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Resignation Letter

bariweiss.com

591–600 of 716 posts

Re: Resignation Letter

#591

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rioters were already burning buildings and looting stores. That is why Tom Cotton proposed sending in the military. It was fighting violence with violence. Again, I disagree with sending in the military, but preventing the progressive readership of the NYT from hearing about an opinion that 58% of Americans hold is simply coddling them and keeping them away from bad thoughts. We need an informed citizenry, not on…

Then cover it as news. "Tom Cotton supports sending military troops to suppress peaceful protests" is a headline.

Burning down buildings and looting is "peaceful" to you?

How about spreading Covid during a lockdown? Is that peaceful as well?

Take a moment and watch this video, out of Novato... https://streamable.com/58kma9

These are senior citizens, in a 85% liberal area, who are trying to support local business during a pandemic, and they potentially just contracted Covid which could easily kill them, for what?

Re: Resignation Letter

#592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you saying? You think, "I hope you get raped" is a critical response?

Do you think that's the extent of people's criticisms of Bari? But I'm sure such dogged defenders of free speech normally send other reporters after people to acccuse them of being anti-Semitic for a joke about them on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hels/status/1283092586392178695?s=20

I could care less about Bari's horrible writing. I am just saying that bullying her on Slack is not correct response.

Re: Resignation Letter

#593
post #124

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[flagged]

No, her complaint is that there is an orthodoxy at all, instead of openness to debate and willingness to consider divergent opinions. If you're going to make the case that her stated complaints are made in bad faith, you need to bring some evidence to bear, or you're just indulging in ad hominem name-calling.

Debate only works if one side isn't arguing in bad faith.

We should simply allow political stances that have real harm to simply run amok with "debate"? That got us 140,000 dead.

Yeah, I'm kinda done with the "debate" idea. It's time to bring "consequence" to people's political stances.

The only reason people are bitching about "cancel culture" is that they finally have to face some consequence for their political stances.

The problem I have with "cancel culture" is that it feels like "animal rights" activists that throw paint on old ladies but leave Hell's Angels alone. "Cancel culture" only seems to attack people who won't do real damage if they fight back--somehow I don't see Trump, McConnell, etc. suffering very much.

Re: Resignation Letter

#594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"coalesce into slanderous mobs" Now, of course "the mob" can get things wrong. We see it all the time — and it's not a progressive or "cancel culture" thing specifically. It's just a side effect of these very rapid and short-burst communication platforms that many people use these days. And I'd frankly argue that the fact that bad information is so easy spread has been used to very harmful effect not by progressives…

> But that doesn't mean it's wrong People aren't just expressing their opinion. Instead a whole bunch of people are engaging in actual illegal harassment, when these mobs start up. No, I am not talking about criticism. I am talking about the actual harassment that often comes out of these mobs. Harassment such as death threats to you, your friends and your family, and the like, all because someone said something dumb…

When we debate cancellation, we're mostly debating other kinds of harassment: doxxing, pressuring one's employer to terminate an employee, and defamation. Specifically, we're talking about harassment campaigns--in other words, large movements that engage in any of these behaviors for the purpose of punishing wrongthink. While these mobs have a few people who make death threats, there aren't usually large enough numbers of these threats to constitute a campaign, and even if there were, I like to think that even cancellation advocates would consider this out-of-bounds of acceptable behavior. The debate mostly revolves around the question of whether these harassment campaigns constitute criticism ("the opponents of cancellation just don't want to be criticized" and all that). Of course, harassment is never criticism, and it's always morally repugnant; however, sometimes harassment is legal either in theory (e.g., afaik there is no legal prohibition against doxing) and other times it's legal in practice (e.g., 'defamation' is illegal in theory but the burden of proof is absurdly high).

From the perspective of free speech ideals, "speech" is the expression of an idea; it may be "persuasion" but not "coercion" or "intimidation". Cancellation is both coercive and intimidating by design and by definition, so it falls outside of the boundaries of 'speech'; however, not everything that violates free speech ideals is illegal to the great glee of free speech opponents.

