Nevertheless, the Niskanen Center fired Wilkinson and made it clear that they did so explicitly because of the tweet. “The Niskanen Center appreciates and encourages interesting and provocative online discourse, wrote Niskanen President Jerry Taylor in a statement. “However we draw the line at statements that are, or can in any way be interpreted as, condoning or promoting violence.”
Hence, Will Wilkinson evidently was fired for making a sarcastic tweet.
I see Wilkinson as a victim of what I call Zero Tolerance Culture. Zero Tolerance sets up a binary: stay on this side of the line and you’re ok; cross the line and we bring down the hammer!
Zero Tolerance creates zero tolerance for ambiguity, for mitigating circumstances, and for making the punishment proportionate to the crime. The popularity of the phrase “Zero Tolerance” actually serves to legitimate the arbitrary use of power.
I would rate members of the commentariat on a scale that is not so binary. Instead, imagine a scale from 1 to 100. If your score is 1, then in my opinion the world would be a better place if no one listened to you. If your score is 100, then I wish everyone listened to you. In my subjective rating system, the punishment for saying something wrong would be a reduction in score.
It might be fun some day to publish my ratings of public intellectuals. Off the top of my head, and leaving out people I know personally, those scoring in the high 90s would include Coleman Hughes and Jonathan Haidt.
Ten years or so ago, I would have scored Wilkinson somewhere in the 80s. More recently, I probably would have put him somewhere in the teens. But the offending tweet has no effect on his score, as far as I am concerned.
Note 1: In posting this instead of the post I was planning to put up today, I am violating a personal norm, which is that ordinarily I do not rush to comment on the latest kerfluffle. I am once again putting off a post with more cancel-bait than anything else I have written, much worse than anything said by Wilkinson or many others who have been canceled. You’ll know it when you see it, unless I come to my senses and trash it altogether.
Note 2: Jason Brennan comments,
Niskanen’s senior leadership is and has been unworthy of its quality staff.
If quality staff agrees with this assessment, then they should be able to do better elsewhere. I’m not saying that it is morally wrong to stay at Niskanen, but staying there may not be the wisest career move.
Arnold, let me repeat what I have been saying: never tolerate zero tolerance. As you say zero tolerance serves to legitimate the arbitrary use of power. Focus on violence, on those ready to grab and keep the legitimate power of coercion by resorting to violence (by definition, the barbarians have always resorted to violence as you can see with the ones that took power last Wednesday –they are not willing to discuss their Portland and Seattle experiments). As I said in another comment, the barbarians (and their little Greg-G puppets) project into others their own behavior because it seems a good argument to persuade cowards and idiots that the barbarians’ enemies are doing what they want to do (in the meantime little puppets are paid peanuts).
It’s a pity that in the past 3 months you have failed to anticipate how your grandchildren will do under the barbarians.
Arnold, I assume that you have read Tyler’s latest post on data from a book on Mao’s cultural revolution (on the data you can read my comment on his blog). It’s amazing that rather than focusing on the relevance of Mao’s cultural revolution to understand what is going on in the U.S. and the rest of the world, he focuses on some data. One way to understand that relevance is to recognize that the barbarians are not willing to wait until future generations are educated according to the new Bible so to accelerate the process they need to retrain the young in the existing generations. When I worked in China in the 1990s, I had the opportunity to work with a few 70+ “retrained” economists (they had learned English before 1966 and “rescued” by the new government around 1980) and learned a little about their re-training.
BTW, Will Wilkinson has been an idiot for some time (so long ago that I don’t remember when I stopped reading his columns) but he doesn’t deserve to be treated like garbage. I hope people pay attention to those with whom they work. Just read
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-moronic-firing-of-will-wilkinson?token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMzQ4OTgsInBvc3RfaWQiOjMxNzcyMjE0LCJfIjoiY3ArMkQiLCJpYXQiOjE2MTEzNjAxNzgsImV4cCI6MTYxMTM2Mzc3OCwiaXNzIjoicHViLTEyODY2MiIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.r_ilNoLYPaGWZb6GR3AN8NaMmTa3BnEr4QDoFBBab2g
My rule of thumb for these things is: always flip the meme.
