Quote:
Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
It fit my point that she was conventional. I’d been arguing she was milquetoast in most regards. You can go back and read the posts where I made that point.
If you view that as a dodge, I understand. Taking it that way is fine with me. I did not intend that. I took the low hanging fruit there myself and perhaps deserve to be flagged for it.
So let’s stipulate she’s a hypocrite. OK. Is what she wrote, or what the Harper’s Letter contained, controversial? No. We should, I’d say must, aspire to the type of dialogue sought by the Harper’s Letter signatories. When someone offends you, you’re first move is not to destroy the person. The first move is to offend him or her back, or mock their offensive behavior. To support cancel culture is to cut off dialogue. It’s like reacting to offensive language by keying the speaker’s car or egging his home.
That cancel culture takes the form of speech is somewhat immaterial. It is speech not designed to counter the speech that has offended it, but intended to harm the person who made the offensive comment. That’s legal of course. That’s protected speech to an extent. But it’s low rent behavior. And yes, when Weiss engaged in it, she wallowed in the practices of low minded, infantile sorts who think they’ve a right not to be offended.
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My instincts are actually similar to yours. I finally read the Harper’s Letter, and it seemed to be an innocuous if long-winded version of a somewhat naive and obvious statement: Listen to others and don’t be unkind. I feel like it could probably be boiled down to a hashtag. But, as is the case with hashtag platitudes, the nuances get lost. And when I read about someone like Weiss, who has been a bully herself, complaining about being bullied, I begin to wonder if the Harper’s Letter is, at least for some of the signatories, just another way of saying, “Don’t criticize ME.” And when I find out that this self-described provocateur has supposedly been intellectually bullied her whole life, I begin to wonder if maybe she is one of those people who loves doing the provoking, but is too thin-skinned to take it when people actually get provoked. And, because she has engaged in the same sort of low conduct she accuses others of, which you concede, it makes me question her credibility and her motives when she calls for an end to bullying. So when you point to her self-serving martyr letter of resignation as proof of illiberal Twitter fascists snuffing out free speech and murdering the soul of the NYT, I’m telling you I don’t buy it.
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