Word.
Is it a lie to say "black people are more likely to be felons"? No, but if that's all you have to say on the subject, then you're probably a jerk and shouldn't be talking about it at all.
TL;DR I'm weary of people saying things that are factually true on the face of them, but that utterly distort the conversation. See also: "scientists don't know how old the universe is" (but have a broad consensus of a narrow band of values), "vaccines can harm you" (so can water), "it's getting cooler in some places" (global climate change doesn't add X degrees to every location uniformly), etc. etc. etc.
While the sentiment sounds good on paper, in practice it far too often is someone complaining that you can't demand a black men to be lynched if they have a white girlfriend anymore because society has gone all woke.
There are lots of things that aren't 'PC' to say anymore and that doesn't mean society is failing. In fact I would argue that it is just plain old progress, especially when it is accompanied by a number of things that we can now say that used to be taboo.
Out with: "Gay people should be burned at the stake."
In with: "Contraception allows families to decide when to have children."
Is that what you want?
If yes, why? If not, what's your approach?
There are very few situations where speech leads to incarceration, and I don't think PG is talking about those, is he?
I ain't doing all that work. I'm picking whatever I already believe in.
/s but only kind of. That's how most people think. They aren't enlightened like you.
Usually when people complain about what you "can't say", what they actually mean is they can't say whatever they like and still have people still employ / socialise / be nice to them.
Expressing opinions that others find disagreeable is not a protected class.
I am strongly convinced that any person or organization has the right to moderate content flowing through the systems they host. If you want to say "I don't believe the Holocaust happened", that should be your legal right. It should be my legal right to tell you, "go get your own soapbox to spout that nonsense. You're not doing it on my dime."
If you KEEP saying it, despite being told that it's making your coworkers uncomfortable, then you're just being an asshole, and sorry, people don't like working with assholes.
If you want to shun me for not loudly enough pronouncing how great some sort of special privileges for certain ostensibly oppressed classes is, or for not jumping enthusiastically enough though hoops referencing people with exactly the most woke-community prescribed terminology, then chances are I don't particularly to associate with you either. That's fine.
If you start telling lies about me online and try to incite a mob to threaten or harm me and the people who do opt to socialize with me (despite or maybe even because of my opinions), or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Of course that would still not literally make me unable to pronounce my woke-taboo opinion, but it should nonetheless be obvious that trying to wreck my life is a disproportionate response merely to me not toeing the line you took it upon yourself to draw. What you "can't say" is almost always graded rather than absolute, but active hostility destroying months or years of a person's life is well into the territory that constitutes a real hindrance for freely expressing an opinion.
Assuming intelligence is normally distributed, then what's the plan for the bottom 50% here?
I read this as "it is impossible to determine truth". If there exists a well resourced entity who's entire purpose in life is to determine objective truth and they are unable to do so what chance do I have?
I think someone's an idiot for denying the moon landings, but their ignorance doesn't directly affect my ability to stay alive and health. Some misinformation is worse than others.
At one company, we instituted "opportunistic hiring" policies. A certain portion of our engineering headcount was reserved for women. Men explicitly could not be hired using the headcount put under the "opportunistic hiring" pool. However, it was absolutelyy forbidden to mention that gender was used as a factor in hiring.
Yes, we straight up banned one gender from a portion of our head count. But nobody could say that one gender had greater headcount than the other. That was considered offensive harassment. The same managers that would hire women under their "opportunistic hiring" pool one day would admonish other people for suggesting that women were beneficiaries of discrimination the next.
Another example: 9 out of 10 people shot and killed by police are men. Is this evidence of sexism against men in police? If I say that I don't believe that the police are sexist, but rather this disparity is due to the fact that men commit proportionally more acts of violence than women, is such an opinion sexist against men?
In many circles, pointing to the fact that the racial breakdown in policy shootings matches the racial breakdown in violent crime, with the same strength of correlation as the gender breakdown in shootings, is considered racist. In fact, even acknowledging a disparity in the rates of violent crime is considered racist by many (even if one states that poverty and historic injustice are the causes of the racial disparity in crime).
I'm very curious how you came to the conclusion that Paul was thinking of statements like "gay people should be burned at the stake" when he writes, "the number of true things we can't say should not increase".
Free speech isn't free. We pay for it by tolerating speech that's unpleasant, uncomfortable, wrong, insulting, offensive or hateful.
It might work at first and be effective for some time in the same way that a dictator can "get things done" but there is no free lunch.
Eventually you will get evil dictators, power hungry arbitrators of truth. It will bite you. It is only a question of when. It might be years or generations. The only winning move is not to play. Don't concentrate the power in the first place.
The statement could easily be interpreted as either:
- when selecting a random black person and a random white person out of the current American population, there is a statistically higher chance that the black person is a felon than the white person
- black people are more inclined towards committing felonies than white people, and will continue to do so at a higher rate
These have very different meanings, but are both fair and natural interpretations of the information-deficient statement "black people are more likely to be felons". Given that, the statement will likely cause more confusion and argument than clarity, and so is a bad statement.
Can the people demanding more censorship ever be wrong?
Both of these things are already well-litigated limits on speech. I.e. - it's already illegal.
> or organize mobs for PR damage to pressure my boss into taking away my livelihood, that is something quite beyond exercising your right to choose your associations.
Either your views are so taboo that most of society doesn't want anything to do with you if you express them, or they're mainstream enough that only some people don't want to associate with you. If it's the former, then yes, you might struggle to find a sympathetic employer and that warrants some introspection. If it's the latter, then you're hardly at risk of having your livelihood taken away.
The alternative is that I should be forced to employ someone who fundamentally disagrees with my right to exist (and perhaps owns lots of guns).
> Paltering is when a communicator says truthful things and in the process knowingly leads the listener to a false conclusion. It has the same effect as lying, but it allows the communicator to say truthful things and, some of our studies suggest, feel like they're not being as deceptive as liars.
I’ve found it more effective to just say “you’re wrong” and move on. The end result of the argument is the same, and it gets them all riled up, which is generally what they’d hoped to inflict on others.
If we were still living in the time of thirteen channels and Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, I'd be inclined to agree with you.