Can you please be more specific? I really do not know what would be “heresy” now. Maybe I’m tweeting something which is “heresy” (and knowing that since nobody reads my tweets).
If you use master branch on git you are racist. Inexplicably the word is still ok in other contexts like chess master. Although maybe that needs to be updated too. What's the harm in changing the term to chess expert I ask you? Are you going to get so hung up defending the use of a word?
David Shor’s firing is the common example since it’s the most egregious case (getting fired for retweeting a black professor's paper arguing riots are bad for black political movements). See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
Nastiness directed at JK Rowling and Jesse Singal because of trans stuff [0][1]. I’d add Bari Weiss to this list too. [2] If the mob could destroy these people and get them fired they would. As it is the pressure from the mob makes things unpleasant for them. Most people would not continue to fight back against it.
Sam Harris gets a similar level of hostility for what are very nuanced conversations and it’s why he has his own platform.
James Demore at Google is another more controversial case (actually read the memo - it’s way more benign then you’d think from the meta conversation and imo a reasonable thing to discuss).
AGM wrote chaos monkeys and comes across as an ass in it so he had his offer rescinded from apple - I personally don’t care as much about this one since there’s some risk here with what you write and how it represents you when it comes to a hiring decision (though Apple handled it poorly).
Depending on where you work not adhering to Kendi style anti-racism can also be heretical.
Then there are pressures for other things like being forced to state pronouns in tech interviews or be unlikely to move forward. The song and dance around land acknowledgements (I think they're dumb, but that's likely a heretical view in these circles). Being given side eye or “corrected” if you don’t say “Latinx” at work. There are lists of stuff like this at work, told not to say “sanity check” because it offends insane people, don’t say “left hand side” because it hurts one handed people. If you don't agree you can find yourself labeled ableist, racist, transphobe, etc. specific arguments from you are then ignored and your job can be at risk.
Lots of stupid shit imo and pushing back against it will often have harmful career consequences so you have to be quiet about it. Most of the people loudly complaining about this stuff are on the right, but it affects a lot of people across the political spectrum. I suspect the right complains the most about it because they paradoxically have the least to lose (they're just in a separate tribe anyway with their own political support structures). The people that get hurt by this the most imo are earnest people that are interested in things that are true despite tribal affiliation, they're more exposed.
This permeates the culture and makes it hard to have interesting conversations about anything that comes anywhere close to a third rail topic. It also makes it harder to understand what’s true.
I find Sam Harris, Bari Weiss, Scott Alexander, Yascha Mounk, Andrew Sullivan, Coleman Hughes, Kmele, to be good examples of people engaging on this stuff in a nuanced way across the political spectrum.
For what it's worth this is a comment I would not have historically been comfortable writing before getting a new job where the risk from this kind of thing blowing up and having career consequences is reduced. That's likely the most common negative affect of this kind of heresy. When you put penalties on sharing ideas sure you block some truly horrible stuff, but you also snuff out anything that doesn't align with the current cultural beliefs about what is correct and true. The issue with that is what's currently believed to be true is almost certainly not 100% correct and rigidly enforcing cultural beliefs will slow down our ability to struggle closer towards things that are more correct. That's why holding free speech up as a virtue is better on net (and engaging in in-good-faith discourse on difficult topics is a good thing).
When you limit speech you put a subset of people in the position to choose which speech to limit - even those with the best intentions will do this poorly, it's better to have robust systems that don't require this centralized speech control. The promise of the web was to enable this (and in a lot of ways it has), but the failure of the web is that problems with our computing stack incentivize centralized services that bring this problem back. Either way, mobs pushing to silence/fire people that disagree with them is probably something we should work to avoid.
For example, almost everything I’ve ever heard about white privilege is also true for Jewish people but it would be a career ending mistake to talk about the over representation of Jewish people in positions of power.
It's remarkable that this needs saying: nobody gets fired for mentioning that Jews are over-represented in whatever industry you choose. It's a plainly verifiable fact. What they get fired for is claiming that said over-representation is the result of a conspiracy in which Jews, by virtue of a mostly amorphous cultural identity, are the conspirators and main villains.
Confusing these two fundamentally different statements is one of the oldest moves in the reactionary playbook.
Jewish people are white though - and "white privilege" as a concept is primarily about how white people don't have to overcome racism or adapt their behaviour to the dominant culture to get ahead. It does connect with issues of diversity but it's not a direct explanation.
I meant that most people would say that most Jewish Americans are white. Given the US racial categories, it's the one that most Jewish people in the US fit into.
Of course, racial categories are made up anyway, but some people seem to care about these things.
Yeah, I'd agree with that. There are lots of non-white Jews out there, but average American interaction with Judaism has probably been through Ashkenazi Jews.
Ironically, the Sephardic and North African Jews that I know are more likely to self-identify as nonwhite, but are probably still counted as white by the US Census. Goes to your point about made-up categories!
“In positions of power” is the important thing here. I’m not talking about diversity, I mean statements like “a small number of extremely wealthy white men have a disproportionate influence in the media, government, financial system, some specific company, etc” is a common left wing opinion for why systems work against the interests of racialized people. It’s even more accurate if you add “Jewish” after the word white, but that’s not something we’re allowed to talk about.
It's also more true if you put "Irish" in there, but people wouldn't object so much to that (probably just be confused).
In politics, people are typically arguing for their positions, and thus you can't take simple statements of fact apart from what the speaker is trying to achieve. Basically: why is the speaker talking about Jewish people on power so much? Why do alt-right people love to talk about black crime statistics? Both of these things can be true, but they're not just making random statements, they're trying to imply their arguments. It's dogwhistling, basically.
What criticisms of these groups do you have in mind? That's like 80% of the world population.
Also think its a common misunderstanding to think of critical theory issues as relating directly to oneself. I'm a straight white guy and I understand concepts like privilege, and it's nothing to feel personal responsibility or guilt for.
I don’t feel guilt for things I didn’t do. I also don’t have much in the way of criticism for /any/ category of people. But the group I mentioned above is the only group which is allowed to be criticized. Also the only group which is categorically allowed to be punished in the name of supporting every other category of people.
That’s wrong (evil), full stop. No amount of gaslighting will ever change that fact.
I don’t believe this comment. I literally don’t believe you can be unaware of the myriad ways white heterosexual males who are in the country legally are portrayed in culture and treated in hiring practices. That’s not good faith debate.
OK so we're talking about affirmative action then?
I'm talking about interpretation. I think that conservative pundits try to get people to interpret diversity initiatives as an attack against white people. I think people can also come to those conclusions by themselves too of course. But that's why I wanted an example: there's like a dozen programs you might be taking offense to but given that I don't take offence to them myself, I'd need an example.
No, I didn’t reduce the scope to affirmative action. That’s one particular case where people are explicitly racist, know that they are being racist, but do it anyway and justify it with entirely Machiavellian ideological language.
I object to the idea that it's Machiavellian, but I do disagree with affirmative action. I think it's well-meaning but a really ineffective and misled concept. I think demographic outreach is a better approach. Affirmative action tries to solve a systemic problem at the hiring pool, which is stupid.
You still haven't given any other examples though. Like, I get your concerns and I'm trying to have a genuine conversation but I can't discuss pure vagueries. I think liberals misunderstand and misapply critical theory as much as conservatives misunderstand and decry it, so I can certainly agree that some in-world implementations of it are bad.
