10 Comments
Mar 31, 2022Liked by Sarah Haider

So many emotions about this. The fact that I'm now established in a good career where I'm probably mostly un-cancel-able and a good marriage has ironically made the urge to just roll my eyes, keep my head down and spend my time on my patients, my kids and my D&D campaign much stronger. I no longer believe that this is something that can be reversed by any action I can take. My project for the next few years will be trying to invent a way to inoculate my kids against this nonsense as much as possible and steering my young patients away from the self-mutilation that is gender-affirming care.

It was still pretty disgusting to see someone like Nicholas Grossman doing the same nonsense you saw from Davidson. I've spent the last 13 years of my life in 3 different universities. At this point it is not plausible that anyone with any exposure to universities (much less a professor) could deny in good faith that a) Everyone is terrified to speak their minds about the known taboos even though the majority know or suspect they are bullshit and b) this is not the way it was even 10 years ago. In the latter years of medical school and into residency it was obvious that all of my colleagues lived in perpetual terror of saying the wrong thing. By the time I graduated you could hear a pin drop when a lecture ended on anything remotely politically charged (And there were many, many such lectures. The last academic conference of residency had a 30 minute lecture devoted to a glorified twitter troll lecturing us on our duty as doctors to advocate for abolishing the police).

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Mar 30, 2022Liked by Sarah Haider

I’m not following what you’re suggesting, Sarah. Let’s take a couple examples:

1. Do you regret tweeting in support of Sam Seder (https://mobile.twitter.com/SarahTheHaider/status/937820495810002946) when MSNBC fired him?

2. Do you think FIRE shouldn’t have stood up for Nicole Hannah Jones when the UNC decided not to provide her tenure?

I don’t think either of these actions were properly recognized by Seder or NHJ, who are dishonest actors. But there are plenty of others who do recognize it, and support you and FIRE because of it.

If you do think those actions were wrong, what was the correct response? I don’t think anti-woke liberals are a powerful enough group to actually make these people pay a cost here. I don’t think they should be defended as vigilantly as someone we think is more innocent, but I am not convinced there is much to gain by breaking our principles.

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It’s simple really, many liberals have had decades of selling their souls for triffles. At least the affluent muslims Sarah wrote about, ignored extremism to avoid loosing the vague promise of an afterlife. At what price did so called secular, feminist westerners agree to run cover for female genital mutilation, forced marriages..? The woke have a despicable vision for our future, but their contempt for the type of liberals who even now, won’t lift a finger to save their own skin is deserved.

Having smug principle-free people in positions of power is a bad thing, and would continue to be a bad thing even in a world without a single Ibram Kendi.

Whenever defending the virtueless is not strategically necessary to prevent the domination of the woke, doing so, is a bad thing. There are plenty of decent people also being targeted by our rivals. Defending people takes time, and abandoning your friends to help people who would never raise a finger for anyone, is morally wrong.

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Could you elaborate on a culture of honor vs. a culture of dignity?

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<When a canceller gets canceled, it is fairly common to see anti-woke liberals defend them - as if on a mission to prove their own magnanimity and integrity.

But this is a misguided tact, and in practice more self-serving than morally justified.>

It seems what you want is for the people on your side of the fight to lack real principles, basically. It seems like you want "anti-woke liberals" who advocate for free speech to put aside those principles as long as the "right people" are on the business end of the punishment stick.

So the ends justify the means, then?

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