As someone who's a devout Christian, it's quite interesting to me to see how the same anti-patterns which plague zealous religious movements -- intolerance, judgementalism, lack of an avenue for repentance / rehabilitation, unquestionable dogmas, inquisitions to root out heresies, factionalism, etc -- plague the progressive movement as well.

"So I find this law at work: Although I want to do good, evil is right there with me." - The Apostle Paul

Far too many people today, many of whom I suspect have a recent inclination to harboring particular political views at all, are missing the entire point of politics - that it's a debate.

It's the great debate, the one that we set up entire electoral systems to have, and built entire buildings in which it would be held.

Today, a dangerous number of people are outright enraged by having their dogmatic political beliefs challenged, and they'll go to great lengths to ensure that you can't share yours.

It's a mess. Years ago, attempts at political conversation were more often than not met with indifference and you had to find like-minded people interested in having them. We used to bemoan that too few people were engaged in politics. Who knew that it would be this much of a mess once they were.

Whenever I hear term 'climate denier' not even 'climate change denier' I know speaker is stewing in his own superiority and least bothered about actual improvement.

Someone's a racist? Getting them to stop lynching people is necessary, absolutely. Getting them to stop using the n-word is needed for a civilized society. But more deeply, they need their heart changed, not just their external behavior. They need to see "those people" as being of equal value to themselves.

Well, the only thing I know that can change hearts that way is the gospel of Jesus Christ. (Note well: I did not say "going to church". That's not the same thing.)

You will eventually be damned whatever you do.

Maybe that is too harsh on them in contrast of people just flaming random people by random characteristics, but they do have real institutional support.

Reminds me of the 10 minute hate from 1984, which was also intended for catharsis not outward justice or remedy.

The thing with situations like this is that it's not that the crowd is reporting that a crime has been committed. It doesn't even matter what was said, it's just that thousands of people are threatening that they will boycott their product. Companies and organisations just need to realise that those people were never their customers anyway and will have forgotten about it tomorrow. A Twitter campaign to get an employee fired should be treated as no more than a DDoS attack and mitigated the same way.

But the kicker is that in the end it turned out that he didn't even make the donation.

One that was circulating was for boycotting anything Peter Thiel had significant involvement in because he is a major donor to Trump. Not much of a surprise but Theil is either a board member or has invested in many companies... So, the list was large and purely virtue signaling. It had other major donors on it too.

I don’t know if this cancel culture really works for large companies. Most companies have taken money or have board members or high level employees that are on opposing sides of the political spectrum. (With some of both sides who have donated heavily to political campaigns...)

> ... he'll just have to work a job making far less like "the rest of us."

How much do they think PIs make anyways? It depends on school, but adjuncts only make ~$1250/credit and typically have no health insurance [0]. They all have side gigs to make ends meet.

[0] https://work.chron.com/adjunct-vs-fulltime-professor-8553.ht...

I also dislike arguments of the form "If they believe <this> how can they treat <some demographic> fairly", or even "People of <some demographic> will feel uncomfortable working with them"; but I accept they have some validity.

I feel a true answer is more complicated; i.e. before we answer these problems, we consider:

- is someone not know to express racist opinions therefore not racist?

- what political-compatibility criteria is needed to work with someone?

- if person A doesn't want to work with person B; is that persons As problem, or person Bs?

- how objective are hiring/firing/promotion criteria? to the extent that they are subjective, what goes into that, and what is fair? Are promotions fair if they are random, so long as they are not biased wrt race/sex/etc? Or is a random process unfair because it is arbitrary? If it is biased towards arbitrary criteria that is not the usual demographics (e.g. ppl who wear glasses) is this fair?

- what moral obligation do employees have in their private lives? Does this obligation differ by job type? Do all jobs have obligations e.g. do corp contracts imply them too; and are employees compensated wrt these obligations?

When you have such a significant power over someone's higher education and therefore their life earnings, I don't think it's unfair to scrutinise these people's views further than had they little structural power.

Can you see how that is a recipe for attacking people and ruining their lives based on something that in the end might be imagined?

Do you see how easily that becomes ... anyone who disagrees with any opinion I have is evil?

"criticising protesters" leads to "support militia", that leads to "support their murders", so he "do(es) not support the black lives matter", therefore wants "continuation of black people being murdered".

Imagine that for a guy that had his car turned upside down by protesters and was complaining about that.

But there are a lot of complexities and nuances to each one of those moral issues. Each one really needs a discussion.

Even just separating out BLM, there is the core moral anti-racist belief behind the statement (which I think most people would agree with), but there is also the political association affiliated with the Democratic party that in their belief statement supports abortion, transgenderism, and many other issues that are still at contention in our country. Talking with many of my conservative friends, they have no issue with the race movement of BLM but will not align themselves with a political organization that supports abortion, particularly as they see it as a genocide targeted primarily at inner-city blacks.

Again, we need more nuance, not less. We're already polarized enough. One issue is that peoples' views are not being scrutinized, they're being thrown into a bucket of "racist" and cancelled. Any time a straw man is used to silence a group of people based on mass categorization, it's contributing to division and not unity. These issues, and politics in particular, are and should be complex.

When the word racist is being attributed to everything and anything including opposition to complete open borders by bullys and funnily enough, racists it is understandable that people may want to take cover.

> because we don't know what his exact words were, but it's telling that even your defence of him describes him criticising protesters at a time when protesters are being shot and having chemical weapons used on them by the police, a state militia who can kill pretty much anyone without threat of consequence.

It is also quite telling that "When those protesters are also burning down cities and attacking people" is strangely absent from your description.

> If your stance in this case is to support that militia, their murders and their use of chemical weapons, then I think that it's not remotely unfair to say that you not only do not support the black lives matter movement, but that you support the continuation of black people in the states being murdered without recompense.

Very few are in full support of everything the police do but binarizing the support to all or nothing is ridiculous.

Another victory for social justice. Brexit, Trump, you guys just can't stop winning.