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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
That's a bit ellipitcal. But where it makes clear points, they seem to be:
1. Right wing trolls acting in bad faith deserve to be canceled
2. They're ruining it for everyone
On 1, agreed. On 2, no.
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I don't think it's elliptical at all. He's responding to a bunch of people who have written a public statement fretting about the marketplace of ideas and urging, more or less, that the remedy to speech is more speech. He is saying, that only works if everyone is speaking in good faith, but many people are not, and it's not just right-wing trolls.
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The extreme left is afraid of smart people who pick apart its arguments. The thread you cite lumps smart conservatives in with Nazis and slippery slope alarmists, and that's dishonest. The critics of the left are myriad and varied. We can separate the psychos from the reasonable people acting in good faith.
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1) Holbo is not extreme left.
2) In what way does he lump together those people? What does he say about smart conservatives?
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The mob is seeking to eliminate the smart debate that would put some of its shibboleths to the test.
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I'm not talking about the mob. I'm talking about Holbo. What does Holbo say that -- you think -- seeks to eliminate smart debate?
I think Holbo is more than happy to have a debate with anyone who will defend their first principles. He's a philosophy professor -- that's what they do.
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That Twitter thread goes a long way to defend this essential point none of the New Left dare say aloud:
We're doing this, dammit. All in or all out.
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Honestly, I have no idea what in Holbo's thread you think says this.
I think he has his finger on a very real problem, which is, what do you do when you are debating someone who is not speaking in good faith. A specific example is the people who raise concerns about transgender people and bathrooms:
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If you want a world in which a good faith argument is possible between Rowling and her critics (which I do!) work to bring about a world in which there is less bad-faith arguing from the right on trans rights. Let me be very specific about that. The bad faith arguments all have the same form. They are what I call 'downstream worries' arguments. If 'trans rights are human rights' we have pronoun trouble, or need new norms for bathrooms or women's sports or in womens' shelters. Or philosophical ideas about the metaphysics of gender will be problematized. All this is true and some of it may get bumpy. But there's really no point arguing about it without a high baseline of initial acceptance of trans rights. If trans rights are human rights, how are we going to run sports/use pronouns? But the bad faith arguers are not willing to debate the antecedent honestly. They have a sense they'll lose, and they are right. So they fuss about bathrooms to pollute discourse with issues that can only be reasonably discussed after we accept something they don't, but aren't willing to argue about honestly.
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