- 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.
They could also not be. Even the phrasing of "economic terrorism" stretches both the terminology of economy and terrorism beyond what most people would consider by the terms.
> People who don't respect the right to liberty or property of others probably don't respect their right to life either.
Which of the 'cancel culture' advocates don't respect the right to liberty? I can understand they have arguments against the right to (private) property, but this seems far more abstract.
>the objective is the purging institutions of dissidents and the destruction of all artifacts of the old order
I have some recollection of Marcuse's argument that the qualitative, historical, and social differences between terrors and movements are increasingly being reduced to nothing by the popular consciousness who is only acquainted with them through one-off facts and cherry picking...
>Whatever the people participating in Cancel Culture believe, they are still following the Cultural Revolution template.
What is sufficient to constitute a 'template' here? Let me provide a concrete example; the anarchists of old frequently argued against the notion of human rights, the state, and property. Marx and his followers did the same. Who is following who's template here? As another commenter in this thread pointed out, when most people think of the cultural revolution, they're really not thinking about tearing down statues or call-outs on social media (or even newspapers!) from a mob only given power by association (and not, say, the state or weaponry).
The comparison is almost entirely bunk, and it's a little surprising that Mao's atrocities are being reduced to tearing down statues of slave traders. BLM actually more closely resembles (again, I'm ignoring many qualitative differences here, since it seems to be fair game to do so in this discussion) the systematic removal of Marx and Lenin statues in Europe and especially Lukacs' and Engels' statues being removed recently.