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[Bama Chick 28596]

I have some huge problems with some of the signatories of that letter calling out cancel culture when they themselves employ the same tactics often.

And for some of them, like JK Rowling, they’re using this to concern troll and a cover for disgusting opinions.

No one is denying her right to be a horrible person and a TERF. She’s just mad the public is calling her out.

And I sort of chuckle at a list of journalists for major publications, published authors, faculty at Ivy League universities, and billionaires complaining about their lack of ability to have free speech.

[washparkhorn 9931]

14 minutes ago, Bama Chick said:

I have some huge problems with some of the signatories of that letter 

Oh . . . there are shitbirds who signed this that definitely contributed to the problem. I agree. 

I look at the thinkers on the letter and lament their inability to speak about everything that leads them to their conclusions. We should not retreat from the pursuit of enlightenment.

[UpperWestside 6104]

18 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Counterpoint: we have “talked to” and “treated fairly as members of society” people who are happy to tell you that minorities are inferior, black people are worthless n words, etc, for far too long. Tolerating evil allows it to fester and even flourish. Some shitheels need to be crushed.

There will be collateral damage. Such is the ugly nature of humanity.

This is where I am. The time for being civil with the pieces of shit running around this country harassing and being racist towards people because of the color of their skin deserve no voice in anything that happens going forward. The other people who have blindly supported a racist president, be it the senators, congresspeople, the president's inner circle of racists or the citizens around this country that can excuse all of his horrific decisions, racist remarks and general asshattery do not deserve any kind of lifeline right now. We are well past that stage of reconciliation and onto the get the fuck out of the way of people who will attempt to clean up Dotard's unending mess.

[washparkhorn 9931]

23 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

 Some shitheels need to be crushed.

There will be collateral damage. Such is the ugly nature of humanity.

Brought to heel - definitely. 

The collateral damage is already massive. The ship is breaking up, Captain. 

[washparkhorn 9931]

2 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

This is where I am. The time for being civil with the pieces of shit running around this country harassing and being racist towards people because of the color of their skin deserve no voice in anything that happens going forward. The other people who have blindly supported a racist president, be it the senators, congresspeople, the president's inner circle of racists or the citizens around this country that can excuse all of his horrific decisions, racist remarks and general asshattery do not deserve any kind of lifeline right now. We are well past that stage of reconciliation and onto the get the fuck out of the way of people who will attempt to clean up Dotard's unending mess.

While the tribes battle, the Masters of the Universe are sneaking out the door. https://www.ianwelsh.net/americas-elites-live-by-the-rule-of-power/

. . . As of the end of April 2020, the total amount of wealth controlled by U.S. billionaires’ swelled by more than $565 billion since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.

. . . The rule of power, as composed by Thucydides twenty-five hundred years ago, is as follows: 

The Powerful Do As They Will: The Weak Suffer As They Must.

 

 

[UpperWestside 6104]

8 minutes ago, washparkhorn said:

While the tribes battle, the Masters of the Universe are sneaking out the door. https://www.ianwelsh.net/americas-elites-live-by-the-rule-of-power/

. . . As of the end of April 2020, the total amount of wealth controlled by U.S. billionaires’ swelled by more than $565 billion since the beginning of the coronavirus crisis.

. . . The rule of power, as composed by Thucydides twenty-five hundred years ago, is as follows: 

The Powerful Do As They Will: The Weak Suffer As They Must.

 

 

They haven't been forgotten. Their day of reckoning is coming as well. One of the issues that gets hammered on a lot at the protests I go to is the wealth disparity in this country. These young folks are not stupid. They see what is going on monetarily and they aren't taking it like prior generations have. They are why I have hope for this country.

[Bama Chick 28596]

lol It didn’t even take 24 hours!

One of the signatories tweets she didn’t know everyone who would be signing that open letter and she’s not comfortable being in company with some of the others.

One of the other signatories gets mad about her tweet and proceeds to internet shame her for it.

[Mole 4318]

The Satanic Verses was good, but Midnight’s Children is without a doubt the best book I’ve ever read. It was the literary equivalent of a Mahler symphony: overwhelming in scope and conception while simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. It’s a heavy and thick read, but well worth it.

Everyone should listen to Wynton Marsalis’s Blood on the Fields as well.

[washparkhorn 9931]

1 hour ago, Mole said:

The Satanic Verses was good, but Midnight’s Children is without a doubt the best book I’ve ever read. It was the literary equivalent of a Mahler symphony: overwhelming in scope and conception while simultaneously terrifying and beautiful. It’s a heavy and thick read, but well worth it.

Immersive. Wide and deep. Hell of a mind. 

[Mole 4318]

Disavowing a letter you agree with because you don’t like the people you agree with is a pretty strong indictment of our culture.

[Fudge Nuggets 19118]

5 hours ago, Message Board User said:

Thought this was an exceptionally relevant piece today and the range of signatories is impressive - David Frum, Gloria Steinem, Wynton Marsalis, Margaret Atwood, Zaid Jilani, Noam Chomsky, Kmele Foster, Salman Rushdie, Malcolm Gladwell, Garry Kasparov, and Fareed Zakaria among others.

