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> I asked her what happens after we get him fired? Can he earn back the worthiness to again feed his family? Will he need to denounce his views or just stop spewing them publicly? Will he just need to collect unemployment for the rest of his life now that we've deemed him a heretic unworthy of work?

As someone who's a devout Christian, it's quite interesting to me to see how the same anti-patterns which plague zealous religious movements -- intolerance, judgementalism, lack of an avenue for repentance / rehabilitation, unquestionable dogmas, inquisitions to root out heresies, factionalism, etc -- plague the progressive movement as well.

"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." - The Apostle Paul

We're certainly witnessing a religion. Just one without mercy, repentance, or atonement.

So true.

Far too many people today, many of whom I suspect have a recent inclination to harboring particular political views at all, are missing the entire point of politics - that it's a debate.

It's the great debate, the one that we set up entire electoral systems to have, and built entire buildings in which it would be held.

Today, a dangerous number of people are outright enraged by having their dogmatic political beliefs challenged, and they'll go to great lengths to ensure that you can't share yours.

It's a mess. Years ago, attempts at political conversation were more often than not met with indifference and you had to find like-minded people interested in having them. We used to bemoan that too few people were engaged in politics. Who knew that it would be this much of a mess once they were.

I am not surprised by this at all. Somewhere I read that 'The more strict the scriptures, the more interpretation is magnanimous and compassionate' And 'the more liberal the written text, interpretation will be very strict'

Whenever I hear term 'climate denier' not even 'climate change denier' I know speaker is stewing in his own superiority and least bothered about actual improvement.

I think the common root between the two is a belief in having found a universal and unquestionable Truth from which it logically follows that anyone that denies that Truth must be "evil".

I've read somewhere once that the PC culture is precisely like a religion, but there is no absolution possible.

You will eventually be damned whatever you do.

I'll go a step further. All this yelling at people may shut them up, but it doesn't change their hearts. It may even harden them.

Someone's a racist? Getting them to stop lynching people is necessary, absolutely. Getting them to stop using the n-word is needed for a civilized society. But more deeply, they need their heart changed, not just their external behavior. They need to see "those people" as being of equal value to themselves.

Well, the only thing I know that can change hearts that way is the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Note well: I did not say "going to church". That's not the same thing.)

The thing is that these groups (yeah, yeah, always with the generalizations) preach empathy but have no trouble to get people fired, their families too if possible. I think they behave this way because of pressure from social media and racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink.

Maybe that is too harsh on them in contrast of people just flaming random people by random characteristics, but they do have real institutional support.

> racism and sexism are used as some form of emotional sink.

Reminds me of the 10 minute hate from 1984, which was also intended for catharsis not outward justice or remedy.

VERY interesting analogy! Never thought about it this way.

She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired for saying something offensive on Twitter.

The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.

I saw a large thread on a subreddit about music asking others to boycott a specific store because the CEO made a campaign donation to Trump. Several people sounded like they were actual customers...

But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.

I see things like this all the time on Facebook. It’s quite annoying.

One that was circulating was for boycotting anything Peter Thiel had significant involvement in because he is a major donor to Trump. Not much of a surprise but Theil is either a board member or has invested in many companies... So, the list was large and purely virtue signaling. It had other major donors on it too.

I don’t know if this cancel culture really works for large companies. Most companies have taken money or have board members or high level employees that are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. (With some of both sides who have donated heavily to political campaigns...)

This is something which I have become more aware of after reading "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" by Jon Ronson. I am now wary of posting any thoughts online which go against the tide of popular opinion. One of my takeaways from that book was that the cost of saying anything controversial online can be limitless. It's scary how mob "justice" and the rampant virtue signalling these days can ruin lives and careers. It's not just governments policing speech: the public is just as guilty.

The issue isn't necessarily that he doesn't deserve to have a job, but he certainly doesn't deserve to take advantage of what is demonstrably a position of power and influence over others to spread hate in a public forum. Freedom of speech is treated as this unassailable privilege in any arena but if the speech in question is, for example, a violent fatwa calling for the death of an author, as in the case of Salman Rushdie, I think it's entirely justified for a public forum to suppress that. Let those who want to spread violent or damaging ideas find a private platform for it and leave it to them to find an audience.

Jon Ronson’s book “So You’ve been Publicly Shamed” touches on this. Less from the angle of PC culture and more about anger on Twitter. I think it’s a good book and interesting even if you disagree with the conclusions.

