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Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by rippercushions on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:02PM (#34133736)
Looks promising, but let's see how this is interpreted in practice: we unfortunately live in a world where the statement "I like Harry Potter" can be weaponized into the "direct threats, harassment" excluded from freedom of expression. (Why? Because JK doesn't think transwomen are real women, so if you support her writing, you are clearly denying that that trans people have the right to exist.)
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by hyperbovine on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:11PM (#34133804)
I smell a straw man. Please show me a specific incident where "I like Harry Potter" led to the speaker getting cancelled.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by bell-cot on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:38PM (#34133943)
"can be weaponized" - not "has been" - is a pretty big disclaimer. Threats & harassment are (sadly) quite common on-line. And "speaker getting cancelled"is your criteria, not rippercushions'.

In any case, a "Looks promising, ... in practice." sounds like a pretty reasonable reaction, these days.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by rippercushions on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:57PM (#34134072)
Here's the backstory, complete with a long list of Hollywood celebrities including Harry Potter stars dissociating themselves from her:

https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk...

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by comex on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:05PM (#34134118)
That is about J.K. Rowling, not about someone who said “I like Harry Potter”.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by rippercushions on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:07PM (#34134481)
No, it's also about everybody associated in any way with Rowling, who were also forced into servile apologies to avoid getting cancelled themselves.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by hyperbovine on Monday December 26, 2022 @08:48AM (#34137588)
Which is still unrelated to your original claim.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by snotrockets on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:23PM (#34134218)
Yes, associating with an outspoken bigot like JK Rowling has a price.

But this isn't about the books, but the author (many LBGTQA+ people read the books as coming out story, and still hold them dear for that, regardless of the author's vile opinions of those very same readers).

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by throwaway0x7E6 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:30PM (#34134264)
surely at this point you must realize it was just a story about wizards and witches, lol
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by snotrockets on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:29AM (#34135260)
I wasn't too fond of the books when they were first published (showing my age here), and I don't feel a need to reread them. But here's the fun thing about stories: you can find whatever you'd like in them. As a reader, you are allowed to put part of yourself into the story; it is no longer just the author.

If you want Harry Potter to be a story about queerness, it is yours to make it so. If you want it to be a story about the problems of British education, it is just as much.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by devmunchies on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:02PM (#34134447)
> LBGTQA+

I believe it’s just the “T” in this case, snotrockets.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by snotrockets on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:35AM (#34135300)
An injury to one is an injury to all – if you single out the T, you're no A.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by justin66 on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:00PM (#34134436)
What I got from your reply is that even you don't believe your previous statement we unfortunately live in a world where the statement "I like Harry Potter" can be weaponized.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by Dig1t on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:04PM (#34134457)
I'm not linking evidence here, but there are tons of examples of this happening on Twitter.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by acdha on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:08PM (#34134484)
Without linking, there’s no value to that statement as the reader can’t evaluate whether those statements are true, leaving out significant details, or representative of some trend.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by peanutcrisis on Monday December 26, 2022 @01:46AM (#34135357)
Not sure if such pedantry is necessary, this is something that can be trivially searched up.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by kspacewalk2 on Monday December 26, 2022 @06:37AM (#34136830)
It absolutely cannot be. What you're claiming to exist in fact does not. You're welcome to prove me wrong, of course.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by roflyear on Monday December 26, 2022 @06:12PM (#34142984)
I'm waiting for the link too!
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by acdha on Monday December 26, 2022 @07:45AM (#34137232)
Pedantry would be trying to make some kind of unnecessarily fine distinction like arguing that the situation was totally different because the person claimed to be a Harry Potter super-fan.

This is basic media literacy of the type taught to school children. Without a source, we don’t know whether anyone is even talking about the same thing or evaluate how trustworthy it is. People write lots of things on the internet and since search engines customize results there’s no guarantee that anyone will get the same result.