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

A Letter on Justice and Open Debate

July 7, 2020
The below letter will be appearing in the Letters section of the magazine’s October issue. We welcome responses at letters@harpers.org

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

 

Can you work that down to less than 280 characters, please?

[Goredho 17302]

Make it a font size less than 280 while you are at it.

[wildcat09 29187]

8 hours ago, washparkhorn said:

This is undoubtedly true and quite disturbing. 

I think we presume humanity's march is always forward towards a more open society. Technology marches forward, but humanity has largely been left holding the rope and little else. We have become tribalistic - maintaining a tight control on information received and processed and basking in media silos that only bring good news and our political soap operas. That is not going to work for long. We are seeing fray on the edges already. And the pressure is still on.

The road to better days will require open conversations about ideas for the future. 

This is just absolutely false in every possible respect. The exchange of ideas is less restricted than it's ever been in American history. What's changed, and what gives some people the impression of the opposite, is (1) a few specific things that used to be considered socially acceptable and wouldn't get you fired, like public displays of racism, are now considered socially unacceptable and can get you fired, and (2) social media has enabled ordinary people to tell a certain class of people that they aren't nearly as smart as they think they are and that they actually kinda suck.

As for the letter, it manages to seem completely innocuous and plenty of good people signed it with good intent, but it's giving cover to some real dipshits. Yeah, excesses of "cancel culture" are real, though extremely overblown. There have been a few instances of people losing their jobs for what seem to me to be some pretty dumb reasons, but many if not a majority of the people who signed that letter aren't really complaining about some journalist getting fired for sharing data from a white paper. They're just people who say stupid shit and then get criticized for saying stupid shit on twitter and get angry about that. Some of them are people who have long histories of trying to get their critics fired. It's like when nazis whine about how they're just promoting free speech by spouting hate speech, or when a bigot fires someone for being gay and claims he's protected because it's his religion and we've got freedom of religion. Few people are going to say that we shouldn't have freedom of speech or freedom of religion, because those are very obviously fundamental rights that people must enjoy for any society to be considered free. But some people manipulate those concepts and use them as as swords to attack those they see as beneath them, rather than shields that universally protect everyone. Those people suck and it's actually good when people talk shit about them on twitter.

There are a lot of more serious threats to speech than some people being mean to J.K. Rowling on the internet. Right now we're seeing them all over. We've seen dozens if not hundreds of violent crackdowns by police against peaceful assemblies, we've seen dozens of far-right car attacks against peaceful assemblies, basically everyone who was involved with planning any of the protests in Ferguson has died under mysterious circumstances (they were murdered by cops), etc. Hell, if we want to be specific to journalism, private equity has eliminated tens of thousands of journalists' jobs in the past few years. Some of the people who signed that letter actually care about these things, but many of its signers absolutely do not give a shit about any of it because those are all things that happen to a lower class of people, and that's why their examples of "cancel culture" in the letter were so vague. It let them get some well intentioned people to sign on to a statement that sounded nice but was clearly just a pretext to generate exactly the kind of reaction that it generated, so the people who don't give a shit about real threats to speech could go "aha! See, this is the problem!" Which, again, the problem as they see it is that some regular people are mean to them online. 

Edited July 8, 2020 by wildcat09

[TwiceHorn 31184]

Another thing about social media, I think, is that ideas can be publicly adopted or propagated so easily and with so little effort or actual understanding and affinity groups and communities can form around them in minutes or hours.

Previously, it took some effort to put together an echo chamber.

[elfenix 34168]

facebook persecuting conservatives!  wait, no, that's backwards:

Quote

• The conservative commentator Ben Shapiro has gotten 56 million total interactions on his Facebook page in the last 30 days. That’s more than the main pages of ABC News, NBC News, The New York Times, The Washington Post and NPR combined. (Data from a different firm, NewsWhip, showed that Mr. Shapiro’s news outlet, The Daily Wire, was the No. 1 publisher on Facebook in July.)

• Facebook posts by Breitbart, the far-right news outlet, have been shared four million times in the past 30 days, roughly three times as many as posts from the official pages of every Democratic member of the U.S. Senate combined.

• The most-shared Facebook post containing the term “Black Lives Matter” over the past six months is a June video by the right-wing commentators The Hodgetwins, which calls the racial justice movement a “damn lie.” The second most-shared Black Lives Matter post? A different viral video from The Hodgetwins, this one calling the movement a “leftist lie.” (The Hodgetwins also have the 4th, 6th, and 12th most shared posts.)

• Terrence K. Williams, a conservative comedian and Trump supporter, has averaged 86,500 interactions per Facebook post in August, more than twice as many as Joe Biden, the Democratic presidential nominee, who has averaged 39,000 interactions per post. (Mr. Trump outdoes them both, naturally, with an average of 92,000 interactions per post.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/technology/what-if-facebook-is-the-real-silent-majority.html

[tantric superman 4667]