A Famous Harvard Professor Became a Target over His Tweets

There is an obvious difference between disagreeing with what someone says and believes and circling a petition that harms their livelihood because of said disagreements.

If a group of bully comes to you and tell you that you can for sure express yourself, but “there will be consequences” wink wink, I would argue that you’re not actually free to express yourself. It’s creating an environment of fear were people either self censor themselves or are subjected to a punishment by the mob.

That's a tautology. If I support freedom of expression, and believe it is in the say, national interest, then by definition I am against those who oppose freedom of expression.

Where the line ends is when they stop merely saying "we are against freedom of expression" and actually harm people expressing themselves. We've definitely crossed that.

That’s a miscategorization. Cancel culture isn’t about being free to criticize others (that’s fair), but that’s not what they want. They want to control other people by means of intimidation (force people out for having a difference in opinion) via economic peer pressure.

It’s not about being able to say “eating meat is cruel, so since you don’t denounce eating meat you are cruel” it’s you don’t denounce meat eating therefore you are evil and your peers and employers should ostracize you else the are complicit in your cruel behavior too, we demand they see it fit to remove your means of perpetuating that cruelty”.

That's not really correct, though. We may safely assume that the dean of Harvard would prefer to keep Steven Pinker on board (and, if not, substitute another controversial figure whose boss does). But the dean of Harvard is afraid to do so: afraid to follow his own moral compass and act upon the strength of his convictions because the Harvard donors are likewise afraid to support him if he does: not because they agree with Pinker's firing, but because they're afraid of anonymous mob justice, too, and on and on up the line. "Cancel culture" is the exact opposite of people expressing themselves as a reaction: it's weaponized fear such as has only ever been used by Marxist dictators or as a precursor to such.

Cancel culture is about making sure people you disagree with (and their dependants) are out of jobs.

Pressing companies to fire people for their political views should be a crime. The judicial system is meant for punishing people, not a pile-on of twitter users.

Over here in The Netherlands it is illegal to fire employees for their political views. Although that law is increasingly ineffective because of the huge (biggest in EU) growth of contract workers.

Cancel culture people do not believe in freedom of speech. They do not believe in free and open debate.

The cancel culture people have a set of views on topics such as race. They further believe that every institution should have an elaborate, harshly enforced set of rules that forbids and punishes anyone who expresses contrary views.

My question to you is, do you believe it would be good for institutions to have such a set of rules?

> The future will look like Idiocracy, only it wont be funny.

The present looks like Idiocracy. And Idiocracy never looked funny from within that world.

Those guys get a ton of criticism. Universities have been deciding to oust people for public outrage. Zuckerberg owns most of his company. Elected officials are removed by voting, and their critics are trying to reduce those votes.

Edit: My point is that all these people receive criticism. Universities seem to act on it more often, but they don’t have to. They choose to.

Did you read the letter? If not go read it. They’re essentially making a complaint to the manager of their society. Their criticisms are there and public. They’re within their right to do so. The society considered and rejected the merits of the complaint or decided it didn’t rise to the level of warranting removing Pinker’s honorary title.

The letter may have been entirely fabricated since its not even verified. Which even leaves open the possibility this is a very small group of “cranks” who wrote it and forged people’s names which then gets turned into “OMG CANCEL CULTURE” level story.

What are the “get them fired” and “makes them feel unsafe” ones? Is that where Bari Weiss tried to get the professors fired and suggest she was harassed at work because she misrepresented things that went on inside NYT and a whole bunch of other NYTers were like “uh, no that didn’t happen”, then she made a big splash this week about the end of “centrism” leading to the past few days of endless media navel gazing about cancel culture?

There are real cases of people trying to get others fired and plenty of real cases of reporters being “cancelled” for having contrary opinions (such as on Israel-Palestine) over the decades. But strangely those aren't the cases the media are talking about.

> but his public discourse is at odds with the LSA's officially stated goals.

It should be noted that the complain singles out LSA's stated goals of "listening to and respecting [the experience of students of color] is crucial", but their criticism of Pinker is that they feel he doesn't support their pet cause enthusiastically enough.

And to substantiate their accusation, the persecuters cherry-pick a hand-full of tweets dating way back from 2015, where he cited the New York Times showing real-world statistics on police shootings.

So, I feel the article summarizes the problem pretty well. This is a good example of how this Cancel Culture systematically resorts to persecutions and chilling effects as weapons to punish and censor away anyone who doesn't enthusiastically endorse their pet political cause.