YouSaid · the spoken record

Suzanne Nossel

lines on the record: 29
first: 2024-12-11
most recent: 2024-12-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squad. This episode was produced by myself, Mia Sorenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. Make sure to stay tuned for the next episode as we look back on 2024 and select our 12 books of Christmas.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From a kind of negative point of that, is obviously that you're always going to have this sense of speech being kind of challenging or frightening to be like these kind of questionings of norms, right, is challenging and frightening. And if what free speech is doing in academia and particularly in history is kind of opening up the sort of stories we can tell about people, there's inevitably a backlash to that. And I think there's this kind of part of what we're often seeing in kind of the field I work in, in imperial history, is this backlash at the moment. And I think this kind of waves of kind of opening up and then backlash is something that's very common and predictable, but it doesn't make it any less alarming to be in that sort of point in the cycle.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm not sure historians are really given to optimism. I think from an optimistic perspective, and not to fully respond to the points about colonial history, but I think academia, speaking as an academic working in Britain, academia is becoming more open and the number of voices we have in academia are much wider than they were previously. And that's what's driving things like this reevaluation of colonial history, right, that we actually have much more of a reckoning with the past. And what that's doing, I think, is challenging a lot of the assumptions that people make about things like British history and opening the range of things that we can say about who we are. And there's always going to be pushback to that, but I think that's say in the book, I think actually, you know, a time of mass democracy in speech and we're at a time when academia is more open to people than ever before and people are able to speak more. I think, you know, from a”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Attack their identity or their existence or their personal experience, the stakes in debate can be very kind of academic, but they can also be very personal, and there's a difference between someone making a very kind of academic debate argument about something and somebody making a debate which kind of comes from their lived experience. And there are quite a lot of examples of debates around topics that might for some people feel like a kind of fun exercise and for some people feel like something which is really not really not up for debate. And I think that's, you know, I make arguments similar to that in the”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's not true. And that's why I use the example of evolution. We would never sort of think, oh yeah, it's a really productive debate to have people who think evolution is real and people who think evolution isn't real and we'll have this debate about it and we'll see the people who argue most persuasively. you know that's the side that's won. It's a settled argument. Quite often when people are unwilling to debate ideas, it's because it's a settled argument. We don't need to debate whether women are critical thinkers anymore, right? It's a settled argument. We know this stuff. But also for some people, there might be debate questions which seem to really kind of”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The former leader of the British National Party, for example, is that what you are saying is that the topic under debate, the sort of winner just comes down to who argues most persuasively. And what that debate structure is doing is saying, It's either of these positions could be correct. And the problem with that, or one of the problems that I set out in the book, is firstly that often”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I also think the problem with, and yeah, I use the example of evolution in the book, and this is something that has been the case in moments in Britain, where debates become the kind of target of activism or of attempted kind of cancellation because of a kind of anxiety about the topic that's being debated or perhaps the viewpoints that are being platformed on one side of it. I think what debate does as a structure is posits that either side could be valuable because that is the premise of debate that either side could win. And I think the problem with that, and we've seen this, for example, in the very famous example of the Nick Griffin Oxford University platform, Nick Griffin, for example.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think I'm very ambivalent about debate as a structure generally. I think actually there are lots of ways in which politics certainly in Britain, possibly in America as well, are really shaped by a kind of debating culture in particular elite schools and elite universities, which really prioritize the idea of being able to vocalize arguments and actually to be able to switch sides in an argument, right? So the premise of debating is that you can argue either side of an argument and that you can do that as eloquently as you want and debate competitions. You're told which side to argue for. I actually think that's quite dangerous. I think I don't think that's a great way of thinking about the world because I...”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, we can't kind of call out this behavior that the idea that if this language can be marshalled so dangerously and there is no ability to respond to it, like in the example of the book burning, like either cancel culture is powerful or it isn't, right? If it's not for love to push against that, and I agree it probably isn't, then surely it's not a problem generally. Like I don't sort of see this scenario where cancel culture is powerful enough to be worried about where it's targeting some people, but it's not powerful enough to bring down these other forces.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I think a lot of the time in these arguments we end up talking these hypotheticals, but what happened is a specific thing, which is that somebody published a specific op-ed about the fact that the National Guard should have been called into pharma blacklist matter. That's a protest, and they were fired, right? Yes, in this theoretical instance you are proposing to me, I would of course oppose that, but that's not something that, I mean, that's not something that has happened. So it's not something that I guess I think that the argument that”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Harms me, so I want to burn books about gay families, but it's not a meaningful argument. You can say those words, but it's not meaningful. The content of the argument matters as well as the structure of it, right?”