1

The 21st century’s first great work of political philosophy is “Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody’s Ass,” Season 2, Episode 9 of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

The episode begins with a dispute about smoking bans in bars.

Charlie and Dee argue that they shouldn’t have to work in a smoke-filled environment, while Dennis and Mac argue that smoking bans are anti-freedom and un-American, prompting Charlie and Dee to leave the bar to join an anti-smoking crusade. Meanwhile, Mac, Dennis and Frank plot to turn Paddy’s into the most American bar in all of America.

Their explicit intention is to create a space with no rules and no restrictions, a place where anything goes. However, it’s clear from the ensuing discussion that they have a specific vision of what a no-rules bar would be like, namely, a bar where they, the straight(ish) white men, are in charge, and where hot college coeds want to go wild and remove their tops, like at Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The problem is that the allure of a “no rules” bar soon attracts Frank’s Vietnamese gambling ring, as well as the degenerate McPoyles, the presence of whom creates an environment where hot college coeds don’t really feel like going wild. This prompts Mac and Dennis to realize that having no rules doesn’t really produce the situation they were hoping for, but when they propose setting some boundaries, Frank throws their freedom-loving rhetoric right back at them.

The situation at the bar soon devolves into a nightmare of milky incest, drug addiction, weird Vietnamese music, and the gang all accusing one another of treading on freedom. Dennis and Mac are finally forced to accept defeat, and the episode ends with them reluctantly agreeing to call the cops. This episode is so efficient at conveying the paradoxes of freedom it should honestly be taught in university classes. It shows the way an abstract value like freedom is always invoked in particular circumstances: it’s always imagined as the freedom of specific people to do specific things without the constraint of specific regulations.

So, for Mac and Dennis, freedom means the freedom of Mac and Dennis, to host a girls-gone-wild Mardi Gras type situation, without the constraint of rules banning toplessness. It doesn’t initially occur to them that the presence of Vietnamese gamblers and milk-guzzling perverts might also have an inhibiting effect. This general pattern is repeated when it comes to freedom of speech. At the level of government, the U.S. Constitution prohibits congress from making laws restricting speech. But in any given forum of discussion, you find there are in fact rules restricting what you can say.

Let’s take a look at 4chan, much celebrated as a den of total anarchy. RULES?? Wait but I thought 4chan loved freedom. I thought it was the most American imageboard in all of Philadelphia. Well, thank God there’s still Newgrounds.

Hold on, racism is not allowed on 4chan, except on /b/. But even on /b/ you aren’t allowed to post about My Little Pony. This is outrageous. What about brony freedom, 4chan?

I will stand up for the bronies.

The point is, any forum needs to have a few rules in place in order to maintain the purpose and functionality of the forum. Now, you might say, well, who do we trust to make the rules, and what’s to stop the rules from being misused once they’re in place? Well, welcome to the most basic problem of political theory, a problem that is unavoidable. We’ll always be arguing over what the rules should be, who gets to make them, and how they’re enforced.

Mao: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun

But just because the current rules suck, or are administered incompetently, doesn’t mean that we can or should just have no rules. Not even 4chan disagrees with me here, at least not in practice. Because even if your forum is a den of fascism and child pornography, there will always come that moment when everyone looks around at each other and says, maybe we should set up a couple boundaries.

I don’t know why brony posts are restricted to a specific section of 4chan, but I’m guessing it’s because bronies wouldn’t stop posting their goddamn shit everywhere and it was driving everyone crazy and ruining the site.

Likewise, the most American bar in America probably needs to have rules against gambling, milk and incest if they want to maintain an environment where hot coeds feel like going wild.

And universities probably shouldn’t be hosting goddamn trolls whose only stated purpose is kek triggering liberals, if they want to remain spaces where intellectual discussion among students and faculty with a diversity of viewpoints can flourish. But this disinvitation issue has been seized by commentators like Dave Rubin, who object to the cancelling of bullying dinguses with no redeeming value, or of commencement speakers, who are there to preside over a celebration more than to discuss ideas anyway.

And all of this gets blown way out of proportion. The many right wing speakers who regularly appear on college campuses are ignored, the left-wing speakers who are disinvited are ignored, and Dave keeps on harping on the “left hates free speech” talking point. Why? 

