The Ontario Human Rights Commission (OHRC) has addressed a letter to the principals and presidents of universities and colleges across the province after reports of racism and other human rights violations. Service providers in Ontario have obligations to their patrons under the Ontario Human Rights Code, and the Chief Commissioner of the OHRC is concerned that these obligations are not being met on campus.
The Commissioner points to several trends, procured from media reports, which point to the need for “more respectful, equitable, and inclusive” learning environments. The examples which are given include threats of violence, “Zoom-bombing” online meetings hosted by racialized students, the posting of racist images and comments in chat rooms, gratuitous use of the “N-word”, and faculty microaggressions towards students.
Many of these problems appear to be stimulated not by a toxic academic environment but rather by a toxic online environment. It is effortless to conceal one’s online identity, and anonymity gives bullies the courage to do and say what they like without fear of reprisal. If there have indeed been threats of violence on campus, racially motivated or otherwise, universities and colleges should condemn those actions and work with the police to ensure perpetrators are punished accordingly. Universities and colleges are not, however, in a position to regulate the internet. “Zoom-bombings” occur because faulty security mechanisms are easily bypassed by internet trolls. Again, online anonymity allows pathetic bullies to disrupt virtual meetings which their cowardice would not allow for in person.
Racist images and comments are frequently posted in chat rooms and forums, despite the best efforts of moderators and online harassment policies. The price we pay for a “free” internet is the price we also pay for a free society – we may occasionally be hurt by malicious people who use their freedom irresponsibly. Unfortunately, the internet is not – and cannot be – governed by social norms which keep in-person discourse civil. Universities and colleges are only responsible for this reality insofar as they have treated the internet as an alternative to human interaction. Pandemic or no pandemic, it is not.
This leaves us with the two concerns which universities and colleges may be able to address: the use of the “n-word” and faculty microaggressions. The only scenario where it is appropriate to use the “n-word” at a university is when quoting a primary source where that word was used. Similarly, universities ought not to fly swastika flags on campus, but professors may well show images of that hateful symbol as a teaching tool in the context of a history or political science lecture. If this is the context in which professors have uttered the “n-word”, its use has not been gratuitous.
The OHRC should have left “microaggressions” off of their list of otherwise reasonable concerns. According to the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion office at Brandeis University, microaggressions are verbal, nonverbal and environmental slights which, directly or indirectly, “target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership”. The late Chester Pierce, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, claimed that the “subtle, cumulative mini-assault is the substance of today’s racism”. If somebody makes a genuinely racist comment, they should be held accountable for it, no matter their position. But how are faculty supposed to engage with students if they are worried that any innocuous comment can be interpreted as a microaggression and thus violate the Ontario Human Rights Code?
The Chief Commissioner identified the source of the problem when she noted that many of the students who have issued complaints are “just a few years out of high school”. The concept of microaggressions is absurdly immature. Some students do genuinely feel as though comments their professors make are racially insensitive, and it is conceivable that there are some situations where that was the professor’s intention. When someone is emotionally and intellectually mature, however, the appropriate response to an insensitive comment is to speak to the offending party about the comment. Perhaps these students would be surprised if they told their professors, in private, that their words were hurtful. Perhaps the professor would begin to choose his or her words more carefully or would help clarify innocent remarks which had been misinterpreted. The general reaction, however, appears to be to lodge a complaint with an authority figure. This is not dissimilar to when six-year-olds complain to their parents about their siblings. When respectable institutions like the OHRC indulge immature students by issuing heavy-handed letters to the administration, it infantilizes those students who are able to cope with their problems in an age-appropriate way.
Jonathan Haidt has made an important distinction between cultures of honour and cultures of dignity. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, Haidt argues, Western societies were cultures where honour was earned by avenging insults on one’s own. Modern Western societies have transitioned, he continues, to cultures where dignity is assumed rather than earned. This has been a positive transition in many respects. Men are no longer expected to defend their honour in duels to the death; most decent people accept that they should treat others with respect regardless of their immutable characteristics, social status, or wealth. Citing a paper published in Comparative Sociology, Haidt notes how some are now observing a transition from a culture of dignity to a culture of victimhood. This transition is evinced by the OHRC’s letter.
