Unless they are associated with the Hoover Institute in some manner, no humanities faculty at Stanford is raking in big bucks. They all live in the dumpy professor-ville offered by the university because salaries cannot pay for palo alto homes.
A total coincidence that 15 FWD: FWD: UNIon RUInEd My Life stories immediately dominate the conversation whenever a story like this hits the front page.
Yes I too used to belong to a scary union. I was forced pay dues and there was this bad employee that didn't get fired! Now at my non-union job we only have the best employees and managers because we are allowed to fire the bad ones.
The people who become obscenely wealthy in this country become so precisely because they have so little regard for others and almost no comprehension of the long-term impacts of massive inequality (either to the nation or their own physical security). And the system has become so perverse and adept at indoctrination that these people are heralded as heros when they drop a few crumbs from the table.
There's several layers of irony here, chief of which Bari Weiss headed a very vocal campaign to fire anyone at Colombia who didn't exist on the far-right on Israel/Palestine - and of course, falsely painted several professors as racist and anti-Semitic:
Hilarious that the top comment exemplifies the problem. It seems few today are still able to engage with ideas directly, always trying to filter them through some, any, lens to discredit the ones they don’t like. Sometimes it’s attacking the speaker, sometimes their associations, sometimes the tweets they have “liked.” If all else fails, seek out language in the text itself for unfalsifiable “dog whistles” that allow the affixing of a label. Whatever allows one to shield their eyes, ignore the argument made, and secure the moral high ground.
So you're digestion of her letter should not be informed in anyway by the fact that she routinely employed the tactics that she now claims she's a victim of? She's spent her career vilifying and seeking out personal retribution for people who she's disagreed with, I don't know how this doesn't factor into one's purview.
I think readers here think that you are engaging in an "Ad hominem" attack on Weiss but since she herself is the subject of discussion I don't see why you wouldn't include her historical contradictory actions in a response.
It's very appropriate to call someone out on their actions if they are completely inconsistent with what they are claiming to value whenever it stops being useful to them. This isn't a scoring panel for high school speech and debate class.
I certainly don’t think that. What “ideas” that Bari Weiss presents in this essay does your conversational counterpoint here fail to engage? And why is the context of her hypocrisy not relevant?
Aren’t there times when an ad hominem attack is fitting?
If I have a documented history of a certain type of bad behavior and turn around to say I’m a victim of exactly that same sort of behavior. If I write a screed about my victimhood it does lie in the background that my own behavior likely seeded the negativity I received in return.
In that sense this goes beyond “ad hominem attack”. The accusation is more accurately that Bari Weiss is a bad faith actor in a system of mutual journalistic integrity, accusing her current colleagues of being bad faith actors. I don’t know if her colleagues are bad faith actors are not but Weiss does seem to be a case of “the pot calling the kettle black” or whataboutism which should be taken seriously rather than dismissed as ad hominem.
If you read my comment and assumed I was making an argument of absolutism, ie, that you should never consider the speaker in any way, you should re-read it and consider how it may have led you there.
In any case, a person’s background should be fair to consider when an argument by that person is raised. The anti-pattern is to use that, among other things, at the exclusion of any direct engagement of the argument, as was done by the comment I was replying to.
We are not living in a world plagued by people ignoring the background of authors or the subtext of writing they disagree with, and blindly focusing on arguments. We are living in a world where arguments themselves are routinely ignored by focusing exclusively on their authors and presumed subtext.
Unlike the former scenario, which doesn’t exist from my vantage point, the latter scenario seems more difficult to unwind since it terminates in unfalsifiability. If you stand firm that a certain phrase signals some kind of latent subtext, and that can be used to discredit the whole thing, then that tactic basically results in an equilibrium where arguments can not stand on their own under any circumstance since a clever reframing, which cannot be disproven, is fatal to them.
In this particular case the author argues from her particular experience in her workplace without providing any evidence, so I think it's pretty relevant to take such things into account because she might be exaggerating.
I'm not exactly inclined to take someone's purely personal criticisms at face value if they have engaged in the same behaviour.
For all we know she might be leaving on bad terms and is taking it out on her coworkers who may have a different story to tell.
I agree, as someone who is concerned about "cancel culture" broadly, and found Weiss's resignation later interesting and noteworthy, that her credibility as a witness is a relevant consideration in this situation, since she is asking us to believe her accounts of the internal politics at the New York Times. She isn't just making an argument based on publicly available facts.