In this case, imagine if anyone had advocated for lynching Kamala Harris, even in jest. They would have been fired from just about every organization I can think of.
You are wrong. He would have been lynched (or sent to “el paredón” if he survived the mob). I think you don’t understand who your enemy is.
>—“In this case, imagine if anyone had advocated for lynching Kamala Harris, even in jest. They would have been fired from just about every organization I can think of.”
Probably so but are we done pretending that cancel culture is just a left wing thing that we want to oppose rather than adopt?
Right wing cancel culture goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts. It reached its peak with the McCarthyism of the 50’s. It was present for most of American history when it would have been extremely risky for the career for any ambitious public figure to be openly gay or atheist. In the last 4 years we have seen the cancelation within the Republican Party of almost everyone who has opposed Tump on anything. Just yesterday the Arizona Republican Party censured Jeff Flake, Cindy McCain and Governor Ducey for heresy.
There are always bounds to socially acceptable speech and those bounds are always controversial.
Yes, cancel culture has gone way too far in America today, especially on the left and especially in academia. Yes, zero tolerance = zero common sense.
A good number of those censured in the McCarthy episode went on to significant careers.
The body count under Right-wing terror in the modern age is a magnitude less than the Left’s result.
Indeed, despite the now indisputable fact that many of those McCarthy’s committee investigated (such as every one of the Hollywood Ten) were in fact members of CPUSA. Whereas McCarthy himself was censured by the Senate, disgraced, and drank himself to death, his very name become a curse and a byword for wrongful and malicious persecution.
“Right wing cancel culture goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts”
Do you really think a law from 1798 signed by John Adams is relevant to some kind of modern left/right axis?
Or are we talking about when progressive democrats like Wilson or FDR used the outbreak of war to jail and intern people.
McCarthy is covered below.
“Arizona Republican Party censured Jeff Flake, Cindy McCain and Governor Ducey for heresy.”
Yep – the Rep Party censured, not (yet) fired, “Republicans” who acted against the interest of the Republican Party.
It’s not firing them, nor even quite expelling/ excommunicating them, but it’s telling the el-Reps (RINOs?) that their public votes do not represent the views of Rep Party – the Party which they have been hired to represent in a partisan gov’t position and which they claimed they would represent. If Trump could fire some Rep who started acting like a NeverTrumper, he did – but that’s politics and expected in politics. It’s not a private person using Free Speech and getting fired / doxed/ hearing death threats (like Parler CEO has been getting).
Like most Dems, you seem to believe there is no difference between public elected folk and private folk – everything is political and there are no private folk working for any public company.
Democrats excluding folk who no longer act like current Dems are expected to act is not cancel culture, tho it is similar to other PC-Nazi tactics, and to Reps with their Purity Police, and even to Libertarians (but are they even worth talking about in this context?).
Many famous Democrats, Al Franken & NBC Matt Lauer, have lost their jobs due to #MeToo – but that is not Republicans, it’s mostly Dems, including Dems who supported and support the serial sexual harrasser Pres. Clinton. But Reps cheer when a Dem gets cancelled – yet it’s not Rep cancel culture. It’s Dem cancel culture, most often against private citizen Reps or conservative/ libertarians like Charles Murry – whose talks were cancelled.
I think actual private people getting cancelled are targeted by Dem cancel mobs over 90% of the time, possibly over 95%.
Whenever some “thing” is done 80% or more on one side, I’m pretty good with that side getting all the blame, even if I’d agree when pushed that there is some small blame on the other side.
After the Capitol protest, the Dems have been quick to condemn all Trump-supporters, over 99% of which were peacefully protesting at the protest. This is an attempt to cancel thousands of law abiding folk for a peaceful protest about an election they believe was stolen. (Which I also believe).
Even if you believe the election was fair, the Dem attempt to cancel / dox/ re-educate / punish thousands of honest voters should be at least a little disgusting.