Well, because it lets him adopt this phony neutral posture of a centrist defending free speech, when what he’s really doing is smearing and discrediting social justice movements while sidestepping any deep engagement with their actual ideas.

Now, I should say that disinviting speakers is not generally a good way to deal with proponents of offensive views on campus, and students sometimes do abuse this approach to disinvite speakers who really do have something to say—disagreeable or false though it may be. But Milo Yiannopoulos is nothing but an open saboteur of the discourse, and his absence only makes conversations between liberals and good-faith conservatives easier.

Now, this is not to say I support the student riots at Berkeley and elsewhere aimed at shutting down people like Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter. I actually don’t. 

I mean I understand why they riot, and I sympathize to a certain extent, but honestly we don’t even have to talk about the morality of silencing Milo, because no leftist attempt to deplatform him ever did anything except add to his celebrity and amplify his voice. Milo was never successfully silenced until the right-wingers at CPAC and Breitbart decided to deplatform him once and for all.

So tell me, Dave, who hates free speech now?

Sorceress: Freedom is life. Life is vitality. Vitality is the milk of the wolf.

2

When I was a grad student, I went to a talk by a pretty famous philosopher. He was speaking about ancient Greek philosophy and the superiority of the contemplative life over all other ways of living.

During the question and answer session, a black woman raised her hand. She was one of the only people of color in the room—typical for academic philosophy—and probably the only black woman there. She asked, isn’t it a little elitist to suggest that being a philosopher is the best way to live your life?

And the professor responded, “well, I only teach Princeton students, but I don’t see anything elitist about it, I mean, there were slave women in the garden of Epicurus.”

At which point I was thinking, I would rather lie down with a goat than continue being in this room. And if that’s how I felt, how did she feel?

And the professor—hold on I’m not in this field anymore, I don’t have to protect this guy. You know what, it was John Cooper, of Princeton University. The editor of this very famous Plato anthology.

Cooper! This is a callout!

What you have to realize is each year every philosophy department in America holds these meetings where everyone sits around and asks, why are there not more black people in philosophy departments? It’s just a mystery. And what Cooper said wasn’t even outright bigotry. I mean it was a microaggression. But these kinds of things can add up. My friend was just telling me that he’s in a class at a top American law school, with an 80-year-old white professor who said the word “negro” in class several times. And he presumably wasn’t trying to cause offense, but a girl in the class, the only black student, started to cry, ran out of the class, and dropped the course. So, there was only one black student in the class, and now there are none.

And you can say, well that student just needs to toughen up. And as a pragmatic matter, that is what black people usually do and have always done. But also, don’t tell black people to toughen up. Black people in America have been very tough, for decades and centuries. They’ve been much tougher than you, I guarantee it.

And I’m not saying I think these professors should be fired, but I think it’s a definite problem that without even really thinking about it, certain kinds of speech create a campus environment that’s hostile to certain groups of people.

So again, the question we ought to be discussing, is what kind of forum do we want universities to be? Who gets to feel welcome or unwelcome? Do we allow posts about My Little Pony? Does hosting speeches by outright bigots foster or detract from the kind of environment we want to create? These are all legitimate questions, questions we should be discussing instead of the fake question “does the left hate free speech?”

Because what’s up for discussion are not constitutional rights, but the norms of conduct for a particular forum. And no one with a mature understanding of the issue would say that there should be “no rules, man.”

That is the position of a sixteen-year-old white kid who’s angry that he can’t say the n-word, or that he can’t post brony shit on /b/.

Sorceress: The ether is the light, but not all light reveals. Sometimes truth dwells in darkness.

3

Never in my lifetime have I seen a bigger tantrum thrown over something so small as trigger warnings. The practice of adding warnings to media containing potentially triggering content originates in online communities of feminists and rape survivors. Effectively, it’s a courtesy measure, akin to warning readers that pictures in an article may not be safe for work. Trigger warnings are apparently now sometimes used in universities, though I must say I was a university student and then a professor until 2016 and I never once encountered a goddamn trigger warning. 

