
A Letter on Justice and Open Debate - tosh
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/
======
dnissley
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](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1279105937404579841)

[2] [https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-
wi...](https://medium.com/@sarahadowney/this-politically-correct-witch-hunt-
is-killing-free-speech-and-we-have-to-fight-it-7ced038d33ae)

[3]
[https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_li...](https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/gvc7k9/black_lives_matter/)

[4] [https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-
racism](https://www.city-journal.org/brown-university-letter-racism)

[5]
[https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/12799365902367907...](https://mobile.twitter.com/sapinker/status/1279936590236790784)

~~~
justin66
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.

~~~
rayiner
What is “the overall message?” Is it just the plain meaning of the words? Is
the idea that we need to reform the police so they stop murdering Black
people?

Or is it the New York Times’ claim that “nearly everything that has made
America exceptional grew out of slavery?”
[https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/116140196616729805...](https://mobile.twitter.com/maragay/status/1161401966167298054).

Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family
structure,” as BLM’s website claims? [https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-
believe/](https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/)

Or is it that “institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and
colonialism” are all equivalent evils that must be “abolished,” as BLM’s DC
chapter proclaims? [https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-
an...](https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-and-yes/)

Or is it—as the 1619 project claims and which is now being taught in
schools—the supposed historical fact that capitalism is an outgrowth of
plantation slavery? [https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-
theory](https://www.city-journal.org/1619-project-conspiracy-theory)

Or is it applied Marxism?

> No doubt, the organization itself was quite radical from the very beginning.
> Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors described herself and fellow
> co-founder Alicia Garza as “trained Marxists” in a recently resurfaced video
> from 2015.

Look at how much the debate has transformed within the last month. It started
out with universal condemnation of a murder committed by the police in
Minnesota. Now, we are talking about tearing town statues of Abraham Lincoln:
[https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-...](https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/education/2020/06/26/uw-
madison-students-call-removal-abraham-lincoln-statue/3263355001/) (“Students
in the UW-Madison's Black student union are calling on university officials to
remove the statue of the nation's 16th president.”) My high school, named
after Thomas Jefferson, is thinking of renaming itself. We are debating
whether the Constitution as a “pro-slavery document.”

I am pro-BLM. To me, it’s a matter of my faith, as well as my personal
experience living in places like Baltimore and Philadelphia and realizing that
Black people just aren’t getting a fair shake. I think people of every stripe
can do something to help finish the job of reconstruction. Libertarians can
pitch in to help end police abuse of minorities. Conservatives can help push
forward school choice, which the majority of Black people support. Middle of
the road people can agree that we need to undo the pro-confederacy monument
building that happened during the KKK era.

But I also believe that our country rests on mostly admirable principles and
history, and that Marxism is a recipe for suffering while capitalism is
uplifting billions of people before our very eyes. I can hardly blame people
who are skeptical when they are forced to chant a slogan that was coined by
self-avowed Marxists. You can’t blame people for being cautious in their
support of a movement that has under the same roof a majority of well-meaning
people who simply want to eliminate police brutality and inequality, and a
vocal minority of people who view those problems as an indictment of our
entire country and it’s institutions. The far left, in characteristic fashion,
has taken something most people could agree on, and pushed it further and
further until normal people are forced to push back to keep society from
crumbling beneath their feet. And that’s a tragedy for everyone, especially
people who care about the core concept of fixing policing in America.

~~~
tptacek
_Or is it that we need to “disrupt the western-prescribed nuclear family
structure,” as BLM’s website claims?[https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-
believe/](https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) _

Why is this problematic for you? They're not saying children don't need
caregivers, or that families are bad. They're saying the American nuclear
family has downsides compared to other models, notably the extended family
model common in African and Asian cultures. What makes a nuclear family
"nuclear" is that it's self-contained; it's practically by definition not
intergenerational, the way many effective non-American families are. It's an
especially resonant point given the amount of effort American culture put into
making sure black nuclear families couldn't succeed.

I feel like criticism of the American nuclear family has been pretty much fair
game for decades; it's not like BLM invented that concern.

