From: egnilges@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Ed Nilges)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,alt.censorship,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: Hate Speech Okay, says the Supreme Court
Date: 30 Jul 92 14:29:47 GMT
Article-I.D.: Princeto.1992Jul30.142947.23811
Organization: Princeton University
Originator: news@ernie.Princeton.EDU


Well, it's been fun, but I am leaving for a two-week Outward Bound
course and as such this thread is going to die, as is the "Using kill
files..." thread.  The uniformity of opinion and in general
flaming nature of the replies, which contravene explicit usenet
guidelines and have often been of unexampled viciousness, which have
in general been content-free and free of references to any sorts of
authorities, has been pretty much par for the usenet course.

It's ironic that proud defenders of "freedom" should be so vicious and
violent in expression when the exercise of freedom appears, and this
thread has been quite self-referential in that the defenders of hate
speech are honest in at least one respect; they are postmodern believers
in the equivalence of all speech and in the strange military axiom that
"opinions are like assholes, everyone's got one."  Which of course means
that the opinions of a Jeffery Dahmer or of a Viktora are to be accorded
equal time with the opinions of a Ghandi, or a Martin Luther King.

I am old enough to be aware of the provenance of this belief.  In
justified reaction to the transformation of the Berkeley campus of the
University of California into a sort of factory for men in grey flannel
suits and their helpmates in 1965, that same campus exploded with
justified demands, documented in such out-of-print tomes as Jerry
Farber's The Student as Nigger, for a real rather than an ersatz
education.  Shortly after this explosion, some idiot on that campus
started what he was pleased to call a Filthy Speech Movement, implicitly
equating the right to cry "fuck" in a crowded theater with
the right not to die in Southeast Asia.  Which has silenced and
trivialized and confused the Left ever since, and if you go to Berkeley
now, you will find that the campus policecars come equipped with high
powered rifles.  These rifles, and the lush local foliage, give a sort
of Latin American ambience to the campus, but for the last time, where's
the freedom?  Where's the sense of priorities?

These discussions have confirmed my belief that despite the loud support
of usenet posters for "freedom", which they confuse regularly with white
male privilege, a near-unanimity of viewpoint is enforced by the
mechanism of "flaming", akin to the ways in which women are
systematically reduced to silence in our society, and in which
workgroups in high-technology factories are expected to police
themselves more effectively than any management overseer could.  Perhaps
there are good reasons for this, but there's a real dishonesty in baying
about freedom and in enforcing a rigid conformity of views.           

P.S.: To Joe May: I cannot speak for the blacks of the inner city, but I
submit that if they had a choice between making Ice-T (in reality,
Time-Warner) rich, and access to decent jobs, education, homes and
health care, they'd take the latter.  So perhaps USING Ice-T to get a
rise out of the cops is a form of fighting words, but as usual the
questions in America are posed in a fashion such that the answer makes
companies like Time-Warner rich. The sensible Canadians have, in their
new constitution, a waiver re free speech as applying to hateful speech
and I really doubt that the Gulag is about to sprout up on the frozen
tundra of the Yukon. 
Newsgroups: misc.legal,alt.dads-rights,alt.child-support