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King’s College Free Speech – The Problem With The Fascist Boot Boys

This is to use the word fascist in its wider and incorrect meaning, not just to mean followers of Il Duce. Fascists to mean people who employ boot boy tactics to drown out speech they don’t like. The point being that unless your’e prepared to rain down truncheons upon the heads of those who would use violence to drown out that speech then it will be them, the boot boys, who determine what can be said.

Which is something of a problem, whatever the political allegiances of the fascists:

King’s College London (KCL) has been accused of “no platforming” its own lecturer, after his talk on free speech was deemed “high risk”.

Dr Adam Perkins, an academic who specialises in the neurobiology of personality, was due to speak to students on Friday afternoon about the scientific importance of free speech.

But the event, hosted by KCL’s Libertarian Society, was forcibly postponed by the university following a risk assessment.

There’s absolutely no doubt that a risk assessment is an interesting and useful thing. But it’s the use to which one is put that is important:

It comes amid growing concern about threats to free speech on university campuses, with students seeking to “no platform” individuals or groups whose views are deemed offensive. Earlier this month, protesters stormed a KCL event featuring a controversial anti-feminist YouTube star.

Police are investigating the incident, which saw masked activists reportedly assault security guards as they barged into the university building, smashed windows, hurled smoke bombs and set off a fire alarm.

Free speech does mean that peeps get to stand up and say, whatever, subject to the usual libel and incitement to immediate violence exceptions. People who come along to argue against are simply exercising their own free speech rights. Those who come with violence are not. Simples.

So, what use should we make of a risk assessment? Sure, this is controversial this speech, the boot boys will be around, there’s a risk of violence. What we don’t do is then ban the speech on the grounds of that risk of violence. Instead we mass our own boot boys to beat s**t out of the violent ask the police along to maintain public order.

Why do we do this? Because if we allow the fascist boot boys to determine which speech can be heard then the speech we can hear will be determined by the fascist boot boys, won’t it? Rather the point of their being boot boys and thus why we shouldn’t submit to it.

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bloke in spain
bloke in spain
6 years ago

Yeah, well. When you’ve got the police boot boys on the same side as the fascist boot boys, having your own boot boys is probably the only way free speech will survive.
Time to go buy boots.

Dongguan John
Dongguan John
6 years ago

Imagine if it was said “you can’t build that mosque because some Nazis are likely to burn it down”? Same principle, no?

jgh
jgh
6 years ago

Why aren’t these violent intolerant thugs being chucked off their university courses?

BniC
BniC
6 years ago

Because for the left the end justifies the means. so if they do it it’s ok because their intentions are honourable.
Bit like the torturers in the inquisition, they knew it was a sin, but believed that god would ultimately forgive them because of the cause they were working for. The fact that they took this risk to their immortal soul made them hero’s to some

Ljh
Ljh
6 years ago

Grievance Studies have become enttren in academia feeding into and legitimising the narrative of offense. Free speech and with it the ability to think critically creatively and heretically cannot survive on the same campus.

Spike
6 years ago

Let me mention the American “Antifa” (for “anti-fascist”), the goons who mixed it up with “Unite the Right” in Charlottesville, Virginia on the theory that they were also Uniting a few white supremacists (as many on the left have palled around with Al Sharpton). The resulting escalation convinced one out-of-state dope to commit vehicular homicide and that is all we are supposed to remember. Antifa have subsequently shut down speeches on plenty-leftie universities on both coasts.

BniC
BniC
6 years ago

And the guy beaten at a rally protesting against the ‘racist’ protestors who in video clearly swung a flashlight at someone which started the incident and was cleared of assault as he was acting in self defence

Spike
6 years ago
Reply to  BniC

Self-defense against “verbal assault,” surely

Mr Ecks
Mr Ecks
6 years ago

Purge the fucking lot. The only way to take the Unis back.

Still think my ideas are impossible Theo?

Bloke In Italy
6 years ago

Well apparently when the pitch invasion happened the police reacted by playing down the incident and denying (at least initially) that anybody had been hospitalised.
I commented on this at the time at my place: http://www.homoitalicus.it/2018/03/06/weve-been-here-before/

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