Forums

[sebastian_dangerfield]

I wrote a long response to your earlier post and the site just ate it, and I'm not writing it again. I wasn't particularly upset by Cotton's op-ed, and am not sure why you seem to think otherwise.

I didn't say it offended you. I said it offended crazy left wing cranks. If those cranks hadn't flipped out, we'd have all just thought Cotton's ideas were bad and ignored it.

It was poorly written, as you agree, and would have been beneath the NYT's standards, if those standards apply to right-wing views.

Like one thousand other editorials farted onto that debased page every year.

Obviously, they don't -- the NYT chased Cotton to write it, and let him write crap.

Yes.

If editorial standards had applied, they wouldn't have run it, and people were more upset, I think, that the NYT gave it their imprimatur than about Cotton's views themselves, which you can find on Breitbart, Fox, and a variety of other sources. (Hence the absurdity of the idea of denying Cotton a platform. Cotton has no shortage of platforms.)

Brietbart and Fox are not the NYTimes. They are echo chambers for fellow travelers. Crappy as it's become, the Times' oped page is supposed to be home to differing opinions read by literate sorts, thinkers, who would never watch Fox or read Breitbart.

The harder question is, in this day and age, what should the NYT do with its op-ed pages. Your glib answer is, expose readers to all views, the assumption being that the readers skew left and need to be confronted with what the right is saying. (I would take that more seriously if you had any interest in finding a way to make sure that people on the right are exposed to what the left is saying.)

Why do you think I think people on the right should not be exposed to what the left is saying? I absolutely think they should be exposed to it. I think the problem is that people on the right and left cocoon themselves and refuse to hear other voices. Siloing is rampant on both sides.

That's great if you can find people on the right who write good op-eds.

Do you think the left writes good opeds? It doesn't. They're more open to facts and they tend in aggregate to be structurally and grammatically of better quality, but their ultimate statements are often childish, naive, and lately, scolding.

But you don't, because the premise of a good op-ed is open debate, and today's conservatives are not interested in open debate. Given the chance, Cotton repeated lies about antifa. How do you have a debate with people who are so committed to lies?

You simply say, "That is untrue, and here is why." Then you provide facts.

And if you think the left is open to debate, you're deluded. The left is a bag of orthodoxies. More rigid than the right. #Metoo, Cancel culture, BLM, Trump is a facsist and the source of all evil in the world, Russiagate... If you even question some of the motives behind these things, or the methods of those pushing these ideas, you are treated like a heretic. The left immediately seeks to silence you. And they don't hide these efforts. They admit, "We think allowing debate is dangerous." They say their ideals are so important, that to allow them to be questioned is a form of violence. You've seen it. They actually argue speech = violence.

Granted, that's not the entire left. But it's a lot of the left today, and its the loudest of the left.

Identically, you cannot argue that the entire right is refusing to debate. A lot of the right will debate. I think Cotton would even be open to it. But a lot of the right will not, and sadly, those are the loudest voices on the right.

So if you're serving false equivalence, I'll return with a suggestion you drop the false elevation (of the left).

You are committed to both-sidesism, so when you are confronted with the fact that Trump and conservatives lie all the time, you pretend that the left does it too, and you insist that reporting that Trump lies is itself a sign of media bias. You care more about the form of the debate than the substance.

I think you are biased. One can easily find tons of sensible conservative voices. The Never Trump Camp is loaded with them. National Review still offers sensible conservative criticism and analysis. If you look at RealClearPolitics any given day, a site that attempts to provide equal time to right and left views, you'll find reasonable and intelligent conservative pieces.

You avoid that and selectively pit the Ezra Kleins of the world against knuckledraggers to create a false dichotomy. Of course a skilled editorial writer and interviewer is going to be more open minded and reasonable than a right wing troll. (Cotton is not a troll generally [more a psycho who actually believes the authoritarian shit he spews], but did troll with that oped.)

The best thing I have read on this subject is this piece (in Vox!) by David Roberts. He makes a lot of good points. Please don't feel any need to read it or respond to it.

It's just another framing of the sphere of deviancy to place ideas like Cotton's beyond the scope of debate:

Here’s the thing, though. While Cotton very deftly exploited the liberal tolerance that Sulzberger and Bennet are so proud of to get his piece published, he does not share that tolerance. The movement he represents — he is often identified as the “future of Trumpism” — is ethnocentric and authoritarian. It is about maintaining the power and status of rural and suburban white people, even as they dwindle demographically, by allying with large corporate interests and using the levers of government to entrench minority rule.

Such a movement is incommensurate with the shared premises that small-l liberals take for granted. Minority rule is incompatible with full democratic participation. A revanchist movement meant to restore power to a privileged herrenvolk cannot abide shared standards of accuracy or conduct. Will to power takes precedent over any principle.

This is the author's wholly subjective assessment about what can and cannot be tolerated as debate in the country based on his also subjective view of the country's founding ideals. He's going to herculean lengths to defend the argument, "Some things simply cannot be debated, and I and those who think as I do am able to judge and should judge that."

I say, if an idea is so dumb, or so odious to the ideals on which the nations is founded, it will be rejected by the public.

But that leads us to two other issues:

1. Should simply badly written factually inaccurate crap be allowed on the oped page? No. I agree, as I said from the start, that Cotton should not have been allowed to publish untruths. But should he be able to spew his crazy opinions if he likes? Sure. Opinions are just opinions. Nobody is mislead. They read it, consider it, and either agree with or reject it.

2. Is the public too credulous to spot what Cotton was doing? Do we need wise men to preclude it from considering bad ideas because it may not be smart enough to vet them on its own? I'd say a lot of the public is quite credulous, silly, and naive. But I think it's anathema to the most important values on which the nation is built to say, "Ok, let's install a star chamber to keep Joe Sixpack from adopting ideas he's too dumb to realize he shouldn't." That kind of arrogance is what brought us Donald Trump. People were sick of narrative shapers telling them what to think.