#silencing speech

[alcrego]

Silence

"Self-censorship is the last step of censorship."

October 2018.

[feral-ballad]

But there was something almost agonising about speaking and being misunderstood or found unintelligible, something that got right to the heart of all my fears about aloneness. No one will ever understand you. No one wants to hear what you say. Why can’t you fit in, why do you have to stick out so much?

Olivia Laing, from The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

[anyataylorjoys]

Have you ever peeled the skin off a human corpse? It's not as easy as you might think. It's really uh, stuck on us. Skin. You have to roll back just the edges of it, so you can get a good enough grip on it to really pull. Which again, isn't easy. People are always so sweaty when you kill them.

YELLOWJACKETS | S2E03 Digestif

[fagulaa]

Something I really love about the Silt Verses is how, in a world of gods and monsters, how grounded Faulkner's trauma [and relationship with his father] is. Especially as the season moves on, and the stakes amp up [and up] its so unexpectedly piercing to be presented with this exploration of childhood abandonment/negligence, inter-generational trauma, the indignities and stress that comes with unexpected elder care/early onset Alzheimer's. You're so locked in to these grander, more abstract concepts that your defenses are down! Mine were, anyway. TSV is so good at cutting its grand, complex plotlines with simpler [but not shallower] gutpunches, and it just grounds the whole thing.

[lichqueenlibrarian]

Somehow, I think the good doctor might be wrong.

[palatinewolfsblog]

Do not live half a life

and do not die a half death.

If you choose silence, then be silent.

When you speak, do so until you are finished.

If you accept, then express it bluntly.

Do not mask it.

If you refuse then be clear about it

for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance.

Do not accept half a solution.

Do not believe half truths.

Do not dream half a dream.

Do not fantasize about half hopes.

Half the way will get you nowhere.

You are a whole that exists to live a life

not half a life.

Khalil Gibran.

[lilacerull0]

sometimes i really dislike my tendency to give A Speech™️ because i feel like it reads too much like preaching when it's mostly reflecting and it helps me move forward in my opinions

[haveyouseenthisseries-poll]

Original title: 甜言蜜語.

[lizardson]

happy "I'm a faggot with a tony" day to all who celebrate

[tenshiharmonia]

Okay, I know there are much wilder things happening right now, but am I the only one who'd really like to see Razor Rex' "seven fearsome Corpse Cardinals" ?

[daylighteclipsed]

I doubt the devs meant for cloud strife to be so autistic-coded, but holy hell does he come across autistic

[kamala-laxman]

Silence is an ocean. Speech is a river. -Rumi

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-adults-are-still-in-charge-at-the-university-of-florida-israel-protests-tents-sasse-eca6389b

The Adults Are Still in Charge at the University of Florida

By: Ben Sasse

Published: May 3, 2024

Higher education isn’t daycare. Here are the rules we follow on free speech and public protests.

Gainesville, Fla.

Higher education has for years faced a slow-burning crisis of public trust. Mob rule at some of America’s most prestigious universities in recent weeks has thrown gasoline on the fire. Pro-Hamas agitators have fought police, barricaded themselves in university buildings, shut down classes, forced commencement cancellations, and physically impeded Jewish students from attending lectures.

Parents are rightly furious at the asinine entitlement of these activists and the embarrassing timidity of many college administrators. One parent put it bluntly: “Why the hell should anybody spend their money to send their kid to college?” Employers watching this fiasco are asking the same question.

At the University of Florida, we tell parents and future employers: We’re not perfect, but the adults are still in charge. Our response to threats to build encampments is driven by three basic truths.

First, universities must distinguish between speech and action. Speech is central to education. We’re in the business of discovering knowledge and then passing it, both newly learned and time-tested, to the next generation. To do that, we need to foster an environment of free thought in which ideas can be picked apart and put back together, again and again. The heckler gets no veto. The best arguments deserve the best counterarguments.

To cherish the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly, we draw a hard line at unlawful action. Speech isn’t violence. Silence isn’t violence. Violence is violence. Just as we have an obligation to protect speech, we have an obligation to keep our students safe. Throwing fists, storming buildings, vandalizing property, spitting on cops and hijacking a university aren’t speech.

Second, universities must say what they mean and then do what they say. Empty threats make everything worse. Any parent who has endured a 2-year-old’s tantrum gets this. You can’t say, “Don’t make me come up there” if you aren’t willing to walk up the stairs and enforce the rules. You don’t make a threat until you’ve decided to follow through if necessary. In the same way, universities make things worse with halfhearted appeals to abide by existing policies and then immediately negotiating with 20-year-old toddlers.

Appeasing mobs emboldens agitators elsewhere. Moving classes online is a retreat that penalizes students and rewards protesters. Participating in live-streamed struggle sessions doesn’t promote honest, good-faith discussion. Universities need to be strong defenders of the entire community, including students in the library on the eve of an exam, and stewards of our fundamental educational mission.

Actions have consequences. At the University of Florida, we have repeatedly, patiently explained two things to protesters: We will always defend your rights to free speech and free assembly—but if you cross the line on clearly prohibited activities, you will be thrown off campus and suspended. In Gainesville, that means a three-year prohibition from campus. That’s serious. We said it. We meant it. We enforced it. We wish we didn’t have to, but the students weighed the costs, made their decisions, and will own the consequences as adults. We’re a university, not a daycare. We don’t coddle emotions, we wrestle with ideas.