Do not forget Niskanen President Jerry Taylor’s initial commentary on the matter of the McCloskeys, which was deadly serious and not at all sarcastic or ironic, but perhaps indulged in just a bit of a rush to judgment about people and a situation about which he had not learned the facts, and was not as professional, measured, and reasonable a comment as required by staff in his organization to maintain their employment.
He deleted the tweet, but I don’t know if he apologized for it for even one goddam second. I absolutely guarantee you that everyone at Niskanen knows about this incident, knows that Jerry survived it without any serious difficulty, and use it as a yard stick to measure the reasonableness of both firing Wilkinson and the public explanation for doing so.
By the way, the judge just dismissed Kim Gardner from the McCloskey case – “the Circuit Attorney’s conduct raises the appearance that she initiated a criminal prosecution for political purposes” – oh, you think maybe that might be it?
“By the way, the judge just dismissed Kim Gardner from the McCloskey case – ‘the Circuit Attorney’s conduct raises the appearance that she initiated a criminal prosecution for political purposes’ – oh, you think maybe that might be it?”
Maybe/maybe not. Without the appropriate threat of grave bodily injury (and including personal property in some states), you cannot willy nilly point a gun at someone else. Due to their extremely poor gun skills, which included the active pointing of a deadly weapon at non-lethal threats, the McCloskeys made themselves extremely vulnerable to an aggravated assault charge (a felony).
The 2A/gun community on YouTube was very quick to point this out and to criticize the actions of the McCloskeys.
It will probably get settled for some lesser non-felony charge, but I wouldn’t necessarily be betting my money on them getting off scot free.
Lol, the protestors came into their private gated street and given their recent history of property damage, this lawyer and his wife came running out to ward them off from damaging their century-old house. The nutjob St. Louis prosecutor who went after the couple was removed from the case by a judge and just lost her second appeal to be reinstated.
Like I said: maybe/maybe not.
However, what’s unequivocal is that their extremely poor gun skills/etiquette put them in the legal crosshairs. It didn’t have to be that way and it’s not that controversial.
****
According to Kansas University School of Law professor Corey Rayburn Yung, the McCloskeys’ case would be directly at odds with established Missouri precedent regarding the castle doctrine.
“Whereas the large majority of jurisdictions limit the castle doctrine to the boundaries of the house, MO’s is more expansive. Some commenters are reading the statute to mean that you could lawfully shoot someone who stepped onto your lawn. Despite the availability of signs saying, ‘Trespassers will be shot,’ mere trespass has not historically been a basis for using deadly force. So, does MO’s statute represent a new trend, allowing expansive use of deadly force to protect private property? No,” Yung wrote in an extensive Twitter thread.
The professor pointed to the 2016 case State v. Whipple, which held that subsection 3 cannot be interpreted as giving “the occupier, owner, or lessee authority to stand his ground and use deadly force without having a reasonable belief that such force is necessary to defend himself or a third person from what he reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force.”
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/will-gun-wielding-st-louis-attorneys-be-able-to-hide-behind-the-states-castle-doctrine/
Having spent too much time in law school when I was younger, I am fairly sure that “reasonable” can be interpreted to mean just about anything a judge wants it to mean. (Which is one reason who gets to be a judge is so important.)
The word “reasonable” is elastic, but not infinitely elastic.
The videos of what transpired along with the MO statutes and case law are not very supportive of the McCloskeys. Let’s see what other evidence surfaces.
Practical tip: pointing a deadly weapon at someone garners a more than remote possibility of: jail time + $50k to $100k of legal fees + civil liability. Proceed with caution.
Yes, proceed with caution. And any good gun owner knows that you don’t point a firearm at a person unless you think the situation is bad enough to potentially use it.
“Reasonable”is elastic enough that the same act can get you convicted in one jurisdiction while in another, the DA won’t even press charges.
Good points, thank you!
FWIW – We are very pro-2A and we’ve got the ARs, shotguns, pistols and, most importantly, training to back it up. We absolutely support *responsible* gun owners who represent us proudly. Unfortunately, we don’t consider the McCloskeys to be a part of that group based on what we saw from the videos.
