus Christ, my man, is there some part of "peer-reviewed, published research" that is difficult for you? Because a Ted Talk isn't it, either. And neither of the anecdotes you posted contradict that there is body of research that demonstrates both the ability to orgasm AND the ability to conceive post-transition.
I understand most people do not have a strong scientific background and are lacking in even relatively basic skills related to finding and parsing scientific and clinical information because the education system in this country does a frankly terrible job of teaching scientific literacy. But even with that deficiency, you should be able to see that a Ted Talk, regardless of how much it supports your personal beliefs, is not a source for anything other than the speaker's opinions. And you should at the very least understand that a TedX Talk isn't even a Ted Talk, but a local pay-for-play offshoot of the original Ted Series where the only criteria for being a speaker is the willingness to pay a sponsorship fee.
So, would you care to try again, but with real sources? Or do you want to keep throwing out opinions and anecdotes and pretending they mean something?
Except we suppress bad speech all the time. We have, for example, decided that inciting people towards imminent violence is bad speech that shouldn't be suppressed. And you, of all people, know this.
Responding to this incident as a free speech absolutist is one of the worst possible takes on the entire incident, because it is obviously intellectually lazy and quite likely intellectually dishonest. What you really mean is "it's ok that some bad speech is suppressed and shot down, but I just don't believe that this particular speech rises to that level because I, personally, do not feel threatened by it or believe that it creates any immediate danger for anyone, and also despite regularly citing landmark decisions that fundamentally change our understanding of free speech, I refuse to even consider the possibility that our current understanding of the first amendment isn't perfect and complete and should possibly be examined with some more scrutiny to see is maybe it is a good idea to maybe do some more suppressing."
So now, thanks to plaintive cries that we should accept the right of people to say anything, so long as you don't personally see the immediate harm, state legislatures feel comfortable proposing bills to forcibly detransition trans youth. But thank god that at least we didn't go down some hypothetical first amendment slippery slope, so real crisis averted.
And what's really telling is that immediately after talking about a concerted effort to enforce oppression from the bench and legislature, the only time you use the term "fascism" is to lambast a group of students shouting at someone who does the exact same thing, except from the bench and with the full force of the federal government behind him and only at people who have absolutely no opportunity to respond. You have weighed the two behaviors and found that being disruptive at a casual event is worse than a judge usurping his authority to demean a powerless person. "Fascism," I guess, is now a synonym for "rudeness."
The real problem isn't the organization you openly call "evil" in another post normalizing state-sanctioned violence against marginalized groups. The real problem is that if we silence people openly calling for the slow-motion murder of trans people, eventually some day maybe it's possible that somewhere someone might accidentally ban speech that isn't designed to hurt people. The horror.
Here's the thing, though, is that I have genuinely respected and looked up to you for years. Maybe over a decade now? Time has been relatively meaningless over the last couple of years. So if I'm a little less tempered and polite than I should be, that may be why. Or perhaps it's the fact that I had to pick up my life and move across the country in order to escape a state where it was no longer safe for my trans child to live thanks to a host of legislation culminating in SB254.
Which partly my point — this is all purely an academic exercise for you, but for trans people and their families, it isn't. You joke about me wanting to send people to camps (and come on, really? Camps?) while ignoring that the speech you're protecting is actually threatening to send people to jail. Not in a tongue in cheek, "I've basically decided that trolling gets more clicks now" way, but real jail.
But what makes this an intellectually lazy argument, in my opinion, and the portion you didn't bother to address at all because "OMG lol camps Nazis hitler" is that free speech is restricted in thousands of ways in this country and many others and it doesn't immediately (or even eventually) lead to your nightmare scenario of cattle cars full of brave contrarians. Canada's free speech laws are more restrictive than ours, but it routinely ranks higher than the US on measures of human rights. Germany (ironic given your knee-jerk response) has some of the most restrictive laws on speech in what we think of as the Democratic West, but somehow they muddle through without restarting that whole Holocaust thing every time someone says something that's verboten. Your entire support for the moral/ethical part of your argument is a slippery slope fallacy that has ample evidence of being neither a slope, nor slippery, but you trot it out nonetheless. If that's not intellectual laziness, what is it?
I apologize if I did a poor job expressing myself leading us to this question, and I hope you understand why this topic especially is exceptionally raw for a lot of people.
My point is not that the judge was violating any specific speech policy. I am not making a legal argument. I'm not a lawyer, and wouldn't dream of arguing the specifics of the law with you or any other lawyer, because I'm not an expert — you are.
