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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Cotton's Oped was problematic to the extent it contained factual errors. Its argument that we should use troops should offend most people, but its offensiveness is not problematic. The Oped page of a paper is a competition of ideas. People throw out ideas and the comments in response to them (at the Times, where commenters tend to have brains and decorum) and the letters to the editor they elicit test whether those ideas are worth exploring or are dangerous, like Cotton's.

His idea was roundly criticized as deeply un-American. The marketplace of ideas dismissed his argument as dangerous crackpot thinking. I see no reason to litigate whether what he wrote should never have seen the light of day in the first place. Such sentiments are those of people who think a star chamber of sophisticated consumers of news and data should be allowed to shape the narrative for the broader public. I'm not unsympathetic to that view, but it seems unnecessary. A really bad idea tends to die from exposure. A really bad idea which is prevented from view will often fester online and gain a perverse credibility among knuckledraggers who'll see it as a form of forbidden wisdom.

The competition of ideas doesn't work so well when some people in it are more committed to sharing what they think than in entertaining other people's ideas, like when Bennet didn't read Cotton's op-ed before running it or when you posted without reading or responding to what I linked to.