User:Woozle/LwaC/2014-05-29
I'll be having #lunchWithAConservative tomorrow before he heads off to England for a few months, but we had this email exchange in advance -- I'm responding to his complaint the last time we met (2 weeks ago) that the students who protested Condi Rice giving a speech at their university were suppressing the free exchange of ideas:
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I think this article explains the problem pretty well:
http://gawker.com/in-defense-of-protesting-commencement-speakers-1578500053/+aweinstein
PZ Myers, biologist prof at the University of Minnesota Morris and an ardent defender of free speech (he "desecrated" a communion wafer, a Koran, a Bible, and Dawkins's "The God Delusion", to howls of religious protest and calls for his tenure to be revoked) adds this:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2014/05/28/getting-paid-to-speak-is-not-free-speech/
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Interesting...The first article is right: it's not a free-speech issue. It's a respect issue. The Hirsi Ali case is particularly offensive. Yes, she works for American Enterprise Institute -- no doubt if Harvard had offered her a job, she would have gone there, where her husband has a position. She's in the US because her life was in danger in Holland and the craven Dutch police would not protect her. My colleague Charles Murray also works at AEI. Why is anyone from AEI anathema to the AH critics? How many people have AEI murdered? It's not right to use AEI or any other non-terrorist organization as a way to smear people.
As for Condi Rice, she participated in some mistaken -- not criminal -- foreign policy decisions. So who in government hasn't? Try Carter, Obama, Clinton and Reagan. Unless she acted in ways that were clearly unlawful or out of malice, these critics should shut up.
I'm with Prof Myers on desecration. If someone burns a Koran or a Bible, my only question is: Was it his Koran?
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Some answers to your questions:
Q. Why is anyone from AEI anathema to the AH critics?
Because they support a lot of really bad policy using dishonest arguments and tactics. They are not supporters of free speech, even if they claim to be.
Q. How many people have AEI murdered?
Why is this relevant?
Q. It's not right to use AEI or any other non-terrorist organization as a way to smear people.
Who is being smeared, and how?
Q. As for Condi Rice, she participated in some mistaken -- not criminal -- foreign policy decisions. So who in government hasn't? Try Carter, Obama, Clinton and Reagan. Unless she acted in ways that were clearly unlawful or out of malice, these critics should shut up.
Um, yes, they were very mistaken. The Bush administration knew there was no evidence of WMDs, and lied that there was in order to get approval for their war. These lies resulted in the deaths of many thousands of Americans (to say the very least).
What criminal foreign policy decisions did Carter and Clinton engage in? How are these decisions comparable? (Obama seems a bit of a stretch to me, but I'll let it slide.)
Yes, she did act in ways that were clearly unlawful, and acted in support of the unlawful acts of others. This is in fact the substance of most of the criticisms. One of Obama's greatest moral crimes, in my view, is his refusal to investigate (and prosecute, if the investigation found apparent wrongdoing) the actions of the Bush administration.
Q. "If someone burns a Koran or a Bible, my only question is: Was it his Koran?"
Indeed. The same holds with regard to communion wafers. There seems to be this bizarre idea that 'copies of certain "sacred" works are somehow still owned by the religion that produced them.
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Oh come on W. Saying that someone is affiliated with AEI is for some people a condemnation. I don't think they are any worse than many other orgs. I think Bush and Blair were mistaken, I don't think they lied intentionally. And the evidence that the left is more interested in suppressing debate than the right is incontrovertible.
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Responding to your points:
> Saying that someone is affiliated with AEI is for some people a condemnation.
I'm not sure which particular point you're responding to here. I'd certainly consider affiliation with AEI to be a mark against someone's character, given the kind of work AEI does. They're basically unprincipled defenders of profiteering and wealth-concentration.
In their defense, they're one of the few right-wing orgs that doesn't try to pretend that Obamacare isn't pretty much exactly what the Right has been pushing for since the 1990s.
> I don't think they are any worse than many other orgs.
Solely in terms of their political positions, there are certainly many others that are much worse. AEI does more damage, however, because they are much better funded. A lot of the most persuasive right-wing and "libertarian" propaganda originates with them. They have close ties with ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), which has written a lot of the most toxic and awful pro-big-business legislation over the past decade or two.
> I think Bush and Blair were mistaken, I don't think they lied intentionally.
There's plenty of evidence that Bush and his advisors knew very well what they were doing. Poor old Colin Powell is the one exception that I'm aware of; he later regretted his support for the war. None of the others have so much as admitted they were wrong, much less apologized for leading the US into disaster to benefit their war-profiteer financial backers.
> And the evidence that the left is more interested in suppressing debate than the right is incontrovertible.
Based on what? This is the opposite of all the evidence of which I am aware -- unless you're talking about some completely different "left" than the one I'm aware of. (Perhaps the UK Left? I gather they're more like our Right in terms of sanity levels -- banning criticism of Islam in the name of "cultural sensitivity" and so forth.)
For instance: the calls for students to stop protesting paid speakers to which they object are basically attempts to shut down debate. A free-speech-oriented approach would have been to counter the students' arguments with evidence-based counterarguments addressing the points that the students made. Did anyone on the Right do this?
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There was no substantial response to this... he seemed to be kind of frustrated, but it's hard to tell in email.