But I don't believe you made a legal argument in this newsletter. You made a moral and ethical one, and that's what I'm responding to. In your own words:
"And they are too hubris-swollen — not too stupid, but too drunk with self-righteousness — to see that exceptions to free speech have always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be. They’re too full of themselves to see that “let a crowd decide who is allowed to speak” is a horrific norm to promote with grotesque historic resonance. Some of them will grow out of this."
This is why I bring up European speech policy. And Canadian speech policy. And existing exceptions to the 1st Amendment that you touch on regularly, including in your newsletter about Shivaro.
I'm not saying there is a specific policy, law, decision, memorandum, or other bit of obscure legal wrangling that makes what the judge said wrong, or gives legal air cover to the students shouting him down. What I AM saying is that carving out exceptions to the 1A and freedom of speech as a concept has not, in fact, "always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be." And that, in fact, the students shouting down the Judge in no way caused any meaningful harm to either the judge's free speech OR to the concept of free speech in general, and that perhaps we should look at expanding exceptions to free speech, not to include "anyone I think is an asshole," but to include "anyone who's speech is used to create harm to the very powerless that you're worried may be hurt in stone distant future when we've fully slid down the slippery slope that others have managed to avoid sliding down.
Maybe I'm drunk on self-righteousness and hubris-swollen. Maybe I'm arrogant in thinking that we, as a people, are capable of thoughtful carve-outs of inalienable rights that simultaneously prevent marginalized communities having to be refugees in their own countries AND prevent the United States from becoming the Fourth Reich. But if I am, then you must admit that you are as well, for supporting carve-outs of the 1A. The only difference, as I see it, is that you believe the issue is largely settled with the expeditions we have, and that the law must lead and the rest of us follow; whereas I believe that there's still room for improvement, and that the law is a trailing indicator for justice.
And I apologize for calling you dishonest. Everything else aside, that was unnecessary and petty.
"This is relentlessly grim. Nobody in this story makes me optimistic about America."
Nope. There are very clear good guys and bad guys here.
The protesters at least have the right intentions: defeat right-wing fascism.
True, they should think more creatively about their tactics. There are much better ways to weaken the power of a bully than by giving the bully an easy way to play victim. The best response is utter mockery, and Judge Duncan provides them plenty to work with. They could have held a mock trial accusing him of gross incompetence on the bench. They could have dressed like Trump and yelled "You're fired!" They could have done anything to accentuate his basic weakness: he's an unqualified troll who was appointed by a crook.
But they missed their chance. They fed the troll. It's not so difficult to understand: fascists make people afraid for their lives, and fear causes anger.
But the protesters at least have honorable intentions. They are literally trying to protect the lives of vulnerable people who are under attack by sadistic bullies. They are literally trying to protect democracy from a fascist power grab.
There are a lot of good guys in America. But nowadays not a single one of them is on the Right. Let's stop pretending otherwise.
Well, kind of. I much prefer the students' core value of "let's treat gays and trans people as humans and stop pretending they're oppressing us." But "bad speech shouldn't just be countered, it should be suppressed and shut down" is a dangerous, shitty value that's core to their approach. Not cutting them any slack on it.
Fair enough. But I will cut them a little slack, since they need education in the finer points of countering fascist narratives. It's not like they have a whole TV network feeding them their talking points every day.
They're college students. Free speech norms (and the importance thereof) should have been part of high school civics, and "don't feed the trolls" should have been hammered into their heads since they were old enough to google "boobs". How much more education do they need?
Okay, let's really talk about feeding trolls. You know what fascist trolls really want? It's not just to provoke the left into acting intolerantly. It's to provoke the left into acting intolerantly, and then have "moderates" respond predictably by talking about civility and moderation and "letting all voices be heard."
So instead of everyone focusing on the fact that the Federalist Society is a well-funded right-wing astroturf tool of fascism, we're here talking about civility and the finer points of the First Amendment.
Trolls have more than one goal, and you might be feeding them without even realizing it.
Did they teach you that in high school civics class?
"They meant well to shut down speech and be a mob because it was mean fascist speech." Um, no. The braying mob shutting down speech ARE the fascists. That's definitional.
You know, I'm getting so many predictable responses like this, I wonder if I need to rebut them or just leave them up as proof of my point.
The trolls at FedSoc won this round, that's for sure. Not only did the protesting students fall into the trap, so did all the apologists for fascism.
You're getting "predictable" responses because they are the correct responses to the argument of "suppressing speech is ok as long as it's the right kind of speech"
Except I never said suppressing speech is ok as long as its the right kind of speech.
My point, let's be clear, is simply this: there ARE good guys and bad guys in this situation. The bad guys did what the bad guys always do, flex their bullying power; the good guys chose a dumb response, anger and shouting down, which fell right into the bad guys' trap.
