No, I was not asking anyone.
So why did you end your reply to my question with a question mark? Did you think this is Jeopardy, or do you just have a mortal fear of giving straight answers?
Bomb#20 said:
That's an odd opinion.
Doesn't matter, since you say you weren't asking my opinion.
Bomb#20 said:
Worrying about tremendous financial risk to a school in the event that a classroom's pet hamster causes a worldwide plague strikes me as a tail-wagging-the-dog kind of consideration.
That's a very weird comment to make.
My point was that your expressed concern -- "And the fact that it may make some students uncomfortable, even if the idea of privilege is taught factually, creates tremendous financial risk to the school." -- is a loony scenario to base decisions on because it's such a remote possibility. The vastly more probable scenario to be concerned about is the tremendous financial risk to the school created by teaching the idea of privilege
non-factually.
Bomb#20 said:
Bomb#20 said:
Therefore, this school is taking an innocuous course offline to see how things play out and what the resolutions will be. So much for "free speech advocates."
...If that public school classroom had been in the U.S., telling us what she told us would have been illegal -- our government is not supposed to be in the business of teaching one segment of society's religion as fact. Hypothetically, if that teacher had been in the U.S. and had gotten swatted for breaking the law about what the government authorized her to teach, would you regard that as "stifling free speech"?
So, to be clear, being anti-discrimination is not being anti-free-speech.
Is that a "no"? That sounds like a "no", assuming you were actually sincerely answering the question. Were you sincerely answering the question? 'Cause it also sounds kind of like you're imputing a claim to me that's a gross overgeneralization of anything I actually implied, while you're simultaneously evading the question I asked you.
Assuming you were sincerely answering the question "no", this establishes that the government limiting what its employees are allowed to teach while on the government clock does not qualify as "stifling free speech", that your 'So much for "free speech advocates."' quip was just unsupported character assassination, and that your OP totally missed the mark.
If you weren't sincerely answering the question, now's your chance to give a sincere answer. Hypothetically, if that teacher had been in the U.S. and had gotten swatted for breaking the law about what the government authorized her to teach, would you regard that as "stifling free speech"? Yes or no?
Jesus Christ. Calm down, stop with the coffee or getting triggered or anxiety or whatever it is that made you write 3 paragraphs to a simple sentence including phrases like "character assassination." WOW! Just chelax.
Well, that was your point when you wrote the words 'So much for "free speech advocates."', wasn't it? You were impugning the character of any people responsible for the Oklahoma law who regard themselves as pro-free-speech, weren't you? You were accusing them of hypocrisy, weren't you? But you don't have a case for making that accusation -- if you had a case, then you wouldn't keep ducking my question about a teacher teaching the Noah's Ark myth as fact. So you were impugning people's character without having a case against them. Looks like character assassination to me.
Okay, now that you are calmed down, it's just a simple conclusion that looking at your anecdote one could make and that is that discrimination may be an exception to political free speech. That can be the heart of the controversy in the anecdote to some people. And some people may agree or disagree whether free speech or discrimination matter more in what contexts or if it's even a free speech issue or a discrimination issue.
My opinion on free speech is very complicated and my mention of it in the thread title is not to define or to try to define it in this thread, only instead to point out the logical inconsistency that is driven by over-simplification. Therefore, you will not get a simple yes or no from me. Too bad.
It's one thing to say it should be okay to stifle free speech when the speech is defined to be discriminatory; it's quite another to say that whether free speech is in fact being stifled depends on whether it's defined as discriminatory. The latter is just another way to say "'Free' means people being allowed to do what I want; it has nothing to do with whether they're allowed to do what they want." There is nothing in the historical record to suggest that when the First Amendment was enacted, discriminatory speech was one of the sorts of speech such as soliciting murder-for-hire that were understood not to be the sorts of speech that "freedom of speech" referred to.
I will continue to point out the inconsistencies, however, such as in another thread calling it free speech for a professor to say discriminatory things about trans persons in a classroom. Some of the same persons support that, but oppose discrimination in your case, and then support canceling "free speech" of the professor in the op.
