Ousted eLife editor on being fired in wake of Israel-Hamas remarks
nature.com
nature.com
Cancel Culture is undoubtedly having a profound chilling effect on free speech. If only there were a way to measure it.
That said, his tweets have always been controversial and I wish he'd put down the twitters and get back to work.
I mean, that's par for the course when talking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It almost invariably devolves into extreme rhetoric. I have a feeling this post will be taken down because of this. Hopefully not, since this story isn't about the conflict, it's about Cancel Culture, IMHO.
> That said, his tweets have always been controversial and I wish he'd put down the twitters and get back to work.
People should be allowed to have personal lives that are separate from their work lives. If you were CEO of a large company, does that mean everything you say and do is now an official statement or action of that company? I really hope not.
Why shouldn't free people have the right to freely associate as they would like? Shunning is just the free expression of association, particularly the lack thereof.
Though if I'm honest, I thought political views are protected in California.
I think it's important to parse out the difference between bad and illegal. Just because something is bad doesn't mean it should be illegal, and just because something is illegal doesn't mean it's bad.
Cancel Culture is a bad thing, but I don't think it should be illegal to fire someone because he's controversial. That being said, I don't think our culture should tolerate it.
Cancel Culture creates a chilling effect on speech; it's hard to have a candid conversation when you know that expressing the "wrong" opinion could mean losing your job and being publicly humiliated.
It can also create a mob rule, which has no interest in the truth, but rather seeks to demonize anyone who challenges its worldview. I'll give you an example of this that happened in San Francisco recently. A school board member was accused of being a "racist" after she remarked that "black and brown students" lack family support. Despite the fact that this is objectively true in her school district, she was forced to publicly apologize and resign, Chinese Cultural Revolution style. This kind of publicly humiliation creates a toxic environment, where instead of identifying and addressing the root cause of problems, school boards will plug their ears and hum while doing things that actually make things worse [1]. Or, people will say one thing, but actually think another. San Francisco is notorious for this; people virtue signal left and right, but when it comes to actual policy, they vote very differently.
The fact of the matter is that people have a wide range of opinions. I work with people who are all over the political spectrum, none of whom should be publicly humiliated and forced to resign, apologize, and flagellate themselves just because their opinions are controversial. This is definitely not how you win hearts and minds for a cause, at least not among rational people. Sooner or later, the things you use against other people will be turned against you.
[1] Different school board, but undoubtedly the same type of people who called Ann Hsu a racist: https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-sa...
https://www.state.gov/united-states-saudi-arabia-relationshi...
Hamas obviously are a bunch of evil barbarians.
On the other hand, they're spawned from decades of systematic oppression of Palestinians (I've seen it fh) by Israel, isrealis, and their insecurity.
And now the world is basically standing-by, if not encouraging events, while Israel freely exacts revenge, if not genocide, justified by Hamas' atrocious (but quite predictable) outburst.
Do they really think removing 'radical elements' (along with whatever collateral damage) will solve the problem? I feel myself becoming more radical just by watching events, and I have absolutely no connection whatsoever to the region.
Destroying the Hamas is 100% the right thing to do. It's an evil movement that must be eliminated, there's no middle ground here or two sides. To qualify the difference in levels lets look at the situation over the past week. Israel told civilians to move out of the northern part of Gaza so they won't get hurt. Hamas blocked the roads so civilians won't leave.
They use their own people as human shields. They kidnapped civilian women, children and elderly people. They are evil.
Innocent people sometimes get hurt when rooting out evil. That's terrible. But the Hamas must be removed for the sake of the people in Gaza almost as much as for the sake of the people in Israel.
Worldwide support is right. People who actually understand the issue have uniformly come out in favor of this.
Some smart people have said stupid things here, like calling for a ceasefire. That isn't an option. Every time the Hamas was given leeway it has used that to arm itself and attack. E.g. a few years back 1,000 Hamas detainees were released to free one kidnapped Israeli soldier. They promised that they would not attack as a condition of their release. Yet most of them took a part in the October 7th attack. To make matters worse they focused on kidnappings, they learned the effect that has.
Relax. It's a figure of speech. It means, "these two things are different." It in no way dehumanizes anyone.
> Seeing your family members killed is the same, regardless of who you are
Would you agree that it's important to recognize who is responsible for the killing?
Experts who study the propagation of violence say that the currency of radicalism is grievance. The more grievances happen, the more support goes to violent extremists to strike back, even if this only results in more bullets coming back their way in the future. I can certainly see this feedback loop playing out on both sides of this conflict, because every Israeli civilian casualty results in more support for hard-line military response against Gaza, and every Palestinian civilian casualty results in more support for Hamas.
* This example is taken from an Obama-era US drone strike in Pakistan, because I'm far too distressed to track specific tragedies happening in Israel and Palestine in real time.
Afghanistan, 2002: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.lu...
Iraq, 2004: https://web.archive.org/web/20050310145831/http://www.guardi...
Afghanistan, Nov 3, 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wech_Baghtu_wedding_party_airs...
Afghanistan, 5 July 2008: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA599423.pdf
Afghanistan, 6 July 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haska_Meyna_wedding_party_airs... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/11/afghanistan.us...
