Against the New Irish Hate Speech Bill
To the Irish Justice Ministry George Orwell once wrote that, “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”…
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Free Speech
86 posts
The Promotion of Ivermectin: A Free Speech Edge Case
Several recent exchanges about Covid-19 vaccination and a medication called Ivermectin—for example in a recent podcast hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—have raised an important question: What responsibility, if…
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The Neuroscience of Intellectual Openness
How is it that some people feel energised by the thought of fierce debate and keen to have their beliefs challenged and their minds potentially changed, while others appear unwilling…
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The Golden Age of Slogans
Free speech suffocates when a requirement to parrot slogans constricts the free exchange of ideas and thoughts in the public square.
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Cancel Culture and the Free Speech Debates
In our public discourse, those who say things that are polemical, simplistic or polarizing tend to receive the most attention. But the world is complex, life is messy, moral intuitions…
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What Multilevel Selection Theory Tells Us About Free Speech
I’m guessing that most readers of this essay are unfamiliar with the theory its title refers to. That’s a pity, because multilevel selection (MLS) theory, which was developed to explain…
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The Right to Remain Silent
But the danger [here] of words in their theoretical insignificance is perhaps that they claim to evoke the annihilation where all sinks always, without hearing the “be silent” addressed to…
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The Lab Leak and Other Conspiracy Theories, Some Of Which Turned Out to Be True
Conspiracy theories are the new evil of our time—or so we thought. Over the past six months, there has been a unified drive from politicians and Big Tech to ban…
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The Free Speech Crisis Runs Deeper Than You Think
The question of whether freedom of speech is under threat has been a point of debate for several years now. Some have argued that the notion of a free speech…
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Censorship and the Policing of Identity in Young Adult Literature
Becky Albertalli is a mover and shaker in YA (young adult literature). Her 2015 debut novel, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, won the American Library Association’s prestigious William C.…
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Free Speech, Civil Rights and the Moral Imperative of Persuasion
The guarantee of freedom of expression in the First Amendment to United States Constitution has never abridged a publisher’s right to determine what content he prints in his newspaper. Just…
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Free Speech and Academic Freedom in the Humanities
Excerpted with permission from Ideas That Matter: The Concepts That Shape the 21st Century by A. C. Grayling. Copyright © 2012. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.…
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Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments: Featuring That XKCD Cartoon Everyone Likes to Quote!
In a recent episode of her podcast, Iona Italia expressed frustration about bad arguments against freedom of speech that she’s had to combat over and over again. I am therefore…
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Asking Utopians How: An Alternative Strategy for Defending Freedom of Speech
I used to be woke a good fifteen years before it was called that. You could call it proto-woke, but I called myself a post-Marxist, sometimes a postmodernist. Being a…
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Students Must Stand Up for Their Professors’ Free Speech
Whatever else they may be accused of, British students are not apathetic. On social media and online petition sites, they campaign for social causes and fight for equality. Every so…
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The Limits of Free Speech
Freedom of speech is a fundamental democratic right and a bedrock principle of enlightened society, but it has its limitations. Not only are there legal restrictions to free speech, such…
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What My Soviet Life Has Taught Me About Censorship and Why It Makes Us Dumb
A few years into my American life, I took a class on western thought. The only philosopher on the syllabus familiar to me was Karl Marx, and he wasn’t why…
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What Kinds of Liberal Freedoms Should Democratic Socialists Support?
One of the biggest controversies on the contemporary left today concerns the relationship between leftism and liberalism. People often use the word liberalism to refer to a location on the…
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