The New York Times publishes an OP-ED against free speech

It is hard to believe that anyone, let alone a professor, would argue against free speech. The freedom to say what you want, even if everyone else finds it disagreeable is an inherent part of American culture. It is what allows us to challenge religion, the government, and outside forces. It is also what allows us to express ourselves and live our lives in the manner we wish.

Who would want to curtail such freedom? Ulrich Baer, a professor, argues that free speech should be controlled because it might hurt some people’s feelings. It is a thing to behold:

At one of the premieres of his landmark Holocaust documentary, “Shoah” (1985), the filmmaker Claude Lanzmann was challenged by a member of the audience, a woman who identified herself as a Holocaust survivor. Lanzmann listened politely as the woman recounted her harrowing personal account of the Holocaust to make the point that the film failed to fully represent the recollections of survivors. When she finished, Lanzmann waited a bit, and then said, “Madame, you are an experience, but not an argument.”

This exchange, conveyed to me by the Russian literature scholar Victor Erlich some years ago, has stayed with me, and it has taken on renewed significance as the struggles on American campuses to negotiate issues of free speech have intensified — most recently in protests at Auburn University against a visit by the white nationalist Richard Spencer.

The two instances have nothing in common. The latter is a situation in which a group of people wish to prevent a controversial speaker from sharing his opinions while the former is a situation in which a one person challenged another person’s presentation of historical events.

Free speech is a zero sum proposition. You either have it or you do not. The moment that someone can stop you from saying anything, you lose that freedom.

Lake Zurich High School’s sordid history of hazing

Hazing is a practice that most people experience at some point in their life. It is usually intended as a bonding experience. Sometimes this is done in good nature, with the newcomer engaging in some silly or embarrassing practice to gain the group’s approval and admittance. Yet It often turns to more cruel activities.

Reports about hazing from fraternities to police departments to sports teams to the military show that hazing becomes a means of ritually abusing newcomers. The older and more accepted the practice, the more perverse the ritual abuse. It is quite common for hazing to take on a sexual nature, usually resulting in sexual assault.

When one thinks of these cases, one would expect to hear this coming out of university or military school. One would not expect it out of a high school. Unfortunately, this is what happened at Lake Zurich High School. Two students who played football at the school filed a lawsuit against the school district, alleging that the coaches and school officials ignored the hazing, which allegedly included forcing the boys to strip naked and sexual assault:

Puritanism’s Shameful Secret

The Honey Badgers had an interesting stream with YouTuber TL;DR about the “puritanism” of the current progressive and feminist movements. The Badgers and TL;DR break down some of the reasons why so many modern leftists fall into the a cycle of smug arrogance. As TL;DR notes in the stream, everyone has this capacity and everyone does it from time to time.

Alison mentions this as well. She notes that she and Karen Straughan went through a series of videos and noticed the smug looks on many feminists’ faces in the videos. This is something I have noticed as well in my dealings with feminists, both offline and online. The contempt for those who disagree with feminists or feminism is often palpable, as is the arrogance when feminists know they are in a protected space.

One can see this in spaces in which the opposition is heavily moderated or banned. The feminists in those spaces behave with a kind of self-righteous indignation based solely on their assumed superiority over whomever represents the opposition. Yet this attitude quickly shifts when they enter uncontrolled spaces. Feminists then become defensive to a comical extent, reflexively accusing anyone and everyone of hating feminists, women, and social justice.

Factual Feminist: Intersectional Feminism

I first read the term “intersectional” years ago as child. It appeared in one of my aunt’s feminist books. I cannot recall which one, but I do recall the explanation given in the text. According to the text, white female feminists had ignored the plight of black and other minority women. White women rallied around middle and upper class issues that affected them, completely missing the experiences of the typically lower class minority women. The focus of feminist discussions, according to the explanation, also revolved around white women’s plight. The issues that affected minority women were rarely, if ever, discussed or addressed.

This in essence made minority women, black women in particular, doubly oppressed. They were oppressed by their sex and their race, whereas white women were only oppressed by their sex. There was an additional oppression within the feminist movement as well. White women basked in the privilege of being the majority, dominate voice in the movement while minority women remained silenced.

