Category Archives: Freedom

Protecting Speech that you Hate

Free Speech, Freedom, Liberalism

 

There is one thing a lot of people seem to forget about free speech. Those of us who actually believe in free speech are those who work to protect the speech we hate. It is not about protecting the speech of those with whom we agree. It is not about protecting the speech of our friends. It is about protecting speech  we despise .  Fro example, if you are a Christian you should fight to protect the speech of Satanists. That is what we must work to defend. If we are not able to do that we don’t really believe in free speech at all.

 

It reminds me of what I learned from watching minor hockey. Frankly, I was disgusted by my fellow parents when I watched my young sons play minor hockey. With hair trigger tempers, many of these parents turned viciously on young referees who were often only a couple of years older than our children. The parents saw every perceived mistake as an assault on their perfect children and complained vociferously about each call while ignoring the mistake of their own children. I never saw them complaining about mistaken calls in our own favor, only those against us. As a result I lost all respect for their claims that the young referees were making unpardonable mistakes. Had the parent complained equally about all mistaken calls I might have taken them seriously. It is the same with free speech. Defend all speech or admit you don’t really favour free speech at all.

 

Although I don’t know much about the attack on Salman Rushdie by a man wielding a knife perhaps because he is despised by much of the Muslim world because they don’t like what he said about their religious leader, Rushdie said this about on the topic: “The defense of free speech begins at the point where they say something you can’t stand. You often have to defend people you find outrageous, unpleasant and disgusting.”

 

It is not important to fight for people to have the freedom to say things you like. You have to have the capacity to listen to people whose opinions you strongly disagree with. Even if you hate their opinions or even hate them. As Piers Morgan, of Piers Morgan Uncensored said the day Rushdie was attacked, “you should be able to tolerate their right to have a different opinion.”

In most Muslim countries this is not on the table. They don’t want that. They resist the right of someone like Rushdie to express his views. More and more in the United States and Canada this point of view is gaining strength. That is why, it seems to me, free speech is on the decline.

According to a recent study in the UK. 86% of students want a trigger warning before they hear something offensive. This even includes classics of English literature like Canterbury Tales and Shakespeare. 36% want academics fired if they say something hurtful or offensive. If speech is not even free in Universities where is it free?

Rikki Schlott a columnist with New York Post mentioned how New York University issues student cards on which it placed a bias hotline for you to phone if you are offended by something you hear.

Many liberals now claim words are violence. If that is true, as Schlott said, then you must fight words with violence because that is how you fight violence with violence. Does that not follow?

Why are young people in particular so anxious? They fear words. They want trigger warnings. Is it because they have been coddled all their lives? I think this is part of the problem

According, to Piers Morgan there is “a celebration of victimhood in society.”  There is prestige in being a victim. People want to be victims because it gives them special status. He of course blames “the woke brigade.” I don’t doubt that extreme liberals are often at fault, but so are extreme conservatives. Are they all woke? Who is left to defend free speech?

It’s Good to be Disturbed

Freedom, Human rights, Liberalism

 

In Viet Thanh Nguyen’s article in the New York Times called, “My Young Mind he said he was Disturbed by a Book. “It Changed My Life.” That was what said that when he was young, probably 12 or 13, and he read Larry Heinemann’s 1977 novel, Close Quarters. He was horrified when he read that book. He was born in Vietnam but was an immigrant to the US.

He was shocked to learn what some American soldiers thought about Vietnamese people like him and the book depicted horrifying scenes of rape and murder. Hard stuff for a boy so young to read. He said he hated the book. He hated what it said of his adopted country. Should he have been protected from reading a book like that? He said no. Though he hated the book he thought it was ultimately good for him to have read the book. He had been able to read the book because he was in a library where there are no boundaries and he was allowed to go into the adult section and find and read such a book. He was disturbed by the book and even said he hated it at the time. He thought it was a terrible novel.

