free speech

The Tragedy of the Commons follows the theory that people can't be trusted to take care of common property without degrading it or taking more than their fair share of resources. This idea was popularized by William Forster Lloyd, who published a pamphlet in 1833 using cow herders to prove that people couldn't be trusted to share our common resources wisely. He believed property should be owned privately.

The national conversations about race and racism; police and African Americans; free speech on college campuses; “safe spaces” and hate speech and political correctness have all come together in very interesting and interlocked ways here in Connecticut recently.

On Monday, the first police officer went to trial for the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Just a few days earlier, video was released of a white police officer in Chicago shooting a black man 16 times.

This hour, we talk about race and racism with three people including Hartford resident Gareth Weston, a black man whose own daughter thought he looked like a "bad guy" when wearing a dark hooded sweatshirt. 

Events this past week at Yale and the University of Missouri have sparked intense debate about the boundaries of free speech, and whether that debate is diverting the conversation away from a culture of racism at both schools that is not easily understood by those who don't live it.

Can we separate the fight against racism from the freedom to speak openly about it? Are we hurting students on the brink of adulthood if we protect them from exposure to the cruelties of life?

Dozens of students marched to their college president's home on Sunday after racist graffiti was found in several campus bathrooms.

The graffiti read, “no n------”, with the “n” word spelled out. Sources tell WNPR that the graffiti was found in several bathrooms and in different handwriting styles.

The data breach that affected Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield in February affected more than a million and a half current and past Connecticut members. Most recently, Anthem announced they’ll be sending letters to those whose data was possibly leaked, offering them two years of free credit monitoring. We'll get an update. 

It's an idea as old as free speech itself: where does one's right to speak freely end, and the public's right to safety begin? The community at Connecticut College in New London is in the middle of trying to figure that out. 

Our topics today involve censorship, transgression, and reconciliation. 

Earlier in the week, The Nose panelists started talking about China's "dancing grannies" problem. This sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but it's real. In China's public squares, droves of people --most of them women and most of them with a little snow on their roofs -- assemble and dance, in various styles, to various kinds of music. 

Today on the Scramble, we talk to two cartoonists about the road ahead from the Charlie Hebdo massacre. I'm still wrestling with some of my own questions about what this story means to the world of satire, which I consider vitally important to the health of the world.

The success of a society depends - at least in part - on the civility of its members. Mutual respect, openness to different viewpoints...civil conversation is what we try to promote here on our show.