I think some would consider the criticism alone an attempted cancellation if it suited them

I suppose it depends on what you mean by cancellation. I wouldn't mind seeing his star a little dimmed for this--talking cogently about critical thinking is something a science communicator should be able to do. A few less bookings on talk shows, maybe?

He does provide a good illustration of why I think it's weird when people on the left celebrate so many of these cases. When Tyson was accused by a handful of women of sexual impropriety, he got an 'internal investigation' that ultimately cleared him. When Karen there gets accused of being a racist, outside of any work context, she just gets summarily fired. Nobody even considered the fact that this happened in Williamsburg, so there's at least a 20% chance she was being ironically racist.

Of course it is speculation, since none of us heard what the woman actually said. Somehow you seem convinced that you know what she actually said, and why she said it, and that your preferred scenario is not speculative.

I was just reading last night that a school board has admonished a teacher for having a book called "This Book is Anti-Racist" in the classroom.

Yep, the majority of the school board is literally anti-anti-racist.

Is twitter down or is it just me?

I get a page with the words "Something went wrong. Try reloading." after clicking both links.

The whackjob who compared diversity to fascism? :rolleyes:

They might, but it's a dumb argument.

"Hey, I'm going to go set that person on fire, they're a witch! Wanna come with?"

"No, I don't really approve of setting people on fire, even if you think they're witches."

"Then you're just as bad and now I'm going to set you on fire too!!!!!!!!"

It's a bit of a Mongol Hoard "Join or Die" approach.

Actually, it worked REALLY well since the 60s. It still works well, at least for most people who have a bit of sense about it.

On the other hand, if one defines anyone who doesn't jump on the bandwagon to go intimidate people as being a racist, well, maybe not. But then, that's a matter of redefining words to mean whatever one wants them to mean so one can justify ones authoritarian approach, rather than actual objective reasoning.

Wow this reminds me greatly of a conversation I had with my mom. Essentially it became clear to me that she thinks her generation "solved racism" in the 60's. To summarize back then when she participated in student marches it was for "real racism" and these BLM people have never even experienced "real racism" so they just need to go home and stop making such a fuss. As if she is the arbiter of what's bad enough to protest and what isn't.

We have confirmation from the witness, on video.

If you truly believe this, then you are delusional. The only it has fixed is leglised racism.

There is still plenty of racism out there - as Will Smith rightly said, "...racism isn't getting worse, its getting filmed"

You're kidding, right? Do you genuinely believe that social interactions with respect to race are just as bad or worse than they were in the 60s? It's not even comparable!

Yes, there is still racism out there. There probably will always be some, at least until we're all a lovely shade of ambiguity brown. But the volume and the magnitude is significantly smaller than it was 60 years ago.

Yes, surveys of social attitudes generally show very substantial reductions in racist attitudes (e.g. whether it is acceptable to discriminate based on race, whether one would mind having Black people as neighbours etc.) over time, with a few blips.

However, there is no reason why we should believe that any theory, idea, practice or policy put forward as 'anti-racist' will further improve anything if the proponents of such ideas attempt to shield their ideas from criticism by inflicting punitive 'consequences' on critics.

The on-camera part shows up in my hypothetical, word for word. The question remains whether the bystander was confirming a paraphrase or an exact quote.

Once again, here is my hypothetical, but for the sake of clarity I've italicized the (off-camera) hypothetical dialogue:

Canceled woman: Go back to Long Island City and stay there!

Frederick Joseph: Did she not just tell us to stay in our hood?

Random bystander: She did.

In this scenario, the unnamed bystander is confirming that Mr. Joseph has paraphrased the canceled woman's demand substantively correctly.

Why are you confident that this scenario is so unlikely that you feel comfortable in publicly demanding that the young woman in question ought to lose her livelihood and health insurance?

As I understand it, this was an argument because she thought Joseph was bringing a noisy aggressive dog into the park. She admitted saying something to this effect (I'm not sure of the exact words) and says she was referring to removing the dog to a different area. If she did use those words it was a stupid choice of words, but given Joseph's history as a professional grievance monger I would also suspect he did everything possible to escalate the argument in the hope of getting some good material.

You go ask the families of the hundreds of unarmed black people gunned down and murdered by white cops in the last 50 years if they think things have gotten much better.

All that is happened is that legislated racism ended* and what once used to be overt racism is now covert racism. Its the same demographic doing the same thing, white males mostly, in the south. The KKK hasn't gone away, its gone underground. They were pretty much the only game in town back then. Now there are more white supremacist organisations with a larger overall following that the KKK ever had....

