Angry at the library

Toronto's public library system recently was in the middle of a conflict surrounding trans rights and freedom of speech.

People who read my stuff regularly can probably already imagine what I will be yelling, considering that freedom of speech came up, but I can't resist doing it all over again.

The basic situation is this:  Meghan Murphy is a feminist activist who has a lot of anti-trans opinions.  She has testified in front of multiple governments in this way, pushing to prevent trans rights.  She takes the view that trans women aren't real women, so they don't deserve any rights that women get, and they ought to be kept out of women's washrooms and other places that are reserved for women.

Murphy is a classic anti trans bigot.

Murphy was giving a speech about gender at a Toronto library, and a lot of people got pissed about this and demonstrated, demanding that the library refuse to host her.  The library said no, citing the fact that they have a policy to prevent people using the library who are going to promote hate speech, but saying that Murphy doesn't count as having done that.

Murphy did get to give her speech, and there was a lot of blowback and controversy about it.  But freedom of speech! was a commonly used rallying cry, as it so often is in these cases.

My take on it is simple:  Freedom of speech requires that you be able to speak without the government threatening or imprisoning you.  You have to be able to say a broad variety of things without fear of retribution.  Murphy has that.  In fact, she has had a drastically greater platform, at the government's expense, than the great majority of the population.  Telling her she can't spew her anti trans bigotry at the library isn't crushing her freedom of speech.  She can speak outside the library, she can write blog posts, or she can rent a hall.  Her freedom of speech wouldn't be threatened by being banned from the library.

The crux of the issue is the hate speech policy.  If Murphy was going to give a presentation on how Jews shouldn't be allowed in bathrooms, there is no doubt whatsoever that it would run afoul of hate speech laws and she would be banned.  But many people still don't see trans people as being fully entitled to rights, and they still think that debating their existence is a reasonable thing to do.  It is clear to me that her statements are hate speech, and her opinions on policy are reprehensible.  But much of society isn't on board with that yet, which is why so many people still think this is a debate we can have.

Those same people generally think that 'Do black people deserve to be enslaved?' is a question that cannot be debated publicly.  They haven't yet got around to seeing trans people's issues as so clearly decided.  I think over the next few decades we will make that transition, and I eagerly await it.  But until we do get there, we need to push back against Murphy and her ilk, and keep pushing their bigotry down until the masses of humanity start to do it reflexively.

The speech that should not be free

 Today I am going to get myself in trouble.  Specifically I am going to talk about free speech, and in the context of recent events that is a messy and charged topic.  So here goes.

The defining principle behind free speech laws and philosophies is the idea that we need to protect people's right to criticize the state and those in power.  Part of that is protecting things that aren't necessarily direct criticism but which push back against cultural norms and powerful institutions and individuals.  We definitely want to make sure people can safely say that the current leader of the nation is an asshat, that we should all be communists, that one religion or the other is nonsense, or that patriarchy is wrong.  Even if I don't agree with all of these sentiments there is a real public good in letting people talk about them without fear of government persecution.

There is some confusion on that last bit, so it should be clearly noted that free speech is NOT consequence free speech.  You may be entitled to say that Islam is evil, but Muslims are free to tell you that Christianity is evil right back.  Atheists might tell you that you are stupid and wrong because all religions are terrible, and perhaps the Jews will laugh at you and tell you that their religion is way too cool for you and you aren't invited.  The government should not censure, harass, or imprison you for saying these things, but other people are free to disagree and there will be social consequences for your statements.  These social conequences are not only acceptable, but desirable.

Just because the basic tenets of free speech are admirable does not mean that you get to say whatever you want without any pushback.

The problem with free speech right now is that it is being invoked as though saying anything you want is the goal.  It isn't.  There is nothing inherently good about spouting off your opinion.  The good comes in the improvement in human circumstances that occurs when people are free to tell those in power that they are stupid and bad.  The goal of free speech is to make the world better for people to live in. 

So when someone wants to speak publicly about their desire to murder everyone of a particular group or to simply oppress them brutally, remove their rights, or throw them out of their homes, we must decide if this sort of speech is something that we ought to protect under the banner of free speech.  The important question is this:  Is protecting this kind of speech helping to make things better for humanity?

Obviously the answer is no.

So while you can make a coherent argument that we must protect the rights of people we hate to speak their mind at the end of it you have to justify it on the basis of improving human life, not just upholding a particular social custom and set of laws.  Laws and customs are created to serve humans, not the other way around.

