Tag: tolerance

Suspended for Dissent

SUNY, university, PC, political correctness

Don’t state the “wrong” opinion while studying at SUNY-Geneseo.

That is, if you want smoothly to sail through your academic career.

Owen Stevens violated the school’s “inclusivity” creed, according to which “a diverse campus community [is] marked by mutual respect for the unique talents and contributions of each individual.”

Would-be future teachers like Stevens, the university contends, must respect “all forms” of gender identity. But he has argued publicly that there are only two sexes or genders (male, female).

“A man is not a woman and a woman is not a man,” said Stevens in one un-inclusive Instagram video. “The biology is clear.”

So, faster than we have time to remember that “academic freedom” was once a hallowed standard of university conduct, he was suspended from the field teaching programs that are a requirement for all education students at the school. Stevens has refused to cooperate with the school’s plan to rehabilitate him.

The toleration and respect promoted by SUNY-Geneseo apparently does not include tolerating and respecting the right of others to express opinions about politics, society, and biology with which a university censor might disagree.

Of course, what constitutes “official” acceptable doctrine keeps changing. One can never know which once obviously untenable claims — about biology or anything else — will suddenly be upgraded to sacred dogma by persons with the power to penalize disagreement.

Regardless of one’s views of transgender contentions, though, Americans should judge a policy of forcing people to salute certain government- (or administrator-) approved conclusions intolerable.

It’s the school administrators responsible for suspending Stevens who should be suspended — or fired — for their conduct.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags education, gender, identitity, inclusion, tolerance

Accountability crime and punishment First Amendment rights general freedom ideological culture national politics & policies political challengers Regulating Protest

Assaults Not Allowed

speech, argument, hate speech, minds.com, Bill Ottman, violence, free speech, tolerance

Have Americans forgotten that freedom makes getting along easier?

We do not all have to like each other. We do not even all have to be nice to each other. We just don’t have license to hit or hornswoggle our fellows. Hate speech may be bad, but it is hate assaults — not talk — that should be punished by law.

Yes, free people are at liberty to insult each other, call each other nasty names, even demean each other. And those insulted, besmirched, and dissed may return in kind or shrug the negatives off.

But we needn’t let it go at that.

Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of Minds.com, reminds us that there is more than one way to skin a hate. When coming across vile nonsense and worse, “the most important question is how we deal with these situations,” he writes.

We may be able to find the answer in the work of Daryl Davis, a famous blues musician with a hobby of befriending members of the Ku Klux Klan. According to him: “Once the friendship blossoms, the klansmen realize that their hate may be misguided.” By having dinner with Klansmen, he has inspired over 200 members to give up their robes.

Ottman goes on to call for a concerted effort to reclaim a future for “internet freedom and human rights.” That’s a good idea.

Don’t accept the premise that, to get along, we must squelch speech. Instead, ignore disagreeable people trying to make us feel bad.

And look for ways to persuade those who hate us.

We can be adults about this. And keep freedom of speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags argument, Bill Ottman, free speech, hate speech, minds.com, speech, tolerance, violence

Accountability First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people moral hazard U.S. Constitution

Exit Strategy Advised

free speech, Trump, First Amendment, rights, college, campus, tolerance

The First Amendment applies only against governments, but our free speech rights can be violated by nearly anyone.

These days, these rights are most notoriously and routinely violated by mobs of students . . . attending colleges and universities nearly all of which depend upon taxpayer subsidies.

David E. Bernstein, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, in “USC Law Professor: Supporters of Campus Free Speech are ‘Preying on Vulnerable Teenagers,’” makes a number of points regarding a law professor’s published defense of nasty student reactions to a Federalist Society speaker . . . on a campus not his own.

Bernstein notes that “the article has to have the requisite references to the Emmanuel Goldsteins of the modern left, the Koch Brothers, who are mentioned four times for no discernable reason.” The reason, of course, is demonization. For a movement needs enemies.

The USC law professor argues that journalists should ignore campus speaking events that “goad” students into “tactical mistakes” by the “mean-spirited provocations” of “seasoned political operatives preying on vulnerable teenagers and inexperienced young adults.”* Bernstein shows that the “tactical mistakes” amount to peaceful and intellectual speakers being “harrassed, shouted down, and subject to or threatened with violence”; every reasonable person knows that disagreeing with the ideas someone communicates does not excuse violating that someone’s rights.

No matter how “provocative.”

Most chillingly, the speaker who incited student ire and accusations, etc., had been advised by “a security guard” before his “talk” to devise “an ‘exit strategy.’” This indicates that the American taxpayer needs an exit strategy from subsidizing anti-democratic mob activism.

And its professorial enablers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Don’t you find this language awfully coddling of people who should be treated as responsible for their actions, and who, by their attendance at an institution of higher learning, should be capable of listening to any point of view? I find it maddening.

