I think that part of the issue is that most internet platforms don’t really allow for nuanced discussion. Likes and upvotes/downvotes tend to amplify simple opinions (and often drown out dissenting ones) while character limits prevent real discussion.

I also don’t get the point of digging up old tweets (except for times when you’re showing someone is a hypocrite). Times change, people’s views can change, and it’s very odd to me to go after something that’s already been in a public forum for a while. If it didn’t cause outrage at the time then why are we looking for something to be pissed off about?

Trump’s advisers, by contrast, are seeking ways to reframe his response to the coronavirus — even as the president himself largely seeks to avoid the topic because he views it as a political loser. They are sending health officials to swing states, putting doctors on TV in regional markets where the virus is surging, crafting messages on an economic recovery and writing talking points for allies to deliver to potential voters.

You can try, but when you fail that hard publicly everyone sees it for what it is.

TenuredVulture wrote:How much of this stuff is twitter and other social media, and how much of it is real life? I have facebook, but I don't use it for news. I don't have twitter, don't use reddit, or anything like that. Click bait is a problem too I guess, as it the demise of print media.

That's kind of the point, though, isn't it? People active on Twitter and reddit are... people who exist in real life. Look at td11's response to that article. "LOL at those list of people." He lives on twitter, presumably, and know who these people are. Maybe it's arrogant for you or me to say that these platforms are isolated from people's thinking.

pacino wrote:I mean JK Rowling appears to be a bigot. How is mentioning that she's a bigot a bigger problem than her being one?

Did you read what she has to say about it?

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k- ... er-issues/

Does that inform your opinion at all?

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:I mean JK Rowling appears to be a bigot. How is mentioning that she's a bigot a bigger problem than her being one?

Did you read what she has to say about it?

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k- ... er-issues/

Does that inform your opinion at all?

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

Bit of a strawman I think and one that seems to be fairly important to her reasoning here.

Augustus wrote:The feeling that "you can't say certain things anymore" comes from voices that were silenced for generations now answering back. People now feel more free to say "that's racist" or "don't talk like that around me." The "PC culture is taking my free speech" crowd sees this as oppression, because privileged people always see any slight move toward equality as oppression.

As stated above, if this person wants to spout her views without being challenged, she should log off and she should also stop claiming that free speech is what she's after.

I assume you read the article, but if not, she addressed a few of these points. In particular, she addressed the credibility issue, where people count how many checkboxes apply before evaluating whether one's opinion is worth listening to. There is a narrower set of opinions of what is considered to be acceptable speech. Some of that good, but some of that is bad.

But the other part of that article that touched home for me is the cultural shift. Are professors free to express controversial academic opinions? TV can likely attest that there is heightened risk that even well-intentioned opinions, backed by data, can be persecuted. For one example that I found with a google search, take a look at this. WTF is with this garbage?

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... ncel-final

JUburton wrote:

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:I mean JK Rowling appears to be a bigot. How is mentioning that she's a bigot a bigger problem than her being one?

Did you read what she has to say about it?

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k- ... er-issues/

Does that inform your opinion at all?

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

Bit of a strawman I think and one that seems to be fairly important to her reasoning here.

I think reasonable people can have different ideas on how laws should be crafted to protect all people.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brit ... SKBN23I3AI

Time for a TED talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haid ... =en#t-3482

Werthless wrote:

JUburton wrote:

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:I mean JK Rowling appears to be a bigot. How is mentioning that she's a bigot a bigger problem than her being one?

Did you read what she has to say about it?

https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k- ... er-issues/

Does that inform your opinion at all?

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

Bit of a strawman I think and one that seems to be fairly important to her reasoning here.

I think reasonable people can have different ideas on how laws should be crafted to protect all people.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-brit ... SKBN23I3AI

I agree but I think stating, with the obvious subtext that this will lead to a net decline in safety, is very likely completely false. You think a sex predator will all of a sudden be enabled to commit his crime because he has a government issued paper saying he can go into a womens bathroom?

I can get behind at least a conversation about whether someone should be able to change their gender by signing a piece of paper (vs a cosign by a doctor/gender identity counselor etc.) but I think to paint it as a near inherent safety issue, as she seems to be doing is not the right tact.

My point is that perhaps she's not worthy of the bigot label. And with how quick we are to label disagreements as something that is a character flaw in the other person, our discourse has eroded.

Uncle Milty wrote:Time for a TED talk

https://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haid ... =en#t-3482

I shared an article on this a while back. If I recall correctly, pacino hated it.

A win for democracy in the Supreme Court, and a 9-0 decision at that:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/suprem ... or-pledges

This sound familiar to anyone? I guess a difference is that Wallace says that he doesn't want anyone to get hurt.

She's denying existence to people and discriminating against them based on that.

pacino wrote:She's denying existence to people and discriminating against them based on that.

What does that mean?

Werthless wrote:

pacino wrote:She's denying existence to people and discriminating against them based on that.

What does that mean?

She has decided that trans women aren't true women and is using fairly spurious reasons to do this. She's doing this to legitimize her discrimination.

Werthless, tons have been written on this from a trans perspective, I encourage you to seek out and read/watch some of that

Here is a long YouTube https://youtu.be/6Avcp-e4bOs

Werthless wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:How much of this stuff is twitter and other social media, and how much of it is real life? I have facebook, but I don't use it for news. I don't have twitter, don't use reddit, or anything like that. Click bait is a problem too I guess, as it the demise of print media.