As Haidt wrote (with Greg Lukianoff) in The Coddling of the American Mind, “the key idea is that the new moral culture of victimhood fosters ‘moral dependence’ and an atrophying of the ability to handle small interpersonal matters on one’s own”. The culture of victimhood has also given rise to the intellectually and morally dubious claim that “my truth” ought to be valued over “the truth”. If I feel offended, an offense has been perpetrated against me, regardless of the other party’s intentions. This is the line Ontario’s colleges and universities are being encouraged to adopt by their government. Principals and presidents should think carefully about how they choose to respond. Imprudent measures which will be temporarily satisfying for a small number of students could adversely affect the quality of their education, the veracity of public discourse, and, ultimately, an entire generation’s maturation.
35 comments
https://youtu.be/LERGht6nshE
Dr Chester Pierce doesn’t stand up to scrutiny
Flying the Swastika as ‘…images of that hateful symbol as a teaching…’ hateful? That would be a fetish reaction. A symbol is neutral. Hate is imposed upon it. This does not make the symbol hateful.
A Palestinian is more nuanced seeing the Israeli Flag and the injustices from what follows by the state of Israel. No one uses the word ‘hateful’ so why should the Swastika flag be singled out and not he Hammer and Sicle or the Red Star or any dictorship’s flag as well.
That’s not even coherent.
The asininity of these people knows no bounds, it seems like every thing I read about the woke should be an Onion piece, I just shake my head and wonder how we got here. If it wasn’t so dangerous to our Republic it would be laughable.
Exactly. I remember when we used to joke about clowns like this. Then they took over and it’s not funny anymore.
Hey Theo-
I think the truth is often (but not always) somewhere in the middle. At least that’s what I’ve noted when people have disputes. Sometimes, we should strike a balance in the record. Also, physical characteristics are not always a reliable indicator of how people think, feel, or behave.
As to behavior, the Nonaggression Principle is a value I hold and practice. Basically, it amounts to “leave other people alone”. Don’t hurt others or their property. Let people succeed or fail. It’s on them not you. Some refuse to do that. In the end, they fail. Just wait. The sad aspect of waiting is it sometimes takes a long time for that to happen and people get hurt.
Life is filled with risk, unfairness, and is uncontrollable and unpredictable. I think we’re all more calm when we accept the fact life sometimes sucks. We can’t control others. Our thoughts are always private. We can control ourselves.
Dear Saint Simp,
Some comments demand ad hominem responses. Yours is one of them.
Are you for real? There is no “middle” any more. Who do you think you’re pretending to be? Gandhi Ji Moron?
Will you apply your smug arrogant “nonaggression pact” if a posse of “misunderstood racialized othereds” grabs your wife/gf in a dark alley and rides a train on her bitch ho pooty then sodomizes your cucked rectum with a broomstick while stealing all your money and laughing at your wussified eunach passive submission-broken sorry white ass? Turn the other cheek? Try doing that with 2-feet of wood shoved up your arsehole, Mary Poppins.
The previous commenter made a wry observation that racist violence against white people by black/”brown” people happens all the time (in USA, UK, everywhere that’s majority white) because there is no legal penalty against such anti-white violence nor any public will to enact such legal penalties because supercilious sanctimonious fools like you block it through “anti-racist microaggression” shaming and scolding while self-righteously strutting and crowing about how “moral” you are as a an “ally” of the “marginalized”.
This violence is happening because people like you keep inventing dangerously naive false-Christian New Age gobbledy-gook bullshit excuses for refusing to look at reality and admitting that not just individual humans but some self-sorting groups of humans are deliberate and willful evil f-ing monsters who prey on the perceived weakness of other individuals and, like it or not, other groups. Wolves hunt the weakest sheep.
That is life. That we can control with enforced laws, common agreement on what is crime, real punishment of crimes, and public acknowledgement that the real world fact that racial violence against white people is coming from races that are not white because there is now nothing to stop it. This is not “racism”; this is truth.
Remain in your fantasy world of channelling and crystals, Baba Rum Raisin. And while unpacking your white privilege knapsack, say hi to that racist “human”-skidmark Whore of Babylon, Peggy MacIntosh, and tell her that her ass looks fat in her self-loathing white race-hating fake hair shirt.
Have a nice day.
Sincerely,
Lucy Fur.
(Meow.)