11th Hour Remnant Messenger
American Renaissance
American Freedom Party
American Nazi Party
Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
Aryan Republican Army was a white nationalist terrorist organization.
Aryan Nations
Asatru Folk
Atomwaffen Division
Council of Conservative Citizens
Creativity Alliance
EURO,
Hammerskin Nation
Identity Evropa
National Alliance
National Association for the Advancement of White People
National Policy Institute
National Vanguard
Nationalist Movement
Occidental Quarterly
The Order, or Brüder Schweigen
Pacifica Forum
Patriot Front
Phineas Priesthood
Pioneer Fund
Vanguard America
Volksfront
White America, Inc
White Aryan Resistance


Not significantly enough.




* You can make a very good argument that voter suppression laws being enacted in red states is racism because it is clearly aimed at suppressing voting by non-whites),

What we have on video is the default, and is confirmed by the witness.

Your fantasy paraphrase was made up by you and based on... nothing but your own desire to minimize. You're looking for any excuse to excuse the racist.

As opposed to the tens of thousands of unarmed black people gunned down and murdered by white cops and civilians in the 50 years prior to that?

Do you even know any black people who are older than 30? My dad is 70, his mom is still kicking at 88, as are a dozen aunts and uncles in the 70 to 100 range.

Yes, it has definitely gotten better.

This is victim blaming.

There is a really easy way to foil your so-called "grievance mongers"... don't be a ******* racist; don't say racist things... ever. Don't give them the ammunition!

Pure whataboutism!

Yes, as it happens, quite a few actually.


Not by much


I note that you failed to address the rest of the post.

Serious question here, but even if everything he says is true is he really a victim? Its not a crime, or even a civil rights violation, in the United States to say something racist. Is having a racist slur levied at you any worse than just something mean and nasty?

Unless you have evidence she wouldn't have said the same thing to a white guy under the same circumstances, you have zero evidence she is racist.

Her response was stupid and inappropriate but there is no evidence Joseph is more a 'victim' than she is.

You've no idea what the witness is confirming, and you've given us no good reason to believe they are confirming an exact quote rather than a paraphrase.

Sorry, but you've got to come to grips with the fact that your scenario (the one in which the canceled woman actually says "go back to your hood") is just another hypothetical.

Maybe your hypothetical is more likely than mine, but I remain (as ever) skeptical. You are so confident in your conclusions, despite an abundance of alternate possibilities which haven't yet been ruled out. :(

Yes I do.

Frederick Joseph: Did she not just tell us to stay in our hood?

Bystander: She did.

This is the default, the null. No matter how you try to spin your apologism for the racist, this remains the default until PROVED OTHERWISE.

The only thing you have offered so far is some crap you made up, with no basis in fact.

Nope. It is stated by the victim, and confirmed by the bystander.

Sorry, but you've got to come to grips with the fact what is claimed to have happened, actually happened and you just made stuff up to excuse the racist

Again, I have not ruled out anything. I have assessed what is more likely

a. what we see happened, and what was claimed to have happened, or

b. what you made up, without evidence, from whole cloth.

Option a. is clearly more likely!

Say racist things, suffer racist consequences - in this case she lost her job.... and its exactly what she deserved.


Her response was racist, any way you slice it!

When you direct something racist to another person, that other person is a victim of racism

Nope. You are simply asserting that people are more likely to exactly and perfectly quote their interlocutors than they are to paraphrase their own impression of an interlocutor's intended meaning, while interacting in real time without the benefit of transcripts. You've done nothing to show that this is actually the case IRL, and I'm guessing you've yet to even skim Loftus on eyewitness reliability.

While there are a bunch more such organizations, I'd love to see some evidence that they have even remotely close to same number of members as the Klan once did.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics...d-klan/509468/
There was a time when the Klan had rallies of 10s of thousands of members. Charlottesville had about 500 racists from all over the country. At its peak in the 20s, the Klan had between 3 and 6 million members.

The SPLC likes to make a big deal out of the growth in the number of such groups but most of them are the result of splits in previous groups. It would be like concluding that that there are more communists in the US circa 1990 than in 1940 on account of the proliferation of various communist parties in the US. Pretty much everytime there was a split among the soviet block and/or Chinese communist block there was a split in the associated US parties.