But for some reason, a few journalists and a lot of classical liberal YouTubers have decided that trigger warnings are a major threat to our most fundamental freedoms, and a lot of their audience has apparently believed them without really looking into it or thinking about it at all. Oh and safe spaces too, let’s not forget about safe spaces. From the way classical liberals talk you’d think a safe space is a fortified area designed to permanently protect sniveling, terrified wrecks of human beings from ever encountering an opinion they disagree with.

In fact, the term safe space originates in LGBT communities and designates a business, a bar, a forum, or any other venue where homophobia isn’t tolerated. The concept is decades old, but recently it’s been spotlighted by classical liberals claiming that campus safe spaces are, you guessed it, a harbinger of the death of free speech. The argument usually goes that safe spaces keep people from encountering ideas they disagree with, and so they have an infantilizing and a silencing effect.

To which I respond, that when gay people are so sheltered that they just have no idea what homophobia is—what? Some people think marriage is only between a man and a woman? Who ever heard of such an outlandish notion?— well, then I’ll admit that maybe things have gone a bit too far. But in the meantime, gay people not experiencing enough homophobia isn’t really striking me as a pressing social issue.

For my own part, it’s nice to have certain places I can go, and certain communities I can be with, where I can not have my gender identity or expression questioned, where I can just relax and be myself, and not be constantly interrogated about it.

But it’s not like my having safe spaces means that I’ve just never heard the idea that there’s only two genders.

Awhaaaaat? Only two genders you say? I’ve never heard that before.

Like, we all have that idea imposed on us every day of our goddamn lives. The fact that I want a two-second break from it is not silencing or infantilizing. Remember Hitchens’ defense of ideas that need special protection? The idea that there are two genders is the default idea. The idea that I don’t fit the binary was the idea that it took effort to come up with. I find the notion that every commonplace prejudice and assumption needs special protection ridiculous.

And you’ll notice that critics of trigger warnings and safe spaces are usually pretty short on concrete examples of how these things actually erode free speech.I mean, I’ve heard people talk about how safe spaces and trigger warnings can be misused, and fair enough, that’s a discussion worth having. But more often I see people alluding to them vaguely as a kind of emblem—“trigger warning and safe space culture”—in order to caricature college-age leftists as whiny, delicate snowflakes, which, well, there might be some truth to that. But you’re lying when you pretend that this is fundamentally about free speech, and worse, you’re doing it at the expense of people who have suffered actual trauma and of embattled minority groups whose request for safe spaces is perfectly reasonable.

So your sly attempt to invoke liberal values like free speech and diversity to malign these people is taking a pretty low road indeed, and I want to ask people who constantly make jokes about trigger warnings and safe spaces, what percentage of confidence are you at that you’re not just being a huge fucking asshole for no reason?

Sorceress: The Dark Mother casts shade over the blinding fire, revealing in shadow what was hidden by the light.

4

Dave, I know I’m throwing a lot of criticism at you, and that sucks for you because being criticized sucks. Personally, I hate criticism. It’s trash. But you of all people should be willing to acknowledge that hearing criticism of your viewpoint is a necessary part of, like, growth or whatever. And I like to think that the two of us are not so far apart ideologically that we can’t talk at all, but I worry that more and more of the people I interact with are that far apart.

It’s kind of a scary time to be alive, Dave. I know that you believe in something called the free marketplace of ideas. You think that the best ideas will come out on top as long as their proponents are given a fair chance to argue for them. That must be a very comforting belief. But I regret to say that I don’t share the optimism.

The human mind is not very rational. People pick up most of their beliefs from the culture around them, and oftentimes people believe things for really-self interested reasons that have nothing to do what’s true or what the strongest arguments support.

So when I see all kinds of bigotry gaining traction, instead of fading away as my upbringing led me to expect, well, it makes me afraid for a lot of people who I care about, and I kind of freak out, because I don’t have faith that having good facts and arguments on my side will be enough. I’m honestly not sure that truth and justice will prevail, so if I seem a little on edge, that’s probably part of why. And I know you don’t agree, but I just thought you should know that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be heading back to my safe space with a couple bottles of lube and a big fat [bleeeeeeeep]

Sorceress: Tell me, Laoshi, who is the man in the triangle?