I am not a fan of Brendan O’Neill. I think he’s a libertarian ass and under all the pretense, an old-fashioned conservative. He has, of course, decided that Tim Hunt is being persecuted.
The Illiberal Persecution of Tim Hunt
An old guys tells a bad joke and academia descends into a frenzy
New rule #1: when you’re going to accuse a group of being in a “frenzy”, explain what you mean and give evidence.
Because I don’t see it. I’ve been seeing academics write about it and deplore Hunt’s words; I’ve seen them suggest that this behavior ought to be publicly repudiated by major organizations. That sounds about right to me. That’s what ought to be done: academics and journalists ought to express their opinions honestly, and have an expectation of some accountability.
New rule #2: when you start accusing a group of being in a “witch hunt” or comparing them to the Inquisition, you have to be specific in saying exactly what they ought to do differently.
Yes, O’Neill compares the response on Twitter to the Inquisition.
The response to Hunt is way more archaic than what Hunt said. Sure, his views might be a bit pre-women’s lib, pre-1960s. But the tormenting and sacking of people for what they think and say is pre-modern. It’s positively Inquisitorial.
The irony is too much to handle: Hunt is railed against for expressing an old-fashioned view, yet the railers against him do something infinitely more old-fashioned: they expel from public life someone they judge to have committed heresy. Kick him out. Strip him of his titles. Mock his misfortune. “Savour the moment.” How awfully ironic that the Royal Society, which played a key role in propelling Britain from medievalism to modernity, is now being asked to behave in a medieval fashion and send into the academic wilderness a heretic among its number.
Excuse me, but how has he been expelled from public life? Is he in solitary confinement in a cage somewhere? Is his ability to interact in public in any way diminished compared to, say, me, or Brendan O’Neill, or yours? Is he wandering in a wilderness, or is he crying in his comfortable home with the expensive paintings on the wall and a lovely gold medal from the Nobel Foundation?
Here’s what’s illiberal: that someone said something repugnant and stupid in public, and Brendan O’Neill does not think the public should be allowed to judge that person. We are supposed to give a certain privileged subset of humanity carte blanche and never criticize them. Deciding that a public figure has uncivilized, ignorant views…why, that’s not to be allowed! And to speak out and actually say that those views are vile…why, that it is the true vileness!
So O’Neill does have a suggestion for how we all should respond to people like Hunt. We should all shut up.
The Hunt incident is quite terrifying. For what we have here is a university, under pressure from an intolerant mob, judging a professor’s fitness for office by his personal thoughts, his idea of humour. Profs should be judged by one thing alone: their depth of knowledge. It shouldn’t matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever. All that should matter is whether they have the brainpower to do the job at hand.
Oh, gosh. I had no idea. Professors are exempt from all the normal rules of human behavior! Perhaps science isn’t really part of the domain of human experience after all. We get to be judged on one narrow criterion, and everything else is excluded. At long last, I can kick puppies! I can spit on poor people in the street! I can go play in a national forest with a chainsaw!
Oddly, though, the administrators and faculty at my university don’t think that way. It’s not as if every year I go in and take a test on developmental and cellular biology, and my “depth of knowledge” determines my employment status.
I am regularly evaluated on the academic holy trinity: research, teaching, and service. Did you know that public outreach, administration, collegiality, and communication are actually regarded as significant components of the professor’s job? O’Neill clearly doesn’t.
So his answer is flatly wrong and unrealistic. Professors aren’t excused from being more than grant-writing lab-running machines.
So what would O’Neill’s actual solution to this “illiberal frenzy” be? Are my posts on the Tim Hunt affair to be deleted? Should anyone on Twitter who was appalled at his behavior have their accounts banned? Perhaps we’re just prohibited from saying anything about Hunt’s offensive remarks — we should all change the subject to something about cyclin-dependent kinases.
Once again, conservative histrionics are exposed for what they are: a massive case of projection. The whine about illiberal academia is really a complaint that we can disagree strongly.
I’m an old guy…not quite as old as Hunt but old enough. If I tell a bad joke on my job, I could get fired or at least severely admonished not to do that. My age doesn’t excuse me from the rules of decorum that our public society has established, no matter how recent that became the expected norm. I’ve had to take the same diversity training as everybody else in this company. If I can’t work by those standards, then I probably don’t get to work here.
