If you want to hear more of his view, including some solid rebuttals, I highly recommend IntelligenceSquared, a debate series that gets published as a podcast. They cover motions from culture to science to politics across the spectrum and usually get excellent, well-informed debaters on both sides.
Their most recent one was "Cancel Culture is Toxic"[0] and Kasparov was arguing in favor of the motion.
While I ultimately disagree with the motion, I think Kasparov and Kmele Foster (mostly Kmele, really) made the stronger case. And regardless, it was a fascinating and well-argued discussion of the sort you almost never see around topics like "cancel culture." Well worth a listen.
Tangential but it’s always amusing to me to see Kasparov mentioned as a “chess grandmaster” when there are over 1000 grandmasters while Kasparov was the longest reigning world champion & widely considered the best ever. It’s like having Zuckerberg on your panel and making his title “Entrepreneur”.
Second the recommendation for the series. They have some misses, mostly of the sort where everyone seems to talk past each other, but I learn something from most episodes.
Gotta love Kasparov. I think he's wrong about black lives matter. He's right that it's a required movement, but he's wrong that it's about power. In fact it's the opposite.
They control the house and never actually passed the legislation. They know they have no power at all. In fact the only person to have done anything for the black community was an exceutive order. https://cops.usdoj.gov/SafePolicingEO
Black lives matter organizers know the democrats aren't doing anything for them. This is in the context of a clear humanitarian crisis. They are actively harming their own goals. Why would they do that?
BLM's problem[1] is that it's a national movement about local problems. It's city cops, not the FBI, that kill people with impunity. The presidential election is generally not the right place to take action, IMHO [2].
In any event, it seems to me that BLM should focus on police money, and ways to put that money in the hands of people who feel that killing unarmed civilians is wrong, the militarization of the police is wrong, and who is willing to peel off some of that money to fund wholly independent police accountability policies, and non-police solutions to community problems (e.g. community intervention, mental health, etc.)
[1] I am highly supportive of BLM, but even more so of the implied general movement toward police accountability. Blacks get it more than the rest of us, but everyone is victimized, regularly, to greater or lesser degrees, by a totally unaccountable police force.
[2] Except in the unlikely event that one of the candidates is overtly racist, approves of violent behavior, and even pardons military and law enforcement personel convicted of murder and torture. Of course, such a candidate would never be a problem in the USA. We're too good for that.)
I don't know much about this, but "Democracy has never been a safe space" seems to be the key: that healthy disagreement, debate and compromises are not easy, not comfortable, and well... not the ideal (in the literal sense), but is necessary, because we should respect the other side, continue to assume they're not evil, and find some damn compromises.
(at the time of the creation of the US's declaration of independence, there were big ideological differences between the north and south of the US, but folks like John Adams understood that compromising was better than being divided, so the north said: ok for slavery and other stuff, but you gotta sign to be in this together, and we'll work on it. I would recommend John Adams' biography by David McCullough for a good account of how politics back then was basically the same garbage fire as today, except the early presidents were educated and smart, and recognized that partisanship was a bad idea).
It might be that we've all become a bit tired from shouting the same things without seeing much progress. As if the left burned out from trying to convince people of the values of science, of socialism, or helping the less fortunate and so, as a result, is now playing the game of forcing the hand, almost apathetically.
Can't take a man seriously that is so rabidly russophobic. He is too emotional and irrational - makes for a great activist though. Just doesn't sell well when an informed and more cerebral audience is confronted.
> Schools are being pressured to remove books and cancel professors for spreading the “wrong” ideas. These sentiments are all too familiar to me, and to anyone who has survived life in a dictatorship. The only answer is more freedom, more speech, not less.
This is a good sentiment, but it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of pressure to "cancel" books and academics is directed at the left by the right, regardless of what gets column inches and think-pieces.
I think it's interesting phenomenon on its own that Kasparov is taking a fairly centrist stance here through a careful choice of words (cancelling books getting tends to be done by one side and cancelling professors is often done by the other side) and specifically calling out to promote more freedom regardless of what side you're on, but here in the comments people are looking at it from a bipartisan blame-shifting perspective.
