Safe Spaces and the Mote in America's Eye.

Ken White writing at Popehat.

Ken says that he ridicules the college students and their preference for illusory safety over liberty but upon reflection it occurs to him that there was nothing else to expect. Ken, the father of three children, describes how college students today were raised as children following 9-11. He cites examples in series that support his assertions that add up to a statement that we raised our kids to be this way by the examples we provided in response to terrorism, by the things we allowed without raising a stink that they saw while growing up before they arrived at college. Ken writes an incredibly powerful piece. You will find it worthwhile, I am certain. I do not want to wreck it, it's a thing of beauty, a pice of real art.

We should have taught them not to give up essential liberty for a little safety. Instead, we taught them that the government needs the power to send flying robots to kill anyone on the face of the earth without review and without telling us why. The government, we're told, needs to do that for our safety. 

That starts him off. And the thing that gets me is he is not just delivering all Libertarian crap. And it is not just Republican grievances nor a particularly conservative perspective. I had to read this a couple of times before I understood.

We should have taught them that our subjective reaction to someone's expression isn't grounds to suppress that expression. We didn't. They probably didn't learn that lesson from the freakouts over mosques at ground zero or in Georgia or in Tennessee. They probably didn't learn it from calls to deport Piers Morgan for anti-gun advocacy or by the steady stream of officials suggesting that dissent is treason or from their government asserting a right to "balance" the value of speech against its harm. 

He's for mosques at ground zero. grrrrrr  He dismissed objections to Islamic triumphalism as "freak out." And Piers Morgan, eh, I didn't read or hear much of that to mention, but now that it is mentioned I did see it. What I saw most was a strong desire to educate a new citizen with British prejudices about American law, the nature of the NRA lobby, and how people process events differently. And I saw a strong desire for Piers Morgan to just STFU for being too thick to engage. What happened to him anyway, did somebody shoot him?

Ken hammers that we really should have taught our children more about the issues of free speech even when we detest it, that we failed by example by choosing safety instead of liberty. It is the most heavily linked article I've ever read. Each phrase is a link. Each sentence contains an entire story behind it. The thesis builds with examples backed up as if it were assembled by index cards and links would be footnotes. That is the impression I received while reading. It has an that academic submission quality to it, but I never submitted anything this great.