Words Don’t Hurt, Ideas Do.
I am often told that, as a writer, I should recognize the power of words. As a crafter of poetry and prose, they tell me, surely I must understand the…
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Posts by tag
Free Speech
56 posts
The Soft Mob: Intolerance and the New Definition of “Harm”
In the festival of non-sequiturs that was the reaction to the Harper’s letter, two equally specious rebuttals rose to the fore: the first, that freedom of expression has become a…
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Hobbes, Locke and Mill: In Defence of Tolerance
The traditional liberal call that we should extend tolerance to our opponents has been replaced by a demand for recognition and acceptance that is paradoxically intolerant towards those who do…
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What Yoram Hazony Gets Wrong About Cancel Culture
The open letter in Harper’s Magazine on the dangers of ideological conformity and the suppression of speech, signed by more than 150 leading writers and intellectuals, has been explosively controversial.…
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Self-Cancel Culture and the Threat of Moderate Wokeness
Liberalism’s defenders usually describe illiberalism as comprised of two distinct threats: the authoritarian right and the culturally totalitarian left. However, this framing misrepresents the situation. The dangers posed by the…
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The Problem with the Concept of Cancel Culture
The phrase cancel culture has been all over the internet over the past few weeks. The publication of the Harper’s letter defending free speech and a number of high profile…
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A Therapist’s Plea for Freedom of Speech
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.—Frederick Douglass. The single best predictor of a positive…
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The Historian Who Came in from the Chill
I am in the sunset of life, and I feel it to be my special mission to tell people what they are not prepared to hear.—Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Elizabeth Cady…
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Are Calls for Open Debate Too Little Too Late?
In Harper’s Magazine this past week over 150 prominent intellectuals and bestselling authors, such as Malcolm Gladwell, J. K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky and others signed a letter that…
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Open Letters in the Age of the Cultural Commissar
This week, Harper’s magazine published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” The letter contains a reaffirmation of liberal values: a commitment to open debate, a refusal to ostracize others…
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Generalisations, Complicity and Jeff Goldblum
Image by Gage Skidmore Yesterday, Jeff Goldblum sparked controversy by asking Jackie Cox, a hijab-wearing contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race, whether there was something about Islam that was anti-woman and…
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A Blue Sky Vision for Social Media
On 11 December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced, via the social media platform itself, that Twitter would be funding an independent team of researchers, to develop an open standard…
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Is Anti-Woke Becoming the New Woke?
It was bound to happen. As Mark Twain writes in “Corn Pone Opinions,” our self-approval is “acquired mainly from the approval of other people.” Our ideas don’t come from “thinking…
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Is France Charlie?
France has been a crucible of radical philosophy since the eighteenth century, and was the pre-eminent centre for the arts in the nineteenth and twentieth. It was France to which…
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Some Thoughts on Christopher Hitchens
“Ladies and gentlemen. Brothers and sisters. Comrades. Friends. Thanks for coming out.” Thus began Christopher Hitchens, as was his custom, speaking from behind a lectern facing a standing-room-only audience. They…
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Threats to Free Speech at University, and How to Deal with Them—Part 1
Free speech is arguably the most important value for universities to uphold. As Steven Pinker points out in an essay aptly tilted Why Free Speech is Fundamental, “the very thing…
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What Social Justice Gets Right
Social Justice ideas and the postmodern thought that underlies them are extremely difficult to critique in a balanced way. This is largely caused by black-and-white thinking: many people wrongly believe…
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Enforcing Patriotism, Suppressing Dissent: America’s Neglected Free Speech Crisis
Picture this. Students in schools paid for with tax dollars are ordered to stand as a sign of respect for the federal government. If they sit or kneel, they face…
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