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[sebastian_dangerfield]

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.

He's not a victim in the bluntest definition of that word. He's a very sane, moderate voice who's felt like he can't freely express himself because of editorial oversight conducted by people who are unreasonable and basically zealots.

Ultimately, we the victims. His is not included within the views that inform the product put out by Vox. Instead, strident and more ludicrous positions are allowed to hold sway without a check.

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.)

I saw the same article in which the Times attempted to suggest McNeil was terminated for being a pain in the ass for years. It strikes me as an after the fact excuse.

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.

What he said would only be offensive to a person seeking desperately to be offended, or a reporter seeking to "gotcha" a celebrity. (Adder will say it was offensive. Because Adder is silly and has adopted this religion of perpetual grievance.)

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.

The right wing invented cancel culture. This shit started with Brent Bozell's Focus on the Family boycotts. And Wilkinson's firing was totally a cynical right wing cancel hit-job, whether he believes it or not.

The state GOPs censuring Sasse, Cheney, etc. are totally engaging in cancel behavior. And they are hypocrites, as these same assholes supported the argument that the impeachment was an attempted "canceling" of Trump. It was not. Not by any means.

I support the right of every GOP legislator to criticize Trump and view the censuring of them as a pitiable act of vengeance by small minded jackasses in the state parties. Why do I not rail against that every day? Because those people are pitiable. They're state legislators -- largely idiots. Tribal, Trump-worshiping idiots. No one pays any attention to them, and I doubt their actions will have any impact on those being censured.

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

Do I have to dust off the list of cancel targets I offered months ago? We have to play the game again?

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.

That's true. Most of the right that complains about cancel culture are hypocrites. But you're talking to me, and I complain about it because I am a free speech absolutist. I detest the woke twits triggered unreasonably and the whiny evangelical housewives who flip out over gay families being discussed in their precious children's school textbooks.

Both are clowns who ought to be ignored. And neither should be able to alter the career trajectories or job or outlet choices of people like Yglesias or Sullivan. They are not worthy of that power.

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.

Yes, the whole thing is made up. Except for the next story about it that will emerge in 24 hours.

You seek to go case by case because you can bog down the conversation in picayune arguments about really small ways each case might not involve a moderate, or might be about something other than cancellation (like the Times' attempt to suggest McNeil was fired instead for being a dick).

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.

That's a different issue. Are you suggesting that gives them license to engage in cancelling others? That's where you're headed. Might want to walk that one back, as it may betray what's actually in your head on this issue.

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.

Are you suggesting that I cannot lament cancellation unless to an identical extent I criticize a lack of women or minority voices?

I have no issue with hearing any voices. That's entirely my point. I have an issue with people telling me that I shouldn't be allowed to hear other voices, or that voices they don't like should be banished from their media outlets, or suffer loss of jobs or income.

You have my position entirely backwards, and your logic in this last response is so lousy, and your efforts to bring in arguments that have nothing to do with the issue at hand so telling, I suspect you realize you are arguing against Enlightenment thinking and feel kind of grossed out to have found yourself on that side. But as always, you'll go down swinging like a motherfucker.