Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I detest religion, so I am no fan of Peterson. But he's only one person in a very long list. You are asserting that the Peterson drop of ink turns the whole pool orange. That's obviously untrue. What you're actually doing there is cherry picking the most lurid example in the list. I might ask if you thought that wouldn't be transparent. I mean, come on... try a little if you wish to defend this silly "call out culture" thing you and Ty seem to think is acceptable.
If you wish to defend the dumb masses who throw rhetorical rocks on a board of people who can actually think, you have to do better than use the types of arguments those dimwit rock throwers would deem persuasive. This isn't a rally or a protest where the need to observe logic can be suspended.
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Hint: maybe identify one person on the list you think is a good example, because looking down that list, it's pretty easy to find the bad examples.
My defense of whatever you want to call "call out culture" is very simple: sometimes, speech does and should have repercussions, whether those repercussions are lawsuits, firing, boycott, loss of a board seat, or just a bad reputation. There is nothing wrong with private parties looking to hold people to account for what they say, or with having discussions about what the right consequences are for different forms of speech.
Larry Summers is a good example: he was in charge of an institution that had, as an institutional priority, recruiting and promoting women to tenured positions in Science and Engineering, and he stated publicly that he thought women may well lack the "intrinsic aptitude" for high level science and engineering. He earned the widespread disdain of much of the Boston and Harvard scientific community (one friend, a department chair in Sciences at MIT, laughed about how of all people an
economist was trying to pass judgement on what aptitude was needed for scientific study), and he had a board worried about what idiotic thing he'd say next. Bye-bye Larry, that's not something you can start saying as President of Harvard. At the same time, the institution gives him a professorship, where they let him make such statements at will. It all seems very appropriate and I see no reason why critics of Summers should be told to shut up or that their criticism of him is inappropriate.