Afghanistan, 8 June 2012: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/general-apolog...
Yemen, Dec 12, 2013: https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/us-investigates-yemenis-c...
AFAIK, the US and Israel make explicit efforts to avoid killing civilians in an effort to abide by international rules of engagement. Compare this to Hamas, who makes explicit efforts to target civilians and use them as human shields (even glorifying and celebrating it), and you can see why it's impossible to draw a moral equivalence of the two. Like I said, apples to oranges.
Obviously in no case were US military commanders evilly rubbing their hands together and looking for innocent brides and grooms to blow up. Perhaps it was a lack of due diligence, or blind faith in unreliable sources. Perhaps it was trigger-happiness. Perhaps it was the fog of war. Perhaps it was a sense of guilt by association. Perhaps a few false positives were deemed to meet somebody's threshold of acceptability. Perhaps it was an understanding that there would be little reporting and no major reputational consequences. Perhaps it was an understanding that principles like "it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer" do not apply to non-citizens in poor, far off lands.
If I were the bride or groom, I don't think any of this would matter greatly. I'd still be pretty mad at the people who launched the missile, and it's very likely that this would propagate the cycle of violence. As far as the civilian casualties go, every innocent human life is an apple, and they all count the same, regardless of how guilty their neighbors or cousins or government are. They all feel the same outrage, pain, and grievance when their 13-year-old kid is killed in an explosion, whether it's a car bombing or an air strike or a mass shooting or an improvised rocket. It takes near-superhuman levelheadedness to shrug and say "well I guess I'll forgive them for killing my children, since they meant well". That was my point. Nowhere did I say "Israel and Hamas have exactly the same moral standing" or "The USA is just as bad as the Taliban" or something like that. If you're developing a feeling that anyone disagreeing with you is a supporter of Hamas or an enemy of Israel, it's probably time to put down the keyboard and go for a walk.
Meanwhile, Hamas routinely fires artillery shells directly at Israeli civilians, and people get offended when I say this is different than Israel attack Hamas's terrorism infrastructure embedded in civilian areas.
> If you're developing a feeling that anyone disagreeing with you is a supporter of Hamas or an enemy of Israel
Total strawman. I'm getting the feeling that nobody is capable of talking about this conflict rationally, which is why it's so toxic. Which brings us back to the actual topic: a man got fired for a tweet that sympathizes with a dying Palestinian civilian, which is totally absurd.
Not even remotely close.
Besides, we are way off topic. This is not related to the dismissal of an employee because of his tweet.
And just to be clear, it's not siding with the terrorists or those directly complicit with them to question these methods, just as it wouldn't be siding with criminals to suggest police can't act with impunity.
No, I did not, and the fact that you believe this is just proving my point. You’re being unreasonable, and no amount of explanation is going to help here.
Besides, this is way off topic.
I did a quick search for this. Seems like there's some controversy over the numbers, even though they've tried to back it with evidence. That's approaching 5x the official numbers of Israeli casualties, so even if its been inflated my 3x is probably already low and out of date.
Now you might take that figure with a grain of salt, I cannot verify it and wouldn't trust it at present. However, there are plenty of individual stories being reported by agencies I have enough trust in (and some of which I wish now I had not read). You can't accurately shell buildings in a densely built up city like Gaza. Israel told people to move, but there are credible reports that they then attacked people in transit, shelled an area near the south they'd asked people to move to and shelled a refugee camp.
I'm sure that in every case Israel will argue they had intelligence. But I don't think the families of those who see their kids killed in those strikes are going to care. They're just making the next angry generation by applying indiscriminate vengeful violence.
Regardless of your point the 3x number is irrelevant. This isn't about retaliation. Israel isn't aiming at civilians. The exact opposite. Israel has asked them to leave, they are trying to leave. The Hamas blocks their path so people like you would blame Israel.
> Hamas did an evil deed but the response Israel is taking is going to make more terrorists.
There are no great options here. The Hamas, must be destroyed and any option will be painful. A ground invasion will probably result in even more civilian deaths.
I suggest googling some of the child programming in Gaza's TV station. Pretty horrific stuff. They used the past decade to raise the next generation of terrorists/human shields. All the while their leaders have been amassing vast amounts of properties living in Quatar, Turkey, Lebanon etc.
> There was a story yesterday about a journalist whose entire family was killed by an Israeli shelling. That's just as evil at the atrocities Hamas committed and support for Israel will ebb if that is their approach.
That is a terrible comparison. No one was aiming at that journalists family. Based on your logic the Nazi's should have been appeased. We know how that turned out.
There was a mistake of letting the Hamas survive, even supporting it. It was always a genocidal organization that had no qualms about Palestinian deaths as part of its Jihad. War is messy and terrible, I feel bad for that family. They shouldn't have died, it's not their fault. The natural reaction is to stop violence and in 98% of the cases that's the right thing to do.
This is the 2% case. It's going to get a lot worse but the Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) can't exist when this is over. This is the only path for a future Palestinian state. If you support a Palestinian state then the only path to get there is this.
The impression that Israel is particularly egregious is often plain prejudice. How dare they defend themselves.
I wish I could just turn it off, but I get email notifications of it, and the platform is beneficial to other parts of my/our work (announcing new features on a tool I work on)