The secondary point I made, which you have now helped me demonstrate, is that the trap laid by the bad guys not only traps their obvious opponents, it also traps "neutral" bystanders who want to appear "reasonable."
By this logic, people advocating for threats and the eradication of others are just as legitimate as those who want them left alone and want peace. This didn’t work with the Nazis and it won’t work here either. Some boundaries about what is acceptable need to be set.
You are mistaking protection of speech and strong free speech norms with endorsement or approval of the speech in question. It's not a matter of who is "legitimate" or not. It's a matter of that historically whenever any group has been given unilateral power to decide who is and isn't "legitimate" that has resulted in acute human suffering, and I don't believe we are any more advanced today than we were any of the other times in the past to know for sure what speech is or isn't "legitimate" or to keep our governments and other levers of power under control enough to give them the authority to decide that either.
Consider that I find your views on suppressing speech to be abhorrent and dangerous. Is the world better of if I am able to restrain you from speaking your views? Arguably yes. And yet there is always a possibility that you're right, after all enlightenment thought processes haven't been the default for most of history, or even a good part of the modern age. So what if you were right? By forcibly suppressing your speech, the discussion will never happen. The status quo will continue and the world will be worse off as you imagine.
On the other hand, you could be wrong. But if I suppress your ability to speak, again this discussion and debate will never be had. Other people who think the same as you, or even who are on the fence may never hear a robust (or even this mediocre) defense of free speech values. In such a world, people with your views might eventually become a majority because with no articulated defense of free speech, it could become viewed as a relic of "old white men", and that majority might even change the laws eliminating free speech and again we'd be worse off.
Or moving out of the very abstract into the more concrete, one doesn't have to go back very far to find us jailing, fining or suppressing people for:
* advocating against the draft (Schenck v. United States)
* establishing communist organizations (Whitney v. California)
* advocating the "violent overthrow of the government" by way of distribution of the Communist Manifesto (Dennis v. United States)
* general communist advocacy including at times "violence" (Yates v. United States)
* calling law enforcement officers fascists (Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire)
* "maliciously and willfully disturb[ing] the peace or quiet of any neighborhood or person [by] tumultuous or offensive conduct" (Cohen v. California)
* "endeavoring to arouse the Negro people against the whites, urging that they rise up in arms and fight for equal rights" (Feiner v. New York)
* Selling erotica (Roth v. United States)
* Selling more erotica (Miller v. California)
* Saying 7 words (FCC v. Pacifica Foundation)
* Distributing "obscene or indecent" messages to anyone under 18 (Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union)
* Publishing material that depicts "depravity, criminality, unchastity, or lack of virtue of a class of citizens of any race, color, creed or religion" (Beauharnais v. Illinois)
* Taking out an ad criticizing the police (New York Times Co. v. Sullivan)
* Antagonizing a judge (Sacher v. United States)
* Antagonizing the police (Hess v. Indiana)
* Criticizing a congressman (Susan B. Anthony List v. Driehaus)
* Lying about military service (United States v. Alvarez)
* Protesting wars (Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District)
And many many many many others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases_involving_the_First_Amendment#Freedom_of_speech
Not all of those cases went in the way of maximal freedoms, but in every single one of those cases, the people who were suppressing the speech thought it was dangerous, or abhorrent or otherwise illegitimate. In many cases, it's likely the speaker themselves was viewed that way. Back to those communist/socialism cases specifically and that was viewed by all "right thinking people" at the time as about as bad as being a Nazi. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But that's for each individual listener to decide, not for some authority from on high to forcibly stop.
Whatever happened to "stand up to bullies?" I guess that fighting back is just bad american values. Far better to give the bullies whatever they want as soon as you can or else you might be undermining their first amendement rights.
Or do only these things apply when its the liberals fighting back? Hmmmm.....
Nothing happened to it. Stand up to bullies. But proportional force is also called for. One doesn't get to shoot their bullies because they called them a "four eyes". Heck I'm sure our recent president thought many a media organization were being bullies. I don't know about you but I'm awful glad we have strong free speech rules and norms that prevented him from shutting down everyone and everything that didn't kowtow to him.
A braying mob is not inherently fascist, not according to the "definition" anyway.
Well sure, if there's one thing extremists of all types can agree on, it's those damn moderates and their calls for civility and free speech that are the true problem.
Or less sarcastically, the reason we're talking about "civility" and the finer points of free speech is because actual incivility and suppression of free speech took place. If we wanted to discuss well funded advocacy of fascism, there are many ways to do that without using actual fascism to accomplish it. In the hierarchy of "things that are important to stop" actual suppression of free speech is higher on the list than advocacy of suppressing free speech.
