Helen Dale on hate speech laws in Australia; Frederick Hess on academic research; Ben Glasner on labor market policy; Damon Perry on Muslim extremism in the UK
On issues of speech, one shouldn't conflate what is legal (the First Amendment limits government regulation) and what is appropriate to a given institution. Universities are places which should be dedicated to disinterested intellectual inquiry, not settings for protests, marches, chants, let alone intimidation, insult, and violence, none of which serve the purposes of the institution. So banning such activities and ousting anyone responsible is not an impingement on free speech; such people can take their activities elsewhere.
And who decides what is appropriate, if not the property owner? Surely not you or anyone else. Do you really want the government classifying people and private property into various categories, and defining what actions are appropriate for each?
If you mean that the government *should* do that since they are giving them taxpayers' money, than it would be a whole lot simple and show a whole lot more for rights to just not give them taxpayers' money.
Freedom of speech does not trump private property rights. No one has a right to come in my house or yard and scream and yell. If a university wants to be known as allowing protests, marches, and chants, that's their business. Intimidation is not a very clear word; if it stops short of imminently unavoidable physical violence, it's still not violence, and insults never are.
Out of those six examples, only one is actual assault.
Maybe he who pays the piper, which the government does to a great extent, to include multiple juicy tax exemptions. If Harvard wants to go full Hillsdalev with neither grants nor loans and be taxed like a private corporation, then they can free themselves from all the strings attached.
If you mean that the government *should* do that since they are giving them taxpayers' money, than it would be a whole lot simpler and show a whole lot more respect for rights to just not give them taxpayers' money.
Thucydides did not mention that, so I jumped in with my own wisdom. You are halfway there.
Government does not pay for anything; taxpayers do. I am not being pedantic; the First Amendment includes an individual right not to pay for the spread of views you disagree with. This is not a group right, and cannot legitimately be made as a (non unanimous) group decision. That is why private forums are usually well managed and tax-funded forums are not.
I’m pretty sure a significant part of what Harvard is selling is “come to college and protest! - just like we did back in the day!”
Scholarship is hard; pussy hats are easy.
Gen X was perhaps just a bit more self-aware than those that followed, and we absolutely understood that our “No Blood for Oil!” protest was a one-off, so that we could say we participated in a protest.
If anything, we probably should have been more sincere about it, but … Gen X.
And of course, given we were in Texas, our protest should have been: re-take all the oil fields our grandfathers and great-grandfathers built. You should never have given them away 😆. That was never going to go good! Hell, they built the trains too, I’ve got a shoebox full of paper ephemera from the great-grandfather. It was a great addition to my postcard collection.
I have skin in the game when I approve using some of my tax money for research. It corresponds to my position on public finance: borrow only to finance investment and research counts a that.
You are correct that NSF grant makers do not face the same level of incentive as does a VC manager and any ideas about how to improve the process (Tyler Cowen has some) are welcome. But the basic problem is the same. You can't know how valuable something is until you try it.
Everybody's indirect tax-skin in the game is expressed, only broadly, in voting. That's partly why democracy works better than most dictatorships, tho throwing the bums out is perhaps more valuable. Peaceful transfer of Supreme Executive Authority (without any strange woman in a pond).
"Skin in the game" as a phrase does mean the decision maker loses, directly, from the bad results of the decision. Since all decisions include uncertainty, even "good" decisions, probabilistically, can have bad results, & conversely some bad decisions have good results.
That first sentence makes no sense. To get the most obvious out of the way, it makes no sense to say "approve using ...". It is grammatically incomplete. Do you mean "approve of", or "control", or "authorize"? I cannot tell. I am going to take it as "approve of".
Taxes are collective. You do not know where your taxes alone are spent. You don't even know where all taxes are spent. To pretend you approve of where your individual taxes are spent is sheer malarkey. To pretend that legitimizes taxing me for purposes you approve of makes you a collectivist.
If you want to use your money for research, donate it, yourself, individually. Don't pretend that you approve after the fact of whose taxes were spent on "research" as a general field.
Show that you have more skin in the game than being one of millions of taxpayers, and that you control where your individual taxes are spent. Anything else is just dandruff at best.