Nothing will improve until Whites gain a racial consciousness and realize they are being trampled on 24/7 by Anti-white psychological (and literal) warfare. (It took my 42 years to shed the illusions of what I thought all this was about: i.e. human decency and equal opportunity.) The Left yell, burn, demand, loot, murder, riot, ostracize, cancel, shout, humiliate. Well-meaning White egalitarians who have poured more moral energy into lifting up POC simply nod, submit, and bend over. It’s hard to blame them: they’ve been demonized from birth to believe that they are culpable and have no identity, except for one that rapes, pillages, and subjugates. The Left have made clear, by actions and intellectual output, they want no middle ground.
To continuously pretend this *still* isn’t about anti-White hatred is confounding to me, especially after our glorious Summer of George. Words spoken by whites are condemned more harshly than violence by people of color, which, oftentimes, isn’t condemned at all. In the words of Colin Flaherty, the media deny it, excuse it, condone it, encourage it, and even lie about it. The media have something else to say. Not only do they ignore it, they are constantly buttressing the narrative that People of color are relentless victims of relentless white racism all the time everywhere and that explains everything.
We-
Your response was interesting. You certainly sound very angry.
You do know than an ad hominem is a logical fallacy/invalid argument, right?
Right now, I’m more concerned about government trampling constitutional rights (covid emergency measures), foreign interventionism, and the government debt.
Do scream at kids “get off my lawn”?
You make some legitimate points there.
A white person sees three black men ahead of them on the pavement/sidewalk of North End Rd in west London. At 2am in the morning. The white person stays on the pavement on their side as he knows that to move to the other side would be seen as a micro-aggression.
White person passes the three black men – who ‘relieve him’ of his wallet.
Happened to a friend of mine….
I find the use of the “N-word” in rap music a macro-aggression against all my sensibilities; actually I find rap music a macro-aggression against all of my sensibilities regardless of the presence or absence of the “N-word”. Yet, somehow, rap music is deemed essential and cultural by many blacks. How can that be?
Dan Tige,
When **left to their own devices,** Africans and Europeans make fundamentally different types of music, imo. Remember the controversy around Cardi B’s disgusting “WAP” last summer? Well, we all know that many decades ago when Blacks used Western instruments, scales and harmonies, you heard beautiful stuff out of Sam Cooke, Bill Withers, Temptations, and the miraculous tradition of jazz and blues.
Today, when you remove the need for instruments because of modern music technology, African Americans can now put out pieces consisting of little more than repetitive drum beats and griot-like chanting. You hear this perfectly in Cardi B and other rappers like her: this is pure sub-Saharan Africa, a clear descendent of the Bantu peoples & tradition. Rap is now entering its FOURTH decade of popularity and shows no signs of slowing.
As someone with European ancestry, I know why this is so grating to my ears but is pleasing and innate to Africans the world over, wherever they may reside. My personal un-PC opinion, of which I will no doubt be castigated, is that this is no insignificant difference, and translates similarly into the difference between European marble and African mudbrick, or the lyrical sensibilities between Lennon/McCartney or Jay-Z.
I agree with what you say, except for referring to rap as “music”.
Section 230 hasn’t been repealed yet.
Did I get moderated because I cited the name of a former congressman who is now has a felony conviction? He was trapped by the very law he wrote.
Why did my comment appear as all one paragraph? At least, that’s how it looks now. Why is it being moderated?
If Calum had waited a day or so to write his piece, he could have included 19 year old Mimi Groves’ name in it. She’s a new casualty of wokeness. Full details can be found by searching: mimi groves, college, video.
Anyway, agree with the above commenters. Microaggressions are simply another technique for power acquisition and retention!
I also think it’s useful to mention again that the correlation (causation is different) between holding authoritarian beliefs and mental health disorder (specifically, the dark triad/tetrad) is strong!
Here’s a journal article in case you care to read more about it: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7369609/ There are many more such articles on ncbi.gov and others sites.
Also, here’s a piece from Reason: https://reason.com/2020/07/07/narcissists-psychopaths-and-manipulators-are-more-likely-to-engage-in-virtuous-victim-signaling-says-study/
By the way, I don’t think all psych is crap. I know I didn’t think that decades ago when graduated and began to practice. That was a while ago though. Human behavior still dumbfounds and fascinates me.
OT: If you want to enjoy some schadenfreude check out convicted sex offender, former NY congressman Anthony Weiner and a law protecting teens from internet porn he advocated.
I was unfairly ostracized for microaggressing a stranger in the locker room by saying that “he had a pretty big penis for a Chinaman.” My good intentions were mistaken for naked racism. Welcome to life in 2020.