Frankly, I’m offended that anyone should think in these ageist terms and use it as a defense. It’s a cliché of ageism that older people are out of touch and don’t know the current rules. Bull. Unless you’re debilitated in some way, there’s no reason an older person can’t know how to act. Hunt is clearly an intelligent person and capable of making speeches in public. He does not appear to be suffering from any form of senile dementia nor is he comatose. He doesn’t get a pass because the calendar date has been his birth date 72 times.
>But the tormenting and sacking of people for what they think and say is pre-modern.
Just like Clarence Thomas was “lynched” during his Senate confirmation hearing.
Conservatives are such drama queens and delicate flowers!
And, as PZ points out, massively lacking in self-awareness.
ps – great point robro. One thing I’ve noticed is that closed-minded people tend to get dumber as they age. That’s because most of the people (hopefully!) in their age cohort are gaining some wisdom as they age, and so the closed-minded ones lag more and more.
Watson’s disease is best treated early. In the sad case of “Lucky Jim,” the symptoms were ignored for far too long, and eventually become extremely ugly. Convalescence may be hard for Hunt, but we hope for a better outcome — remission, or maybe even a cure.
O’Neill says:
What I’m getting from this is that it is intolerant to criticize the words people say. And if I had to guess, it’s only certain people.
My grandfather is 72 – he’s a working class northern English former truck driver. He has less sexist views than Tim Hunt and supported his seven daughters (my mother included) to get into whatever careers they wanted. Nobody gets a pass for obnoxious behaviour because of their ‘upbringing’. The hordes of 70s TV presenters getting rounded up now for sexual crimes have all tried the ‘well it was a different time and culture then’ argument and it doesn’t wash. It seems that only child rape is the line drawn by some people screaming about feminazis and frothing mob vigilantes – Tim Hunt is not being jailed, he made some pretty outrageous comments but then flunked his opportunity to walk them back and apologise. Most of the anger has been at his notpology of ‘sorry you were all so easily offended, but I’m still right about girls, I’ll just not say it in front of reporters next time.’ As PZ said, is he getting jail time? Fines and restrictions? No. Next.
Goodness. I was completely unaware that Hunt had been placed in stocks with the obligatory basket of rotten fruit.
Actually the inquisitorial offices of the late medieval and early modern period were staffed less by frothing fanatics and more by bureaucratic proceduralists with a penchant for strict by-the-book legalism. If you were unfortunate enough to be caught up in an early modern witch hunt, you’d be far more likely to be given a fair hearing by the centralised, bureaucratic courts of the Spanish, Portugese or Papal Inquisition than you would by local secular courts in Germany or Southern France.
But you would hardly expect someone so enamoured of the lazy rhetoric of medieval-bashing to know this…
I would like the Nobel committee to rescind his Nobel prize. I think think he has caused great damage to the world of science with malice aforethought, and he stood his ground when given a chance to retract it. I don’t think they should try to claw back the money, but they should ask for the medal back and they should certainly strike him from the rolls.
So if Hunt thinks if you don’t like what someone has to say then they should shut up, then shouldn’t he shut up about what other people say if he doesn’t like what was said?
It wasn’t a bad joke. It was a bad joke that revealed an underlying attitude that was sexist and damaging careers because of that sexism.
No, I disagree with the idea of rescinding a Nobel. That was awarded for a specific, narrow set of ideas that significantly advanced our understanding of the cell cycle; they are still valuable ideas, so there’s no cause to retract.
Now that Nobel to Kissinger, on the other hand…
Question: What’s “the academic wilderness”?
Is that like an understaffed library or something?
It shouldn’t matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever.
Unless, of course, the professor in question is either an uppity woman, or someone using his/her depth of knowledge to tell us something we don’t want to hear; in which case his/her previously-irrelevant character flaws will be used to discredit everything he/she ever said.
No, I disagree with the idea of rescinding a Nobel.
So do I — that would be exactly what all those right-wing whiners are falsely accusing us of doing. Although it would be amusing to offer such a response in the “quit crying or we’ll REALLY give you something to cry about” department…
Golgafrinchan Captain @ 12:
Set loose in the nether regions of Lspace!
Captain: it’s the kind of library that still has card-catalogues.