~~~
jariel
"They're saying the American nuclear family"

Not the 'American' -> 'Western'. And that's just way of making the 'family'
consistent with 'Colonialism' and 'White People' because it suits their
bigotry. The nuclear family is pretty closely similar around the world,
outside of mostly aboriginal communities. Obviously it's somewhat different in
different places, with multi-generations under the same roof.

I view this as fundamentally antagonistic - it's 'making stuff up' to find
supposedly powerful and inspiring words, 'defining the enemy' ever more as
'White People'.

It defines their struggle as not one to 'finish school and gain competence'
but as merely against the forces of 'White people'.

Of course by most objective measures, nuclear families are good for society.

This is the inherent problem when we mix radicalism with 'good intentions' \-
they end up mestastisizing the 'grain of truth' (ie racism exists) into
everything (ie everything is racist).

~~~
tptacek
No, pretty much none of this is true. The English/American model of isolated
"nuclear" families isn't even the norm throughout Europe (see, for instance,
Italy), let alone throughout the world. I decline to take the rest of the
argument you're making seriously, since your foundational premise isn't even
accurate. Anything else I'd say would just be restating my previous comment.

~~~
jariel
Having lived quite long enough on the Continent (in multiple continental
countries) to know otherwise, this is obviously not true.

At very least English families have more in common with German families than
German families do with Italian or Spanish families.

But it's moot: because family structure across civility is not fundamentally
different with respect to the antagonising view of BLM.

Aside from some degree of intergenerational cohabitation, it's not that
different in advanced countries.

The BLM statement with respect to family is unfounded bigotry, specifically
created to concretise and define the image of their enemy.

It's very similar to Trump specifically trying to use the term 'Wuhan Virus'
so as to invoke 'blame' for the virus on China. There is a 'kernel of truth'
to complicity in China - in that China did some very bad things during the
early phase of the pandemic, but that doesn't justify the use of this kind of
language to blame them for the entirety of the problem. The language he uses
here is to provoke - and to shift blame for the inadequacies of his own
system, using crude language mapped onto an external group. When in doubt, use
xenophobia.

BLM attacking the 'Western Family Unit' is shifting the narrative and denying
any responsibility for a very foundational problem within the community - and
that is >50% of Black children have little no relationship with at least one
of their parents, and that rates are about double for Black families as they
are for other groups [1]. Now - obviously it's a very complicated problem
(i.e. incarceration etc.), but it's a lot easier to dismiss if you don't have
to see it as a problem, rather, merely an oppressive measure by your
villainous opponents.

The argument "The Black community has challenges at least partly due to the
deep fragmentation of the family unit" can simply be dismissed and ignored
with the radical, and ironically xenophobic statement: "The family unit is
colonialist and racist".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-
American_family_struct...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-
American_family_structure)

------
bargl
I grew up in a very religious family. It was funny how you could get
ostracized from the community for not following the guidelines. This really
(REALLY) depended on the individual communities more so than say the religion
and the relative power of that religion in that area. (EDIT: from my
experience with 4 christian based religions.) For example, in Utah, not being
Mormon or even being found out to consume caffeine could get you in all sorts
of hot water.

What I from the left has similarities to the religious fervor of my youth. You
either believe and are part of the solution. To do that you have to convert
everyone, and if you aren't with us then you're against us. It might be that
it just evokes a similar emotional response to me as being on the "outs" with
my childhood faith.

Many people want to have faith in something. We've torn down religion as
fairly corrupt, government has been likewise torn down for many people. Now we
have massive leaderless movements that offer the same sort of thing.

My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature
by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now). If you
don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a better way of
performing human interactions online. We need more humanization of people
through technology not the dehumanization of people through technology.

~~~
bork1
> My issue with this movement, is it's amplified the worst of our human nature
> by having social media (which I recognize I'm consuming right now).

What movement do you mean?

> If you don't want global censoring of opposing ideas we need to have a
> better way of performing human interactions online.

I absolutely agree with this. My experience with online interactions is that
they've been filled with polarized sentiment for a long time (I've heard the
sentiment "never read the comments" about news articles on the internet for at
least 5 years), not just in the last few months.

~~~
bargl
Movement as in general cultural shift with the advent of social media. Not
really a specific movement as in #somemovement.