I would appreciate a better source for the claim that Weiss tried to get a professor at Columbia fired than that article by Glenn Greenwald. I dug through it (admittedly a bit quickly, so maybe I missed something), and could only find evidence that she was harshly critical of a Columbia professor, but not that she attempted to get him fired. It's also noteworthy that some or all of her criticism of that professor concerned not his expressed opinions, but the way he (allegedly) berated Israeli students in his classroom.
Ironically, I haven't generally found Greenwald himself to be the most reliable narrator, but that discussion would take us far afield.
This comment is not explemifying the problem, as you put it. It's pointing out the hypocrisy of this author for condemning something she engages in herself, without taking any blame.
> It seems few today are still able to engage with ideas directly...
Who has the TIME? I mean, you have to filter what you choose to think about and engage on. The world doesn't need to pause and refute every stupid opinion someone trots out.
If I say "only weak people would choose to smoke; and I have never been weak" you don't think pointing out that I was once a smoker is relevant? Who's really making the contortions here?
Nobody is ignoring the smoking history of people who make claims about quitting smoking.
But a lot of people are rejecting such claims on their surface if they come from someone who smoked, or knows a smoker, or was once rumored to have sat in the smoking section of a restaurant 20 years ago. (As if that should be tolerable by anyone other than someone who, in their heart of hearts, is a smoker even if they’ve never actually been seen with a lit cigarette before.)
I don't understand this phrase. I certainly wouldn't describe what I experience when I take the time to consider things at face value as causing anything I'd describe as whiplash. Just because I attempt to evaluate what I read from another's perspective doesn't mean I give up my own in the meantime.
And I'm not advocating for that, especially given the amount of garbage on the Internet. But the pendulum has swung too far in one direction and many people are scared to voice their opinions for fear of being rejected or worse, outcast from their livelihood and their way of life.
What the writer is saying is that she no longer feels that The Times is unbiased. I don't see how that's a hard thing to take at face value.
I don't see anything "discrediting" the that comment. I think it is very salient to point out that it us much easier to call out intolerance in other people than to face our own intolerance. Weiss's own intolerance doesn't negate the intolerance she faced, instead it reminds us to remember to strive for tolerance within ourselves as well as pushing for it from other people.
The people who have spent decades trying to keep the airwaves "clean," "family friendly," "anti-communist," etc, are suddenly shocked that they don't get to set the rules anymore, and that they're on the wrong side of some of them.
Context is everything for this discussion, because if you truly don't want there to be such censorship, you have to be aware of the motivations of the people pushing for change at the top now.
Otherwise you just get them running the show again, and you've just rolled back the clock a few decades to a world with a more violent state and a more cheerleading media.
Your argument that “context is everything” is exactly my point. It’s not. Context is something. If context was everything, then there is no point in writing anything, because words cannot be wielded to create new meaning. Their meaning will be imbued by their collectively interpreted context.
> The people who have spent decades trying to keep the airwaves "clean," "family friendly," "anti-communist," etc, are suddenly shocked that they don't get to set the rules anymore, and that they're on the wrong side of some of them.
Or, to frame it another way, the people who spent decades saying "We should be allowed to broadcast whatever we want, because we support equality and liberty", and "If you don't like what we broadcast then you can just avoid it", are now suddenly finding themselves drunk on the power that they have gained, and are abusing it in much the same way as the people they were complaining about before.
Censorship by the right, and censorship by the left are not the only two exclusive options. Free exchange of ideas in a constructive and respectful fashion should be the ideal.
Those who disagree with Bari Weiss have spent plenty of time and energy engaging with her ideas directly. At this point, it's pretty clear that she's a troll.
Yeah hard to take seriously someone who was "masquerading as an opponent of viewpoint intolerance" while simultaneously being intolerant of any viewpoints that aren't pro-Israel
I can’t find the part where she tries to get anyone “fired”. Just claims that she criticized Muslim scholars, and arguing that is automatically racist.
I had a hard time finding direct quotes of the bad things she said, mostly just quotes from others saying how bad she is and how much they don’t like her.
I'm not familiar with the controversy, so I went looking for actual views of said professors. Wikipedia states 'Massad has characterized Israel as "a racist Jewish state."'