Nguyen read the book again when he was an adult because he was writing a book about that war too. He realized Heinemann had done exactly what a good writer should do. He made Nguyen realize how terrible war was. “He did not want to give his readers an explanation or editorial. He did not want to humanize the Vietnamese people because from the perspective of the American soldiers he was depicting, the Vietnamese were not human. That was the point. He knew they were human, but they were not depicted that way. Why was that? It made him think. Discomfort can be a good thing. It is not something to be feared, even for a young boy.

“Writers want to entertain their readers, but also confront them”, said Nguyen. That is the writer’s prerogative. That is what writers can do in a free and democratic society. That is what they should do in a free and democratic society. Writers often want to disturb readers out of their slumber. Even children should be disturbed.

 As Nguyen said in his New York Times article:

“The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness. He didn’t offer readers the comfort of a way out by editorializing or sentimentalizing or humanizing Vietnamese people, because in the mind of the book’s narrator and his fellow soldiers, the Vietnamese were not human.”

 

I remember once when my boys were very young, and Chris’s uncle had died, we discussed whether we should bring our boys to the funeral or not. They had never been to a funeral before. They didn’t know much about death. I remember our youngest son, Stef, asked, as the coffin was lowered into the grave, “Are uncle Joe’s bones in there?” “Yup,” was our answer the bones of their great uncle were in that coffin. Should a young lad not learn that? Would it disturb them? Maybe. So be it.

Many people currently want to protect young people from disturbing truths. They want the children to think their country is always right, even when it isn’t. That happens in both Canada and the United States.

Confronting readers or disturbing them “can make them think twice,” said Nguyen. I think that is a lot better than not thinking at all. As he also said, “That is exactly the function that, books, schools, and curricula should have. It’s not always about making us feel comfortable, it’s about helping us to confront difficult realities and difficult pasts as well.”

Isn’t it better to get disturbed than to slumber?

 

Banning Books: I thought conservatives loved freedom?

Freedom, Liberalism

More and more conservatives (and liberals too)  in the US and Canada, who used to believe in freedom are demanding the right to control what other people read. In 2022 many of them  worked hard to ban books.  In Indiana Republican lawmakers are pushing a bill to protect students from “harmful materials at libraries.”  In other words, they want to ban books. Recently Republicans members of a School Board in Tennessee  School Board banned Pulitzer prize-wining graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegleman. That book seems to be about t cats and mice, but is really about Nazis and Jews. Guess who are the cats?

Another Pulitzer prize winning writer, Viet Thanh Nguyen  recently wrote an article in the New York Times called, “My Young Mind was Disturbed by a Book. It Changed My Life.”

As Nguyen said, about banning the book Maus,

“Part of a democracy is having the capacity to engage with difficult, or disagreeable, or even dangerous ideas. So about the banning of a book like Maus, number one I feel sorry for the students or children who would be deprived of the opportunity to read a great book! But number 2, I think it also shows a lot of fear on the part of the parents and politicians who are banning books like Maus because what they don’t want to do is have difficult conversations with their children either about art or about the subjects that a book like Maus raises.”

 

Part of the rationale the Tennessee school board had to ban Maus was that the book contained scenes of nudity, profanity, and violence.  People objected to the images in the book that showed bare breasted cats (Jews) who were being assaulted by the Nazi cats.

Well, if you want your children or yourself to learn something about the Holocaust they probably have to learn something about nudity, profanity and violence. They sort of come with the territory.  Should young children be protected from learning about nudity, profanity, and violence?  Should the parents or the school board have the right to ban such a book?

Not in my view. Personally, I have young grandchildren and worry about what they learn when unsupervised on the internet or playing video games and things like that. I wish they had someone to curate what they watched or put it into proper context. That is something a teacher or librarian or parent could and should do.

Maus has been curated by a thinking author. It is not pornography. It does show a naked mouse in a bathtub! Horrors! The proper context for discussing such a book would be with a librarian, or teacher, or parent who can teach the context. The problem really is that children have contact with a lot of violence, profanity and nudity outside the classroom. That is where they are unsupervised and there is no one around often to put those things into context. Parents should be much more concerned about that, though I am not arguing in favor of censoring that either. I am in favor of parents and teachers and librarians helping students to understand what they are doing when they go to the internet or social media.

