All The Tropes Wiki Project, Part XVII

[Labster]

I know GethN7 wanted us to fall into line behind him, because he really feels strongly about it. Normally, we'd give him deference. But it's an extraordinary claim -- that a major television network is airing illegal child pornography, following a theatrical release of said pornography. And extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So we can't make a snap reaction like you expected. One random congressman calling for an investigation is not evidence, we all know we have some bad ones. My own side had Katie Hill, for instance, until she resigned.

I was an officer of the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students. So you had better believe that I understand exactly how academic freedom works. It's why I chose it as a rule at the very beginning. And the concept of academic freedom was designed for precisely situations like this one, where people may want to study concepts that are illegal or immoral. The study itself may not be immoral -- this is what institutional review boards are for. But things like studying the effects of illegal drugs, the economic impacts of communism, the security of government encryption, the sexuality of people -- these are all the sort of things that researchers should be able to speak the the truth about. If they are not allowed to speak the truth about anything, then eventually we end up with soviet-style science programs that only ever agree with the state and lead to massive famines.

> it's okay to share literary criticism on other websites here, but not to share literary criticism about it on All The Tropes

Believe it or not, this example of mine is a tenable position. If we are not mature enough to have a discussion on this, it doesn't add to the discourse of ideas. But we did this preemptively, which, again, requires extraordinary evidence.