A one dimensional left/right view doesn't really explain our current politics very well. Factions in both parties have strong reasons to be against freedom of speech.

There is a very strong tribal/identity politics thing going on with both the left and the right in the US.

Scares the hell out of me.

Yeah. People with brains should be more united.

>Yeah. People with brains should be more united.

While i don’t disagree on its face. That statement usually means “people should just be on my side”.

As written above; the Overton window has been moving left, and things like not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders - things that would have got you locked up 50 years ago are being pushed by presidential candidates and congress members.

It’s moved left, and a little too far. So while I agree people with brains should be united, right now many of the balanced beliefs will get you called an alt-right Nazi.

You need a third party that takes up the middle. That allows the parties to move slowly towards the middle and shift left or right over certain issues only. Right now it is setup to move the parties apart as the choice is binary.

> not prosecuting female gential mutilation in the US, straight socialism, not settling for anything less than full gun bans, open borders

Please don't lie. There is no mainstream Congress person or presidential candidate protecting FGM, advocating for full socialism or complete open borders. Just because you disagree with them doesn't make your projections true.

This. So much this. FoE is attacked from both sides. Each with their own self-serving justifications.

Anecdotal, but I notice a lot more people clamoring about freedom of speech when it's white supremacists being affected and a lot less when it's ISIS or Al-Qaeda. I find it very hard to take them seriously because of this, despite agreeing with a lot of the sentiment.

Keep in mind that the definition of "white supremacy" has been expanded to include things like opposition to affirmative action, or support for enforcement of existing border control regulations (let along their expansion). Of course calls to censor those things are going to garner much more opposition than censoring explicit terrorist organizations.

The definition of white supremacy isn't expanding, but those are two topics white supremacists vocally support.

Many people, including mainstream media outlets, friends of mine, and co-workers have labeled these positions as white supremacist. Not just identifying them as positions that white supremacists support. The set of views considered "white supremacist" is indeed expanding to include mainstream conservative views like the ones I mentioned.

It most certainly is.

I recently attended a diversity workshop at a large organization that you’d recognize where we were taught some key elements of white supremacy are things like: perfectionism, urgency, defensiveness, individualism, etc.

https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-cu...

Wow. Apparently "Objectivity" is white supremacy, along with "Individualism". This honestly surprised me.

Stephen Fry might disagree with you there.

Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification. A single false positive by Twitter of all places isn't indicative of a trend.

> Being conscious of dog whistles isn't expanding the white supremacist classification.

It does when allegations of dog whistling are levied against mainstream viewpoints. Saying "build the wall" is a white supremacist dog whistle is absolutely a means of expanding white supremacy to encompass support border enforcement. Nothing about building a wall on a national border is white supremacist. White supremacists may be in favor of such a viewpoint, but that does not make the viewpoint itself white supremacist.

Accusations of dog whistling is a very cheap and effective way of stuffing words into one's opponents' mouths and many do use it to try and paint acceptable views as white supremacist.

It most certainly is. What's worse is when anonymous strangers on the internet accuse someone of being white supremacist just because they oppose reparations and affirmative action without even knowing anything else about the person. I am a brown immigrant myself (recently moved to Canada) who opposes affirmative action and reparations and just for that, I got called white supremacist, a nazi etc on reddit. Like how exactly can a dark brown person be white supremacist? Makes no sense. But the hidden identity on the internet lets people throw abhorrent insults like no tomorrow.

I’m pretty tired of people linking any sort of complaint, worry, and defense of their rights to white supremacy or whatever hate group.

Plenty of people stand up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom. It’s not all some conspiracy by hate groups to defend themselves.

Welcome to the world created by faster communication.

At a point where each issue is extremely polarizing, where we connect people around the world - blurring the local and the global - and there’s a new crazy event happening every minute around the world minute - people lose nuance and the ability to stop and compartmentalism events.