Whatever the merits of disciplining people for their beliefs, Hunt deserves a good kick in the rear (metaphorically, of course) for the incredibly bad judgment of telling that joke to that audience. It’s like throwing a rock into a wasp’s nest; what did he think the result would be? If I told that joke at my place of employment, I would expect to get fired. So far, I don’t see that he’s suffered any more serious consequences than some bad press. People who do things with predictable results should not complain when those results do in fact happen.
Yeah, it kills me when Libertarians wring their hands over the free-market shit-canning of people who make a private organization look bad, whether it be those young jerks harassing the Canadian reporter or a CEO who can’t keep his bigotries behind closed doors. Not only is it perfectly legal, and not only is it perfectly proper, to shitcan an asshole who makes your organization look bad, but it also fends off potential litigation in the future. For example if the asshole has women or black or Latino or gay subordinates/students/co-workers, and a public track record of saying demeaning stuff about them. The organization needs to protect itself against future charges that they knew damn well this might happen. Where does John Galt find a problem with this straightforward free-market behavior? Oh, right, it’s a straight Christian rich white guy, nevermind……
And I have a friend who won the same Nobel a few years back — the prize money is now well north of a mil. Hunt may have a problem landing a professorship at a university that admits those pesky little co-eds, with all their flirting with REAL scientists, and distracting from REAL science, but he has a million quid in the bank, and a guaranteed guest gig on Sky News every time they need a rich white straight Christian guy to bemoan their plight.
petesh @3, I love that! I’m afraid, though, that Hunt’s extremely poor response to the therapy that’s been administered so far may mean that he’ll just remain in palliative care, like the kind being administered by O’Neill et al.
Let’s try a thought experiment: switch the remarks of Hunt and Watson. Had Hunt gotten in hot water for saying what Watson did, would the mayor of London be all for his reinstatement? Would O’Neill?
Had Watson said what Hunt did, would there have been a crusade to reinstate the poor little fella?
Somehow it seems that many people are less willing to associate themselves with racists, while “just” being a sexist is still fairly respectable to them.
OK, I admit I thought that putting that giant mask over Tim Hunt’s head and sending him off into the desert on the back of a horse was pretty extreme. But now that I think of it, that was a scene from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, not something that happened to Hunt. Still, I agree that if they had done something along those lines, O’Neill’s comments would have merit, so he’s got that going for him.
Can someone remind me what horrible punishment Tim Hunt received? He lost an honorary position and whined a lot about not being able to do his work. Anything else?
But of course judging 51% of the world’s population’s fitness for lab work by their gender is a-okay…
auraboy
My grandpa would be 94 by now, miner, 8 years of school. That shit wouldn’t have gone down with him either…
Oh, look who thinks that Hunt is subjected to a witchhunt
I guess “should” can mean whatever O’Neill wants it to mean, but as far as I understand, the limited set of grounds for firing tenured faculty include “moral turpitude” among other things, which has nothing to do with depth of knowledge. And I’m pretty sure that reduced research productivity and generally coasting along are very explicitly not grounds for firing tenured faculty. You would probably have to show total incompetence or refusal to perform assigned duties (like teaching) not just that the tenured faculty had become kind of mediocre.
You want people to not judge Tin Hunt for the awful shit he spouses? Fine, tell him to shut the fuck up, then…As long as he is vomiting sexist filth, expect people to fucking talk about it.
Do these people even comprehend how social beings behave? That actions have consequences? Oh…shit, of course…mind-bogglingly gigantic amounts of privilege, i always forget…
Spoiled little fuckers think we should pretend we can’t smell their shit even when it’s smeared all over our lawn…
Help! I’m being oppressed for being a toxic arsehole, by not being rewarded for it!!! The horror!!!
Berfore I look.
RD?
I find it hard to believe in this day and age neither Hunt nor O’Neill have had sexual harassment training. I think they just treated it as bullshit not applicable to themselves, and forgot the lessons. Then they wonder why they get grief for their arrogant attitudes.
My 24 was for Giliell’s 21.
and I was right
At least he didn’t say ‘lynching’.
yet
No points for you, chigau. That was way too easy
Bullshit! Being a professor involves a lot more than simply knowing stuff. Also, whether you have the brainpower to do the job is irrelevant if you’re not actually doing it.