I'm curious, what exactly did he say?

> She was trying to get a faculty member at a local university fired ...

> ... he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us."

How much do they think PIs make anyways? It depends on school, but adjuncts only make ~$1250/credit and typically have no health insurance [0]. They all have side gigs to make ends meet.

[0] https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.ht...

I recently read a story (AITAH) where a persona who worked as a university professor (a neighbour) was throwing branches into someones back yard and trespassing (to smoke). After the police didn't do anything, they contacted their work (the university) and later considered social messages of the form "University professor did <this>". I was fairly uncomfortable with this; I feel these kind of things need to be handles by e.g. courts or similar, not in via social pinion where a persons profession is leveraged against them.

I also dislike arguments of the form "If they believe <this> how can they treat <some demographic> fairly", or even "People of <some demographic> will feel uncomfortable working with them"; but I accept they have some validity.

I feel a true answer is more complicated; i.e. before we answer these problems, we consider:

- is someone not know to express racist opinions therefore not racist?

- what political-compatibility criteria is needed to work with someone?

- if person A doesn't want to work with person B; is that persons As problem, or person Bs?

- how objective are hiring/firing/promotion criteria? to the extent that they are subjective, what goes into that, and what is fair? Are promotions fair if they are random, so long as they are not biased wrt race/sex/etc? Or is a random process unfair because it is arbitrary? If it is biased towards arbitrary criteria that is not the usual demographics (e.g. ppl who wear glasses) is this fair?

- what moral obligation do employees have in their private lives? Does this obligation differ by job type? Do all jobs have obligations e.g. do corp contracts imply them too; and are employees compensated wrt these obligations?

People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account. I can't speak for this exact case, because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence. If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense.

When you have such a significant power over someone's higher education and therefore their life earnings, I don't think it's unfair to scrutinise these people's views further than had they little structural power.

I disagree and think that we need more nuance in our speech and understanding, not less. There are a lot of moral issues you just listed, from violent vs peaceful protesting, the limit of authority with police, black lives matter, free speech, and race. And you summed it all up with if someone disagrees with any of those that they are racist or regressive.

But there are a lot of complexities and nuances to each one of those moral issues. Each one really needs a discussion.

Even just separating out BLM, there is the core moral anti-racist belief behind the statement (which I think most people would agree with), but there is also the political association affiliated with the Democratic party that in their belief statement supports abortion, transgenderism, and many other issues that are still at contention in our country. Talking with many of my conservative friends, they have no issue with the race movement of BLM but will not align themselves with a political organization that supports abortion, particularly as they see it as a genocide targeted primarily at inner-city blacks.

Again, we need more nuance, not less. We're already polarized enough. One issue is that peoples' views are not being scrutinized, they're being thrown into a bucket of "racist" and cancelled. Any time a straw man is used to silence a group of people based on mass categorization, it's contributing to division and not unity. These issues, and politics in particular, are and should be complex.

Okay, so you can check their academic CV and ask for colleague references. Quite another to ruin their professional career for a personal view on Twitter that isn't about planting bombs in black churches, or the like.

You are trying to say you can infer racism, and you need to do that to identify the racists because they won’t speak their racism openly?

Can you see how that is a recipe for attacking people and ruining their lives based on something that in the end might be imagined?

Do you see how easily that becomes ... anyone who disagrees with any opinion I have is evil?

What amazes me most is the cascade of reasoning. It's the most obscene misuse of logic, that might be fine only if it comes from a toddler.

"criticising protesters" leads to "support militia", that leads to "support their murders", so he "do(es) not support the black lives matter", therefore wants "continuation of black people being murdered".

Imagine that for a guy that had his car turned upside down by protesters and was complaining about that.

> People with racist or otherwise regressive views know that these views will (rightly) get them criticised by the majority, and so they won't couch them in those terms precisely, but it's often very clear when you take context into account.

When the word racist is being attributed to everything and anything including opposition to complete open borders by bullys and funnily enough, racists it is understandable that people may want to take cover.

> because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence.

It is also quite telling that "When those protesters are also burning down cities and attacking people" is strangely absent from your description.

> If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense.

Very few are in full support of everything the police do but binarizing the support to all or nothing is ridiculous.

It's awesome for real racists that now every minor bullshit is considered racist. Suddenly there's a lot more of them, they're in pretty good company and the term has been diluted into meaninglessness.

Another victory for social justice. Brexit, Trump, you guys just can't stop winning.