liv: cast iron sign showing etiolated couple drinking tea together (argument)
[personal profile] liv
Somebody on Twitter linked to a really pointed Al Jazeera article: The freedom to criticise free speech. It concisely articulates something I've thought for a long time, but haven't quite been able to state without waffling a lot. tl;dr version: freedom of speech – Muslims have it too.

This is my big bone of contention with large swathes of the New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s): they seem to be very shouty about the right, mostly exercised by people who are (entirely coincidentally I don't think) white, middle-class men living in powerful, rich countries, to publish utterly vile, ignorant, hateful stuff about Muslims and Islam. But as soon as any Muslim raises the slightest objection to this, it's an attack on free speech and the very foundations of democracy. Yes, it's important to protect freedom of speech you don't agree with, but I don't see much knee-jerk Voltaire quoting when it's Muslims exercising that right.

Even in the most repressive regimes, powerful, influential, well-connected people can pretty much say what they like, there's nothing especially notable about that. The point of enshrining freedom of speech as a right is that it applies to people of subaltern status. Immigrants, members of minority religions or ethnic groups, these days people living formerly colonized countries. If it's important to you to have or protect the right to express prejudices, then you should care at least equally much about the right of oppressed or relatively less powerful to point out that bigotry is bigotry. They also have the right to refuse to give money or attention to people publishing bigoted stuff, that's not an attack on free speech, that's exercising their democratic, free market right to give their business to people whose views they agree with. And yes, some of them are wrong, they see things as offensive or attacking when they're actually true and harmless. So? They still have the right to hold and express their opinions, that's the whole point about freedom of speech.
Page 1 of 3 << [1] [2] [3] >>

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 08:58 pm (UTC)
ceb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ceb
As far as I can see, the way the "free speech" argument works in the US is:

Person A does something unpleasant/bigoted/discriminatory.
Person B tries to get them to stop.
Person A says "you're treading all over my right to free speech!"

See also efforts of parts of the US white Christian right to convince people that white Christian right-wingers are a beleagured minority.

I am seriously confused as to why you think this is something the "New Atheist / Skeptic / Rational movement(s)" are doing; I've only seen them being Person B over arguments like whether evolution should be taught in schools. Am I missing something?

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 09:03 pm (UTC)
ceb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ceb
(And the other people being mad in that article are the French government, who are at best confused about the whole religion issue.)

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 10:45 pm (UTC)
jack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jack
Can you remember who did those cartoons? I was talking about this somewhere else, and I remembered the avalanche starting with some really gratuitously not-artisticly-redeeming disgusting cartoons, which I thought did make a big difference, and I thought should not be published. But when I googled it, I seemed to only get a later iteration of the furore of people drawing Mohammad only to push the freedom of speech angle.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 10:54 pm (UTC)
ceb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ceb
Sam Harris> Good grief (having just read his wp page), what a nutter... especially about Muslims, it's like he's not talking about people any more but about some weird sub-human things. I do not understand a lot of US attitudes to things, I can only hope that your average athiest-on-the-street thinks he's a dangerous embarrassment.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 10:58 pm (UTC)
ceb: (Default)
From: [personal profile] ceb
It's so obviously wrong it's quite surreal; state-sponsored victim blaming. Hello France! banning religious expression is not the way to create a harmonious multi-cultural society.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 11:02 pm (UTC)
nameandnature: Giles from Buffy (Default)
From: [personal profile] nameandnature
I largely agree with Harris, though I don't find that he completely conflates criticism with violence or that he thinks Muslims should not protest. The closest I can get to that is the line "And where they do not immediately resort to violence in their protests, they threaten it", but it's not clear whether the reference is to "some percentage of Muslims" or to everyone who protests. If it's the latter, he's certainly wrong.

Harris is much more strident (you missed "shrill", "fundamentalist" and "militant": see the fake convert Harris) about the right of people to make bad art because it's that right that's under threat.

and they have the right to use strong language, they don't have to be measured and polite in their reactions to protect the freedom of speech of the racists.

I think Harris is right to criticise people who hold signs threatening other people with beheading, personally.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 11:06 pm (UTC)
jack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jack
There was an awesome essay on less wrong explaining why we should not be deliberately offensive to people about things that they were very, very sensitive to (such as obscene depictions of Mohammad), but it was disturbing that people couldn't see in advance why they shouldn't do that...

