And Andrew Sullivan is leaving NY Mag
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Sullivan on cancel culture, his departure and the fear of others being canceled.>.
https://spectator.us/andrew-sullivan-run-new-york-times/
It’s never a good sign when you’re watching a scene of street terror in yet another gut-churning YouTube video and you find yourself thinking: ‘Hang on a minute, that’s around the corner from my apartment!’ But there’s a now infamous video from last week where a mob of enraged millennials with their fists pumped in the air surrounded a lone young woman sitting outside a Washington restaurant where I often eat. Like a scene from the Cultural Revolution, the crowd demanded she shout certain slogans and raise her clenched fist in solidarity — or be damned as a racist. Most of her fellow diners took the path of least resistance. She wouldn’t. The chants grew louder: ‘White silence is violence!’ They started screaming in her face. She wouldn’t cave. Wokeness, in case you hadn’t noticed, has entered a more intense phase. Not so long ago, you were canceled for something you did or said or wrote. Now you’re canceled just for saying absolutely nothing at all.
I had a much milder experience of this during the past week when the New York Times decided to run a profile of me. The hook was that I was forced to leave New York magazine last month because, according to the NYT, I had not publicly recanted editing an issue of the New Republic published…in 1994. The issue was a symposium on The Bell Curve, a book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein that explored the connection between IQ, class, social mobility and race. My crime was to arrange a symposium around an extract, with 13 often stinging critiques published alongside it. The fact I had not recanted that decision did not, mind you, prevent TIME, the Atlantic, Newsweek, the NYT and New York magazine from publishing me in the following years. But suddenly, a decision I made a quarter of a century ago required my being canceled. The NYT reporter generously gave me a chance to apologize and recant, and when I replied that I thought the role of genetics in intelligence among different human populations was still an open question, he had his headline: ‘I won’t stop reading Andrew Sullivan, but I can’t defend him.’ In other words, the media reporter in America’s paper of record said he could not defend a writer because I refused to say something I don’t believe. He said this while arguing that I was ‘one of the most influential journalists of the last three decades’. To be fair to him, he would have had no future at the NYT if he had not called me an indefensible racist. His silence on that would have been as unacceptable to his woke bosses as my refusal to recant. But this is where we now are. A reporter is in fear of being canceled if he doesn’t cancel someone else. This is America returning to its roots. As in Salem.
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If white silence is violence, then I guess we can start beating up folk on the street next then, right?
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Sticks and stones will break my bones, and words, and silence, and white men dead for over 100 years, and pillows, and cans of beans, and chicken sandwiches will always wound me.
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Oh, forgot about the OK
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I support more redistribution of wealth for entirely conservative reasons. Mainly to preserve political support for the capitalist system, which I truly believe is the least bad way of organizing society
@jon-nyc said in And Andrew Sullivan is leaving NY Mag:
I support more redistribution of wealth for entirely conservative reasons. Mainly to preserve political support for the capitalist system, which I truly believe is the least bad way of organizing society
How would you do that?
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I would agree in principle based on the tendency for technology to concentrate wealth, and that technology is a product of the market system. When someone invents something that concentrates wealth all to themselves, you'd want your society to forcibly redistribute that. Or people will get angry and start rioting.
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Mik, I don’t have a specific program in mind, probably it would take the form of a more generous safety net, universal healthcare of some sort or another supported by progressive taxation. I’m open to the idea of UBI but I take Peterson’s objections pretty seriously.
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But my real point above is that I changed my ‘natural’ position on it for pragmatic reasons. I’ve done the same for immigration.
I used to dismiss concerns about inequality, thinking the focus should be on reducing poverty, not worrying about rich vs poor gaps. But people aren’t wired to ignore that. That’s just a fact. So I decided we need to worry more about it for the sake of political stability.
Same with immigration. I am by nature an expansionist (though hardly an open borders guy). But too much immigration in too short a time causes political instability so I’ve compromised there too.
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I’m not understanding your point but you can have a hybrid public-private system that is universal. Like the UK.
@jon-nyc said in And Andrew Sullivan is leaving NY Mag:
Like the UK.
I hear lots of terrible things about the UK's system, mostly from Americans and the Daily Mail, however my own personal experience of it has been quite positive.