Tim Hunt wasn’t doing his job. His job was to inspire a new generation of graduates and make them excited about working in their chosen field. Instead, he told half of them that they were too distracting and emotionally unstable to even be allowed into the same lab.
That’s bad enough, and could even conceivably be written up as a bad “joke”. However, when the problem was pointed out to him, instead of apologizing and correcting his mistake, he doubled down. And what was done as a result? A purely cosmetic slap on the wrist; an honorary title lost, nothing more.
So, why are these people losing their shit? Because they identify with Hunt. This isn’t about Hunt, specifically, at all. He’s just a symbol for every entitled asshole out there, who thought that their degree would render them immune from criticism from the plebs. They’re shocked, and possibly quite scared, to find out that they might be held accountable for their own words. If it could happen to a Nobel laureate, it could happen to them and that cannot be allowed.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls #25
Hunt seems to have been living under a rock. He can’t really use the “old man” defense when his statement would have been outrageous back when he was a young to middle aged man. I find it hard to believe that anyone would try to defend his statements. They seem worse every time I read them, and are also out of keeping with my experience. I’ve been working with women in computer science, at biotechs, and in software engineering jobs for about 25 years and Hunt is full of it.
Tim Hunt being intolerant of women (with actual, real consequences for a multitude of people): academic freedom, jokes, irrelevant.
People being intolerant of Tim Hunt’s intolerance (with pretty trivial consequences for him): Witch hunt! Lynching! Crazy liberal, inquisitioners persecuting decent human beings!!!
Also, are all the people saying “it was a joke!” (as if that would excuse anything) teling us that Hunt lied when he said he meant it?
Look at all the “it’s a joke!” excuses. And the punchline of the joke is a sexist stereotype about women. So yeah, so what if it’s “just a joke!”?
@Raging Bee:
Card catalogues plural, with different parts on different floors. Each in a locked cubby that is unidentified on the map of the library, which, of course, is labeled by the names of donors instead of by the authors or content found within a given space.
Seriously.
I’ve been there. In France, which isn’t my first language. There was 20 minutes of nightmare before I just gave in and said, “I’m not doing research anyway, I’ll just explore.” Then I approached it like a garden, totally disregarding the map. I didn’t want to know if azaleas were around the next bend. I just walked around with eyes open.
But still, if I **were** trying to do anything academic, that’s my nightmare library.
Crap. Obviously France isn’t my first language. French isn’t either. I’m beginning even to doubt English.
It would help if he’d acknowledge just how painfully bad his not-pology was. A lot can be forgiven if the next thing the person posts/says is sufficiently sincere, but his reply to the initial criticism was to double-down and blame the people who were offended.
Honestly, if I were in charge at a large institution (academic, corporate, whatever), there would be an employee whose duty it would be to immediately intervene in situations like this. First thing you tell the employee is, “Issue a short statement saying that you are listening to the criticisms being given, and would like to take a few days to digest them before responding, and you will issue a fuller statement at the end of the week. Then get your ass in my office.” And these would not be carefully worded not-pologies; they would lay out the harm done, and the redress being proposed.
I wonder what would happen if I was in a similar position and said you can’t have men in the science lab because they get sexually frustrated and start humping anything in sight. Also, when their experiments fail they fly into a testosterone-fueled rage and start smashing stuff.
First, my remarks would almost certainly not be taken seriously, but for the wrong reason. It’s not because I said anything substantially more outrageous than what Hunt said. It’s just that we are so accustomed to the idea of male scientists, that any suggestion that men shouldn’t be in the lab is assumed to be humor. But note that there is a cultural lag, because women are moving into the sciences faster than society at large may recognize. I like to think Hunt does not want to slow this trend in any way, but that just might be the optimist in me. Certainly, there is nothing in his remarks and later elaboration that would back up my optimism.
Hunt is like a century out of date (or substantially more if you want use Marie Curie’s Nobel as a symbolic milestone).
I mean, there is no way to spin this in his favor. I can kind of get that maybe at one time he was a schoolboy at a same-sex institution and felt some awkwardness growing up. But, my God, he has had over 50 years to get over it. What is his problem? If he just said “I thought it would be funny, but I guess not. My bad.” he could probably have mitigated things substantially. If there is any serious issue here, it is of his one making and continued insistence.