That's kind of the point, though, isn't it? People active on Twitter and reddit are... people who exist in real life. Look at td11's response to that article. "LOL at those list of people." He lives on twitter, presumably, and know who these people are. Maybe it's arrogant for you or me to say that these platforms are isolated from people's thinking.

I just wonder why people think it's important to post on and read twitter so much. First (though based on somewhat limited exposure) it's a terrible platform for anything other than a "hot take". If you want to be informed in a serious way, using twitter and reddit (and much of what gets published on the internet in general) is not an efficient use of time. The lack of editorial vetting is a huge problem throughout the internet, but these platforms seem especially vulnerable to it.

My question regarding Twitter v. real life had to do with how many people are actively participating in all this, and to what extent those "conversations" affect people who are not directly engaged in them, and to what extent those conversations matter, or should matter to people not engaged in them. There's a case to be made the attitude engendered by twitter bleeding into real life--though it seems to play out in real life more among the right than the left with the anti-BLM protests and the aggressive non-mask wearers.

Werthless wrote:

Augustus wrote:The feeling that "you can't say certain things anymore" comes from voices that were silenced for generations now answering back. People now feel more free to say "that's racist" or "don't talk like that around me." The "PC culture is taking my free speech" crowd sees this as oppression, because privileged people always see any slight move toward equality as oppression.

As stated above, if this person wants to spout her views without being challenged, she should log off and she should also stop claiming that free speech is what she's after.

I assume you read the article, but if not, she addressed a few of these points. In particular, she addressed the credibility issue, where people count how many checkboxes apply before evaluating whether one's opinion is worth listening to. There is a narrower set of opinions of what is considered to be acceptable speech. Some of that good, but some of that is bad.

But the other part of that article that touched home for me is the cultural shift. Are professors free to express controversial academic opinions? TV can likely attest that there is heightened risk that even well-intentioned opinions, backed by data, can be persecuted. For one example that I found with a google search, take a look at this. WTF is with this garbage?

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/ar ... ncel-final

We need to understand what this article is, who is behind it, and who it's targeted to.

The entire article is full of tropes used by voices in the right wing radicalization pipeline, from mis-defining intersectionality, to narratives about "walking away", to references to the Matrix and "red pilling," to identity politics being bad even though she's denouncing the one party in America that has a multiracial coalition, to the laughable idea that the threat to free speech is almost exclusively from "the left." These are the same lines that these people use every time, including many of the people she linked to like Dave Rubin, Candace Owens, etc. Her definition of intersectionality is linked from PragerU! Most of these people and organizations operate with funding from a small group of Republican mega-donors. Most of them have histories of racist behavior, such as Rubin hosting and discussing racialist pseudoscience with Stefan Molyneux, Turning Point USA leaders using racial slurs, and Ben Shapiro calling for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Now, none of this means that we can dismiss her arguments out of hand, but we should understand what this is-part of a concerted, well funded effort to stop the flood of young people and moderate voters away from Republicans and to the Democratic Party by concern trolling about free speech.

Intersectionality is not about "I have this many checkboxes so I get the conch." It is about how the various aspects of a person's identity intersect to inform and influence their experiences in society. I'll link the paper in which Kimberlee Crenshaw coined the term at the bottom. It doesn't mean white people can't talk about racism! It does mean that if a white person is constantly dismissing or belittling allegations or examples of racism, it probably has something to do with them being white. I don't think this is particularly controversial. As a stated above, a lot of the people doing this kind of critique of intersectionality are-gasp-white right wing media figures who are constantly dismissing and belittling allegations or examples of racism.

As for the Gordon Klein story, it's journalistic malpractice that US News didn't also publish the email that got him in trouble. He plays the innocent victim when talking to the reporter. Here's his email:

Thanks for your suggestion in your email below that I give black students special treatment, given the tragedy in Minnesota. Do you know the names of the classmates that are black? How can I identify them since we've been having online classes only? Are there any students that may be of mixed parentage, such as half black-half Asian? What do you suggest I do with respect to them? A full concession or just half? Also, do you have any idea if any students are from Minneapolis? I assume that they probably are especially devastated as well. I am thinking that a white student from there might be possibly even more devastated by this, especially because some might think that they're racist even if they are not. My TA is from Minneapolis, so if you don't know, I can probably ask her. Can you guide me on how you think I should achieve a "no-harm" outcome since our sole course grade is from a final exam only? One last thing strikes me: Remember that MLK famously said that people should not be evaluated based on the "color of their skin." Do you think that your request would run afoul of MLK's admonition? Thanks, G. Klein

I have a feeling that we're going to disagree about this email, but to me, it's unprofessional, rude, and profoundly stupid. It demonstrates the professor is inept at essential parts of his job, such as communicating effectively with students and assessing student learning. As I stated, I think "cancelling" individuals is not an authentic anti-racist strategy, but the way the article presented the story is misleading.

Crenshaw's paper on intersectionality: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=uclf

Good info on who funds articles like this:

https://prospect.org/justice/care-faux-free-speech-warriors-koch-brothers-paying-bills./

https://medium.com/@guineverefry/the-intellectual-dark-web-is-a-billionaire-funded-echo-chamber-8c8981b79e01

06hawkalum wrote:A win for democracy in the Supreme Court, and a 9-0 decision at that:

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/suprem ... or-pledges

TL;DR: Supreme Court rules states can sanction or remove ‘faithless' presidential electors upholding laws requiring those chosen for the Electoral College to back the popular winner in their state