Quote:
Originally Posted by Pretty Little Flower
You read what I wrote and ignored it because it was inconvenient for your argument. I said: “ Anyone who once tried to get a fellow staffer blackballed from the publishing industry for using the word ‘fuck’ on Twitter, is maybe not the poster child for free speech that you are looking for.” It was pretty obvious to everyone here but you the point that I was making, which was that focusing on a person who perpetually complains about being a victim of “bullying” and being “silenced” while simultaneously bullying and silencing others does not compellingly support your argument that the radical Twitter left has a stranglehold on the marketplace of ideas. There are lots of ways you could have responded that would have not have been the weaselly dodge you came up with. You could have argued that, just because she has engaged in suspect behavior does not mean she was not, in fact, the victim of intellectual bullying herself. Or that her hypocrisy does not necessarily delegitimize her criticisms of the NYT. Instead, like you often do, you tried to sidestep the obvious point I was making and pretended instead that I was calling her out for being prudish about a co-worker’s Twitter language. These weaselly little dodges are transparent and make you look silly. And they are one of the reasons it is pointless to try to substantively engage you.
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It fit my point that she was conventional. I’d been arguing she was milquetoast in most regards. You can go back and read the posts where I made that point.
If you view that as a dodge, I understand. Taking it that way is fine with me. I did not intend that. I took the low hanging fruit there myself and perhaps deserve to be flagged for it.
So let’s stipulate she’s a hypocrite. OK. Is what she wrote, or what the Harper’s Letter contained, controversial? No. We should, I’d say must, aspire to the type of dialogue sought by the Harper’s Letter signatories. When someone offends you, you’re first move is not to destroy the person. The first move is to offend him or her back, or mock their offensive behavior. To support cancel culture is to cut off dialogue. It’s like reacting to offensive language by keying the speaker’s car or egging his home.
That cancel culture takes the form of speech is somewhat immaterial. It is speech not designed to counter the speech that has offended it, but intended to harm the person who made the offensive comment. That’s legal of course. That’s protected speech to an extent. But it’s low rent behavior. And yes, when Weiss engaged in it, she wallowed in the practices of low minded, infantile sorts who think they’ve a right not to be offended.
