Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

The well established rule is that it takes 10 times the energy to debunk bullshit as to spew it. I don't think this rule has changed in thousands of years.

This is opposed to the voice of the Citizens United crowd: the sound of a voice should be commensurate with its commercial sponsorship?

I think youth is just kind of sick of all the bullshit needing to be countered. Maybe it's a good idea to suggest spreading bullshit shouldn't be quite so profitable?

After all, it's not really about the speech, if it were, people like those you cited (Greenwald Sullivan Harris et al. - what a group of groupthink morons!) would spend some time saying something intelligent and supporting it rather than honing their skills at spreading total bullshit that's also offensive enough to get attention for them and their sponsors? These asshats are just about the payday.

Re: Texas
 

Thank you!

It's pretty awful. Our water went out two days ago, power went out last night. Fortunately, we have a place to go that still has both, so the dogs are learning to live with a cat for the time being. It's not going to get better for at least three to five days, because an ice storm is sweeping across the state right now. We're above freezing today, which should help, but a lot of people are going to die. A lot of property will be damaged (the pipes started bursting this morning), and a lot of already frazzled people are going to be even more disrupted. We don't know how to deal with this. A lot of people don't have winter gear. A lot of people don't know not to use their cars or generators or grills for warmth. Two days ago, there were over 300 cases of carbon monoxide poisoning. I imagine it's more now. People don't know how to drive in this either, so there've been tons of wrecks, some deadly.

My parents are on a ranch halfway between here and Austin. They fortunately never lost power, but they lost water starting Sunday. Got some back today.

This is a major catastrophe, and it's of our own making.

Re: Texas
 

It sounds just terrible, and I have a sinking feeling that when the power is restored and they start going from house to house, they are going to find a lot of elderly and infirm who had no power, no heat, no cell service, no water, and died in their homes. It seems like just a complete infrastucture collapse. Good to hear you and your parents are somehow managing through it all. Hoping for a warm spell soon and that they somehow find ways to get everybody down there some power and water.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

That's a different rule. But I think you can speed that up since the internet, when used by critical thinkers, can allow one to spot bullshit near instantaneously.

Citizens United is a bigger problem than any issue I have been discussing. It is a direct danger to the future of not only our democracy but our society. I've never once defended it. I'd drop all of my objections to the cancel phenomenon in exchange for seeing Citizens United overturned.

But they're not shutting down bullshit. The bullshit proliferates. They're engaging in petulant gotcha attacks and leveling absurd charges even against each other for being insufficiently supportive of their "social justice" religion.

They're taking out moderates who are skeptical of them. That's just dumb.

You say that. But if you actually listen to them, they are thinking in line with Enlightenment values. The criticism that they're in it for $$$ is fallback because if you place their criticisms of the extremes of wokeness out there today and the cancel fixation, they win the debate. They are logical and rational. Greenwald is a bit of a zealot sometimes, I admit, but Harris is unflinchingly and calmly logical, thoughtful, and intellectually honest.

The clerisy of wokeness detests people like Harris because they have no adequate argument for the rigorous criticism he applies. They also can't slot him into a left/right binary because he's a liberal.

So what do they do? What they cheaply do to anyone who routinely and with minimal intellectual efforts shows the flaws in their religion: Call Him a Racist!

In his case, it's easy to make the charge. Ben Affleck, a Hollywood moron, made the case on Bill Maher years ago. He didn't listen to what Harris said, couldn't process it, let alone process it with an open mind, and so just shouted "Racist!" And now Harris, who is no more a racist than you or I are female, is, in the minds of the credulous masses who worship this new woke religion, a racist.

If you don't see this sort of thing as a sign the country is devolving into an idiocracy, you're blindered. The right is gone. They've gone full cuckoo pants loony. Forget them. But the left? Come on... they've at least tried historically to respect facts and logic over all else. To hear a person on the left say a people can have "their truths" instead of an objective truth is both incredibly depressing and mind boggling. Idiocy is idiocy. Worshiping this new social justice religion to the point of being intolerant isn't as overtly crazy as being into QAnon. But it's in the Crazy Bucket. And the Crazy Bucket is a bad place to be.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Can you give me an example of a moderate who has been "taken out"? I honestly have no idea what you're talking about.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

Yglesias is one. He walked before they made him run, but he walked because he felt stifled. Sullivan is definitely one. He’s a total moderate. (Nevermind Adder’s bullshit... I’m not dignifying him in re Sullivan.)

