UK universities face fines as part of 'twin assault' on cancel culture | Hacker News Reader

UK universities face fines as part of 'twin assault' on cancel culture

telegraph.co.uk

The UK has been home to several chilling episodes of police harassment triggered by tweets that were considered possible hate speech. The tweets in question were innocuous, simply repeating common knowledge that can be found in any introductory biology textbook. I hope this initiative (although it also smells like ideology itself) puts a stop to that.

Pattern recognition leads me to believe that this will not serve its intended purpose, but will instead be misused as a bludgeon.

"Common knowledge that can be found in any basic biology textbook"

That sounds like transphobes out harassing people again.

The "but we were just stating some basic biology" is the first line of defence for what has been found to be unprotected abuse in the UK.

I’m not quite sure what you’re saying, but it sounds eerily close to the claim that scientific facts can be hate speech.

Proof that science denialism is just as much a problem on the left as it is on the right.

What science? The scientific consensus is that there is such a condition as gender dysphoria, that is, people who perceive themselves as a gender different from their biological sex.

In my experience, the phrase "I was just stating basic biology" is a dogwhistle for transphobia.

While I might agree with a slightly different version of this opinion, I strongly disagree with the terms "proof" and "just as much" here.

Example? Let us decide if they were so innocuous.

To be clear though, I'm against police harassment regardless.

The examples you have in mind may be totally reasonable - but conflating "factually true" with being somehow unassailable on any other qualities, or being above reproach and not hateful, is a super common fallacy.

E.g. pointing to differences in cranial shape between races is often used, with various levels of implicitness/explicitness, as a way to express race-based hatred.

https://web.archive.org/web/20210214122852/https://www.teleg...

While I appreciate the context of the article (cancel culture is a danger to a free society) the writing is quite poor. Segmented chunks of information put in one or two sentences per paragraph is an eyesore.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9258031/Government-...

Another article covering the same topic, if the paywall for the telegraph gets in your way.

Stalin was an effective politician and cancelling was his instrument. People just copy what works.

Absolutely trash article, but then again what could you expect from the telegraph.

Sadly I cannot find anything about this on a better news site.

> Sadly I cannot find anything about this on a better news site.

Congrats on having your informational/censorship bubble burst!

? I googled for a bit and could only find articles on $place_telegraph and other minor local newspapers. Is it a "bubble" to seek quality information?

cancel culture has always been a thing.

If you are poor and have views that in some way threatens the current ruling class and it's narrative, you get cancelled.

What they mean by "cancel culture" is when the poor and marginalized use new technologies of communication like twitter to put people in power in the spotlight.

If the mob is angry, it's up to the government to find out why and resolve the issues.

This strikes me as an alarming defense of the most destructive parts of our current epoch. The culture in question usually does not take the form of speaking truth to power. More often it is unreasonable people destroying the lives and livelihoods of mostly innocent people because of an abstract and usually imaginary offense. A person can be smart but groups of people are not.

Call-out culture is bullying disguised as benevolence and empathy. It is doing more lasting damage than any of us realize. The bullies from school now believe themselves to be the virtuous ones BECAUSE of the bullying they engage in. And the only way to be moral in their eyes is to hold onto power and exercise the maximum amount of control possible over others.

Why do you think that people being uninvited from speaking at universities is "one of the most destructive parts of our current epoch"?

Partially, but that's a very low-res version of what I mean. Drilling a resentment-based ideology into the minds of young people, and inundating universities with it, is the most destructive part of our epoch.

Universities are either dead or dying, for all intents and purposes, and they are filled to the brim with extremist-leftist-manufacturing departments that teach students that the entire structure upon which they now stand is immoral, evil, hateful, bigoted, etc.

Look at any grievance studies department's website, and maybe some sociology departments too. Chances are they'll say something about "dismantling systems of oppression". What's a system of oppression? Oh, that's all of Western Civilization.

We're allowing the teaching of literal destructive revolution ("overthrow the state and seize the means of production," basically) in universities. That is NOT sustainable.

You're overreaching something fierce. Universities dead or dying? Filled to the brim with extremists hell-bent on destroying Western civilization?

People having different opinions than yourself doesn't mean civilization is about to collapse.

EDIT: Perhaps this is your idea of a university nowadays (enable subtitles): https://youtu.be/watch?v=7C_qJnd5fT8

Am I overreaching, or am I trying to warn the West against allowing resentment-based ideology to take hold?

Read about Soviet dekulakization, and ponder how that could've happened. It started with "this whole society, the shoulders of which I now stand upon, is wholly bad and corrupt, irreversably, nose-to-tail, and we must destroy it all (so that nobody else can gain the influence over society that I have achieved)."

When you believe that the only moral position is for "your side" to hold power, and to use it against the other side, you'll justify any atrocity.

It's a great example that you brought up, dekulakization, because it illustrates exactly my point. Pre-Soviet Russia was indeed an atrociously brutal an unjust place to live. Is it any wonder that resentment and revolt ensued, and that people exploded in a murderous rage? Not good, but very understandable. Maybe if the Czars had actually worked towards a more equal society instead of crushing millions of peasants under their yoke there wouldn't have been a dramatic reaction to the state of affairs, don't you think?

Likewise today: improvements in quality of life have stagnated in huge parts of the world, wages are falling in real terms, inequality rises to Gilded Age levels, democracy is backsliding. Is it any wonder there is "resentment"?

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