For example. I'd fucking love to have this conversation with a group of people
and instead of getting a ^ or (Insert down arrow) see your expression, you
either nodding along, or making a slight facial tweak that lets me know I hurt
your feelings so I can see, oh crap, I shouldn't have said "movement" and
instead said cultural shift. That real-time feedback that build empathy and
makes me not want to piss you off, or makes me walk away thinking, we'll we're
never going to see eye to eye.

The movement from me having lunch with friends, to losing them on facebook
because they support #somemovement and I have a nuanced opinion about it.

EDIT: I'm also not implying I hurt your feelings with the word movement, I'm
creating a narrative specific to this thread to create an example of how in a
in person setting I might have picked up on that, but in text I have to be
super clear instead of being able to have an easy back and forth to get to the
nuance of what I meant.

------
tomjakubowski
Firing people for expressing "distasteful" views publicly is nothing new. In
2003, MSNBC fired the host of their most popular program, Phil Donahue, for
expressing his opposition to the Iraq War.

> An internal MSNBC memo warned Donahue was a “difficult public face for NBC
> in a time of war,” providing “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the
> same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

Fortunately for Phil, he was well-off and probably wasn't relying on the
income.

With at-will employment, companies have enormous leverage over their workers'
freedom of expression and it's disappointing to see this letter with some
ostensibly "left" signatures attached leave that consideration untouched.

~~~
DavidVoid
On a related note: arguably one of the biggest "cancellings" of the post-9/11
era was that of the Dixie Chicks [1].

 _" Just so you know, we're on the good side with y'all. We do not want this
war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States
is from Texas."_

The above comment (made by the lead singer at a concert in England) was all it
took for them to receive death threats and get blacklisted by thousands of
radio stations in the US.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Chicks_controversy)

~~~
krrrh
They were hardly cancelled though, they were more feted after the controversy.
They went from the CMA to winning album of the year at the Grammys, got on the
cover of Rolling Stone, etc. In many ways they vaulted from the country music
backwater into the mainstream.

Interestingly enough, they changed their name to “The Chicks” 2 weeks ago.

------
lallysingh
I think this comes down to a lack of trust in good-faith debate. People don't
trust that someone "from the other side" will actually have the empathy and
generosity required to have a good-faith discussion on a topic.

Also, I believe that we're constantly hearing so many voices trying to
convince us one way or another, that our own discussions on those topics end
up being attempts to convince others. That would explain "safe spaces" to some
degree -- people don't want the pressure of having someone else try to
convince them of something they don't agree with.

Some of it just the two-party system. The points don't matter, just which side
of the line each person is on. I wonder if more parties would help depolarize
the situation. I'm really not sure.

~~~
pdonis
_> The points don't matter, just which side of the line each person is on_

That's because it isn't just about ideas, it's about power. Politics and
government now are not about coming to consensus solutions that everyone, or
at least everyone but a small minority who just wants to game the system, can
live with. Politics and government now are about imposing on everyone
whichever set of ideas gets a slim 51% majority. That isn't the way it was
supposed to work.

I personally would like to see a Constitutional amendment that would require a
2/3 majority in both houses of Congress to pass any legislation, and a 3/4
majority required to override a Presidential veto. That would at least require
some amount of bipartisan consensus, and therefore some amount of actually
somewhat reasonable debate instead of just shouting back and forth, before a
public policy was imposed on everyone.

~~~
mcguire
" _That would at least require some amount of bipartisan consensus, and
therefore some amount of actually somewhat reasonable debate..._ "

What you would get would be a lot of back-room deals and strange bedfellows.
Like now, only more so.

~~~
pdonis
I'm not so sure. The back-room deals that go on now are not about getting the
other side to vote for things they really don't want to vote for, as much as
horse trading on which bills come up for a vote vs. getting stuck in committee
or tabled. It would be harder for either side to get any value out of that if
a 2/3 majority was required to pass a bill--back-room deals can't get that
many votes to switch in the opposition party about something that's really
contentious.

That's not to say that any bill that gets enough bipartisan consensus to pass
a 2/3 vote must be good; plenty of bills that have passed in the past with
that much consensus have been bad. But I think it might change the dynamics in
at least something like the right direction.

