O/T:-Bum Lickers

[drillerpie]

Great work Driller, you falsely accused me of purporting a straw man argument, then claim that you and Utm have been called ‘closet racists’ (when, by whom?).

You also claim that others ‘base everything on personalities behind the arguments’ right after citing Chomsky and Rushdie! Literally accusing people in one sentence of what you’ve just done in the previous one. Unbelievable.

In its opening paragraph the letter you’ve linked to states;

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning...

If that isn’t tacit support for your hated BLM campaign, I don’t quite know what is. The rest is a committee written series of platitudes about free speech which no one sentient could really disagree with. It gives no further info on the examples of ‘hasty and disproportionate punishments’ so the reader has no idea about the individual merits of those cases.

I’d love to know the authors’ opinion on David Starkey, the historian who talked in an interview with a right wing website about ‘damned blacks’ along with putting forward other questionable racial attitudes. Did they feel he had a right to put forward those opinions? Were the universities who had connections with him right to ‘cancel’ him? We have no idea.

I thiught this was an excellent contribution from the former cricketer and top commentator Michael Holding on the BLM campaign.

https://twitter.com/ralphyheraldsun/...645998081?s=21

I find your post very disingenuous.

The other day you implied I was right/far right for using the word Antifa. I know that far-right to you means Boris Johnson, so you've basically stripped the term of all its meaning, but I still still don't appreciate the suggestion.

I've mentioned several times that it's hard to talk about this with you because you try to disqualify opinions based on the person that expressed them rather than examining them on their merits.

I was pointing out that maybe now someone with unimpeachable left-wing credentials has signed a letter saying that censorship and the threat of disproportionate punishments for expressing certain opinions are stifling good faith debate, you might finally be able to engage with the topic. And so it has proved.

Having said that I disagree with your analysis of the letter. You saw tacit support for BLM, I saw explicit support for the general ideas of justice and equality, but implicit criticism of BLM (the "new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity" mentioned in the letter is as clear a description as you'll ever see of the forced compliance with intersectionality, be that in the guise of BLM or something else.

You called the rest of the letter 'platitudes which nobody sentient could disagree with'. I would ask you to consider whether 150 prominent intellectuals would really feel it necessary to do this if nobody sentient were disagreeing with them, and also whether you are by your own definition sentient.

[drillerpie]

Here's the letter, if for anyone who's interested:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most ***** causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis ***uyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Mashek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria

[BigFatPie]

I find your post very disingenuous.

The other day you implied I was right/far right for using the word Antifa. I know that far-right to you means Boris Johnson, so you've basically stripped the term of all its meaning, but I still still don't appreciate the suggestion.

I've mentioned several times that it's hard to talk about this with you because you try to disqualify opinions based on the person that expressed them rather than examining them on their merits.

I was pointing out that maybe now someone with unimpeachable left-wing credentials has signed a letter saying that censorship and the threat of disproportionate punishments for expressing certain opinions are stifling good faith debate, you might finally be able to engage with the topic. And so it has proved.

Having said that I disagree with your analysis of the letter. You saw tacit support for BLM, I saw explicit support for the general ideas of justice and equality, but implicit criticism of BLM (the "new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favour of ideological conformity" mentioned in the letter is as clear a description as you'll ever see of the forced compliance with intersectionality, be that in the guise of BLM or something else.

You called the rest of the letter 'platitudes which nobody sentient could disagree with'. I would ask you to consider whether 150 prominent intellectuals would really feel it necessary to do this if nobody sentient were disagreeing with them, and also whether you are by your own definition sentient.

I didn’t imply you were far right at all. What I said was that I had only seen the term ‘antifa’ used pejoratively by the right/far right. That’s the way it is overwhelmingly used but you were right, some groups in the US call themselves by that name. I think our previous exchanges have proved that I’m ‘engaged with the topic’ so I don’t quite know why you think this letter has sparked a change.

On the letter itself, it is anodyne and bland, it has to be to get 150 people to put their signature to it. To take two sentences in isolation. ‘The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation’, and ‘We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other’. Well, yeah. I don’t think there’s a single person on here who’d disagree with either of those two sentiments and we all know what a wide range of opinions there are. Again, I don’t know about the examples it cites, so can’t comment on their individual merit.

I do think there have been examples from the recent past where people have been afraid to have an honest debate. When Islamist attacks have happened, any questioning or criticism of that particular religion have been wrongly shut down as ‘Islamophobic’. I found the Charlie Hebdo atrocity a particularly heinous attempt to scare journalists and satirists into making Islam off limits. Some would say they’ve succeeded. We won’t agree on the BLM campaign. I think it has faults, but is generally A Good Thing, you think it’s some sort Marxist plot. Fair enough, we will, to use your words see who’s on the ‘right side of history’.

