Sham investigations silence professors at Central Florida and Princeton
thefire.org
thefire.org
From their Wikipedia page: > In 2017, FIRE was listed as one of the sponsors of the conservative campus group Turning Point USA's Student Action Summit, according to tax records.
Free thinker #1: Check out Wikipedia on FIRE (but I hope you don't, so I won't provide the link)
Free thinker #2: Don't be closed minded and read Wikipedia! (I too won't provide the link)
So I will do it, said the little red hen. (Are you using reverse psychology on me?)
I had to poke through a fair amount of "disambiguation" to find it, as FIRE is such a common name/acronym.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_for_Individual_Righ...
What seems to me relevant context is that originally it was founded by Harvard faculty, one of whom was an ACLU board member in Massachusetts, but may have drifted/evolved as funding is allegedly coming more and more from right wing and (faux?) libertarian sources.
Also, like practically everyone, it seems to be engaging in mission creep, expanding from E=education to E=expression.
But in fairness, college and college campuses have become such litmus tests of which side you are on in the culture wars, that that is probably driving them to widen their focus if they have any desire to preserve a non-partisan image.
I recommend reading the "Cases" section.
One of the most recent things they have allegedly done is:
`FIRE announced a lawsuit challenging Florida’s "Stop Woke Act"'
I'm not convinced they are pure and non-partisan and uncorrupted, but after skimming the list of controversies they have been involved in, they don't seem too transparently partisan.
They seem to have defended an organization threatened with a defamation lawsuit for criticizing electro-shock therapy.
I mistrust "conservatism" a bit more than whatever the mainstream Democratic Party is, but only a bit. Both generally seem to be disingenuous and concerned more with the appearance of having principles than with actually having principles.
Both dogmas have their place. The problem we have isn't that the two exist, it's that there's now a gap between them you can measure in AUs. Some ideas are better expressed by conservatism. That is, keeping the status quo. Some ideas are best expressed with progressivism. Right now the two parties are being turned in tribes by the media (twitter especially in this example) which benefits absolutely no one but the people who actually hold the power. As for democrats and republicans, it's my opinion they play on the same team.
Your reply strikes me as sitting further on the edges of the horseshoe than you might realize.
We live in an age in which social trust is declining, so we should probably be skeptical of even the more "reputable" sources.
You can defend someone's right to say something offensive without actually being in support or agreement with said statement.
But the ACLU has changed quite a bit since those days it seems. It's my understanding that they no longer take the "sunlight is the best disinfectant" approach to free speech and the free and open exchange of ideas.
Regardless of whether you agree with this person's opinions or not I think it's safe to say Twitter has become an actual cancer on the world. Especially in America. I've heard plenty of times at work people unironically say "I don't want to get canceled on Twitter" for saying something relatively mundane that in context was fine, but if written in a small tweet would start a feeding frenzy.
It is absolutely silly to me that we've let a bunch of upset over-educated under-worked twitter goons have so much external power. Some people deserve to be "canceled". It's not twitter users job's to form a mob and prevent people from ever being employed again. I have no idea why or where this started but it probably has to stop for political discourse in America to turn into anything less than immediately incendiary. Reddit has the same problem. I rarely say anything super inflammatory on the internet but this mob mentality has prevented me from contributing to various projects on github, joining discords, etc for fear one of these eternal-victims gets their feelings hurt and decides to dedicate a large portion of their life to destroying mine.
What honestly do you think Twitter's hand in this is? Even with a purely chronological feed, people with "selective" critical thinking skills, inconsistent value systems, and a disrespect of personal liberty will still surround themselves with other such people.
Twitter's only option would be to take a "paradox of intolerance" approach and start banning such activity, but then you are trusting a corporation to make such judgments fairly, rather than just expediently.
And if Twitter disappeared tomorrow, what then? Old-school student protests, picketing, signs/posters/pamphlets, letters in the school newspaper, and "cancel-prof-foo.net" getting thousands of views per day.
Ultimately the problem is that people are too willing to join the dogpile and/or are unwilling to stand in solidarity against the dogpile. Twitter doesn't cancel people; people cancel people.
Edit:
I also want to be very clear that Professor Katz, who accused a radical student group of being a "terrorist organization" was absolutely in the wrong for doing so and in my opinion does deserve to be censured for that statement. And making public statements about "black privilege" is even worse, which frankly leads me to question Professor Negy's moral compass and fitness to be an educator. I fully agree with the assessment that they used their rights to free speech irresponsibly, at best.
But I also think it's completely wrong to dig up an old incident for which they had already been judged and punished. I'm sure that the members of the Black Justice League are strongly opposed to policies that take away the rights of convicted felons, and I'm sure that they all have the critical thinking skills to recognize the parallel here, and I'm also sure that none of them would be interested in admitting such. In my opinion the only correct move by the University here is to dole out wrist slaps on both sides and tell all parties involved to drop it or face further consequences.
