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.