russ_watters said:
Hopefully, then, he'll be balanced enough to show when the opposite happens. Like when Berkeley's students censor its own newspaper for coverage that isn't liberal enough.
In any case, freedom of speech doesn't work the way you think it does. A university is not required to give a forum for everyone who wants to speak. Nor should it be - that's not what the school is there for.
First of all, the Berkeley student newspapers have had a history of conservatives, David Brock and others, infiltrating them and posting garbage and nonsense and lies in their pages and manufacturing quote.
That is why Berkeley has had their own, conservative newspapers like the "Berkeley Review" and the conservative Berkeley journal. These were generally funded by the Institute for Educational Affairs, a right-wing group headed by William Simon and Irving Kristol, an ex-Trotskyite and one of the founders of "neoconservatism."
Ben Hart and Dinesh D'Souza, the latter a very popular conservative commentor, started the
Dartmouth Review as well where they did things like out homosexuals and one of the things they published is an article titled "Dis sho' Ain't No Jive Bro" where the author pretended to be an African American -- that kind of reminds me a lot of the time when the conservative gun advocate Jon Lott pretended to be a woman with three kids on the internet concerned about the issue of gun ownership on usenet.
So, there was generally a reason why conservatives were prevented from editing and writing in school news papers considering the crap they have tried to pull.
Of course, the fact is, no one prevented them from starting their own newspaper though, and to my knowledge it's still running.
Berkeley has also hosted several right-wing professors who believe that the media is manipulated by liberal institutions (corporations?) and ones such as A James Gregor, a "race realist" who in the 60s said that racial segregation was justified because blacks were simply too different from whites.
They've had other professors that border on Holocaust deniers as well, certainly professors that would have been tried and convincted for racial hatred in places like France.
russ_watters said:
The issue is whether a university needs to give a forum for anyone who shows up at the door asking for one. It is rediculous to assert that they must.
No it isn't. Universities are mostly publicly funded. Even private ones like Harvard have taken in billions of dollars from the public.
When the public funds something, the public forums should be open to the public to use if the University is not using them, especially ones that would generate student interest, even getting students to pay to hear a political discussion.
This is why free-speech codes have been struck down by state supreme courts.
IF the public says that the University is allowed to censor speech at their discretion, then maybe they could do it, but that would violate several US laws anyway.
russ_watters said:
The university must first assess the value - that is, after all, why the kids are there, isn't it? For the university to teach them? Heck, if the kids got to choose their own speakers, it would be nothiing but porn stars and Howard Stern.
If they are to assess the value, why don't they break up musical events, sporting events, prevent protesters from ever going on campus, and so on? There's a reason they don't do that, and one of those reasons is because they can't.
russ_watters said:
There is nothing at all repressive about this mindset. I am appalled at how badly some people misunderstand the First Amendment.
My sentiments exactly. Here's an article that might help:
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19801011.htm
When LightBulbSun says that anybody "stupid" should NOT be given a platform, that is a restriction of free-speech.
If he says, in his opinion, it would be better if these "stupid people" (do these include people who think the Confederates weren't totalitarian?) had no audience, that would not be calling for restrictions of free-speech.
It's not that hard.
russ_watters said:
Heck, the content filtering we're talking about is not too dissimilar from the principle on which PF operates!
False analogy. PF is not publicly funded like these Universities are; plus, Universities are big too, they take up a lot of land and space, so it's not like the public has a lot of other places where they can host the large crowds that Moore draws.
People gawk at car wrecks too. It doesn't mean there's anything of value there, just something to horrific they can't help but look.
(And continue to do so, by your continued insistence of associating censorship with totalitarianism)
