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The latest campus cancellation is different

theatlantic.com

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Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#251

Post by civilized »

dang wrote: post #242
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.

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvotes. Besides doing no good and making boring reading, it ends up being uncollected garbage when the original comment gets corrective upvotes, as yours has. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Understood. Deleted the offending text.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#252

Post by FridayoLeary »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #146
FridayoLeary wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only things that should be compared to Nazis and Hitler should be the Nazis and Hitler themselves. I don't think that's unreasonable. [Edit: some people think it is reasonable, but they don't want to explain themselves]

I guess I'll disagree with that, Nazis and Hitler are not some holy or taboo things that must never be compared to anything else, the problem is that comparison between things becomes difficult the more emotionally charged the things being compared are, so if you are going to compare Nazis and Hitler with something else you better be really clever at making comparisons and able to fight when folks come unglued.

and who can do that? Logically what you are saying makes sense, but when applied practically it falls apart. Leading me to suggest a blanket taboo considering how hugely disrespectful and inconsiderate there comparisons are.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#253

Post by tomp »

zeckalpha wrote: post #49
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.

Ah, the Paradox of Intolerance. Who cancels the cancellers? It’s almost as though we should reserve cancellation for those seeking to exclude people from society.

We all should.

I'm generally very "pacifist" (not that this is violence, but I don't like attacking people in any sense of the word) and "live-and-let-live" on principle, but I also follow the "reverse golden rule" - i.e. I assume others are following the golden rule. Therefore:

Bullies deserve to be bullied (and, yes, let's call out this behaviour by what it is - bullying).

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#254

Post by dang »

q1w2 wrote: post #141
Causality1 wrote: post #121

Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter Fascinating. I would call this another indicator of qualitative change in the cancel phenomenon. "Classic" cancel culture was driven by highly informed activists, who in this case would've known race-agnostic acceptance benefits Asian people and is at best neutral toward white people if not harmful. Today's mobs are…

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.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar, let alone (god help us) race war. We're trying to avoid that here, for what should be obvious reasons if you've read the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#255

Post by everybodyknows »

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…

Another satire, in narrative podcast format, spoken by author Zadie Smith. Wonderfully subtle.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/19-the-new-yorker-the-writers...

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#256

Post by jefftk »

mactavish88 wrote: post #66

Weak bureaucrats are going to be the undoing of so many societies until the average person realizes that they do have genuine agency in (and a responsibility to) the world, and that the weak bureaucrat is unnecessary.

The decision was made by the chair of the department that was organizing the talk

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#257

Post by NovemberWhiskey »

crocodiletears wrote: post #192
NovemberWhiskey wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suspici…

>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.

That's exactly where the wheels come off. The implication is that individual ideas or policies should be valued based on whether they're part of a platform at the level of party politics or similar.

So what if the idea is part of someone else's larger agenda? What exactly are we threatened by?

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#258

Post by dang »

lugged wrote: post #81

> 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.

Would you please stop posting flamewar and/or flamebait comments to HN? We're trying for something else here, and comments like this contribute directly to destroying that possibility. You've done it repeatedly in this thread already. If instead you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#259

Post by thinkingemote »

gambiting wrote: post #44

Ultimately I blame Twitter and Twitter mobs for all insanity like this. World would be a much better place without Twitter.

Well many claimed that Twitter caused the Arab Spring a decade or so ago. That uprushing of democracy in the Arab states. And look how that turned out....hmm.

Re: The latest campus cancellation is different

#260

Post by Ekaros »

gambiting wrote: post #234
ramraj07 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly did Twitter itself do other than create a unique platform that is arguably valuable in its own right? Are they secretly making it more evil to make more ad money?

Just to be clear - I blame "Twitter" the platform not "Twitter" the corporation. The platform gave voice to people who want to cause outrage, whether the corporation wanted or intended that is only secondary. Maybe it's a distinction without a meaning, but it makes sense in my head.

Blame could be extended to the corporation. If they swiftly banned permanently anyone engaging in these sort of activities it wouldn't be a problem.
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