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The latest campus cancellation is different

theatlantic.com

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Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#191

Post by civilized »

metagame wrote: post #184
civilized wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The letter you link is quite clear: MIT doesn't want to hold a scientist up as a role model if progressive activists dislike him. This wouldn't have happened at University of Chicago.

Here, I'll give a rebuttal, even though I don't think every internet comment deserves a reply, your comment included. It is an outreach event. The majority of people in developed nations live in progressive cities, and hold center-liberal to outright progressive views. Now, if you're trying to spread propaganda, good or bad, you want to do it in the most efficient way possible. Just as you wouldn't put a radical Sata…

The activists who demanded this aren't the ones who need to be persuaded on climate change.

MIT just handed the center and right-of-center, full of actual climate skeptics who need to be persuaded, another cancel culture event.

Your whole post hinges on the assumption that the prospects of fighting climate change hinge on the approval of college town progressives. In reality, their approval is the least important thing.

Of course, if the lecture is really just pandering to that audience without any interest in the larger public, then what you say makes perfect sense. It's also in 100% agreement with original comment.

You're actually just agreeing with me and don't realize it because you're lost in your own sea of words.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#192

Post by crocodiletears »

NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #147
einpoklum wrote: post #95

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…

It's really OK for you to agree with someone who doesn't share your entire set of political beliefs. There is no need to be suspicious. It's probably a bad thing for the world to be divided into "us and them", don't you think?

Group affiliation is a decent heuristic. It helps you to know what to look for when identifying whether there are concessions made to forward a larger agenda concealed within the text.

I wouldn't dismiss the document out of hand by virtue of its author's social circles, but I also wouldn't say that suspicion is entirely unwarranted. Though the CFR is such a large organization, I would also be less immediately suspicious of its rank and file.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#193

Post by whitexn--g28h »

air7 wrote: post #151
q1w2 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is an intentional misdirection by them. The important motivation is to undermine the influence of the majority white population. In that regard, it is always important to make every other ethnic group a victim and never paint anyone but white people as benefactors of systemic racism. Inconvenient data points, such as the one you describe, are intentionally omitted.

E.g. In the orignal "Women make 70 cents for every dollar a man makes" gov memo, it was also said that Asian men make 115 cents for every dolar a white man makes. That doesn't fit the narrative so it's just ignored.

The gap between white and Asian outcomes is due to immigration policies which make it easier for wealthy people to get in. The US imports rich asians who can afford to send their kids to MIT, the rich get richer ect. The gender pay gap is a different issue and doesn’t need to address immigration policy.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#194

Post by tomjen3 »

inglor_cz wrote: post #43
umvi wrote: post #3

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.

Vote in or appoint new leaders who do not give a damn about them. May backfire if too callous people are the winners. Another method, create a formal method for processing complaints from Twitter that diverts the hateful energy from individuals towards a larger decision-making body. Let us say that a random 24 people jury of MIT peers had to decide by secret ballot whether the researcher in question gets approved or…

I am pretty sure the mob would go after the entire group: those who vote for it for voting for it, and those who didn't for being part of such a group.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#195

Post by asdfasgasdgasdg »

nradov wrote: post #189
asdfasgasdgasdg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to imagine a legal approach that does not impermissibly infringe on the free association rights of all the various participants. The question is whether any other mechanism would be sufficient. If Twitter were interested, they could do something to inhibit the flow of the outrage mechanism, but there are strong free speech arguments against doing this. Also it is of course not in Twitter's own best interest. If…

Twitter management stopped caring about free speech years ago. They are no longer the "free speech wing of the free speech party". Instead they actively promote a particular brand of US progressive politics, and ban anyone who steps out of line. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/05/twitter-steps-down-fre...

I'm not saying Twitter cares about free speech. I'm saying that if we do, there's probably not much we can do legally to address this situation.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#196

Post by creata »

mawise wrote: post #118

Seems like there were two things Abbot did "wrong", one was to argue against affirmative action, and the other was to use a nazi reference to make his point. 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…

> Does anyone have first-hand knowledge of what the mob said on Twitter?

The article contains links to a few Twitter posts.[0][1] Keep in mind that they might not be representative.

Edit: also consider that your use of the word "mob" (which isn't used in the Atlantic article) might be unfair, and that the word might apply to us uninvested, nameless faces better than it does to those students and professors putting their real name down against something that actually involves them.

[0]: https://twitter.com/henrifdrake/status/1445520653830930438

[1]: https://twitter.com/NMGasparini/status/1444688917001801730

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#197

Post by ksec »

umvi wrote: post #3

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.

>Not a healthy precedent to set.

May be a precedent for MIT. UCLA [1] already had theirs and many more who didn't get the press coverage.

Luckily the Universities in UK have remain somewhat firm on the issue ( at least as far I am aware ) but are also under similar threat.

I am also glad this is the top upvoted comment. It wasn't that long ago majority of HN were not on the same side, I think the big tech censorship, while often hard to pin point the right and wrong of it, was a wake up call to a lot of people.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28714431

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#198

Post by fighterpilot »

meheleventyone wrote: post #80
fighterpilot wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don’t think it’s been confirmed that these people are left wing authoritarians. It also seems like a dangerous way to think about this as a problem rationally. You’re basically deciding the facts of the matter outside of any actual evidence or argument. Further writing people off sounds pretty authoritarian.

I regret making such a sweeping statement. I do think there are many decent people that get caught up in the cancel mob who are primarily motivated by genuine egalitarianism, and these people can surely be reasoned with.

However, at the same time I do believe that some (perhaps a small minority) of the agitators are cynically motivated by narcissism and sadism, and there's quite a bit of research which points in this direction. For example, the close connection between virtue signalling and grandiose narcissism. Reasoning with this particular subset (however small they may be) is probably not going to be productive because their actions aren't coming from a place of real egalitarianism.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#199

Post by helen___keller »

If it wasn’t Twitter it would be Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, or whatever social network is cool tomorrow.

The social media cat is out of the bag. Mob justice is, unfortunately, the purest form of democracy, untempered by government or constitution or other forms of control. The only paths forward are to live with mob justice or to enforce actions against free speech and expression (ie making it illegal to cancel someone on the institution side, or make it illegal to participate in a social media mob on the user side, or make it illegal to host a social media mob on the social network side). I don’t see those happening.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#200

Post by Aunche »

mkr-hn wrote: post #152
pjc50 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is basically it; the normal mechanisms don't work properly, and nobody in the mob has any faith that engaging with any formal process is going to achieve a result, so they complain in public. (This specific incident sounds like a storm in a teacup, but there's far more serious and less visible problems with racial discrimination in academia) Similar to #metoo. Reporting sexual harassment, assault and even rape q…

Dr. King put it best: "a riot is the language of the unheard." Some portion of the mob on Twitter is people chasing clout and performing social justice. For example: I've been attacked for "generalizing nonbinary people" by cis people while describing my own experience as a nonbinary person , so I don't doubt people like that drive a lot of the discussion, but the vast majority is sincere if sometimes misdirected ang…

>a riot is the language of the unheard

The context of this quote is in a speech that is largely anti-riot. It's a warning to the government to not be complacent, but the woke left treats as if he was condoning rioters.

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