Niall Gooch on free speech and its enemies: 

Free speech, like the right to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence, is a procedural virtue, which is why fanatics and revolutionaries hate it… Defenders of free speech are arguing not only for free speech as an abstraction, but a wider culture of honest debate, factual argument, respectful disagreement, and civilised co-existence with people who see the world very differently from us. Complaints about attacks on free speech can be seen as proxies for concerns about the maintenance of this culture, particularly in the context of the university. So in a sense, free speech isn’t one thing. It’s many things. It’s a whole network of overlapping norms about the exchange of ideas. One thing that people commonly mean when they say “free speech” is “if I’m invited to give a talk somewhere I should be allowed to do so without intimidation, interruption or threat, and people who want to come and listen to me should be able to do so.”

Well, obviously, we can’t have that. 

Ed West on things you mustn’t laugh about: 

There are plenty of subjects that merit satire today – the diversity industry, with its shakedowns and professional bullshit artists is a rich seam, as is the transgender movement. But these areas really are too edgy for satirists, most of whom – like the vast majority of influential people in the arts – hold quite uncontroversial (left-liberal) political views and also fear the next wave of revolutionaries more than they do the ancien régime. That’s why they make jokes about the ancien régime. In fact there is plenty of edgy comedy these days – but it tends to be told in private.

Jonah Goldberg on the leftist leanings of the establishment media: 

According to a just-released study [by the Centre for Public Integrity], more than 96 percent of donations from media figures to either of the two major-party presidential candidates went to Hillary Clinton… Anyone who has spent a moment around elite reporters or studied their output knows that they tend to be left of centre. In 1981, S. Robert Lichter and Stanley Rothman surveyed 240 leading journalists and found that 94 percent of them voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1964, 81 percent voted for George McGovern in 1972, and 81 percent voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976. Only 19 percent placed themselves on the right side of the political spectrum. Does anyone think the media have become less liberal since then? None of this means liberals — or conservatives — can’t be good reporters, but the idea that media bias is non-existent is ludicrous.

As some of you may be interested in this kind of thing, I now have a Gab account. I’m not entirely sure what to do with it as yet, but there we are.

Joy Pullmann on when feminist feelings collide with science: 

Throughout her dissertation, [doctoral candidate, Laura] Parson asserts that women and minorities are uniquely challenged by the idea that science can provide objective information about the natural world. This is an unfair assumption, she says, because the concept of objectivity is too hard for women and minorities to understand. “Notions of absolute truth and a single reality” are “masculine,” she says, referring to poststructuralist feminist theory… Rather than rejecting this insulting view of women and minorities’ intellectual capacities, Parson uses it as a pretext to advocate that science classes abandon the scientific method itself… and all other “male” forms of oppression, such as “weed-out courses, courses that grade on a curve, a competitive environment, reliance on lecture as a teaching method, an individualistic culture, and comprehensive exams.”

Feminism is of course famed for its intellectual rigour. 

And in other, utterly unrelated news: 

Many elite universities relegate Women’s Studies degree programmes to second-class status.

Nick Gillespie interviews Instapundit himself, Professor Glenn Reynolds:  

It’s a small number of companies that really control almost all social media, and they all kind of lean left. Facebook has been accused, and I think credibly, of a lot of political bias, and there are experiments that suggest they could swing an election by manipulating their flow of news and views. At some level, you say that’s just private enterprise and they can do what they want, but at another level, it’s a little more troubling that they are kind of a monopoly and they’re politically in the tank with an administration that is doing them a lot of favours… I’m not so sure we aren’t approaching the point where people might want to think about anti-trust. And I know we’re past the point where, if these were companies that operated with a slant towards Republicans, everyone would be calling for anti-trust regulation right away.

And at Claremont College, your “extremely toxic” masculinity is being discussed:  

Miles Robinson, who attended the event, told the Claremont Independent that among attendees there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it.” Robinson added that all of the organisers, as well most of the attendees, are female.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets, on any subject, in the comments.

In the interests of furthering public awareness, here’s an extensive list of potentially offensive words and expressions that you probably shouldn’t use on pre-watershed television. Oh, don’t pretend you’re not curious. There are at least a couple on there I wasn’t previously familiar with. And no Googling.

Via the invariably genteel Mr Tim Worstall.

Fans of car-crash interviews may enjoy these extracts from the BBC’s Today Programme, in which Ms Malia Bouattia, president of the National Union of Students, shares her deep thinking on the subject of “safe spaces” and campus censorship.

Do stay tuned for her thoughts on the University of Birmingham as “a Zionist outpost.”

Via Julia.