Debating Speech

Debating Hate Speech, following "When is hate speech violence"

Twitter Feed on the subject https://twitter.com/search?q=%22When%20Is%20Speech%20Violence%22&src=tren

When Is Speech Violence?By LISA FELDMAN BARRETT JULY 14, 2017
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/14/opinion/sunday/when-is-speech-violence.html?smid=tw-shar

Imagine that a bully threatens to punch you in the face. A week later, he walks up to you and breaks your nose with his fist. Which is more harmful: the punch or the threat?
The answer might seem obvious: Physical violence is physically damaging; verbal statements aren’t. “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

But scientifically speaking, it’s not that simple. Words can have a powerful effect on your nervous system. Certain types of adversity, even those involving no physical contact, can make you sick, alter your brain — even kill neurons — and shorten your life.

Your body’s immune system includes little proteins called proinflammatory cytokines that cause inflammation when you’re physically injured. Under certain conditions, however, these cytokines themselves can cause physical illness. What are those conditions? One of them is chronic stress.

Your body also contains little packets of genetic material that sit on the ends of your chromosomes. They’re called telomeres. Each time your cells divide, their telomeres get a little shorter, and when they become too short, you die. This is normal aging. But guess what else shrinks your telomeres? Chronic stress.

If words can cause stress, and if prolonged stress can cause physical harm, then it seems that speech — at least certain types of speech — can be a form of violence. But which types?

This question has taken on some urgency in the past few years, as professed defenders of social justice have clashed with professed defenders of free speech on college campuses. Student advocates have protested vigorously, even violently, against invited speakers whose views they consider not just offensive but harmful — hence the desire to silence, not debate, the speaker. “Trigger warnings” are based on a similar principle: that discussions ofcertain topics will trigger, or reproduce, past trauma — as opposed to merely challenging or discomfiting the student. The same goes for “microaggressions.”

This idea — that there is often no difference between speech and violence — has stuck many as a coddling or infantilizing of students, as well as a corrosive influence on the freedom of expression necessary for intellectual progress. It’s a safe bet that the Pew survey datareleased on Monday, which showed that Republicans’ views of colleges and universities have taken a sharp negative turn since 2015, results in part from exasperation with the “speech equals violence” equation.

The scientific findings I described above provide empirical guidance for which kinds of controversial speech should and shouldn’t be acceptable on campus and in civil society. In short, the answer depends on whether the speech is abusive or merely offensive.

Offensiveness is not bad for your body and brain. Your nervous system evolved to withstand periodic bouts of stress, such as fleeing from a tiger, taking a punch or encountering an odious idea in a university lecture.

Entertaining someone else’s distasteful perspective can be educational. Early in my career, I taught a course that covered the eugenics movement, which advocated the selective breeding of humans. Eugenics, in its time, became a scientific justification for racism. To help my students understand this ugly part of scientific history, I assigned them to debate its pros and cons. The students refused. No one was willing to argue, even as part of a classroom exercise, that certain races were genetically superior to others.

So I enlisted an African-American faculty member in my department to argue in favor of eugenics while I argued against; halfway through the debate, we switched sides. We were modeling for the students a fundamental principle of a university education, as well as civil society:When you’re forced to engage a position you strongly disagree with, you learn something about the other perspective as well as your own. The process feels unpleasant, but it’s a good kind of stress — temporary and not harmful to your body — and you reap the longer-term benefits of learning.

What’s bad for your nervous system, in contrast, are long stretches of simmering stress. If you spend a lot of time in a harsh environment worrying about your safety, that’s the kind of stress that brings on illness and remodels your brain. That’s also true of a political climate in which groups of people endlessly hurl hateful words at one another, and of rampant bullying in school or on social media. A culture of constant, casual brutality is toxic to the body, and we suffer for it.

That’s why it’s reasonable, scientifically speaking, not to allow a provocateur and hatemonger like Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at your school. He is part of something noxious, a campaign of abuse. There is nothing to be gained from debating him, for debate is not what he is offering.

On the other hand, when the political scientist Charles Murray argues that genetic factors help account for racial disparities in I.Q. scores, you might find his view to be repugnant and misguided, but it’s only offensive. It is offered as a scholarly hypothesis to be debated, not thrown like a grenade. There is a difference between permitting a culture of casual brutality and entertaining an opinion you strongly oppose. The former is a danger to a civil society (and to our health); the latter is the lifeblood of democracy.

By all means, we should have open conversations and vigorous debate about controversial or offensive topics. But we must also halt speech that bullies and torments. From the perspective of our brain cells, the latter is literally a form of violence.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, is the author of “How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain.”

“‘Hate Speech’ and Incitement to Violence”

Given the evils of hate, any argument for protecting is, at best, an uphill effort and, at worst, simply misguided. Many people either accept or, at least, wonder whether they should accept, an argument that goes something like this: Anyone sensitive to the horror of genocide knows that hate pervades the atmosphere at such times. Few goals can rank higher than preventing genocide and the murderous racial conflicts presented to the world during the twentieth century. Moreover, it is difficult to find any value in the freedom to engage in racist hate speech. Important but ultimately less significant values such as free speech cannot, for any sensitive person, lead to any pause in outlawing the speech that contributes to these horrors. Whether or not the ban will be effective in even a few cases at preventing genocide or racial violence, the mere possibility that it will more than justifies the ban. As an advocate of almost absolute protection of free speech, I should explain the grounds for my valuation of free speech and rejection of the above claim. That explanation, it turns out, is too ambitious for this essay. Nevertheless, Part I describes but does not defend a theory of why racist or hate speech should be protected – a theory that I believe provides the best, though often unrecognized, explanation of existing American case law but one that is surely a controversial, probably minority, view even in the United States. Most readers will realize, as do I, that these theoretical grounds do not really answer my imagined proponent of regulation. Thus, Part II describes the empirical evidence that would cause me to abandon the theory described in Part I, at least in the context of some category of racist or hate speech, but then gives reasons to doubt that this evidence will be forthcoming. In the end, this essay is more a call for more knowledge – I stand ready to be shown that the relevant evidence overrides my doubts about the efficacy of suppression. But given the inevitable empirical uncertainties in evaluating such evidence, Part II does not answer the last sentence of the imagined argument for regulation set forth above about the mere possibility of making a contribution toward prevention. Thus, the final part of this essay offers a different answer: it considers reasons to expect, as a practical matter, that hate speech regulation is more likely to contribute to genocidal events and major events of racial violence than to reduce them. These historical horrors help justify, or so I suggest, greater protection for speech. My hypothesis is that the empirical investigation supports the gamble that strong speech Baker - hate speech - protection leads to better results. 

https://www.law.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/microsites/law-culture/files/hate-speech-files/Hate-Speech-C-Edwin-Baker.pdf

Requiem for Aleppo

Requiem for Aleppo

Kindly support http://requiemforaleppo.com/ raising funds for Syria through two organisations SyriaRelief & Techfugees 

http://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2017/requiem-for-aleppo/

http://requiemforaleppo.com/for-charity/

https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/requiemforaleppo

Architecture of Refugees II W.A.Ve 2017

W.A.Ve 2017 Syria





on Ethics of Intervention and Insta follow-up

Save the date: 07/07 12:00 Auditorium #cotonificio Nasser Rabbat MIT - Aga Khan #wave2017 @iuav_venezia @iuav_architettura

A post shared by IUAV WAVe 2017 (@wave2017syria) on Jul 7, 2017 at 12:41am PDT

VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION 

Published on May 12, 2017  

https://issuu.com/w.a.ve2017/docs/venice_charter_issuu

The VENICE CHARTER ON RECONSTRUCTION aims at the establishment of clear guidelines for post-war development. Though generated in response to the Syrian conflict, the charter aims to be useful in any other similar possible scenarios. The nature of modern conflicts challenges our understanding of conventional war: they manifest as permanent, asymmetric local and mobile wars between numerous transnational actors, and they extend beyond geographical boundaries. The Syrian case presents an example of how local conflicts involve the whole international community: epochal migrations, global terrorism and widespread violence affect globally every person regardless of any economic, social and religious boundaries.

The Architecture of Refugees I

The Architecture of Refugees: The Question of Ethics

Uploaded on May 12, 2017

Hosted by the MIT Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture

Significant transformations in the world's political landscape are signaling the emergence of a new world order that undermines the
certitudes established at the end of World War II. At the core of such discussions, the concept of human rights is significantly challenged, calling for a discussion at the core of ethics for the revisions of the principles and mechanisms of intervention. In reaction to these new transformations some have called for a World Parliament representing the people and not governments to replace the UN General Assembly.

The workshop addresses the agency of architecture and design in a context where the disrespect of human rights is aggravated by
the incapacity of global institutions to react efficiently. What are the ethical questions regarding the architecture of refugees? What timescales, short or long terms, represent a priority for architecture and through which agenda – refugee relief, historical preservation, camp upgrades and daily life, or rebuilding and resettlement? What is the role of design in front of the degradation and destruction of cultural artifacts? How can design be channeled towards peace building objectives and possible resettlement projects? What are the material, technological, systemic responses to address emergency needs in the context of refugee camps?

Speakers:

Ethics of International Law as a Framework for Displacees and Refugees
Balakrishnan Rajagopal

Ethics and Politics of Post-Conflict Repair
Delia Wendel

Material Culture and Historical Conservation
Admir Masic

After Belonging
Carlos Minguez Carrasco

Architecture of Exile: The Permanent Temporariness of Refugee Camps
Alessandro Petti

Panel Discussion moderated by El Hadi Jazairy

Design X ::: remote conference on design and exclusion

https://x.design.blog/transcript/

https://x.design.blog/audio/

https://x.design.blog/

https://x.design.blog/articles/

https://aformalarchitecturemena.tumblr.com/

Sanctuary Cities Debate 2017

LD Debate: Should Sanctuary Cities be Abolished? 2015


The Sanctuary City Debate Heats Up


UCLA POINT LOMA, SEMI-FINALS, ON SANCTUARY CITIES, 2017


Justice Matters: Sanctuary City


Q and A - Sanctuary Cities: Yes or No?


Dallas Co. Commissioners Debate Sanctuary Cities

Tucker to advocate: Why are sanctuary city debates racial?


The Great Rialto Sanctuary City Debate

The Great Debate over Sanctuary Cities

Published on Feb 3, 2017

The term “sanctuary city” has been widely used in the great debate over immigration policy and protections. Opponents of sanctuary cities claim that policy protects undocumented immigrants from criminal prosecution, where supporters believe these policies are needed to protect the rights of both citizens and undocumented immigrants.

On Lawyer 2 Lawyer, host Bob Ambrogi joins Matthew J. O’Brien, the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), and Jonathan Blazer, the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) advocacy and policy counsel, to discuss policy, current legislation, immigration reform, and the status of sanctuary cities under a Trump presidency.

Matthew J. O’Brien is the director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).  Matt joined FAIR in 2016 and is responsible for managing FAIR’s research activities.

Jonathan Blazer is the American Civil Liberty Union’s advocacy and policy counsel. As the ACLU’s advocacy and policy counsel, Jon tracks developments in state and local measures concerning immigrants as well as police practices and supports the legislative advocacy efforts of ACLU staff across the country.

The Art of Listening

The Art of Listening - Music Documentary (2017)

Published on Feb 21, 2017

The Art of Listening is a documentary film about the journey music takes to reach a listener’s ear, from the intent of an instrument maker and composer, to the producers and engineers who capture and preserve an artist’s voice. This journey is narrated by intimate conversations with artists, engineers and producers about the philosophy of their work and the intent behind each musical note they create.

This film is an invitation for music fans to rediscover the intricacies and details available in the sounds of their favorite recordings. The Art of Listening is the beginning of a conversation of how the quality of our listening experiences define the medium.

Find out more and listen to the soundtrack at www.theartoflisteningfilm.com
Directed by:
Michael Coleman
www.colemanfilm.com
Emmanuel Moran
www.emmanuelmoran.com
Produced by:
Sebastian Weinberg
www.sebastianweinberg.com
Music Composed by:
Christopher Willits
www.christopherwillits.com
For licensing and screening opportunities:
screening@theartoflisteningfilm.com