Woke-ism was pro-violence in June. After Jan 6th its anti-violence, that’s the new branding. At least until the next election rolls around. We get BLM riots about every four years or so now.
Jerry Taylor’s tweet that Handle quoted was worse than Wilkinson’s.
Yes, because Taylor was serious and Wilkinson was making a (nasty) joke.
I want a hero: an uncommon want,
When every year and month sends forth a new one,
Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,
The age discovers he is not the true one;
Of such as these I should not care to vaunt…
– Byron
“Zero Tolerance creates zero tolerance for ambiguity, for mitigating circumstances, and for making the punishment proportionate to the crime. The popularity of the phrase “Zero Tolerance” actually serves to legitimate the arbitrary use of power.”
I disagree. Power is being used arbitrarily all right, but the problem is that it’s not actually “zero tolerance” at all, but only “plenty of tolerance for my friends and allies”, based on specious distinctions. We notice the hypocrisy and inconsistency in use of the term “zero tolerance” and the practice of selective tolerance, and it is delegitimating, as it is in the case of Jerry Taylor himself. Hence the whole weird internet commentary phenomenon of ‘whataboutism’ and, naturally, anti-whataboutism.
One example out of millions: several famous people were severely penalized when it was revealed that they had one worn ‘blackface’ in the past, even if they admitted and apologized for it. But when it came to Virginia Governor Northam or Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, well, no need to raise a fuss or make a federal case out of it, they are good people with good intentions on the right team, so they can just move on with their lives, and we can just agree to forget all about this.
Now, people often complain about dealing with a bureaucracy that gives every case a “one size fits all” identical treatment, with little ability to prioritize according to importance, to hear about special circumstances, or to apply reasonable judgment to extraordinary cases.
If you tell people there should be some flexibility, some ability to appeal and receive special solicitude, to present evidence for compassionate exception on grounds of particular hardship, or to waive the requirements in the cases on the national interest especially in an “””emergency””” in the discretion of senior officials, well all those ideas are indeed quite popular. They *seem* reasonable. They ‘legitimate’ (i.e., enable) Congress to sneak in all manner of over-delegation of political responsibility into the hands of political appointees who can both act in obscure cases below the radar of public awareness, and avail themselves to corrupting pressures those same politicians would like to exercise in their name of their close, personal donors and pet projects.
In my own experience, around 90% of the cases of the actual exercise of those exceptions to the rules are either simply corrupt (e.g. who to prosecute, and who gets a free pass and room to destroy) or capricious (for example, a senior official likes a particular sport, or is a fan of them team employing the athlete). That is the very opposite of “rule of law”, in terms of being “rule by men, doing what they want, helping friends and hurting opponents.”
There is no substitute for the good judgment of decision-makers, and there is no substitute for the ethics of good, fair governing. *Actual* “Zero tolerance” and “one size fits all” (practiced by many annoying bureaucracies) are perhaps inadequate attempts to substitute and cope when you can rely on neither of these, but they are still better than the alternative.
Actually full tolerance or actual zero tolerance are both sustainable, fair policies with their own pros and cons. Fake tolerance and double-standard zero tolerance where one side, team, tribe, whatever always gets a pass, while the other always gets the boot, is what cannot be reconciled with the needs and life of a genuinely free society.
“People must have every confidence that every vote legally cast will be legally counted and accurately counted but constantly shifting vote tallies in Ohio and malfunctioning electronic machines, which may not have paper receipts, have led to additional loss of confidence by the public.” Nancy Pelosi.
“Our election was hijacked. There is no question.” Nancy Pelosi.
“Alarmingly, across the nation, we see the devastating effects of the President’s campaign to sabotage the election by manipulating the Postal Service to disenfranchise voters.” Nancy Pelosi.
The storming of the Capitol in Wisconsin? “Impressive show of democracy in action.”
A statue of Columbus heaved into Inner Harbor? “People will do what they do.”
+1
zero tolerance
Reminds again the conundrum of overlaying binary thinking with the continuum paradox.
I would rate members of the commentariat on a scale that is not so binary.
Good idea, but the John Brennans of the world quickly bestow negative infinity on all the deplorables and politics becomes the logistics of how many bodies he can harvest for the cause.
