Defending Free Speech versus Suppressing Free Speech

Excellent Tweets from Paul Graham:

Thus, we should guard the right to free speech like we should guard (though we often don't) against restraining competition. Everyone is free to speech and to be heard it is not often easy. The temptation is to gag the competition rather than to prevail on the merits in the marketplace of ideas. Putting undue pressure on an organization to fire someone from their job to deplatform them is not having one's ideas prevail in the marketplace of ideas. The only type of fair fight is ideas versus ideas, and these days anyone with a computer and an internet connection has a right to compete.

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The Nuanced Story of Race Discrimination: 2016 Pew Study

According to this 2016 Pew Research, racial discrimination is far more nuanced that one would assume based on the rhetoric from recent protests. This study contains nuanced stats on gender too.  Many charts to consider in this article, including this one:

Blacks more likely than whites, Hispanics to see their race or ethnicity as hindering their success in life

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Dishonest Zealots Attempt to Destroy the Career of Linguist Steven Pinker

Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don't see any value in Pinker's willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker's statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker's use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.

Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:

In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: "I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly."

Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:

Here is Jerry Coyne's full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne's post is titled "The Purity Posse pursues Pinker."

I invite you to read both sides of this dispute.  I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated.  You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers.  The phrase "social conflagration" might come to mind as you review the evidence.  The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.

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The Wrong Kind of Fireworks

Celebrating our freedom while 41 people are shot in one night in NYC.

The headline from the Daily News: "41 shot overnight in NYC with at least 4 dead in citywide explosion of gun violence." Then I noticed this headline: "16 Dead, at Least 67 Wounded in Chicago Shootings This Weekend."

Maybe the headlines should include the phrase: "Bullets: The other Pandemic." Epidemic shootings are terrorizing numerous city residents and this is absolutely unacceptable. Do our politicians not care or is the problem that they are pretending that there are no solutions?

There is a cycle of violence in many cities that begins with financially struggling families who are forced to send their kids to shitty schools. Then the cycle moves to 1.3M students who drop out each year. Stir in the lack of comprehensive and free birth control so that people can plan when they want to have families.

Unplanned pregnancy and childbearing are also implicated in the failure of many young women to finish their college education. Research shows that 61 percent of women who have children in community college don’t finish their degree, and less than two percent of teen mothers who have a baby before age 18 get a college degree by age 30.
Then comes street violence and deaths and then to prisons, where we've decided that the best thing we can think of doing is to park people in prison for 10 or 20 years each, before we dump them onto the streets, insisting that they can fend for themselves even though many employers want nothing to do with people with criminal records, especially violent criminal records.  Our politicians claim that it would cost too much money to improve things, even though the prison-industrial complex is extraordinarily expensive:  $33K per year per prisoner on average. 

I cannot think of a better formula for hurting adults and children than the above formula.

There doesn't seem to be any political will to fund new creative types of interventions into any of these steps. It's especially frustrating that we won't fund (and in fact, we've been cutting) interventions at the early childhood step even though that is the best place to invest. That, in fact, was one of the first posts I wrote for Dangerous Intersection. Still true today and still being ignored today. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

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