It's funny how I keep getting comments that I'm advocating suppression of speech. That's telling. That shows how effective this trolling tactic is. The bullies get sympathy because they were shouted down, just as they hoped they would be, because they knew it would actually increase the reach of their sick message. It's so easy, and so many otherwise intelligent people fall for it every time.
My original most made very clear I believe the protesters chose a dumb tactic. Shouting down the bully doesn't work. Humiliating the bully with mockery works. One of the reasons it works is because it humor gets to the heart and truth of the matter, and when "neutral" observers are compelled by humor to laugh at the bully, it deflates the bully's power instantly. The neutral observer realizes that the person they were giving the benefit of the doubt to does not deserve it--that they're simply a bully who deals in lies and aggression.
And once again--the protesters' response was the wrong tactic, but an understandable one. They feel that they and their friends and loved ones are under attack--and they are correct. The bullies we are talking about are sadists who want to inflict pain on vulnerable people simply to score political points and fleece money off of rubes.
They don't have a whole TV network? Sorry, was MSNBC founded this morning? I guess that (to a lesser extent) CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN are also brand new? I just this second invented late-night comedy and forged from raw geneseed the likes of John Oliver, Jimmy Kimmel, and Seth Meyers. I might have also just founded every major news and opinion page in the nation and peopled them with every over-educated, overly affluent midwit in existence, with the (lukewarm) exception of the Wall Street Journal. I'm god, is my point.
C'mon man.
And here we go, predictably. "But what about MSNBC?!!" False equivalencies are the lifeblood of fascist propaganda. Sorry, but Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson. Not even close. You aren't comparing apples with oranges, you're comparing apples with strychnine.
I'm definitely not comparing apples with strychnine. I might be comparing a fresh apple to one injected with strychnine, but my point would be that these are all news/opinion television personalities etc. and it's eminently reasonable to compare them.
But anyway, let's agree for the sake of argument that Jimmy Kimmel is not the same as Tucker Carlson, and that Fox is worse than MSNBC. Personally, I think they're all pretty atrocious, but no matter. That also wasn't the point of my comment.
Do you really think one Tucker Carlson is equivalent to 500-ish Jimmy Kimmels and Rachel Maddows? This isn't (precisely) a moral comparison; this is about who has the larger talking points pipeline.
Again, let's agree that Fox is 100% in hoc to a maximally bad fascist (keep crying wolf on that, see how it works out, btw) agenda, and that the Kimmels and Maddows are NOT 100% in hoc to a maximally bad communist agenda. I'd still lay odds that our media ecosystem produces about 10:1 communist to fascist talking points you could scrawl on a sign or shout over an invited speaker.
My point is, cut the shit. No one, not a single person, really believes you're the oppressed minority. You may not be the triumphalist majority (though you sure act like it when it suits you), and I know being the oppressed minority is core to your sense of self.
But your views on everything preponderate across virtually every field of elite discourse and have for about 40 years. The Wall Street Journal and Washington Free Beacon can't even find people to hire on the news side that aren't reflexively hostile to those papers' editorial stance. I say that's bad and needs to change.
And when your fellow-travelers, like these clowns at Stanford, make it so easy, dip the fruit so low, how can you blame me for picking it? I don't need fascist
(again, your word) talking points from Fox. SLS students and staff wrote them for me.
Let me make it perfectly clear: the reason why the views of the "left" or "progressives" or "communists" or "snowflakes" or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment, if not going all the way back to the dawn of democracy. However imperfect, they are a baseline of moral and ethical politics that the vast majority of decent, humane, patriotic Americans share. What the Right shouts about every day on Fox isn't an "alternative view." It's a bullshit view pushed by bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters. It deserves no respect as a view in and of itself; in fact, it's the opposite of a "view" - it's mere propaganda, and more often than not in these post-Trump days, it's just straight up lies.
Who says they predominate? Maybe in colleges, among the college-educated, but in large swathes of the population they don’t. The main problem is that progressives don’t communicate outside their bubble and are unwilling to acknowledge that a lot of working class people don’t automatically see them as reasonable. The danger is that the actual “fascists” end up looking reasonable, not just to “WWC” but to working class people of all races. This is the danger inherent in indulging these students--the stakes of losing this argument now aren’t “better luck next time” as it might have been in the 1980s. When you’re facing actual authoritarians, the danger is real, and excuses like “they meant well” don’t cut it.
The problem is that there are two sets of views being expressed by the protesters. (And by you.)
The first is “ gay, and trans people deserve to be treated with respect and dignity under the law.”