In all seriousness, I wake up every day simply gobsmacked by the fact that intersectional Wokeness has become mainstream in virtually all of American life. It is far more socially permissible, a la Sarah Jeong, to say you ‘hate White people’ than it is for a benevolent, MAGA-hat-wearing Catholic boy to smile at a “wise” Native American. I am dumbfounded daily—hourly—by its sudden and pernicious presence in our lives.
In his advancing years, Philip Roth was asked about death:
“It stuns me. It … stuns me. The whole concept is stunning. I was in St. Bart’s church recently and remembered when Bill Styrons’ memorial service was held there, so many years back. I stood there and couldn’t believe Bill was dead. So I’m just shocked and stunned.”
Along with microaggressions even being *considered* a human rights violation, David Bern’s noted “2020’s moronic and dangerous woke ideas” have had the same effect on me. Just as the question of death robbed a profound writer like Roth of any articulate insights, so too has Wokeness stripped me of comprehending such a divisive and suicidal ideology. Time past is now compartmentalized to me in much clearer terms. It’s as if the morning before Trayvon’s death Donna Reed had a hit sitcom.
“I was unfairly ostracized for microaggressing a stranger in the locker room…”
Probably the most unsettling compliment that you can get is when your wife tells you that, of all of your friends, you have the largest penis.
With regard to the ‘sudden’ appearance of Woke™, none of this is new. It has been building for more than a century. However, like an algae bloom that doubles in size every week, it went unnoticed in the beginning, because it was too small to take seriously. It came to the attention of Friedrich Hayek, Albert Jay Nock, Ayn Rand, and others during the World War Era, and they sounded the initial alarm. During the 1960s and 1970s, the intellectual pond scum doubled, doubled again, and doubled some more.
Four weeks before the pond is completely choked, only 1/16th of it is covered. Likewise, in the 1980s, Critical Social Justice loons were only a handful of radicals kenneled across campus, and the only time that serious academics encountered them was at Curriculum Committee and Tenure Committee meetings. (That should have been a big, red flag.)
By the 1990s, the Woke™ radicals had infested the Humanities and Arts, but our colleagues in Business, Engineering, Science, and Medicine were unconcerned, because they thought that they were immune to life-hating unthink, in spite of the alarms that Allan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, John Ellis, et al. sounded.
And, now, here we are. Professors in Biology and Medicine present Gender Fluidity™ as an axiomatic ‘truth’ that students dare not question. Professors in Accounting and Finance are beginning to require their students to include environmental and social impact factors in their calculations. History and Law are being taught as literary genres that are based on Power Narratives™. Education and Psychology departments have become leftist indoctrination camps. (Think about that the next time that you hear that someone is to be evaluated by a court-appointed psychologist for fitness to raise his own children or to own a gun.)
Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess. In the meantime, homeschool.
To extend your pond analogy, you are basically saying American culture is the slow-boiling frog, as far as this “ever-warming” ideology goes.
I’m finishing a doctorate and earlier this fall our female Asian professor, who’s proudly a “social justice educator” but a lousy teacher, listed on the syllabus directly under contact info one of the most aggressive “Stolen Land Acknolwedgements” I have ever seen. (I repeat, this now-obligatory scolding of my European ancestry was listed before **any** course info.)
Since 2017 I have had a series of so-called “wake-up” moments where I’ve clearly felt the heat being turned up in the cauldron. That was one of ’em.
For an Asia or Asian-American professor to give credence to the Stolen Land™ meme, instead of continuing her oppressive and exploitative occupation of stolen land, the only moral thing for her to do—by her own standard—would be to return to her country of origin. Her deciding to stay on occupied land and apologizing for it is crasser than stealing someone’s computer and then imagining that all is good, if you apologize regularly, but do not return it.
If she is Chinese, then she should work vehemently to push the Red Chinese occupiers of the Chinese Mainland into the sea and to reinstitutionalize traditional, feudal Chinese culture.
It is getting to the point that if feels like—right after they restarted the Large Hadron Collider in 2015—we slipped into that bizarre parallel universe, where Spock is clean shaven and Kira wears brown flannel instead of her normal black leather catsuit. (Seriously, in 2016, it snowed in the Sahara, locusts swarmed across the Middle East, the Cubs won the World Series, and Donald Trump was elected President… and he since has negotiated peace between Israel and several Arab countries, and between Serbia and Kosovo.)
