Category Archive 'Freedom of Thought'

09 Jul 2020

Latest From the New Paper of Record

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Babylon Bee: “International Manhunt Under Way For Those Who Signed Letter Supporting Tolerance Of Differing Viewpoints”

Harper’s A letter on Justice and Open Debate

A couple of signatories (including trans author Jennifer Finney Boylan and professional African American Kerri Greenidge) are crawfishing and revoking their signatures.

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27 Nov 2019

More Intellectual Freedom Today in Eastern Europe than in Elite Universities in Britain & the US

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Radomir Tylecote finds the differences remarkable and striking.

‘You can talk about anything you like,’ said Radu, a young Romanian academic when he invited me to a conference in Bucharest. The theme was ‘Real liberty or new serfdom?’ marking the anniversary of the fall of Nicolae Ceauşescu 30 years ago. The audience was made up of Romanian undergraduates.

The keynote speaker, a German federalist, was planning on making the classical liberal case for the EU, which made the title of my lecture – ‘The classical liberal case against the EU’ – a no-brainer. But I was nervous when I told Radu what I wanted to talk about. Thirty years ago, Romanians had been ruled by a man who literally gave his critics cancer. Would fears of criticising the powerful die hard in Bucharest? I waited for the explanation that there had a been a mix up, that my lecture would be cancelled, and… ‘Excellent!’ replied Radu. ‘That’s exactly what we need.’

A week later I was preparing to talk to a student politics society at Cambridge and I suggested the same subject. Only this time I did get the explanation. ‘The problem is… we’re looking for something a bit more mainstream.’ Mainstream? But this is broadly the view of 52 per cent of the UK population! ‘Right. It’s just that we had a pro-Brexit speaker once and it all got a bit uncomfortable, a bit… controversial.’ Controversial ideas? At a university? Whatever next?

He was quite honest about it. It seemed like his society’s director had introduced a policy of no-platforming Brexiteers. I spared him the thoughts crystallising in my mind about Cambridge as the scholarly heart of the English Reformation and the Parliamentarian struggle against arbitrary power. ‘Something on China, perhaps?’ he suggested. An authoritarian regime that suppresses free speech. Yes, I can see why that would go down better at Cambridge. …

I have long held the theory that the experience of communism in Eastern Europe has inoculated these countries against socialism today. It’s not that I romanticise these former Soviet satellites. Their political elites are frequently crooked (and often in hock to EU officials). Many of their citizens will likely wait decades before getting a real choice about EU membership. Most read little criticism of Brussels in their newspapers, just the boiler-plate encomiums. But that is beside the point.

The students in Bucharest were doing what students are supposed to do: hearing each side of the argument. They didn’t show any of the symptoms of intellectual decay that I often encounter among students in the Anglosphere – in particular, using someone’s dissent from progressive orthodoxy to exclude, purge, persecute, or otherwise gain power over them (I mean no-platforming, social-media mobbing or denouncing in an ‘open letter’). But there is another malady that afflicts so many of our students, and is often indicative of an authoritarian mindset: they are so boring.

In Cambridge there is a continued failure to uphold free speech, or to grasp what it is to be properly liberal. Because if I can make a case against rule by faceless bureaucrats in a former Warsaw Pact dictatorship but not at one of our finest universities, our culture is in serious trouble. By 1975 Saul Bellow warned that ‘the universities have failed painfully’ and in the 1980s Allan Bloom pointed out that ‘the spirit of scientific inquiry’ that used to animate them is slowly dying. In British universities now, you can’t talk about certain subjects. That sounds like the ‘new serfdom’ to me.

RTWT

02 Apr 2015

Forcible Conversion in America

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FreeCountry

Kevin D. Williamson notes that our ruling class is determined to eliminate private freedom of thought and opinion and make everyone in America conform in every kind of expression to the belief system of the optimates.

Adlai Stevenson famously offered this definition: “A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” We do not live in that society. …

When there is no private property — the great legal fiction of “public accommodation” saw to its effective abolition — then everything is subject to brute-force politics, and there can be no live-and-let-live ethic, which is why a nation facing financial ruination and the emergence of a bloodthirsty Islamic caliphate is suffering paroxysms over the question of whether we can clap confectioners into prison for declining to bake a cake for a wedding in which there is no bride. …

Gay couples contemplating nuptials are not just happening into cake shops and florists with Christian proprietors — this is an organized campaign to bring the private mind under political discipline, to render certain moral dispositions untenable. Like Antiochus and the Jews, the game here is to “oblige them to partake of the sacrifices” and “adopt the customs” of the rulers.

Read the whole thing.


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