Most people I know don't have any connection to the Muslims-are-evil meme, whether tied to religion or not, but I've heard "Islam is an especially bad example of religion" ideas from a couple of places in the atheist blogosphere. I don't know how widespread the idea is.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 11:09 pm (UTC)
nameandnature: Giles from Buffy (Default)
From: [personal profile] nameandnature
I largely agree with Harris

Actually, I agree with Blackford more: http://blog.talkingphilosophy.com/?p=5969 for that.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 11:19 pm (UTC)
nameandnature: Giles from Buffy (Default)
From: [personal profile] nameandnature
Yvain's http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/ was about Draw Mohammed Day, which is not just about obscene depictions of Mohammed (some people draw stick figures, for example). I think the people doing that believe it is more important to protest about the encroachment on free speech than it is to avoid upsetting Muslims. Note that Yvain withdrew part of his argument in the face of Vladimirs' point about utility monsters and Schelling: http://lesswrong.com/lw/59i/offense_versus_harm_minimization/3y0k.

Personally, I wouldn't draw Mohammed but I support the right of others to do so if they wish. I believe that as a matter of harm reduction, such pictures should have trigger warnings. That'd be my Schelling point (if that's an accurate use of the term): people get to make the pictures, but they shouldn't make other people look at them. If the mere existence of such things is too much for some Muslims, that's tough. If the people making the pictures insist on their right to draw them in chalk on pavements, they're being pretty rude.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-01 11:58 pm (UTC)
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
From: [personal profile] redbird
On the other hand, the first place I read about Harris being unreasonable was at PZ Myers's Pharyngula, an atheist blog that is not exactly devoted to moderation, sweetness, and light: but Myers is pretty clear that we can say both "this person is saying horrible things, and we're not going to allow them in our space" and "this person is saying horrible things, and he has the right to do so in his own space."

1 != 2

Date: 2012-10-02 02:18 am (UTC)
siderea: (Default)
From: [personal profile] siderea
Um. I thought the article was terrible, because it claims an equivalency between holding a kiss-in and murdering people.

From the article: "In America, a nation was divided by a sandwich. Across the world, people are dying because of a Z-grade film trailer."

Shooting people is not free speech. The correct analogue to what happened in Benghazi wasn't gay people boycotting chicken sandwiches, it was Salvi hosing my gynecologist's office with automatic weapons fire and Tiller being killed by a sniper for the Christian god.

I am 100% in favor of offended people expressing their severe displeasure. With words. Pictures are also okay. No bullets. No nooses. No fires. Allow me to suggest boycots and marches.
Edited Date: 2012-10-02 02:20 am (UTC)

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-02 09:59 am (UTC)
jack: (Default)
From: [personal profile] jack
actually assume all religions are some variant on right-wing American Protestant Christianity, and reserve the really nasty attacks for Islam and / or Catholicism, which don't fit that mould very well. And happen to be correlated with ethnic groups that are often despised anyway, which is why I don't hesitate to regard Islamophobia and virulent Catholic-hatred as a species of racism.

Yes, I think this is very true. I don't know whether bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Islam are better or worse than bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Atheism, or bad-things-more-common-in-some-segments-of-Christianity, but whether they are or not, I think people seize on objections to them because they're unfamiliar. (To be fair, many people also do the complete opposite and spend all their effort objecting to the dominant religion where they are, but that doesn't make either ok.)

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-02 09:59 am (UTC)
naath: (Default)
From: [personal profile] naath
Well, quite. You have the free-speech right to call me nasty names and I have the free-speech right to call you a nasty-name-caller...

It's quite amazing how many people will pull out the "OMG FREE SPEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECH" crap whenever anyone tells them their speech is nasty and hurtful.

(no subject)

Date: 2012-10-02 10:10 am (UTC)
naath: (Default)
From: [personal profile] naath
I can pretty much bet that you, and the people who draw Mohammed cartoons of various levels of offensiveness, and Harris and Blackford and all the rest, are never going to be arrested for exercising your freedom of speech.

There might be a solidarity argument - no, Harris won't be arrested for drawing Mohammed; but there are countries where doing so is illegal and might well lead to imprisonment or death. However this "campaign" doesn't really seem to be helping any! Just... being really annoying.
Page 1 of 3 << [1] [2] [3] >>

Soundbite

Miscellaneous. Eclectic. Random. Perhaps markedly literate, or at least suffering from the compulsion to read any text that presents itself, including cereal boxes.

Top topics

July 2025

S M T W T F S
  12345
6789101112
1314151617 1819
20212223242526
2728293031  

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Subscription Filters