Yes, I meant to say that religious beliefs deserve special respect and tolerance over and above non-religious beliefs. — T Clark

Nope.

Not that anyone cares, but I'll be 30 next month — Jimmy

By the way, congratulations on being nearly thirty, and happy birthday in advance. Thirty is a good age. You stop being embarrassed about tripping over in the street, you suddenly become really good at sex, and you are still blissfully unaware of the horror that lies ahead.

Missed that. Too busy stroking my Capuchin.

Whose face? Roy Wood's?

Yep, before I even existed.

Less than a month before, it's true.

Before my time sorry

Elaborate!

Almost as old as Bitter Crank

I think we've had a thread about this already Jimmy, so you get a big fat zero for originality so far. :wink:

I don't think I've revealed my age on the forum before, though I'm sure it's obvious which range I'm in from my political and philosophical disillusionment and general world-weariness. 47.

Btw welcome to the forum.

I'm not going to defend neoliberalism or the right wing Brexit ultras, but I'll note that Brexit did arguably represent the chance to escape from the neoliberalism of the EU (aside from whether and how that could actually have succeeded). From that point of view, the dominance of neoliberals among pro-Brexit political leaders is owing to a failure of the Left to get behind and shape the Brexit movement, which I'm tempted to say is or was, like Trump's election to president, an expression of people's frustration with the neoliberal policies that, as Monbiot points out, have done a lot of harm.

But maybe the Brexit angle is not your focus.

Isn't it odd ... — TheMadFool

Depends how you look at it I guess. The conditions are unfavourable for building a new skyscraper on the site of the Empire State Building, but pretty good for sustaining the one that's there.

I guess it's possible that life could be appearing quite often, and immediately being eaten by bacteria.

I find the present conditions of the world - liquid water, air, temperature - actually perfect for life to begin, start from scratch. — TheMadFool

Note that the conditions of the Earth at the beginning of life were different from the present conditions.

Hate speech cultivates the conditions of/for war. — creativesoul

Do you think the following example of hate speech cultivates the conditions for war between Britain and the US?

Too much guns, religion, celebrity, flag waving nationalism, egomaniac, warmongering, stupid constitutional rights obsession. The U.S. is like our deformed offspring. — S

If not, is there any circumstance in which you think it could? Or maybe you think it isn't hate speech at all?

I'd rather acknowledge that sometimes words do lead to bad things than allow a situation where someone could order my family to be murdered and receive no punishment because some had an ideological attachment to free speech laws even more irrational than religious fundamentals' attachment to blasphemy laws. — Baden

I haven't read much of this discussion, but...

Do any serious commentators argue that ordering murder etc. ought to be defended on the basis of the principle of freedom of speech, or on the basis of its constitutional safeguards? I don't think even (reasonable) free speech absolutists would advance that position. Now, this may cast doubt on the purported absolutism of free speech absolutism--in that even it admits exceptions to the freedom of speech acts in general--but I don't think it's what is at issue in the wider debate.

on balance I'd prefer a society where extreme cases of hate speech, for example, surrounding a black person, shouting the N word at them and threatening to lynch them was not tolerated — Baden

What you're referring to here as hate speech would surely be covered by things like criminal threat, intimidation, or incitement to violence. Isn't the introduction of hate speech legislation precisely to cover other cases, namely of harm interpreted more widely, or offence--cases that don't fall under the other laws?

Ah. Now I know I was taking you too seriously.

[Rant]...[/Rant] — Pattern-chaser

At the risk of taking your rant too seriously...

As I understand the view of linguists, English English, and more widely British English, are just as much variants (varieties or dialects) of English as American English. Why should the variety spoken in the original home of the language be regarded as primary, in a world in which English is a native language in other places? After all, English has mutated in England too.

I was actually attempting to link to the YouTube playlist, not that interview in particular, which isn't the most interesting of them, in my opinion. I remember most enjoying the interviews with Ayer, Searle, Bernard Williams, Hubert Dreyfus, Marcuse, Martha Nussbaum, Hilary Putnam, and Anthony Quinton. But yes, Magee's ability to summarize and clarify was brilliant.

Who recognizes the music this track is based on?

the overthrow of basically any authoritarian political regime I can think of has happened by at least physical protest if not outright war — Isaac

Yeah I'm not denying that.

It's worth noting that 'tHe RaDiCaL LeFt CrEaTeD tHe RaDiCaL RiGhT' meme is just another function of the liberal inability to countenance politics beyond the thin film of speech. Nevermind stagnating wages, the destruction of primary industry, the corportization of the media, the swelling of economic inequality, the ballooning of household debt, the evisceration of state investment into public works, the explosion of prisionfare, the glaciating of social mobility, the crushing inflation of educations costs, the increasing capture of regulatory apparatus, the meteoric concentration of industry monopolies, the gutting of union power - no, won't somebody think of the fucking salons and how they look. All the rest is ViOlENcE. The InDiGnITy!