~~~
shadowgovt
That's because the tools in place to override a tabling are the 2/3 vote
tools.

Make everything 2/3 vote and you increase the need for the dealings that
override the current 2/3 vote tools.

~~~
pdonis
Which tools are you talking about?

~~~
shadowgovt
Bills can be forced out of committee to the floor via a discharge petition
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discharge_petition)),
but it requires a 2/3 vote.

------
andreyk
I find it weird that so many people seem to think that "attitudes and
political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and
toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity" (I guess this is
a fancy way of saying cancel culture?) is a big problem, because frankly I
have no idea how big a problem it is. Where are the statistics on this? How
many are actually impacted by it? There are many articles citing examples and
saying how dangerous it is
([https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-
shaming-d...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/06/25/online-shaming-
dangerous-rise-internet-pitchfork-mob/)), and yes there are certainly such
examples, but are these just outliers? Is this like air travel, where really
for the most part it's ok for people to speak their minds and people get
overly freaked out because of rare events?

Actually curious to hear what people on here think about this.

~~~
HeroOfAges
If you'd like to see how big of a problem it is, post "males are not females"
or "males do not have periods" or "all lives matter" or "we should not be
giving hormone blockers to children" to your Twitter or Facebook accounts. Go
right ahead. If you feel even the slightest bit of trepidation over publicly
stating any of those things, then you will see first hand how big of a problem
it is.

*edit

this very post will be down-voted

~~~
bargl
I could see myself getting fired from my company for stating one of these
views. Even as I write this, I feel it's important for me to state the
following.

I think the "all lives matter" is a anti-slogan to something important so I
wouldn't say that. I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really
disputed. You can gender identify how you'd like though.

I think the hormone blockers is a complex issue and I'll leave it at that.

But I recognize that if I held radical ideas (which the ones you pointed out
are either on the edge or beyond it), I very well might get fired for
expressing them in a public forum if someone showed that to my companies HR.
To deny that is just me being blind.

To be clear, I took my job with that explicit knowledge that, any public
information on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, or here would be
scrutinized. I don't like it, but I also went into that with my eyes wide
open.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
"Males are not females" is a radical idea? You might be surprised at the
number of radicals in this country, then. Enough, in fact, that it seems a
stretch to call it "radical".

~~~
bargl
>I think the first two are based on sex, which is not really disputed. You can
gender identify how you'd like though.

I specifically addressed this with my opinion which I feel confident won't get
me fired in my comment. I could have been clearer in saying, I don't believe
that the idea that sex males are not sex females is a radical idea. Gender
wise I'll respect anyone being called whatever they would like to be called.

I don't understand the gender issue, I don't really think I need to. I do
respect that people have complex feelings which are made easier by me
addressing them in the manner which they prefer. It's no sweat off my back as
long as it doesn't impede the scientific study of sex differences in order to
better treat and identify diseases specific to sex.

------
anonms-coward
I think most of the people being able to speak against the mob opinion have
many things in common. They are rich, famous, and are generally hard to
cancel. Carmack, JKRowling and maybe even pinker are in this category. For
example, one writer got fired just for tweeting "I stand with JK Rowling".
([https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/scots-author-sacked-
bac...](https://www.scotsman.com/news/people/scots-author-sacked-backing-jk-
rowling-2904530)) . Many professors have been suspended just for not speaking
tone in tone with the popular opinion. If Pinker wasn't this famous, he might
have been fired by now.

~~~
beckyb
The problem with JKR in particular, is that she is "speaking out" against a
group of people who are extremely oppressed, and using outdated / debunked
info to do so.

Because of who she is, and her massive audience, this does real damage.

A person's right to even exist in society shouldn't be up for debate.

~~~
beervirus
No one is debating whether trans people have the right to exist.

~~~
beckyb
JKR is in fact doing that, everyday. Basically, if trans people aren't free to
even use the bathroom in public that matches their gender identities, then we
can't live in public society.

~~~
beervirus
LMAO the right to use a public restroom of your choice == the right to exist.

------
ve55
With seeing more letters like this recently, I wonder if they can really have
much of an effect. They seem to just ask kindly that people act more kind,
which often doesn't do a whole ton. What is needed is to change the way
communication is occurring away from viral algorithms promoting the most viral
content (outragebait), which only certain companies and people can do.