There might be more to this story than Glenn Greenwald frothing at the mouth.
Can you clarify whether (and if so why) you have a problem with that characterization?
> Wikipedia states 'Massad has characterized Israel as "a racist Jewish state."'
Israel's own definition of self calls itself a "Jewish state" and says that the right to exercise national self-determination there is "unique to the Jewish people", so that "Jewish state" part is correct by definition.
And it defines that Judaism is a race by birthright and not a religion, and it grants special privileges to jews that aren't granted to others and it metes special discriminations against its non-jewish resident minorities, so, without even getting into any discussion of the history of arab-israeli conflict, it's hard to argue seriously with the other part as well.
If true, this doesn’t disprove the stated criticisms in the letter but only further highlights how serious the issue is and how easily people fall into that behavior.
There are many things I disagree with Weiss on, including her previous flirtation with cancel culture, but by attacking her with an article from 2 years ago instead of addressing what she is talking about directly is not really honest debate.
There is a cleaving point coming for those who believe in Liberal values and the nyt has already chosen the side of extreme ideological orthodoxy.
I mean, Weiss herself attacks the NYT for a two-year-old interview with Alice Walker, although she's not especially upfront about it, preferring instead to talk about an interview from May while describing - and in a highly tendentious way, at that - the controversy over Walker's 2018 NYT interview.
I think there are definitely some points in her essay that ring true. But the author engaging in behavior only 2 years ago that she is condemning today is certainly a valid and relevant criticism.
Unless there's proof she's changed from then until now, I think it's a rather relevant proof of hypocrisy and that one should rightly doubt whether what she's saying now is just more of the same
> There is a cleaving point coming for those who believe in Liberal values and the nyt has already chosen the side of extreme ideological orthodoxy.
I wouldn't say they chose it - under shareholder capitalism, they are beholden to maximizing the returns for their investors. Conservatives who like Bari Weiss (do such people exist?) probably aren't subscribing to the NY Times, while people who despise Bari Weiss and Tom Cotton are cancelling their subscriptions in protest.
> It’s worth repeating something else Bari Weiss said [in my April 13-19 column, “Columbia Whitewashes“]: “We are doing this because we believe in the rights of all Columbia students to dissent without fear of abuse. Yes, this means for conservative students as well as left-wingers, for Zionists as well as anti-Zionists. . . . Criticizing professors does not violate their academic freedom or stifle debate. It only adds to it.”[1]
That doesn't sound like someone trying to get people fired.
This is not an accurate account of her actions. The tweet which Greenwald embeds in his article as evidence against her is here https://twitter.com/saeen90_/status/971562600315215872. Watch the video underneath where she explains what her problem was with Professor Massad. In class, Massad referred to the Jenin massacre, a student raised her hand and pointed out the UN had dismissed the claims that the Battle of Jenin was a massacre, the professor kicked her out of class. A left-wing student from Israel asked him a question at a lecture. Massad noticed the student's accent then asked him if he was Israeli then asked him if he served in the IDF. He then demanded the student tell the group how many Palestinians he had killed. This is a little different from getting anyone who "didn't exist on the far-right on Israel/Palestine" fired as you put it. This documents the professor's views on Israel/Palestine[0]. I don't think you can characterise anything other then these views as being far right.
They should have spun off DoubleClick for Publishers and other server/ad mediation into separate companies and is likely what will happen if the government is successful in their case.
What does Google have a shrinking share of? This article is specifically referencing ad tech, of which DFP has near 100% market share, while AdX is greatly outperforming it's rival (Facebook audience network pulled support for mobile web in April while Amazon's much-ballyhooed A9 platform turned into a big Whataburger).
"Facebook, Google Digital Ad Market Share Drops as Amazon Climbs" - June 2019 [1]
"Amazon is eating into Google's most important business: Search advertising" - October 2019 [2]
There are dozens and dozens of articles about this. The market as a whole is growing, and Google's market share is large, but shrinking as a percentage of the pie.
My general sense is that fewer power brokers in DC would complain if they had stuck with the bottom part and complemented that with GCP.
Its one thing to serve ads on the bottom (i.e. ads for pentalope screw drivers against articles about pentalope screw drivers). Its another thing to encroach on establish media outlets turf, AMP up their content and sell ads to Auto, CPG and Airline companies based on that content.
