House Committee: Hearing on Free Speech - IDW Member, Bret Weinstein, Testifies
Recent YT video by Bret Weinstein regarding The Evergreen State College:
LOST said:
More recently - 60 years ago.
This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
LOST said:
ml1 said:Really good comedy like really good drama should stand the test of time.
I'm not sure which performers you're referring to who are being prevented from getting gigs.
I'm responding to the specific mention of Friends in thr Ullman video, and the specific complaints from Seinfeld and Maher and the many comedian guests on Maher's show. They constantly complain that audiences aren't laughing at certain jokes because they're too uptight and PC. Having heard some of the jokes, I contend that it's not the audience's PC attitudes. It's that the jokes aren't very funny. I know it's hard for veteran stand ups to accept that. But sometimes a gay joke that would have got a laugh in 1980 just isn't funny now. Not because the audience is too "woke," but because the context of the joke is different now.
Not sure about Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift but if possible watch "Modern Times" and tell me if you didn't laugh.
I don't really buy that. There is such a thing as good topical humor that is only funny for a limited time. Not all comedy is intended to be timeless.
RealityForAll said:
LOST said:This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
More recently - 60 years ago.
Somebody doesn't like free speech, apparently.
Right another member of the never-have-a-substantive-discussion-about-topics/individuals-we-don't-approve.
Do you have anything constructive or substantive to add to the discussion regarding Bret Weinstein or free speech?
dave23 said:
RealityForAll said:LOST said: More recently - 60 years ago.This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
Somebody doesn't like free speech, apparently.
RealityForAll said:
Do you have anything constructive or substantive to add to the discussion regarding Bret Weinstein or free speech?
Yes, two things:
1) I made the point earlier in the thread that "approved" speech is as much a problem from the right as it is on the left. You opted not to engage.
2) You take yourself much too seriously.
The gist of the Strossen interview is that this is a complicated topic. One wrinkle she raises, but doesn’t really elaborate on when discussing her own more absolutist views, is the idea of competing rights. The New Yorker article quotes a Cal professor framing it this way:
Later that fall, Judith Butler, the cultural theorist and Berkeley professor, spoke at a forum sponsored by the Berkeley Academic Senate. “If free speech does take precedence over every other constitutional principle and every other community principle, then perhaps we should no longer claim to be weighing or balancing competing principles or values,” Butler said. “We should perhaps frankly admit that we have agreed in advance to have our community sundered, racial and sexual minorities demeaned, the dignity of trans people denied, that we are, in effect, willing to be wrecked by this principle of free speech.”
ETA: The New Yorker piece will take you less time to read, RFA, than the Weinstein video will take me to watch.
interesting to me that pretty much the only source for how badly Weinstein is said to have been treated is Weinstein himself. It's his word that he's a liberal in favor of racial equality who wrote one email and then got run out of the school.
The Seattle Times article on the incident is more balanced for sure. It makes it clear that many students behaved badly in their protest. But the article also makes it clear that the school and the town had been ignoring their reasonable requests to address issues of racial equality for months and even years. It's also clear that the students' reaction to Weinstein wasn't due to his one email. He admits to being a long time opponent of the school's diversity efforts. Frankly, to me he does seem kind of racist in his reasons for that opposition. Of course he has a right to his views on diversity, and the right to oppose the school's efforts in that area. But suggesting that by pushing back on his opposition to efforts at equality the students are infringing on his free speech is a facile and probably inaccurate recounting of the story. I'm not surprised Weinstein tells a self-serving version of his story. Pretty much all of us do that. Our stories makes ourselves heroes or innocent victims, or sometimes both. In this incident, the unbiased stories don't support the notion that this is exactly what Weinstein and the right wing press have portrayed it as.
RealityForAll said:
Right another member of the never-have-a-substantive-discussion-about-topics/individuals-we-don't-approve.
Do you have anything constructive or substantive to add to the discussion regarding Bret Weinstein or free speech?
dave23 said:
RealityForAll said:LOST said: More recently - 60 years ago.This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
Somebody doesn't like free speech, apparently.
Sorry, I read this thread and thought we were having a discussion about comedy.
