Re: On the verge of Enlightenment
 

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Marketplace of ideas in action. It has co-opted the term and now it is a pejorative. Just like, as the author notes, "patriot" is a pejorative for a Trumpkin.

You don't like it? Push the boulder. The market cares not.

Re: On the verge of Enlightenment
 

This will be an epic next few years for divorce lawyers.

"[W]hen a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” ― Samuel Johnson. When one is reprieved, I can't imagine there's any greater recognition of the need to live one's life urgently, indulgently.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

No, you can't weigh in yet. Ty has to say it three times first.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Thanks, I'll have to remember this response the next time you are complaining about "cancel culture." "You don't like it? Push the boulder. The market cares not." Good one.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

If you want to have the most free and unfettered of markets, where it’s fair game to seek to destroy an opponent and shut down his message rather than engage it, expect the same in return.

This author is saying certain types of uses of a term are beyond the pale. Um, no. All is fair in total war. I don’t like it either, but the market cares not what I think any more than it does what the author thinks.

It’s quite clever, really. Mobs figure out how to pressure corporate lackeys to disown speakers they don’t like. The opposing side finds a way to hack the mob by using their own terms to delegitimize them. One hack returned with another.

Result? Extremes cancelling each other.

Maybe the marketplace is working just fine?

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Sorry, I can't keep track of when you think the exchange of ideas is like a free market -- you know, where people buy and sell things in mutually beneficial economic exchange -- and when you think it's like total war -- where people try anything to kill each other, duh. Maybe you want to think through that and sort it all out.

Also, your summary of what Elizabeth Spiers shows a poor grasp of what she said. Hint: More apt to say that she is engaging in the exchange of ideas than that she is trying to destroy you. Maybe it would be easier to participate in the intellectual exchange if you weren't sheltering in a ditch to avoid the forces of "wokeism"? The market does care what she thinks, fwiw, even if you don't. She makes a living from it, if not a killing, pun intended.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Hi!

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

You have said that responding to speech one doesn’t like by calling for a boycott or firing of a speaker is just more free speech. You’re right. It is. “Total war” may also be used as a metaphor for that approach, as that approach is extreme and deviates from the traditional approach of either ignoring or refuting speech one does not like.

Within these highly aggressive market behaviors you also find another nasty tactic - turning the other side’s buzzwords into insults. Making the very term around which they rally a pejorative to the majority of society.

These are both free speech. They are also hacks of the system of discourse normal people have traditionally observed. They are tricks, devices, and they preclude the exchange of useful free expression.

And she’s a blogger. No killings.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

When someone to the right talks about race and gets a critical response, you fret about "cancel culture" and talk about how we need to remember the Enlightenment. When someone to the left talks about it, you talk about how total warfare, without the fretting. "Precluding the exchange of useful free expression" is exactly what you say you don't like about "cancel culture," but you might as well be an Air Force colonel talking about Vietnamese body counts in 1967. "Yes, that napalm has a substantial impact on hard targets like that elementary school."

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

No. When someone on the right or left talks about race and gets a critical response, that's traditional free speech. A person says something, and someone disagrees.

OTOH, when a person says something about race (or anything, really) and in reply, another person calls for that person to be boycotted, or to lose their job, or to be socially ostracized, that is not traditional free speech. It is still free speech, of course. Just not enlightened, traditional, classically understood free speech. It is not engagement, it is certainly not criticism. It fits the analogy of being a "total war" response.

Talking about, or critiquing, something and calling for the boycott/firing/shunning of a speaker are two very different things, which you know. You're trying to conflate them to make two very different reactions seem alike.

Idk where you were going with this.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I pointed you to that piece by Elizabeth Spiers. You did not talk about or critique what she said. You started talking about total warfare. ????????

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

She complained about people turning woke into a pejorative. As if that's wrong, that it shouldn't be stolen and turned against itself.

I responded by stating that she's missing an obvious reason for its being stolen (which is a critique of her). My criticism was that, to be woke is to weaponize expression. The woke have been some of the loudest voices for boycotting or firing, rather than engaging, speech they do not like.

When this occurs, one cannot complain when his opponents start using similarly extreme bad faith tactics, like stealing his buzzwords and turning them into insults.

I don't know how she misses this, or where she finds the temerity and lack of self awareness to scold people for using the term as an insult. She actually seems offended by it.

Welcome to the war, Liz. Nobody likes it, but if neither side is willing to drop their extreme responses to each other, expect it to escalate.

(One wonders if she'd be similarly dismayed at people crying for firings and boycotts.

Underdog Bias seems to permeate all these arguments. Those perceived to be on the short end of the power dynamic are allowed to engage in extreme responses, but those on the other end may not.)

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

What a long-winded way of saying, "What's wrong with monetizing bigotry?"

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I just want to know why, to paraphrase Erick Erickson, that uppity black girl is trying to cancel the queen?