The parallel to my immediate life that comes to mind is when my kids are bickering about some inconsequential triviality and I say "I don't care who started it, I only care that you stop fighting". It must surely be an "important" topic for them that they feel the need to argue about it, but in the grander scheme of things, the resolution shouldn't come at a cost of a losing a core principle (i.e. aiming for resolution through vengeful means is not a productive course of action).
You may be right about one instance, but I've never seen anything but pro-freedom of speech from the right. Leftism in colleges and academia is so rotten beyond belief.
I am down with History of Racism, naked and in all its gory details. But, let's not confuse that with how fusion of Big Tech with Big Gov to move more and more towards totalitarianism - we've seen this happen in Australia in the name of COVID. Vast majority of this is a push from Left, not the Right.
Edit: Australia passes mass surveillance laws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451066 . I can't reply because of limits, been too much on HN, I need to get off :-). It is indirectly linked to quanrantine and other measures Australian government is taking as a result of COVID. I would go a step further and argue that the world has become more authoritarian post-COVID in general.
Edit: Those saying this is a naive and disingenious take - my observations are pretty much consistent with censorship is mostly from the left than right. Sure you can give examples of suppression from the Right (which I would oppose), but that doesn't really change my observation. Generally speaking, it is indisputedly obvious to me. Here is an economist article that goes in much more depth than single counter examples in the responses: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from...
A right-wing think tank with strong influence on Idaho legislators produces this gem of a report:
'The report doesn't just call for eliminating individual courses, however. It calls for the elimination of five whole departments — Gender Studies, Sociology, Global Studies, Social Work and History — that it claims are infused with "social justice" ideology. (A sixth blacklisted department has since been added: Criminal Justice.) Eight other departments (later updated to nine) are on a watch list of sorts, judged to be "social justice in training."'
Followup: I can't Google up the studies I read on this, as all the terms I can think of are either overloaded or heavily partisan ("cancel culture"), etc. But I have a strong recollection of seeing quantitative data on number of complaints brought against academics from outside with an attempt to figure out whether this was a left/right thing and seeing a tentative conclusion that the bulk of complaints about academics are that they are "too left".
If this seems tendentious and unlikely, let's remember that Bari Weiss, now advocating for the University/grift that is University of Austin as a beacon of academic freedom, made her reputation attempting to get academics "cancelled" for having the wrong views on Israel.
There are a lot of people with a vested interest in beating the drum to claim that universities are a mess of "cancel culture", but I'd be intrigued to read some actual statistics on this, rather than heavily publicized anecdotes.
I tend to agree with the poster who complained this was some sort of blame-shifting ("he started it, mom!"). But the portrayal of normal academic life as being rife with endless left-wing cancel culture is a project being done for a reason. I don't like left-wing cancel culture either - and some of the leftiest people I know dislike it from a practical perspective (I know people personally teaching at elite institutions whose teaching has become unmanageable from constant weird student political demands). But any analysis of this that doesn't take into account the fact that universities are under pressure from the whole political spectrum is dumb.
It's also worth noting that "right wing cancel culture" sometimes just manifests itself by quietly shutting whole departments in favour of, say, expanding the "trade school" elements of a university. Just nuke the whole history department and double the size of business... obviously an apolitical act, right?
Don’t know about most pressure, but when it comes to succeeding at cancelling, conservatives don’t seem to be able to cancel anything. What or who was cancelled by conservatives in the past let’s say 2-3 years?
Is it? Anecdotally, I see a lot of news about conservatives trying to "cancel" books in their kids libraries whose topics they don't like, but regarding professors, it seems like those getting cancelled are getting cancelled by the left, not the right.
The American "left" is soft right wing. These disputes are the right squabbling with the other right. Much of the silencing of the hard right, for "decorum" and such, is not recognized as censure by the soft right. At least the hard right is honest about banning speech.
Because all of the focus is on soft and hard right wing cancellation, anything actually on the left is seen as extremist. Extremist speech can be silenced and, just like with the hard right, not acknowledged as being silenced.
The “left” cancels everywhere. The “right” cancels in their own community. Big difference IMO. Pros and cons to both of those approaches but that’s how I see it.
The first example cites what I guess is an attempted cancellation of Peter Thiel:
> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.
I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.
I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?