Liberalism is cancer. — StreetlightX

Just from a Left-strategic point of view, I think liberalism is precisely now necessary. The Left antipathy to free speech only makes sense from a position of dominance, as in, it's generally not ok to be openly racist and sexist, and we need to protect those progressive gains. That is, it only makes sense for a Leftist focus on culture at the expense of economics and class, because a concern for the latter, as expressed in your post, is what we need free speech for, given that the societal ills you mention are real (and I agree they are). Pretty much any fundamental social gain either depends on free speech or is intimately associated with a fight against restrictions on speech.

Thus the Left is suicidal in abandoning the defence of free speech to the Right. Liberalism still has the potential to undermine its own social conditions, which is part of its enduring value.

But I guess that's an old and obvious argument, and I think things are a bit more interesting than that. Culture war and identitarian Leftists have not merely forgotten about economics and class. Their position is predicated on an outright rejection of the working class as a progressive political force, and on a concomitant fear and suspicion, namely that the average white Joe is always one Shapiro video away from signing up as a white supremacist. So this Left antipathy to free speech is not merely suicidal or naive, but is an expression of a class hostility.

@csalisbury: The danger for me here is that if I start banging on about "liberal elites", as befits my nauseating role right now, I might look like a kind of proto-fascist. Instead, in my attacks I feel the need to use other terms of abuse such as "petit-bourgeois" so I can remind everyone I'm even more woke than woke. But still, I want to say that in saying so I need not be disavowing my position, exactly. It's more that I'm struggling to find or create the language to use, most often failing and falling back.

:ok:

In arguing that the liberal appeal to the neutral ground of 'the free and open marketplace of ideas' is bullshit (I'm certain about that), is it battle lines that I'm casting? — StreetlightX

In the context of the rest of your posts, yes, obviously.

This might be too obvious so maybe it's been said before, but it must be worth noting that it wasn't Leftists screaming FASCIST! who just exposed Shapiro as a strident fool with horrible views, but a conservative journalist on a mainstream news network giving him a platform.

Otherwise, @StreetlightX, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it, to talk politics in order to scorn talking politics. You presume a position of political certainty where the battle lines are drawn--e.g., the Left vs white supremacist murderers--from which you can make an intervention to tell us all that we're wasting our time at best, paving the road to hell at worst.

But the political situation to me and others is different from that, hence the discussion. Hence the need for discussion.

Can Kant be the most depressing philosopher... just based on the fact his prose are like reading an obscurantist, over elaborating robot with the charisma of the bowling shoe ? — thedeadidea

I get the robot and bowling shoe, but Kant doesn't read like an obscurantist at all.

Scruton?

In fact, I wouldn't want the use of it against the rules either. BC used it, and I'd say he wasn't being racist, merely sort of ironically irreverent.

British and Australian English do not — andrewk

The terminal "r" is pronounced in some versions of British English. Not relevant but I can't stand this generalization.

I agree it's a matter of etiquette, and I agree it's not always right to insist on being able to mention it. But it might be important to insist on it sometimes. I insist on being able to do it here, for example.

It's worth pursuing not least because it belittles the experience of actual racism to see unwitting racism in the mention of a racist word, mentions that are obviously not racist. And this does now happen.

I agree with all of that except, I think, for the last sentence, which is what this is all about I guess.

Get the popcorn

What do the admins and the moderators and other old timers think? — ssu

I'm really happy we rose to the top so quickly, but I do worry about the quality sometimes. We didn't fulfill all of the hopes we had in the beginning, like the thriving articles site and the monthly readings--which went on for a few months but died out--but generally I think it's great.

Yes, and that kind of complicates the use/mention thing, which gets infected by user/context/falsely attributed phonetic variant issues, confuses people, and leads to general strife on both sides. — Baden

I don't exactly see how it complicates the use/mention thing. I can see how it's complicated in the way I described above, by the sheer violence of the word, which as with "cunt" makes even the mention of it uncomfortable. But the linguistic angle you've outlined and which I agree with doesn't seem to add any complication that I can think of with respect to use/mention, though I'll note that it's not nearly so uncomfortable to mention the word "nigga" as it is to mention the n-word, hence my repeated use of "n-word".

It centred around the general status of AAVE/BVE — Baden

Oh yeah. Good times. I thought that was here on TPF.

Otherwise yes, thanks, that's what I was thinking, that they're actually different words (which is not to say it's always cool to use "nigga").