Whom are you referring to? If you're talking about me, in the first place, it is not discriminatory to decline to refer to an individual as "they"; that's a trumped-up charge based on religious fantasy. And in the second place, the law requiring such usage that I described as a violation of free speech was a law a government was applying to private workplaces, not a requirement it was imposing only on its own employees. If you think you can point out an actual inconsistency in one of your opponents' positions X and Y, as opposed to an inconsistency between your own invented overgeneralization of X and your own invented overgeneralization of Y, have at it.
Bomb#20 said:
Bomb#20 said:
Why do so many people equate having the right to say what you want with having the right to be paid to say what you want by the taxpayers?
So you are okay with government interference in college education so long as some taxpayers disagree with the content of the professor's speech, even if the taxpayers don't actually know the content of the speech because those government officials are propagandizing it.
You have a penchant for making up positions out of whole cloth and imputing them to political opponents
No, I don't. You just chose specifically to be silent on the huge issue of the thread
Huh? The legislation being "to stifle free speech" isn't the huge issue of the thread? If that's not the huge issue of the thread, then why did you put that in your thread title?
So what is the huge issue of the thread? The other thing in your title, "Anti-anti-racist legislation"? Sorry, my bad -- I will stop being silent on that issue. No, the legislation in Oklahoma is not "Anti-anti-racist legislation". It's anti-racist legislation. The Oklahoma legislators evidently regard CRT as discriminatory speech, and clearly intended their law to obstruct racists from using the Oklahoma public education system to teach Oklahoma students to be racist against white people.
and instead to divert the responsibility of propagandists to a brainwashed conservative base and so I wanted to point out what you were in fact doing. Knowingly.
Not sure how I could "knowingly" be doing whatever it is you're describing with that word salad.
Bomb#20 said:
... as a rhetorical tactic to draw attention away from weaknesses in your arguments.
That is some weird mind-reading you have going on. There isn't a weakness in my "argument." It would be great, if you could try to imagine you are not in a debate, too, with debaters presenting arguments against each other, getting involved in "character assassination," and pretending to do mind-reading in order to...well, whatever. Why are you trying to present a knowingly false reading of my mind again? It's weird.
What's weird is you complaining about mind-reading in the same sentence where you tell me what I know. It's always possible I said something wrong about you, but I did not do so knowingly. You are making a baseless trumped-up false accusation against me with reckless disregard for the truth, and, to all appearances, with malice.
That being said, there's also a legitimate, more nuanced free speech point to be made since the Oklahoma Constitution does not support the way this law has been constructed.
Do tell. Did you read your own OP? The Oklahoma law in fact does not interfere in any way with Oklahoma City Community College making that course available to its students. The administrators had no reason to think they needed to cancel or "pause" the course. There's nothing in the text of the law to stop a college lecturer from teaching "about White privilege", or from teaching about CRT, or from teaching that CRT is correct, or even from flat out telling her students that white people collectively bear a blood-taint due to their collective guilt over the unparalleled crimes of the white race. To quote your own OP:
it essentially revokes any ability to teach critical race theory, including discussions of white privilege, from required courses in Oklahoma
You do understand the meaning of the word "required", don't you? All the OCCC needed to do if they wanted to keep teaching that course was
make it optional.
So explain to me how there's also a legitimate, more nuanced free speech point to be made since the Oklahoma Constitution does not support the way this law has been constructed. Explain to me how the Oklahoma Constitution says "free speech" means college students have no right to absent themselves from whatever bloody thing their professors feel like indoctrinating them with.
Bomb#20 said:
we aren't talking about "some taxpayers" but about a democracy's elected representatives of the majority;
Who are not making laws in good faith because they're engaging in shenanigans.
Show your work. Show they don't sincerely believe CRT is what they think it is.
Be that as it may, your characterization of my position as "so long as some taxpayers disagree" was a baseless misrepresentation.
Bomb#20 said:
...and you have produced no evidence that the taxpayers would know the content of the speech if only those government officials weren't propagandizing it --
wtf
Bomb#20 said:
...there are after all plenty of folks on the other side of the cultural divide who are propagandizing it too.
For any propagandized position, there is an equal and opposite propagandized position. And probably also one involving aliens. None of which is relevant.
Of course it's relevant: to the correctness of your claim that the reason the taxpayers don't actually know the content of the speech is because those government officials are propagandizing it. The taxpayers wouldn't know the content of the speech regardless of whether those government officials propagandized it, so your claim of causality fails.