I strongly recommend this Radiolab episode on Free Speech and "The Marketplace of Ideas"

(from April 2021)

What Up Holmes?

• Episode: https://www.podcastrepublic.net/episode/18250853008
• Media: https://pdst.fm/e/www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast21whatupholmes.mp3>

Love it or hate it, the freedom to say obnoxious and subversive things is the quintessence of what makes America America. But our say-almost-anything approach to free speech is actually relatively recent, and you can trace it back to one guy: a Supreme Court justice named Oliver Wendell Holmes. Even weirder, you can trace it back to one seemingly ordinary 8-month period in Holmes’s life when he seems to have done a logical U-turn on what should be say-able.  Why he changed his mind during those 8 months is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of the Supreme Court.  (Spoiler: the answer involves anarchists, a house of truth, and a cry for help from a dear friend.)  Join us as we investigate why he changed his mind, how that made the country change its mind, and whether it’s now time to change our minds again.

Further reading:

• Thomas Healy’s book The Great Dissent: How Oliver Wendell Holmes CHanged His Mind - And Changed the History of Free Speech In America
  https://www.worldcat.org/title/great-dissent-how-oliver-wendell-holmes-changed-his-mind-and-changed-the-history-of-free-speech-in-america/oclc/1121441031

• The Science article that Sinan Aral wrote in 2018, along with Soroush Vosughi and Deb Roy: “The Spread of True and False News Online”
  https://politics.media.mit.edu/papers/Vosoughi_Science.pdf

• Sinan Aral’s recent book The Hype Machine: How Social Media Disrupts Our Elections, Our Economy and our Health - And How We Must Adapt
  https://www.worldcat.org/title/hype-machine-how-social-media-disrupts-our-elections-our-economy-and-our-health-and-how-we-must-adapt/oclc/1253750788

• Zeynep Tufekci’s newsletter “The Insight” plus her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
  https://www.worldcat.org/title/twitter-and-tear-gas-the-power-and-fragility-of-networked-protest/oclc/1198557402

• Nabiha Syed’s news website The Markup
  https://themarkup.org/people/nabiha-syed

• Trailer for “The Magnificent Yankee,” a 1950 biopic of Oliver Wendell Holmes
  https://youtube.com/watch?v=0EADzGGjuqI

• Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought that We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment
  https://www.worldcat.org/title/freedom-for-the-thought-that-we-hate-a-biography-of-the-first-amendment/oclc/1057159064

#FreeSpeech #OliverWendellHolmes #MarketplaceOfIdeas #Podcasts #RadioLab #ThomasHealy #ZeynepTufekci #SupremeCourt #FirstAmendment

Do Protests Even Work?

It sometimes takes decades to find out

Zeymep Tufekci, June 24, 2020

...In the long term, protests work because they can undermine the most important pillar of power: legitimacy. Commentators often note that a state can be defined by its monopoly on violence, a concept going back to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes and codified by the sociologist Max Weber. But the full Weber quote is less well known. Weber defined the state by its “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.” The word legitimate is as important as the words physical force, if not more. Especially in the modern world, that monopoly on violence isn’t something that self-perpetuates. Violence doesn’t just happen; it has to be enacted and enabled by people. The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late 1980s. It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers had lost the will and the desire to live in their own system. Compared with Western democracies, their system wasn’t delivering freedom or wealth, even to the winners. If the loss of legitimacy is widespread and deep enough, the generals and police who are supposed to be enacting the violence can and do turn against the rulers (or, at least, they stop defending the unpopular ruler). Force and repression can keep things under control for a while, but it also makes such rule more brittle. ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/why-protests-work/613420/

(Emphasis in original.)

Previously. Previously (by @Phil Landmeier (ᚠ)).

#FeetToTheFire #ZeynepTufekci #protest #legitimacy #MaxWeber

Do Protests Even Work?

It sometimes takes decades to find out.

Zenep Tufekci has written some of the best online media analysis there is. She's got landlord problems

My landlord wants me to sign a new lease that gives me only two hours notice to show the house to potential buyers, upon which I am supposed to vacate the house—and if I don't do that three times, he can evict me. Two hours notice. In the middle of a pandemic.

-- Zeynep Tufekci

https://nitter.net/zeynep/status/1313212697706668037

This is unconscionable both for Tufekci and for renters everywhere. Please give this visibility.

#landlords #TenantsRights #eviction #ZeynepTufekci #pandemic #covid19