- 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...
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.
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?
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)
Sure, but the notions of "re-education", "self-criticism" and the struggle-session as a form of public humiliation where someone is forced to admit their "crimes" before the "people" are a distinctive part of leftist social strife and oppression. And it seems quite relevant to point out that these social practices have led to mass murder in at least one instance that we know about, where they were promoted in an extensive "grassroots" campaign and thereby became widespread. We're not talking about willful and intentional physical purges of intellectuals ala Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge, where your contention that mass murder is the defining element of it all would be far more on point.