Bingo. The only way to really reform research institutions is to drastically reduce, maybe eliminate, tax funding of the system. So long as nearly all research funds are taken from taxpayers and handed out by ideologically run bureaucratic agencies to the writers of grant letters that please them, rent-seeking will determine the outcomes.
"If Harvard takes sides with Y except when Y is Jewish, that is Harvard’s prerogative." Not if Harvard is lying about what it's doing, pretending to apply terms equally in similar circumstances but secretly exercising favoritism and abuse of discretion, which is fraud, to it's customers and contracting counterparties. If Harvard wants to admit it takes sides, or reserves the right to take sides, that it makes no claims whatsoever about fair and equal treatment or due process, then, sure, 'prerogative'. But that's not what it says, it lies about the truth of its unfairness, all customers get equal rights, but some are more equal than others. You want prerogative? Then you must own your unfairness. You want to pretend you're fair? Then you must accept the liability for breach.
Like Russia, like Hamas, there is every incentive for Harvard to claim the moral high ground while continuing its blatant treachery. Unless someone is willing to draw a line and uphold consequences then they will ignore the jawboning
A few years back there was a big discourse about whether it was OK (or even a duty) to "punch a Nazi." Lots of libs came in on the side of "yes, you should punch a nazi."
What is an incitement to violence? It seems to me that if you establish that one should punch a Nazi, then calling someone a Nazi is pretty much the same as saying you should punch them.
There is a difference between a rebellious teenager calling his father a Nazi, he doesn't really MEAN IT. It's just a curse word.
But if you ACTUALLY MEAN IT, then I think calling someone a Nazi* is in effect a call to violence.
That's basically what happened with Kirk. The shooter was told he was a Nazi so much that he decided it was literally true. And if it's literally true then OF COURSE you should shoot him.
Rufo elaborates on this kind of decentralized call to violence via dogwhistle.
"because these digital spaces rely on user-generated discussion and lack the editorial guardrails of a traditional publication, individuals can plunge deep into the radicalization process and take the premises of left-wing narratives to their grim conclusions. Democratic politicians shout that Trump is a fascist; users on Reddit and Discord conclude that the proper response to fascism is political assassination."
*Calling someone a commie isn't the same, because whether we like it or not communist just means "well meaning person that wants the world to be equal" in the popular imagination. People call themselves communists. They were Che Guevara T-Shirts. It's just not the same as Nazi.
I thought it amusing as this played out, with breathlessness about the dread harm it caused, that it was easy to google an NYT article from the 90s as I recall, a sort of reportage of Haiti, that mentioned the pet or cat-eating.
How fun that the paper of record was presumably the source of the claim.
That article if not scrubbed has now been subsumed in a tidal wave of wave of search results re Haitians eating cats, offended at assertion which.
This may not have the effect of putting the issue to rest in the far future lol.
However, the common sense view that cats probably do not make good eating, was not aired as far as I know.
I’m trying to understand the moral difference between eating say a chicken and eating a cat (or dog). I say as long as they are euthanized in some cruelty free manner, then to each his own.
This strikes me (if sincere) as paranoia that "hate speech" in general or "Nazi" in particular will lead to violence. That's not the reason to disapprove of it while tolerating it.
I agree with Hess, and yet ostensibly relevant and important social psychology research on race and gender has had a much more malevolent effect on academia and beyond.
(1) the failure of the Weimar Republic’s attempt to manage politics by managing discourse.
(2) the Soviet postwar revival to try and undermine any culture of free speech.
(3) the quasi Marcusean “repressive tolerance” revival we are now living through.
The advantage of the Haddad ruling is it makes clear Australian law will not ideologically pick and choose, which may blunt enthusiasm for it in Australia (which has never been all that high).
I have always seriously disliked the concept of hate speech. Helen Dale and I expounded on our dislike in our essay in interwoven parts on Charlie Kirk’s murder and the reaction to it.
I support Free Speech—if it’s ok with the First Amendment, it should be ok with every employer & teacher. Including F-word vulgarity & n-word racist & all x-ophobic phrases.
With protection for K-7 prepubescent kids.
