Speech Is Violence? Not if We Want a Liberal, Intellectual Society
The cases of two scholars, Rebecca Tuvel and Bruce Gilley, immediately come to mind. Tuvel wrote a paper for the feminist philosophy giant Hypatia, exploring parallels between transracial and transgender identities and advocating transracial identity statuses. However, for Theory, race and gender are profoundly different. To claim transgender statu
... See moreHelen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
Confronted with words, ideas, or decisions they dislike, a growing number of people are asserting that they are in danger of suffering psychological or even bodily harm. But when one party asserts that a debate threatens their very well-being, it is hard to deliberate on policy—or topics such as race and gender. The result is a narrowing of the spa... See more
persuasion.community • A Taxonomy of Fear
At best, this has a chilling effect on the culture of free expression, which has served liberal democracies well for more than two centuries, as good people self-censor to avoid saying the “wrong” things. At worst, it is a malicious form of bullying and—when institutionalized—a kind of authoritarianism in our midst.
Helen Pluckrose • Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
American political discourse is deteriorating into two opposing echo chambers. They both betray a conformity in opinion and intolerance towards dissension that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be identified as "liberal". The furious blows between these political tribes is unrecognizable as a free marketplace of ideas. And the conformit... See more
Jonathan Bi • Johnathan at Limbo — 404
Open systems – free speech, democracy, open content, open science – will sometimes produce results we do not like. That openness, of course, will be used by the powerful as well as the powerless. There will be cruel speech, bad democratic decisions and uses of openly licensed content with which we disagree. Thus, it is very easy to blame openness. ... See more