RealityForAll said:
ml1 said:But telling those who are errantly parking automobiles in cross-walks that people are keying cars is funny?
drummerboy said:Not really an explanation, but —
ml1 said: I could go into an explanation of why the sketch falls short on humor. But there is nothing more boring and pretentious than someone trying to explain comedy. https://youtu.be/JCWMcmZtt-YWhy is comedy beyond explanation?
I’m noticing that some of the biggest “snowflakes” out there these days are comedians complaining that people are too sensitive to laugh at their jokes. That’s such nonsense. If people aren’t laughing it’s because the jokes aren’t funny. Laughter is spontaneous and people can’t just stop themselves from laughing at something out of “PC.” Maybe later they’ll reconsider whether a joke was mean or offensive. But Seinfeld and Bill Maher and others are whining about people not laughing at jokes that are frankly not funny. Seinfeld joking that people scrolling on their phones look like “gay French kings.” How is that funny? What does it even mean? I’m not surprised no one laughed.
And you don’t have to be “woke” to be of the opinion that Friends hasn’t aged well. If you’re 20 years old, you don’t have to be PC to wonder why Chandler and Joey are so panicked if someone might think they’re gay. Or if you wonder why there are no people of color in NYC. Times change and things that seemed normal decades ago now seem a little puzzling. Like watching the Dick Van Dyke Show today and thinking it's strange when Rob frets so much about Laura potentially working outside the home.
A lot of humor doesn’t travel well across generations. We don’t laugh at racist Loony Tunes cartoons anymore, or watch Amos & Andy. Times change, context changes and stuff that used to make people laugh doesn’t anymore. Generally that’s thought of as progress.
A threat of vandalism/property damage is funny?
Two wrongs do not make a right.
PS Perhaps the errant person parking deserves more in the future? Perhaps the errant parker deserves to be punched in the nose (like a nazi because parking in a cross-walk is no longer a boorish, as****e move but has moved up to nazi scale). Where does the encouragement of violence and property damage end?
Seems to me that you were discussing what is funny or not funny.
LOST said:
RealityForAll said:Sorry, I read this thread and thought we were having a discussion about comedy.
Right another member of the never-have-a-substantive-discussion-about-topics/individuals-we-don't-approve.
Do you have anything constructive or substantive to add to the discussion regarding Bret Weinstein or free speech?
dave23 said:
RealityForAll said:LOST said: More recently - 60 years ago.This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
Somebody doesn't like free speech, apparently.
we were. In the context of free speech.
That Honeymooners scene is a classic. But here's a question -- does a joke with Ralph threatening to punch Alice in the kisser play the same way it did a generation or two ago?
RealityForAll said:
This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
Did you watch your own post? The very first topic that Bret Weinstein addresses in the video is humor.
Hello, topic!
This is the paradox of Weinstein in that video: He refers to his experience at Evergreen State as being diagnostic of an academic crisis on college campuses, yet when he warns against several of the social justice movement’s “bad assumptions,” one of them is that “lived experience is the only true insight,” which he calls a “terrible error.”
“You can imagine that it is very empowering,” he continues, “if you find yourself in a group that is historically repressed and suddenly you’re able to assert, ‘This is what I have experienced, this is what it means, and this is what the natural remedy for it must be.’”
Replace “historically” with “academically,” and you pretty much sum up Weinstein’s last 13 months.
Early in the talk, he describes how low the bar for being denounced as a white supremacist has been set these days, so low that it’s almost impossible to avoid tripping over it. (This even though lots of white professors manage to avoid it.) Which brings to mind another bad assumption that he attributes to the social justice movement: “Any time you find yourself on the defensive, your opponent has pulled a fast one.”
(Let’s pause here to recall, too, the title of his video: “How the Magic Trick Is Done.”)
Based on what I’ve heard and read from him, including this video, it’s hard for me to imagine Weinstein questioning his own experience with the same rigorous inquiry that he exhorts others to pursue. If he did, he might not be so quick to dismiss, for instance, “discomfort is itself injury” as yet another bad assumption. As the New Yorker writer broached it with a Berkeley law professor:
I asked john powell what he thought about the rhetorical tactic of conflating speech with bodily harm. “Consider the classic liberal justification for free speech,” he said. “‘Your right to throw punches ends at the tip of my nose.’ This is taken to mean that speech can never cause any kind of injury. But we have learned a lot about the brain that John Stuart Mill didn’t know. So these students are asking, ‘Given what we now know about stereotype threat and trauma and P.T.S.D., where is the tip of our nose, exactly?’”
ml1 said:
LOST said:we were. In the context of free speech.
