I seldom agree with Rick Salutin (and I don't totally agree with him here -- being hit with a pie is being hit and is an assault) but he makes some good points here:
http://tinyurl.com/y8uhwt6
Nor do I feel like joining in the ritual statements that find Ann Coulter's views appalling. The only point of free speech is when it's about views you find appalling. Otherwise, it's “allowed speech,” because it doesn't offend you.
One Ottawa student protester said a campus should be a safe and positive space. I agree with safe but not so much with positive. I'd even say a university should be a safe and negative space, in the sense used by Herbert Marcuse, whose student I was. He praised the power of negative thinking, by which he meant learning to be critical of the way things are. Little kids deserve a safe and positive space, largely so they can gain the self-assurance to deal with all the negative space they'll meet later on. In fact, one of the unheralded merits of free hate speech is that it can give those vilified and maligned a sense of their own strength.
3 comments:
Also, I don't think you can blame Houle for the Coulter camp's leaking his private email to her to the NP.
That's true -- it was intended to cause a backlash -- Houle was naive not to realize it would happen but the press was intentional from Coulter et al
Canada is a far left American hating country.
That's the reason for the hatred spewed at Ann Coulter.
The leader of Iran would have got a standing ovation from those same students had he attended the university in Ottawa.
See the moral problem with that?
Post a Comment