Because I have seen multiple times that any political post or comment right of the far left getting banned?
And reddit isn't connected to real life and "mainstream" in any way. In fact they can give Twitter a run for their money based on how disconnected from reality they are.
Yeah, this 100%. If you went by what Reddit and Twitter thought was going to happen in recent votes and elections, you'd think that Sanders would be the Democratic nominee in 2016, that Trump was not going to be president, that Britain would vote to remain in the EU and that Jeremy Corbyn would lead the Labour Party to victory over Boris Johnson and the Conservatives.
The fact that all those predictions turned out to be wrong indicates that at least a sizeable percentage of the population is further to the right politically than the majority of Reddit or Twitter seemingly is.
You may not always get banned for having the opposite opinion on topics like those (though it definitely happens in quite a few subreddits), but the point is, the prevailing consensus on those sites is certainly a lot further left than the mainstream as shown by election resultls.
I think in the big political (and even many of the non-political) subreddits, there is tolerance only for a very narrow band of centrist Dem opinions, and anything outside that band to the left or the right is heavily downvoted.
Is that the way that centrist democrats express themselves because the language and attitude comes across as extremely caustic. I considered myself a democrat for the vast majority of my life but now I no longer know what I am if that is the bar that is being set.
The site became mainstream while still being extremely vulnerable to manipulation by a very small pool of individuals. They've done next to nothing to address how effective and rampant brigading is (among other tactics).
It really doesn't take much to brigade. Write some scripts to get 100 accounts upvoting your posts while they are on new, and chances are after that initial hump you've surmounted with your bots it will catch exponential viewership over the course of the day and make it to the front page.
You see this happening constantly on Twitter. You see unverified accounts with one or two followers having tweets that are trending within a few minutes with tens of thousands of "likes" and thousands of "retweets" and Twitter doesn't even blink an eye, but its so blatantly obvious what's happening.
What's frightening is that groups like politicians, unions, and extreme right-wing groups could very easily use this technique to quickly and pretty effectively promote or quell discussion.
I just recently saw an example of where this might have happened. Very suddenly a comment in a discussion I was following - what initially was a popular up-voted opinion (i.e discussing police brutality) - got down-voted into oblivion (from +5 to -25) in less than 5 minutes. The comment was deleted soon after - probably to protect their score.
This kind of quick/easy manipulation by bots can't be easy to detect/deal with yet I fear it may become mainstream.
Extreme right-wing(and center-right) are countered by the extreme left moderators and administrators. I assure you, if left-wing posts started being vote brigaded, Reddit would ban all those involved. They can already detect and ban vote brigading, they just don't care to stop it.
What "political agenda"? If anything, the original core of the site was very left-leaning or heterodox technophiles that didn't have a home on Slashdot. The political parts of the site are now very much deadlocked in the center-right frame of the Democratic party, pretty far away from what the site once was.
The fact that you'd describe Reddit as "center-right" currently is enough to tell me you're coming at this from a very different perspective than the average person.
I would say that Reddit began as libertarian, and is now far-left.
I wouldn't call Biden far-left by any means, and the support he has on Reddit doesn't seem to be much more enthusiastic than "he's the best chance we have of getting rid of Trump."
Or posts and content that have an agenda behind them are popular and naturally end up on the front page. I see a lot of speculation about reddit being manipulated and no evidence of such manipulation being posted.
> the original core of the site was very left-leaning
I don't remember it that way. I remember it being very libertarian (Ron Paul was the Bernie Sanders of 2000's reddit) for a very long time. I believed that the shift to a left-wing orientation was organic and representative of the general population UNTIL the whole T_D thing came along... T_D was doing the same thing, pulling the site to the right, until Reddit's owners worked overtime to make sure that didn't happen. That makes me suspect that the liberalism was also artificial.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted, perhaps over how people are defining core.
In terms of the user base, I definitely remember early Reddit having a strong libertarian bent, or at least significant conflict between libertarians and more mainstream leftists. Things seemed to shift left roughly when the Digg influx happened.
I find it pretty funny that you're accusing reddit of being "artificially liberal" when it's actually organically liberal thanks to its demographics and history. The market has chosen, isn't that the libertarian way?
I'm guessing there's really nothing that would convince you that your views just aren't as popular with reddit's audience as you think. You'll have more luck with the Facebook 5G truther crowd.