RealityForAll said:Sorry, I read this thread and thought we were having a discussion about comedy.
Right another member of the never-have-a-substantive-discussion-about-topics/individuals-we-don't-approve.
Do you have anything constructive or substantive to add to the discussion regarding Bret Weinstein or free speech?
dave23 said:
RealityForAll said:LOST said: More recently - 60 years ago.This is not relevant here. Please stop posting crap like this!!!!
Somebody doesn't like free speech, apparently.
That Honeymooners scene is a classic. But here's a question -- does a joke with Ralph threatening to punch Alice in the kisser play the same way it did a generation or two ago?
Maybe it's funny because we all knew Ralph would never do it and if he even came close Alice would have floored him.
A couple of final thoughts on the Weinstein video (unless RFA decides to share his own):
Weinstein may be right when he suggests that the faculty and administrators who initially opposed Evergreen State’s Strategic Equity Plan before ending up supporting it were cynically motivated careerists. That he fails to acknowledge the possibility that at least some changed their minds because of persuasion on the merits, however, says something about his own cynical outlook, I think.
Weinstein concludes by invoking the “political compass” model, in which everyone can be placed along a Left-Right horizontal axis and an Authoritarian-Libertarian horizontal axis. He then observes that the Left/Libertarian and Right/Libertarian quadrants have a lot more in common than the Left/Authoritarian and Right/Authoritarian quadrants, which hate each other, and that the Libertarian half should be able to divide and conquer the Authoritarian half.
The hitch is that this turns the graduated axes model into four boxes: It lumps everyone in a quadrant together, rather than recognizing that somebody on the Left who’s not that deep into the Libertarian side might feel more affinity toward a Lefty who’s not that high up on the Authoritarian side than to a deep-Libertarian Righty. After all, that’s the point of axes.
Given a choice, I prefer the logic of Ralph Kramden.
ml1 said:
DaveSchmidt said:
Given a choice, I prefer the logic of Ralph Kramden.
I bet the next line was Norton talking about climbing in and out of the sewer.
Knew it:
RALPH: “I’ve always followed that old adage: Be kind to people you meet on the way up, because you’re going to meet the same people on the way down.”
ED: “Happens to me every day in the sewer.”
“On Stage”
Back to free speech from the right. Yesterday Milo Yiannopoulos--defended by the right when students protested at schools he was scheduled to speak at--said this: “I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight."
He got his wish today.
Reality for All lately appears determined to generate constructive and substantive comments on free speech in threads other than this one, but I’ll answer his question here:
Yes.
As I see it, an ongoing debate about freedom of speech that is focused on "who's worse, the right or the left?" serves no meaningful purpose. What is not being discussed is the challenging fundamental conundrum (taking overt threats of violence out of the equation) of how does a university balance someone's right to express something and/or the right to be heard with another person's right to not have to be exposed to something they find objectionable or hurtful. Some of the related questions are: Whose rights and values should prevail? What qualifies as objectionable or hurtful? Who gets to decide? If one person objects to a particular speaker's presence on campus, should the university automatically ban that person from speaking? When/how does constitutional law apply? What is a university's obligation to uphold academic freedom? If a university prevents all objectionable points of view from being expressed, how do we prepare our students to critique and debate them? Is the only way a university can address the needs of students who might be offended by a speaker is to prohibit the speech or are there other ways?
Ron Paul tweets racist and anti-Semitic cartoon. Popular libertarian's free speech remains protected.
https://twitter.com/ReaganBattalion/status/1013813799655231488
Paul's excuse is that he doesn't do his own social media, and it was posted by some staffer.
So his only sin is that he only hires racist anti-semites for his staff.
Remember the good old days when the loopy, racist Republican we had to worry about was only Ron Paul?
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Really good comedy like really good drama should stand the test of time.
Not sure about Shakespeare or Jonathan Swift but if possible watch "Modern Times" and tell me if you didn't laugh.