McNeil was one. Liberal, fired for using a term to describe manifestations of racism. A mob within the Times said intent didn’t matter.

The host of the Bachelor just has to take a hiatus for merely suggesting a contestant who’d been racist in the past wasn’t so today. That’s a perfect example of an insane purity test.

Punch “cancel culture victim” into google and you’ll find an endless list of cases of sane people saying something that offended some ludicrous pious view of social justice or wokeism and getting attacked for it and having their employers pressured to terminate them.

A lot of these people are not and do not want to be Taibbis. They’d like to write at moderate publications that entertained numerous views. They get pushed to places like Substack because “justice” and “gotcha” zealots are gunning for any scalp they can find.

This is a classic moral panic. It’ll pass. But we shouldn’t forget just how deluded and silly this purge has been, so we’ll be positioned to laugh at the next one rather than allow it to cow corporate toadies and newsrooms into paying it deference.

From an Ex-Head of the ACLU
 

“ I went to one of the half-dozen best law schools in the country a year or two ago to speak,” Mr. Glasser recounted. “And it was a gratifying sight to me, because the audience was a rainbow. There were as many women as men. There were people of every skin color and every ethnicity. It was the kind of thing that when I was at the ACLU 20, 30, 40 years ago was impossible. It was the kind of thing we dreamed about. It was the kind of thing we fought for. So I’m looking at this audience and I am feeling wonderful about it. And then after the panel discussion, person after person got up, including some of the younger professors, to assert that their goals of social justice for blacks, for women, for minorities of all kinds were incompatible with free speech and that free speech was an antagonist. …

“I said this to the audience, and I was astonished to learn that most of them were astonished to hear it — I mean, these were very educated, bright young people, and they didn’t seem to know this history — I told them that there is no social justice movement in America that has ever not needed the First Amendment to initiate its movement for justice, to sustain its movement for justice, to help its movement survive. …”

https://www.reviewjournal.com/opinio...enemy-2232752/

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

There is no sense in which he has been "taken out." He moved from Vox to Substack, where he is prolific. He's easy to find on Twitter. He recently published a book. There cannot be many people who have an easier time getting their ideas out there than he does. If you think he is some kind of victim, you seriously need to rethink your idea of crime.

I continue to not want to talk about McNeil for a few reasons, prime among them that the New York Times' internal HR problems have their own peculiar attributes. People are quite deliberately confusing how the NYT runs its own shop with the state of discourse more broadly, just as you are here. The accounts I have seen suggest that the NYT had been trying to get rid of McNeil for a while for other reasons and had been blocked by the shop's union. They tried to exile him to the public health beat, and then inconveniently a pandemic broke out. (Your characterization of McNeil as a "liberal," of the reasons for his firing, of a "mob" within the Times, and of what that "mob" said are all inaccurate, from what I've seen. But we don't need to get into that, because if you are talking about something larger than the NYT, there will be other examples.)

Was he a "moderate"? If I search for the facts, are they really going to be that he "merely suggest[ed] a contestant who'd been racist in the past wasn't so today"? Because it sounds a little like you're using hyperbole to downplay whatever it was the he did. TBH, I don't pay attention to the Bachelor, so I missed this one.

No, I won't. I'll find a tendentious bunch of conservatives bitching and moaning about liberals, but not standing for any kind of principled freedom of expression. I mean, you're right that they'll be bitching about people who stand for social justice or "wokeism" -- a term I don't think I've ever seen anyone but you use -- but they will not stand, for example, for the principled view that Liz Cheney, for example, has every right to her view about just how much sedition the president should be allowed too get away with and shouldn't lose her job just because of those views.

Besides, you were the one who said "moderates" were being "taken out," but it doesn't sound like you actually have any in mind.

Of whom, specifically, is that true?

Yes, "cancel culture" is a classic moral panic, but not quite in the way you mean.

Most of the people who complain about "cancel culture" show zero -- or less than zero -- interest in objecting to threats to free expression from the right. In other words, the ostensible commitment to free expression is a disguise for people carrying water for the right. If "cancel culture" is treated as a bad joke by so many people, that bad faith is why. It's the transparently selective application of faux general principles, like Republicans who pretend to care about deficits only when a Democrat is in the White House.

