Comments on: A Comment I Posted On “What Would JT Do?”

By: Another day, another censored discussion! On Patheos this time – Duck Dynasty and homosexuality | Censored at First Things – First Thoughts

Fri, 03 Jan 2014 18:47:58 +0000

[…] Scott of Slate Star Codex has a good essay up that was prompted by the whole Duck Dynasty fracas. Phil Robertson’s comments on homosexuality aren’t a first amendment issue; it was A&E that might be firing him for his speech, not the government cracking down, but Scott points out that, for speech to flourish, we need protections beyond legal guarantees: […]

Report comment

By: Musings on Free Speech, Civility, and the Constitution | Gunlord500

Musings on Free Speech, Civility, and the Constitution | Gunlord500 — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 07:11:50 +0000

[…] a private/public workplace distinction does not exist. Finally, Eli of “Rust Belt Philosophy” avers that “context determines the correct way to respond to ideas that you disagree with, and there are […]

Report comment

By: hazemyth

hazemyth — Fri, 03 Jan 2014 05:25:52 +0000

As far as the employer/employee relationships goes, Robertson falls into a special category wherein his value to his employer derives from his celebrity. His interview with GQ wasn’t simply an example of private speech. He was being interviewed as the star of his show and that interview consciously shaped his public image. Insofar as that image is the commodity in which he trades, his speech directly impacts his job. If it makes his persona non-salable, or simply the sort of commodity in which A&E doesn’t want to traffic, it’s not unreasonable for them to dispense with him. If your career specifically depends on your public popularity, it may be inconvenient but it’s unavoidable that you will impact your career if you make yourself unpopular.

Report comment

By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 03:24:15 +0000

What really bothers me are “secondary boycotts.” Not people saying: “I don’t like Robertson, so I’m not going to watch his show,” but people boycotting A&E or the show’s advertisers. (Not that I think it happened in this example.)

Report comment

By: Alexander Stanislaw

Alexander Stanislaw — Tue, 31 Dec 2013 03:04:56 +0000

Well sure two views can be opposites and still be within the Overton Window, and I’m still trying to figure out the conditions under which that can happen. Does that only happen with controversial issues in which the population is somewhat evenly divided? Can almost everyone agree on view X, yet still be tolerant of view ~X? If 95% of people believed that abortion should be allowed, I don’t think that the opposite view would be tolerated.

Trying to find a counter-example: I would guess that almost all Americans are okay with factory farming – yet the position that factory farming should be banned might be within the Overton Window.

Report comment

By: JRM

JRM — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 18:24:39 +0000

I don’t think these are quite the same.

The Duck Dynasty guy is selling this persona (whether real or not) and his views are a part of that. Calling for social sanctions and afterlife sanctions is not the same as calling for extermination and using deliberately offensive language.

I don’t think Robertson should have been suspended, and I would support more vigorous sanctions against your hypotheticals. (I am for gay marriage, and I don’t see it as a close issue.)

Nonetheless, I absolutely agree that this is a line-drawing exercise.

I don’t think this is hypocritical – the call to burn Scott and you and me in a lake of fire for all eternity seems rather uncharitable, but while the Duck Dynasty folks seem to be for that, it would be wrong to shut them down for that now. That’s what they sold the show as.

When Mike Tyson’s one-man show contains profanity, misogyny, violence, race, crime… you had Mike Tyson do a one-man show. If you want to fire Mike Tyson for using coarse language and talking fondly of a problematic lifestyle, well, you shouldn’t have expected Martha Stewart as a producer or a viewer.

That’s just my opinion. I could be wrong.

Report comment

By: Paul Torek

Paul Torek — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 17:56:55 +0000

Human biodiversity is a multifaceted subject, on many facets of which, data is still pouring in. Holocaust evidence has mostly been available for many decades.

The state is just plain more powerful than A&E, Fox News, or CBS. By a large margin.

Report comment

By: A hermit

A hermit — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 15:47:21 +0000

Robertson was never threatened with anything like “financial ruin…” He has a contract with A&E and they took a moment to reconsider that in light of his vulgar, hateful comments. In the end he and his show and A&E got a whole bunch of free publicity.

Report comment

By: Kerry

Kerry — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 11:34:47 +0000

I think that’s a mischaracterisation. It’s not just “a bad word”, it’s a racist epithet, and she didn’t only use it to her husband, she said she has used it since then. Also, I think the plantation-themed wedding with black staff members has gotten equal play in the reporting; it’s not true that the truth getting its boots on meant it turned out she didn’t have a history of using racist language after all.

Report comment

By: Eli

Eli — Mon, 30 Dec 2013 07:24:37 +0000

Ah, to the contrary: I think that you’re accepting a much lower standard of philosophical rigor than ordinary speech needs to support. Even if you think that you’re just using some words in a loose, colloquial way, they must still have some literal meaning – or else why are you bothering to use them at all?

So say, for the sake of argument, that your assertion about “the correct” response is really just a colloquial way of getting to the stuff about a marketplace of ideas. Does it follow that you don’t need to back that up with philosophical rigor? Not hardly. For example, and to piggyback off of another comment, it seems fairly obvious that this Robertson character was hired because of his personality. His personality, in other words, is the good or service that A&E takes itself to be acquiring in exchange for his salary. Why, then, do the norms of the marketplace not allow A&E to withdraw their support upon discovering that it’s purchased a defective product? Last time I checked, it goes against every tenet of the market to suggest that one must continue to pay for a service that one doesn’t like. But even if I’m wrong about that, the overall point remains: you can’t very well just shrug off philosophical rigor just because you’re trying to make a point.

Very similarly, you do a pretty poor job of rigorously responding to JT’s actual writing (rather ironically, given your penchant for philosophical charity). He never proposes “a norm of trying to punish the people with opposing views,” yet that’s the position against which you contrast your own point of view. So are you now going to tell me that, because you’re just engaged in “ordinary speech,” you don’t need to accurately depict your opponent’s position before you criticize it? Just how far does this go, exactly?

I mean, sure – there are unstated premises all over the place when people have conversations, not least of all when they have “ordinary language” conversations. But since when does that excuse poor logical reasoning or underhanded rhetorical tricks?

Report comment