> who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game
IMHO, that's the problem right there. Once you get into this "you did it, so can I" game, you've set into motion the wheels of destruction. This seems best summarized by this quote:
> Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won’t work
Incidentally, the history of the aptly descriptive idiom "fighting fire with fire" offers a cautionary tale of its own[0]:
> The source of this phrase was actual fire-fighting that was taken on by US settlers in the 19th century. They attempted to guard against grass or forest fires by deliberately raising small controllable fires, which they called 'back-fires', to remove any flammable material in advance of a larger fire and so deprive it of fuel. This literal 'fighting fire with fire' was often successful, although the settlers' lack of effective fire control equipment meant that their own fires occasionally got out of control and made matters worse rather than better.
Why would Thiel, an individual, "cancel" and destroy an entire corporation? (And how often does that even happen, anyway?)
It seems disingenuous to not also mention why Thiel was angry with Gawker, and to not also mention that most people will never be in a position to be able to fight back when a giant media corporation publishes private and personal details about our lives.
I like Kasparov on Twitter. I think this article is bullshit.
He starts by citing two responses from what he considers to be people he disagrees with. These are "it's not happening" and "it happens only to bad people". He never actually addresses these claims directly, and instead heads off on tangential matters.
Kasparov appears (probably correctly) to be worried about "groupthink". Yet who can point me to a position that has actually been silenced? Those who believe in the lab theory, that vaccines are toxic, that covid19 is a hoax - these people all have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people reading, listening, watching presentations of these views. Are they a broadcast TV network? No. Are they on MSNBC? No. But how on earth can anyone seriously make the claim that these sort of views (or any others) are excluded from public consideration?
The major reason why only 58-60% of the US is vaccinated against COVID-19, for example, is precisely that anti-vaccination viewpoints have been widely distributed and viewed, despite being completely non-establishment.
Kasparov cites Thiel as someone who has apparently suffered from "the politics of personal destruction". Excuse me, but just how has Thiel suffered? He still publishes books, appears in what I can only assume is as wide a selection of media as he chooses to (given his historically rather reticent public persona), is frequently asked for comments about matters he appears to the world to be knowledgeable about, and continues to enjoy the benefits of his prodigious wealth (including that IRA).
Then Kasparov dives into lab-leak theory, and the way that many people considered this theory to be "pro-Trump". If his point was merely that it was rather pre-emptive to declare this idea false, it would be an excellent point.
However, that's not his point, and he chooses to ignore the way in which Trump attempted to use "the China virus" and the lab-leak theory as cover for his own administration's ineptitude, which creates a context in which a disdain for lab-leak theory is sort of inevitable. That context is arguably more important than anything else about this episode, particularly given that the origin story of SARS-COV-2 was always going to, and now is, receiving about as much scrutiny as anything like ever could (Chinese reluctance notwithstanding).
If Kasparov had actually addressed "it's not happening" and "it only happens to bad people" effectively, maybe this would have been an interesting essay. Instead, I find it intellectually weak, and basically a great example of a conclusion ("there's a threat to free flow of ideas") in search of some rather weak evidence.
He grew up in soviet Russia, and they honed this rhetorical tactic to perfection. He knows what it's like to live in the aftermath of its "success" and has seen the end result as well.
[+] [-] dandotway|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blub|4 years ago|reply
Can somebody please post the article or post a trustworthy link?
[+] [-] fishtoaster|4 years ago|reply
Their most recent one was "Cancel Culture is Toxic"[0] and Kasparov was arguing in favor of the motion.
While I ultimately disagree with the motion, I think Kasparov and Kmele Foster (mostly Kmele, really) made the stronger case. And regardless, it was a fascinating and well-argued discussion of the sort you almost never see around topics like "cancel culture." Well worth a listen.
[0] https://intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/cancel-culture-tox...
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ritchiea|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amalcon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WalterGR|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sleepysysadmin|4 years ago|reply
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2014-10-18%202...
black lives matter only exists during the election. And what do they have to show for it? Nothing at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_Justice_in_Polici...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_Law_Enforcement_T...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ending_Qualified_Immunity_Act
Nothing at all passed.
They control the house and never actually passed the legislation. They know they have no power at all. In fact the only person to have done anything for the black community was an exceutive order. https://cops.usdoj.gov/SafePolicingEO
Black lives matter organizers know the democrats aren't doing anything for them. This is in the context of a clear humanitarian crisis. They are actively harming their own goals. Why would they do that?
