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A comment on An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science. Parent comment

Re:An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science by Dig1t on Tuesday November 08, 2022 @11:56AM (#33521223)
I think you are being disingenuous if you are denying that cancel culture is a thing. There is a long list of people who’ve been cancelled or have attempted to be cancelled and finding that list is a quick Google away. Examples include: JK Rowling, Dave Chapelle, Matt Damon, etc. the list is a mile long. Some cancellation attempts are more successful than others depending on how famous they are. But the key is that a large mob of people banded together and tried to get them deplatformed, usually using common language like “do better”, and calling them things like “fascist”, “bigot”, “racist”.

Additionally, those are just examples of people in the public sphere, there are tons of videos and other examples of online of students shouting down professors or guest speakers, calling them "fascists", demanding they be fired, literally cancelling speakers with opposing views. I mean there's just a lot of evidence online, very easy to Google. I can link it here if that's helpful, but I worry that the people who don't already know about this problem will probably just ignore the links since they were already willfully ignorant up to this point.

Of course there are examples of right extremes, nobody here is denying that, we’re talking about the extremes of the left and how they are having a chilling effect on scientific research.

For the record, I am not a Republican and I am not a Democrat.

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Re:An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science by vibrio on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @10:07AM (#33532607)
I don't think I denied that "cancel culture" is a thing. The quote are because I have very limited exposure to social media (this site and some limited reddit) and don't follow any popular news (cnn/fox/abc/nbc etc), and don't talk politics socially- so I'm not comfortable that my definition of 'cancel' is the common definition. My intended point was this behavior is on both left and right BUT but more importantly, it is the extremes of each that are the problem and 'canceling' drives greater extremes. that is not good. I intended to make the point that the folks at Williams are likely extreme due to the bubble that they live in- and I don't support that at all. Fwiw: I'm neither Republican or Democrat either. I have deep distrust in anyone with power, which is dark soul of both of those organizations.
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