That’s close to what we had in the 70s, before folks started getting cancelled, fired, for legal but offensive stuff, and professors & intellectuals like Murray were blacklisted for their ideas & analysis of data. Most fired folk were conservative Republicans.
We only get free speech if most folk want it, including accepting it for those with whom they disagree, and those whose speech is offensive. We don’t have agreement on this ideal. Mostly because Dems are willing to censor Reps, especially in colleges.
The most likely path to get agreement on the superiority of Free Speech for all is for Reps, when we have some power to censor Dems, to do so—as payback for decades of Dem censorship. The claim that Tit for Tat fails is far weaker than the claim that continued acceptance of Dem censorship while Reps don’t censor will lead Dems to continue rather than change.
Not censoring Dems for hating Charlie Kirk, or Jews, won’t lead Dems to change, tho it’s not certain that censoring them will lead more of them to change. In any case, both or neither getting censored is more fair, and better, than mostly Reps being censored.
Hess lets Bazerman off rather easily in his article, as he should bear significant responsibility for the Ariely/Gino collaboration. At minimum, that scandal draws into question the value of his non fraudulent scholarly insights as well as his fraud-assisted ones.
The titles of his books are kind of hilarious…
Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (2022)
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (2014)
Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (2011)
I wrote a short blog post on hints of wrongdoing that preceded the major fraud being uncovered back in 2023, 8 months after Complicit was published and just after the truly damning evidence came out.
On issues of speech, one shouldn't conflate what is legal (the First Amendment limits government regulation) and what is appropriate to a given institution. Universities are places which should be dedicated to disinterested intellectual inquiry, not settings for protests, marches, chants, let alone intimidation, insult, and violence, none of which serve the purposes of the institution. So banning such activities and ousting anyone responsible is not an impingement on free speech; such people can take their activities elsewhere.
And who decides what is appropriate, if not the property owner? Surely not you or anyone else. Do you really want the government classifying people and private property into various categories, and defining what actions are appropriate for each?
If you mean that the government *should* do that since they are giving them taxpayers' money, than it would be a whole lot simple and show a whole lot more for rights to just not give them taxpayers' money.
Freedom of speech does not trump private property rights. No one has a right to come in my house or yard and scream and yell. If a university wants to be known as allowing protests, marches, and chants, that's their business. Intimidation is not a very clear word; if it stops short of imminently unavoidable physical violence, it's still not violence, and insults never are.
Out of those six examples, only one is actual assault.
Maybe he who pays the piper, which the government does to a great extent, to include multiple juicy tax exemptions. If Harvard wants to go full Hillsdalev with neither grants nor loans and be taxed like a private corporation, then they can free themselves from all the strings attached.
Or as I poorly typed ...
If you mean that the government *should* do that since they are giving them taxpayers' money, than it would be a whole lot simpler and show a whole lot more respect for rights to just not give them taxpayers' money.
Thucydides did not mention that, so I jumped in with my own wisdom. You are halfway there.
Government does not pay for anything; taxpayers do. I am not being pedantic; the First Amendment includes an individual right not to pay for the spread of views you disagree with. This is not a group right, and cannot legitimately be made as a (non unanimous) group decision. That is why private forums are usually well managed and tax-funded forums are not.
In other words, freedom of association > freedom of speech.
I’m pretty sure a significant part of what Harvard is selling is “come to college and protest! - just like we did back in the day!”
Scholarship is hard; pussy hats are easy.
Gen X was perhaps just a bit more self-aware than those that followed, and we absolutely understood that our “No Blood for Oil!” protest was a one-off, so that we could say we participated in a protest.
If anything, we probably should have been more sincere about it, but … Gen X.
And of course, given we were in Texas, our protest should have been: re-take all the oil fields our grandfathers and great-grandfathers built. You should never have given them away 😆. That was never going to go good! Hell, they built the trains too, I’ve got a shoebox full of paper ephemera from the great-grandfather. It was a great addition to my postcard collection.
Research is like venture capital. Most has not much utility, but some does.
Except venture capital is privately funded by people who have real skin in the game. Government research is nothing like venture capital.
I have skin in the game when I approve using some of my tax money for research. It corresponds to my position on public finance: borrow only to finance investment and research counts a that.