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to kind of work out where the limits of that are, and I guess part of the argument I make in the essay is perhaps the limits of that should be constructed around people's kind of moral ideas and cultural ideas. But the fact that you could use these arguments to make a, you know, oh, well, you can use the idea about harm to groups to shut down. Books about gay families, for example Those arguments are being made in bad faith, and you can only use them if you're willing to accept that the arguments are detached from the actual argument at the center of it that the words aren't important. Yeah, you can, of course, you can use language around Harm to argue that being positive around gay families.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And kind of be happy in society. And I think ultimately... The kind of last point the idea that these arguments around some speech being acceptable are malleable and therefore we shouldn't use them. I mean, firstly, everywhere has a degree of limitation on free speech. We all agree actually that there is a spectrum. To different extents, but in different places. In America, actually, like commercial speech isn't protected under the First Amendment, right? There are things you can't say. You can't fraudulently advertise. Admittedly, it's a kind of capitalist framework, but there is speech you can't use. In the UK, we have hate speech legislation which sets a limit on what you can and cannot say. And so the argument is actually about where that limit should lie, not on whether that limit should exist. In lots of European countries, Holocaust denial is illegal. So we actually have accepted that some speech is unacceptable and that”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That language of projecting free speech at all costs is also the language that people use when they want to. Attack people for their identity, right? So, like the idea that freedom of speech is something which enables as diverse a society to flourish as possible is quite difficult to square with the harms that trans people feel like they're facing today in public discourse, for example, where they feel like their identity is constantly under threat because of the proliferation of hate speech. Or, for example, Haishan people living in Springfield who feel that the fact that JD Fance can talk about the idea that this migrant group are killing and eating pets, that speech is putting their identity directly under attack and under a spotlight. I don't think we can say that freedom of speech is something which always has these kind of positives for people being able to kind of live.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I guess I just don't think it's a bad thing for people to face consequences for doing bad things. I know that sounds very simplistic. I think going back to this point of freedom of speech being important because it enables people to sort of express their identity or this idea that it's important for the development of sort of social ideas about identity and for people to kind of in different groups. I think part of what I talk about in my essay is that often where the tension comes in questions around freedom of speech are around people's rights to assert their identity against people who want to shut that down or want to critique that, right? And that when you're talking about freedom of speech and as freedom of speech is something that needs to be protected as far as possible at all costs because it's something that enables people to sort of have the fullest expression of their personal identity. I mean”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some people obviously, you know, of course, some people do have a problem with that. I think it's okay to face consequences for professional choices that you make. And I mean, actually, certainly in the States, there are lots of at-will states, right, where people can be fired for all sorts of things. He was fired for doing something that, I mean, ultimately brought the paper into disrepute, caused kind of anxiety and tension among his workforce, put a huge amount of tension actually on the commissioning process at that newspaper rather than the news that was being published. There are all sorts of reasons why actually his position became untenable.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think, and there's a couple of things I'll respond to there, but I'll start with this one. I think ultimately, like. I don't personally have a problem with someone facing career consequences for publishing Tom Cotton saying that the National Guard should be used to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For most people, this is like a sort of brief storm of critique, and then they kind of find themselves back in public spaces able to speak again. And so even the language around it is used to invoke this sense of, oh, this speaker is being kind of held to account unfairly or this critique is unfair. But of course, actually, this often isn't the case at all. And this idea about cancellation is often that these people who actually often have very little structural or systemic power are critiquing somebody who's speaking and kind of pushing back on their arguments. The person who's speaking often does have structural Systemic power, but takes even that degree of critique as being unreasonable or unfair.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of the time in these dialogues around cancellation, figures who claim that they have been cancelled, a lot of the time what this is is that people want the right to be able to talk however they want without facing consequences. And when they experience pushback or critique, and it often, you know, even the use of the term cancellation, the idea of being cancelled, like what does that invoke? The idea of being completely wiped out, of like... In a public space, right? But of course, that's not what happens to almost everybody who has gone through a kind of cancellation.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time when we kind of think about how this works, so much of the time this kind of call for freedom of speech or for speech to be protected is from positions of power aimed at people who are less powerful. And so you have this sort of sense that actually that whilst of course it's very important these kind of legal frameworks are very important, the discussion is often not, you know, that people are kind of invoking those rights to talk about a form of censure or a form of kind of freedom of speech which isn't in the same register, isn't happening in the same space at all.