Honestly, its ******* absurd to claim the US hasn't gotten less racist or cops haven't gotten less racists than at anytime in the past. The reality that there is a social taboo against openly being racist is evidence we have gotten better. Seriously, the Dixiecrats were a thing. A guy had a legit run at the presidency on a platform that was explicitly racist, no dog whistles, just racist.

FTFY

It is far more likely that the witness is agreeing with what was said than with some fantasy version you made up.

Nope, that is not how it works. I don't need to show anything. We already know what happened!

The burden of proof is on you to prove your claim.

I am already familiar with Loftus... I have even quoted her in a number of trial threads on this and other forums. But it does not apply here. She is talking about recall in testimony of things the witness saw or heard in the past or at some earlier time. What he have here is a witness immediately responding to what they heard, and that response is recorded on the ******* video!!!!

Assertion noted.

The witness may be agreeing with a paraphrase or agreeing with an exact quote; you’ve given us no reason to prefer one scenario over the other so far. The test subjects who claimed there was no gorilla on the basketball court were immediately responding to what they'd just seen on video.

Right...not sure how your analogy works here, but as we are in that territory, let's tweak the scenario to help you understand the point.

"Hey, I'm going to go set that person on fire, they're a witchblack! Wanna come with?"

"No, I don't really approve of setting black people on fire, even if you think they're witchesbecause I am not racist."

"Then you're just as bad and now I'm going to set you on fire too!!!!!!!!"Ooh, no biggie. I just thought I would ask out of politeness. Hey, it's so cool that we can agree to disagree in a civilized manner, not like ol' Mr. Anti-racist over there with his dramatic over-reactions to things and his loud denunciations of racism, and calling up my boss, etc...

No argument from me there. He's quite annoying, isn't he.

Yeah, but err, no. The debate here is "since the 1960's"

The Klan at its peak you are talking about is in the 1920s. The so called "Third Klan" at around the time of MLK only had about 14,000 members, and it declined to about 2000 to 3500 by 1970
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klu...tional_changes

It also had a resurgence up to a peak of about 10,000 in the early 1990s, but is now back to about 3,000 - the same as what it was at the end of the 1960s.

WARNING: This link is a to 976Kb PDF
https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/fi...ec2011-508.pdf


While US Society has improved, actual racism has not gone away, its gone underground, it has become systemic and it still widespread

Interact map - enjoy !
https://www.splcenter.org/hate-map

False comparison. The basketball test...

1. is a visual observation test, NOT an aural response test

2. the testee is intentionally misdirected by being told to count the number of passes made by players wearing white.

3. is a test to see what the observer will MISS seeing, not what the observer WILL see or hear.

When that test was first shown to me, I replied with the correct number of passes by the players in white as well as the fact that someone in a gorilla suit walked through the group.

I'm that ******* annoying bastard who handed the 20 question test in after less than a minute because I followed the instructions that said "read all the questions before starting" and found question 20, which said "do not answer any questions, just write your name at the top and hand the paper in". I'm that pedant who reads the all instructions for a new piece of equipment or software before I try to use it. :D

This not bragging - almost 60% of people do see the gorilla first time up.

We apparently agree on the idea that people are relatively unreliable (40%) when distracted by other observations or considerations. We appear to disagree whether the unnamed witness in this particular case was thus distracted, but I'm erring on the side of skepticism rather than credulity, given that someone's livelihood is on the line.

The basketball/gorilla test is not just distraction, it is intentional misdirection - the participants are told what it is they are supposed to be looking for, and specifically, it gives them a task that will keep them occupied looking for it for the whole length of the video (counting the passes by players dressed in white). Without that misdirection, say, if you just asked them to watch the video and comment I what they saw, a LOT more people will see the gorilla.

A more interesting example of 'Cancel Culture' is this one where the 'Woke' combined with Creationists from the Discovery Institute to promote the denaming Western Washington Universitie's Huxley College.


Here is an account at The Panda's Thumb:



https://pandasthumb.org/archives/2021/10/creationists-social-justice-advocates-unite-take-down-huxley.html

The funny thing about this test is that because it is so famous and shown so often in college, it eventually becomes useless since everyone expects the gorilla to show up.

By the time my Psy 101 professor showed us the video, I had already seen it twice in other classes, lol.

Whereas an individual act of hostility could potentially indicate a prelude to violence coming from an individual, a racial slur delivered in a society where racist systems of oppression exist in powerful public institutions, the implied threat is multiplied in so many ways.