Arnold, do not trash your cancel bait post. You are relatively impervious, and public discourse desperately needs responsible intellectuals who do not self censor.
Besides, you’ve piqued our interest. We’ll be sorely disappointed if you suppress it.
Like other readers here, I’m curious about Arnold’s working draft “cancel-bait” essay.
It would be bad to see Arnold cancelled. I’ve never met him. It would sadden me to see this blog go away. Can a bureaucrat make Arnold’s blog disappear with the flick of a switch? I was saddened when Scott Alexander toyed with deleting his “Slate Star Codex” blog.
Enough about me. What is it that keeps Steven Pinker from being cancelled? He seems to know how to navigate the storms of wokeness, at least for the moment.
Another example that comes to mind…What keeps the Unz Review going? It’s largely a nest of weirdos, but there are things worth reading there. I understand that Ron Unz has made enough money that he doesn’t seem to need to worry about making any more.
I would enjoy seeing a typology that helps to explain why some people are cancellable and others are not. Same question for blogs and websites.
This post from Jonathan Haidt after the Weinstein Affair at Evergreen College is relevant. It’s 3 and 1/2 years old.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/06/01/four-lessons-for-professors-from-recent-campus-tumult/
“I would enjoy seeing a typology that helps to explain why some people are cancellable and others are not.”
If the past few years have demonstrated anything, it is that everyone is cancellable. A major theme of economics is division of labor, gains from specialization and trade, “no one knows how to make a pencil”, etc. and how we are all connected in a vast, dynamic spiderweb of relationships of exchange.
Which is normally great! Except … the big risk is that all your relationships are also effectively dependencies. So long as you can always “cover”, so long as there is effective competition or some “provider of last resort” and you can substitute to some adequate alternative supplier at reasonable additional cost, then you don’t have to worry about being cut off.
But if you get cut off by all the major players in a whole sector moving in lockstep, then you’re screwed. And if you don’t get cut off, then the people who wanted to cut you off will just try to move up the chain and cut *your holdout provider* off from *its* providers.
This game cannot go on forever and does not have infinite steps. Eventually you come to an end, which we can define as the ‘sovereign’. If one can always cover, the market makes the individual sovereign, which we call individual liberty. If one can’t, then only the sovereign can have your back, because being at the top of the chain of coercion, only it can act as a countervailing force to the coercive pressure of the social-punishment machine.
The late great Walter Williams observed that “Fifty-one percent of students think that it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. About 20 percent of students hold that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent say colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people.” And a sitting member of Congress used publicly available FEC campaign contributions data to organize a boycott against individuals and businesses that had contributed to a political opponent. Prosecutors use their discretion to pass over cases where the homes and businesses of political opponents are burned down by the prosecutor’s allies. Children have their college admissions revoked on the basis of years old tweets. Public employees must recite anti-racism oaths to retain employment. Dissenters to the new authoritarian normalcy face the threat of calls for “deprogramming.”
I’d not be surprised if Wilkinson’s departure to substack had been planned in advance and that the crapweasels who besmirch Niskanen’ s legacy had worked this out as a PR stunt to gain much needed publicity for both of their forgettable enterprises. Nevertheless, signalling conformance with closed society dogmas won’t hurt either party. Both will go on to make more money rationalizing The Great Crackdown on dissent by those with whom they disagree.
It is a dark age that we live in. Does anyone know anything about offshore blog hosting services?
InRangeTV has a recent video on just exactly how to set up a website that is not beholden to the madness of our day.
Unfortunately step 1 “found a bank” and it just gets harder from there.
Really, you need to found a whole ‘nother country.
That’s what you need to do to effectively fork finance and the internet. And then expect to get treated like a rogue state, isolated, sanctioned, pressured, and of course completely excluded from the systems used by the other countries. Enjoy your hermit kingdom, better get busy with that nuclear missile program, or accept the price of sponsorship from someone who already has them.
Have you ever read Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson? Much of its plot centers around the ideas you’ve raised in this comment thread.
