Cardi B and our Censorious Culture
Cardi B used to be my dirty little secret. I first heard about her in graduate school, and she immediately captured my interest. Not only did I feel a connection…
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Posts by tag
Freedom of Expression
44 posts
The First Freedom: Free Speech: A History by Jacob Mchangama
In President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, he spoke of a “world founded upon four essential human freedoms. The first is freedom of speech and expression—everywhere…
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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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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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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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From Parrhesia to Freeze Peach: The Demotion of Free Speech
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.—George Orwell, 1946 Let’s start with a pop quiz: when he wrote his…
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Free Speech in France and the Prophet Muhammad
On 16 October 2020, in France, schoolteacher Samuel Paty was murdered for showing his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. The vast majority of French political leaders immediately declared their…
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Academic Curiosity Under Threat
Desire to know why, and how, curiosity; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this…
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Would Hunter S. Thompson Be Cancelled Today?
It’s a strange world. Some people get rich and others eat shit and die.—Hunter S. Thompson, Generation of Swine. The father of gonzo journalism was known for his uncompromising but…
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De Jure and De Facto Censorship: Why We Need to Be Concerned About Both
The last few weeks have seen dustups over the decision by the foundation overseeing Dr. Seuss’s works (i.e. Dr. Seuss Enterprises) to cease publication of six books deemed problematic, as…
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Defending the Key Liberal Value: Andrew Doyle’s “Free Speech and Why It Matters”
I did not expect to enjoy Andrew Doyle’s Free Speech and Why it Matters. I like Andrew himself very much and our values closely align. However, I seem to be…
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Free Speech in the Age of Digital Oligarchy
An opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor, or that owning private property is robbery ought to be unmolested when simply circulated through the press, but may justly incur…
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In Defence of Argument: “Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars” by Piers Benn
In the closing pages of Intellectual Freedom and the Culture Wars, Piers Benn writes: I was motivated to write this book because there was something that mattered to me, that…
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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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Brave New Literary World
I recently saw a tweet by writer Thomas Chatterton Williams that said, “We are going to need very brave novelists again.” My first reaction was that he’s right. My second…
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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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On Fighting Monsters
Why are people so afraid of being cancelled? It’s not a social death sentence. You can see plenty of supposedly cancelled individuals rambling about the hot topic of the day…
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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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