Noam Chomsky Explains Freedom of Speech

Chomsky: "I do not think that the state has the right to determine historical truth and to punish because I'm not willing to give the state that right even if they happen . . ."

Unknown man: "Even if they deny that the gas chambers existed?"

Chomsky: "I'm saying if you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. I mean, Goebbels was in favor of freedom of speech he liked, right? So was Stalin. If you're in favor of freedom speech, that means you're in favor of free speech precisely for views you despise. Otherwise, you're not in favor of freedom of speech. There are two positions we can have on freedom of speech, and you can decide which position you want."

Chomsky: "With regard to my defense of the people who express utterly offensive views, I don't have the slightest doubt that every commissar says, "You're defending that person's views." No, I'm not. I'm defending his right to express them. The difference is crucial, and the difference has been understood outside of fascist circles since the 18th century."

Glenn Greenwald has focused on this issue repeatedly because many people who consider themselves to be "liberal" have abandoned free speech, now embracing the opposite, censorship of things they find offensive and things they don't like.  I agree with Greenwald. Many modern so-called liberals have dramatically changed positions on free speech as a stealth maneuver.  They won't admit that they formerly embraced wide-open free speech (the version described by Chomsky) and they won't explain why they turned their position upside down.

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The Most Important Thing You’ll Discover in Your Journal

Have you kept a journal for a long time? I wrote a lot in my pen & ink journal for decades. I'm now 66, and looking back, there are two things that are rather stunning:

1. There are some things that seemed very important to me back when I wrote about them, but I don't remember them at all. That amazes me, because I wrote about a person or event in some detail. If you had asked me back then whether I would always remember that person or event I would have quickly responded "yes." It doesn't happen all the time. For most things, my journal revives a memory that is still in my brain intact or it offers me details that I don't remember, even though I have some memory.

2. I have changed a LOT over the years. Some of my observations about the world, the things I believed with certitude, have changed dramatically. In fact, some of my journal writings are cringe-worthy, making me wonder "How could I have been so certain about that when it is clearly so untrue?" If I time travelled back to 1980, for instance, my 1980 self might even bristle about some of the things that I now believe. That is the nature of "truth." It is always evolving, even in ourselves. It is a constant work in progress, even in ourselves, no matter how hard we try to get things right and no matter how sure we are about things. Certitude is only an emotion and it very often misleads us. These observations are critically important to me--they some of the reasons that I am so much opposed to censorship. Truth constantly evolves in all of us and we need each other because all of us, some of the time, fall off the tracks and need course correction. No one has ever had it right all along. In short, no one is equipped to declare the "truth" for the rest of us. To believe that would be supremely ignorant. We need free speech, including wide-open speech that can seem offensive and even odious, to test each other, so that we can make figure things out. And the only option to being for free speech is to be pro-censorship. The only option to free speech is to be authoritarian, to relish in the arrogant and narcissistic exercise of power over others. I trust absolutely no one to be the censor of others, not even myself. Truth-seeking is not possible in the non-stop society-wide churning of ideas over time.

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The Hurdles Faced by Science Teachers

Biologist Luana Maroja, is deeply concerned about hurdles science teachers are facing. Here article is "An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science: What scientists are able to teach and what research we can pursue are under attack. I know because I’m living it.". Here is an excerpt:

We each have our own woke tipping point—the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. . . .

One of the most fundamental rules of biology from plants to humans is that the sexes are defined by the size of their gametes—that is, their reproductive cells. Large gametes occur in females; small gametes in males. In humans, an egg is 10 million times bigger than a sperm. There is zero overlap. It is a full binary.

But in some biology 101 classes, teachers are telling students that sexes—not gender, sex—are on a continuum. At least one college I know teaches with the “gender unicorn” and informs students that it is bigoted to think that humans come in two distinct and discrete sexes.

Even medical schools and the Society for the Study of Evolution have issued statements suggesting that sexes are on a “continuum.” If this were true, the entire field of sexual selection would be baseless, as its bedrock insight lies in the much larger female investment in reproduction, explaining the demonstrated choosiness in females (who have more to lose) and competitiveness in males (the “abundant” sex in most species, one male can fertilize multiple females). Published papers (see here, for example) ask us to be “inclusive” by limiting the sex discussion to the few species of algae and protists (such as amoebas) that have equal size gametes—even when that has no relevance to any animal or vascular plant.

In psychology and public health, many teachers no longer say male and female, but instead use the convoluted “person with a uterus.” I had a colleague who, during a conference, was criticized for studying female sexual selection in insects because he was a male. Another was discouraged from teaching the important concept of “sexual conflict”—the idea that male and female interests differ and mates will often act selfishly; think of a female praying mantis decapitating the head of the male after mating—because it might “traumatize students.” I was criticized for teaching “kin selection”—the the idea that animals tend to help their relatives.

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How the CIA Convinces Lazy Journalists to do its Bidding

Ed Snowden: "The most important video of the year was filmed in 1983. The entire thing is much longer, but *entirely* worth the watch. The government sued Snepp in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled intelligence workers had to submit any statement for censorship, even those unrelated to secrets."

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The Long Slow Demise of Twitter

Walter Kirn has personally and repeatedly seen the corruption of Twitter. An excerpt from his article at Common Sense:

My forebodings were confirmed with the launch of the “Russiagate” investigation. I doubted its premises highly from its inception, but when I voiced these doubts on Twitter curious things occurred. My tweets on the subject, my followers reported, often were invisible to them, and yet, to my eye, they drew engagement. Strange. The Twitter users who “liked” my tweets tended to have tiny followings, I found, and they didn’t follow me. Their profile photos were often stock images. I ran an experiment one night and sent out a tweet of a controversial nature which I expected would be suppressed or screwed with, and then, when it was, I used screenshots of the mischief to prove to my followers that Twitter was dishonest.

I looked crazy. Concerned DMs arrived. One accused me of grandiosity for thinking I mattered enough to provoke intervention from on high. Innocence about Twitter still prevailed then; its cheerful bluebird logo still charmed the public mind. We had yet to learn, as we finally did this week (in a manner which confirmed my worst suspicions) of the hidden but direct coordination between Twitter’s management and the government, including the Department of Homeland Security, to suppress and guide opinion on topics from war to public health. (“One could argue we’re in the business of critical infrastructure, and the most critical infrastructure is cognitive infrastructure,” one government official put it.)

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