The second is “people who disagree with me on the first quote (and in your case, people who disagree with you on any major point of the left’s social and economic agenda) are ‘bullies, plutocrats, and mobsters,’ and don’t deserve the right to free speech.”
The first is a core Enlightenment value. The second is decidedly not. The Enlightenment shook off the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic Church and replaced it with freedom of speech and free enquirer precisely because it’s adherents recognized that we are never so certain of being correct that we may safely silence dissent.
“I hate what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
There is no exception for homophobes or loudmouth Federal Judges.
"the reason why the views of the 'left' or 'progressives' or 'communists' or 'snowflakes' or whatever you want to call it predominate is because THEY ARE THE REASONABLE VIEWS. And they have been the reasonable views since the Enlightenment"
Except, of course, that a growing fraction of that group is expressly anti-Enlightenment . . . . (See, e.g., Jamelle Bouie on the subject.)
I don't see anything wrong with confronting racism, even if it means scrutinizing the history of liberal politics. I'm not sure that makes Boule anti-Enlightement, but even if he was the point still stands: the so-called "liberal bias" in media, if it truly even exists, is simply the bias towards reason, compassion, and democracy. Contrast that with the Fox/Trump/GOP world which is pure poison, and only maintains power by duping rubes.
Bouie is not merely "scrutinizing" it. This is part of a larger attempt at discrediting the Enlightenment through a left identitarian frame, as made clear by Liam Kofi Bright: https://sootyempiric.blogspot.com/2022/04/why-i-am-not-liberal.html
Tucker Carlson himself disagrees with you about the legitimacy of right wing media vs msm which tends to have a liberal bias: https://youtu.be/2_9zX6VyZuM
They’re a great deal of difference between a paper like the NYT and Murdoch’s NY Post. I wouldn’t lump all of them together. The NYT has many conservative writers but they’re also *good* writers, who for the most part adhere to basic journalistic standards. But also they have a lot of liberal/progressive writers whom you conveniently left out. The WSJ definitely skews right and may have a higher circulation, but i think it’s probably equivalent to something like NYT + WaPo which skew left. But WSJ definitely has fewer writers with liberal views and based on some of the crazy stuff allowed to be published in the WSJ oped, I’d say it was slipping.
US Today is *not* a serious paper and no one would put it in the same category as the others. And the NY Post is little more than a glorified tabloid.
That said Tucker’s point was that the “right” at the time (and even less now) doesn’t have anything close to a news source that takes journalistic integrity serious. They rarely publish stories without naming sources (unless it’s a government source or whistleblower). They require two independent legitimate sources before they will print a story. “They worry about things like making sure they spell a person’s name right”. Are they perfect? No. But they have standards. Right wing media didn’t then - I doubt Rush Limbaugh gave 2 fucks about getting the facts right or the consequences of spreading poorly researched, misleading or downright false information to an audience brimming with grievance about being shut out of main stream media and universities and institutions. But the audience booed him because he committed the crime of faint praise of the NYT.
By then, the right had lost all capacity for humility, self-reflection, and the ability to admit they were wrong about anything. Rather than concede Tucker’s point, they attributed the disparity in the growing dominance of left leaning media and institutions to grievance and discrimination rather than wondering whether it was based on the fact that they had better standards.
So when they tried to retaliate by creating their own universities, media networks and institutions dedicated to promoting right wing values, they completely disregarded the importance of quality or standards - concentrating instead on solely on *ideology* - not how deeply you believed it or how well you could argue it. Because Limbaugh had already made those things irrelevant. He was proof that outrage was more important than facts in terms of ratings. And ratings/money is all that the right ever really cared about. Yay capitalism!
And that’s why we have this dramatic asymmetry that Chris Hayes was alluding to - where even Fox hosts use “left leaning” msm as their main source for reliable information.
If we got rid of the electoral college, this wouldn’t be a discussion. The grand Putin party would be a footnote.
Most transwomen identify as lesbians and refer to "cis-lesbians" who son't have sex with them as transphobes.
https://afterellen.com/backlash-against-lesbians-assaulted-by-transwomen/
Here's a TED Talk by a pediatric endocrinologist about a 12 year old raised as trans from birth, started on blockers and estrogen at 10, and sterile at 12. So why not surgery?
https://www.ted.com/talks/tandy_aye_is_the_surgical_world_ready_for_adolescent_gender_surgery?language=en
Masculine girls and feminine boys are now pushed towards identifying as transgender.
