The Case of Abby Martin: Google Continues its Crusade to Protect Us from Ideas
Abby Martin is a serious journalist who I have followed for many years. Now this:
Duck Duck Go Drinks the Koolaid: Decides to Tell Us What to Think
I often use Duck Duck Go, but my confidence level in the search engine has plummeted. Geoffrey Miller sums up the problem at the bottom:
How is it possible that Duck Duck Go is now ignoring why people switched over from Google?
Intolerance of Viewpoint Diversity at Colleges
From a NYT op-ed by Emma Camp, "I Came to College Eager to Debate. I Found Self-Censorship Instead."
“Viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education,” Samuel Abrams, a politics professor at Sarah Lawrence College, told me. He felt this firsthand. In 2018, after he published an Opinion essay in The Times criticizing what he viewed as a lack of ideological diversity among university administrators, his office door was vandalized. Student protesters demanded his tenure be reviewed. While their attempts were unsuccessful, Dr. Abrams remains dissatisfied with fellow faculty members’ reactions. In response to the incident, only 27 faculty members signed a statement supporting free expression — less than 10 percent of the college’s faculty.
Social justice Is Compatible with Free Speech
Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. The following is an excerpt from is recent article (at FIRE): "Social justice requires free speech."
Prevailing political power has always been antagonistic to social justice and has sought relentlessly to restrict speech advocating social justice. That is why social justice has always required speech to nurture and grow its movements.
That was true for the nascent labor movement in the early 20th century; the anti-war movement around 1917 (and again in the 1970s); the birth control movement around 1916, when Margaret Sanger distributed informational leaflets on the streets of New York; the movement to gain the right of women to vote; the anti-lynching movement when the crusading journalist Ida B. Wells (1862-1931) used the only weapons she had — articles and speeches — to rally opposition to the epidemic of lynching; and, in our time, the gay rights and civil rights movements. All of them and others depended critically on speech rights, and all would have been extinguished without speech rights. That is why John Lewis (1940-2020) said that “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the Civil Rights movement would have been a bird without wings.”
Progressives forget that at their and our peril.
Ira Glasser: “Speech Restrictions Are Like Poison Gas.”
Ira Glasser served as the fifth executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union from 1978 to 2001. Here is an excerpt from his new article, "Social Justice Requires Free Speech."
"Hosannas for publishing Burt Neuborne’s scintillatingly clear and powerful piece on the danger of allowing universities to punish faculty for sloppy or obnoxious speech.
Along with David Cole’s excellent piece in The New York Review of Books, and Erwin Chemerinsky’s spirited piece on the Ilya Shapiro case at Georgetown, all three did a great job of explaining the distinction between supporting the right of someone to speak and disagreeing vigorously and loudly with what they say.
Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee book cover I have long regarded the failure to understand that distinction as one of the two major obstacles to widespread public support for free speech, and all three pieces do a superb job of explaining it."