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Tags campus, college, first amendment, free speech, rights, tolerance, Trump

folly general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard nannyism national politics & policies Popular Regulating Protest U.S. Constitution

Force Over Persuasion

free speech, BLM, Black Lives Matter, tolerance, censorship

Today’s campus radicals assert that free speech is bad because it “gives voice” to people with hateful, dangerous views.

Does that argument seem at all familiar? It is the old RightThink rationale for censorship.

A recent Spiked “Unsafe Spaces” event at Rutgers (“Identity Politics: the New Racialism”) was interrupted by now-too-famiar shouts and out-of-turn questions and invective. Kmele Foster, one of the panelists, had been explaining how important free speech rights were to the civil rights protesters in the 1960s, and to Martin Luther King in particular.

At “that precise moment,” as Reason’s Matt Welch puts it, the shouts of “Black lives matter!” began. And continued.

But more interesting than this bullying? Some of the more coherent theses articulated by the interrupters. One woman, CampusReform relates,

yelled in response to the panelists that she doesn’t “need statistics,” later complaining that “the system” controls facts.

“It’s the system. It’s the institution,” she said. “Don’t tell me about facts. I don’t need no facts.”

Well, the moment you prove immune to any fact is the exact point in time that you’ve given up on rationality, free inquiry, and maybe even civilization itself.

It’s so 1984-ish.

And it demonstrates the old idea that, when you can no longer reason or allow others to express different opinions . . . or even discuss the factuality of this or that contention, you have only one other option: force.

Become bully.

Or tyrant.

Civilization is the triumph of persuasion over force. Being against free speech is to reverse that.

The acme of barbarism.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags Black Lives Matter, BLM, censorship, free speech, tolerance

folly ideological culture

Swedish “Generosity”

religion, Sweden, Bishop, tolerance, folly, progressivism, secular, collage, photomontage, JGill, Paul Jacob, Common Sense

The headline? Gaspworthy: “World’s First Lesbian Bishop Calls for Church to Remove Crosses, To Install Muslim Prayer Space.”

Are we being punked? Onion–ized?

I checked: apparently not.

The place is the Seamen’s mission church in the eastern docks of Stockholm. The Church of Sweden’s local bishop challenged the mission’s priest with a what-if: Suppose a Muslim came off the boats and wanted a place to pray?

Had the encounter been just a one-off, we could shrug it off. But this is one latitudinarian cleric, and she didn’t let it go:

Calling Muslim guests to the church “angels,” the Bishop later took to her official blog to explain that removing Christian symbols from the church and preparing the building for Muslim prayer doesn’t make a priest any less a defender of the faith. Rather, to do any less would make one “stingy towards people of other faiths.”

Generosity über alles strikes again!

I’ve long wondered about radicals who infiltrate religions. If you don’t like Catholicism, join or start something else; if you find the Baptist Conventions opprobrious, check out the Methodism, Greek Orthodoxy, or . . . Thelema. Why horn in on someone else’s religion?

But there is a reason it’s happening in the city that gave us “Stockholm Syndrome.” The Church of Sweden’s a state institution, while Scandinavia’s real religion is secular progressivism. You need no gift of prophecy to see where that’s bound to go.

Separation of church and state just makes sense. To each religion its own. There need be no fighting for adherents, or laying down of one’s own beliefs merely to appeal to “inclusion.”

Unless or until you get the government involved.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Tags belief, church and state, faith, progressivism, religion, secular, Sweden, tolerance

Common Sense crime and punishment general freedom

Ultra Anti-Civilization

The stabbing event at a Thursday “Gay Pride” march in Jerusalem reveals an element of the much-talked-about “clash of civilizations” not often discussed any longer. But it used to dominate the conversation.

Why? It was not a Muslim jihadist who stabbed six people and ultimately killed one of them, a 16-year-old girl (she died in the hospital this weekend).

It was an Orthodox Jew.

That is, the man arrested at the event, identified as Yishai Schlissel, certainly looked Orthodox, when I saw him on TV, briefly, in an early report. The BBC now refers to him an “ultra-Orthodox Jew” (“ultra” theirs; emphasis, mine). He had previously carried out a similar attack in 2005.

“Israel’s government would have ‘zero tolerance’ for Jewish extremists, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a security cabinet meeting on Sunday,” according to a BBC report.

What suspect Schlissel shares with other terrorists is not merely a rock-hard belief that certain other people are sinful and corrupt, etc. He somehow also believes that he may assume the role of judge and executioner . . . of people he only knows by their differences.

This is beyond “ultra.” Schlissel repudiates not only the rule of law (since he acts outside it), but a basic idea that has grown in Western civilization — from roots found in his own religion.

Liberty.

The essence of liberty? Leaving peaceful people you disagree with alone.

It is more than possible for the religiously orthodox to get along with the un-orthodox. We can all get along if we respect each others’ rights, regardless of our differences.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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