Here's a lesbian/transman telling her story. She's in Walsh's film but she defends gay men and lesbians. Tomboys are girls who behave like boys. Let them be. https://twitter.com/NotScottNewgent/status/1634682798903635970
Nonsense. Just absolute tosh. None of that is true, it’s pure fabrication in the service of moral panic. If you’re reading this with the idea that there might be some truth in any of these slurs, please remember: being trans is not actually a political position, it’s a gender identity. There are trans people with many different ideas about sexual politics, but just like in every other group, trans people overwhelmingly understand that sex without freely given consent is not OK and any hint of coercion in that process is creepy and awful at best and rape at worst. Just as in any other group of humans it is possible to find one or two examples of someone who has expressed horrific views. To state the bleeding obvious, the assertion that such a view is generally held is pure bullshit.
Nonsense? A Stanford affiliated pediatric endocrinologist defends a mother's choice to raise a child as trans from birth and sterilize it with cross sex hormones. Maybe it's a moral choice, maybe not. Tell us what you think.
The Times (UK) on Hannah Barnes' new book
https://archive.ph/3jhxE
---Clinicians were seeing increasingly mentally unwell kids, including those who didn’t just identify as a different gender but as a different nationality and race: “Usually east Asian, Japanese, Korean, that sort of thing,” Dr Matt Bristow, a former Gids clinician, tells Barnes. But this was seen by Gids as irrelevant to their gender identity issues. Past histories of sexual abuse were also ignored: “[A natal girl] who’s being abused by a male, I think a question to ask is whether there’s some relationship between identifying as male and feeling safe,” Bristow says. But, clinicians point out, any concerns raised with their superiors always got the same response: that the kids should be put on the blockers unless they specifically said they didn’t want them. And few kids said that. As one clinician told Barnes: “If a young person is distressed and the only thing that’s offered to them is puberty blockers, they’ll take it, because who would go away with nothing?
Then there was the number of autistic and same-sex-attracted kids attending the clinic, saying that they were transgender. Less than 2 per cent of children in the UK are thought to have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, however, more than a third of their referrals had moderate to severe autistic traits. “Some staff feared they could be unnecessarily medicating autistic children,” Barnes writes.
There were similar fears about gay children. Clinicians recall multiple instances of young people who had suffered homophobic bullying at school or at home, and then identified as trans. According to the clinician Anastassis Spiliadis, “so many times” a family would say, “Thank God my child is trans and not gay or lesbian.” Girls said, “When I hear the word ‘lesbian’ I cringe,” and boys talked to doctors about their disgust at being attracted to other boys. When Gids asked adolescents referred to the service in 2012 about their sexuality, more than 90 per cent of females and 80 per cent of males said they were same-sex attracted or bisexual. Bristow came to believe that Gids was performing “conversion therapy for gay kids” and there was a bleak joke on the team that there would be “no gay people left at the rate Gids was going”. When gay clinicians such as Bristow voiced their concerns to those in charge, they say it was implied that they were not objective because they were gay and therefore “too close” to the work. (Gids does not accept this claim.)---
You know an article is reliable, trustworthy, and not pushing an agenda when it very badly misdefines common medical terms ("Gids treats children and young people who express confusion — or dysphoria — about their gender identity," - that is not even a slightly correct definition of dysphoria,) proceeds to make incorrect claimword, originally formulated to treat prostate cancer and to castrate male sex offenders," - at no point were puberty blockers used to 'castrate' anyone, except in the most hyperbolic and sensationalist use of the word. They reduce libido and can lead to erectile dysfunction while they are being taken, but the effect passes once the medications are discontinued,) then continues with bad science ("It is generally accepted now that puberty blockers affect bone density, and potentially cognitive and sexual development." This makes it seem like these are shocking new discoveries, when in fact standard of care for use of GnRH in children has always included regular bone density tests because this is something we've known for a very long time, and it is neither "generally accepted" nor remotely supported that the use of puberty blockers causes absolutely any long-term issues with sexual or cognitive impairment.)
But these are just things that popped out at me from a cursory skim of your source. And these are just the quantitative, objective signs that an article may not be interested in truth so much as in agenda. There is also plenty of qualitative evidence, such as beginning the piece with the radical but entirely unsubstantiated claim that someone with a published book and multiple high-profile interviews is somehow being censored, but we'll ignore those as being too wishy-washy and subjective.
Long-story short, Gids had issues. Mainly, being sadly underfunded and understaffed. What they didn't have was an issue with the medication itself, or frankly most of their prescription of it. It's telling that when the long-term study came out, it showed that most of the people put on puberty blockers ended up fully transitioning and that this was somehow spun into being an indictment of puberty blockers and the clinic, instead of a running endorsement that despite their troubles they had actually mostly got it right. And they did, because despite the very public lawsuit from someone unhappy with their transition, long-term trans satisfaction rates are actually significantly higher than long-term satisfaction with plastic surgery, bunion surgery, hip replacements — basically any kind of medical procedure. Think about that: more people regret getting hip surgery, something we typically call a medically necessary procedure, than regret their transition.