This matters because someone who is confident that they’re honestly representing the facts rarely needs to be evasive. When you see so many people commenting about something which they assert is true but won’t even name, it’s usually an in-group shibboleth which they are not confident will stand up to scrutiny.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by LawTalkingGuy on Monday December 26, 2022 @03:51AM (#34135919)
A nurse helped fund an "I heart J. K. Rowling" billboard and is having her job threatened. Close enough.

https://www.newsweek.com/nurse-being-investigated-i-love-jk-...

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by rippercushions on Monday December 26, 2022 @04:09AM (#34136014)
A billboard she offered to fund, but in the end did not. Not that it matters, a selfie of herself smiling in front of it was sufficient evidence of thoughtcrime.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by jbeam on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:30PM (#34133905)
JK isn’t even cancelled, let alone those who enjoy her magnum opus.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by peanutcrisis on Sunday December 25, 2022 @09:39PM (#34133952)
Doesn't reject the fact that attempts were made to do so. The threat of cancellation is very real regardless [0], and not everyone is able to make it out unscathed like JK Rowling.

[0] https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/pr...

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by zzzeek on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:28PM (#34134584)
JK Rowling was not cancelled in any way. Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate. "Cancel culture" to the degree that it exists as any kind of actual threat to free speech is squarely a right-wing endeavor.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by lelanthran on Monday December 26, 2022 @12:26AM (#34134857)
> Gawker Media however, was, by a deranged billionaire who abused the legal system to exact revenge on a gossip-oriented news site and its entire media conglomerate.

Gawker Media wasn't cancelled; they intentionally violated a direct court order. Maybe you should be arguing that the court should not have ruled against Gawker in the first place, or arguing that the court should not have directed Gawker to cease the publication of nonconsensual nudes, or that the court should not have brought the hammer down when Gawker continued its publication of nonconsensual nudes.

I'm curious why you think it is okay to publish nudes of someone against their will. https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/824/503/e53...

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by zzzeek on Monday December 26, 2022 @09:17AM (#34137752)
> I'm curious why you think it is okay to publish nudes of someone against their will.

I in no way stated or implied that that is OK in any way. such practices are vile and disgusting as was the outing of Thiel.

However, a "first amendment violation" , neither incident was.

"free speech" means, as we are reminded constantly by right wingers when they are denouncing "cancel culture", "speech that we despise is also free". Gawker in no way violated the first amendment. Right wing billionaires who claim to be things like "free speech absolutists" are full of it and will use any tools at their disposal to silence and "cancel" speech they don't like, including using their billions to abuse the justice system, launching torrents of frivolous lawsuits against media companies that published a story they didn't like (but had no legal basis to challenge).

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by lelanthran on Monday December 26, 2022 @10:29AM (#34138329)
Yeah, but this wasn't the abuse of the Justice system, nor is it a free speech issues.

Entity ordered by a court to cease publishing nonconsensual nudes, Entity refused, then told the court they would never agree, then fined punitively.

What about this do you consider is a free speech violation?

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by zzzeek on Thursday December 29, 2022 @01:08PM (#34175760)
Again, "a free speech violation occurred" is not my point.

my point is, billionaires saying "At last! free speech!" like PG did when he retweeted this MIT annoucement are completely full of it. They would like right-wing speech, ideas like "Black people are less intellectually capable" to be "free", which means "unquestioned and globally amplified", whereas any media company they don't personally like should be sued into oblivion. Gawker's fate only began when Peter Theil decided to target tens of millions of dollars at suing them into oblivion, waiting for something to stick. It quite plainly set a precedent that such actions can be taken by any billionaire whenever they want. Billionaires like Theil, PG and quite plainly Musk do not give a flying f** about "free speech". it is their speech they care about. And they should be widely challenged on this.