You are correct that NSF grant makers do not face the same level of incentive as does a VC manager and any ideas about how to improve the process (Tyler Cowen has some) are welcome. But the basic problem is the same. You can't know how valuable something is until you try it.
Everybody's indirect tax-skin in the game is expressed, only broadly, in voting. That's partly why democracy works better than most dictatorships, tho throwing the bums out is perhaps more valuable. Peaceful transfer of Supreme Executive Authority (without any strange woman in a pond).
"Skin in the game" as a phrase does mean the decision maker loses, directly, from the bad results of the decision. Since all decisions include uncertainty, even "good" decisions, probabilistically, can have bad results, & conversely some bad decisions have good results.
That first sentence makes no sense. To get the most obvious out of the way, it makes no sense to say "approve using ...". It is grammatically incomplete. Do you mean "approve of", or "control", or "authorize"? I cannot tell. I am going to take it as "approve of".
Taxes are collective. You do not know where your taxes alone are spent. You don't even know where all taxes are spent. To pretend you approve of where your individual taxes are spent is sheer malarkey. To pretend that legitimizes taxing me for purposes you approve of makes you a collectivist.
If you want to use your money for research, donate it, yourself, individually. Don't pretend that you approve after the fact of whose taxes were spent on "research" as a general field.
Just how woud you like me to deny the implication that I have no skin in the game, then?
Show that you have more skin in the game than being one of millions of taxpayers, and that you control where your individual taxes are spent. Anything else is just dandruff at best.
According to the findings of Fiscal Dermatology, does one need more skin to favor research than to be skeptical of it?
Bingo. The only way to really reform research institutions is to drastically reduce, maybe eliminate, tax funding of the system. So long as nearly all research funds are taken from taxpayers and handed out by ideologically run bureaucratic agencies to the writers of grant letters that please them, rent-seeking will determine the outcomes.
"If Harvard takes sides with Y except when Y is Jewish, that is Harvard’s prerogative." Not if Harvard is lying about what it's doing, pretending to apply terms equally in similar circumstances but secretly exercising favoritism and abuse of discretion, which is fraud, to it's customers and contracting counterparties. If Harvard wants to admit it takes sides, or reserves the right to take sides, that it makes no claims whatsoever about fair and equal treatment or due process, then, sure, 'prerogative'. But that's not what it says, it lies about the truth of its unfairness, all customers get equal rights, but some are more equal than others. You want prerogative? Then you must own your unfairness. You want to pretend you're fair? Then you must accept the liability for breach.
Like Russia, like Hamas, there is every incentive for Harvard to claim the moral high ground while continuing its blatant treachery. Unless someone is willing to draw a line and uphold consequences then they will ignore the jawboning
Every year they lie that they are non-partisan, when they are really partisan.
Tho it’s not clear what the legal definition of non-partisan is—Congress should specify a metric.
Like my 30% for both Reps & Dems, or some other amount, or determination.
A few years back there was a big discourse about whether it was OK (or even a duty) to "punch a Nazi." Lots of libs came in on the side of "yes, you should punch a nazi."
What is an incitement to violence? It seems to me that if you establish that one should punch a Nazi, then calling someone a Nazi is pretty much the same as saying you should punch them.
There is a difference between a rebellious teenager calling his father a Nazi, he doesn't really MEAN IT. It's just a curse word.
But if you ACTUALLY MEAN IT, then I think calling someone a Nazi* is in effect a call to violence.
That's basically what happened with Kirk. The shooter was told he was a Nazi so much that he decided it was literally true. And if it's literally true then OF COURSE you should shoot him.
Rufo elaborates on this kind of decentralized call to violence via dogwhistle.
https://christopherrufo.com/p/the-left-wing-terror-memeplex
"because these digital spaces rely on user-generated discussion and lack the editorial guardrails of a traditional publication, individuals can plunge deep into the radicalization process and take the premises of left-wing narratives to their grim conclusions. Democratic politicians shout that Trump is a fascist; users on Reddit and Discord conclude that the proper response to fascism is political assassination."
