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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

Yglesias is one. He walked before they made him run, but he walked because he felt stifled. Sullivan is definitely one. He’s a total moderate. (Nevermind Adder’s bullshit... I’m not dignifying him in re Sullivan.)

There is no sense in which he has been "taken out." He moved from Vox to Substack, where he is prolific. He's easy to find on Twitter. He recently published a book. There cannot be many people who have an easier time getting their ideas out there than he does. If you think he is some kind of victim, you seriously need to rethink your idea of crime.

McNeil was one. Liberal, fired for using a term to describe manifestations of racism. A mob within the Times said intent didn’t matter.

I continue to not want to talk about McNeil for a few reasons, prime among them that the New York Times' internal HR problems have their own peculiar attributes. People are quite deliberately confusing how the NYT runs its own shop with the state of discourse more broadly, just as you are here. The accounts I have seen suggest that the NYT had been trying to get rid of McNeil for a while for other reasons and had been blocked by the shop's union. They tried to exile him to the public health beat, and then inconveniently a pandemic broke out. (Your characterization of McNeil as a "liberal," of the reasons for his firing, of a "mob" within the Times, and of what that "mob" said are all inaccurate, from what I've seen. But we don't need to get into that, because if you are talking about something larger than the NYT, there will be other examples.)

The host of the Bachelor just has to take a hiatus for merely suggesting a contestant who’d been racist in the past wasn’t so today. That’s a perfect example of an insane purity test.

Was he a "moderate"? If I search for the facts, are they really going to be that he "merely suggest[ed] a contestant who'd been racist in the past wasn't so today"? Because it sounds a little like you're using hyperbole to downplay whatever it was the he did. TBH, I don't pay attention to the Bachelor, so I missed this one.

Punch “cancel culture victim” into google and you’ll find an endless list of cases of sane people saying something that offended some ludicrous pious view of social justice or wokeism and getting attacked for it and having their employers pressured to terminate them.

No, I won't. I'll find a tendentious bunch of conservatives bitching and moaning about liberals, but not standing for any kind of principled freedom of expression. I mean, you're right that they'll be bitching about people who stand for social justice or "wokeism" -- a term I don't think I've ever seen anyone but you use -- but they will not stand, for example, for the principled view that Liz Cheney, for example, has every right to her view about just how much sedition the president should be allowed too get away with and shouldn't lose her job just because of those views.

Besides, you were the one who said "moderates" were being "taken out," but it doesn't sound like you actually have any in mind.

A lot of these people are not and do not want to be Taibbis. They’d like to write at moderate publications that entertained numerous views. They get pushed to places like Substack because “justice” and “gotcha” zealots are gunning for any scalp they can find.

Of whom, specifically, is that true?

This is a classic moral panic.

Yes, "cancel culture" is a classic moral panic, but not quite in the way you mean.

Most of the people who complain about "cancel culture" show zero -- or less than zero -- interest in objecting to threats to free expression from the right. In other words, the ostensible commitment to free expression is a disguise for people carrying water for the right. If "cancel culture" is treated as a bad joke by so many people, that bad faith is why. It's the transparently selective application of faux general principles, like Republicans who pretend to care about deficits only when a Democrat is in the White House.

It’ll pass. But we shouldn’t forget just how deluded and silly this purge has been, so we’ll be positioned to laugh at the next one rather than allow it to cow corporate toadies and newsrooms into paying it deference.

Yes, this "purge" of nameless, faceless victims of assaults on free-speech, victim who are everywhere around us but don't really seem to exist.

If you were objectively concerned with threats to free speech, you wouldn't obsess about this mote while ignoring so many beams. For example, it's very well established that newsrooms are less diverse than the communities they serve, and that women and minorities are less represented in senior role. There's no serious rebuttal to the idea that this affects what gets published. If you really cared about free inquiry more broadly, you would pretend that this bothers you. But you identify with white men who might not be able to say whatever they want (Yglesias, McNeil, the host of Bachelor, Taibbi -- those are the people you've mentioned), not with women and minority journalists, and I presume you assume that women and minority journalists would publish more "wokeism" that you don't want to read anyway. Free inquiry seems to be a euphemism for not having to hear certain views you disagree with. Which explains how you can go so quickly from complaining about threats to the marketplace of ideas to complaining that CNN has been taken over by lefties and you don't trust it anymore.