Leadbelly:
Two links and I'll leave it there for good:
http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=45437.msg2419019#msg2419019
http://www.thebore.com/forum/index.php?topic=45437.msg2420397#msg2420397
Okay. I've not said the Right is necessarily any better than the Left in this regard. In fact this is why being on the side of free speech is extremely important. Who is on top can change. Those same speech restriction policies you were in agreement with could one day suddenly be used against you.
You say you don't understand why they are focusing on the Left so much because you see similar attitudes, but for different reasons on the Right. What I think you are missing is institutional power. So for example, universities are overwhelmingly liberal which is why the attacks on free speech are more likely to be from the Left. We're not simply talking about attitudes from the students, but the policies they are beginning to influence. Safe space policies, trigger warnings, dress codes at halloween, etc, they're not coming from the Right, it is coming from the Left. They are also creeping into other areas. As you know, Google for instance has a diversity department that has a particular ideological perspective. The very reason Peterson suddenly came into the spotlight was because of legislation to do with gender neutral pronouns.
Basically the one place that the left seems to take a harder line on free speech restrictions are when it comes to issues of prejudice. Which has always made me suspicious about why so many like Peterson only seem to give a shit about that particular inflection point of anti-prejudice and not the still much larger issue of people advocating restrictions on speech because of their prejudice??
I'm from the UK. We have hate speech laws in the UK. You may be aware of the Count Dankula incident, in which he was prosecuted for hate speech for making a Nazi joke. Very few people on the Left defended him. The majority of the protest actually came from the Right. The Left has pretty much completely abandoned free speech.
Why be against hate speech? The problem with hate speech is that it is vague and subjective. What exactly is 'hate' if you get my point. If you go back 60 years for instance, the LGBT community would have been considered grossly immoral and a degradation of society. Homosexuality of course was illegal in the UK until 1967. It took a bit more time to get wider acceptance. One thing LGBT campaigners knew back in those days was that free speech is extremely important. When you are faced with a society and a State that is hostile to you, all you have is free speech. Some people today seem not understand that hate speech laws even 60 years ago would have been used against them. Against their speech. In fact in terms of LGBT campaigners, don't take my word for it.
The other thing is, once you normalise the idea that the State has the right to criminalise certain speech, you create a culture and climate where people grow up thinking no one has the right to offend them. That the state should step in. Then you get all kinds of special interest groups that say things like, "Wait a minute, if this speech is classed as hate speech, why not this other type of speech?". That's inevitable. So in the UK for instance there have been campaigns to make 'misogyny' a form of hate speech. You can really see the issue there. Misogyny no longer simply means 'hatred of women' it is used far more broadly than that by feminists and people on the Left. Pretty much anything criticisng 'feminism' could be construed as misogyny. And the way hate speech works, it is not intent that decides whether something is classed as hate speech or not, it is the person who took offence.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/amber-rudd-misogyny-hate-crime-change-law-prejudice-women-home-secretary-greens-mps-charities-a8196786.html
The left is silent. What they don't seem to grasp is, governments change. One day maybe a far-right government is voted in and they have the same legislative powers against 'hate speech' as any other government. It is a bad idea to allow the state to control speech. It is a bad idea historically, and it is a bad idea logically.
Peterson was against it because it was compelled speech by the State. I hope I have given you a god explanation of why you should be fully in support of Peterson on that. A lot of people on the Left it seems aren't. Certainly this is the case in the UK.
So I'm gonna start by saying I absolutely agree with your core argument about why erring on the side of non-regulation when it comes to speech and that is where I come down as well. I also very much co-sign onto the notion that people that advocate for the ability to control speech in a democracy have to be aware of the sort of devil's bargain they may be getting into because those that have different values, motives, and views then your own could become in charge of those levers and re-purpose them in ways to silence speech you think should be allowed.
Much else though isn't really addressing what I am trying to get across. Though I get the points you are making.
I'm not saying that the left, and more specifically the younger generation of the left, is absent their own free speech concerns, clearly there are some notable cleavages there, and you speak to some of them. My point has only been that by all evidence I have found, they are not currently the sort of existential threat that is often catastrophized by the speakers mentioned in the video in the other thread. That comparatively, the left-leaning youth and the left writ large seems to be much smaller in both depth and breadth toward restricting free speech than what you currently see on the right and from older generations. And the left unquestionably in America has far less control of power levers to advance their free speech restrictions.
And to extrapolate into a point I didn't make in that last post, when certain speakers beat that drum as if it is the major existential free speech issue of our time, and basically infer it is the only one, its hard not to conclude that either through ignorance or purpose, they are manufacturing a crisis by denying the proper larger context this issue exists in, or at a minimum, ends up greatly exaggerating and denying proper context about it. Which leads people who put trust into them and then leaving with warped views of reality.
As an aside to the whole Google thing, it has always been a bit of a hard sell for me on getting worked up over that as someone that lives in the south. I mean from short experience in that field, and from friends still in it, there is a pretty good chance that if you have any sort of perceived liberal leanings on your facebook page or on a company personal audit, you can consider your resume shredded if you try and work in any of the oil and gas or industrial industries that populate much of the region. If we are moving to a world where there is a bit of an over-correction in trying to policy misogyny or racism in the workplace, I'm not sure I'm losing sleep over that trade-off.