One person's fists could be scary. One frantic 9-1-1 call can be deadly.

composer Bright Sheng
 

"A professor has taken over the undergraduate class previously taught by Bright Sheng, Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition, David Gier, dean of the School of Music, Theatre & Dance announced Friday. The announcement comes almost a month after Sheng showed a video to an undergraduate composition seminar featuring an actor in blackface." Michigan Daily

The video was the 1965 movie version of the play Othello and the actor was Laurence Olivier. Some have been unhappy with a few aspects of Laurence Olivier's performance through the years, it must be acknowledged.

https://twitter.com/guardian/status/1446239072213733376

More on Bright Sheng and Othello
 

Robby Soave wrote, "The University of Michigan is a public institution at which students and professors deserve free speech and expression rights. It is a violation of the university's cherished principles of academic freedom to punish Sheng for the choices he makes in the classroom. Screening a racially problematic film in an educational setting is neither a racist act nor an endorsement of racism. At this point, it is Sheng who is owed an apology from the broader university community for falsely maligning him."

I would go slightly further and say that (with some narrow exceptions) professors have first amendment rights at a public university (the distinction between public and private universities in the United States is worth making in this regard).

Before I read this article I thought “this surely can’t be about Olivier’s Othello”. Of course it was.

Yes everyone has moved on from blackface, but I thought this movie was masterful. I first watched it as school student struggling to come to terms with Shakespeare, and this movie helped greatly.

At least the University didn’t buckle. I personally don’t believe that Sheng even needed to apologise. He explained the reasons he chose the film, and that should have been enough.

Cathy Young wrote an article about the Sheng case.

"If Sheng apologized for showing the film in class, I don’t think he needed to. It would have been enough to acknowledge the objections and discomfort and say that he should have introduced the screening with a disclaimer. It would have also helped to throw in a reminder that people who study art should know how to deal with classical art that is offensive by modern standards. And dropping the entire Othello project was totally unnecessary."

I think these apologies (especially by the university) are a mistake. It just fuels the witch hunts and purity spirals.

Just wait until they hear about how Shakespearean-era troupes shut out actresses altogether.

All this ends with the guillotine or the gulag.

An interesting editorial in The Atlantic on the Dorian Abbot (The guy who bought up Hitler when discussing the Woke. He's right, both wanted 'compliant' academia.) cancellation.



https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ar...ferent/620352/

The Fire.Org on the cancellation of Bright Sheng for 'thoughtcrime'. Of note Bright Sheng is BIPOC in some situations, he's 'White Adjacant' in others, which goes to show the arbitary nature of much of the 'Theory of Critical Race'




https://www.thefire.org/university-o...-othello-film/


I will note the linked article ends with a 'puff' for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, but it's still worth reading.

Jerry Coyne on the attacks on Kathleen Stock's situation where she is subjected to abuse and threats for arguing that biological sex is not a social construct.



https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2021/...-so-should-we/


He also includes a screenshot of the full Times editorial, which is quite decent of him.

I was playing with my niece tonight, and to hyperbolize a distance she says, "Further than from here to Antarctica." She quickly added, "I used to say 'from here to China,' but that's racist."

I'm still reporting her to the Internet for past racism.

A Verdi good point
 

The headline is "Oppose the right-wing, racialist attack on composer Bright Sheng at University of Michigan." The statement reads in part, "The International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan denounces the racialist smear campaign against renowned composer, conductor and pianist Bright Sheng. The claim by a group of students and faculty that he committed a “racist act” by screening a film version of Othello with Laurence Olivier is as badly informed as it is false. All serious and democratic-minded students should refuse to be intimidated and come to Sheng’s defense." World Socialist Web Site..

The statement continued: Any suggestion that there is a hint of racism about Olivier’s performance is preposterous. The actor takes pains to bestow his character with the greatest possible dignity and humanity. The Michigan Daily wrote that in a letter sent to the Daily Sheng explained “that the original intent was to show how the opera composer Giuseppe Verdi had adapted Shakespeare’s play into an opera. Since cross-casting was frequent in opera, he did not think Laurence Olivier’s performance was ‘intended to be the same as the minstrel performances which did degrade African Americans.’” More on the IYSSE here.

The FIRE's Robert Shibley wrote, "But at public universities, the application of these mores through official discipline or punishment is prohibited by the First Amendment."

Finishing up Stock's book today—usually try to push back on attempted cancellations by buying the cancellee's latest treatise—it's a fairly compelling read. She addresses many of the issues raised in the trans thread with a reasonable level of philosophical rigor.