I think the big problem with twitter is that people are often only exposed to the "other side" of an argument by first seeing a reply to that tweet from someone they are following (and probably agree with). That's a recipe for starting mob flame wars.
That stops and the mobs lose all their power. It will probably take some lawsuits to set the standard too.
I agree with what you said, but things get hairy when other people in positions of authority agree with, or are part of, the mob.
There already have been lawsuits (e.g. a recent HN thread about a shop getting "canceled" by Oberlin students, leading to a large award in favor of the shop), but I don't think anything is going to change until the general society pendulum swings the other way. And then we have to worry about what's on the other side of the pendulum...
The problem is vindictive people in positions of authority, with no constraints, and heavy ideology aka Universities.
Most American corporations are not ideological, the public sector is a highly constrained place.
Universities allow profs to have their petty adult beefs with each other, veiled in intellectual language or moralisms etc..
The problem is that the effort required to join the dogpile is miniscule and continuing to decrease, but the net effect of many joining is not.
This was, pre-internet, kept in balance by requiring people to do something uncomfortable to protest (e.g. leaving the house, marching all day on the street).
The quip used to be that Internet anonymity turns everyone into an asshole, but that doesn't ring true these days.
Now, the decreased minimum effort required means that 10,000 people can take 5 minutes each to be an asshole, and Facegramchattertok will happily amplify and distribute the result to increase ad revenue.
And then companies have to act on it because the media sites are reposting tweets claiming the cloudflare CEO wants to see trans people die or whatever the thing of the day is.
24/7 to fill with content = {scrape social media trends} -> {generate story} -> {repeat}
As engineer by training this is positive feedback with a wide bandwidth loop gain which is ALWAYS a recipe of unstable system behavior. Things that could "fix" social media:
1. Slow down the speed of replies - e.g. 24 hours instead of seconds
2. Reduce the gain - limit how many people can see your reply or post to a narrower range of people you know instead of broadcasting to the universe.
This is exactly what you do with feedback systems like amplifiers or analog circuits to control their stability and prevent unstable behavior. :-)
Instead, it's the same effect as "nobody gets fired for buying IBM." If you follow the crowd, you won't get punished even if what you're doing turns out to have horrific consequences. At best, one could argue that echo chambers fool mob participants into overestimating the size of the crowd, but people on twitter are fully aware that there are people who hate them, and that they hate, and the most unhinged of them spend all day following those enemies around lobbing insults at them, and trying to get them fired or hurt.
There's a significant and illustrative overlap between public opinion-havers and tv/press pundits: pundits got fired for being right about Iraq, CIA black sites, etc. Everybody who was wrong about those things is still being trotted around as if they were an expert on something. Because this is a game of playing it safe, not a game of truth. If something is dangerous, like deviating from the crowd or the boss, do the other thing.
If you see a crowd of wolves surrounding a sheep, be a wolf, not a sheep.
Twitter is going to have some major, major legal problems with the current Missouri lawsuit - acting as a direct agent of the US Government puts Twitter 100% under the jurisdiction and requirements of the 1st Amendment. "The government shall not infringe" now includes Twitter censorship!
Social media as also enabled mentally ill and fringe lunatics to have a voice that is nominally equal to people who are rational and law-and-order based. In so far as individuals should show "reasonable restraint" in anything they do or say (to avoid 1st Amendment, discrimination, slander, libel or other ILLEGAL speech acts), that is partially and centrally an individual's fault as well.
Both feed on each other. Both are evil in any sense of what civilization and civil society are. The pendulum will swing back and in many ways already is.
When a group of people act like terrorists, it's absolutely wrong or illegal. It's not polite but politeness is not the measure. The definition of terrorism lately is (per the FBI):
Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
Committing slander or libel or violating the 1st Amendment (if government OR GOVERNMENT AGENT) is precisely terrorism by the above legal definition given by the government itself.
With Brexit, there was some vague notion of exploitation by the EU and by immigrants, and of lost sovereignty, and with Twitter mobs, it's of some great unpunished injustice. With the former, it leads to people voting against their own interests, and with the latter, a rejection of law and order and a return to half hearted vigilante justice.
The problem isn't Twitter, it's the goons. They have quite a bit of influence on major social institutions, and that's not merely because they can tweet.
Without social media, we'd be left with legacy news organizations and their distorted narratives.
If I was attacked by it, I'd be a victim. I'm not a victim, but I exercise an abundance of caution (conversations as brief, formal, and public as possible and recorded when not) when dealing with this kind of person in the workplace and I'd rather not have to do even more of that in my free time. I already spend enough clock cycles trying to identify these people so I know who to avoid, monitor, or if I'm forced to talk to them arrange a proper meeting/recording so everything is in the clear. Perhaps I am being extreme, but if I lose my health insurance I die and I cannot reasonably let some punk take that away from me so easily.
