Britain’s Social Media Problem
For people under the impression that the UK takes its civil liberties seriously, the past two years’ parliamentary debates around social media make for a frightening read. A recent spate…
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Free Speech
34 posts
“Good Intentions Gone Awry”: Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff’s The Coddling of the American Mind. Book Review.
There has, in recent years, been a significant change in the way in which many left-wing activists—especially student activists—express their complaints against their ideological opponents on the right. In their…
Positive Liberty and Social Rights: Freedom of Speech on Campus
On university campuses, on the whole, people should be able to express their minds freely and openly, even if they hold contrarian opinions. Campuses are generally places of intellectual inquiry…
Areopagitica for Millennials
A few weeks ago, I went to the Chiltern village of Chalfont St Giles to visit a building that looks like something an illustrator would produce in a children’s encyclopedia…
The Ideological Reflex and the Culture of Reason
Plato’s Socratic dialogues—in which Socrates questions and argues with a variety of interlocutors who claim to know the nature of such things as justice and virtue—are known for their exhortation…
Don’t Be an Indoor Cat: The Danger of Safety Culture
Too many of us are behaving like indoor cats these days. Let me explain.
The Reluctant Leftist: Pragmatism and Liberty
Liberty and Regulations Individual liberty—the right to determine one’s own path in life, and the opportunity to improve oneself or squander that potential—has long been of great importance to me,…
Unhinged Martyrs for an Unhinged Culture War
Earlier this month, a flurry of tweets, an onslaught of think pieces and a blast of cable news fury have heralded the arrival of two new media martyrs, both anointed…
How Free Should Free Speech Be?
Maybe it came in the form of racism or sexism, such as in the cases of Roseanne Barr, Quinn Norton, or Sarah Jeong. Maybe it was someone whose jokes were…
[Title Redacted] or How Not to Address Holocaust Denial and Anti-Semitism
When initially asked about Facebook’s refusal to remove the InfoWars page, John Hegeman, head of Facebook’s News Feed, said, “I guess just for being false that doesn’t violate the community…
The Value of Immoral and Factually Incorrect Speech
This article uses John Stuart Mill’s arguments for free expression to analyze campus activism, and in particular the original incident regarding use of gender pronouns that catapulted Jordan Peterson into…
“Who I am” and the Problem of Offense
I recently asked a class of American students whether a man should be allowed to strut up and down a busy high street, dressed in a Nazi uniform. I knew…
Campus Speech Debate: The Nightmare of the Nineties is Alive
On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to attend a very engaging debate at the Comedy Cellar in New York City. Organized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and…
Mad Online; Or, The Enemy of My Enemy
In The Fragile Absolute Slavoj Zizek wrote of the Balkans that they’re “always somewhere else, a little bit more towards the southeast. . . .” Pundits seem part of a parallel…
Freedom of Speech and the Fallacy of Demanding to be Heard
There is a troubling misunderstanding of the principle of freedom of speech gaining momentum right now. It fundamentally misunderstands two central concepts of the principle — individual freedom and the…
This Is Why We Need to Talk About Diversity
We simply cannot address any issues productively if we cannot talk about them.
The Case of Lindsay Shepherd and What It Teaches Us about How Learning Occurs
People with real power over someone else often use the excuse that they are defending “victims” to engage in the most shameless bullying.
On Campus, A Minority, and Reflecting on Free Speech
A while back, I was profiled for the Atlantic by Conor Friedersdorf about my thoughts on the campus culture wars in a piece titled “Left Outside the Social-Justice Movement’s Small…