~~~
paulgb
> What is needed is to change the way communication is occurring away from
> viral algorithms promoting the most viral content (outragebait), which only
> certain companies and people can do.

Exactly. Articles like this are fine and all, but they're generally preaching
to the choir; the audience they really need to reach is indifferent to the
arguments, and like it or not, calling for someone to be cancelled is _also_
an exercise of their free speech rights.

Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive
engagement (even if they slowly make the platforms uninhabitable).

I don't know what's to be done except to move away from social networks into
smaller communities (Slack groups, etc.) that have their own norms of
discourse.

~~~
rmrfstar
> Social networks don't want to change anything, because culture wars drive
> engagement

Is there any public evidence that outrage-driven engagement is profitable?
It's a statement that is frequently repeated, but I haven't seen any evidence
for it.

~~~
paulgb
Admittedly, there's no smoking gun here, just inferential evidence from the
fact that they don't tweak their algorithms to curb it. Which, admittedly,
could be that they don't have the resources to do it -- but in either case, my
point is that the solution probably will not come from the social networks on
their own accord.

------
bovermyer
Walking back from the precipice we're on is going to be very, very hard.

------
Analemma_
When I try to visit that page, I get an error saying "504 - this request was
canceled", which is darkly amusing in its appropriateness.

~~~
danso
You can find an Internet Archive snapshot here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20200707133437/https://harpers.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20200707133437/https://harpers.org/a-letter-
on-justice-and-open-debate/)

FWIW getting server errors on this did make me chuckle, because the publisher
of Harper's Magazine has had a reputation for being a neo-Luddite when it
comes to web publishing [0]:

> _He described being trapped in a corridor in the early 2000s “by a small mob
> of what I can’t help but refer to as ‘young people.’ ” Those youths, he
> wrote, demanded that he open the magazine to online readers. What he told
> them was “essentially, forget it.” The web, to him, “wasn’t much more than a
> gigantic Xerox machine” designed to rob publishers and writers._

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20160112032957/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160112032957/https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/business/media/harpers-
publisher-standing-firm-in-his-defense-of-print-and-paywall.html)

------
throwanem
One of the most fascinating things to me about the 1960s has always been the
fashion in which power was transferred from the old left of the day, to what
was then known as the "New Left" \- Tom Hayden's crowd. I've always wondered
what it would look like to see something like that happen in real time.

One might hope to see the then-"New Left", now both physically and
ideologically very much the _old_ left, face their supersedure with greater
equanimity than their own predecessors, to whom they offered no more kindness
than they are receiving now. They, too, had their little lists, back when they
were young. To bleat about having earned a place on others' lists now fails to
favorably impress, for all that it's unsurprising.

------
anonms-coward
I think this is very important.

Mob justice over what people said years ago is very dangerous. And due to the
global nature of the internet, it is very hard to get the mob off your back.
It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to stuff
they tweeted as a teenager. It seems in the modern world felons deserve
redemption, but bad tweeters do not. Not to mention that cancelling people
over what they said in the past is so stupid, that if applied consistently,
will lead to funny scenarios. For example, if teenagers should be punished for
their past tweets, why shouldn't be Joe Biden for saying on the record that he
doesn't support same.sex marriage in the 2008 VP debates. This is not even
counting what opinions biden held in the 20th century.

It seems that we have come to a point where you simply can't speak on certain
topics, neither in the affirmative nor in the negative, and so most people end
up saying what will keep the mob at bay. Case in point, all the people
attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self ids as a woman
should have access to women's private spaces.

~~~
steffandroid
> It seems many students have been denied their college admissions due to
> stuff they tweeted as a teenager.

How many of them have still been denied after showing genuine remorse for
their views? Nobody is owed a college admission.

> all the people attacking JK Rowling do not want to say that any man who self
> ids as a woman should have access to women's private spaces

Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to
women's spaces.

~~~
lliamander
> Nobody's saying that men who falsely claim to be women should have access to
> women's spaces.

What are they saying?

