Category: Society & Citizenship

In his acceptance speech for the George Polk Career Award, the cartoonist made provocative remarks about satire and the responsibility free speech confers.

Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny—it’s just mean.

What free speech absolutists have failed to acknowledge is that because one has the right to offend a group does not mean that one must. Or that that group gives up the right to be outraged. They’re allowed to feel pain. Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility. At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious. It becomes its own kind of fanaticism.

It’s not easy figuring out where the red line is for satire anymore. But it’s always worth asking this question: Is anyone, anyone at all, laughing? If not, maybe you crossed it.

Source: The Abuse of Satire – The Atlantic by Garry Trudeau, American cartoonist best known for Doonesbury, his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic strip

The attack on Memories Pizza and its implications

What do white evangelicals, Muslims, Mormons, blacks, conservative Republicans, and immigrants from Africa, South America, and Central America all have in common? They’re less likely to support gay marriage than the average Californian.
…
Should we destroy their livelihoods?

If I recorded audio proving their intent to discriminate against a hypothetical catering client and I gave the audio to you, would you post it on the Internet and encourage the general public to boycott, write nasty reviews, and drive them out of business, causing them to lay off their staff, lose their life savings, and hope for other work? If that fate befell a Mormon father with five kids or a childless Persian couple in their fifties or a Hispanic woman who sunk her nest egg into a pupusa truck, should that, do you think, be considered a victory for the gay-rights movement?

Before this week, I’d have guessed that few people would’ve considered that a victory for social justice.

I’d be fascinated to [know] how many grandparents of mob participants oppose gay marriage and what degree of social stigma they would want directed toward them.

Source: Should Mom-and-Pops That Forgo Gay Weddings Be Destroyed? – The Atlantic

Transcript: Anand Giridharadas: A tale of two Americas. And the mini-mart where they collided | TED Talk

We tend to think that technological progress is making us more resilient, but it might be making us more vulnerable

with each new generation of technological innovation, we edge closer and closer towards an age of sublimity. What’s less obvious in all this are the hidden, often surprising risks. … Just as technology pacifies once-dangerous events, sometimes the needle swings in the other direction. Call it a reverse sublime, a return of the repressed: a thing that was once safe becomes dangerous.

Source: Technological progress makes us more vulnerable to catastrophe | Aeon Essays

The activists who tried to keep Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley lost out, but they still pose a real danger.

Berkeley did the right thing, but it offered the wrong explanation—and that mistaken explanation raises the chances that the next university may do the wrong thing if it faces some combination of a less self-confident speaker, a better-organized protest, or a less strong-willed university leadership.

“Free speech” is the wrong category in which to think about attempted commencement shutdowns. Nobody has a right to be a commencement speaker.

When protesters mobilize against an invited university guest, they are not merely expressing disapprobation of a selection. They are threatening the university with embarrassment or worse unless the university yields to their wishes. It’s the university, not the speaker, who is their target. What they want from the university is not the right to be heard, but the right to veto. More exactly: These battles over campus speakers are not battles over rights at all. They are battles over power.

What they would have done, had they succeeded, was write new rules for the university itself: rules about what may be said, who may say it, and who decides.

Source: The Campus Free-Speech Debates Are About Power, Not Sensitivity – The Atlantic