#no-platforming

[pro-abortion-rights]

hey auntiewanda is a terf (she’s in the reply’s on the most recent post you reblogged)

Curses! I was on mobile at the time and Shinigami Eyes didn’t catch her. Thanks for the heads-up anon, I deleted that reblog and reblogged directly from the source.

[hypnictwitch]

An open letter to the left regarding silence

The smearing, harassment, no-platforming, and silencing of women who express feminist opinions about gender and prostitution is unacceptable.

Last week, The Chinatown Action Group, which "organises to improve the lives of low-income residents of Vancouver’s Chinatown, many of whom are seniors" had their panel removed from a conference due to representative Yuly Chan's views on gender and prostitution. Friend Cherry Smiley writes:

"I am of the political opinion that prostitution is a form of male violence that should be abolished. I am also of the political opinion that gender is a social construct and hierarchy that traps and harms women and should also be abolished. Today, these two sentences are enough to mark me as a violent, hate-filled, supremacist/fascist, and have the ability to destroy my reputation, livelihood, and potential academic or employment opportunities now and in the future. I have already been passed over for some opportunities due to my political analysis of prostitution, asked to leave conferences, told I’m not allowed to speak about prostitution when invited to speak about Indigenous research, and threatened with police involvement. I have been intimidated and harassed due only to my politics, not my behaviour. These are only some examples of some of the backlash that I, and other women, have experienced for speaking our opinions. This backlash, however, doesn’t just include no-platforming, but also threats and acts of violence. To many, this may sound unbelievable, as though I am exaggerating. I wish this were the case. I wish I were exaggerating. Unfortunately, this is the reality of activist and academic circles in Canada and elsewhere."

At an event by Missing Justice, a group highlighting missing and murdering indigenous women "non-Indigenous organisers told me to stop speaking and attempted to literally grab a megaphone out of my hand when I was invited to make a statement at their gathering by another Indigenous speaker. My crime was a decolonising and feminist critical analysis of prostitution and speaking out against men buying sexual access to Indigenous women and girls. In other words, my crime was having a political opinion that differed from the organisers."

[matchgirl42]

Reminder

If I see you putting known fandom toxics on my dash, and we’re long-term mutuals, I will give you a friendly heads-up.

If you put them on my dash again, I will unfollow and block you.

I also check my followers, and if you’re reblogging from known fandom toxics, I will block you as well.

This is a hard limit for me.  You want to interact with people known to unapologetically and continually engage in racism, misogyny, ableism, and other types of bigotry, that’s your business and your prerogative, but you’ll no longer be interacting with me.

[pro-abortion-rights]

I would like to thank the terfs who swarmed my notes to get salty about the fact that I don't give them a platform. They showed their disgusting transmisogynistic asses so I could block each and every one of them.

[dyslyssa]

No-Platforming isn’t real

Recently a tech-acquaintance complained to me that he’d been no-platformed.  He’d had an invitation to talk at a conference, and it was withdrawn after he supported a ‘race-realist’ publicly.  He had no right to speak there - it wasn’t that it was his conference, or that he’d paid to speak there, or even that he couldn’t go to listen. He just wasn’t invited to speak publicly at someone elses’ event anymore.  It’s the most entitled nonsense. There’s a common comparison to most people being no-platformed to most things because there’s no interest in hearing them talk, but the difference to them is that the invitation was withdrawn. And he does have good ideas, it just conflicts with two points. 

1) Asking someone to speak is an endorsement of the merit of their ideas.  2) Endorsing someone who speaks and supports oppressive or hateful things will prevent people in marginalised groups from going. To him, he was being punished for standing up for his views. To everyone else, he was being told he wasn’t more important than other people, and that’s why it’s entitled. He thinks he should go even if it means others won’t. 

[theskepticalleftist]

Special Episode/Debate: Is No Platforming A Good Policy For Universities?

[jessespafford]

“No-Platforming” Isn’t a Free Speech Issue

There has been a lot of debate recently over the tactic of “no-platforming” where leftist groups attempt to pressure institutions to block certain instances of far-right speech—and, failing that, attempt to physically block those instances themselves. Sometimes this dispute takes the form of a debate over tactics: does it help or hurt the left/the far right when leftists take such actions? However, whenever people insist on speculating a priori about what are really empirical questions, that is usually an indication that there is some deeper moral disagreement present with the empirical question being a mere proxy battle that distracts from what is really motivating the dispute. This isn’t to suggest that a priori debates about the efficacy of tactics are useless or that there aren’t people who appeal to actual empirical research when speculating about these questions. However, it has been my experience that, when people agree about the moral permissibility of a given tactic, debates over the efficacy of that tactic tend to disappear. It is with this in mind that I want to briefly discuss some of the moral arguments regarding no-platforming and try to show that much of the debate around this issue is confused. By clearing up this confusion, I hope to move the debate one step closer to some sort of resolution.

