Nobody Can Take a Joke Anymore

[it]

You know I have to ask Dana.... How do you feel about the following:

- The student's fight against allowing the Warren Farrel lecture.
- The effort for boycutting Israel in itself and the administration's response to it.
Both in the university of Toronto, both from 2012

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by traceur

You know I have to ask Dana.... How do you feel about the following:

- The student's fight against allowing the Warren Farrel lecture.
- The effort for boycutting Israel in itself and the administration's response to it.
Both in the university of Toronto, both from 2012

They're both interesting cases, I think. They are also very distinct.

The case for boycotting Israel and therefore Israeli speakers from participating in campus and other events is something that crops up a lot in the UK. The point there is rarely about wanting to block what is being said, so much as it is making a political statement about the wider culture the speaker nominally represents. It's a little like people boycotting South African sports during the Apartheid era. There are arguments for and against but they are not really arguments of free speech and acceptance of alternative views.

The Farrell lecture is a difficult one. I can totally understand why some people at that campus would not to host someone with such extreme views, and one supported by others of even more extreme views. I know I wouldn't want him or his ilk anywhere near me :P But - that kind of response is a double-edged sword. Without the protest, and without the likelihood of such protest, I suspect his event would have had fairly low attendance and be fairly low impact.

And if you're going down that route, then you really need to make sure your own house in order. Would those same people have objected to someone from the more extreme edge of the women's movement giving a lecture about how all men are inherently violent rapists and oppressors?


I think sometimes it is a mistake to make a noise about it. The same argument that says we shouldn't give, to go back to racism for example, fascistic political parties the oxygen of publicity and the legitimacy of debate by including them in the political debate scene, also really makes the case for not boycotting them in the first place.

I have very conflicted feelings on both of the examples you cite. I can see the arguments for and against boycotting them. Overall, I am in favour of college and university students shaping the ethos and contours of the intellectual space they inhabit. The downside of that is that most of those students are in their teens and early 20s and kids of that age who engage in politics tend to be very fierce about it. That's natural - it's a big part of becoming politically engaged and learning where you stand on things and what really matters to you. But it does mean that the responses to this sort of thing often lack nuance.

[it]

Originally Posted by DanaC

The point there is rarely about wanting to block what is being said, so much as it is making a political statement about the wider culture the speaker nominally represents.

That's probably does happen and was probably part of it, since the demands did include cutting ties with Israeli universities and that's part of how they bring Israeli speakers, but it's not what I meant. The demand was a demand that the university of toronto itself boycott israeli product or Canadian and american companies that trade with israeli companies. The relevance to this is that in that case, in contrast with many other cases, the administration intervened and disbanded the group that was petitioning and relying for the boycott.

Originally Posted by DanaC

And if you're going down that route, then you really need to make sure your own house in order. Would those same people have objected to someone from the more extreme edge of the women's movement giving a lecture about how all men are inherently violent rapists and oppressors?

An interesting thing about extremes, they very much depend on where your own opinions and those of the people around you stand in order to define a relative norm.

I had my own experience with that regarding the first topic, where opinions that would be considered extreme left wing or extreme right wing here within Israel appear equally right wing to those with the political beliefs regarding the middle east in places like the UK/France/Sweden, while from an Israeli perspective the opinions about the middle east and their implications are only distinguishable from Nazism by the lack of sexy uniforms

Which brings me to the next and best example: Godwin's law. The reason it exists as a phenomena in the first place is because almost any stance is extreme and fanatic relatively to someone else's further down the spectrum, and there's no agreed upon zero.

Likewise, in the interview I linked above, one of the dominant complaint made by the one representing "radical feminism" was the attribution of radicalism and extremism to her stance to began with - from her perspective it's not an extreme, it's something she is used to getting school credits for.

The point been, where the norm is will generally be relative to the bubble of information and perspectives you are used to consider and encounter, very much dependent on your own subjective norm.