It is a deep shame that I am having to write about this issue once again but nonetheless I’ll refer you to my previous attempts on this issue.
https://fedge22.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/concessions-of-the-liberal-perspective-part-2-free-speech/
This week both sombreros and a free speech magazine have been banned by university student unions- because they caused offense. One makes me wonder whether the student union actually believed that offensiveness was never a construct of free speech. They can be forgiven for being ignorant about the offensive nature of a questionable choice of chapeau.
Stereotypically, we used to live in a student society that was founded on rebellion in the name of free speech and freedom in general. As a student, Christopher Hitchens got ruffed up writing up Antifascist graffiti and arrested for attending underground socialist meetings. The cause was the prominent issue but it seems now that one’s cause (and now has to be everyone’s cause) is to no longer offend, despite its inevitability when one opens their mouths. It seems to be a rising construct of our “liberal society” that we no longer have the right to offend.
In this discussion it is seldom the actual words that the offender has said that causes controversy but it is often what the offended person perceives the offender to have said. This is a state of affairs, with the lazy headline reading of the news, that we are rapidly entering into. We are moving into a strained dictatorship of rage, where any approved group’s fury is significant to trigger the cause of the denial of platforms and the suppression of one’s opinions.
When Peter Hitchens wrote that he did not believe that Dyslexia and ADHD were not real constructs and medical fabrications, he’d received lots of emails informing him that he had offended them. Now I have, in my time, been insulted by experts and I have learned to give back as good as I get and this state of affairs must be maintained for the purpose of education and the alleviating of ignorance, both of bad and good ideas.
This idea that any opinion that can be dismissed on the grounds that it is offensive is the foundation of a new and terrifying censorship and this censorship is only one predicate away from tyranny.
https://fedge22.wordpress.com/2015/08/29/concessions-of-the-liberal-perspective-part-1-morality/
beyond the Edge of reason 