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by keyboard_slap 960 days ago
> That is not what the survey shows.

In OP's article, doesn't the survey show that conservative respondents are about as likely to allow campus speakers who espoused liberal opinions as ones who espoused conservative opinions?

1 comments

Look at the numbers of who is willing to disagree with their professor publicly on controversial topics. It's those on the left. In other words, more open to express their opinions. By preventing intolerant speech from entering the space, you open it up to people being open to speak freely.

The right is simply more open to having people come in that would scare people from speaking. Again, Paradox of Tolerance.

So you have to aggressively deny intolerant people space because it creates an unfree, fearful space.

>Look at the numbers of who is willing to disagree with their professor publicly on controversial topics. It's those on the left.

Those numbers aren't in OP's article. However, even if that statistic is true, all it says is that people on the right handle conflict better than people on the left. Your assumption is logically invalid since you're making an assumption that people on the right invite people come in that scare people from speaking. Those speakers truly don't, and the left students actively prevent those invited speakers from even speaking.

Also, thanks to your HN profile information, I see you graduated from North Central College in Naperville, IL in 2006. You've been out of school for quite a while, so I can understand that you're probably looking through the lens of college in the mid-2000s. You really don't understand how current students think. Having been in the classroom these past few years, it's abundantly clear that the conservative students are afraid to disagree with their professors, particularly if the professor makes it known that they themselves are liberal.

Look, tyranny needs to be recognized. The Paradox of Tolerance means if you want a tolerant society, you must recognize intolerance as a tyranny and eliminate it. If you recognize a tyranny but do nothing, you stand to receive further oppression.

The students today are recognizing a growing tyranny and are fighting back. The fact that this fight is obfuscated as a fight against 'free speech' is just wrong. Nate Silver doesn't us any service by further obfuscating that fact.

When I was in school, people didn't speak up enough about the Iraq war and the further restricting of liberty via Patriot Act. It was a place of fear. If you think today's schools are oppressive imagine being surrounded by heavy handed nationalism. Why do people forget the early 2000s after 9/11?

>The Paradox of Tolerance means if you want a tolerant society, you must recognize intolerance as a tyranny and eliminate it. If you recognize a tyranny but do nothing, you stand to receive further oppression.

Yes, and the recognition of this tyranny is exactly why the right is banning books. Your view of tyranny is just different than theirs. Unless you can try and rectify that, you'll be seeing them on the battlefield.

>Why do people forget the early 2000s after 9/11?

Well, current college students weren't born yet. I'm sorry that you felt that discussion of the invasion of 9/11 was oppressive, but I can sincerely tell you that schools are far more oppressive than they were back then.

Did you mean to delete your other comment? Let me respond to it here:

>Letting intolerant people speak is not evidence of your support for tolerance. That's what the Paradox of Tolerance shows. You have to be aggressively intolerant of intolerance. That's why that survey shows exactly the opposite of what you demonstrated. Intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance. Since the right is tolerant of intolerance (which is what the survey shows) they are not for free speech. Also evidenced by them literally banning books that promote tolerance.

Ah, you seem to think that the left viewpoints in the survey are tolerant, whereas the right viewpoints are intolerant.

>L1. The Second Amendment should be repealed so that guns can be confiscated.

This view is tolerant of intolerance.

>L2. Religious liberty is used as an excuse to discriminate against gays and lesbians.

This view is tolerant of intolerance.

>L3. Structural racism maintains inequality by protecting White privilege.

This view is tolerant of intolerance.

With these points accepted, I agree that letting intolerant people speak is not evidence of support for tolerance.

You might also be assuming that the left's intolerance is morally correct, which isn't true. One purpose of free speech is to converge upon how society should practice tolerance and intolerance through lawmaking and cultural norms. In fact, all six viewpoints in the survey are tolerant of intolerance, and that's exactly the point. If you can't see that all six are tolerant of intolerance, please try.

Left students have made explicit calls in recent days to "murder the Jews" [1]. Calling of the mass murder of a group of people is intolerant. Some people in this thread argue that you can let anyone speak, but just don't give them a megaphone. A book is a type of megaphone that echoes across time. If a book calls for the killing of Jews, and the left allows it to exist, the left is tolerant of intolerance, which is what you claim the right does. By your own statement, intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance. Therefore, the left should ban the megaphones that call for the killing of Jews, which includes banning books calling for the killing of Jews.

Perhaps you don't realize that the right says that certain megaphones/books of the left cause injury to children. You might disagree, and that's fine, but a majority of people on the right hold that view. In those cases, if the right allows those books to be read by children, the right will be tolerant of intolerance. Therefore, they have a moral obligation to remove those intolerant books, just as a person on the left will have a moral obligation to ban intolerant books calling for the killing of Jews.

>Intolerance of intolerance is evidence of support for tolerance.

That is a false statement. Tolerance is not a binary variable; NOT ( NOT ( "tolerance" ) ) != "tolerance" or even "evidence of support for tolerance", just "maybe". If tolerance is saying you're wearing a red shirt, intolerance of intolerance is saying you're not wearing a not-red shirt. That response is satisfied by a full red shirt to single red thread secretly woven into a blue shirt. Intolerance of intolerance is undefined uncertainty.

Again, given that all six viewpoints are tolerant of intolerance, and the left and the right are capable of being both tolerant and intolerant, the survey shows the left is less tolerant than the right. The left is more intolerant of intolerance, as you say, which actually shows the left operates with undefined uncertainty about the world. The left, to bring in a theory of knowledge, tends to think about unknown unknowns, whereas the right tends to think about known unknowns. The left tends to say "maybe", and the right tends to say "yes" or "no". Is this really that surprising?

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/chants-calling-for-the-mur...

The right claims the books are damaging to children, they aren't claiming the books are intolerant. I'm starting to wonder if you understand what that word means. The books they are banning promote tolerance. You again missed the point.