A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
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I'm so old, I remember when our identities weren't supposed to be based on our gender.
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I'm so old, I remember when our identities weren't supposed to be based on our gender.
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Yes it's well known that cancel culture is already a powerful force in our most important institutions. It's nice to see this data. It will be disgusting to watch the Ezra Kleins of the world continue to deny its existence.
Rogan had on recently the guy who wrote the nonsensical -studies papers that got accepted and published. He said that the last time a feminist studies (or any -studies) academic paper got seriously peer reviewed was in the 90s.
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I listened to Klein's podcast about this. He discussed it with Yascha Mounk, who was on the free speech side of the debate. It really did come down to Ezra just saying that while he understands why free speech is important, trans people's feelings have to be taken into account and if free speech can hurt them, then free speech needs to be reconsidered. If asked to reflect on that trade-off, he would just dig deeper into how important the feelings of trans people are, and how they face legitimate danger every day, because people want to murder them.
It's clear that those sorts of arguments can be used eternally by those who have an interest, based on the power dynamics as they see them, in shutting down free speech. If it's not trans folk it'll be some other group. It does not appear to matter how large the group is.
One thing Klein and Mounk agreed on was that the White Fragility book was bad. Klein thought it made some good points though. They mentioned something that I've noticed, too. That "white supremacists" share common beliefs with the ideas in that book - that white people are different and privileged. It's just that one group feels pride about it, and the other group feels shame.
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They never disagreed much. Yglesias is attempting to publicly embrace being not-totally-woke. He commented a couple times in the interview that the stuff they were discussing would seem heretical to many of his friends. I think like a lot of people on the left who are capable of doing some thinking, he thinks the direction is good and justifies a ton of disingenuousness in messaging to that end. But he's smart enough to know how absurd some of it is getting and has chosen not to consider all the opposition evil.
McWhorter enjoys a privilege of being taken seriously thinking what he thinks and saying what he says. Identical thoughts and words from a person with the wrong skin color would not make it onto Yglesias' show. (Of course.)
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Not too surprising. I wonder to what extent the left will separate itself from the far left in the coming months and year.
