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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

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.

You are trying to squeeze what Conor Friedersdorf reported into your agenda, but neither Conor nor Matt have said anything about "editorial oversight conducted by people who are unreasonable and basically zealots". That is your fiction. There's not a trace of it in what Yglesias has said. What he *has* said is that Substack lets him write longer pieces on abstruse subjects that interest him but don't get page hits, which is exactly the sort of thing you see when writers get successful enough to leverage their own name.

And emphatically, we are not victims at all. Your framing assumes that we only read Vox, but that is false. I read Slow Boring, and I do not read Vox. So now I am getting unedited, better Yglesias, longer pieces that interest me. And he's still on Twitter.

If your problem is that you don't want to pay for his Substack and you want to read him for free on Vox, that's a real and different problem that has nothing to do with free inquiry and everything to do with the economics of the media business. If you want to talk about that, go nuts, but don't pretend it has anything to do with anyone being woke.

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.

So you saw the same article reporting the facts that I did, and you misrepresented the facts to suit your argument? Of course you did.

Here's what putative "cancel culture" victim Will Wilkinson said recently, totally on point:

Here’s an incredibly boring point that deserves much more attention than it gets: it’s bad when people who don’t deserve it get fired, but it’s not bad when people who do deserve it get fired!

I know, crazy. I’ll pause a moment to let you stuff your scattered gray matter back into your exploded skull.

Because some so-called “cancellations” are merited while others are unmerited, categorizing all these cases in a way that tends to efface the distinction between right and wrong, just and unjust, bad and not bad, is highly unlikely to improve the quality of our thinking. Indeed, it is likely to make us stupid! There is an important difference between things that are bad and things that are not bad, and it is bad to be stupid. It is bad, then, to toss every high-profile case in which someone was sacked for giving offense into the same cognition-destroying conceptual garbage bin. And thus it is also stupid and bad to run around with your hair on fire screaming about some incredibly alarming trend that exists in your wild imagination only because you’ve refused to acknowledge the fundamental difference between things that are fundamentally different.

Note also that Wilkinson said this on his Substack, and yet it is now a part of our free inquiry, showing that we still have access to his ideas.

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.)

I continue not to want to argue about McNeil for all of the reasons I've said, but you just literally cannot drop the topic. Whatever McNeil did or didn't say, at worst it had nothing to do with anything that he wrote in the NYT.

The right wing invented cancel culture.

And yet you say things like, "However, the more the intolerant left seeks to purge the slightest offending voices from mainstream media, the more mainstream media becomes garbage."

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

No. You have to name just one actual moderate who was actually "taken out" in a way that actually affects "free inquiry." A make-believe story about how Yglesias has been silenced by woke editors is transparently bullshit to all of us who are reading him -- take that to anyone you know who reads only Vox and nothing else. Pretending that McNeil was fired for anything relating to journalism or that his firing has had some effect on what the Times or anyone prints -- more bullshit. As Wilkinson says (and he should know), some people who get fired actually deserve it. Pretending that people coming and going in the ordinary course of business at large media corporations is not the same as arguing that "wokeism" is a threat to free inquiry. You have totally lost the forest for the trees, and they aren't much in the way of trees.

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.

Absolutism in the defense of the careers of Yglesias or Sullivan is rather different from free speech absolutism. Uncannily, you care the most about defending the speech of people who have no problem being heard.

Your dishonesty in debate tactics is on display here. 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).

Fuck your "dishonesty." You can't name a single moderate who has been silenced by the left for something they wrote. The problem here is your hyperbole, your efforts to portray successful journalists with solid careers as victims. I don't see anyone here being silenced by the left for anything. I hear arguments from the left that you disagree with, and you trying to create victims instead of answering the "wokeism" you disagree with on the merits.

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.

No, pull your head out of your ass for a second and pretend that "free inquiry" and the marketplace of ideas are real things, not just intellectual props for your moral-panic crap. I'm suggesting that newsrooms are not diverse, and that people are not exposed to reporting and ideas as a result. If you care about "free inquiry" rather than Andrew Sullivan's status, that's a problem.

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

"Cannot"? No. Lament whatever the hell you want. I'm suggesting that the lack of women and minority voices is a much bigger problem than "cancel culture." As I've said repeatedly, I don't see much evidence that "cancel culture" is actually silencing anyone. The problem I'm pointing to means that lots of voices are never heard at all.

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.

Then you should care a lot about all of the journalists who don't get hired because they're not white men and because newsrooms are not diverse. Objectively, it's a far bigger problem.

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.

I'm arguing for Enlightenment thinking, unless your version of the Enlightenment is that the voices of successful white men are the only ones that matter. That's historically accurate, as far as the Enlightenment went, but I think we can all want better.

eta: You seem confused about what I'm arguing, so let me try to be more clear:

1. Concerns about "cancel culture" are overblown.
- "moderates" are not being "taken out" by the left
- when established voices move from one platform to another, it's not a threat to "free inquiry"
- many ostensible examples of "cancel culture" aren't really

2. "Cancel culture" is mostly a bad-faith response to arguments the right is losing, the new version of PC
- as it used, "cancel culture" excludes silencing by conservatives
- most people who complain about "cancel culture" seem to have no commitment to free speech as a principle
- they are complaining about "cancel culture" to avoid debate on the merits with people to their left

3. There are much bigger threats to "free inquiry" than "cancel culture"
- this obviously follows from the fact that people are not being silenced by "cancel culture"; also....
- newsrooms are not diverse, and many voices and viewpoints are not published
- the economics of the media space are terrible
- political media would rather avoid criticism than report the truth
- the right wing is committed to making arguments in bad faith, and the media won't deal with it
- technology gives people the news they want to hear
- there is a huge right-wing news/opinion machine, and nothing of the sort on the left
- etc.