Re: Resignation Letter

#595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are bullying and harassing people, and trying to lump that in with "criticism". To make it worse, when they get called out on it, the left goes to victim blaming. It is just gross, like when people point out what a girl was wearing in a sexual assault case. You can criticize, you can ignore and you can boycott. Instead too many people (look at the response to JK Rowling) are threatening death and rape. Or are ha…

The vast majority of the criticism Rowling has received was not death or rape threats. Why do you ascribe that behavior to the entire "woke-left" (I'm assuming thats who you meant by "they"). Do you not think that targets of the right ever receive rape or death threats? These are not characteristic of the left. There is not some "woke-left" governing body directing people and asking some to give cover so that others…

I don't understand why I can't condone bullying or rape threats. I am on the left, I hate it when the right does it too. There is this sentiment though that bulling, threats, doxing, and getting someone fired are "consequences" of free speech. Even though this is happening to people I happen disagree with, I still don't think it is right. I don't think the entire left is like this, but I never have to read to far down on Twitter before I find someone exhibiting these bad behaviors.

Re: Resignation Letter

#596

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> Right/conservative political philosophy is fundamentally not. > Conservatives believe that even if we are all human, we do not all have enough in common to be able to form a cohesive, coherent society. Conservatives believe that there are good and bad people and that they can identify and assign people to each group. You're assigning beliefs and motives to other people's actions. Looking beyond the internet groups…

[flagged]

Re: Resignation Letter

#597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's politicizing a totally nonpolitical issue. She was totally fine until she live-tweeted public insults about her co workers during a company meeting. If it were not for her politicizing the issue she would be immediately fired.

You could have made that point if they had not just purged the leadership of the opinion section because they dared to publish some republicans opinion piece. When even international press criticise what they did at NY Times it you know you have a problem.

The one guy that got purged admitted to not reading an article before approving it for publication. That person would've been fired under any normal circumstance with great fanfare.

Re: Resignation Letter

#598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are getting low level employees fired from their jobs This is an interesting intersection. It either implies that all employers are left-aligned (not true) and therefore willing to fire employees that hold right-leaning opinions, OR that low level employees are so expendable that it literally any reason can get them fired if enough people complain.

I think HR departments just want to offload risk and they'll take advantage of loose labor laws to offload an employee who got mobbed online. I don't ascribe a right or left bias to them. It's the mob that has the bias (perhaps because of age or ideology or certainty or something else) and the mob uses the technology and then the HR department responds by firing the employee.

> I don't ascribe a right or left bias to them.

My personal experience is a lot of HR departments do have a left-of-center bias to them, especially at the lower-levels (but at times reaching all the way to the top). A few reasons:

1) HR departments tend to skew female, and women on average skew somewhat more left-of-center than men do

2) They often have special teams for "diversity & inclusion", which inevitably tend to be filled with people with left-of-center political views

3) They'll put requirements like "commitment to diversity & inclusion" in job descriptions, which can (ironically) act as a filter to remove political diversity. Those phrases can get copy-and-pasted into job descriptions in other departments too, but while for many in engineering/sales/etc it is just compliance boilerplate with little real significance to the hiring process, HR really means it.

Of course this isn't universally true, I'm sure there are some HR departments out there full of Trump supporters. But most of the people here would not be working for those kinds of companies.

Re: Resignation Letter

#599
post #541
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect we have some "deep staters" in attendance. Everything you know, you don't. Everything you believe is false. A liberal conspiracy exists and it's hiding in plain sight. If you ignore these "throw the baby out with the bathwater" comments, some good discussion is being had.

...and it's the others who believe in conspiracy theories? The "deep staters" you call them?

I didn't invent it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_state_in_the_United_State...

I discovered it on July 4 when people I passingly know on FB took a pledge to QAnon. Looking up QAnon brought me to the Deep State conspiracy belief.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon

One characteristic of it is a deep distrust of "the media".

Re: Resignation Letter

#600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Can't anyone there see past the current insanity and think? "To be inclusive, we have to get rid of her"? Don't they even hear the words coming out of their own mouths? This confuses a lot of people, but the explanation is simple: it is the Paradox of Tolerance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance Namely, not tolerating someone, who themselves espouse intolerant views and give voice to intolerant ex…

By my understanding, Popper didn’t mean the “paradox of tolerance” in quite the way you think. It wasn’t meant to be used preemptively. It basically meant: when some group starts resorting to actual, literal violence, actual, literal violence is justified to stop them. The classic example of this are the Nazis, who engaged in actual armed violence for about a decade before ever taking power. To this point, Bari Weiss…

I'm keeping this around. It's pretty much game, set, match.
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