This is dreadful. It seems more widespread than anything I've heard about in the US, but chillingly I fear the difference is only in degree, not kind. Plenty of Americans have been shamed and persecuted for holding "unacceptable" views, including views that were widely accepted not so long ago. Ideally articles like this will scare us away from wandering further down that path, but I'm not optimistic.
The students who demand her firing, Camille Paglia argues, take prosperity for granted, are socially undeveloped, and know little about Western history. Who’s Moses?
Identity politics is such made up right-wing bullshit. It's clear that you have to belong to a certain group to discuss anything to do with them, unless you are telling minorities what's best for them because you know better.
People are not getting their views strawmanned leading to their characters and careers being destroyed and being inundated with death threats unless they deserve it, clearly.
Considering how PC advocates doxxes people holding other political views, and the backfire that caused today's Trump situation, this should be dreaded!
Outside of racism, sexism and homophobia, I'm not sure what you are referring to. Any examples?
Climate change denial too. Sure. My point is these views generate real harm to society. How do we progress if large segments of society considers other segments genetically inferior, worthy of extermination?
Religion is another.
Did I miss any? What view was recently acceptable but is no longer?
- Called racist and sexist if you disapprove of affirmative action in schools or the workplace (which by the way, polls consistently have shown the majority of Americans disapprove of AA)
- Called transphobic if you don't want transgender women competing in sports with biological women, because of the unfair advantage
- Called homophobic if you think gay pride parades are not a good idea (even if you're not anti-gay, you just think parades in general are disruptive to cities and streets, and also don't want almost-naked leathered men walking around your neighborhood)
- Called sexist if you suggest that rape victims should go to the police as soon as possible after, rather than wait months or years later. Or that perhaps universities shouldn't be acting like courts without due process, and cases should go to the police instead.
- And do you remember when Firefox's CEO was forced to resign because he donated to an anti-gay marriage prop (that actually won with >50% of the vote?) I mean, maybe the guy was just for civil unions instead, who knows what his reasoning was.
None of these views would make someone actually racist or sexist but they are unacceptable to say publicly in left-leaning places like Silicon Valley.
Parades don't hurt anything - violent parades might be said to be harmful but gay pride parades aren't violent. You'll have to come up with a good reason to justify a claim that gay pride parades hurt anything. There's a complex line separating racists and independent thinkers who have some uncommon view, that difference between "people are mean to me and I can't express my minority opinions safely" and "my horrible beliefs should just be accepted". Saying gay parades are a bad idea is close to claiming that allowing gay people (tolerating their existence) is a bad idea as I see it. There are gay people. They don't hurt anything. There are women programmers, they don't hurt anything and encouraging more women to become programmers should help us make better software that is germane to more situations.
Today no one can reasonably claim that there was any good by laws prohibiting black and white people from marrying or having children. Yet until recently (say 1970s) this was a very common view! Probably in my southern state it was a view into the 1990s. Claiming that polls show the majority of people oppose AA isn't adequate to argue either direction.
>There are women programmers, they don't hurt anything and encouraging more women to become programmers should help us make better software that is germane to more situations.
That is neither the stated reason for affirmative action, nor supported by any evidence that I am aware of. Code is code. Affirmative action is usually framed as a fairness issue, not a pragmatic one.
Be wary of pretending that ideological issues are pragmatic ones to convince people - it tends to backfire when the facts decide not to play ball. As a slightly silly but plausible example, what if it turned out that same-sex software teams consistently wrote better code than mixed sex? You can no longer say "they don't hurt anything". You'd have cornered yourself.
Personally I'm of the view that most ideological arguments can in fact be boiled down to pragmatic ones. But people are not usually fully conscious of the pragmatic observations throughout their lives that have fed into their ideologies, and so - while they sense that they hold their views for a good reason - they often get the reason wrong. Better to admit that you're not sure why you believe something than to make stuff up.
One can think that parades in general are disruptive but should still be allowed due to the right to free assembly, and you did not address the "almost naked leathered men". Which I don't think is a big deal, but I can sort of understand the whole "think of the children" argument.
And the problem is that everyone deviating from the party line is strawmanned into "having horrible views" and thus it's perfectly okay to harass them mercilessly and cause them economic harm just for being stupid or whatever.
> (which by the way, polls consistently have shown the majority of Americans disapprove of AA)
Popular opinion does not make something right or wrong. I have no opinion on AA, but sometimes, needed measures are unpopular.
> Called homophobic if you think gay pride parades are not a good idea [...] and also don't want almost-naked leathered men walking around your neighborhood)
This is only non-homophobic if the same non-want is applied to women, e.g. at some types of carnivals. Then you're just a prude ;)
> Called sexist if you suggest that rape victims should go to the police as soon as possible after, rather than wait months or years later.