Yes, this "purge" of nameless, faceless victims of assaults on free-speech, victim who are everywhere around us but don't really seem to exist.

If you were objectively concerned with threats to free speech, you wouldn't obsess about this mote while ignoring so many beams. For example, it's very well established that newsrooms are less diverse than the communities they serve, and that women and minorities are less represented in senior role. There's no serious rebuttal to the idea that this affects what gets published. If you really cared about free inquiry more broadly, you would pretend that this bothers you. But you identify with white men who might not be able to say whatever they want (Yglesias, McNeil, the host of Bachelor, Taibbi -- those are the people you've mentioned), not with women and minority journalists, and I presume you assume that women and minority journalists would publish more "wokeism" that you don't want to read anyway. Free inquiry seems to be a euphemism for not having to hear certain views you disagree with. Which explains how you can go so quickly from complaining about threats to the marketplace of ideas to complaining that CNN has been taken over by lefties and you don't trust it anymore.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

There’s a good bit here worth addressing. I’ll do it tomorrow when I can do you justice and reply in a worthy way.

Your last argument (last two paragraphs) is dogshit. It’s the kind of thing that’s too easy to dismantle. Like, which arrow?

Sincerely, if you remove it, I’ll not touch it.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

What are you talking about? They went their own way because they have a big enough audience to get paid on their own.

Sullivan has a well-established history of racism, up to and including extended debates with TNC and others about the intellectual inferiority of black people.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I think it's a real argument, and nothing would surprise me more than having you give it a serious response, even if you don't agree. Read this, for example, and take what those journalists said seriously.

eta: Just to be clear, this sort of thing is what I was referring to and which you mistook as a reference to the defenestration of Don McNeil. What happened with McNeil has very little to do with what the NYT or anyone else publishes.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

He's not a victim in the bluntest definition of that word. He's a very sane, moderate voice who's felt like he can't freely express himself because of editorial oversight conducted by people who are unreasonable and basically zealots.

Ultimately, we the victims. His is not included within the views that inform the product put out by Vox. Instead, strident and more ludicrous positions are allowed to hold sway without a check.

I saw the same article in which the Times attempted to suggest McNeil was terminated for being a pain in the ass for years. It strikes me as an after the fact excuse.

What he said would only be offensive to a person seeking desperately to be offended, or a reporter seeking to "gotcha" a celebrity. (Adder will say it was offensive. Because Adder is silly and has adopted this religion of perpetual grievance.)

The right wing invented cancel culture. This shit started with Brent Bozell's Focus on the Family boycotts. And Wilkinson's firing was totally a cynical right wing cancel hit-job, whether he believes it or not.

The state GOPs censuring Sasse, Cheney, etc. are totally engaging in cancel behavior. And they are hypocrites, as these same assholes supported the argument that the impeachment was an attempted "canceling" of Trump. It was not. Not by any means.

I support the right of every GOP legislator to criticize Trump and view the censuring of them as a pitiable act of vengeance by small minded jackasses in the state parties. Why do I not rail against that every day? Because those people are pitiable. They're state legislators -- largely idiots. Tribal, Trump-worshiping idiots. No one pays any attention to them, and I doubt their actions will have any impact on those being censured.

Do I have to dust off the list of cancel targets I offered months ago? We have to play the game again?

That's true. Most of the right that complains about cancel culture are hypocrites. But you're talking to me, and I complain about it because I am a free speech absolutist. I detest the woke twits triggered unreasonably and the whiny evangelical housewives who flip out over gay families being discussed in their precious children's school textbooks.

Both are clowns who ought to be ignored. And neither should be able to alter the career trajectories or job or outlet choices of people like Yglesias or Sullivan. They are not worthy of that power.

Yes, the whole thing is made up. Except for the next story about it that will emerge in 24 hours.

You seek to go case by case because you can bog down the conversation in picayune arguments about really small ways each case might not involve a moderate, or might be about something other than cancellation (like the Times' attempt to suggest McNeil was fired instead for being a dick).

That's a different issue. Are you suggesting that gives them license to engage in cancelling others? That's where you're headed. Might want to walk that one back, as it may betray what's actually in your head on this issue.

Are you suggesting that I cannot lament cancellation unless to an identical extent I criticize a lack of women or minority voices?

