When you put it like that it does sound pretty terrible. Shame the left is making Trump seem reasonable.
I don’t see why, if someone does or says something offensive, you’re just supposed to shut up about it. Are we supposed to just shrug at DeSean Jackson saying that Hitler had a point? And if enough people feel strongly about that, why shouldn’t they organize to boycott… er, “cancel” him? Were the folks who were steamrollering and burning Sinead O’Conner or (Dixie) Chick CDs back in the day doing anything wrong? This is nothing new, and people yawned about it when it was done by people they agree with, so I don’t see what room they have to complain now.
It’s a strawman to act as though most of the “cancel” stuff we’re talking about is people who support Hitler or whatever.
It’s the leaders of the Poetry Foundation getting forced out because their statement supporting BLM wasn’t supportive enough.
It’s the managing editor of the NYT Opinion section getting forced out because he dared to post an op-ed written by a sitting senator, expressing a view large numbers of Americans agree with, that the young woke contingent of the NYT staff claimed made them feel “unsafe”.
It’s the “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons” episode of the acclaimed cult series “Community” being taken off all streaming platforms for supposed “blackface” (a “dark elf” who was called out by the black woman in the room), despite that being universally recognized as one of the top two or three episodes of the series. (ETA: How long before they come for basically every episode of The Office, especially in the early seasons, for all the cringey stuff Michael says, even though that’s the whole point?)
Conservatives have for years (accelerated by Trump) misused the term “political correctness” to mean “waaahhh, I can’t sexually harass women at work or say offensive racist jokes in the breakroom”. Which then leads people on the left to assume that any accusation of “PC” is always bullshit. But people need to recognize some fucking nuance.
I’m curious, how do you get ‘just shut up if someone says or does something offensive’ from the letter? I read it as calling for engagement with and open opposition to opposing views, rather than merely trying to silence them.
“We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. […] 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.”
Yeah I learnt about this one recently and it was completely crazy.
I would also add David Shor, a highly respected data analyst, who was fired for tweeting a published academic paper which argued that race riots reduced the Democratic vote share.
Ultimately I think all this craziness will burn itself out but at what cost? It’s probably too late for Trump but it will definitely help Republicans once he is off the stage. And it will damage the credibility of a lot of institutions like the New York Times and elite universities.
Strange, I just looked on Amazon Prime, and that episode is right there, available to watch.
I believe it was cancelled on Netflix and Hulu.
That may be, but the claim was “taken off all streaming platforms” (bolding mine)
I think that the left-most cohort is not immune to this but not particularly more prone to it than any other group with extreme views. What I dislike about it is the apparent (but perhaps not actual) hypocrisy where on the one hand you have a lot of people claiming to want a dialog or conversation and on the other hand people dismissing every attempt at dialog or conversation as either not important enough to discuss, or a tired old argument bordering on sealioning, or concern trolling from a crypto racist who will never change their mind. I say “apparent” hypocrisy because the people claiming to want a dialog are not necessarily the same people who won’t engage in one.
Sorry, I was talking more about the topic in general, not the letter in specific. But now that I look at it again, I’m not sure what the letter writers expect to happen. I take it as a call for those with power to resist the urge to censure or fire people due to their opinions, because I didn’t see anything actionable for the general public (which I think we agree is the main source of the action) besides an implied “leave these poor people alone.” The fact that JK Rowling is among them makes me suspect at least some ulterior motives in play.
Anyway, this is just the whole “free speech” vs. “giving certain opinions platforms poses actual danger to real life humans” debate again. This is really old territory, but I still think it’s interesting that this power was wielded from the right in the past and no one seemed to care then.
…your summary lacks context.
It wasn’t just about the statement. It was that the Poetry Foundation has been called upon for years to use its resources to help marginalised artists but has failed to do so. Posting “Black Lives Matters” but failing to do the “actual work” is merely preformative, or to use words you might be familiar with, simply “virtue signalling.”
Not what happened. On review the op-ed clearly failed the NYT editorial standards and should never have been published. James Bennett had already come out to defend the article despite not having read it prior to publication. And it wasn’t the first time he had fucked up. He deserved to go.
And I haven’t heard a single black voice who supported taking this episode off the air, or the episode of the Golden Girls, or any of the other episodes that were taken off the air. This wasn’t a decision made in the name of “identity politics.” This was a corporate decision made by number crunchers who are simply protecting their bottom line.
The irony.
You realize there is a difference between not expelling, burning down a business, firing or physically assaulting people and being silent?
So folks didn’t advocate for freedom of expression and thought when more socially conservative elements were pushing for limiting expressions? Well how did pornography, gangster rap, blasphemous art, flag burning, death metal etc. manage to be legally produced and distributed? Yes there were complaints but people weren’t being subject to death threats, fired from a job, expelled from college, or made to prostate themselves before the altar of PC for having a copy of Straight Outta Compton.
The Trump admin ordered the brutalization of peaceful protesters. Nothing the Democrats have done comes close to this.
“prostrate”
No judgement on what you do in the privacy of your own home.
That’s absolutely false. Letting so-called ‘peaceful protesters’ go on a crime spree is far worse than anything Trump did after the crime spree.