Modern intersectional feminism supposedly addresses this oppression, but it really worsens the divide between the groups as the focus becomes more about who has it worse than solving any problems. It leads to concepts like safe spaces, the progress stack, and an ironic amount of discrimination, prejudice, and bigotry against the so-called “oppressors”. Rather than bringing people together, it leads to more conflict. Once the “oppressors” are drummed out or silenced, these intersectional feminists tend to turn on each other, arguing over the most benign, superficial differences.

Christina Hoff Sommers offered a breakdown of the intersectional theory and why it is so (ironically) problematic:

Nerds and Feminism: Feminists Behaving Badly

We are two weeks into the new year, and feminists have begun the year in true form by going after the most oppressive of all men: nerds.

Granted, feminists engaged in a great deal of nerd-bashing last summer with the fallout from GamerGate. The current round, however, has a different cause.

Scott Aaronson, a scientist and blogger, wrote a comment describing his fear of approaching women as a young man:

I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified. I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison. And furthermore, that the people who did these things to me would somehow be morally right to do them—even if I couldn’t understand how.

Aaronson’s fear came from feminism, specifically the feminist notion that all interactions between men and women contain a power differential that men use to exploit women. Aaronson tried to conform to feminist demands, yet it only made the situation worse, to the point that he contemplated suicide.

A Letter to a Poser

I chose to avoid most of the coverage about #GamerGate because I already knew how the liberal media would spin it. It took little time before the claims of “misogyny” and “sexism” trumped any level of honest reporting. Only a handful of media outlets interviewed GG supporters, and most of those interviews continued to peddle the “all gamers are sexist men” trope.

The death threats against Anita Sarkeesian, Brianna Wu, and Zoe Quinn continue to receive attention while the numerous threats and doxxing of GG supporters largely goes unmentioned.

What bothers me most, however, are the attacks on gamers in general. It is not that the attacks any different than the usual “they’re basement-dwelling losers” nonsense. It is that I assumed that people were past this kind of invective. I assumed people had seen enough evidence that gaming did not make anyone violent or hateful. I assumed that people had seen enough attacks on gaming to know that most gamers only want to play games. I assumed people had seen enough to know that gamers are people, too.

Instead, I saw people falling back into old habits, lambasting gamers as pasty white, unshaven, unwashed men living in their mom’s basements. I saw people who write for gaming publications calling for bringing back nerd bullying. I saw a geek culture icon attacking the very community that made his so-so film a $1.5 billion success.

Yet none of that prompted a need for a response. After all, these are far-leftists. There is little more that one could expect from them.

One article, however, did necessitate a response. Former NFL player Chris Kluwe took to The Claudron to attack supporters of GamerGate. His invective and ad hominem-filled rant perfectly demonstrates why the anti-GamerGate side has not won despite every attempt to do so. Below is my response to Kluwe’s rant:

Being a Boy: The Monster Inside

Originally posted on March 8, 2014

Here is a suggestion: if you want to change a person’s behavior, it would be best not to trash them while doing it.

There seems to be a problem with feminists and their efforts to change male behavior. Feminists seem to view men and boys as walking predators hellbent on oppressing, demeaning, and hurting women and girls every waking moment of their lives. They also seem to believe that until the advent of second-wave feminism males experienced no other emotion but rage. Feminists marry the two ideas together to come up with the theory that only with feminism can men and boys ever express true emotions and lose their violent tendencies.

Yet this desire to get men and boys to feel has nothing to do with helping them. Rather, it is only about keeping them from hurting women. So volatile is male behavior that only by “softening” boys can they be changed. Or as Jeff Bogle puts it:

Raising strong girls is not enough because a strong girl, even the strongest of mind, body, will, and spirit, can too easily be fractured into a thousand unrecognizable pieces, a glass bottle of glitter shattered on a venetian tile floor, by a physically stronger, drunker, misogynistic boy. We can cobble together and restore some of the sparkle, but it’s doomed to be mixed with crumbs, dust, and dirt, no matter how studious we are. A dulling of the shine. A repeal of the magic.

That reads like something written by someone who has never spent much time around actual, living boys.