How Colleges Silence Eccentrics – Geoffrey Miller (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Imagine a young Isaac Newton time-traveling from 1670s England to teach Harvard undergrads in 2017. After the time-jump, Newton still has an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, and unstable moods. But now he’s subject to Harvard’s speech codes that prohibit “disrespect for the dignity of others”; any violations will get him in trouble with Harvard’s Inquisition (the “Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion”). Newton wouldn’t last long as a public intellectual in modern America. Sooner or later, he would say offensive things that become moral-outrage clickbait. His eccentric, ornery awkwardness would lead to swift expulsion from the academy and would make him a pariah on social media.
On the upside, he’d drive traffic to HuffPost, BuzzFeed, and Jezebel, and people would have a fresh controversy to virtue-signal about on Facebook. On the downside, we wouldn’t have Newton’s laws of motion.
Worth considering the same phenomenon as applied to neurodivergents in the comic book industry.
H/t: Instapundit
In a pair of cases, music educators have been subjected to academic “herd culling,” as one administrator honestly described his efforts at ridding his school of unwanted faculty members. In both instances, professors were attacked simply because they wrote things that upset some of the irritable “progressives” on campus.
H/t: Instapundit
The Deep State and the left-wing legacy media have decided that the only outlets advertisers will be approved to pay money to are, get this, left-wing legacy media outlets that support the Deep State.
Did [Politico] talk to a single conservative before writing this? Apparently not. We just don’t count. We’re meant to be speech-patrolled, they’re meant to be free.
The New York Times, meanwhile, claimed that first it was college campuses, and only now are corporations firing people over wrongspeech.
Only now, New York Times? Really? The New York Times itself has fired people and forced people to resign over wrongspeech! And now they’re pretending this is a “new” feature of corporate life?
Again, what they mean is: The new thing is that the wrong people are being cancelled.
Who else would fucking hunt a child?
A cunt of a Deadspin “journalist” [Carron J. Phillips] defamed a child yesterday, libeling him in claiming the kid was wearing “blackface” at a Chiefs game. The kid was not.
But this “journalist” needed some clicks and “content” so he tried scalphunting a little kid, tossing out false, defamatory charges of racism.
[…]
[AI replacing sports writers] can’t happen fast enough. Every fucking “journalist” should lose his job. And then I’ll laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.
Journalists Condemn Little Leaguer For Wearing 12% Blackface – Babylon Bee
UPDATE (November 29, 2023): Defamation: Mom of Child Targeted by Deadspin’s Clickbait Racist Reveals That He’s Native American – Ace of Spades HQ
He was accused of being racist against both blacks and Indians.
Turns out, he’s an Indian.
Perfection. https://t.co/h9mCCplgiQ
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) November 29, 2023
H/t: Instapundit
Nolan encouraged people to purchase his upcoming Blu-ray release of Oppenheimer so that ”no evil streaming service can come steal it from you.”
In a follow-up interview with the Incredible Shrinking Far-Left Washington Post, Nolan explained, “There is a danger, these days, that if things only exist in the streaming version, they do get taken down, they come and go.”
[…]
It’s not only movies… People who love books should preserve books. The jihad against the classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone with the Wind, and Huckleberry Finn is no secret. The Sensitivity Gestapo is actively rewriting Ian Fleming and Roald Dahl. This was unimaginable 20 years ago…
Dr. Seuss too, IIRC.
H/t: JosiahRises