I wouldn't call this opinion sexist, just ignorant. Yes, going ASAP is definitively recommended, but if you listen to testimonies of victims (I can recommend the Guilty Feminist podcast, which talks about this topic every now and then), violence of any sort but especially sexual violence can instill deep, long-lasting emotional trouble that people struggle hard to deal with, making them unable to go the authorities. It's as if you told someone with clinical depression to pull themselves together.
(Edit, addendum: also think of rape that happens in relationships with a power asymmetry. Reporting the perpetrator immediately might get you into even more trouble)
Note the common theme that sexual violence often goes on for a long time or is buried under silence before it comes to light. Think e.g. of the reports about children being abused by church clerics or by teachers in certain boarding schools. This is not an easy topic with a simple "duh, just go to the authorities" solution.
> >I mean, maybe the guy was just for civil unions instead, who knows what his reasoning was.
> Does that sound likely to you?
So you're for running people out of their jobs when they take a political position you don't like, because you know what their likely motives for doing so are? You think that's the moral thing to do? You don't see any problems with, say, false positives?
And even if you think your judgement will be accurate, be careful. You're setting the precedent of someone else judging your likely motives, and therefore running you out of your job.
This is not a wise way to run a society. It's better not to go there.
>Outside of racism, sexism and homophobia, I'm not sure what you are referring to. Any examples?
The above would be a good example itself.
What's quite often branded "racism, sexism, and homophobia" could be nothing like a racist/sexist/homophobe bigot from 10-20 years ago, and just what most would consider totally normal then.
E.g. two guys making a "dongle" joke (when a dongle was shown on screen) among themselves at a conference, and being fired for it.
Or somebody believing a 6 or 10 year old child is not old enough to decide and be helped on things like "sexual transition" (and that in many cases it's the parents using it for their 15 minutes of fame and "you're so brave" kudos).
Or somebody calling out trans men who simultaneously identify as lesbians and want lesbians to have sex with them else they deem them TERFs, or want to compete in women's sports events
Or people who don't think asking to perform a sexual act, getting the OK, and then doing it (like Louis CK) is horrible sexism (or it is because you're more famous than the person who consented).
In fact even daring to question such cases (which wouldn't be considered bigotry or sexism or whatever 10 or 20 years ago, even among progressives), is enough to brand someone as a bigot. Heck, even someone like Camille Paglia gets the same slack...
What if I told you that just because I have a different opinion than you about people who don't identity with their biological gender doesn't mean I think some segment of the population is worthy of extermination?
Your post proves the OP's point. They implied that they have a different point of view on _something_, & you've attacked them for it
Do you believe all views you consider acceptable today will be correct in a decade? You can instead make the argument that our views are monotonically converging towards "the right view" but that's acting like something can never reemerge from being out of fashion
& consider this: acceptable is within your subculture. How are you going to interact with a different subculture that doesn't hold your views? Cultures need to avoid shouting down anyone who votes differently at the ballot box
Doxxing / humanflesh search typically gets filtered by the great firewall because it promotes "activism", occasionally it's also weaponized. That said this isn't exactly a novel phenomenon, HK protestors has been doxxing police family for the last few months but of course that doesn't get much coverage here [1]. It's only remarkable in the sense that China (supposedly) isn't cracking down on it, implying state endorsement. I wonder if there's actual change in GFW policy, humanflesh doxxes usually get deleted after a period of time based on specific triggers (reach X critical shares, influence real life activity), is that not happening now or is this just business as usual?
It’s more of an unfortunate misinterpretation IMO. The translation is quite literal, but does not imply the same concept in Chinese as in English.
The 人肉 part originally means human as in “the human calculator” or similar expressions. A “human search engine” (or more colloquially here in Taiwan, a human Google) is someone super good at finding information most can’t, and that expression is then turned into the verb.
I would say to those who identified with aggressors have to project what broke them on those who resist it.
Being silent is support, and people like Stephen Hawking would know nobody who think it's perfectly acceptable in polite society to be obedient and quiet. Alan Turing might have recognized the murderous cowardice inherent in it, too. One wouldn't know from those making selfies with the dead, and I wish the dead could speak, and scream "begone, I never knew you" where applicable.
All it takes is for supposedly good people to do nothing. We understand that that is true about things that are static and behind glass, with the same little effort with which we pretend it's not true for things that are ongoing and ask for our position. We join in condemning tyrants of the past, and praising their victims in the past -- but how we (fail to) act in the present is what descides if that incense is sweet or reeks to high heaven.
> You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be. And one day, some great opportunity stands before you and calls you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. And you refuse to do it because you are afraid... You refuse to do it because you want to live longer... You're afraid that you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity, or you're afraid someone will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house; so you refuse to take the stand.
> Well, you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I know that some people don't like to hear that. I don't like those people.
Legal remedy? This is what the state wants; as far as the legal system is concerned, if you’re doxxed, it’s because you’re a de facto enemy of the state. The future of China looks like the Cultural Revolution implemented as a “human flesh search engine.”
