Rotundus.com

That's a quote from this Spectator article about Peter Tatchell. Here he wrote more broadly about the feedback that he got following putting his name alongside those of over a hundred others to an article arguing in favour of free speech:

For me, free speech is one of the most precious of all human rights. It is the foundation of a democratic, open society. It should be defended without exception, unless it involves threats, harassment or incitements to violence.
The most effective way to defeat bigoted ideas is not by proscription but by challenging and exposing them - and by presenting better, non-bigoted ideas. That's why I've often accepted invitations to debate homophobes, misogynists, transphobes and anti-Muslim zealots. The feedback I've received nearly always suggests that they've come out of such debates damaged and discredited.
... Although used to being assailed and vilified, I was stunned by the vicious and often untrue nature of the Twitter attacks - and by the sheer volume. A colleague estimates that I received 4,000 to 5,000 mostly hostile comments from Saturday to Monday. They ran from 8am to midnight, continuous and relentless. At peak times, there were 30-40 comments a minute.
Some were fine: critical but polite and fair. Many were hateful and abusive: homo, foreigner, misogynist, paedophile, nutter and so on. Others were threatening: "I would like to tweet about your murder you f*cking parasite."
Most tweets completely misrepresented what the letter said and my personal record of support for trans people for over four decades. It is one of the largest and most vituperative onslaughts in my 48 years of human rights activism.
... I couldn't win whatever I said. If I did not support trans issues I would be accused of prejudice and neglect. When I did support them, I was condemned for uninvited interventions and disempowering trans campaigners.

Though I appreciate Tatchell's stand for free speech, I also tend to agree with the following point that the article I drew the headline from also made:

As it happens, I think the feminists complaining about No Platform, and possibly even Tatchell himself, unwittingly helped to nurture this censorious tyranny of identity politics with their old slogan ‘the personal is political’.

I've been debating whether to post anything longer about the events in Ferguson and at the University of Virginia over the course of the last year or so. For now I wanted to excerpt the following from a recent NYT article:

... these cases stand as cautionary markers that we can never be so eager to have our convictions confirmed that deliberation is abandoned and our truth-detectors are disarmed. That goes for those in the media as well as the public. Sometimes justice dictates a glacial fortitude, even in a modern period of instant gratification.
In these cases, the error must be acknowledged and absorbed without distorting the mission. One measure of the merits of a movement and a cause are their resilience in the face of tumult, their ability to take a blow and scamper back to their feet, to stay homed in on the beacon of light even after the darkness falls.
Remember what Malcolm X said: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against.” When you are in honest pursuit of justice, the truth will never hurt you.

One thing that I found rather odd about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson was just how hard and consistently the media and activists were pushing a single and seemingly questionable case as an instance of obvious police brutality when there seemed to be other, better-supported examples that could be used. Even since the Michael Brown shooting, the deaths of Eric Garner or Tamir Rice both seemed to be reasonably documented cases that could be used to make that point. To push Brown's case over these other two once the details of it arose - including the results of multiple autopsies and testimony from eyewitnesses with relatively little reason to lie - has seemed to me to be likely counterproductive in the quest for justice. I like Blow's assertions above from the NYT, but it seems to me that as far as the Brown case goes the NYT overall has been part of this problem.

Now it seems that there may be another such case in the shooting of Walter Scott where the cop in question has now been charged with murder. If a cause is true, you should expect to find multiple and sometimes well-documented examples of it - but often it seems the media and activists often push the more dubious cases rather than the cases that seem to me most likely to produce positive changes.

Good Leaders Are Willing To Change Their Mind

"one of the most crucial roles of the leader is to be a learner, and it is impossible to learn without being shaped and changed in some way. To be shaped, you have to open yourself to the idea that you don’t know everything, and that your present ideas could be incorrect, or at least incomplete."

A group of independent scientists created night vision eye drops

Interesting that their test seems to have worked. That said: "Don't try this at home" until they've better studied the safety of the drug used.

Car insurance premium on 'male' jobs makes a mockery of equality law

Implement a rule compelling companies to act in an economically inefficient fashion and is it any surprise that the companies try to work around it?

Fire extinguisher factory destroyed in massive blaze

If only there were something that could put out fires.

From the NPR article How Snobbery Helped Take The Spice Out Of European Cooking:

Back in the Middle Ages, spices were really expensive, which meant that only the upper class could afford them. But things started to change as Europeans began colonizing parts of India and the Americas.

“Spices begin to pour into Europe,” explains Krishnendu Ray, an associate professor of food studies at New York University. “What used to be expensive and exclusive became common.”

... Serving richly spiced stews was no longer a status symbol for Europe’s wealthiest families — even the middle classes could afford to spice up their grub. “So the elite recoiled from the increasing popularity of spices,” Ray says. “They moved on to an aesthetic theory of taste. Rather than infusing food with spice, they said things should taste like themselves. Meat should taste like meat, and anything you add only serves to intensify the existing flavors.”

This reminds me a lot of recent trends of artisanal, local, organic, farm-to-table, and so on and so forth. That said, I think the adoption of a less-meat-intensive diet a good thing both to address animal welfare concerns and also sustainability issues - though not necessarily an idea I live up to particuarly well. That said, what I think a lot of the food world - e.g. Dan Barber - doesn't account for well are cost issues.