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
Was my meaning actually unclear to you? There have been plenty of times of censorship and social strife in history. Choosing one that involved the murder of tens of thousands of people makes for an especially poor analogy to what's happening today.

The Cultural Revolution is a poor analog in other ways as well (I mean, upon examination the comparison to our current moment doesn't hold up at all and it's boring to discuss) but the large number of dead people seems like an especially important indicator that perhaps what's happening today is not as serious as all that, and that the author is engaging in some pretty extreme hyperbole. (which is their right of course, blah blah)