*Calling someone a commie isn't the same, because whether we like it or not communist just means "well meaning person that wants the world to be equal" in the popular imagination. People call themselves communists. They were Che Guevara T-Shirts. It's just not the same as Nazi.
The left dehumanizes its opponents. The right pokes fun at its opponents.
One leads to violence, while the other leads to laughter.
That’s why, in terms of political violence, the left currently holds a monopoly on assassinations.
That the Haitians in Ohio eat cats was just good fun!
I don’t recall anyone murdering Haitians in Ohio. See the difference yet?
No, becasue I don't see any murdering anyone as a result of "hate speech." That is why I said I though the concern was "paranoid" if sincere.
I thought it amusing as this played out, with breathlessness about the dread harm it caused, that it was easy to google an NYT article from the 90s as I recall, a sort of reportage of Haiti, that mentioned the pet or cat-eating.
How fun that the paper of record was presumably the source of the claim.
That article if not scrubbed has now been subsumed in a tidal wave of wave of search results re Haitians eating cats, offended at assertion which.
This may not have the effect of putting the issue to rest in the far future lol.
However, the common sense view that cats probably do not make good eating, was not aired as far as I know.
I’m trying to understand the moral difference between eating say a chicken and eating a cat (or dog). I say as long as they are euthanized in some cruelty free manner, then to each his own.
One’s view of the matter depends on your degree of relationship to the cat, I imagine.
This strikes me (if sincere) as paranoia that "hate speech" in general or "Nazi" in particular will lead to violence. That's not the reason to disapprove of it while tolerating it.
I agree with Hess, and yet ostensibly relevant and important social psychology research on race and gender has had a much more malevolent effect on academia and beyond.
Hate speech has a history in three parts:
(1) the failure of the Weimar Republic’s attempt to manage politics by managing discourse.
(2) the Soviet postwar revival to try and undermine any culture of free speech.
(3) the quasi Marcusean “repressive tolerance” revival we are now living through.
The advantage of the Haddad ruling is it makes clear Australian law will not ideologically pick and choose, which may blunt enthusiasm for it in Australia (which has never been all that high).
I have always seriously disliked the concept of hate speech. Helen Dale and I expounded on our dislike in our essay in interwoven parts on Charlie Kirk’s murder and the reaction to it.
https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/the-hate-speech-murder
I support Free Speech—if it’s ok with the First Amendment, it should be ok with every employer & teacher. Including F-word vulgarity & n-word racist & all x-ophobic phrases.
With protection for K-7 prepubescent kids.
That’s close to what we had in the 70s, before folks started getting cancelled, fired, for legal but offensive stuff, and professors & intellectuals like Murray were blacklisted for their ideas & analysis of data. Most fired folk were conservative Republicans.
We only get free speech if most folk want it, including accepting it for those with whom they disagree, and those whose speech is offensive. We don’t have agreement on this ideal. Mostly because Dems are willing to censor Reps, especially in colleges.
The most likely path to get agreement on the superiority of Free Speech for all is for Reps, when we have some power to censor Dems, to do so—as payback for decades of Dem censorship. The claim that Tit for Tat fails is far weaker than the claim that continued acceptance of Dem censorship while Reps don’t censor will lead Dems to continue rather than change.
Not censoring Dems for hating Charlie Kirk, or Jews, won’t lead Dems to change, tho it’s not certain that censoring them will lead more of them to change. In any case, both or neither getting censored is more fair, and better, than mostly Reps being censored.
Hess lets Bazerman off rather easily in his article, as he should bear significant responsibility for the Ariely/Gino collaboration. At minimum, that scandal draws into question the value of his non fraudulent scholarly insights as well as his fraud-assisted ones.
The titles of his books are kind of hilarious…
Complicit: How We Enable the Unethical and How to Stop (2022)
The Power of Noticing: What the Best Leaders See (2014)
Blind Spots: Why We Fail to Do What's Right and What to Do about It (2011)
I wrote a short blog post on hints of wrongdoing that preceded the major fraud being uncovered back in 2023, 8 months after Complicit was published and just after the truly damning evidence came out.
https://infovores.substack.com/p/strauss-vindicated-hints-of-wrongdoing