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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
I think he means that the customary approach to free speech was to protect the rights of any group to speak, however fucked up what they say might be. ACLU defending Nazis in Skokie, etc.
The old rule was bad ideas would be countered by either being ignored or critiqued with other speech showing their flaws.
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If that's what he meant, he would have talked about the law and legal rights, not "customs," which are different.
And there have always been topics which "custom" has decided that do not warrant free inquiry. NAMBLA did not get invited to run op-eds when we were young, and they still don't.
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I think he's focusing initially on college campus intolerance and corporate toadying to left wing cancel mobs and extrapolating from there.
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Ah, yes, the left-wing cancel mobs. I thought about meeting up with one on Friday -- we were going to go to a golf-course and try to chant about the overuse of pesticides until all the golfers gave up and resigned their memberships. But it was raining, so I stayed in and listened to Terri Gross archives.
When you say college-campus intolerance, are you talking about Liberty University, yes?
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However, as to your point, I agree that Substack and other forms of direct online publishing have allowed more voices to proliferate. But Substack is a bit unique. It attracts voices who, to use Sam Harris's term, have cancel-proofed themselves. Taibbi, Sullivan, Greenwald, Harris... these people are beyond the reach of cancel hysterias. They actually profit from looking down their noses at those who'd seek to cancel them. Substack is like a finger in the eye of the current youth gestalt: An offending voice should not be countered, but silenced as much as possible, and have economic pain inflicted on it.
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My point is a broader one, which is that for decades now the technology to publish your views has gotten cheaper, and the opportunities have gotten broader. Substack is only the most recent example.
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That is a huge problem. It forces consumers of media to apply critical thinking and decide what's true and what's not.
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Lots of people decide wrong, so empirically it does seem to be a problem.
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And worse, it allows intentionally self-deluding types ample falsehoods to pass back and forth to one another to silo themselves even more extremely.
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Free inquiry doesn't seem to do society as much good if so many people just stay in their silos.
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However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage. Garbage like what CNN has turned into -- ignoring riots in the streets in the summer, and treating the Capitol riot like the most important story of our lifetime. (It's not.) Or garbage like the argument, offered by numerous mainstream left-leaning sources, that rioting in the streets this summer did not spread Covid. (It did.) That kind of Fox-like "finger on the scale" reporting drives consumers away from mainstream media (no one trusts it anymore) and into the arms of the bad faith outlets of alternative media.
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If you don't like CNN, stop watching it, right? You have lots of choices. Choose something else.
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You're speaking of the McNeil debacle, I assume.
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Nope, not at all. You are so aggressively conventional on this subject!
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You think so? I think WaPo is a very close second right now.
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Maybe in their national political reporting, but not as an institution more generally.