Gawker was not fined $140 million for violating a court order. They were sued for damages by Hulk Hogan and Hogan could have sued for the same things even if they had complied with that order, and I am not familiar with what basis there is to claim this lawsuit would not have been brought or successful if they had complied; even if unsuccessful, Theil's goal was to continue flooding Gawker with lawsuits until they went out of business, and this is most certainly an abuse of the legal system.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by peanutcrisis on Monday December 26, 2022 @12:35AM (#34134895)
I did not say she was cancelled (in a successful sense), I said there were attempts to get her cancelled. Again, while her attempted cancellation wasn't successful, the fact that such an attempt even happened in the first place is mortifying. We live in the 21st century, witch hunts should not be a thing anymore.

Furthermore, I get the sense that your dismissal of JK Rowling's attempted cancellation is a thinly veiled attempt to dismiss or minimise the notion that "cancellation" is an actual phenomenon. People have their lives physically harmed and their livelihoods threatened because of this. People have committed suicide because of this (if you did actually bother to read the comment you were responding to). If that were your intent, you should take a good look as to whether you're consumed by the culture wars or not.

The notion that cancellation is exclusively a right-wing phenomenon is bollocks as well. Countless leftist academics have been successfully cancelled for their views. Oftentimes, their views were (mis)interpreted and misrepresented by their attackers in a fashion that requires the complete obliteration of reasoning. In fact, if you actually check the statistics from FIRE, 60% of the cancellation in academia came from the left, although 40% from the right is non-trivial as well. As such, the threat to free speech is indeed real, regardless of your political affiliation.

Lastly, I'm not based in the US or any part of the anglosphere. From my outsider's point of view however, the imminent threat to free speech in the "1984" sense is coming from the left. I spent two years of my time watching how Donald Trump and the republicans made a complete joke out of the US. I watched in utter shock at the atrocities and lunacy that they were capable of. In the next two years however, I observed an equivalent form of lunacy that was emerging from the left. This is no thanks to the influence of big tech, academia, and the left-wing media, whose global reach is far more prevalent than that of Fox News. From then on, I watched as more institutions in the west were ideologically captured, sacrificing their function for "social justice". While they are not the government, they are the cumulation of every power aside from the government. We've seen how big tech can rival the power held by congress. That, plus the media, academia, public and private institutions combined, is capable, and is exercising that power in a manner that is starting to look 1984-esque. What seems to be successfully driving this trend is the left's inability to discern social justice from "critical social justice". In other words, my calculus assignment easily runs circles around Robin DiAngelo's entire academic career and intellect. However, marketing and rhetoric triumph reason. Make what you want out of what I've written.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by yucky on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:27PM (#34134248)

   > Why? Because JK Rowling doesn't think transwomen are real women
This shouldn't even be a controversial statement, it's just a statement of fact. Transwomen are advised to get prostate exams, women aren't. Women are expected to get screened for cervical cancer, transwomen are not. I could list 50 other things, but why bother. They are not the same.

Anybody who claims they are the same is gaslighting, because I don't think anybody actually believes this to be the case. Therefore, people who make those claims should be ignored, or educated if they are actually confused.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by ndhlms on Sunday December 25, 2022 @10:55PM (#34134399)
This such a patent example of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, that I'm embarrassed for you that you even bothered.
Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by crackercrews on Sunday December 25, 2022 @11:11PM (#34134500)
I think you mean the "no true Scotswoman" fallacy.

Why are you embarrassed for someone else that they believe something you do not believe? Seems like GP's argument is pretty convincing, and even obvious.

Re:MIT Faculty Votes for Statement on Freedom of Expression ... by hutty on Monday December 26, 2022 @12:33AM (#34134884)
Fortunately, Rowling is uncancellable in practice, so she can keep on fighting to maintain the rights of women to have single-sex spaces without worrying about what a bunch of anti-women activists think.

As eloquent as she is, JKR isn't just talk - she recently founded an Edinburgh-based centre to help women who have been sexually assaulted, giving them a safe, female-only space for support in a crisis. It's heroic work, and alongside her many other charitable contributions, I'm glad she's doing such good in the world.