Tolerating dissent

[Mugwump]

<split from “Alex Jones” thread – thanks, David for BBMods>

Speech, like all behaviour, does indeed have consequences, but the question is the nature and proportionality of the consequences. Losing your employment is generally too serious a consequence for speech, unless it is manifestly and materially contrary to the interests of your employer and your ability to perform your role. Slating your employer or their product in a public forum, or abusing their significant customers, is a problem. Making patently offensive remarks while working on their business can be a problem. But what you do and say on your own time as a private citizen is your affair, not your employer’s. This principle should apply even when the speech in question is very unpleasant.

Increasingly, in our society, we manage a Soviet-style restriction on freedom of speech, but instead of sending people to the gulag, we publicly shame them via twitter, demand that they apologize on pain of boycott, and strip their employment away. This modern show-trial is a very sinister development, the more so because it is so protean that it’s hard to attack.

[stui magpie]

^

And that's another example of the hypocrisy of the left.

You publish something they agree with and get in trouble with your employer, they scream and demand your employer is punished

You publish something they disagree with, they scream and demand your employer sacks you.

[Mugwump]

[Jezza]

[Mugwump]

^agreed, Jezza, though conservatism has different meanings. I think libertarian “conservatism” shares the same bed as the establishment. It too relativizes everything. The US Republicans seem to me just as radical as the mad-eyed Left. It’s partly how they arrived at Trumpland.

Burke’s conservatism is what the new Leftist establishment fear and despise, because it checks their power. It means belief in particular, local values, shared and defended and developed by a people whose common experience has shown them what works best, and what is beautiful.

Family, faith, tradition and patriotism, liberty under the law and a well-regulated market framework : this sum of things has been so long derided and undermined that it seems quaint and reactionary. Yet it really is subversive, underlying (as it once did) the most civilized, plurally tolerant, safe and improving societies that have ever graced the planet.

Great societies and hegemonic powers die, often explosively, when the values that hold them together no longer grip. That gravity, in our civilization, is now very weak.

[David]

People are just hypocrites in general and tend to have their own partisan blinkers on to varying degrees. Like censorship, it’s not just a left-wing thing. And while leftists and liberals may have colonised the cultural establishment and entertainment industry, the right still holds all the real power in our society. Look at our government, our opposition party, our biggest companies, our powerful lobby groups, our newspapers, our radio stations and commercial TV shows and tell me that it’s the left that controls speech.

[Mugwump]

^ goodness, I don’t think that’s true at all.

Do Turnbull and his government stand for the things I described above ? To the extent they are on the Right at all, they’re libertarians whose values are closer to the mainstream Left than they are to Menzian Conservatism. Can you evidence one area where they have declared for a genuinely conservative position ? Wanting a slightly lower corporate tax rate and keeping a few refugees on Manus while admitting 350,000 immigrants a year does not qualify.

“Lobby Groups” ? you believe that the Left are underrepresented on these ? Amnesty, Greenpeace, the UNHRC, th multitude of aboriginal and multicultural lobbyists, many of them government funded ? That the business groups wanting lower taxes and lower penalty rates (and more immigration) are genuinely conservative ?

Our biggest companies ? The only views you will hear them express at all will be for free markets and for equality and diversity. How many corporate leaders declared for gay marriage vs how many against it ?

The Left has indeed “colonized the cultural space and entertainment industry” (and the education sector), and that is the most critical point,because the other things you mention are mostly technocratic and managerial in nature, with very little to say about values at all. It is the cultural space and entertainment industry that set the agenda, and it is overwhelmingly an establishment Left position.

I believe you are looking at the surface and the labels affixed to things here, rather than looking at what is really done and said, and where it comes from on the values spectrum.

[HAL]

Thanks like a sacrificial offering to assuage the British entertainment industry's collective guilt and shame for turning a blind eye to or condoning such behaviour on a widespread basis for the past half-century you look nice too.

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies4shaw]

[HAL]

Oh I get belief local values shared and defended and developed by a people whose common experience showed them what works best and what is beautiful .

[Mugwump]

^ “The Left doesn’t control anything”. And just my saying it makes it true. It’s magic : The sky is zero. The monks are down stilled. The hour is tufted.

What a hoot.

[Pi]

50 years of churning out leftist graduates from universities certainly has had an influence.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/proof-of-liberal-bias-in-hollywood-media-and-academia-2014-11?r=US&IR=T

https://nypost.com/2017/10/21/the-other-half-of-america-that-the-liberal-media-doesnt-cover/

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/why-graduates-lean-to-the-left/news-story/01abf264376ea109f0c6675c62c0ac5a


and then there is government bureaucrats

http://www.libertylawsite.org/2014/03/17/the-problem-of-bureaucracy/


.... the left have plenty of power and representation in the media and government.

hence the backlash.

[stui magpie]

That NY Post article was very good.

[David]