Since everything is now part of a never ending stream of outrageous actions, content consumers have adapted by looking at meta identifiers to get a grip on the world around them.

Who is speaking? What are they saying ? Oh? It matches statements used by white supremacists ? Ok, good bye.

I don’t have the time or bandwidth to invest in you.

When everything is accessible and people have only limited processing space - decisions are made on lossy fast information.

Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being uninvited to speak at college campuses. Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.

> Perhaps, but there is also a cultural trend of alt-right/far right groups clamoring about free speech in response to de-platforming and being disinvited to speak at college campuses.

For public universities, this is a breach of the first amendment no matter how heinous the speakers' viewpoints are. And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.

> Most contemporary American free speech protests aren't apolitical affairs where nonsectarian activists are just "standing up for their rights because they legitimately care about freedom" for the sake of free speech as an ideal- they view freedom as a means to promote their ideology.

I don't disagree with you. But you're drawing the wrong conclusions from this observation. If the concerns over free speech is more prevalent on one end of the political spectrum, it could easily be due to the fact that said end of the political spectrum is being censored more frequently and more aggressively. And I can't argue with that, I've seen very stark disparities in enforcement over the past several years.

> And for private universities it's a big blow to the institution's reputations for all but the most objectionable speakers.

Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.

I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.

Let me preface by saying I disagree with everything you say, but I still think you have the right to say it.

Universities are meant to be institutions of learning. Learning isn’t always comfortable. Some long held truths turn out to be wrong at some point. What we all think is true or right right now could completely reverse in a decade. Letting people speak especially when it’s against your morals is important for learning and understanding. Even if it’s bizarre and incoherent, if somebody believes it, we should try to understand why so that we can better educate those who were persuaded.

As an example of the rapid change in public thought and what’s acceptable, almost nobody publicly supported gay marriage a little over a decade ago. Saying you did would result in mockery, people questioning your sexual identity, people bringing up the religious history of America, etc. Now publicly opposing it is career suicide.

I generally agree, but here's a concern I have:

The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.

For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?

> The student body is going to have its own set of values, some of which may challenge the prevailing norms of society or the university itself. Should a university ignore, nurture, or challenge the views of its students? I feel like, as a student, you should be allowed to pick. Because depending on the issue, or the individual, the answer may change.

And what happens when students cease to challenge their own views? They become accustomed to a monoculture and become adverse to views other than their own. In time, the refusal to challenge their own views morphs into hostility towards those that dare challenge those views.

> For example, at one time Gen-Xers and Millennials were significantly more tolerant of homosexuality than society overall (they still are, but society has largely come around). Did universities do them a disservice by either nurturing or ignoring these views, rather than intellectually challenging their pro-gay marriage views?

It did them a service. By being force to challenge these views, these students were prompted to developed effective arguments to refute those challenges. This better equipped them to turn around and challenge the rest of society's views on these topics.

I think there’s a difference between challenging and shutting down. Challenging should be encouraged since it (at least theoretically) forces people to have a reasonable basis for their beliefs. Students who don’t want to be challenged and just want to be correct and shut down opposing thoughts shouldn’t really be called students. They’re not seeing to broaden their horizons. If they only want to learn about their speciality topic, that’s okay, but university isn’t really the place for that. Technical and speciality schools exist to focus on small fields of learning.

> Universities are meant to be institutions of learning.

They should be, but in this country they are essentially businesses now, and so will likely have the same institutions (TOS and so forth) accordingly.

> Numerous private universities (Christian schools in particular) enforce strict student code of conduct rules that severely limit the student body's freedom of expression as to way to enforce religious or secular compliance. And it doesn't hurt their reputation but instead is an integral component of the school's identity.

Perhaps you're coming from a different cultural context than, but in my circles such universities absolutely are mocked and looked down upon. Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.

> I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I'd argue that colleges and universities should have the right to police speech and expression: they should just be upfront about it. "Our house: our rules" as they say.

