Where is the mob though? The 2 tweets referenced by the article had a total of 138 likes between them.
Searching twitter for Dorian Abbot, I couldn't find much else.
The latest campus cancellation is different
211–220 of 520 posts
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
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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Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If their goal was good PR, I'd say they have failed quite dramatically. This kind of thing is surprising from MIT and I doubt it has a lot of support among the science/engineering types. It is common to see this behavior in social sciences nowadays, but less so in engineering.
Nobody who's in the demographic of people who could be attending university in the next ten years is going to see some professor getting knocked from a position as anything noteworthy; there's no viral potential in somebody not doing a speech. But the speech, if it goes well, could have and has historically had great potential to inspire people to going into the field of climate science. Making the best impression is paramount, and you can't do so if the person heading the explicitly public relations-based charge is in a position to alienate a sizeable portion of the perspective candidates.
Meritocracy is paramount to science and engineering, and having someone with such great potential to alienate placed in a public relations role is the exact opposite of meritocratic. Abbot is well-respected in his field, and it could be meritocratic to offer him a reward for his work, but it wouldn't be to put him in a critical social position with the baggage he brings along.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#214Stop hiding and pretending you're the majority. You aren't. People know the truth.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#215Prima 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…
Debate the argument, not the argumentator.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#216Twitter is a massive echo-chamber, reinforcing their belief in themselves and most people believe them because the internet-oligarchy hides and censors different outlooks on society (not that I necessarily agree with those outlooks, but still). Best example: All of the twitter-mob was hyping themselves up about the german election, the young generation being all green, all "Generation Greta" as some called it. There…
I wonder how raising the voting age might help solve this wave of online political radicalism.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be good to pass laws that make it illegal to fire someone over a twitter mob (or any kind of mob action). Anti-mob or anti-bullying laws. And/or initiate class-action lawsuits against twitter for encouraging this kind of behavior or failing to prevent it, resulting in significant damage to people's careers. It's far from being the first time this happens, so there's definitely a case to be made that twitter…
Yes, it is largely a labor law issue. Twitter mob is not just cause for terminating the employment of someone. Using anti-defamation laws against individual bullies is another possibility.
In general, in the US, there doesn't need to be a "just cause." Someone has become a headache or embarrassment for us--for whatever unprotected reason--is sufficient.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#218He wants a system based on merit? Where should this merit come from for underrepresented groups if not from affirmative action?
Affirmative action is explicitly NOT admitting people due to merit.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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,…
> I am also glad this is the top upvoted comment. This story is only two hours old. You have to wait, at least until the U.S. west coast wakes up and enters the ring. Stories like this often swing wildly. IIRC the top comment on the "GitHub, fuck your name change" article was reasonable from my point of view for a very long time, until eventually one telling us that using the word master somehow implies subconscious…
Yes I deliberately left that point out and try not to provoke some ( or even more ) negative reaction.
My thought and observation is that there are silent majority on HN who usually dont get into these sort of discussions but are now vaguely aware of the consequences.
Also worth pointing out today is Sunday so on HN it tends to be a quiet day. Just like twitter as if anger only works from Monday to Friday.
Re: The latest campus cancellation is different
#220Seems 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…
The period of 1933-1938 offers a wealth of information on how dictatorships are set up, how a war economy is financed (quantitative easing), the march through the institutions, censorship etc.
The other obvious parallel, Stalin, is more messy because a revolution started it all. Germany went from fragile democracy to full dictatorship overnight with the enabling laws (after the Nazis had marched through the institutions for about a decade).
It is a perfect analogy and does not mean that all of the "progressive" left are Nazis (though some of them would have participated in the Nazi movement, too, because they are just power hungry and don't care about the specifics of the cause).