~~~
Pulcinella
That trans women are women.

~~~
lliamander
In what sense? That is, in terms of their gender, or their sex, or both?

~~~
joshuamorton
"Women" is not a sex.

You don't see people saying "trans women are biologically female" for a
reason.

~~~
newen
Things are getting just a little bit ridiculous in America when you have
people saying "women" is not a sex.

~~~
babycake
male/female are biological descriptions. Men/Women are social constructs. A
man can wear a woman's dress, but a male cannot be pregnant and give birth.

~~~
lliamander
> Men/Women are social constructs.

What does it mean for these categories to be social constructs? What criteria
makes one a man or a woman?

~~~
babycake
> What criteria makes one a man or a woman?

That's up to the society, hence their definitions as social constructs. For
example, when you shop for dresses, do mostly men or women come up? Articles
of clothing by themselves are not tied to the biology of a person's sex...
meaning a vagina/penis is not required to wear a dress.

But most of society (as it is now) has deemed that woman are associated with
dresses, while men are associated with suits. That image is now changing,
although slowly, with trans and other non-binary genders.

An easy way to see this is to ask yourself if you think it's acceptable for
men to wear dresses? If so, ask why we don't see more of that in the
workplace.

~~~
lliamander
> That's up to the society, hence their definitions as social constructs.

So, if someone identifies as as man, but society disagrees, is that person a
man? What reasons would a society have to change their criteria to include
this person in the category of "man"?

~~~
babycake
There are lots of reasons that a society would change. Some factors would
include newer generations introducing ideas that the older generation didn't
take heed to.

Marriage used to be strictly between a man and a woman. Now society says it
can include homosexuals. Women used to stay at home to take care of the house,
while men worked at jobs to provide for the entire family. Now society says
both roles can be taken up by both men and women. Black people used to sit at
the back of the bus, and now anyone can sit anywhere.

I mean, society constantly changes. We see it in history, we even see it today
within our own lives. Places like Saudi Arabia are currently having their own
version of woman's suffrage even as we speak.

So given this, in your example person, I would wager that society would deem
that person not a man, since the hypothetical society has already decided it
that way. But that's not to say that person will give up on not being
recognized as a man. Our human history has shown us that we don't just stop at
an idea, some of us go all the way to pave new rights for entire future
generations to come.

Whether or not society adopts the new definitions, well, that's up to the
people living in it.

------
mellosouls
I'm not sure if it's crafty or cowardly that the first section co-opts support
by attacking Donald Trump and "right-wing demagogues".

Whatever their faults (and the historical right-wing witch-hunt parallels like
McCarthyism), Trump and conservatives are not the enemies here - this modern
censorship and cancel-culture trend is entirely an attack from (and problem
of) the _Left_.

It is shameful, illiberal and will only be stopped if we are crystal clear
where the blame lies.

------
mtgp1000
>While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is
also spreading more widely in our culture

The "radical right" enclaves on the internet are literally the only places
where you won't be banned for not falling in line.

We need to have this discussion in more than one dimension. Left/right and
authoritarian/anarchist are orthogonal metrics.

~~~
CJefferson
I'm not sure which "radical right" enclaves you are talking about.

Donald trump and conservative groups on reddit for example are some of the
most ban-heavy groups around. Where are you thinking about?

~~~
mtgp1000
TD is not far right. 4chan is "far right". 8chan is "far right". But there are
regular far left threads on chans advocating for all kinds of radicalism
(including violence) as well as making legitimate talking points - no one gets
banned, even though the sites primarily lean right.

The only "side" interested in actual free speech currently is the "far right",
unlike left leaning forums and media outlets which explicitly censor one
particular point of view, regardless of whether it is backed by legitimate
science which should be open to discussion.