Giiell @31:
It’s typical damage control and kneejerk protectionism. Can’t give your enemy any quarter or you cede there is common ground, and the gulf of the battlefield isn’t nearly as wide, so as that ground gives way the house of cards they’ve built their conclusions with. The obfuscation is just a smokescreen so that no one can see they’re simply playing 52-card pickup.
That, my friends, is how you butcher a metaphor!
Giliell, professional cynic -Ilk- #31
Oo! Oo! Pick me I know this one!
This is a game we played at least as far back as Usenet days called “My irony is thicker than yours.” Anyone who said “it was a joke” meant that ironically, and you are humorless in not recognizing this. Also, when Hunt said he meant it seriously, that was just a continuation of the same joke. Hence, those of us with superior levels of meta-irony would spot this. Note that my analyses may sound contradictory (adding more layers of delicious irony). But the point remains that anyone who dares to criticize Hunt is a humorless PC feminazi.
Hope this clears it up.
ONE OF THESE THINGS IS NOT LIKE THE OTHERS.
(Also? He lost one honorary, unpaid position. Relax, Brendan.)
How did I miss this at first glance?
I don’t know, but generally I would not want my academics to be stupid.
Don’t you know, Lady Mondegreen, that a white man facing criticism for his toxic horseshit is the worst evil imaginable? It is the cruelest and most heinous atrocity ever inflicted upon man to make them accountable for their own shit. How is the poor man going to continue to live in the cloud of privilege he has been riding since he got into that all-boys school where he was irreparably taught to think he was the fucking center of the universe? All of those people using words to say “that’s not acceptable” are getting in the way of what’s trully important….that man gliding through life like a fucking lubed up pig on skates. Because what could be more obscenely and disproportionately agressive than saying to that man “what you said is wrong” over something as trivial, as silly and unimportant as saying that 51% of the world are unfit for science on account of their vulvas.
Taking offense from that is insane and utterly disproportionate. Taking offense from being told you are a sexist pig and acting like you have been nailed to a cross, however, totally apropriate…
As always, women are expected to just smile and clap at the superfunny joke, or they are humourless, bloodthirsty monsters, but the man can cry and whine like the feathery slap on the wrist had been done by a 4 tone golem made of lava.
It needs to be said more often….there is nothing more soft and easily bruised as a privileged man. It takes a mite to render them a sobbing mess…
paulbc
Yep, It’s just a joke! (Can’t you take a joke? Why are you crying now you’Re making me look bad) The abuser’s most favourite excuse…
There would be no problem, no problem at all, if Hunt had admitted it really was a bad joke and apologized for it. But he didn’t.
I disagree!!!
Even with the Brendan O’Neill mindset, a professor has to be judged including his ability to instill his deep knowledge into his students. If not he fails as a professor, he might be a good reference source, but teaching has to be part of professing [pun intended], not just answering specific questions.
And all this “just a bad joke” nonsense. Brendan’s advice seems to be: If someone tells a bad joke, just walk away silently. Do not try to tell him why it is bad.” Apparently the professor who told the bad joke already knew why it was bad, and intentionally wanted to offend everyone; to make a point. Telling him. it was bad, is pointless.
Apparently, one is never allowed to react negatively to bad jokes.
To talk about the offensive joke, and berating the teller of it, is equivalent to banning him from ever speaking again.
Brendan is just reiterating the old maxim, “If you can’t say something good, say nothing at all.”
never discuss why one can’t think of anything good to say about it, just sulk away and stay quiet.
Alfred Nobel founded the prizes specifically because he was concerned about the moral implications of his invention of dynamite, so for that reason alone I think it is wrong to insist that the prizes are only for specific, narrow sets of ideas. You yourself, PZ, have decried the common perception of scientists as amoral monsters, or at least self-absorbed social misfits. You have complained twice, at least, about the character Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory for example, I should think you would champion the idea that the most prestigious prize in science should have a moral component.
I would go even farther. I would like the prizes to be conditional on the recipient(s) submitting plans to use part of the prize money to help under-privileged people advance their scientific careers, and the Nobel Foundation should monitor them to ensure the plans are enacted.
