Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times

Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by tptacek on Tuesday March 22, 2022 @10:02PM (#30774015)

I'm not interested in rehabilitating Pinker, who appeared in Epstein's flight logs and has been photographed socializing with him. My point is simply that he tends to be a bad example when brought up in these kinds of discussions. He's treated as if he's simply a celebrity scientist caught in the limelight over political tweets. But he's not just that.

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Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by gjm11 on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @03:59AM (#30776119)

Maybe you know something about them that I don't, but to me it seems alarming that someone needs to be "rehabilitated" for those things.

"Appeared in Epstein's flight logs" = "went on his plane to a TED meeting in 2002", and "has been photographed socializing with him" = "was at a few parties where Epstein 'socialized' with everyone famous he could find", so far as I can tell. From Pinker's account -- which obviously might be self-serving -- they disliked one another. What do you think Pinker did that he could reasonably have been expected not to do, given the information available to him at the time?

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Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by jollybean on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @06:45AM (#30777052)

Rubbish - Pinker is exactly the person that should be protected and there's no need to 'rehabilitate him' from anything.

Celebrities of various kinds interact with each other, that's how that works.

If you were invited to a conference and the CEO invited you on his plane because you had something interesting to say, and 10 years later we find he was a rapist, do we cancel you?

If you're going to tell me that Pinker was 'on rape island sleeping with teens girls' - then obviously that's another matter, cancel away, but as far as I know that's not the case.

This is exactly the kind of petty, toxic, vindictive posturing exemplary of bad cancel culture.

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Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by tptacek on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @11:56AM (#30779808)

Funny, I can't think of that many other "celebrities" that contributed directly to Jeffrey Epstein's sweetheart sentence in 2008, which enabled him to continue trafficking and abusing minors in the ensuing decade.

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Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by gjm11 on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @04:28PM (#30782921)

What do you think Pinker should have done when Dershowitz wrote to him asking "what exactly do you think this statute means"?

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Re:Our fundamental right to shame and shun the New York Times by prutschman on Wednesday March 23, 2022 @05:11PM (#30783444)

I genuinely hope both of you continue this thread, even as I think it's unlikely that you'll come to common ground. I'm finding it extremely helpful to clarify my thoughts on this type of situation.

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