For your sake, I hope that your PhD is in something real that you can use in the real world. If you are a fan of James Lindsay’s work, then your days are numbered in higher… um…. whatever it is; none dare call it ‘education’ anymore.
BAH! This interface needs an Edit feature. My first sentence above is stylistically awkward. The initial “For…” should be something like “With regard to…”
Also, upvote buttons would be nice, as well.
as long as we’re making suggestions on improving the forum feature:
– allow a poster to quickly access their past comments.
– get notices when someone responds to your comment.
*both these would require setting up user profiles, which I’d be fine with.
You may well be on to something with the reality fracture. I’m bummed that this is the timeline I ended up in though.
Those “Stolen Land Acknowledgements” are some of the most disingenuous things I’ve ever heard. Every video you can find of a talk at a Canadian university starts with one of those. Don’t the people spouting them realise that to an outsider they just sound like a jeering “The poor indigenous people have lost everything. Well thankfully it didn’t go to waste. We’ve got it now, and they aren’t getting it back.”.
This article seems to be predicated on the premise that this whole microaggressions codswaddle is about the delicate feelings of the easily offended. It is not. It is about power. The whole crybully enterprise is about infecting school and university curricula with Critical Social Justice headnoise and silencing all who refuse to comply.
James Lindsay’s “Psychopathy and the Origins of Totalitarianism” addresses this point in brilliant detail.
“The only scenario where it is appropriate to use the ‘n-word’ at a university is when quoting a primary source where that word was used. Similarly, universities ought not to fly swastika flags on campus…”
These are two opinions that are asserted as facts. An alternative is that anyone over the age of sixteen should grow up, and recognize hate speech as a sign of inferiority in the one uttering it and move on. After all, that is what those of us who are offended by the Hammer-&-Sickle symbol and portraits of mass murderers like Ernesto Guevara do.
If someone points a finger at you and yells, “Nanny nanny boo Boo!!! You’re a doggy doo-doo!” the appropriate response is to roll one’s eyes; not to call the police. (If the insult is accompanied by a credible threat of violence, and you live in a Stand Your Ground state, then you know where to take it from there.)
“But how are faculty supposed to engage with students if they are worried that any innocuous comment can be interpreted as a microaggression and thus violate the Ontario Human Rights Code?”
After teaching for fifteen years, I got out. I have a PhD in a real subject, and I am living relatively well from my consulting practice. Those with doctoral degrees in make-believe subjects have themselves to blame for this sorry mess. Let them deal with the feral little Frankenstein’s monsters that they created. But for them, I still would be teaching.
“Perhaps these students would be surprised if they told their professors, in private, that their words were hurtful. Perhaps the professor would begin to choose his or her words more carefully or would help clarify innocent remarks which had been misinterpreted.”
And, if the professor rolls his eyes at you, roll your eyes right back and enjoy of the rest of your day as best you can. Some persons are jerks. Maintain an internal locus of control and recognize that the jerk’s boorishness is a reflection of him and not of you.
Hey Brad-
Totally agree. Most of the PhDs I know, don’t teach. They work in industry/business.
Professors, not all, seem just as unawares as many of their students.
Quick funny story: my neighbor (a social work professor) appeared at my door one afternoon and asked if I had “seen who knocked over my garbage can”?
She alleged the toppled can was a “hate crime” and would “sue” the perpetrator.
I advised her of two things: it was very windy and the can probably blew over. Also, since she was not the owner of the can (it belonged to a company) she did not have standing.
I had a good laugh after she left. Shook my head and smiled wryly. Well educated people sometimes have no common sense as well as no understanding of life outside their disciplines.
Also agree about internal LOC. We can only control our own thoughts and feelings. We choose how we will react to events.
“respectable institutions like the OHRC”
Are you kidding!?! A Stalinist Star Chamber is “respectable”. Thanks for the belly laugh.