The American Library Association has called banning Maus a part of “an organized assault on the freedom to read.” The freedom to read is a pretty important freedom. One would have thought that in America, the land of the free, the freedom to read would be sacrosanct. It’s not. In fact, it’s under threat.  There have been more than 300 challenges since the school year began.

I was on the board of the Steinbach Public Library many years ago, and I remember we had some challenges too. I was proud that our little board in a very conservative town filled with evangelicals dealt with most of the complaints we received quite well.  Instead of banning books we worked on a statement of intellectual freedom of which I was quite proud. We were armed for the next challenge, which never came while I was on the board. Darn!

Christiane had a problem when she was the chair of the Parent Teacher Association at a local school when a parent objected to a Judy Blume book in the school library even though she had not read it, because she did not like the cover because it suggested to her in some bizarre manner, witchcraft, which she presumed to be wicked. Chris read the book and found it was an excellent book and thankfully, the book was not eliminated from the school library. When I was on the Library board one of our policies would be that we would not consider a complaint about a book by a person unless the person said he or she had read the book.

Freedom can be tricky. I don’t believe in absolute freedom like the members of the mandates convoy. Freedoms can conflict. Nuance is needed to balance one against the other to determine what limits on the freedom are tolerable and what limits are not.

 

Banning or censoring a book should be the last resort (if at all).  We need to protect children and we must help them to read wisely. Banning books is a crude instrument.

Leveraging Sexual Anxieties

American Fascism, Fear, Freedom, Tyranny and Fascism

 

We must always remember that the principal values of democracy are freedom and equality. Those are robust values. They are worth defending and fighting for. Many people in the US, among many other places, seem uninterested in defending those values. Freedom does not include the right to exploit others, because that negates their freedom. You can’t have such freedom. Many forget this. One of the “freedoms” some claim is the “freedom” to impose your view of sexuality on others. Again, that negates their freedom so such an attitude should be off limits for a proponent of freedom.

As Jason Stanley the philosopher of Fascism, said when interviewed on PBS’s Amanpour & Co.,

“Among the freedoms were enjoy in democracy are the freedom to identify with whom we want, to have the adult partners we want. And this freedom is under attack. And this attack on LGBT citizens is very eastern European in character. It comes in the wake of an attack on so-called critical race theory, but the attack is not really on critical race theory, it’s an attack on the teaching of our history, the teaching of our anti-democratic racist history and now we have an attack on LGBT rights. This puts us into the world-wide autocratic context.  If you look at autocrats and would be autocrats around the world, from Russia’s gay propaganda law of 2013, that prohibits teaching minors about non-standard life-styles and had a terrible effect on LGBT communities in Russia. If we look at Viktor Orban’s Hungary the recent election was dominated by attacks on LGBT. If we look at Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil who won election with attacks on LGBT communities. We see American right now embracing this world-wide far right autocratic attack on freedom. This is just putting us in line with the fascist right world-wide”.

 

American conservatives like Tucker Carlson strongly support Orban in the name of freedom, but as I have said imposing your approved sexuality on others is not freedom. It is anti-freedom. Pedophiles also don’t believe in freedom, because they want the right to impose their lusts on other—the most vulnerable in society.

Many Conservatives in the US seem to think that all liberals are pedophiles.

Recently, the Republicans in the US Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, showed by their absurd questions that they believed, or at least wanted others to believe, that she was a pedophile supporter (if not a pedophile).  US. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor-Greene said that the 3 Republicans who voted for her must be pedophiles too. Of course, much of this comes from QAnon and Greene is one of the most famous QAnon supporters among the many in the Republican Party. QAnon claims that the Democratic Party is infested with pedophiles. QAnon used to be considered a fringe group, but increasingly it is mainstream Republican.

Of course, all of this might just be a deflection from the fact that the Republican Party no longer has any policies other than missiles in the Kulture wars. The American right has an uncanny ability to latch onto primal American fears. It used to be communists. Now it is pedophiles, or other “sexual deviants” as they refer to others with different sexual orientations. Many Americans fear nothing more than an attack on innocent children by pedophiles. And that fear has generated a plethora of crazy conspiracy theories.

