Popehat, Stop Looking At Handbooks While Ignoring Context
I continue to not respect Popehat
This piece ignores all context of why they were there in the first place. That the activities of the past weeks have been entirely inconsistent with past actions regarding speech. And despite what the official policy is that these universities have been anything but free speech absolutists for well over a decade now.
Or even liberal norms in general. Where has this commitment been to liberal norms been to the student subject to Kafkaesque Title IX trials? Denied even the basics of defense. Only to discover the value of liberal norms now.
This piece mistakes that people are calling for the firing because they were bamboozled by verbal trickery. No, they are calling for firings because of the obvious hypocrisy. A better answer that would not have had this backlash, "Possibly, depending on context." Because it signals consistency. That they could apply the same censorious rules they've been using with the same lip service disclaimers to free speech they keep in the official policies.
The first and most important rule for free speech absolutism is that free speech rules are applied equally. If you don't have that as a base then it makes thinking around speech a zero-sum game. Why would anyone endorse a value that they believe will only be used against them? And you certainly can't just suddenly rediscover that value when the subject is the genocide of the wrong group of people. When everyone knows there are groups of people they would have no hesitancy in speaking very clearly about. Popehat rightly says the questions are hard. But for some groups the answers are simple. And for some the answers are hard. And the groups for whom they are hard are rightly distrustful of that.