And confusing. Over at the New York Times, Emily Bazelon has a humongous take on freedom of speech in the era of “Big Tech”, though working my way through umpteen thousand words of vaguely authoritarian liberal hand-wringing over what we should do about people who say things Ms. Bazelon doesn’t want to hear (and doesn’t…
Tag: free speech
“Free Speech” letter bad because it was signed by people who should not be allowed to speak, critics say
That’s the basic takeaway from a recent piece, “The Harper’s ‘Letter,’ cancel culture and the summer that drove a lot of smart people mad”, by Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi that appeared in the Washington Post yesterday. Ellison and Izadi naturally corralled a variety of talking heads, including, rather curiously, aging paleo-lib Robert Reich,1 who…
When Bari Left the Times
Now that Bari Weiss has left the New York Times (“scorching” resignation letter here), the Times will almost assuredly be both woker and broker—not “broker” in the sense of financially poorer, but intellectually so. The Times is almost guaranteed to be more predictably “correct” in its coverage of the passing scene and—okay, this is going…
Hey! Unimportant people believe in free speech too!
Damn straight we do! Well, some of us, anyway, and some of us, like me, are very, very unimportant! I say this, of course, because there has been considerable blowback to the now notorious letter published in Harper’s magazine, signed by a large number of cultural icons and/or irritants, to the irritation of many who…
Does the New York Times Understand How the Right to Free Speech Works?
Well, not to keep you in suspense, but the answer is no. Greg Bensinger, a member of the New York Times editorial board hitherto unknown to me, has blossomed forth with an opinion piece, “Does Zuckerberg Understand How the Right to Free Speech Works?”, which, alas, only demonstrates, all too conclusively,1 that it is Mr….
Thought Police No, What Were They Thinking Police, Sort of
No, New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma shouldn’t have been bounced from his job for running “Reflections From a Hashtag”, an article by former Canadian broadcasting host Jian Ghomeshi, explaining, and explaining away, his multiple problems arising from complaints by more than twenty women of various forms of sexual abuse. It was particularly…
Unthinking the Unthinkable: All of a sudden it’s 1984 again
If you’re as old as I am you’re probably dead, but if not you might remember the strange foreboding that gripped some of us back in the day when the fateful year of “1984” began to loom on the calendarial horizon: It was actually going to be 1984! We had been bred and baked in…
2017, the year of speaking dangerously: the Left’s shabby campus record on free speech
Ugh! I’m linking positively to the National Review, to this article by Stanley Kurtz! Actually, I don’t know enough about Stan to know if I really dislike him, but the record he presents of self-righteous leftie rampages is discouraging to say the least. The Enlightenment? We don’t need your lousy, stinkin’ Enlightenment! Who wants to…