zlacker

>>tosh+(OP)
Some bright spots I've noticed in the past month or so in this area, for those who care both about justice and open debate:

- 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...

>>dnissl+Tr
Carmack's comment on the Cultural Revolution was strange. The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder. McCarthyism or something might have been a better historical analog to what is happening, but it would have been pretty tricky to jujitsu that example into a slam against the left, or the kids today, or whatever was being attempted there.

The article he linked to was a little peculiar. As someone who's inclined to agree with the author about the First Amendment, the poorly thought out paragraph about racism - using a link to hate crime statistics to demonstrate the low numbers of "actual racists," but then making a remark like The statement “black lives matter” is easy to agree with if you’re a decent human being, which raises some questions about why we all have so many not-decent people (just indecent, not actual racists?) in our social media feeds - distracted from the overall message.

>>justin+VH
>The greatest problem with the Cultural Revolution, its defining characteristic in most people's minds, was all the mass murder.

I'm not sure that's true. Stipulating that it was "the greatest problem", how could it be the defining characteristic considering all the other historical instances of mass murder?

>>perl4e+Tz1
You should be sure.

Violence and extreme social distress, public humiliation sessions, public beatings were meted out rather liberally. A specifically pernicious aspect of Mao's strategam was turning generation against generation. These are the defining characteristics of Chinese Communist Party's Cultural Revolution.

>>eterna+DF1
I was practicing understatement. I think my general level of ignorance of the cultural revolution is pretty average (I'm going to read some books on it) and I didn't think of it being defined by "mass murder", but rather the things you list and italicize. Even if you had disagreed, I was characterizing popular mostly ignorant opinion based on my own, not the true nature of the period.

The public humiliation sessions are what I think most people that didn't study it think of, combined with the violence. They're what I vaguely think of; they're what you mention, and I'm confident they're what most people think of. The concept of such sessions is something that found its way into Western fiction (e.g. 80s SF) clearly inspired by the historical period. I don't recall a specific example, but this is something I always assumed was part of popular culture at some level.

While we're on that topic (popular impressions of Chinese history), a lot of people died during the "Great Leap Forward" too, but again, I don't think the average uninformed opinion of what defines it is "mass murder". When I think of that, I think of peasants trying to make steel and other social disruption.