Blacks (African Americans, err, Negroes... niggers?) use "nigger" in the same way that cock suckers use "queer". — Bitter Crank

Maybe you can stop being an idiot about this now especially as this was discussed before and it was explained in detail to you where you were going wrong. — Baden

I missed that discussion. I'd be interested to read the linguist's take on it.

Off the top of my head and loosely speaking, if using it--as opposed to mentioning it--can be unobjectionable, then you still gotta use it right. The unobjectionable way of using it happens to be inaccessible to most white people, because it's associated with black sub-cultures. But if anecdotal evidence is worth anything at all, I happen know people in black London sub-cultures who have close white friends in those sub-cultures who use the word just like they themselves do. They know how to use it in a way Hanover never could, not only or even primarily because he's not black, but because he's not of that sub-culture.

Generally I agree with andrewk that it's a use and mention thing. Nobody worth listening to is arguing for the use (in this sense, and also leaving aside its use by black people for the moment); the issue is whether it's all right to mention it. I'll find it horribly condescending of you to presume that a certain type of person ought to be protected from your mere mention of any word. However at the personal level it really depends. Even just the mention of "nigger", like that there, has the same violent frisson as mentioning "cunt", a word that I rarely use or even mention outside of a certain group of close friends, so I pretty much never even mention the n-word at all.

But the cultural significance of all this is that in the public sphere, intent and the use-mention distinction are being ignored. And that is stupid.

Have I read you wrong, or you me? — StreetlightX

Not sure. Let me think about that.

This is probably one of the few sensible things said in this thread so far. The middling liberal approach taken by many in this thread looks at issues of ‘deplatforming’ and so on as though politics and power only ever intervene after the fact, as though the ground of speech were a priori neutral and only then ‘interfered’ with from the outside, per accidens. But this is naïvety at best, utter stupidity at worst - anyone who isn’t a complete idiot knows that only some are ever given a platform to begin with - are ‘platformed’. The rest - the majority - simply shout into the void.

It is simply political infantilism to believe that everyone has a platform - is born with one, as it were - and that harm only comes from 'taking it away’. As if some stupid toy. Platforms are rare, hard-fought over, and mercilessly defended and attacked. Those who complain about ‘deplatforming’ usually have nothing to say about platforming to begin with, because they are so utterly insensible to the play of power everywhere at work long before some wanker has their stupid ‘say’ on a lectern somewhere. Their defence of ‘free speech’ is nothing but a defence of the arrangement of power just as it is - the status quo, all the while denying that power has any role to play expect on the side of those who argue for ‘deplatforming’. It’s hypocrisy unnamed. — StreetlightX

Only "their" defence of free speech? I guess you mean either the defence of free speech for the views you don't like; or, which for you comes to the same thing, the defence of free speech for all views. I guess you mean that, say, my defence of free speech is also a "defence of the arrangement of power just as it is", only maybe I don't know it.

But there is disagreement over what that arrangement of power is, and disagreement over what is a defence of the status quo and what is not. For example, I'm a quasi- or ex- or crypto-leftist, and I believe that neoliberal capitalism and the present cultural orthodoxy that passes for leftism are more than merely compatible: they are two sides of the same coin. And that's despite the existence of bogeymen like the Kochs. The point is not to argue here for that thesis, but to try and show that your moral and intellectual high ground isn't necessarily so high, i.e., that there's a debate to be had, one that you assume has been had already.

Liberal shills have nothing to say about the structural, socio-economic conditions that precipitated that the situations they are decrying. They'll bark your ear off about 'deplatforming' and remain deafeningly, fatally silent about the far more significant, far more pervasive issue of platforming. Their politics is reactive, as reactive as any they blab about with their reams of words. — StreetlightX

Is anyone who defends free speech without compromise, or who complains about deplatforming, a "liberal shill"? What about the people who do so while also having things to say about the "structural, socio-economic conditions that precipitated that the situations they are decrying"?

Like most of your stuff about actually existing politics, your post is impatient, polemical, authoritarian, and--in common with most philosophers when they talk about the real world--disappointingly second-hand and mainstream-ideological. But if you're taking sides in a battle, on behalf of a party, then I guess that's appropriate. I mean, even accepting your stuff about power, from that point if you don't accept that there is a debate to be had about who holds the power in the first place, then it just comes down to who can shout the loudest, who can use the power of the state for their own ends (and who can lament the deplorableness of the common people in the class war of the Left against the working class).

Your post is really just an argument in favour of ad hominem. Do not look to the argument, you say, look to the person--and their power, identity, etc. As such it is close to being fallacious if interpreted as rational, though perhaps useful or understandable if interpreted as bloodthirsty polemic or Leninist revolutionary propaganda. It doesn't come close to being thoughtful or philosophical.

For super easy reading and kind of continental: Why the World Does Not Exist by Markus Gabriel. I just read it and liked it quite a lot.