For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise. For private universities they already have the right to police speech and expression. It is, as you say, their house and their rules. They don't police (or rather they are very liberal in their policing) because freedom of speech and expression are central to an effective academy. Once universities start policing heavy-handedly, or on ideological grounds people start to doubt whether the ideas voiced are genuine or whether people are censoring themselves out of fear of retaliation from the institution. This cloud of doubt hangs overall the research published by that university, and the reputation of that university suffers considerably.

> Some people don't even consider applicants from BYU, and other heavily religious universities because they don't want to reward such institutions.

That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism. HBCUs probably face a similar problem: should we abolish or enforce strict racial quotes on them because there are racists who will toss a resume with Howard University on it?

> For public universities, the First Amendment legally obligates them otherwise.

This is absolutely true. But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?

> That's just religious discrimination cloaked in something less intolerable: academic elitism.

I don't necessarily agree with tossing such resumes in the garbage, but it is evidence that universities that enforce religious dogma on their students do suffer a hit to their reputation because of that.

> how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?

Not every private school is Stanford, MIT, etc. Plenty of private schools are shitty for-profit enterprises (especially online universities) that essentially scam customers out of their money. Purely on the basis of return on investment many studies also conclude that public university is better than private universities.

Also most reputable private university do respect freedom of speech and expression to a similar degree as public universities. If you factor in the reactions of students, perhaps even better. When Berkeley hosted Milo Y students rioted, smashed up cars, etc. When Stanford hosted Dinesh D'Souza it was very tame with protesters being non-disruptive. Public universities aren't immune from going off the deep end regardless of constitutional protection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2cMYfxOFBBM

Again, the private schools with good reputations do behave almost as if the First Amendment applied to them. The ones that don't generally aren't reputable. So your question is based on false premise.

I think the both of you are conflating a multitude of separate topics. Private schools tend to have strong reputations because of legacy reputations, and wealthy alumni funding. Freedom of speech is unlikely to be related. Berkeley and Stanford are both examples of very famous schools with distinct (and sometimes contrasting) cultures. They do not necessarily correlate to supporting/not supporting freedom of speech. (Berkeley was home to a Free Speech Movement in the 1960s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement) Aggressive protest is part of the Cal student body culture, and the behavior of students is not reflective of the actual college administration's actions restricting or upholding free speech.

The above commenter wrote:

> But to your broader point, that freedom of expression yields greater institutional cache: how do you explain the strong performance (and reputation) of private institutions vs. "state schools"?

as a way of insinuating that freedom expression is not important to institutional reputation because private schools (which aren't required to abide by the first amendment) are often very reputable, frequently moreso than public schools.

This is question loaded in false premises. Reputable private schools do support freedom of speech and expression to similar degrees as public schools. And not to mention, the claim that private schools are on aggregate better than public schools is likely untrue.

Banning religious schools is often discussed here in Sweden. It has nothing to do with discrimination. The question is if religion has any right to exist in education that society pay for, and if religious element during education is compatible with the many regulations that cover the education sector.

Education is not some kind of of enterprise free from regulations. The consequences of bad education is similar to bad health care. As I see it, let schools worry about education, political system deal with politics, legal system deal with enforcing the law, health system deal with health issues, and religious communities deal with religion. Trying to mix them together will only cause intolerance and tensions in society.

Sadly the people who mock students from private religious schools are also mocking students from historic black colleges or those who went to comminity college.

Next time you hear about this speak up and change the conversation.

Not the case, at least in my experience. I work in the San Francisco Bay Area. We recruit exclusively at Ives, the likes of Stanford, MIT, Georgia Tech, etc. and HBCUs and HWCUs. There's a big push to increase racial and gender diversity at least in this region. There's not much much diversity at religious colleges (>82% white, nowhere near the kind of representation we're looking for).

Before you try to diversity based on race you need to diversity more based on other factors and stop hiring from the same schools as everyone.