Nancy McLean, a professor at Duke University, says the Republicans have been seizing on parental anxieties about children being attacked or groomed for attack by pedophiles in order to gain support for their causes. They have been focusing on this, she says, not out of genuine concern for children who are vulnerable, but for personal gain. They are doing it to get anxious parents to vote against Democrats. Does anyone really think that Ted Cruz actually thinks Ketanji Brown Jackson is a pedophile? Of course not. He just thinks the Republican base will love his spirited attack on a strong, intelligent,  black American woman. That’s all his nasty insinuations are about. McLean said Cruz is “despicable, and dishonourable but the Republican base eats this stuff up.” That is how you leverage sexual anxieties for political gain. And Cruz is good at it. That is how American and Russian fascism work.

It is not about freedom. It is about imposing your will and your views on others. Again, that is the philosophy of the bully. Pick a vulnerable person or group and impose your will on them.

 

Personal Choice

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom

 

We have been hearing a lot about personal choice lately. People say they want the personal choice to decide for themselves whether or not they take the vaccine.  To some extent that makes sense, but not much.

Rob Davidson is a country doctor from western Michigan and he had a different point of view. In his hospital in a small town the health care professionals saw many patients dying from Covid-19. It was heart breaking to see he said, particularly because most of those deaths were from people who refused to get vaccinated.  They would have had a good chance to avoid that just by taking the vaccine since he said, the hospitalizations  and deaths were overwhelmingly from the unvaccinated. He said some nurses cried every day on their trip back to their homes.  As well, they are frustrated by the attitude of people who just refuse the vaccines saying it is a matter of personal choice. This was Dr. Davidson’s response to that:

“With every shift, I see the strain people sick with Covid-19 put on my hospital. Their choice to not get vaccinated is not personal. It forces patients with ruptured appendixes and broken bones to wait for hours in my emergency department; it postpones surgeries for countless other people and burns out doctors and nurses…Personal choice cannot be an acceptable reason to endanger other people.”

How many nurses and other health care professionals have quit their jobs because they can’t take it anymore?

I wish people who worried about personal choice thought about the effects their choice have on other people. Is that not important too?

 

Wisdom from Curlers and Nonsense from Truckers

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom

 

We have been hearing a lot of crap from truckers and their allies lately.  They want freedom. Don’t we all? They keep demanding the right to decide for themselves whether or not they will take vaccines for Covid-19.  Many of them drove in a “freedom convoy” all the way to Ottawa from all parts of the country to protest mandates, getting lavish praise along the way from all kinds of people including political leaders.  By mandates they mean all laws and health orders relating to Covid-19. Really they want to do whatever they want, saying it is a matter of “personal freedom”.

 

Yet they don’t demand the right to drive on whatever side of the road they choose. They don’t demand the right to drive without licensees. They don’t protest against the safety requirements to restrict the hours that they drive their trucks. They don’t drink and drive. The fact is that truckers, like each of us, are not allowed to do whatever we want. We all have to obey laws whether we like them or not. None of us can do whatever we want. That is not freedom. That is anarchy. Frankly they are full of nonsense.

 

Then there are curlers. Well at least there is one that impressed me greatly.  This was Jason Gunnlaugson the skip of one of Manitoba’s top curling  teams and a former provincial champion. He recently announced that he would not compete in the Manitoba championship this year that will be held next week in Selkirk.  That means he won’t have a chance to compete in the Canadian Briar either.

 

Gunnlaugson announced that several members of his family and others in his “immediate circle” had not been able to receive timely medical treatment during the pandemic as a result of a huge surge of hospitalizations in Manitoba as a result of Covid-19 cases.  This is what he said: “I personally cannot reconcile playing non-bubble and non-testing curling tournaments at this time.”

 

With that comment Gunnlaugson proved he was different from the truckers—he could think of someone other than himself! He believes in freedom for others, not just freedom for himself. After all, we all want freedom.

 

A Spectrum of Mandates

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom, Human rights

 

I have tried to establish that the majority in a democratic society are allowed to impose vaccines on others who do not want to take them. I have tried to establish that on the basis of Mill’s principle of liberty enunciated in his book On Liberty.  Many of us now call the right which we have not to have actions imposed on us the principle of autonomy. I think that is a very important principle, but it is not an unlimited right.