I’ve had “liberal” friends sharing Hunt’s and Collins’s (Hunt’s wife) attempted apologia in The Guardian on Facebook. It’s (darkly) hilarious, becasue the entirety of it consists of them saying the behavior was inexcusable while trying to excuse it using some of the most popular, trite sexism-denials out there. The actual interview segments read like what a clever feminist blogger might write as a parody of a sexism-denying notpology, but it’s somehow for real. Hunt (and Collins, for that matter) has utterly failed to adapt to increasingly feminist cultural norms, and he can’t even see that fact. We really need to make the First Rule of Holes part of primary school curricula, becasue a lot of people apparently never pick up on it when left to their own devices.
And missing the appropriate post for the comment is what I get when I read several days’ worth of posts in one sitting in reverse order. *sigh* Pretend my comment @47 is actually on this thread.
And liberal or not, female scientists create their own #DistractinglySexy hashtag: here are some examples.
Dreaming of an Atheist Newtopia
Thank you for that. Thank you. Consider my dreams haunted by this image, at least for tonight.
Chigau (違う) said:
If you are asking what Richard Dawkins had to say about the matter, here is a recent tweet of his:
The link in the quoted material goes to the Brendan O’Neill article which PZ linked to in his OP.
Btw, Deborah Blum, a journalist who was at the event in which Hunt made his sexist statement, asked him if his comment about sex segregated laboratories was a joke:
You can see a Storify of the tweets in which she discusses the matter, including a photograph of her siting next to Tim Hunt when she asked the pertinent question above.
Too emotional? Tim Hunt, you should do lunch with Sam Harris. It seems you guys have something in common. You can talk about the hazards of “emotional” women in the lab and Harris can wax poetic on the influences of estrogen on female atheists.
This is about common place misogyny in male dominated environments where the guys are still far too complacent about poor attitudes toward women because men have been the gatekeepers of these institutions for far too long. This is NOT about “Oh, I’m just a comedian with an old fashioned sense of humor.”
I would LOVE to see Harris and Dawkins receive the kind of institutional opprobrium that Hunt is getting a taste of. You can be certain such institutional push back against prejudicial statements made in public is what has Dawkins so upset. He’s make awful comments about women and a whole host of other marginalized groups. He’s worried that the hammer might come down on him next.
As canislatrans noted on twitter (saw a pic of the post, not the post itself so no link, sorry):
“So if I understand this correctly, a scientist who says women in science cry when criticized quit his job after 48 hours of criticism” (and, I’ll add, is whining and crying about it and saying his whole career is over).
Here’s how I see it:
Tim Hunt got to spend most of his adult life engaged in scientific research, achieving great professional acclaim. At the age of 72 yrs, he resigned after revealing a belief that is potentially damaging to his university. I assume he has a pension.
Meanwhile, over the past 50 yrs, Hunt has shared a lab with many women who were passed over for promotions, dismissed or diminished, harassed, ignored and overlooked. Women who were pushed out of scientific research to make room for more people like Hunt.
I don’t think I’m going to waste my sympathies on a guy who had every opportunity and still managed to be an asshole.
Look we’ve all got or had relatives who were alive many decades after their ‘current’ period in our minds. We likely forgive them a small amount of leeway with some attitudinal stuff, but I think those of us who respect them are also in agreement that they are still capable of moral growth after say 60 years of age. It’s not like all opinions close and there is nothing to be done. You can teach old dogs plenty of new tricks and I’m sure old professors are just as capable as our canine friends.
Let’s remember Tim Hunt has NOT lost his job over this. He has lost one (possibly two) honorary positions that were little more than the occasional speech and having his name on a brass plate for PR purposes. And let’s also remember that if he’d come out with a genuine apology this would have fizzled out pretty fast. He could have said, ‘I’m not a sexist, I was uncomfortable giving a public speech and I tried for a joke that was massively offensive and I’m sorry. If I hold those opinions I’m working on my attitudes to women, if I don’t, I’m
Working on my sense of humour. Please forgive me. Here’s what I would do to help show women in the lab are valued and equal as scientists first and foremost.’
Given his honorary position was basically PR, best remind him that, ‘you’re all touchy and wrong, I was right about teh gurlz.’ Isn’t going to work. And no, this isn’t twitters fault. It’s yours. Accept it.