These Human Wrongs Struggle Session Gulag Vengeance Kangaroo Courts systemically sustain Woke! HRCs ARE the problem!!! Read Mark Steyn’s and Ezra Levant’s 2007-era books on their (separate) interrogations and punishments by these Cultural Revolutionary Witch Burning Tribunals, whose Ontario leader (Queen “Che” Bully) said over 10 years ago that HRCs in canada were switching from enforcing “rights” using a carrot to using a stick. Guilty until proven innocent. $35,000 fines. Costs paid by the accused win or lose and all lose. Almost all complainants (I accuse thee of witchery!) win against whichever poor heretic pissed off anyone who knew how to game revenge for ca-ching pay offs and rubbing someone’s nose in their own excrement. HRCs are systemic vengeance weapons. “Hate crimes” and “human rights commissions” are the root of PC, identity garbage, woke, the whole f-ing mess we’re now being asphyxiated by.
I’m sure you mean well (you write and argue well) but are probably too young to know the nasty and insidious long history of these abominations. Legitimizing HRCs by granting any degree of respect to a Re-education Gulag Machine with its fetid swamp of highly paid (taxpayers’ money) Inquisition Apparatchiks is seriously misguided and ruins any point you were trying to make about university student/faculty/admin billion-dollar professional-assholism shenanigans. Your polite approach to dealing with such bald-faced Stalinism reminded me of Lou Reed’s Vicious: “You’re vicious; you hit me with a flower”. Only a canadian would take a doily to a machete fight!
Since I still live in this communist hellhole of canadodoland (4th generation) only because I am too old and too poor to now escape from it, I will end with a joke I wrote to explain the real canadimwitland to Americans and others:
Do you know why the maple leaf is the symbol of canada? Because canada is a nation of saps.
Respectable: regarded by society to be good, proper, or correct.
“Society” regards many things as being good, proper and correct – that doesn’t make them so.
Hey We-
Did you ever read the Canadian Constitution? Speech restrictions are in it. Hate speech is not constitutionally protected.
America has no constitutional restrictions on hate speech. The USSC pearl clutches on obscenity, child porn, fraud, IP violation and something else.
Actually read some Libertarian pieces. You might learn something.
Don’t forget what one side enacts to control the other usually/ always comes back and bites them in the ass.
Do you yell to see the Manager when you shop at Walmart?
Derald Wing Sue is the person most people today have heard about. Sue is a professor of counseling psych at Columbia.
Not all mental health clinicians accept ideas like his. I don’t.
For a multitude of reasons, many Americans became a society of individuals with impaired or nonexistent coping skills. By the way, the 18-25 age cohort has the highest number of people with mental health disorder. Females have twice the number as males!
Life is unfair. People can be thoughtless and cruel. Not everyone is equal. We can’t always get our own way. These aspects of life and others are immutable.
People are much happier when they learn to cope with life.
Attached https://www.uua.org/files/pdf/m/microaggressions_by_derald_wing_sue_ph.d._.pdf
is a two page piece he wrote.
‘Life is unfair. People can be thoughtless and cruel. Not everyone is equal. We can’t always get our own way. These aspects of life and others are immutable.’
And that is what the Woke want to change. They want to replace reality with delusion.
If the situation were not so serious, it would be laughable. How can one defend themselves against anonymous accusations of micro-aggression or any other thoughtcrime that craven authority automatically accepts as true and who in many cases not only denies due process but refuses to accept any evidence disproving the accusations?
One tactic of course would be to start accusing the authorities who are enforcing or allowing these travesties of justice of micro-aggressions and keep on hurling accusation after accusation until they are forced out or have a change of heart. Make them live up to the standards they are forcing everyone but the Woke to adhere to.
“How can one defend themselves against anonymous accusations of micro-aggression or any other thoughtcrime that craven authority automatically accepts as true and who in many cases not only denies due process but refuses to accept any evidence disproving the accusations? ”
That’s the most maddening part of all this. Let the window-licking schizophrenics bark slanderous and libelous accusations until they’re too hoarse to chant. They expose themselves as irrational silly-persons with too much time on their hands, to be taken as seriously as a neighbor’s dog.
However, when an employer, landlord, forum moderator, or anyone else who exercises some power over others accepts crybullies’ groundless accusations as prima facie proof of wrongdoing, then it starts becoming more than merely a nuisance.
It is all the more irritating, when libertarians defend this illiberal nonsense—tacitly, if not explicitly—when they point out that private parties—employers, landlords, forum moderators, etc.—should be free to invoke their right of free association. Such allegedly high-minded sentiments are cold comfort to those who lose their jobs, homes, social media accounts, etc.
“respectable institutions like the OHRC”
No doubt the original intent was to be respectable. Is calling it a future totalitarian hammer too harsh?