[+] [-] javajosh|4 years ago|reply
In any event, it seems to me that BLM should focus on police money, and ways to put that money in the hands of people who feel that killing unarmed civilians is wrong, the militarization of the police is wrong, and who is willing to peel off some of that money to fund wholly independent police accountability policies, and non-police solutions to community problems (e.g. community intervention, mental health, etc.)
[1] I am highly supportive of BLM, but even more so of the implied general movement toward police accountability. Blacks get it more than the rest of us, but everyone is victimized, regularly, to greater or lesser degrees, by a totally unaccountable police force.
[2] Except in the unlikely event that one of the candidates is overtly racist, approves of violent behavior, and even pardons military and law enforcement personel convicted of murder and torture. Of course, such a candidate would never be a problem in the USA. We're too good for that.)
[+] [-] greenail|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsansouci|4 years ago|reply
It might be that we've all become a bit tired from shouting the same things without seeing much progress. As if the left burned out from trying to convince people of the values of science, of socialism, or helping the less fortunate and so, as a result, is now playing the game of forcing the hand, almost apathetically.
The article is free on his website by the way: https://www.kasparov.com/woke-is-a-bad-word-for-a-real-threa...
[+] [-] RickJWagner|4 years ago|reply
I hope people get it.
[+] [-] ammonammonammon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tester756|4 years ago|reply
Ain't he more anti-Putin that russophobic?
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
This is a good sentiment, but it's worth noting that the overwhelming majority of pressure to "cancel" books and academics is directed at the left by the right, regardless of what gets column inches and think-pieces.
[+] [-] lhorie|4 years ago|reply
The parallel to my immediate life that comes to mind is when my kids are bickering about some inconsequential triviality and I say "I don't care who started it, I only care that you stop fighting". It must surely be an "important" topic for them that they feel the need to argue about it, but in the grander scheme of things, the resolution shouldn't come at a cost of a losing a core principle (i.e. aiming for resolution through vengeful means is not a productive course of action).
[+] [-] systemvoltage|4 years ago|reply
I am down with History of Racism, naked and in all its gory details. But, let's not confuse that with how fusion of Big Tech with Big Gov to move more and more towards totalitarianism - we've seen this happen in Australia in the name of COVID. Vast majority of this is a push from Left, not the Right.
Edit: Australia passes mass surveillance laws: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28451066 . I can't reply because of limits, been too much on HN, I need to get off :-). It is indirectly linked to quanrantine and other measures Australian government is taking as a result of COVID. I would go a step further and argue that the world has become more authoritarian post-COVID in general.
Edit: Those saying this is a naive and disingenious take - my observations are pretty much consistent with censorship is mostly from the left than right. Sure you can give examples of suppression from the Right (which I would oppose), but that doesn't really change my observation. Generally speaking, it is indisputedly obvious to me. Here is an economist article that goes in much more depth than single counter examples in the responses: https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/09/04/the-threat-from...
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
A right-wing think tank with strong influence on Idaho legislators produces this gem of a report:
'The report doesn't just call for eliminating individual courses, however. It calls for the elimination of five whole departments — Gender Studies, Sociology, Global Studies, Social Work and History — that it claims are infused with "social justice" ideology. (A sixth blacklisted department has since been added: Criminal Justice.) Eight other departments (later updated to nine) are on a watch list of sorts, judged to be "social justice in training."'
[+] [-] glangdale|4 years ago|reply
If this seems tendentious and unlikely, let's remember that Bari Weiss, now advocating for the University/grift that is University of Austin as a beacon of academic freedom, made her reputation attempting to get academics "cancelled" for having the wrong views on Israel.
There are a lot of people with a vested interest in beating the drum to claim that universities are a mess of "cancel culture", but I'd be intrigued to read some actual statistics on this, rather than heavily publicized anecdotes.
I tend to agree with the poster who complained this was some sort of blame-shifting ("he started it, mom!"). But the portrayal of normal academic life as being rife with endless left-wing cancel culture is a project being done for a reason. I don't like left-wing cancel culture either - and some of the leftiest people I know dislike it from a practical perspective (I know people personally teaching at elite institutions whose teaching has become unmanageable from constant weird student political demands). But any analysis of this that doesn't take into account the fact that universities are under pressure from the whole political spectrum is dumb.
