Interesting (and sad IMHO) how he qualified this at the end:
- Just so we’re clear. Nothing in this post is meant to be normative or prescriptive; I’ve tended to stay out of these debates of late, in part because they mostly don’t speak to my experience of campus free speech. Our challenge at Brooklyn College has never really been how to keep speakers off campus; it has almost always been how to get them on campus.
All I’m doing here is making a simple, and I believe non-normative empirical observation: that something new is happening on the divide between liberalism and the left over the question of free speech.
I've been having trouble deducing causality from the the near 1-to-1 association with being tenured and "going quietly into the night", if you will. That lifestyle ain't for me. No worries. But yes, radicalism of late has enjoyed an increasingly positive feedback loop. Probably happens to every civilization right around the time they first hit the Internet's "on" button. So much of this radicalism is attributable to the changes brought about by the increasingly rapid changes to how information is disseminated. No reptilians required. Just too many pieces of garbage all vying for the top can. Edit: Hey guys, I wanted to stress one thing: I'm only making some empirical observations here. Hopefully nobody thinks I'm challenging their viewpoints or feels tempted to accuse me of a crime in the hopes of removing me from the Hubski faculty
Is it the knowledge that the Internet grants, or the way it allows everyone to express themselves and find similar minds for whatever floats one's boat?So much of this radicalism is attributable to the changes brought about by the increasingly rapid changes to how information is disseminated.
Interesting how Robin makes difference between liberals and leftists. I always thought they're of the same camp, just as much as conservatives are the same are rightists. So, what he's saying is - people of a politically-left mentality (same generalization, for simplicity) are getting more critical of free speech as a right because... it allows for terrible things to be said? Is that it? I gather it has something to do with that Betty DeVos gal who, apparently, raves about not being allowed to speak at Berkeley, but I'm not up to speed on that. All I heard is either John Oliver or Trevor Noah calling her a troll because her being denied speech is what's she aiming for in the first place.