#MeToo, Freedom of Speech Gets People Fired.

this is Jonathan Chi Minh he was as you
see on screen the head of the Los Angeles Times Beijing Bureau however he also drank a lot of alcohol and had several peculiar sexual experiences in peculiar places and some accounts of that got written about on the Internet and of course there was some word-of-mouth about him now a journalist named Emily Yaffe way back in October of 2019 wrote an article presenting this guy as a kind of super victim as it says here quote he is one of the least famous least powerful men on the lists published by the New York Times in blue Berg of those who have lost their jobs in the wake of the hashtag me to movement and she makes the argument that this somehow reflects a tendency towards mob justice and as you see her on screen comparing it to hysteria about Satanism McCarthyism false memories yeah it's a bit of a stretch and the fact is it's getting harder and harder to be a bad journalist in the 21st century because all of the sources she worked from are available for us to see on the Internet here is the original account from Laura Tucker which I mentioned repeatedly in the video there's a link to it below the description here's the retort from Felicity asan nez and although the original article was back in October 2019 this is so much talked about today so many people are reading and respond to the article because it was just a few days ago now in August August 25th 2019 that Felicio Psalm has really challenged the accuracy of the journalists work let's just say hypothetically someone wrote an autobiographical account on the Internet of someone else's bad behavior let's say no laws were broken let's just say someone who got drunk and acted in a manner that was um shameful they and let's just suppose this account was completely truthful but because this account was written somebody lost their job someone's whole got turned inside out they lost their job they lost their home that to move to another place they lost their book deal I really want to challenge you does that mean that the first person was wrong to write that autobiographical account we have to make hard decisions about freedom of speech in the 21st century I have a ton of respect for Laura Tucker Laura Tucker is a woman who was living in Beijing and she wrote a completely reasonable account of her bad experience with a journalist called John Chi Minh and I was given s Jonathan Chi Minh naturally the one thing you could never legislate is reasonableness you can never write a law that says you know what we're gonna give you freedom of speech but be reasonable you know what freedom of speech it's not for everybody it's only for the reasonable people you could never do that if you allow people freedom of speech some are gonna use it in an unreasonable way but Laura Tucker link link below this video she wrote a completely reasonable account of her sexual experience with this guy John Chi Minh she does not leap to any unreasonable allegations or accusations she does not for example this is something very common in the 3/4 century she does not leap to the conclusion that this guy has a psychological problem she does not diagnose him and say that he's a narcissist she does not say that he's a sociopath she does not say she's a psychopath she does not do anything like that she has a reasonable set of reflections on this thing that happened in her life and what it meant for her she reflects on her own shortcomings and her own feelings and she reflects on the guy's shortcomings as well if she does not have the freedom of speech to write this then I don't have the freedom of speech to write my own autobiography and neither do you or you or you in the audience all right let's let's face up today I think it's important to discipline this sort of discussion about freedom of speech by asking hypothetically what law would this have broken what law could this have broken do you see I'm saying not just referring to laws statutes is today but if we think this is morally wrong how would we legislate against it what would be the limit to be imposed on it so I see absolutely nothing wrong in the conduct of Laura Tucker here you can click on the link below this video I see something here that's really important to praise because there are so many examples of this kind of controversy that begin with someone pointing the finger and calling somebody a psychopath and a sociopath and making you know criminal allegations that are unwarranted and so on going way way beyond what this account does now the problem is and the reason why this is a controversy today is that Emily Yaffe took this story and wrote a very bombastic very one-sided and frankly misleading article about it on a website called a reason calm so Emily Yaffe characterizes her own motivation she says quote my story is about the dangers of moral panics and of applying mob justice and the bazooka of social media to private relations pure meaning private sexual relationships if that was her interest she really chose a very very poor case study and there's a rebuttal I'll give the link in the description again from Felicia song mass the fundamental question here is can you judge the act by its consequences to different women tell the true story of their or sexual relationship but their sexual experience with this guy because they tell their story a couple other people a couple other witnesses apparently came forward for other other sorts of examples of drunk and bad behavior on this guy's part and that's what we're talking about here we're not talking about rape we're not talking about outright simple crimes but the guy evidently had a lot of drunken bad behavior and his employer carried out an investigation and pulled these things together it wasn't mob justice it wasn't an overnight decision Felicio sets down she tells you exactly how many months the investigation went on for and so on and the employer decided we don't want you okay now I don't know I don't know if you had a contract but you know they had a morals clause in it I don't know you know exactly the base says I don't know if some of the examples of his drunken misconduct were some of the examples of his sexual misconduct were with coworkers or at office functions or parties I don't know in that sense technically what the justification was but I mean there were big unanswered questions here for how the Internet is gonna transform human behavior okay it is now true as never before if you go out and get drunk and get stoned you can end up getting fired for point when you've had this kind of just generally immoral to psaltery behavior disreputable immature behavior it's possible now for an employer to look at that and it may be on videotape on the and it may be that people are writing into your employer and describing what happened at the nightclub one of these events that a karaoke bar and this kind of stuff and the employer is gonna look at that and say well this is not who we want representing our office this is not that we want filling this role this really shows that this person has poor judgment or is very immature or very unreliable I think that's the real story here and those are those are the real questions so this journalist Emily Yaffe tried to take the story and really turn it upside down but nobody nobody claims that he's innocent right that's what's interesting about this nobody is making false allegations both these women seem to have been very very reasonable Felicio saunas and and Laura Tucker they were both reasonable they didn't make unreasonable allegations or accusations and then secondly nobody claims this guy is innocent the version of events given by Jonathan Chi Minh it basically only differs from the accounts of these women in terms of how he felt about things or what he intended to say you know in terms of what happened where and when in terms of his actual again drunken misconduct and sexual Muskaan whatever want to say his bad behavior there's there's no real disagreement here all right the disagreement is about whether or not behavior like this going from the private sphere to the public sphere on the Internet going from being something unknown to something known what what is the morality of somebody making the decision to to take that private experience put in the Internet and it is very fundamentally the same freedom that we have in writing our own autobiography so hey this is my experience this is what happened to me and then you know what your employer can read it remembers the general public agree to you know my mother was was urging me just a couple weeks ago sorry to my mother and my mother was saying to me you know you have so interesting stories you've got to write a memoir you've got to write down a biography or a series of books that are autobiographical and I mean the irony is if I wrote an autobiography it would hurt a lot of people's feelings above all else it would probably hurt my own mother's feelings my own mother would probably one of the people the most hurt the most negatively impacted if I were to now write not a biography does freedom of speech include the right to tell the truth even if other people get hurt even if other people get fired I think the terrifying reality will live within the 21st century is that we know that it does we know that it must we know that freedom of speech would mean nothing if we can't tell the truth and hurt other people's feelings can't tell the truth and get other people fired but in this case I think that the journalists got it a hundred percent wrong because both of these women Laura Tucker and Felicity Summers deserve a lot of credit for being reasonable the challenge of the 21st century is precisely that we give people freedoms with the knowledge that a great many of them are going to make unreasonable use of those freedoms with long term consequences that they can never really take responsibility [Music]