Objectively intelligent.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

You’ve made no point here. If we compare the heft of her letter to the weak and incoherent attack you’ve made upon it, the only conclusion to be reached is you were better off not commenting on her.

The argument that these reporters who are fired or pushed out by left wing nuts are actually fired for being lousy reporters does not apply in most instances. It’s a dodge - a way for the left to defend itself without defending itself, without reaching the merits on which it would lose. And it’s particularly lacking in Weiss’s case. She was quite successful, controversial, and brought a lot of eyeballs to the Times. Just as Taibbi is single handedly keeping Rolling Stone’s political coverage section afloat.

The Times didn’t want her to leave. She’s exactly the kind of smart provocateur media outlets desire. Unfortunately, the orthodox reporters around were not so comfortable in having their “religion” criticized by heretics like her.

She’ll do well, it’s true. We should not feel badly for her and she does not ask us to do so. Her letter is “fuck off,” not “woe is me.”

We should feel badly for the Times.

Bari Weiss is perfectly intelligent and can occasionally write decently if not particularly remarkably. However, she is also a thin-skinned ego-maniacal 30-something who has made a career out of attacking other people but claims anyone attacking her is censoring her. She has no skill set or experience to draw on other than this schtick, which has worn thin on most of us.

Sorry about your reading issues. I had not realized, when I posted, that you had posted her resignation letter not in jest but as some kind of vindication of her. I hope you were drinking and that this isn't an age-related disability.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I am not strangely tolerant of articles calling for military suppression of protests. I am quite unstrangely in favor of allowing such views to be aired and rejected. I am similarly in favor of allowing the idiot left to call for deplatforming as often and loudly as it likes because there is a growing backlash to it which will cure it. But that only happens if we give it more airtime and attention so people can watch it become increasingly absurd.

People are both exhausted by these strident virtue signalers and sick of them. This is leading to them being branded as crazy and frivolous. They are increasingly being mocked, and what can be mocked can be ignored. And once ignored, it disappears.

Re the empirical thing, are you serious? Loads of public figures and media people are being silenced or forced to walk back uncontroversial statements. Just today, Bari Weiss quit the NYTimes under duress. Look it up.

Taibbi is very much the exception. He’s Teflon because he has the balls to say, “Don’t give a fuck.”

“Under duress.” She’s about to get paid (with Sullivan or separately?)

You’ve fallen for the grift again.

ETA: stp

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

I'll leave to the audience to decide whether you are equally tolerant of all threats to free speech, be it a hippie on Twitter or a US Senator urging that the military suppress protests. I guess I missed the part where you told everyone that the New York Times should be giving op-ed space to the lefty critics of the Harper's letter.



I said, who is being silenced, and you say Bari Weiss? Whatever is happening with her, she is not being "silenced." She just wrote a book that some people really liked and some people really did not like. But not for the pandemic, she would have been on an international book tour this spring, something you can read about on her web site, next to her press clips. Clearly you are using "silenced" as a euphemism for something else.

The Times should give space to critics of the Harper’s Letter. I would like to see that debate.

“We argue that shaming and screaming for deplatforming is not discourse between thinking adults.”

“But power dynamics! Something something something... You're old! Racist!”

“Explain yourselves.”

“Patriarchy! Old men! You have to go! We journalists of the New Truth see through you’re using facts and logic. Those are tools of old men scared about keeping their power, like Gloria Steinem and Margaret Atwood.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Racists!”

“I think we’ll just turn the channel now. Call us when you children grow up.”

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The Times should give space to critics of the Harper’s Letter. I would like to see that debate.

“We argue that shaming and screaming for deplatforming is not discourse between thinking adults.”

“But power dynamics! Something something something... You're old! Racist!”

“Explain yourselves.”

“Patriarchy! Old men! You have to go! We journalists of the New Truth see through you’re using facts and logic. Those are tools of old men scared about keeping their power, like Gloria Steinem and Margaret Atwood.”

“You’re nuts.”

“Racists!”

“I think we’ll just turn the channel now. Call us when you children grow up.”

Age related. Clearly age related.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

“Under duress.” She’s about to get paid (with Sullivan or separately?)

You’ve fallen for the grift again.

ETA: sto

This is another dodge. You’re not dealing with the facts any better than GGG. This is a sidestep.

The fact is Weiss is a decent writer who was forced to work among zealots. She’s a provocateur only because the left is so unhinged. She’s actually kind of dull and conventional.

If Hitchens were alive today he and Rushdie would’ve destroyed the purveyors of the New Truth. If Wolfe were alive, he’d have satirized them brutally.

But those voices are sadly long gone.

We must have some elitism. The virtue signaling left is filled with too many people cruising on sentiment and fervor. It’s not the smart set in the debate. Not by a long shot. But zealots are rarely smart. Hoffer’s True Believer lays that bare. Movements can’t abide thinkers because thinkers question. We must say it say it plainly: Cancel Culture is Low Culture. It should be ignored, as it is too dumb to warrant engagement.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The fact is Weiss is a decent writer who was forced to work among zealots. She’s a provocateur only because the left is so unhinged. She’s actually kind of dull and conventional.

If this review of Bari Weiss's book gets at her views, you're batting .333 -- your first two sentences are wrong, but your third is sadly correct.