I read it last year and really enjoyed it. Although the book came out in 1999 and features quite a bit of techno-speak, I didn’t find it dated at all. In fact I often found myself fairly amazed at how timely everything felt.
At any rate, I was turned onto Stephenson’s work by reading this blog, so I thought the book warranted a mention here.
That is indeed a good video from InRangeTV.
In truth, the collective we doesn’t quite know what to do about this or many other problems. Recognizing zero-tolerance as a problem, though, rather than a virtue, is at least important.
I remember the good old days when the libertarians still believed in the core value of freedom of association.
I freely dis-associated from Wilkinson a few years ago by deleting him from my rss and Twitter feeds. Was that wrong of me? Should I be forced to read his nonsense?
If no, then isn’t it completely reasonable for his employer to dis-associate from him too, particularly if it was an “at will” arrangement?
BTW – the content in the tweet would have been grounds for termination pre-woke so likening it to cancel culture seems like a stretch to me.
…the content in the tweet would have been grounds for termination pre-woke so likening it to cancel culture seems like a stretch to me.
Maybe.
But pre-woke, I suspect there would have been more avenues for apology and discipline while keeping one’s job. Now, the zeitgeist is for total obliteration over bad-thinking.
The NYTimes hired someone who called for mass death of all whites, and then people wrote op-eds about how that was a good decision. So I’m not sure what would/wouldn’t get someone cancelled pre or post woke.
Will obviously thought that dunking on conservatives wouldn’t get him cancelled, and he had tons of reasons to think so.
He didn’t think ahead that inner party see this as an opportunity to bring the outer party closer into their embrace and send a message that the plebs can never even joke about touching the patricians.
Tyler would probably scold him for not being able to “read the room.”
I’ve been kicking around an idea of an open source filter. It may already exist (many do for images), but you run statements through it and you get a score. You can then decide if you want to make it, or a forum wants to let it through. Various scoring limits and categories could be devised. Then at least people could say I ran it through a filter and it got an X score, thought it was safe. Problem is, I can see something like this becoming a standard, and speech is forever limited.
Libertarians have a hard choice to make.
On the one hand, they could choose a certain kind of market entity freedom – the freedom of organizations to fire people for socially undesirable expression at zero cost or risk. But the consequence is the loss of freedom of speech, socially, effectively, practically. Well, you might still have some freedom to mildly complain about this state of affairs, maybe, but don’t cross the lines, whatever the heck your opponents might claim them to be tomorrow.
Several important things have changed in the structure and dynamic of modern society, such that what the state is constrained from doing is not so important to the overall framework of personally ruinous coercive pressures and uncertainties experienced by people and institutions, where lack of due process is a feature not a bug for would-be persecutors, and so and obsessive and narrow fixation on state limitations is willfully blind to the real state of liberty in a decreasingly free society.
On the other hand, they could bite the bullet on just one more inch of limitation on freedom of association when they have already given one thousand miles of such limitations for every other basis of discrimination or “protected class” out there, literally straining out the one most important gnat when they have already swallowed a herd of camels of restrictions for private organizations. A “limitation” – which could be as simple as being required to bear some cost – say ten years salary as “speech severance” pay – which, in fact, is a kind of empowerment for companies and institutions which don’t actually want to fire or punish people, but feel they must succumb to social-media-era mob pressures, but which they could resist with a “sorry, our hands are tied” legal excuse.
Organizations which are legally prevented from firing – or even failing to promote in proportionate numbers – millions of people for millions of reasons, will have just one more reason added to the long list – a reason some states have already added – but then, we get our freedom to express our honest sentiments back, without risking the welfare of our families for the rest of our lives.
There is no sense in trying to pretend there isn’t a choice to make between competitive freedoms. Either we allow the state to prohibit the firings, or free speech is dead. Which kind of “unfreedom” is worse, given the current state of affairs? Yet another restriction on employers is such a marginal increase in unfreedom it is negligible and practically trivial. Keeping that margin to lose free speech – which is special because you will also lose the capacity to argue to get it back – is a terrible, senseless deal.