Marci Bowers: "Every single child who was blocked at Tanner Stage Two has never experienced orgasm, I mean it’s really about zero."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5V_gH01uII
I'm done with this.
If only there was a body of peer reviewed, published research on the topic so that we didn't have to take the word of a single genital reconstruction surgeon. Oh, wait, we do!
https://genderanalysis.net/2022/04/abigail-shrier-and-surgeon-marci-bowers-falsely-claimed-trans-girls-on-puberty-blockers-lack-sexual-response-after-vaginoplasty/
You can ignore the author as a biased source, but do browse the excellent collection of citations. And best of all, it's actual research and not a carefully couched, wishy-washy opinion in a video!
Bowers is the President of WPATH. But you knew that. https://www.wpath.org/about/EC-BOD
Repeating myself (see above)
"Here's a TED Talk by a pediatric endocrinologist about a 12 year old raised as trans from birth, started on blockers and estrogen at 10, and sterile at 12. So why not surgery?"
https://www.ted.com/talks/tandy_aye_is_the_surgical_world_ready_for_adolescent_gender_surgery?language=en
Jesus Christ, my man, is there some part of "peer-reviewed, published research" that is difficult for you? Because a Ted Talk isn't it, either. And neither of the anecdotes you posted contradict that there is body of research that demonstrates both the ability to orgasm AND the ability to conceive post-transition.
I understand most people do not have a strong scientific background and are lacking in even relatively basic skills related to finding and parsing scientific and clinical information because the education system in this country does a frankly terrible job of teaching scientific literacy. But even with that deficiency, you should be able to see that a Ted Talk, regardless of how much it supports your personal beliefs, is not a source for anything other than the speaker's opinions. And you should at the very least understand that a TedX Talk isn't even a Ted Talk, but a local pay-for-play offshoot of the original Ted Series where the only criteria for being a speaker is the willingness to pay a sponsorship fee.
So, would you care to try again, but with real sources? Or do you want to keep throwing out opinions and anecdotes and pretending they mean something?
https://profiles.stanford.edu/tandy-aye
Clinical Focus
Endocrinology/Diabetes, Pediatric
Pediatric Endocrinology
Healthcare of Gender Nonconforming Youth
Type 1 Diabetes
Academic Appointments
Professor - University Medical Line, Pediatrics - Endocrinology and Diabetes
Professor - University Medical Line (By courtesy), Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences - Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences
Member, Maternal & Child Health Research Institute (MCHRI)
Administrative Appointments
MEDICAL DIRECTOR, STANFORD PEDIATRIC AND ADOLESCENT GENDER CLINIC (2019 - PRESENT)
Fellowship Program Director, Pediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes (2011 - Present)
Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations
Board of Directors, Pediatric Endocrine Society (2021 - Present)
Member, Pediatric Endocrine Society Workforce Action Team (2019 - Present)
Committee Chair, Pediatric Endocrine Society Training Council (2017 - 2020)
Secretary/Treasurer, Council of Pediatric Subspecialties (2017 - 2020)
Member, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (2016 - Present)
All Boards, Advisory Committees, Professional Organizations (10)
Except we suppress bad speech all the time. We have, for example, decided that inciting people towards imminent violence is bad speech that shouldn't be suppressed. And you, of all people, know this.
Responding to this incident as a free speech absolutist is one of the worst possible takes on the entire incident, because it is obviously intellectually lazy and quite likely intellectually dishonest. What you really mean is "it's ok that some bad speech is suppressed and shot down, but I just don't believe that this particular speech rises to that level because I, personally, do not feel threatened by it or believe that it creates any immediate danger for anyone, and also despite regularly citing landmark decisions that fundamentally change our understanding of free speech, I refuse to even consider the possibility that our current understanding of the first amendment isn't perfect and complete and should possibly be examined with some more scrutiny to see is maybe it is a good idea to maybe do some more suppressing."
So now, thanks to plaintive cries that we should accept the right of people to say anything, so long as you don't personally see the immediate harm, state legislatures feel comfortable proposing bills to forcibly detransition trans youth. But thank god that at least we didn't go down some hypothetical first amendment slippery slope, so real crisis averted.