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Difference, I think, in our arguments is that most of the time today when we hear people talking about freedom of speech and much of the debate about this is thinking about consequences which are not legal consequences. So much of the time when people are talking about this, what they're talking about is cultural vilification or social shunning or even kind of things like economic consequences such as your employer firing you, which are clearly consequences that people face, but they're not consequences which are kind of full within that kind of legal framework. And I think also when we're thinking about this in terms of power structures, so much of the time when we're talking about who gets to kind of speak without censure, we behave as if the person speaking is always the underdog, it's always the person whose speech has to be protected. But a lot of the”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course, the legal protections for freedom of speech such as those that you outline in the American Constitution, in Europe, the ones that we have through the European Court of Human Rights, or the various different ways in which freedom of speech is protected theoretically in Britain protect you from what we understand to be the major threat to freedom of speech, which is that your government might persecute you, right? And in my essay, I talk about this, that there are lots of different ways in which we might consider speech to be threatened. And obviously, a very important element of this is the idea that you need to have legal protection from your own government or from authorities above you in order to have kind of freedom of speech.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this scenario, conservative speech, the outcry about cancel culture is almost always aimed at shutting down progressive speech and silencing progressive voices. And we shouldn't let it. Marginalised groups are less likely to be given platforms for their ideas, they're less likely to find support to develop their writing and their advocacy, and they're less likely to be defended against criticism and attack. And yet we are living in a moment where people have more ability to broadcast their ideas globally than ever before. The internet has been enormously democratizing in terms of who gets to speak and who is able to listen. Some of this democracy to the people who are used to speaking without feedback might feel alarming. But council culture is often simply the anger of the previously underheard being made suddenly visible. The freedom of speech for more people at a higher volume than ever before. Thank you.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some unmistakable way. Instead of reckoning with the ways that a speech can hurt and harm, criticism has been mislabelled as silencing or often as cancellation. Of course, sometimes critique is an attempt to silence people, to neutralize or to rebut someone's views, to the point that no one takes them seriously anymore. And sometimes, yes, it takes the form of telling people to shut up. But is this silencing, is this cancellation, or is it simply part of having a conversation? Perhaps those who do not want to be criticized, perhaps those who don't want to be told to shut up, are people who have historically found themselves most easily able to make themselves heard. In the end, I think it is profoundly unserious to respond to criticism of your views by claiming that your speech is being threatened or that you are being cancelled. In fact, far from cancel culture meaningfully attacking speech and often”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those who argue that free speech is under threat too often dance around the actual words being said and they treat speech in the abstract. But speech is an action, it's not an abstraction, and speaking is not something you do, it's something you do to others. A speaker commands, demands, requests, pleads or asserts. Those who listen will at some point at some level be affected for good or ill whether they like it or not. The law recognizes this, which is why inciting violence is a criminal act regardless of whether the violence occurs or not. Free speech advocates often defend offensive speech as brave, but there is nothing brave about using your relative power and position to attack and perhaps endanger a person or a group more vulnerable than yourself. Even George Orwell in his very famous and often quoted defensive free speech qualified this freedom, saying, everyone shall have the right to say and to print what he believes to be the truth”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Culture represents a moral reckoning with an inequitable society that far from attacking free speech actually brings more people into public and political discourse by uplifting the voices and perspectives of a wider range of people. Many people who argue that freedom of speech is newly under threat in this moment disregard the inequalities of speech. It is far easier to speak your truth if you do not have to worry about what others think, and it is far easier to live without approval if you have the power to resist criticism or the means to go it alone. Historically, it has always been those with power who found it easiest to speak their mind without meaningful opposition. For most people, the problem has been making themselves heard at all. Social media has changed this significantly in some ways, but only a minority have access to the publishing and broadcasting apparatus that still have the power to lend a speaker serious authority and credibility and influence.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terrifying. It is spooky season. The spectre of the woke mob is used to invoke the fear that anybody can be cancelled for their views or ideas at any time, that our ability to speak is constantly being policed and controlled by undergraduate students and furious TikTokers. Cancel culture does not represent an overwhelming threat to freedom of speech. Most people who claim to be cancelled have not meaningfully had their ability to broadcast their views curtailed. They certainly seem to find plenty of venues in which to discuss their cancellation. And many people who railed against cancel culture are concerned less with free speech in the abstract and more with their right to say specific”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Imagine if powerful people faced any consequences at all for their speech. Imagine if people who use their speech to whip up hatred for marginalised groups could be held to account for that. The kind of too long didn't read of my essay in that book is Council Culture doesn't really exist, but perhaps it should. As a historian, I'm always wary of claims that things are worse than ever. And the recent panic about cancel culture derives from the fear that certain political or cultural views have been deemed unacceptable by a hypersensitive, self-righteous group that has taken it upon himself to police what people can say, write or even think the woke mob.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A historian, I am skeptical of counterfactual history, but perhaps you'll join me in a thought experiment. Imagine if Trump had really and truly been cancelled when the American people heard him say that he could grab women by the pussy and because he was a star they would let him.”
2024-12-11 · Intelligence Squared · The 12 Books of Christmas | Think Again: Is Free Speech Under Threat? with Suzanne Nossel and Charlotte Lydia Riley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT