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July 27, 2020: Discussing free speech with Scott Johnston, author, "Campusland"

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Tonight: Discussing free speech with Scott Johnston, author, "Campusland"

By David in London and Handy Haversack. Click for full size.

Also thanks to David in London and Handy Haversack, a list of all the book recommendations (PDF) made during last week's show.

Pointers:

• Campusland, by Scott Johnston

• A Letter on Justice and Open Debate, aka "The Harper's Letter," by Thomas Chatterton Williams and others (July 7): "Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second."

• New Yorker interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams (New Yorker, July 22): "A mood or climate seems to have set in, especially in the past almost four years,... and social media — the growth of the importance of social media can’t be taken away from anything we’re talking about.... Twitter has become all-consuming, especially if you work in the media or in academia, and so it feels like Twitter has taken on this invisible, impersonal force that works through people but no one in particular, that sweeps through and enacts public humiliation and punishment..."

• 10 Theses About Cancel Culture (by Ross Douthat, NYT, July 14): "The internet has changed the way we cancel, and extended cancellation's reach."

• Say It Ain't So, Trader Joe's (WSJ Op-Ed, July 22). See also the original Change.org petition.

• A new intelligentsia is pushing back against wokeness (Forward.com, July 20): "A small group of Black intellectuals are leading a counter-culture against the newly hegemonic wokeness. They are public intellectuals like John McWhorter, a professor of linguistics at Columbia University; Thomas Chatterton Williams, a memoirist and contributor to The New York Times Magazine; Kmele Foster... Chloe Valdary... Glenn Loury... and Coleman Hughes. In being anti-woke and having experienced being Black in America, these public intellectuals scramble the racial lines of today’s debate, speaking up for many who are too afraid to voice their opinions – and facing down the mob on their behalf."

• To unite the country, we need honesty and courage (by Robert P. George and Cornel West in the Boston Globe, July 15) <-- this is the best expression of what I'm trying to say.. -mark

• The Caper Chase, Simpsons episode that aired April 2, 2017

• Ken's show from June 24, 2020, which originally played the Patton Oswalt clip.

For more reading...

• The Dark Psychology of Social Networks: Why it feels like everything is going haywire (by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell in The Atlantic, December 2019)

• Facebook is a threat to whatever remains of democracy in the US (interview of Roger McNamee - past Techtonic guest - in the Guardian, July 26): "when you look at hate speech, disinformation, conspiracy theories, if you take them out, the level of engagement on these platforms goes way, way down – and with it, their economic value. Hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theories, that is the lubricant for their business."

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