I have no issue with hearing any voices. That's entirely my point. I have an issue with people telling me that I shouldn't be allowed to hear other voices, or that voices they don't like should be banished from their media outlets, or suffer loss of jobs or income.

You have my position entirely backwards, and your logic in this last response is so lousy, and your efforts to bring in arguments that have nothing to do with the issue at hand so telling, I suspect you realize you are arguing against Enlightenment thinking and feel kind of grossed out to have found yourself on that side. But as always, you'll go down swinging like a motherfucker.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

This story has nothing to do with cancellation. This is a story about minority voices demanding to be heard.

Do you not see that this is a story in favor of greater freedom of expression?

How do you see a story about voices desiring to be heard and use it as a defense for people who are seeking to banish, fire, and stigmatize others?

Seriously, the perverted logic of what I think is your argument demonstrates just how lacking - utterly lacking - your defense of cancelling attempts (or attempts to prove them to be something else, or somehow justified) truly is.

In no universe but a truly bizarre and backward one could a person demanding to be heard be equated with a person seeking to stop others from being heard or punish them for saying what they don't like. These two camps cannot share the same space. They are mortal enemies, and they are fighting the same villain. In the case of minority voices, they are fighting an old guard that ignored them. In the case of cancel targets, they are fighting a crowd of people who seek to silence them or harm them. In both cases, voices are being silenced. In both cases, the villains are those silencing those voices.

This line of argument actually supports my position. I'm puzzled as to why you'd make this so easy.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

You are trying to squeeze what Conor Friedersdorf reported into your agenda, but neither Conor nor Matt have said anything about "editorial oversight conducted by people who are unreasonable and basically zealots". That is your fiction. There's not a trace of it in what Yglesias has said. What he *has* said is that Substack lets him write longer pieces on abstruse subjects that interest him but don't get page hits, which is exactly the sort of thing you see when writers get successful enough to leverage their own name.

And emphatically, we are not victims at all. Your framing assumes that we only read Vox, but that is false. I read Slow Boring, and I do not read Vox. So now I am getting unedited, better Yglesias, longer pieces that interest me. And he's still on Twitter.

If your problem is that you don't want to pay for his Substack and you want to read him for free on Vox, that's a real and different problem that has nothing to do with free inquiry and everything to do with the economics of the media business. If you want to talk about that, go nuts, but don't pretend it has anything to do with anyone being woke.

So you saw the same article reporting the facts that I did, and you misrepresented the facts to suit your argument? Of course you did.

Here's what putative "cancel culture" victim Will Wilkinson said recently, totally on point:

Note also that Wilkinson said this on his Substack, and yet it is now a part of our free inquiry, showing that we still have access to his ideas.

I continue not to want to argue about McNeil for all of the reasons I've said, but you just literally cannot drop the topic. Whatever McNeil did or didn't say, at worst it had nothing to do with anything that he wrote in the NYT.

And yet you say things like, "However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage."


No. You have to name just one actual moderate who was actually "taken out" in a way that actually affects "free inquiry." A make-believe story about how Yglesias has been silenced by woke editors is transparently bullshit to all of us who are reading him -- take that to anyone you know who reads only Vox and nothing else. Pretending that McNeil was fired for anything relating to journalism or that his firing has had some effect on what the Times or anyone prints -- more bullshit. As Wilkinson says (and he should know), some people who get fired actually deserve it. Pretending that people coming and going in the ordinary course of business at large media corporations is not the same as arguing that "wokeism" is a threat to free inquiry. You have totally lost the forest for the trees, and they aren't much in the way of trees.

Absolutism in the defense of the careers of Yglesias or Sullivan is rather different from free speech absolutism. Uncannily, you care the most about defending the speech of people who have no problem being heard.

Fuck your "dishonesty." You can't name a single moderate who has been silenced by the left for something they wrote. The problem here is your hyperbole, your efforts to portray successful journalists with solid careers as victims. I don't see anyone here being silenced by the left for anything. I hear arguments from the left that you disagree with, and you trying to create victims instead of answering the "wokeism" you disagree with on the merits.

No, pull your head out of your ass for a second and pretend that "free inquiry" and the marketplace of ideas are real things, not just intellectual props for your moral-panic crap. I'm suggesting that newsrooms are not diverse, and that people are not exposed to reporting and ideas as a result. If you care about "free inquiry" rather than Andrew Sullivan's status, that's a problem.

