Woozle/2023/04/29
This is a response to:
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Stanford's Intolerant Intolerance of Intolerance
There's a lot to unpack in this; I'll admit I'm struggling to figure out the chain of logic.
We start out with a Trump-appointed judge being invited to speak at Stanford (why?). Students speak against this, and the event is cancelled. JS then makes allusions to speech being equated to violence, but he gives no exact quotes (at least not at that stage of the argument) to explain how this sequence of events relates to that equivalence nor does he even make it clear whether his statement that "Clearly speech can equal violence, and the speaker bears total responsibility for any effects it has on them" is intended ironically or sincerely.
In the next paragraph, he's suddenly talking about "the woke revolution" -- which is of course a fiction created by the right wing ("woke" being a trigger-word to create, in the mind of the audience, a negative association with whatever is being so labelled, bypassing any critical thinking that might be engaged if more meaningful words were used), but even granting for the sake of argument that it's a real thing,and also a problem, how does the former connect to the latter?
Perhaps this is explained later in the essay, but I feel like the lack of explanation is itself intended to make the reader feel inferior if they aren't clever enough to immediately see the connection for themselves -- doubtless leading many whose feelings have already been activated by the word "woke" to nod their heads and mutter angrily under their breath without any attempt at critical analysis.
Is there actually a logical argument being made here? If so, what is it?
Notes
Lisa Feldman Barrett's NYT editorial is here:
- 2017-07-14 When Is Speech Violence?