This is more-or-less explicitly what the professional free speech movement has spent the last decade fighting for. - ThreadSky

goldwagnathan.bsky.social • 19 days ago

This is more-or-less explicitly what the professional free speech movement has spent the last decade fighting for.

You’re allowed to argue that black people and women are genetically inferior. But you’re NOT allowed to argue they are NOT inferior because that’s divisive. www.nytimes.com/2025/05/09/u...

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billthepony.bsky.social•19 days ago

Time for another victory lap "common sense moderates" who turned their entire political project into protecting the right and attacking the left.

TBF, It was extremely hard to see how that would play out... Because we don't have literally hundreds of years of examples...*sarc

davidmouritsen.bsky.social•19 days ago

True — except that one must be careful not to endorse, even implicitly, the opposition's inversion of rights discourse.

Now, we’ve reached Orwell: “[T]he three slogans on the white face of the Ministry of Truth came back to him: WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”

sharmake.bsky.social•19 days ago

There are a couple of caveats, for example FIRE was more consistent in protecting free speech, including liberal/leftist speech from crackdowns by the state, but yeah a distressingly large amount of the free speech movement was in practice a cover for racism to be spouted again.

dillo.media•19 days ago

FIRE is headed by a weirdo zionist btw

sharmake.bsky.social•19 days ago

That's not very relevant to my point, though.

mx0x20wednesday.bsky.social•19 days ago

🫠

chathamharrison.bsky.social•19 days ago

Principled stands being broken down by operation of concentrated wealth & privilege into mere partisan interest? Well I never!

issuefortyfive.bsky.social•19 days ago

FIRE likes to hold out its defenses of liberal speech to demonstrate its nonpartisanship but the thrust of its work, which is mostly public relations, is to condemn what it calls liberal censorship. It’s not at all accurate to say that is is consistent. It has been a major component of the problem.

issuefortyfive.bsky.social•19 days ago

Arguably FIRE has been the biggest driver of the free speech fetishism campaign over the last ten years.

castlekarberg.bsky.social•19 days ago

Perfectly encapsulates their view of “woke” and all the downstream disdain for the intolerable condition of simply being aware of oppression and/or bigotry

b9n10nt.bsky.social•19 days ago

a federalist judge went to speak at Stanford a few years ago, not because he was a distinguished scholar in a productive field, but because he was GOP hack curio w connections

but when students said “publicity stunt? Okay.” they were condemned for being illiberal

same dbl standard

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