And what's really telling is that immediately after talking about a concerted effort to enforce oppression from the bench and legislature, the only time you use the term "fascism" is to lambast a group of students shouting at someone who does the exact same thing, except from the bench and with the full force of the federal government behind him and only at people who have absolutely no opportunity to respond. You have weighed the two behaviors and found that being disruptive at a casual event is worse than a judge usurping his authority to demean a powerless person. "Fascism," I guess, is now a synonym for "rudeness."
The real problem isn't the organization you openly call "evil" in another post normalizing state-sanctioned violence against marginalized groups. The real problem is that if we silence people openly calling for the slow-motion murder of trans people, eventually some day maybe it's possible that somewhere someone might accidentally ban speech that isn't designed to hurt people. The horror.
I get the feeling a lot of people you don’t agree with are deemed intellectually lazy and dishonest.
We can’t all be you, I guess.
Cheer up. Maybe you’ll get your way someday and be able to put people like me in jail, or camps. And you can still fantasize about it.
Here's the thing, though, is that I have genuinely respected and looked up to you for years. Maybe over a decade now? Time has been relatively meaningless over the last couple of years. So if I'm a little less tempered and polite than I should be, that may be why. Or perhaps it's the fact that I had to pick up my life and move across the country in order to escape a state where it was no longer safe for my trans child to live thanks to a host of legislation culminating in SB254.
Which partly my point — this is all purely an academic exercise for you, but for trans people and their families, it isn't. You joke about me wanting to send people to camps (and come on, really? Camps?) while ignoring that the speech you're protecting is actually threatening to send people to jail. Not in a tongue in cheek, "I've basically decided that trolling gets more clicks now" way, but real jail.
But what makes this an intellectually lazy argument, in my opinion, and the portion you didn't bother to address at all because "OMG lol camps Nazis hitler" is that free speech is restricted in thousands of ways in this country and many others and it doesn't immediately (or even eventually) lead to your nightmare scenario of cattle cars full of brave contrarians. Canada's free speech laws are more restrictive than ours, but it routinely ranks higher than the US on measures of human rights. Germany (ironic given your knee-jerk response) has some of the most restrictive laws on speech in what we think of as the Democratic West, but somehow they muddle through without restarting that whole Holocaust thing every time someone says something that's verboten. Your entire support for the moral/ethical part of your argument is a slippery slope fallacy that has ample evidence of being neither a slope, nor slippery, but you trot it out nonetheless. If that's not intellectual laziness, what is it?
I’ll bite.
What was the judge saying at Stanford that would be limited by a European speech policy?
I apologize if I did a poor job expressing myself leading us to this question, and I hope you understand why this topic especially is exceptionally raw for a lot of people.
My point is not that the judge was violating any specific speech policy. I am not making a legal argument. I'm not a lawyer, and wouldn't dream of arguing the specifics of the law with you or any other lawyer, because I'm not an expert — you are.
But I don't believe you made a legal argument in this newsletter. You made a moral and ethical one, and that's what I'm responding to. In your own words:
"And they are too hubris-swollen — not too stupid, but too drunk with self-righteousness — to see that exceptions to free speech have always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be. They’re too full of themselves to see that “let a crowd decide who is allowed to speak” is a horrific norm to promote with grotesque historic resonance. Some of them will grow out of this."
This is why I bring up European speech policy. And Canadian speech policy. And existing exceptions to the 1st Amendment that you touch on regularly, including in your newsletter about Shivaro.
I'm not saying there is a specific policy, law, decision, memorandum, or other bit of obscure legal wrangling that makes what the judge said wrong, or gives legal air cover to the students shouting him down. What I AM saying is that carving out exceptions to the 1A and freedom of speech as a concept has not, in fact, "always been used most harmfully against the powerless, and always will be." And that, in fact, the students shouting down the Judge in no way caused any meaningful harm to either the judge's free speech OR to the concept of free speech in general, and that perhaps we should look at expanding exceptions to free speech, not to include "anyone I think is an asshole," but to include "anyone who's speech is used to create harm to the very powerless that you're worried may be hurt in stone distant future when we've fully slid down the slippery slope that others have managed to avoid sliding down.
Maybe I'm drunk on self-righteousness and hubris-swollen. Maybe I'm arrogant in thinking that we, as a people, are capable of thoughtful carve-outs of inalienable rights that simultaneously prevent marginalized communities having to be refugees in their own countries AND prevent the United States from becoming the Fourth Reich. But if I am, then you must admit that you are as well, for supporting carve-outs of the 1A. The only difference, as I see it, is that you believe the issue is largely settled with the expeditions we have, and that the law must lead and the rest of us follow; whereas I believe that there's still room for improvement, and that the law is a trailing indicator for justice.
And I apologize for calling you dishonest. Everything else aside, that was unnecessary and petty.