Who cares if you have x number from certain race groups if everyone is from the same monoculture. Why not try to hire the best from African schools.. that will give you race diversity more important cultural diversity.

While I am sure you are well intentioned in your efforts to increase diversity in the Bay Area, your comment makes me think the end result of your hiring policy is going to be diversity in everything but thought. That makes me sad.

If people try to crush speech they don’t like, and fringe groups are the only ones saying they support freedom, otherwise neutral people who are concerned about their rights are going to side with one of those groups.

The number of people siding with those groups will be more than zero. Support will grow and they’ll push their message farther and farther into extremism.

It’s not the first time this has happened. But each generation thinks they’re enlightened and extremism won’t take over again. Political extremists work with a grain of truth (“Look! They really ARE oppressing us”). If they were absolutely false nobody would support them.

People also need to get over the fact that on a business platform like Facebook Google, Reddit -- you have no rights (except those spelled out in their editable tos/privacy policy/etc...), None of these entities has ANY legal requirement to give you a platform for hate speech, and has EVERY right to ban said speech. Unless we'd rather the government take over Facebook and have full on communism, and make all these businesses public entities, etc...

I'm not getting into the hate speech debate - most of this page of comments so far is depressingly tone-deaf and insensitive - but I have to say that your argument about having no rights on websites is pretty hollow. Nobody with even a modicum of sense ever claims that their actual legal rights are being violated when they complain about being censored on a private website. Any reference to "free speech" is an appeal to shared values, an argument that they think the moderators are acting improperly in light of those shared values. The public debate is over whether platforms like Facebook, Google, Reddit, etc should be neutral marketplaces of ideas, like Greek agora, and to what extent they should be able to privately police such a large part of our public discourse. This is a legitimate topic for debate and potential public policy, even if initially such policy would only serve to provide a voice for some pretty despicable people. You pointing out that Facebook is a private company which can do whatever it wants with its own data is wholly missing the point. Nobody is even having that conversation.

Are they platforms or publishers? Your ISP doesn't police content in a meaningful way and are immune to legal claims that their service is responsible for same, similarly a newspaper is legally responsible for what it prints due to the fact they have a editor who controls what is published.

Twitter et al. seem to want to have it both ways.

There is a selection effect going on. The algorithmic censorship of those groups also did a lot of collateral damage to regular folks in the Middle East who didn't have much of an influence or voice (limited or no English-language skills, not much connections to large media outlets or influential tech people, and located in a different part of the world - which affects organic reach of their social media posts even if they did voice their dissatisfaction with what was going on).

Unfortunately this is true. Some on the left have become 1980s republicans when it comes to free speech, Russia, and the goodness of big business.

Tipper Gore and other Democrats lead the charge with the PMRC which created parental advisory stickers and age restriction on music. I felt like both sides were down to restrict expression in the 80's and 90's

Specifically on freedom of speech, the left and right oscillate tons based on who is feeling more authoritarian (the other axis). A small, very vocal portion of the identity-politics left is currently very authoritarian and anti freedom of speech but I think that's a specific current internet-influenced trend and not to do with a wider shift of the overton window on issues in general.

I agree with you on the internet-influenced part, but not on the latter portion of your argument. Even if the anti-free speech movement is small, the majority of "left-aligned media" do echo their beliefs. This to me does swing the overton window to the left.

Where? On a message board of leftists? People are self sorting into subgroups with their own distinct overton windows.

A particular subgroup with its Overton window in a certain range is using the power of cancel culture, naming-and-shaming, etc. to see their standards applied universally. Do not underestimate this. The next frontier is identifying and punishing those who are "at risk" of transgressing identity-politics norms. I saw a few of them on Twitter crafting plans to pressure open source conferences to ban people who gave talks of the form "Making X Great Again" where X = JavaScript, unit testing, etc. on the grounds that such a title constituted "normalizing hate speech" and such people were at particularly high risk of violating relevant Codes of Conduct.