Oops I think I left out an r. 
You are wrong both on the morals and on the facts. Those protests in DC broken up by Barr’s thugs were entirely peaceful.
That one is actually specifically cited in the Harper’s letter.
They were, and that was heinous. Trump didn’t even do a good job of demagoguery, awkwardly holding up a bible Ivanka brought over in her purse and saying it was not his bible but “a bible”. 
I was very glad to see the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff come out and say that stunt was wrong and not something the military should be involved in. And I believe it has been a big factor in his June decline in the polls.
However, we do have cases of the police being told by liberal mayors in Seattle and Minneapolis to withdraw from areas, and it has been a PR disaster as well as leading to sexual assaults, shootings, and destruction of police precinct buildings. That never should have happened and Joe Biden and other mainstream Democrats need to make it clear they oppose that kind of dereliction of duty to protect property (yes, even property!) and public safety.
Okay, good for them if so. I generally boycott Amazon because they killed the IMDb message boards, so my mistake. Taking them down from both Netflix and Hulu is pretty major though (and pretty fucking ridiculous). I seriously don’t understand why they don’t just take down all of the early seasons of the Office? Just too popular and too many episodes, or what? Not that I want to give them any ideas! But it strikes me as odd and inconsistent.
There’s also actual, historically accurate blackface in the “My Old Kentucky Home” episode of Mad Men. That coincidentally just expired from Netflix in June, and last I heard it had not found a streaming home (although you can buy episodes on iTunes or Amazon). When it does find one again, I wonder if that episode will be nuked? If so, it will kill the continuity of the show, which is very much serialized.
I’m not sure that the letter needs to lay out anything ‘actionable for the general public’. The first step towards remediating an issue is surely to draw attention to it, place it in the public discourse; when I wrote the OP to this thread, the most widespread reaction was that the sort of thing I was using as an example, the sort of thing also pointed to in the letter, doesn’t actually exist at all, that it is only a misperception. So I think one result of this letter is to certify that at least there’s a sizable amount of people sharing this perception, which one might consider grounds to entertain the view that it’s based on something real.
Other than that, what’s in it for the general public is an invitation to open debate—to evaluate, in a public forum, whether what’s being pointed to is a real problem and, if so, what to do about it. Because it’s the lack of such debate, or rather, its replacement with stock blanket judgments based on simplistic black and white moralizing, on sorting people into in-group and out-group based on how well they align with some perceived party lines, that’s ultimately at issue.
See, I don’t really have any problem with what happened to JK Rowling. She made transphobic comments, and got called out for that; in response, she’s tried to justify herself, writing an essay that has in turn attracted criticism. This is the debate that I think also the signatories of the letter would encourage (even if Rowling herself might have preferred to avoid it)—this is attacking a viewpoint, and forcing evaluation and justification.
Something like calling on the Linguist Society of America to cut its public ties to Stephen Pinker is the opposite of that: it doesn’t encourage debate, it doesn’t invite response, indeed, it essentially leapfrogs any engagement with Pinker’s views in favor of just branding them as morally misguided and calling for his removal based on this simple judgment. It’s a testament to the fact that we can’t tolerate dissent within our own ranks: any perceived difference in view is immediate grounds for fracturing.
That doesn’t entail, before somebody brings it up, that you have to suffer all hateful speech—that’s not the point. Rather, the issue is that the middle ground between ‘remove every opposing viewpoint from view’ and ‘encourage the Hitlers of this world to speak up’ is being eroded. Above, I pointed to the notion of cross-cutting cleavages: whether somebody is aligned with a broadly progressive outlook, or is opposed to it, isn’t immediately decided by simple disagreements or individual issues. There’s a point in finding out what unifies us, rather than just pointing to what doesn’t, because from the unifying issues, we can begin to work towards healing the schisms that divide us.
Well, there are some things that need to be debated, and revised, and debated again in a healthy society. There are problems as old as humanity—war, famine, sickness—but that doesn’t mean they don’t need to be addressed anymore.
And I think that there’s an added wrinkle here, in that something that I believe was more readily recognized in the past—the necessity to tolerate, even foster, disagreements and accept a spectrum of viewpoints—is lost in favor of simple ‘with me, or against me’-reasoning. Saying that we should entertain diverse viewpoints is not the same as giving a platform to inhuman views, and the recognition that there’s a gradation here, that it’s not a simple all-or-nothing matter, that’s what’s being lost, and, I think, what the letter calls to reestablish.
In other words: just because I’m in favor of tearing down statues of slave holders, doesn’t mean I also have to be in favor of tearing down the Pyramids, even though they’re monuments to rulers that arguably have perpetrated greater injustices; just because I think that the LSA shouldn’t cut ties with Stephen Pinker doesn’t mean that I’d gladly give Hitler a platform for his views. There’s a middle ground, which is admittedly a difficult terrain to map out: but I don’t think we can eschew this difficulty in favor of rash blanket moral statements and still be a just and open society. There’s no moral glory to be gained in this task, not in the same way as there is in the righteous condemnation of The Bad, at least, but that doesn’t make it any less essential.