- John Carmack signal boosting[1] Sarah Downey's article "This PC witch-hunt is killing free speech, and we have to fight it"[2]
- The critical comments on the obligatory "BLM" post in r/askscience[3]
- Glenn Loury's response[4] to Brown University's letter to faculty/alumni about racial justice.
- The failure[5] of a group of folks to cancel Steven Pinker over accusations of racial insensitivity.
[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1279105937404579841
[2] https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-wi...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_li...
[4] https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism
[5] https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/12799365902367907...
Is this really a "bright spot"? Expressing a fear (without any reasoning or evidence shown as the basis for that fear) that one's opponents approve of an atrocious campaign orchestrated by a totalitarian regime?
There's a lot of room to criticize "cancel culture" and deplatforming. Comparisons with mass killings and state-orchestrated oppression is an odd choice, and (to take the other side of the fence here) with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
Coordinated attempts to ruin peoples ability to earn a living is pretty bad. It also strikes me that such economic terrorism could very well be the precursors to actual killing and state oppression. People who don't respect the right to liberty or property of others probably don't respect their right to life either.
> with about the same amount of merit as saying that people critical of BLM have similar opinions of the Nazi regime.
I agree with the point that our criticism needs to have some proportionality, but I don't think this particular comparison is entirely valid. In both the Cultural Revolution and the current Cancel Culture, the objective is the purging institutions of dissidents and the destruction of all artifacts of the old order (e.g. destruction of statues, including Frederick Douglass for some reason). Whatever the people participating in Cancel Culture believe, they are still following the Cultural Revolution template. Obviously the Cultural Revolution was far more violent, but I think that assuming such mass violence can't or won't happen here is mistaken.
On the other hand, there are plenty of critics of BLM who are quite ardently against abusive policing, but either don't think the racial component is as central to the problem of authoritarian policing as BLM claims, or object to some of the other principles of BLM that have nothing to do with race or policing.