[sidders]

Here's the letter, if for anyone who's interested:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most ***** causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Elliot Ackerman
Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University
Martin Amis
Anne Applebaum
Marie Arana, author
Margaret Atwood
John Banville
Mia Bay, historian
Louis Begley, writer
Roger Berkowitz, Bard College
Paul Berman, writer
Sheri Berman, Barnard College
Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet
Neil Blair, agent
David W. Blight, Yale University
Jennifer Finney Boylan, author
David Bromwich
David Brooks, columnist
Ian Buruma, Bard College
Lea Carpenter
Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus)
Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University
Roger Cohen, writer
Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret.
Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project
Kamel Daoud
Meghan Daum, writer
Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis
Jeffrey Eugenides, writer
Dexter Filkins
Federico Finchelstein, The New School
Caitlin Flanagan
Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School
Kmele Foster
David Frum, journalist
Francis ***uyama, Stanford University
Atul Gawande, Harvard University
Todd Gitlin, Columbia University
Kim Ghattas
Malcolm Gladwell
Michelle Goldberg, columnist
Rebecca Goldstein, writer
Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
David Greenberg, Rutgers University
Linda Greenhouse
Rinne B. Groff, playwright
Sarah Haider, activist
Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern
Roya Hakakian, writer
Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution
Jeet Heer, The Nation
Katie Herzog, podcast host
Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College
Adam Hochschild, author
Arlie Russell Hochschild, author
Eva Hoffman, writer
Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute
Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute
Michael Ignatieff
Zaid Jilani, journalist
Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts
Wendy Kaminer, writer
Matthew Karp, Princeton University
Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative
Daniel Kehlmann, writer
Randall Kennedy
Khaled Khalifa, writer
Parag Khanna, author
Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University
Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy
Enrique Krauze, historian
Anthony Kronman, Yale University
Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University
Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University
Mark Lilla, Columbia University
Susie Linfield, New York University
Damon Linker, writer
Dahlia Lithwick, Slate
Steven Lukes, New York University
John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer
Susan Madrak, writer
Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer
Greil Marcus
Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center
Kati Marton, author
Debra Mashek, scholar
Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago
John McWhorter, Columbia University
Uday Mehta, City University of New York
Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University
Yascha Mounk, Persuasion
Samuel Moyn, Yale University
Meera Nanda, writer and teacher
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine
Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University
Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer
George Packer
Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita)
Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden
Orlando Patterson, Harvard University
Steven Pinker, Harvard University
Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Katha Pollitt, writer
Claire Bond Potter, The New School
Taufiq Rahim
Zia Haider Rahman, writer
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin
Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic
Neil Roberts, political theorist
Melvin Rogers, Brown University
Kat Rosenfield, writer
Loretta J. Ross, Smith College
J.K. Rowling
Salman Rushdie, New York University
Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment
Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University
Diana Senechal, teacher and writer
Jennifer Senior, columnist
Judith Shulevitz, writer
Jesse Singal, journalist
Anne-Marie Slaughter
Andrew Solomon, writer
Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer
Allison Stanger, Middlebury College
Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University
Wendell Steavenson, writer
Gloria Steinem, writer and activist
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School
Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University
Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University
Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama
Adaner Usmani, Harvard University
Chloe Valdary
Helen Vendler, Harvard University
Judy B. Walzer
Michael Walzer
Eric K. Washington, historian
Caroline Weber, historian
Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers
Bari Weiss
Sean Wilentz, Princeton University
Garry Wills
Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer
Robert F. Worth, journalist and author
Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Matthew Yglesias
Emily Yoffe, journalist
Cathy Young, journalist
Fareed Zakaria

I see Uncle Tom Cobley didn't get involved.

[upthemaggies]

"Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives."

Do we think Notts can survive this?

[the_anticlough]

"Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives."

That reminds me of the film 'Apocalypto', there the line was

''A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

[upthemaggies]

That reminds me of the film 'Apocalypto', there the line was

''A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

Apparently it's the conclusion of historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus "A Study of History" published 1934–61.
Perhaps events of 2020 have brought the process (which may have begun several decades ago) into sharp focus. Assuming it doesn't end with nuclear war, who marches in to take control?

[macstop]

2020 is like living in a lunatic asylum with the inmates telling you that it's YOU who is insane!

[upthemaggies]

2020 is like living in a lunatic asylum with the inmates telling you that it's YOU who is insane!

We're actually reaching the point where Scientology appears to be a relatively sane and benign organisation.

[upthemaggies]

Left wing comedy is dead, I'm having to look to right wing Christians for laughs now.
A selection of Babylon Bee satirical news website headlines......

Deeply Moved By 'Black Lives Matter' Mural, Trump Joins The Black Panthers ....... “I just had to do something,” Trump later told the press. “When I saw the words ‘Black Lives Matter,’ I was like, ‘I never thought of it that way.’

Ilhan Omar Withdraws Support From Bill To Save The Earth After Learning That’s Where Israel Is

Chinese Spies Using TikTok To Steal All America's Top-Secret Dance Moves

Governors Reinstate Lockdowns To Combat Recovering Economy

Atheists Launch No Lives Matter Movement

Trump Generously Offers To Give Biden 30-Minute Head Start On All Debate Responses

Asylum Orderlies Return Hillary Clinton To Padded Cell Disguised As Oval Office

Bible Experts Determine Goliath Died Of COVID-19

Pelosi: 'We Have To Knock The Statues Down To Find Out If They're Racist'... "Some rioters did something," she added.

Netflix Hires Racists And Pulls Any Episodes They Laugh At

Democrats Call For Labels Warning Consumers If A Company's CEO Voted For Trump

People On Boat Drifting Left Wondering Why Shore Is Drifting Right

My favourite story on there....
https://babylonbee.com/news/new-prog...n-their-behalf