A new video from me: Where are the free speech defenders now?
I’m ashamed to say that for a long time all the criticisms of “cancel culture” bored me - probably, if I’m honest, because it was people like Jordan Peterson making the arguments. Also, there were a lot of counter-points running through my head (“Are they really cancelled if I’m reading about it in their newspaper column?”).
But… the rise of Trump and other right-wingers who are happy to attack institutions, free elections, freedom of religion and so on has awakened the liberal in me. It seems we can’t take these things for granted anymore. This video is a small contribution to that effort.
As I show in this video, after years of complaining about cancel culture the Right has now embraced it, but to their own ends. From laws dictating what university professors can discuss with their students, to the suppression of books in public libraries, it’s now the Left’s ideas that are being silenced with power rather than argument.
Hopefully though, this is a wake up call for the Left. In this video I respond to all the (bad) positions I used to hold on why cancel culture is overblown, and set out the positive left-wing reasons for why free speech needs to be defended.
Hello to all the new subscribers! Happily, my last video took off with over 100k people watching some of it. This was very encouraging and I hope that one day the algorithm gods will smile on me again. (Here if you missed it: The strange politics of UK newspapers)
If you’re new here, today’s video has a more argumentative flavour, but I’ve got another more straightforward explainer in the works. Also, a video on … the political science of Dune. (So bit of variety!)
Other recent videos:
+ How "lived experience" goes wrong
+ How antisemitic are the pro-Palestine protests really?
+ What people got wrong about Russia (and history)
+ Israel is walking into a trap
+ How Bernie Sanders wins an argument
+ The problem with the media is not what we think
Notes and links
+ When You Just Want to Find a Nonfiction Book to Read, but Apparently They're All Bad (YouTube)
+ Absolutely wonderful list of market failures including"The Cuyahoga River: This Ohio river was so polluted by industrial waste that it caught fire three times. Government stepped in and ordered a $1.5 billion cleanup. Today, the river is clean. "
+ “Terror Management Theory says that when people are reminded of their mortality — especially if the reminder doesn’t register consciously, as happens after a brutal act of terror — they will more readily enforce their cultural worldviews. If our cultural worldview is xenophobic, nationalistic or moralistic, we are prone to become more so. Hundreds of experiments, all over the world, have confirmed these findings” New York Times - Found this a fascinating idea: why terrorist attacks make us stupid.
+ Is the teen mental health epidemic actually down to bureaucratic coding change? Twitter / New York Times. If you’re also instinctively sceptical of this phenomena you might enjoy The phone addiction panic
+ "Strange new problems are being reported in the growing generations of children whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework - an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastating boredom with life. Educators are increasingly uneasy about the dependence, the lack of self-reliance, of the boys and girls who are entering college today. 'We fight a continual battle to make our students assume manhood,' said a Columbia dean." This is from page 18 of Feminine Mystique - worrying about kids in 1963!
+ It Turns Out the ‘Deep State’ Is Actually Kind of Awesome - Video from The New York Times
+ I ended focusing a lot on the US in the free speech video - but the UK free speech situation is awful (Twitter)
+ The McSweeney Project (UnHerd) - Morgan McSweeney is the strategist behind Keir Starmer. He’s famous for destroying the Corbyn wing of the Labour party, but this piece tells the story of how his project was also about defeating Blairism.
+ I took my eldest to have a poke around Westminster Abbey (smaller than on TV if you ask me) and got to see another copy of Magna Carta. Apparently there are 25 copies in existence. (I saw another recently in the British Museum.) I might start an effort to see them all.