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A university president makes a case against cowardice

newyorker.com

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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#531

Post by hsiuywbs630h »

hellotheretoday wrote: post #383
immibis wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling your employer you were a dick is extremism?

You can’t win with these people. They don’t care if they aren’t personally impacted. The “sjw boogeyman” that could theoretically impact their cushy livelihood matters more than the very real right wing government that exists right now and is disappearing people. But as long as they can still say the n word on twitter and call of duty everything will be okay. Who cares about those disappeared people anyway, they were…

Listen, this is not theoretical. In my realm, we had people getting in trouble for otherwise benign speech, because someone's feeling matter more than basic.common sense. The pendulum has swung pretty hard not because sjw bogeyman, but because it has gotten to the point people skilled in ignoring corporate idiocy had enough AND the chronic complainers were demanding increasing superpowers.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#532

Post by [deleted] »

mapt wrote: post #475

Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars. They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students. They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a pro…

[deleted]

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#534

Post by slg »

wat10000 wrote: post #500
xhkkffbf wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I’m Jewish. If you want to support me, you’ll let people protest and definitely not throw people out of the country just because they wrote something supporting Gaza.

As another Jew, the way non-Jews are using us as a cudgel to crack down on free speech certainly doesn't feel like "support". As one of history's leading targets when it comes time to scapegoat a minority, I get more antisemitic vibes from the "we have to sacrifice our American ideals to protect the Jews" folks than the "stop killing Palestinians" ones.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#535

Post by nelblu »

shellac wrote: post #408
ekianjo wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them. You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution. Pretty much in any other western government such protections do not exist and freedom of expression has been under attack for a long time

Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights is enshrined in legislation in the UK and Ireland, and offers protections for signatories of the convention. (Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)

Also Canada : https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/services/how-righ...

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#536

Post by LtWorf »

mmooss wrote: post #274
rfrey wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having judges and university trustees hired on merit rather than campaigning to be elected does not make a system autocratic.

Who chooses them? What makes you think they choose them on merit?

It's the whole theological foundation of northern european and american protestantism = being rich means good loves you, so you're a good person.

How they got there from jesus saying rich people can't go to heaven is one of those theological acrobacies they criticise so much in catholics, but don't disregard doing themselves when suits them.

Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#537

Post by hsiuywbs630h »

clonedhuman wrote: post #395
nomonnai wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an equation in what it does to people. Yes, abduction is worse than being yelled at. However, it's pointing out that the general principle has been established: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." At first, it's only removing individuals from public discourse (cancel culture), then it's removing people physically (deportation). This is always the endgame of eroding core liberal va…

Part of the problem here is that you're abstracting the actions of a handful of relatively powerless people to a principle: "People whose opinion I don't like can be banned from society." The 'I' here is, from your framing, the 'left' or something. Strawman. The fired people you're talking about weren't banned from society by the people pointing them out on the internet. If someone's on an international flight yellin…

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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#538

Post by hsiuywbs630h »

somedude895 wrote: post #473
g8oz wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.

If you're a guest, act like a guest. Anti-Israel protests are by extension a protest against the US foreign policy, so yeah... You protest your host in a violent and disruptive manner, you probably shouldn't have been allowed in to begin with.

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Re: A university president makes a case against cowardice

#540

Post by immibis »

freedomben wrote: post #476
immibis wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling your employer you were a dick is extremism?

You really don't see a problem with this? I consider myself more on the left, but this practice has always seemed highly antithetical to liberal values to me. If somebody in their off hours says something assinine, and telling (some might call that "snitching to") their employer in a public forum like Twitter (in a clear attempt to get a social media frenzy going to ultimately get them fired) is a good thing, then wo…

I agree the pervasiveness of at-will employment and the gig economy, when combined with the way our economy is set up to require employment for survival, are a problem.
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