This is what really infuriates me about the privileged knuckleheads defending Hunt. They smugly roll their eyes at the easily offended SJWs and tell them to lighten up but the second that THEY are mildly questioned or made fun of then it’s These fuckers always say “lol grow a thicker skin!”. You first, mate. You first.
Also O’Neill is a boring contrarian idiot of the worst kind and it is incredible that he makes a living writing the fucking tripe he does.
garnetstar @18: Thanks! But please note that Watson was given to sexist remarks, as well as and possibly even before racist ones (also lookist and pretty much any other -ist you can imagine). Why, here he is on Rosalind Franklin, from his 1968 book:
Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même merde.
Is it just me, or is “illiberal” really a dog whistle?
Microraptor #57
Can be. From this article,
So, yes, the right is trying to use it as Dog Whistle.
I actually see it used more by the Conservative Left* than the Right.
*People who tend to vote left for fiscal reasons, but are frequently conservative on social issues like minority rights.
We are supposed to give a certain privileged subset of humanity carte blanche and never criticize them. Deciding that a public figure has uncivilized, ignorant views…why, that’s not to be allowed!
Looking specifically at professors, the unpleasant underlying assumption is that they are always to drop information down into students. It’s shocking and disturbing (somehow) if there is any attempt to roll any information in the other direction.
I find the difference for it’s use, against social justice, to be same conservative Dog Whistle, since it is not from those who are left of center socially.
@Nert of Redhead
Oh, I totally agree, I was just stating where I tended to see the term dropped. The usage is the same either way.
timberwraith #51
I was being ironic.
I knew it was RD.
.
I would like to see Harris and Dawkins in a debate.
About almost anything.
It would be either illuminating or coma-inducing-boring.
.
♥ your nym and gravatar
“It shouldn’t matter one iota if they are sexist, stupid, unfunny, religious, uncouth, ugly, or whatever. All that should matter is whether they have the brainpower to do the job at hand.”
That covers Josef Mengele quite nicely…
I’m still agog at the man who did much to promote the concept of memetics not grasping the idea that words have importance.
I think homosexuals should be prevented from playing sports with heterosexuals because they tend to fall in love with other sportsmen. They are also too soft for sports and emotional.
Also, I tend to find that black people are lazy at workplaces and are generally less intelligent than whites. They should be segregated from whites.
I was only joking, lighten up everyone. Leave me alone!! I am the victim here of a witch hunt by the politically correct brigade.
It’s something I encounter very often, yes. The call to allow free speech without consequences is typically only applied one way: Let the bigots, sexists, racists, whatever talk freely! But don’t you dare to use your free speech to respond with criticism of them, especially not if many others agree with your view. No, that’s a witch hunt.
I always arrive at the same conundrum: What exactly are you arguing? That people should be quiet about unpopular opinions? That people should delete their free speech responses or alternatively be banned from giving them? That the critics in question should change their minds or have their minds changed?
I mean, you can’t simply expect people to change their minds. Andcalling for free speech criticism of others’ free speech to be shut down is extremely hypocritical, obviously.
So what are these people actually arguing for? I never get a straight answer to that from them.
People are seriously upset that he lost this honorary position. “But he’s just an old man who made a bad joke,” they insist. “Now his life is ruined and he is ostracized.” *shakes head*.
Oh good now the way the whole situation was mishandled from the start bodes poorly for how feminism is growing. *sighs* It’s seriously no use trying to argue with people like these.
Where was all this conservative concern for academic freedom during the Salaita affair?
I’m genuinely confused by this. I’m not in academia but the rules can’t be that different to the corporate world. If I was giving a talk at a trade conference and basically said women were not welcome in my workplace I’d be visiting a very upset HR manager the next morning to give an explanation. If my explanation amounted to nothing more than calling it a joke but it’s funny because it’s true then the last anyone at the company would know of me would be a tersely worded email announcing my termination. And the company would be right to do so.
Statements like Hunt’s create a hostile work environment. I know several female colleagues of his have come out in support but how many others feel uncomfortable in his presence? More importantly how can he be trusted to supervise women given his stated attitudes? This isn’t rocket surgery and the fact that people are trying to defend him just amazes me. I should know better I suppose.
“Free Speech For Me, Not For Thee.”
And give students an F for no reason?