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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I agree. We've a war of bullhorns.

Uh, no, that's not my point. The bullhorn metaphor suggests that people are talking but not listening. My point is that people across the political spectrum are less likely to agree on basic principles.

Agreed on Trump. Not agreed on the racism point. Some people hold different definitions of racist. That's a semantic dispute for many.

Again, you are missing my point, even as you illustrate it. The people who define "racism" narrowly often do not believe that "racism" in the broad sense is a problem worth talking about, but they do not say that bluntly, for the most part. From the perspective of people who think it's a big problem, these other people pay lip service to opposing "racism" while not engaging in good faith. Possibly they understand full well that they are not as interested or committed to the issue as others, but they don't want to say that. The semantic debate hides a larger debate, with the operative word being hides.

At any rate, don't let the example of racism distract from the bigger point. Bad faith is absolutely rampant in political debate, largely (IMO) because the conservative movement understands that it is a minority and that a lot of what it wants is unpopular.

Agreed. I liked early adopters of internet media. Many great sites filled with great content. Decent writing. Then along came social media, and now we've the dumb rabble crowing from every corner. The idiocy of crowds, the world's greatest advertisement for a return to monarchy, on permanent display.

OK, granddad.

Cancel culture is a terribly loose concept. But I think you nail it in your first statement. It's what you get when words are turned into rocks. People don't exchange them. They hurl them without concern for truth, in the hope those words harm the other side.

Thanks for the compliment, but you are no closer to a definition of cancel culture that will explain whether a given set of facts is an example of cancel culture or not.

Regarding your comments about me, reread my opening comment. I see no reason to engage in atta boys here about how the Right is filled with cancel culture morons. It's obvious. No one need tell you a group of religious loons who seek to tell people what they can and cannot do in the bedroom is also in favor of cancel culture. But from the Left, which typically stood for free exchange of ideas, the emergence of cancel culture is a terrible development.

I still don't know what you think cancel culture is, or who you think "the Left" is, for that matter, so it's hard to tell to what extent I might agree.

Right. I agree, but there must be some generalization to address a thing so obvious and real but amorphous. But I offered you a list of professors subjected to cancel witch hunts. Hundreds, I believe. What say you to that?

Yes, you sent that as the first of a list of three documents, of which Williamson's article was the second. I opened it and I read the first case. Did you? How could you tell what happened or what the best critique of the professor was? I don't doubt that there are some poor complaints against professors who didn't have it coming. (Thanks, Bari Weiss.) But if a document like that doesn't help you figure out which complaints are meritorious and which are not, what's the point? So I moved on to Williamson's article which, for its flaws, at least cited to a source (the NPR article) and provided a link so I could see more about the facts at issue.

Discriminating against people is not expressing a view.

Yes, exactly my point. If you read the NPR piece, you will see that there were a lot of complaints about how Rapoport did his job, including that he paid white staffers for work that he asked other staffers to do for free, and also that he posted stuff on social media that people found insensitive. Citing that piece, Williamson claims him as a victim of "cancel culture." Similarly, Bennett got fired after he mismanaged the op-ed page into a damaging controversy by soliciting a piece that did not meet the Times standards, failing to read it, and then responding to criticism by telling people that they needed to be exposed to the piece he hadn't exposed himself to. No one thinks Bennett got canned because of his own views or expression. "Cancel culture"? I don't think so, but Williamson sure does.

[QUOTE] Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen Professor who criticized an asinine event in which white students were asked to leave campus for a day and ultimately had to resign, expressed a view. The Yale professor who had to resign for having had the temerity to tell students flipping out about Native American Halloween costumes to get a grip, was expressing a view.

OK, hold it right there. I am a little familiar with both the Evergreen State and Yale disputes. Without agreeing or disagreeing with your view of the student complaints in each, it's pretty obvious to me that both disputes were intrinsically about what a college should do about speech on campus. Evergreen State had an annual event that then was changed, and there was a debate about it. Yale was sending guidance to students about costumes *on campus*. Campus speech has its own weirdnesses, not necessarily defensible, but also not necessarily indicative of what is going on in the larger culture.

The list of people punished for merely holding views is lengthy. That's indefensible. It's dumb. It's Trumpian, authoritarian.

Here's a big point of disagreement between us. I don't see a long list of people "punished? for merely holding views. Everyone you mention doesn't really seem to have suffered.

Are you suggesting that there is a loss of support for the view that people should be able to express ideas, even bad ones? Dude, whether you're a conservative or a progressive or a libertarian or whatever, that should never be out of vogue. When we reach the point where it's okay to say, "Some views should not be stated, even if reasonable," the Country Is Done.

No, I'm suggesting, for example, that on some level Williamson does not have a problem with Rapoport preferencing whites in his running Bon Appetit, but he knows that if he makes that argument, it won't fly. So he has to turn Rapoport into a free-speech victim. As you described, Bari Weiss's writing is boring, but she has a knack for being provocative. It helps her career much more to play the victim of lefty thought police than it does to just move on to something better for her talents and interests.

You have it a bit backwards. None of the canceled professors were famous. The famous - the really famous like Chapelle, or in media circles, Sullivan - are big enough to not give a fuck. I agree their carping about cancel culture sounds a bit odd given they're immune to it. But I welcome it. We need people like Sullivan to speak about it on Maher. We need people like Chapelle to mock it mercilessly. Those people are of the elite mindset. They are the enlightened -- above the crowd, next level thinkers. They do not adhere to the radical chic of the moment or the frivolous academy of McIntellectuals forming around it.

Again, let's set academia aside. When you talk about "cancel culture," you talk about well-established people like Sullivan and Chappelle. They aren't being canceled and they don't need the help.

Murray and Chapelle have more than answered their critics. They do not give a fuck. Not a single fuck. Rowling and Weiss strike me as huge whiners.

Great, so there's no problem then.

I think many of the extreme left who get behind cancelling are just dumb. I've read their crazy explanations of why they're allowed to do what they do, and all the social justice stuff. I agree with many of the goals, but the people behind it? Lots of dumb people over there. Full of sentiment, rage, whatever... But not too bright. "But power dynamics!" Please. Kill me.

For the umpteenth time, not sure who or what you are talking about, and I don't understand why you think it adds something to any conversation to say stuff like this.

Intersectionality is a great example. It's a goofy way of saying things are related and inform and compound one another. Um, no shit? That's a whole topic? Really?

"Intersectionality" captures the same real phenomenon that "synergies" does in the business world, no?

There must be a laddering of thought, placing the circumspect thinkers, the relativists, above the crowd. What is afoot today is not a smart set of Thomas Paines overtaking a crowd of royalist Edmund Burkes. It's not even Vidal vs. Buckley. It's more a cage match of idiot mobs. On the right, nihilist liars provide the intellectual support. On the extreme left, frivolous academics of the "soft sciences" provide the intellectual support.

Much is said about "elites" controlling this country. I see very few.

You could take your own step towards changing that by posting about people whose views deserve respect and a response. Or, you could just keep ranting about the mob. Your choice.