It's also worth noting that "right wing cancel culture" sometimes just manifests itself by quietly shutting whole departments in favour of, say, expanding the "trade school" elements of a university. Just nuke the whole history department and double the size of business... obviously an apolitical act, right?
[+] [-] blub|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wyager|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] salt-thrower|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drewcoo|4 years ago|reply
Because all of the focus is on soft and hard right wing cancellation, anything actually on the left is seen as extremist. Extremist speech can be silenced and, just like with the hard right, not acknowledged as being silenced.
[+] [-] thoughtstheseus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] newacct583|4 years ago|reply
> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.
I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.
I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?
[+] [-] lhorie|4 years ago|reply
IMHO, that's the problem right there. Once you get into this "you did it, so can I" game, you've set into motion the wheels of destruction. This seems best summarized by this quote:
> Destroying the mechanisms of democracy to preserve democracy won’t work
Incidentally, the history of the aptly descriptive idiom "fighting fire with fire" offers a cautionary tale of its own[0]:
> The source of this phrase was actual fire-fighting that was taken on by US settlers in the 19th century. They attempted to guard against grass or forest fires by deliberately raising small controllable fires, which they called 'back-fires', to remove any flammable material in advance of a larger fire and so deprive it of fuel. This literal 'fighting fire with fire' was often successful, although the settlers' lack of effective fire control equipment meant that their own fires occasionally got out of control and made matters worse rather than better.
[0] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/fight-fire-with-fire.htm...
[+] [-] fallingknife|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gunapologist99|4 years ago|reply
It seems disingenuous to not also mention why Thiel was angry with Gawker, and to not also mention that most people will never be in a position to be able to fight back when a giant media corporation publishes private and personal details about our lives.
[+] [-] cool_dude85|4 years ago|reply
If I say I don't like your ideology in a hacker news reply, am I attempting to cancel newacct583?
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] PaulDavisThe1st|4 years ago|reply
He starts by citing two responses from what he considers to be people he disagrees with. These are "it's not happening" and "it happens only to bad people". He never actually addresses these claims directly, and instead heads off on tangential matters.
Kasparov appears (probably correctly) to be worried about "groupthink". Yet who can point me to a position that has actually been silenced? Those who believe in the lab theory, that vaccines are toxic, that covid19 is a hoax - these people all have hundreds of thousands if not millions of people reading, listening, watching presentations of these views. Are they a broadcast TV network? No. Are they on MSNBC? No. But how on earth can anyone seriously make the claim that these sort of views (or any others) are excluded from public consideration?
The major reason why only 58-60% of the US is vaccinated against COVID-19, for example, is precisely that anti-vaccination viewpoints have been widely distributed and viewed, despite being completely non-establishment.
Kasparov cites Thiel as someone who has apparently suffered from "the politics of personal destruction". Excuse me, but just how has Thiel suffered? He still publishes books, appears in what I can only assume is as wide a selection of media as he chooses to (given his historically rather reticent public persona), is frequently asked for comments about matters he appears to the world to be knowledgeable about, and continues to enjoy the benefits of his prodigious wealth (including that IRA).
Then Kasparov dives into lab-leak theory, and the way that many people considered this theory to be "pro-Trump". If his point was merely that it was rather pre-emptive to declare this idea false, it would be an excellent point.
However, that's not his point, and he chooses to ignore the way in which Trump attempted to use "the China virus" and the lab-leak theory as cover for his own administration's ineptitude, which creates a context in which a disdain for lab-leak theory is sort of inevitable. That context is arguably more important than anything else about this episode, particularly given that the origin story of SARS-COV-2 was always going to, and now is, receiving about as much scrutiny as anything like ever could (Chinese reluctance notwithstanding).
If Kasparov had actually addressed "it's not happening" and "it only happens to bad people" effectively, maybe this would have been an interesting essay. Instead, I find it intellectually weak, and basically a great example of a conclusion ("there's a threat to free flow of ideas") in search of some rather weak evidence.
[+] [-] newbie789|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peter_retief|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jdkee|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spoonjim|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kranar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] commandlinefan|4 years ago|reply