If “at-will freedom of association absolutism” were on the table as a possibility, as something for which people are willing to argue with consistency – if Tyler Cowen was as “fine” with, say, some racist firing as he is for kicking people off internet platforms – if the defense was not so particularistic and selective but a full-throated argument for letting anybody discriminate against anybody else for any reason or none at all, even all the bad, terrible reasons, then that is a principled position I’m willing to respect, even if, as a realistic manner, it is now so far off the table as to not even exist in the same universe as “tables”.
Here is a prediction: By the end of the decade, over 90% of the people currently defending the sacred absolute right of organizations to ban, fire, etc. people for speech which would be protected by the First Amendment if the state were acting, will come around to the position that they had made a horrible mistake, that the cancel culture, the deplatforming, the selective-tolerance firings, etc. were indeed so bad and terrible enough to warrant some kind of effective effort to stop them. But, by then it will be far too late. Indeed, it is already probably too late. But the admissions will come only after the window of opportunity has certainly closed for good.
A lot of quirky internet commentators were totally right about this pandemic at the start and recommended a lot of important, common-sense measures which, had they been implemented, would have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars and prevented some unmeasurable amount of human misery. We can look back on those suggestions now and admit these people were right and all the crazy bioethics people, public health bureaucrats, and academic epidemiologists were wrong, but, well, too late now. Milk spilt.
We’re going to look back on our ability to speak freely in the same way. “Yeah, we shouldn’t have let them spill it. Oh well, junior, let me tell you, that milk tasted nice while it lasted. But I guess too bad for you guys, since, by our lack of protecting it for you while we could, you’ll never know.”
Do you believe that nearly half of republicans support the capitol riot Arnold? I don’t know how much to trust these polls sometimes. I find it hard to believe that it is that high, although it is definitely higher than I would like. Jason Brennan suggests that is nearly half in his post.
The worst part about Wilkinson’s firing is that his tweet was actually funny. No one with a brain would mistake it as a call for violence. It doesn’t even warrant an apology, much less a firing. We apparently now have to assume everyone is an idiot who can’t discern comedy from vitriol.
“If Biden really wanted unity, he’d lynch Mike Pence”
The premise behind Wilkinson’s joke is that normal Republicans waving the Trump+Pence signs despise Pence as well as people on the left. That premise isn’t true, most Trump+Pence voters like Pence as well as Trump, therefore the humor wouldn’t work with normal people, and yes, it would just seem violent coming from a left-of-center pundit. And no, normal people who don’t instantly grasp your weird humor aren’t brainless idiots.
I’m curious if Kling thought Wilkinson’s line was genuinely funny. I’d bet no.
In addition to what Niko said, Wilkenson has been a woke scold saying lots of demeaning and extremist things for quite some time. Everyone knows he’s hostile and condescending and the subtext of his comment isn’t meant to be humorous but spiteful.
I suspect that his firing was more a case of scapegoating and the last straw rather than this tweet. Will’s comment a couple of weeks back equating the summer riots with someone throwing a brick through the window of a Jamba Juice did not go down well at all. Combine that with the fact that Will has lost a lot of credibility over the years and that Niskanen was not getting much respect either, something had to be done.
This could be a gift to Wilkinson, getting fired over something trivial is way better than getting fired over the more substantial issues behind the scenes. He now he gets a lot of public sympathy and an opportunity to rebuild his credibility.
He just forgot to add the winky face. You can say anything if you end with a winky face.
😉
You might want to consider that possibility that no line actually exists, and declared lines are simply spin. The cancel mob, along with its elite enablers and financiers, seems to cancel whomever it can, for the twisted purposes of entertainment and punishing enemies. This could explain the seeming contradictions and arbitrariness of cancellings. It also means that “zero tolerance”, and any other declared policies, are irrelevant, and arguments about hypocrisy will not sway the cancel mob.
This is a paradoxical question. The answer is we should have zero tolerance for what isn’t allowed and we should tolerate what is allowed. We need some sort of legislative process to determine what the rules are and some sort of adjudication process to apply the rules.