When a person argues that we ought to be communists I disagree with them.  However, I think the harm that comes to society from letting them speak their mind is not significant, even if you assume there is harm at all.  When a person argues that they should be free to unfurl the swastika and advocate the destruction of queer people, Jews, people of colour, etc, they are imposing a dire and terrible burden on society.  That burden is of course primarily borne by those who are already oppressed which makes it even worse.  There is no demonstrable benefit to society whatsoever in allowing this behaviour so we have a moral imperative to stop it.

While I like the concept of free speech in theory, at the moment it is brought up consistently to defend reprehensible conduct.  This is a huge problem because there are plenty of legitimate cases of speech needing defending and yet if you post on the internet that you are pro free speech in a vacuum many or most people assume you are taking a pro Nazi stance.  Free speech is so consistently being invoked as a way to excuse evil that those two words are being tainted with a dark shroud.

The idea of free speech is to protect the powerless to push back against the institutions that might otherwise oppress them.  It is not an assumption that trying to organize genocide is something that we all ought to protect.  It is there to make human life better, to defend those that cannot defend themselves from those that would hurt them.  Defending that concept, and indeed defaulting to letting people speak when we aren't sure, is a fine and noble thing.

But Nazis chanting that they want to murder all the people who aren't like them are far beyond the pale.  We can exercise judgement to know that they are evil and must be stopped, and we are capable of judging that their speech is not something that should be protected.

That doesn't mean that law and policy surrounding free speech is easy.  On the contrary, it is nearly always thorny and difficult.  Stopping the Nazis without randomly squashing other people is a difficult task from an administrative standpoint, and we don't want overreach.  However, this is a challenge worthy of our efforts, and one we must work hard to succeed at.

This again

An argument has been spewing its way across my social media feed about pronouns.  It started with a University of Toronto professor called Jordan Peterson who made some videos about how he thinks that pronouns other than he and she are wrong and bad and no one should use them.  You can read what he says here.

Naked Man linked me to this mess and asked what I thought of it.  I think that Peterson is a bigoted idiot and he is totally wrong about the new wave of pronouns.

Perhaps I should break down a bit why I think that name calling is justified.

Peterson trots out the usual crap to justify his dislike of pronouns other than he/she, which can be broken down as follows:

-It is an assault on language.

-Hate crime laws will put normal people who misgender others by accident in prison.

-Everyone has an obligation to present themselves in a way that makes it easy for others to interact with them.

Now I will give Peterson credit in one way; he avoids the usual claim that biology backs him up, which is also completely bogus.  However there is still plenty wrong.

Using alternate pronouns is not an assault on language.  Language is not fixed.  The perfect form of language does not happen to be the one you were taught when you were four.  Language evolves based on the people that use it, otherwise we wouldn't *have* any recognizable language.  We all adapted to the word computer as a noun, black hole as an astronomical object, and ISIS as a political entity rather than a mythological figure.  Language changing with the times and with culture is just the way things are, and saying that we shouldn't do a thing because it is a change to language is asinine.

Thoughtful criticisms of how hate crime laws work are something I would actually like to see.  I think we should talk carefully about how those laws work.  If Peterson had actual examples or legal critiques of these laws I would listen because that is a thing I am interested in.  Instead he seems keen to use his opposition to the laws as an excuse for acting like an asshole to marginalized people.  Object to the laws?  Sure, fine.  Maybe even good!  I don't know how the laws work that well, so they might well be overbroad.  But using that as an excuse to refuse to give an important consideration for someone who needs it, and which takes almost no effort on your part?  For shame.  The risk of imprisoning people for trivial offences like calling someone 'she' when they self identify as 'xe' is nonexistent.  The laws are aimed at consistent, deliberate misgendering, not accidents or pronoun usage for a person with a perference the speaker is unaware of.

The bit about people having an obligation to present themselves in ways that make it easy for others really boils my blood though.  Peterson basically has decided that everyone has a moral obligation to cater to his biases in all things.  They have to dress, speak, and identify in a way that is easy for him.  That way he never has to consider that there are people different from him in the world and he is saved from the tragedy of accepting other ways of living.

Peterson is a privileged upper class man who is angry that he might have to think about his preconceived notions and challenge some of his deeply held beliefs.  He is desperate to preserve the sanctity of the world he was taught to believe in and he is happy to cause whatever harm is necessary to do that.

Do his arguments about the laws surrounding hate speech have merit?  Maybe.  I don't know.  I am hesitant to have the state regulate speech, so I am naturally sympathetic to that worry.  But what I do know is that the rest of what he has to say is crap, and that leads me to believe that he is blowing his legal arguments out of proportion to justify his indignance at having his worldview challenged.

