The American alt-right recently cancelled an advertised "Free Speech Week" event. This was supposed to feature Milo Yiannopoulos, Ann Coulter and Steve Bannon explaining to students how an alleged politically correct fear of causing offence was stifling free expression.
You might have dismissed this as yet more self-serving nonsense from a bunch of abusive trolls, but it quickly turned out that, liked a stopped clock, even this bunch can be right twice a day.
Freedom of expression is under threat, in almost precisely the way they'd been warning us about. A forthright group of athletes decided to express their point of view by disrupting a commonly-accepted piece of etiquette.
This piece of radical free expression triggered America's Snowflake-In-Chief who, instead of dealing with the rough and tumble of robust debate and freedom of opinion, just whined that somebody really ought to sack the horrible people who'd upset him so.
So apparently we do need this failed free speech event to be revived and re-scheduled. But not at a university, where most students should already be quite capable of analysing and debating ideas on their merits.
No, the venue that really needs a long and detailed lecture on the merits of free expression and the marketplace of ideas is that fragile orange bubble of safe space currently floating back and forth between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
You might have dismissed this as yet more self-serving nonsense from a bunch of abusive trolls, but it quickly turned out that, liked a stopped clock, even this bunch can be right twice a day.
Freedom of expression is under threat, in almost precisely the way they'd been warning us about. A forthright group of athletes decided to express their point of view by disrupting a commonly-accepted piece of etiquette.
This piece of radical free expression triggered America's Snowflake-In-Chief who, instead of dealing with the rough and tumble of robust debate and freedom of opinion, just whined that somebody really ought to sack the horrible people who'd upset him so.
So apparently we do need this failed free speech event to be revived and re-scheduled. But not at a university, where most students should already be quite capable of analysing and debating ideas on their merits.
No, the venue that really needs a long and detailed lecture on the merits of free expression and the marketplace of ideas is that fragile orange bubble of safe space currently floating back and forth between 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
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https://xkcd.com/1357/
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