Profs Negy and Katz did, and in spectacularly offensive fashion.
Claims of victimhood by any other group are debatable in any general context.
I'm ashamed that intelligent adults on HN could somehow come to the conclusion that ganging up on professors who have opinions different than one's own is somehow warranted. It's repulsive.
The point I have been making throughout this thread is that both things can be true.
Negy and Katz both said nasty offensive things, seemingly on purpose in order to rile people up and/or because they are bad people. You can't "whatabout" your way out of that.
The people they said offensive things about are somewhat-radical ideologues who lack respect for freedom and due process.
Two wrongs do not make a right, and vigilante justice is illegal for a reason.
IMO, strongly taking one side in this issue is a clear signal that you are abandoning your own critical thinking skills in favor of your feelings.
He said something he thought to be true - he was making a rhetorical point, in an uncomfortable and insensitive manner. He doesn't really come from a position of power and notably, has wasn't 'going after' anyone, just making a dumb comment.
The person representing the authority or power in the equation ... it doesn't matter much what their statements were, the fact is they went after him (and others) in a systematic and authoritarian manner.
At most, he should have been asked to apologize for being insensitive.
The school, however, needs to be investigated for systematic oppression of profs. using their weird internal investigations to harass people (aka '9 hour interviews? That's fing STASI like stuff, it's what the FBI does to serial killers. Could you imagine your employer grilling you in a room for 9 hours?).
He spoke out of line, the school acted with retribution using arbitrary authority.
Trump believed he won the election.
The students should also be given actual leadership, so that they can contextualize their concerns, and understand when they're being tits.
Some of them want to be tits, which is fine, so long as they aren't being overly vindictive or violent, being a tit is not illegal in most cases.
That there is no easy way to contextualize all of this is insane.
People seem to take one of 'either side' and can't find where a reasonable landing point is.
It's hard because the 'system' in Academia is judicializing their moral perspective, aka referring to protesters as 'terrorists' off hand is considered 'crime' when really it's 'insensitive and irresponsible'.
I should not be that hard and these schools and unions need to be reformed.
Whether or not Black people are victims in any given scenario is debatable. Firing this prof is obviously ridiculous and speaks to the actual authoritarian systems on campus.
The perpetrators of the former use the word "victimhood" manipulatively to abuse the intuitive sympathy that normal non-callous people feel for real victims, and unfortunately it somewhat works, because many people are gullible to such tricks.
Money. You can pay groups to try to “cancel” others. Generally a performance fee applies if successful.
the hit movie american graffiti from the 1970s showed a high school teacher having an affair with one of his students...but it was just a casual aside in the movie plot...no one made a big deal about it...
this nation is entering some sort of neopuritanical hell hole...and it aint gonna be pretty...
Wait until you learn about slavery.
> but the amazing thing was that the other characters did not think the relationship was unusual at all...nowadays, in a movie or in the media, such a relationship would be portrayed as scandalous...
Wow, it’s almost like standards for what’s acceptable evolve.
Thats because females in 1950 USA had very little rights. It was barely 30 years into letting them vote, but only as long as they stay in the kitchen homemaking 'where they belong'.
>would be portrayed as scandalous
exploitative is the word, balance of power is pretty clear here.
>this nation is entering some sort of neopuritanical hell hole
because you cant willy nilly fuck people you have authority over? indeed end of the world.
An adult female and an adult male having a consensual relations is related to 'rights' in what way exactly?
Because I don't think that has anything to do with the situation.
Exploitative by whom? Students don't have to f** profs, it's never been that way.
Your posture is actually sexist, implying that somehow adult females cannot make their own choices.
Unless they do or feel like they have to. That's the whole point, when there's a serious power imbalance like teacher - student, boss - direct report, consent is not so easy. The person with less power can have their life/career/studies depend on the more powerful one, and they can feel that they have to fuck them, or continue fucking them, or do that kinky thing they don't feel comfortable with, or else, even if that's not the case (but it sometimes is). That's why many places have strict policies that forbid such relationships, and it's up to the professor to know better even if they both want to.
Well, I for one welcome our new anti-child-abuse overlords.
Incessant infantilization of college-aged adult people is part of the problem. A 21 y.o. is not a child by any standard I can think of.
They can take enormous debts in their name, enlist to the army and sacrifice their life, become professional firefighters or miners, use various legal drugs, do dangerous jobs such as sailors etc.
Please do not frame adult people as "children" only because they attend a college. It is patronizing and denies them self-control and agency. It also tends to produce bad, heavy-handed, intrusive and oppressive policies aimed to control them "for their own good".
https://kipsamericangraffiti.blogspot.com/2015/11/?m=1
A scene which was clearly written as an expose of real bad stuff that happened but that subtext flew past the commenter who thought it was accidentally included in a movie script because it was no big deal.