Sometimes, watching the ideological left get played like a fiddle by the more sociopathic elements of the right makes for interesting fare.
Take Ann Coulter. Oh please, Death, take Ann Coulter. (Ok, so we’re agnostic here and shouldn’t anthropomorphize Death. But you get the point.)
Last week, Coulter gained international headlines by cancelling her own speech at the University of Ottawa, claiming death threats from students. Given that there likely isn’t a day that goes by without Coulter having her life threatened, it was a pathetic excuse, spun beautifully into “see, Liberals don’t like free speech.”
Of course they don’t. Nobody who’s ideologically entrenched — conservative, liberal or otherwise, likes free speech. That’s brain chemistry and conditioning for you.
But it’s also besides the point: the only real scandal here is that a supposed insitute of higher learning, the U of Ottawa, would book such a vapid assclown in the first place. Coulter is an old-fashioned provocateur, with a penchant for making her bones off of supports on the right. Her entreaties to kill muslims and jail liberals are comically stupid, the kind of nonsense that has no basis in rational thought.
So free speech wasn’t really the issue. The issue is why a university would book a demagogue in the first place.
Hmm…..let’s see: money, maybe? Attention? The kind of prestige one gets from being on CNN and Fox (even for something heinous)?
There’s an example that plainly illustrate the stupidity involved in “The Coulter Effect”, the willingness of some members of society to band with anyone they think might bring them personal gain. The first comes from the classic Monty Python movie “The Life of Brian.”
Brian of Nazareth, reluctant prophet, falls out of a window while hiding behind a curtain. He lands in a public square, where soapboxes have been set up so that people who have an opinion can rant without causing any public distress (sort of an early-stage internet.)
Is the guy on top any less sensible than Ann Coulter? Hell no. In fact, his insistence that "there will be in that time, rumours of things going astray" is more rational than anything Coulter's ever spewed. And still a University gave her a paid forum. Maybe it's a function of better hair.
All of the other prophets are irrational, rambling, idiotic:
Prophet 1: “And the bezan shall be huge and black, and the eyes thereof red with the blood of living creatures, and the whore of Babylon shall ride forth on a three-headed serpent, and throughout the lands, there’ll be a great rubbing of parts. Yeeah…
Prophet 2: “For the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners, sinners just like you, sir, there, and the horns shall be on the head, with which he will…”
Prophet 3: “There shall, in that time, be rumors of things going astray, erm, and there shall be a great confusion as to where things really are, and nobody will really know where lieth those little things wi– with the sort of raffia work base that has an attachment. At this time, a friend shall lose his friend’s hammer and the young shall not know where lieth the things possessed by their fathers that their fathers put there only just the night before, about eight o’clock. Yea, it is written in the book of Cyril that, in that time, shall the third one…
Notably, even in Biblical times, almost everyone watching is laughing at them. But no one is offering them a broader pulpit and a fat cheque for their silliness, because rambling either sociopathically or nonsensically about issues of faith and politics is something the terminally dim just do.
So why did the U of Ottawa think giving Coulter a more prominent — and easily manipulated — soapbox would, in any way, be educational or thought-provoking? How did elevating this fool to the level of someone to be taken seriously benefit students, on any level?
Even Coulter’s most ardent defenders — mostly idiots on the right who rushed to her “defense” without even checkinf first who cancelled the speech — did so under protest. Columnist after columnist defended not what she says, but her right to say it.
When even other ideological demagogues think someone is vapid and full of shit, what exactly is that person doing being booked at an institution of “higher learning” in the first place?
Probably for the same reason that U.S colleges give free rides to basketball players who can barely spell their own names: money and celebrity.
The whole lot of them should be post-secondarily institutionalized.
Slightly More Upright 
My take on attitudes towards free speech: We all want it for ourselves and our allies; few are equally in favour where their opponents are concerned.
Coulter is not even a blip on the radar screen here in Germany, so I cannot speak of the details of the rest of the post; however, being enrolled or working at a university does not automatically make someone intelligent (in fact, there are many disturbingly stupid people to be found there), and I would actually expect universities to go for “names” when hiring speakers—even if the names have nothing of value to say.
Assuming we have allies.
Seriously, there are a lot of fairly rational people out there — we may only be 2% of the pop, but whatever — who aren’t left, or right, but generally decide issues on the facts at hand.
Sure, you can talk about the relevancy of the facts at hand, but that’s more an issue of the intelligence of the person making the decision.
Given that — and the necessity for the free flow of information to reach the best position — it’s quite fair to say that most people who aren’t ideological and don’t need faith/suffer from relatively easily reached cognitive dissonance would quite happily let both sides yap for hours.