Walter Lippmann on liberty and the news: A century-old mirror for our troubled times
By Roy Peter Clark

At the time of his death in 1974, Lippmann had achieved a special status among newspaper columnists. He won two Pulitzer Prizes. His opinion was sought out by presidents and thought leaders across the globe. He was a founding editor of The New Republic. Most important, he took journalism seriously, not as a trade or even a profession, but as an instrument of democracy. He coined the phrases Cold War, and the manufacture of consent, and the use of the metaphor “stereotype” to describe thoughtless generalizations.

…

[On power and importance of objective fact]:

“The cardinal fact always is the loss of contact with objective information. Public as well as private reason depends upon it. Not what somebody says, not what somebody wishes were true, but what is so beyond all our opining, constitutes the touchstone of our sanity.”

“For, in the last analysis, the demagogue, whether of the Right or the Left, is, consciously or unconsciously an undetected liar.”

“There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the information by which to detect lies.”

“It may be bad to suppress a particular opinion, but the really deadly thing is to suppress the news. In time of great insecurity, certain opinions acting on unstable minds may cause infinite disaster.”

“The desire to know, the dislike of being deceived and made game of, is a really powerful motive, and it is that motive that can best be enlisted in the cause of freedom.”

Continued…

After five years of ‘Unlearning Liberty,’ book’s prescriptions command urgent attention
By Alex Morey

“It may seem like a paradox,” Greg wrote, “but an environment that squelches debate and punishes the expression of opinions, in the very institution that is supposed to make us better thinkers, can lead quickly to the formation of polarized groups in which people harbor a comfortable, uncritical certainty that they are right.”

Indeed, “we live in certain times.”

Censorship on campus is, of course, nothing new. For most of FIRE’s history, campus censorship seemed to come primarily from the top down. Students complained about administrators selectively enforcing speech codes and ushering them into tiny, misleadingly-named “free speech zones.”

But in “Unlearning Liberty,” Greg noticed a shift: Many of the calls for censorship on campus were suddenly coming from students themselves.

But why?

Greg had a theory. It was starting in college, and spreading.

“I believe that an unsung culprit in this expansion of unwarranted certainty and group polarization,” he wrote, “is thirty years of college censorship.”

Continued…

Tyranny’s new trick: in Hungary, a government wages war on liberalism
By Nick Cohen

When their enemies win, liberals ought to examine their faults, the better to avoid future defeats. During the attacks on the Central European University, Fidesz propagandists insisted that intellectual freedom was a mirage in a west where safe spaces, trigger warnings and the banning of speakers suppressed free speech and free inquiry. If western liberals censor universities, why can’t the Hungarian state? The question libelled Ignatieff, who has a principled and consistent commitment to intellectual freedom. Yet who can deny that the worst of the Anglo-American academic left is providing ammunition to, and justifications for, the far right? Now, as always, the similarities are as striking as the differences.

Continued…

Where Now for New Atheists?
By Helen Pluckrose

Western society had made good progress towards being able to criticize or mock sacred ideas and promote reason and evidence as a basis for knowledge over subjective belief and revelation. The consensus that religious ideas were entitled to a respectful deference not afforded other ideas had begun to be shaken. However, the last few years has seen something of a reversal. Skeptical, secularist liberals, by promoting skepticism and critical thinking and a respect for evidence over subjective experience and personal “truths,” are accused of a bullying intolerance and even bigotry even though religious privilege still dominates society. The balance is swinging back again against the skeptics, the empiricists, the rationalists and the universal liberals, but the pushback is not driven by the religious.

Western society’s resurgence of respect for subjective and unevidenced narratives and lived experience comes from a philosophical shift in the largely secular Left. The postmodern shift towards irrationalism, subjective truth and faith-based thinking opens the door again to religion, particularly those of minority groups, but also quasi-religious theories and movements within Social Justice. As science and reason and universal liberalism became associated with an oppressive, ruling, western, white, male elite in postmodern theory (thereby “erasing” the contributions of scientists, rationalists and liberals who do not fit the description), the demand to respect “alternative ways of knowing,” unscientific truth claims, irrational belief-systems and illiberal values intensified.

Continued…

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That’s OK. (For Now.)
By Peter Suderman

The sheer amount of time that many players put into games is stunning to consider. A relatively modest single-player game like The Last of Us might take 10 to 20 hours to complete. A game like Mass Effect: Andromeda might take 60 hours to play through once, and 100 hours for a careful player to encounter all the content. The branching nature of the gameplay encourages multiple playthroughs. Online multiplayer games can take even more time. In 2015, Activision CEO Eric Hirschberg reported that Destiny, a complex mass-multiplayer shooter that mixes role-paying elements with squad-based action, counted 16 million players, and that daily players put in an average of three hours a day.

One way of describing a game that has such pull on its players might be that it is fun. Another might be that it is addicting.

‘As addictive as gardening’: how dangerous is video gaming?
By Jordan Erica Webber

When Ferguson contacted the World Health Organisation to express concerns about the possible inclusion of gaming disorder in the eleventh revision of the ICD (ICD-11), he was told by one representative via email that the WHO has, “been under enormous pressure, especially from Asian countries, to include this”.

In an “open debate paper” on the subject, a group of 26 researchers from 24 departments across the west, including Ferguson and Markey, expressed their stark concerns:

“A diagnosis may be used to control and restrict children, which has already happened in parts of the world where children are forced into ‘gaming-addiction camps’ with military regimes designed to ‘treat’ them for their gaming problems, without any evidence of the efficacy of such treatment and followed by reports of physical and psychological abuse.”

The government in South Korea, for example, is so concerned about video game addiction that it has introduced laws to limit children’s access to online games, and government-sponsored medical practices offer treatments that can involve electric shocks.

Continued…