Censorship has undeniably become a leftist problem, if you insist on reducing
the high dimensional space of political leanings to a single myopic dimension.
Unbelievable that in 2020 people are shamed for going to the last places on
the internet where discourse is unrestricted.

~~~
DavidVoid
You can't in good faith make the claim that the far right is interested in
actual free speech. They'd rather see people get dropped from helicopters than
let those they deem to be "degenerates" voice their political opinions.

TD, /r/conservative, /r/uncensorednews [1], and all the shitholes on voat have
one thing in common, they all ban pretty much anyone who goes against their
narratives.

And TD was far right, not as far right as /r/uncensorednews was, but still
pretty far right. But perhaps your Overton window is much further to the right
than mine (and northern Europe's) is.

[1] The subreddit was banned about two years ago but had 100k+ subs and
featured pretty frequent racism, anti-semitism, transphobia, and neo-nazi
imagery (the head mod is a self-described neo-nazi after all).

------
insickness
> resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or
> coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

I get it. This is aimed at left-wing people who think their side can do no
evil and thus proceed to censor any disagreement. But it's still funny to me
that this whole thing needs to be preceded with 'the right is bad, but believe
it or not, people on the left might do some bad things too', as if any side
has a monopoly on virtue and goodness.

~~~
gameswithgo
Would you at least entertain the possibility that one of the sides could, at
the moment, be a bit worse than the other?

~~~
oh_sigh
That wasn't the question. If cancer is the deadliest disease, that doesn't
mean we can't talk about the obesity epidemic(or vice versa depending on the
actual stats, I'm just making a general point).

Imagine if, every time someone wanted to talk about helping end the obesity
epidemic, many other people chimed in about how dare you talk about obesity
when cancer still exists. And the only way you could make a point about
obesity is to put a disclaimer that cancer is totally worse than obesity.

------
iron0013
This is a bit rich considering Harper’s has fired multiple editors over the
last couple of decades because John MacArthur didn’t like their liberal views.
How is that not “being cancelled”?

------
nvahalik
It's disappointing that, while they name DJT and the "radical right", they
don't explicitly call out the "radical left" (it's assumed within the article,
but it would be nice to call it out).

One of my favorite internet apologists has a saying that people who don't have
good arguments have to resort to bad tactics, and for many people that I've
had conversations with (especially among the left, but also among the right)
this has often been very, very true.

While I don't support BLM/M4BL (the hashtag, not the sentence), I do think
that several valid points have come up. And even though I disagree on their
conclusions and sometimes their methods, it has at least caused me to think
critically about how I understand the situation and what should be done about
it.

I hope that the future can continue to be a place where we don't think of
ideas as either "safe" or "unsafe". Any view we come across that challenges us
can frighten/scare us away. Maybe it causes us to change our views, maybe it
doesn't, but the introspection is valuable. I feel that's what a lot of people
who want to silence debate are missing. Perhaps they don't want the
introspection. Maybe they just want an echo chamber.

Regardless, let's fight for a world where ideas aren't crimes, and that people
are strong/wise enough to debate and engage them in a way that makes everyone
better.

~~~
oconnor663
> it would be nice to call it out

I think it's important to consider the primary audience here. If this were a
Wikipedia article, a neutral perspective would be important, yes. But this
isn't a Wikipedia article. It's a persuasion piece aimed at the members of the
left, and writing from the perspective of the left (or at least not from
blatantly outside that perspective) makes it more effective.

~~~
brlewis
I agree and would go even farther. This article would be 0% effective if
written in a neutral style. When you're trying to reach people stuck in an "us
vs them" mentality, you have to identify yourself as "us" before you start
criticizing "us". Otherwise the criticism will be seen as identifying yourself
as "them" and people will start railing, not against what you're saying, but
against all the other arguments associated with "them".

------
jvalencia
It's interesting to note that as of the time of me writing this comment, over
half of the comments on this thread have been down-voted.

~~~
bovermyer
I noticed that too. Many of them seem to be downvoted for using specific
viewpoints as examples.

~~~
jvalencia
I think having thoughts about the meta-arguments here is perfectly ok, but
having strong opinions about the actual topics is not.

------
Super_Jambo
> The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by
> trying to silence or wish them away.

Unregulated markets have had near a century of exposure and yet here we are.
So I think maybe we also need reform to stop the wealthiest just buying good
press coverage of ideas which they find convenient.

~~~
cpursley
> Unregulated markets have had near a century

Where? Source please.