According to Weiss, the far left (a category never delineated but which seems to include everyone from the Women’s March to Rashida Tlaib to all of academia) engages in a less violent but no less troubling form of anti-Semitism. The left, she says, “asks the Jews to commit cultural genocide, to abandon their traditions and to worship false idols to survive.” In the typical airy manner of someone more used to writing polemic than fact-based analysis, Weiss posits that “intersectionality” has created a “reverse” caste system on the American left, in which the more marginalized people are, the greater their credibility. Jews, designated as white, are thus “incapable of being victims.” As is the case throughout the book, she furnishes no evidence for her claim, thereby failing to prove how widespread this mode of thought is, what groups it permeates, and how it is materially expressed.

Another of Weiss’s hobbyhorses is anti-Zionism on the left. She writes that leftist positions on Israel are absolutist and are directed at the complete destruction of the Jewish state and, moreover, that they conveniently exclude every other state around the world that commits similar abuses. This plaintive call to focus on other human rights abuses—any abuses other than Israel’s—ignores that it is precisely the left that brings up such issues as, for example, the detention of Muslim Uighurs in China. (Weiss has not addressed this deplorable state of affairs in a single column.) Anti-Zionist Jews, meanwhile, are compared to members of the Yevsektsiya, Stalin’s committee to control the Jewish community, whose members terrorized their coreligionists. Jews who support the BDS movement or oppose Zionism, she asserts, are “part of a long history of left-wing anti-Semitic movements that successfully conscript Jews as agents in their own destruction.”

For someone who is just 35, Weiss sounds an awful lot like an old fashioned cold warrior, and her anticommunism has the stale smell of a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing room about it. With the ferocity of someone for whom “healthy centrism” is the only solution to America’s current ills, she conjures up a nebulous far-left menace whose objections are not solely to Israel’s policies but to the very existence of Jews.

By "dull and conventional," I take it that you mean you don't really have any interest in anything Bari Weiss has ever said, but if she's pissing off people to her left then she must be doing something right. Punching hippies never gets old.

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

We must have some elitism. The virtue signaling left is filled with too many people cruising on sentiment and fervor. It’s not the smart set in the debate. Not by a long shot. But zealots are rarely smart.

Yes, no virtue signaling at all in anything Weiss writes.

It's pretty clear that virtue signaling doesn't bother you at all unless the virtues being signaled are valued by the left but not the right.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

If this review of Bari Weiss's book gets at her views, you're batting .333 -- your first two sentences are wrong, but your third is sadly correct.



By "dull and conventional," I take it that you mean you don't really have any interest in anything Bari Weiss has ever said, but if she's pissing off people to her left then she must be doing something right. Punching hippies never gets old.



Yes, no virtue signaling at all in anything Weiss writes.

It's pretty clear that virtue signaling doesn't bother you at all unless the virtues being signaled are valued by the left but not the right.

I am sure the new Sullivan/Weiss venture they've been performatively hyping these last six months will start off with some kind of centrist sounding mission statement, but how long before they go full Blaze/Daily Caller and milk the conspiracy theories for every thin dime?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I am sure the new Sullivan/Weiss venture they've been performatively hyping these last six months will start off with some kind of centrist sounding mission statement, but how long before they go full Blaze/Daily Caller and milk the conspiracy theories for every thin dime?

I will never read what this letter is about, but is it NYT editorial or JK Rowling’s, or both?

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I am sure the new Sullivan/Weiss venture they've been performatively hyping these last six months will start off with some kind of centrist sounding mission statement, but how long before they go full Blaze/Daily Caller and milk the conspiracy theories for every thin dime?

I will never read what this letter is about, but is it NYT editorial or JK Rowling’s, or both?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I will never read what this letter is about, but is it NYT editorial or JK Rowling’s, or both?

Since you asked, the Harper's letter is signed by JK Rowling and a bunch of other people.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

I will never read what this letter is about, but is it NYT editorial or JK Rowling’s, or both?

Since you asked again, Sebby is talking about Bari Weiss's open letter of resignation to the New York Times, which she published on her own web site, where she has been silenced.

[Greedy,Greedy,Greedy]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Since you asked again, Sebby is talking about Bari Weiss's open letter of resignation to the New York Times, which she published on her own web site, where she has been silenced.

One of the things I love about "cancel culture" analysis is who they defend and attack. Folks like Bari Weiss get up on their high horse about what awful stuff the left says about them, but use it get lots of attention, sell their wares, and get paid gigs from colleges to talk to local red hats about their grievances.

But then stuff like this happens, and not a word from the cancel culture fire brigade, hell, the offending material stays online at Israel's most establishment newspaper: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-c...-idUSKCN24G15E The only people really getting cancelled are the targets of the hit job. Bill Maher will probably have Ben Shapiro on to laugh at how they had it coming to them.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

The fact is Weiss is a decent writer who was forced to work among zealots.

Forced??? Dude, you've truly lost the thread.

[Adder]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Since you asked again, Sebby is talking about Bari Weiss's open letter of resignation to the New York Times, which she published on her own web site, where she has been silenced.

From which it was certainly the most widely shared thing on Twitter yesterday.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Greedy,Greedy,Greedy

I am sure the new Sullivan/Weiss venture they've been performatively hyping these last six months will start off with some kind of centrist sounding mission statement, but how long before they go full Blaze/Daily Caller and milk the conspiracy theories for every thin dime?

How can you conclude those two are comparable to Glenn Beck? Sullivan is a staunch anti-Trumper and Weiss is a liberal on almost all things save Israel.

This is a reckless smear.