Harms can be imposed on us if that is necessary to prevent us causing harm to others. It is of course necessary to weigh the harm avoided against the harm imposed.  The harm imposed must be less than the harm avoided, otherwise we have created greater harm by our actions. Sometimes, the ends justify the means. I will have more to say on that later.

Therefore, the harm caused by the mandate must be less than the harm avoided.

I suggest that there is a range of harms involved in mandates that depend upon the type of mandate. For example, the mandate could involve manacling the citizen and forcibly inflicting a needle with the vaccine into the body of the resister. That would be the most serious harm. It could cause great harm on the resister.  It certainly would elicit widespread opposition. I have seen photos of such a procedure being imposed on women’s suffragettes in the United States. They went on a hunger strike in the early 20th century to influence the American government, led by Woodrow Wilson, to grant women the right to vote.  They were horrific images of a woman being held while a tube was inserted into her mouth  through which food flowed against her will into her stomach.. The images probably went a long way toward persuading the public that perhaps their position was too strong and they lost public support. The same thing might happen with vaccines.

Unlike, forcing women to take food, I have argued that we would be morally justified in forcing vaccine Resisters to take the vaccines. But perhaps, such images, and there surely would be images, would quickly circulate and could persuade citizens that the government was going too far. As a result, such measures might be counterproductive.  Perhaps even though vaccine mandates are permissible we would be wise to avoid at least the more serious harms in the spectrum of harms. The spectrum of mandates could be from the smart to the stupid. I prefer the smart, though that is not always easy to determine.

We already have imposed some lesser measures that still go by the name of mandates. For example, we now require some employees in some situations, to be vaccinated, in order to work.  The loss of employment is obviously a serious harm imposed on the resisters.

We have also imposed restrictions on the unvaccinated to refrain from entering restaurants or certain stores or certain facilities such as hospitals or personal care homes for the purpose of visiting loved ones. Again these are serious harms but less draconian than the manacles.

Even though mandates are justified in my opinion we must be smart in choosing those that are the most effective and least counter productive.

We need smart mandates.

Vaccine Mandates are Morally Permitted

Epidemics/Pandemics, Freedom, Human rights, Liberalism

Vaccine Mandates are Morally Permitted

 

Mill’s principle says that the only reasonable limit on freedom is the prevention of harms to others. What is the harm in refusing to take vaccines?

The way I see it there are a number of  harms that are avoided by compelling others to take vaccines they do not want to take. One of them is that refusal to take vaccines gives the deadly virus that causes Covid-19 an increased opportunity to spread that it should not have. The longer the virus is allowed to circulate the more people can get infected, and seriously ill, or even die. The more people get vaccinated the better the chance is that the virus will be stopped in its tracks. Scientists have persuaded me that widespread vaccination is our best chance at stopping the virus. People who resist the vaccines are helping the virus to spread and infect others. This is a serious harm to others.

There is significant evidence that the virus can be spread by the vaccinated as well as the unvaccinated. If it were equally possible for either group to spread the virus there would be no reason for us to impose vaccines on others, on that  basis since it would not make a difference to others.  The chance of others  catching Covid-19 would then be no higher or lower than   Then a vaccine mandate would not justified on this basis at least.  So far as I have learned the spread is greater by the unvaccinated so I think the case is still strong that imposing a vaccine on others against their will is permissible to avoid the greater harm to others.

As well, the longer the virus is allowed to circulate unchecked the greater the chances that the virus will evolve and develop new variants that are even more dangerous than the ones we have now. This can endanger not just us in the vicinity but actually people around the world. We are seeing this right now around the world with the spread of the new virus Omicron. We also saw it earlier with the evolution of the Delta variant. New variants might be available to evade the vaccines again putting other people at great risk of harm.

These are serious harms that people who refused to get vaccinated without a sound medical exemption are inflicting on others, so, in my opinion, the majority has the right to compel people to take the vaccine. I think the case for vaccine mandates is a strong one.