The people creating them shouldn't be banned, but those titles should definitely be banned because that is a terrible and uncreative joke/reference that should have been retired by the end of the 2016 presidential elections.

The window is shifting to opinions held by those who call themselves the left, which isn't necessarily the same thing as what has been traditionally considered to be leftist.

I'd describe the situation as being that the core beliefs of the political left in the United States have diverged sufficiently far from the core beliefs of liberalism (including freedom of speech) to the point that being a liberal no longer automatically implies membership in or sympathy for the left.

Not just freedom of speech, supporting trumps new tariffs would have made you a pinko commie as little as 20 years ago, protests against global trade (like the battle of Seattle) had a sizable trade union contingent. So many that consider themselves left today seem to define it in opposition to what the right is doing, not from valuing egalitarianism.

> Maybe not, it feels like to me that the Overton window[0] has been sliding left.

The Left-Right Overton Window has definitely moved Right, in that reductive to the point of uselessness, single-axis characterization of American politics. Some of Reagan's and Nixon's policies would be dismissed as "libtarded" now, as would some of W.'s.

Another Overton Window (or, more accurately, related group of Windows), describing discourse about and among the races, sexualities, gender identities, &c, have at the same time moved in a direction that is less welcoming to speech that is premised in a notion of superiority or morality about those things, especially when uttered by a person who believes that premise, and which is about the speaker's (and by implication their tribe's) own superiority, or someone else's inferiority or immorality.

The vector product of those Windows' movements is a culturally dominant polity who feels marginalized.

> My views on freedom of speech made me a 'leftist commie' when I used them to defend South Park and Eminem now most often I'm accused being 'alt-right' by those who disagree with those same views.

I think there's a meaningful difference between speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to cultural norms — especially those that are othering, or regressive, or shame-based, or whatever — and speech that is offensive, whatever that means, to individuals and populations — particularly when those individuals or populations are minorities, and have been historically subject to oppression, and which speech attempts to normalize their oppression.

Don't mistake me: Freedom of speech is for the speech one likes least, or it's for no speech at all; I want the bigots every bit as free to make their noise as I do the artists or the critics (who are often the same people), but for entirely different reasons.

Perhaps the comedian's notion of "punching up" versus "punching down" is relevant here. Perhaps also that people — on both sides — are generally just bad at disagreeing.

Based on the views you have espoused here, I would not call you a leftist commie. It sounds like freedom of speech is your number 1 concern, which would be in character for someone with views that could be considered alt-right. Maybe you are a libertarian, which could otherwise be referred to as an anarch-capatalist, but libertarianism is in no way a leftist movement.

While South Park and Eminem both 'triggered' a lot of people because of their use of obscenity, neither is leftist in any way, shape or form. South Park regularly attacks anyone who tries to change society, which is in no way a leftist mindset. As for Eminem, I can't think of a single example of left-leaning thought in any of them outside of freedom of speech.

In general I think you'd have a very hard time making the claim that the overton window is sliding to the left. Maybe the overton window is moving to the left for gender identity and sexual expression, but that is about it. The right has succeeded in moving the overton window substantially in their favor in most social and economic programs.

His point is that it used to be that leftists defended freedom of speech from conservative oppression. Now it's the other way around.

Leftists aren't actually oppressing anybody. We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards). Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.

Leftists aren't, but Democratic Party partisans are. The difference is confusing to Americans.

> Leftists aren't actually oppressing anybody.

Well, that's certainly not true. They are absolutely oppressing people. They may be oppressing people that you or even I think ought be oppressed, but that doesn't mean they're not doing it.

> We're still under the rule of the far-right in the US (a country which does not actually have a left wing by Western standards).

That's true around economic issues. It's not so true around identity politics. The political climate around those issues in the US is very much left of center.

> Voting with your dollar and pointing out bigotry and inequality is not oppression.

That kind of depends on what exactly you mean by that. Naming and shaming individuals for social transgressions based on hearsay seems pretty oppressive to me.