Nobody Can Take a Joke Anymore

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Originally Posted by DanaC

The point there is rarely about wanting to block what is being said, so much as it is making a political statement about the wider culture the speaker nominally represents.

That's probably does happen and was probably part of it, since the demands did include cutting ties with Israeli universities and that's part of how they bring Israeli speakers, but it's not what I meant. The demand was a demand that the university of toronto itself boycott israeli product or Canadian and american companies that trade with israeli companies. The relevance to this is that in that case, in contrast with many other cases, the administration intervened and disbanded the group that was petitioning and relying for the boycott.

Originally Posted by DanaC

And if you're going down that route, then you really need to make sure your own house in order. Would those same people have objected to someone from the more extreme edge of the women's movement giving a lecture about how all men are inherently violent rapists and oppressors?

An interesting thing about extremes, they very much depend on where your own opinions and those of the people around you stand in order to define a relative norm.

I had my own experience with that regarding the first topic, where opinions that would be considered extreme left wing or extreme right wing here within Israel appear equally right wing to those with the political beliefs regarding the middle east in places like the UK/France/Sweden, while from an Israeli perspective the opinions about the middle east and their implications are only distinguishable from Nazism by the lack of sexy uniforms

Which brings me to the next and best example: Godwin's law. The reason it exists as a phenomena in the first place is because almost any stance is extreme and fanatic relatively to someone else's further down the spectrum, and there's no agreed upon zero.

Likewise, in the interview I linked above, one of the dominant complaint made by the one representing "radical feminism" was the attribution of radicalism and extremism to her stance to began with - from her perspective it's not an extreme, it's something she is used to getting school credits for.

The point been, where the norm is will generally be relative to the bubble of information and perspectives you are used to consider and encounter, very much dependent on your own subjective norm.