Malcolm Gladwell on Protesting Princeton's Racist Legacy | The New Yorker Festival

This is Malcolm Gladwell at his absolute best in my opinion. He's very good at making ideas relevant to ordinary people, and I love that he brings up this issue in particular. This distinction between "harm" and "wrong" is very important.

It's kind of an argument against relativism, which largely ends up resting on harm arguments because something that is absolutely wrong cannot be contingent on anything, rendering relativism moot.

This is well said, the notion of harm is an easy gateway to victim mentality.

Only the President of Princeton, 2 term successful Democratic President of the USA. Of course he was a blithering idiot.

And 3 yrs later Princeton will now remove Woodrow Wilson’s name.

They judge what’s wrong and right based on harm because morality is subjective. If a bunch of kids steal a dollars worth of corn it’s not wrong because of the direct harm nor that it’s ”bad”. It’s wrong because that behavior will be harmful if they continue doing stuff like that.

You tell them Barak 😆.

He did give women the right to vote. Then the citizens the right to elect their senators. Wilson supported immigration rights and vetoed a law that required a literacy test for immigrants. He attempted to keep the U.S. out of World War I. Finally negotiating peace. All undone by bringing in the Federal Reserve. But people are complex. Gladwell sees everything through his communist lens and it makes him hard to take seriously. Oh and hair like pubes.

The New Yorker used to share Gladwell's talk in the entirety. Lately it's been 20minutes, and now only 5minutes blurp. Pity.

reminds me of Stephen Pinkers criticism: that he's always cmparing how "we" think today with better alternatives despite raising the question of who this ignorant "we" are

Tort?

First