The principled defenses have failed. The attempts to ignore it have failed. The attempts to placate have, predictably, failed. The only way to shut down the “army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking” is hit back twice as hard and hold the SJWs completely accountable to their own rules.
When Professor Tim Hunt, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist, recently addressed a major conference in Seoul about women in science, he said he had three problems with ‘girls in laboratories’, namely that: ‘You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticise them, they cry.’
As a media storm erupted, Hunt insisted that his remarks were made in ‘a totally jocular, ironic way’.
But none of that matters to today’s self-righteous crusaders against offensive opinions, for whom language is never a laughing matter. Professor Hunt was immediately surrounded online by an outraged Twitter mob demanding his head on a pike.
These boycott-and-ban zealots are not content with exercising their right to criticise somebody who makes an offensive joke. Quivering with self-righteous indignation, they want to silence those who fail to conform to their group-think.
In this case, their bullying worked. The scientific authorities immediately caved in. Not only was Hunt forced to resign from his post at University College London, but he was also dismissed from the science committee of the European Research Council.
So biochemistry loses a brilliant pioneer, while we lose more ground to the forces of oppressive censorship.
For the saga of Tim Hunt’s downfall is just the latest example of how a culture of verbal prohibition is taking over society, led by an army of self-appointed militants who see themselves as the guardians of correct thinking.
If you don’t want to see more Nobel Laureates like Tim Hunt and James Watson hounded from science, more innovators like Brandon Eich hounded from tech, then you should endorse the Tor Books boycott and force the SJWs to realize that they will be held twice as accountable for their every joke, every tweet, every Facebook comment, and every personal statement as they hold everyone else.