Free as the wind

My last post touched a nerve, it seems.  I got a lot of comments on my critique of Guardians of the Galaxy, some inquisitive, some supportive, some critical.  One in particular was interesting because it contained the phrase:

Comedies _must_ be free to offensive, or they may become less funny, which is antithetical.

Now it is true that comedies must be free to be offensive.  I would call that a pillar of free speech, not to mention comedy!

But it is important to note that I never suggested that comedies shouldn't be free to be offensive.  They should.  I should also be free to call them out on their shit.

There is a marked difference between something being free to violate the boundaries of good taste, and something being immune to criticism.  The government is not going to start policing comedies using language I don't like, notably randomly referring to women as whores.  I wouldn't want the government to do that; in fact I would fight against any such thing.  But the government also isn't going to stop me yelling on the internet about how much I dislike randomly slinging around the word whore at women in movies for no reason.  (There are reasons to use words like that in art.  There are times and places for it, no question.  But this place in this movie was not one of them.)

This smacks of someone wanting something they like to be immune to criticism.  Both by my post and by my writing history you can see that I do not support government stepping in to censor comedies' use of language like this, so it strikes me as likely that what the commenter is really getting at is that they don't like their thing being criticized.

I get that reaction.  I have felt that way before and I conflated my desire to support a thing I liked with a violation of freedom of speech.  However, it is extremely important to differentiate these things.  It is also important to remember that just because someone's criticism of a thing makes you uncomfortable does not mean that their criticism is wrong, nor that the thing must be protected from that criticism.

There are no end of things I enjoyed in the past that have real problems upon further reflection.  That doesn't mean those things have no value, nor that I can't enjoy the good bits.  It does mean though that it is worth examining the problems that are there so we can take lessons from them, and maybe improve in future.

This situation comes up all the time, enough so that it is worth repeating.  If someone criticizes a thing, and you want to respond by saying that people have to have freedom of speech, make damn sure that the criticism actually suggested curtailing free speech.  If the criticism was just saying that the thing in question is shitty though, then you are engaging in a strawman attack and completely missing the point.  Rather than making an inappropriate free speech argument, it is probably a good idea to examine why you feel so defensive about it; usually it is because deep down you realize that the criticism has some merit.

Sensing my ship

I read a great little piece today on comedy and censorship.  It can summed up as a call for comedians and entertainers to stop being lazy with their comedy and spend their time punching up against the powerful instead of down against the weak when making jokes.  I support that idea, especially because it makes it clear that it is entirely possible to make jokes about difficult topics like race or gender or rape without those jokes being terrible.  You just have to approach such topics carefully, and make sure that you aren't beating up the victims a second time.  Comedy can and should push boundaries, but it shouldn't actively make the world worse by reinforcing the nasty bits.

The responses to it were fairly predictable, largely consisting of people complaining that censorship is awful and social justice warriors ruin people's careers and campuses are full of people who can't take a joke.  I find all of these sorts of complaints empty and ridiculous.  Nobody is calling for a ban on 'women are totally emotional, amirite fellahs?' humour.  You can make those jokes, and the government definitely shouldn't stop you.  However, you will find a large number of people who will call your jokes stupid, cruel, and sad.  You are not owed laughter, no one is required to glorify your attempts at humour, and a career telling jokes requires you to entertain people... if they hate you, you have failed and you ought to find a new career, or get better at your current one.

Criticism is not censorship.

Write that down.

Criticism is not censorship.

People saying that you suck and refusing to give you money for your performance is not an undue hardship, nor does it make you a downtrodden minority.  Comedians that refuse to do college and university shows because the audiences boo them are not people who desperately need our help and protection.

I am forever irked by the idea that comedians need 'the freedom to tell whatever jokes they want' as if that is a thing anyone is trying to remove.  You have that freedom.  We all do!  (And if anyone wants to remove that freedom they are a fool.)  You don't have the freedom to force your audience to laugh with you, and you definitely don't have the freedom to force people to praise your work or hire you to work again if your work is bad.  Unfortunately what the people who call for such freedom really want is the freedom to ignore the real problems that their jokes highlight.  They want the freedom to hurt people without consequence, to be venerated regardless of what they do.  That isn't a freedom any reasonable society grants, and it is one that nobody will admit that they want, so they frame it as a freedom of speech thing rather than an entitlement thing.

But it is an entitlement thing.  We all have the freedom to speak our minds in this regard, and to pretend we do not is absurd.  What we don't have is the right to force others to pretend our shit don't stink.