"Cannot"? No. Lament whatever the hell you want. I'm suggesting that the lack of women and minority voices is a much bigger problem than "cancel culture." As I've said repeatedly, I don't see much evidence that "cancel culture" is actually silencing anyone. The problem I'm pointing to means that lots of voices are never heard at all.

Then you should care a lot about all of the journalists who don't get hired because they're not white men and because newsrooms are not diverse. Objectively, it's a far bigger problem.

I'm arguing for Enlightenment thinking, unless your version of the Enlightenment is that the voices of successful white men are the only ones that matter. That's historically accurate, as far as the Enlightenment went, but I think we can all want better.

eta: You seem confused about what I'm arguing, so let me try to be more clear:

1. Concerns about "cancel culture" are overblown.
- "moderates" are not being "taken out" by the left
- when established voices move from one platform to another, it's not a threat to "free inquiry"
- many ostensible examples of "cancel culture" aren't really

2. "Cancel culture" is mostly a bad-faith response to arguments the right is losing, the new version of PC
- as it used, "cancel culture" excludes silencing by conservatives
- most people who complain about "cancel culture" seem to have no commitment to free speech as a principle
- they are complaining about "cancel culture" to avoid debate on the merits with people to their left

3. There are much bigger threats to "free inquiry" than "cancel culture"
- this obviously follows from the fact that people are not being silenced by "cancel culture"; also....
- newsrooms are not diverse, and many voices and viewpoints are not published
- the economics of the media space are terrible
- political media would rather avoid criticism than report the truth
- the right wing is committed to making arguments in bad faith, and the media won't deal with it
- technology gives people the news they want to hear
- there is a huge right-wing news/opinion machine, and nothing of the sort on the left
- etc.

Re: Objectively intelligent.
 

I'm not confused and you haven't been unclear. You're: (1) refusing to recognize this cancel silliness as a phenomenon; and, (2) trying to shift the discussion from one about its negative impacts to a discussion about minorities not being represented adequately in newsrooms.

As to 1, you've failed. To argue there is no such thing as cancel behavior is to deny reality. It's a left and right phenomenon. It comes down to this:

When people still revered Enlightenment views, they would listen to a person say something they didn't like and respond by ignoring it or explaining why they thought it was flawed.

This was recognized, properly, as the mechanism by which bad ideas were pushed aside in favor of good ideas.

Today, there is a thinking, left and right, that the proper response to an idea one doesn't like is to claim one is a victim (words as weapons mentality) or one is offended, or triggered, and that the next appropriate move is to seek to destroy the person who said the offending thing.

This is degenerate behavior. It is a dressed up version of "honor society" one might see in the bowels of Appalachia where that sort of idiocy persists. It is excused because the practitioners of it are usually emotional and lack the talent to dismantle what they don’t like with a cogent counter argument. The wink and nod from those of us who are smarter but sympathetic to cancel behavior is an unsaid, “Well, they overreact because they’re angry, and they haven’t had the advantages that would gift one the ability to express himself with a tight, logical counter.” (I’ll even admit having had an affinity for the “Radical Chic” of the bleating classes myself... it’s raw emotion and feels more real than rational, well considered, well crafted discussion.)

It is not okay. And these people who practice it, left and right, are knuckle draggers. They deserve no respect. BUT, that does not mean these dimwits should be cancelled as they would seek to cancel. It means their silly views should be shown to be such. The way the previous system, incorporating Enlightenment views, operated.

I'm not triggered or angry about the cancellation mindset. I believe them, simply, offensive.

They are not logical or thoughtful. They are Robespierres, Torquemadas. You don't countenance these shouters. They've debased discourse. They go in the bucket with the QAnon folks. Temporary infections of the public square accruing from a moral panic taking hold in the midst of a pandemic-induced national nervous breakdown.

They are not winning. They are simply causing a lurid spectacle. Like Trump Nation. But they are doing damage. The winds change. And god help us when the Right is in power again. Their use of cancellation will destroy any remaining reverence for the Enlightenment value of free and open expression and debate.

As to 2, I'm with you. The more free expression by more different voices, the better.

PS: I'm not advocating "free inquiry" here. I do champion that, but the term I've preferred and used is "free expression." And there's a difference. And you know it.