To begin, consider the position of those who oppose “no platform” tactics. Their view is typically that there is some value to the open expression of ideas and, thus, that the use of violence to suppress such expression is objectionable. The problem with this view is that, if taken at face value, we find that speech is violently suppressed all the time—and, specifically, in ways that almost no one, including free speech proponents, seems to find objectionable.

Here is an example. I have a lot of strong views about politics which I would like to communicate to others. I sometimes write these up on this blog, but the audience is extremely limited (though appreciated!), and so my ideas do not reach as many people as I would like. In other words, my platform is fairly limited. Because I would like to rectify this situation, I have developed a strong preference to attend the Super Bowl and read some of my best essays over the PA system during the halftime show. Similarly, I have decided that I would like to go to the CNN television studio and read my essays on air so that more people can hear my ideas. But, of course, I won’t act upon these preferences. Why? Because if I tried to do either of these things, I would be violently removed by police and imprisoned for trespassing.

If one takes seriously the view that a right to free speech requires is a right against the violent suppression of one’s expression of ideas, then my free speech rights have been clearly violated by both the NFL and CNN. If I try to share my views in certain spaces, they will draw upon the violence of the state to prevent me from doing so. And yet, this great injustice has drawn surprisingly no condemnation whatsoever from the many purported defenders of free speech rights!

Of course, the reason that this suppression of speech hasn’t drawn outrage is fairly obvious: most debates over free speech presuppose a background of property rights where those rights take priority over the right to free expression. The owners of football stadiums are taken to have a right to control those spaces and what goes on within them, even if that includes the use of coercive threats and forcible removal to silence unwanted speech. Similarly, CNN is granted the right to unilaterally determine which speech to permit within its studios and which to ban. Hence the lack of outcry over the fact that my plan to give a talk at these venues has been thwarted by the threat of violence.

This observation reveals that, when some instance of no-platforming takes place, much of the ensuing debate over “free speech” is a red herring. Those who condemn no-platforming by appealing to the importance of free expression or the unacceptability of violence to preclude speech fail to take seriously the fact that, in a world of private property rights, speech is constantly suppressed via violence and coercive threats. Thus, unless critics of no-platforming are willing to grant that the NFL acted wrongly in violently suppressing my attempt to deliver my manifesto, they cannot object to no-platforming on the grounds that it is a violent suppression of speech.

Rather, critics of no-platforming must seemingly argue that the practice is wrong because those who do the violent suppressing of speech are not entitled to do so. When the NFL suppresses my speech, it has the right to deploy such violence because it has the prior right to control certain physical spaces—i.e., certain platforms. By contrast, rowdy college students and protesters don’t have any sort of property rights claim over various college buildings, meaning that their employment of violence and coercive threats to suppress speech is not legitimate.

However, if objections to no-platforming must tacitly appeal to property rights, then they lose much of their persuasive force. First, they give up the moral high ground of appealing to free speech, which is revealed to be entirely subsidiary to property rights claims. They can no longer appeal to the importance of a free exchange of ideas, the horror of Orwellian dystopias, slippery slope arguments, or anything of that nature in asserting the wrongness of no-platforming. Further, insofar as optics are concerned, it is rather a bad look to vocally trumpet the importance of free speech just prior to conceding that, actually, the right to control patches of the Earth entirely trumps such free expression.

Second, objections grounded in private property rights are then threatened by the numerous critiques of private property posited by anarchists and socialists. While I will not rehearse these arguments here, I will note that the claim that private individuals had the right to coercively seize unowned patches of the Earth—and, thus, that the inheritors of those patches are similarly entitled to violently control them—is a controversial premise upon which to rest one’s critique of no-platforming. Indeed, many of the most outspoken proponents of no-platforming are, in fact, anarchists and socialists who reject exactly these premises. And, once one rejects the view that some university administrator has the right to unilaterally determine who gets to use certain physical spaces to express their views (and who gets violently removed), then community control of those spaces as expressed via no-platforming begins to seem quite reasonable.

This, of course, is not a full defense of the moral permissibility of no-platforming. Rather, I have merely tried to point out that framing the issue in terms of “free speech” is misguided and that, instead, how one feels about the practice will hang on one’s views about property rights. While this still leaves plenty of space for left-right disagreement on the issue, it suggests that the socialist/anarchist left—and, indeed, anyone who has doubts that property rights are absolute or inviolable—should be at least open to the tactic.