Third, universities need to recommit themselves to real education. Rather than engage a wide range of ideas with curiosity and intellectual humility, many academic disciplines have capitulated to a dogmatic view of identity politics. Students are taught to divide the world into immutable categories of oppressors and oppressed, and to make sweeping judgements accordingly. With little regard for historical complexity, personal agency or individual dignity, much of what passes for sophisticated thought is quasireligious fanaticism.

The results are now on full display. Students steeped in this dogma chant violent slogans like “by any means necessary.” Any? Paraglider memes have replaced Che Guevara T-shirts. But which paragliders—the savages who raped teenage girls at a concert? “From the river to the sea.” Which river? Which sea?

Young men and women with little grasp of geography or history—even recent events like the Palestinians’ rejection of President Clinton’s offer of a two-state solution—wade into geopolitics with bumper-sticker slogans they don’t understand. For a lonely subset of the anxious generation, these protest camps can become a place to find a rare taste of community. This is their stage to role-play revolution. Posting about your “allergen-free” tent on the quad is a lot easier than doing real work to uplift the downtrodden.

Universities have an obligation to combat this ignorance with rigorous teaching. Life-changing education explores alternatives, teaches the messiness of history, and questions every truth claim. Knowledge depends on healthy self-doubt and a humble willingness to question self-certainties. This is a complicated world because fallen humans are complicated. Universities must prepare their students for the reality beyond campus, where 330 million of their fellow citizens will disagree over important and divisive subjects.

The insurrectionists who storm administration buildings, the antisemites who punch Jews, and the entitled activists who seek attention aren’t persuading anyone. Nor are they appealing to anyone’s better angels. Their tactics are naked threats to the mission of higher education.

Teachers ought to be ushering students into the world of argument and persuasion. Minds are changed by reason, not force. Progress depends on those who do the soulful, patient work of inspiring intellects. Martin Luther King Jr., America’s greatest philosopher, countered the nation’s original sin of racism by sharpening the best arguments across millennia. To win hearts, he offered hope that love could overcome injustice.

King’s approach couldn’t be more different from the abhorrent violence and destruction on display across the country’s campuses. He showed us a way protest can persuade rather than intimidate. We ought to model that for our students. We do that by recommitting to the fundamentals of free speech, consequences and genuine education. Americans get this. We want to believe in the power of education as a way to elevate human dignity. It’s time for universities to do their jobs again.

Mr. Sasse is president of the University of Florida.

==

This is the way.

Never forget that the "speech is violence" people have spent the last few weeks trying to gaslight everyone that their violence is just protected speech.

[finelythreadedsky]

love to send an email asking about finding a time to talk about dead bodies and when a human being becomes an object and getting a response that starts with "how fun!"

[mistermistyyy]

This has to be one of my favorite speeches I've yet seen in a show. It breaks my heart every time. Star Trek didn't always get as progressive as it wanted (particularly the earlier scenes and ending of this episode) but this scene hit the nail on the head.

Also, Johnathan Frakes, the GOAT? Pan Riker???

We love you, our trans queen, Soren.

[eretzyisrael]

by Seth Mandel

Additionally, the entire structure of the “safe space” generation of schooling was constructed in bad faith. Much like DEI and other race-essentialist competitions, no one was ever in danger from “Zionists” (read: Jews) on campus. The whole production had one specific goal, which anti-Zionist groups are finally elucidating in clear terms. Last week, an imam headlining a Zoom teach-in hosted by Columbia’s Students for Justice in Palestine said this about Jewish professor Shai Davidai, who has been hounded for his criticism of genocidal anti-Semitism:

“If there’s one professor, like that Shai Davidai guy, how do we get him in trouble? What are the ways in which his professorship is sort of tenuous, or maybe in jeopardy, or at what point will it be in jeopardy? How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy? In a particular situation that might have more impact and it might silence—this is what the Zionists do—that might silence 100 other professors. If you’re able to take out somebody like that, and make an example of them, it might shut up 100 more…. What’s our biggest threat here? What’s our biggest opportunity? Which domino, if we knock it over, is going to knock 20 dominoes over?”

What too many administrators, journalists, and even groups like FIRE never understood (or never wanted to admit) was that if the anti-Israel movement on campus had one single ethos, it was: “How do we create a situation in which he’s in jeopardy?”

Free speech was always at the center of it, but just not the way it has been portrayed. The goal was to eliminate Jewish students’ freedom of speech (and, eventually, of association, and even of movement) on campus. The speech of Anti-Zionists was not in danger—though they were occasionally told not to take hostages in university buildings and not to set up Jew-free zones on campus. What they were protecting was their ability to silence others.

A school like Columbia, where a pro-Hamas student group holds events explicitly designed to extinguish basic civil rights on campus, is in more trouble than schools like Vanderbilt (and University of Chicago, Purdue, and others), because its students have no need to even hide the ball anymore. The institution has already been converted from a university into a theater of political warfare.