How Turkey Purged Its Intellectuals

A few things:

- Protests are valid free speech expressions.

- Holding an entire protest as invalid due to a small number of individual's actions is unfair.

- Many of those conservative speakers aren't trying to spread discourse, but trying to create an outrage and play off of that (evidence exists of the malignant intent). While perhaps being protected by the 1st amendment, that's academic dishonesty. And we should not accept prima facie the arguments they're being oppressed.

- The portland professor was being brought up based on academic dishonesty, human experimentation, process, and ethics. We're going to need better evidence not to take the disciplinary board at face value.

Basically "I hear about this frequently" and "there have been..." is pretty weak evidence. It's mainly relying upon the recency bias, availability cascade, base rate neglect, and our inability to assess large events.

For example, the Berkeley campus protest is constantly referred to. The problem is this is a splashy example which distorts people's thinking. People rarely talk about the thousands and thousands of conservative speakers that hold events without a hitch. We cannot talk about a systematic risk by only referring to events that are so rare that we keep on referring to the same one for the last several years! That is _by definition_ the opposite of a systematic bias/risk.

Basically I call serious BS. Lack of data, cherrypicking stark examples, and the reuse of the same events over and over again while appealing to the impression that there should be more events like this, when there are not, is garbage.

You're wrong about this. If you think that the best ideas naturally win out you're either ignorant (think of how fast bad ideas can spread), or purposefully pushing this "both sides"/horseshoe theory/false equivalence to further impede those who are actually trying to stop fascism.

The "deplatformers" you're referencing here wield entirely different magnitudes of power:

Erdogan: literally an authoritarian dictator

Carlos Maza: journalist who brought attention to the fact that hateful speech has real violent effects on people (it's important that Crowder's videos were only demonetized, not removed, or his channel suspended, and that this action was taken by Youtube).

Antifa: organization with no leadership structure, composed of citizens who are dedicated to preventing fascism from spreading, using means that are historically proven to work.

This is a role whereby he lives in close proximity to students, acts as an mentor and helps students with all sorts of things, like for example if a student was sexually assaulted - their dean is supposed to be on their side.

Students are right to question if he takes sexual assault seriously if he represents Weinstein. There are many other fine lawyers, and this was a totally voluntary job he took on.

His real job, which it certainly appears like he shirked, is to be the best advocate for his students, to help them navigate college, which is often a difficult time.

It's easy to say that his voluntary role in the defense of Weinstein has no merit or conflict with his job. But is that really true? You can say "students should grow up" or toughen up or something, but is that the kind of advice you'd offer to your own child?

I think not.

The appearance of conflict of interest is enough. That his students express discomfort and feelings of unsafe _in their own home_ was easily dismissed by this professor is additional evidence that he doesn't treat his job of dean to a residence seriously enough. "You should reason yourself so my volunteer role and job are not in conflict" is not good enough - he's putting all the effort on the weak and less powerful. And that's not right.

Ultimately the story he spins in that article is that Harvard "capitulated to a mob", but my spin is this: Harvard did the right thing by protecting the less powerful from the more powerful. And there is no disputing a tenured Harvard law professor, with tons of connections, a guaranteed for life salary, etc, is the more powerful person.