111–120 of 520 posts
Here's what seems to be a follow-up on an MIT webpage: https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa... Edit: and for what it's worth, I think many people here are too easily stirred into a frenzy based on astonishingly little information about this incident.
This wouldn't have happened at University of Chicago.
Prima facie, this is a troubling story. But after reading it I noticed the author info at the bottom, and this made me somewhat suspicious. The Council for Foreign Relations, of which Mounk is a member, is a highly-problematic US foreign policy think tank: https://monthlyreview.org/product/wall-streets-think-tank/ Then another comment here on HN got me looking at Persuasion: Apparently, Mounk runs a group/community d…
"...the department leadership concluded that the debate over both his views on diversity, equity, and inclusion and manner of presenting them were overshadowing the purpose and spirit of the Carlson Lecture"
"The Carlson Lecture is not a standard scientific talk for fellow scientists. It is an outreach event, open to the public, with a speaker who is an outstanding scientist and role model [...] to inspire young people to consider careers in STEM."
Seems fairly reasonable to me that you wouldn't want someone with divisive views on diversity giving your outreach lecture.
> MIT buckled, becoming yet another major institution in American life to demonstrate that the commitment to free speech it trumpets on its website The what? I'm an MIT alum and I cannot remember anything about a commitment to free speech on the website. I don't see one now, and I can hardly see any relevant search results for `"free speech" site:mit.edu` - a few blogs and research papers, but nothing about a commitm…
Some white people feel like they're going to be forced out of the US like the US was forced out of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Instead it's a workers' rights issue primarily (it shouldn't be so goddamned easy to fire people), and secondarily it's a problem of the commons that every venue for free speech is managed by an authoritarian institution solely motivated by its own survival and prosperity rather than any animating belief or core ethics. This is your culture on laissez-faire. Whether it's MIT or Facebook managing your culture, you're still free to give your opinion in the shower every morning.
How do we neuter the power of Twitter mobs? Seems like they can bully and intimidate any organization from universities to corporations to GitHub projects to kowtow to their demands. Their demands are usually to fire, boycott, or boot people with opinions that run afoul of the mob. Not a healthy precedent to set. We will regret this later if we continue down this path.
Ignore them. They have no power except the one you allow them to have on you.
Here's what seems to be a follow-up on an MIT webpage: https://orgchart.mit.edu/node/6/letters_to_community/importa... Edit: and for what it's worth, I think many people here are too easily stirred into a frenzy based on astonishingly little information about this incident.
> Why the Latest Campus Cancellation is Different Spoiler: it's not any different at all, the author is just red pilling and decided to tell the world about it.
Having read the article, that seems like a nonsense take. Care to explain?
It doesn’t help the Twitter interface utterly sucks at collating and quantifying the stuff in a real manner.
Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of what the mob said on Twitter? I'm curious if they differentiated between the two.
For anyone who hasn't seen it, Netflix's fiction THE CHAIR satires cancel culture in liberal institutions and their story includes someone who is canceled for using a nazi reference as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't this exactly the world that free speech / pro-liberty advocates want? I don't have any power to fire someone from their job; I'm not their boss. But I do have the right to make my views about them freely known. That's my right to free speech. And I can also decide whether to patronize their business or not. That's my right to economic freedom - to not be in an authoritarian society where the government tells me…
> I don't see any way to cancel Twitter mobs that doesn't itself uphold cancel culture and destroy liberty. An invited speaker could require a signed contract before accepting the invite. At a fairly small expense, some free speech advocate/org could have a contract drawn up that would protect invitees to some degree, pay to have a third party audit the contract (is contract auditing a thing?) to raise the chance tha…
> Why the Latest Campus Cancellation is Different Spoiler: it's not any different at all, the author is just red pilling and decided to tell the world about it.
Having read the article, that seems like a nonsense take. Care to explain?
Pretty much every example of lecturers being cancelled in the last 5 years is for the same unrelated reasons.
It's boring, so you're a fan of this one guy and suddenly it's an issue? Please.