The big valid objections I see to “cancel culture” is the processes aren’t fair or honest. Fairness is subjective, but it’s not arbitrary and it’s important. Donald Trump and the Parler app were supposedly banned from public services for violence, but many quite reasonably suspect that reason was a lie and the bans were done for political reasons. Those were private companies but they seemed to act in concert with government authority figures. Employers generally deserve the right to fire employees at will but they deserve less rights to refuse selling a public undifferentiated service, particularly when done in collaboration with government.
Regarding Niskanen+Wilkinson: that seems like an employer firing and employee, which is not my business to comment on. It would be more severe if Facebook/Apple/Google/Amazon/Twitter banned from from public services like they did with Trump+Parler.
How much of zero tolerance/ cancel culture / whatever you want to call it do we think might be based on basic economic forces.
The supply of “punditry” (especially the sort consumed by the twitterati) is basically horizontal, no? Vastly more people are competing to provide an increasingly uniform product.
One position is that we should more or less sit back and let it happen when ‘zero tolerance’ is applied to its supporters, and that these events may be constructive in that, if the rules are applied consistently, maybe people who support them will reconsider them. Interpretive leeway has a tendency to invite inconsistency. E.g., when the New Yorker discovered that ‘MeToo’ had gone too far, though I agreed with the substance, it was off-putting that they only made this discovery for Al Franken. I don’t know exactly to what extent Wilkinson has favored the kind of treatment he’s just received. I know he has consistently minimized it as no big deal at worst, and supported the firing of James Damore, so I can’t say I have any sympathy for him. But it elicits I think an important dilemma for opponents of this kind thing: should we actively defend McCarthyites from McCarthyism when it comes around to them? Robby Soave thinks so. I’m agnostic myself. I don’t think it’s right to pile on, and people who genuinely see the error of their ways deserve consideration. But is it a good idea to, say, try to help someone keep his job who will then keep using his job to try to get other people fired?
No. The broader goal of opposing cancellation to improve discourse and tolerance. If we keep that in mind, we shouldn’t oppose the cancellation of those who wouldn’t extend that sort of reciprocity to us.
Respect and tolerance are social virtues. They can’t really exist outside of an interaction. I’d hold out the possibility of opposing a cancellation if doing so might change minds for the better. But if it doesn’t? Nope.
Arnold, look how bad the situation is. I’m not subscribed to Andrew Sullivan’s new platform but I could read paragraphs of his last column (many years ago I stopped reading him). I hope you can read that column. Apparently AS argues that equality of opportunity has been replaced by equality of outcome (=equity).
Glenn Reynolds, upon reading AS, writes “It [Biden’s government] means a government empowered to reward its supporters and punish its enemies, along race/ethnic/sex lines. That certainly won’t lower any temperatures anywhere.”
How much are you going to tolerate Biden’s government?
For most of us our thinking evolves over time, but not like it did for Will Wilkinson. That was a dramatic mutation. I quit reading him a good while back, but what a complete transformation from what he used to write.
A bit too much is made of someone being “red pilled” or “blue pilled”. But it’s like Wilkinson consciously decided to take the blue pill and return to a state of comfort.
“But it’s like Wilkinson consciously decided to take the blue pill and return to a state of comfort.”
He shall henceforth be known as Cypher (played by Joe Pantoliano).
Zero tolerance is bullshit.
It is poor man’s justice, trying to make everything “fair” by “following the rules every time.”
It is this sort of bullshit that gets kindergartners suspended for bringing a goddamned PLASTIC KNIFE to school to spread their peanut butter, cause it “violates the zero tolerance weapons-in-school” rule.
I’m a pretty big fan of zero tolerance for rape, murder, burglary, etc.
So, I wouldn’t necessarily call it poor man’s justice.
Right, but even (or especially) that is only following a presumption of innocence until proven guilty and a trial by peers.
It’s poor man’s justice because anyone gets to do it with little provocation, usually anonymously, and without almost no procedural or substantive protections for the supposed transgressor.
On a personal level, we should not have, nor expect to have, Zero Tolerance. Loved ones CAN do wrong, and yet usually should also be loved – yet also, if committing a crime, they should be tried and punished if convicted.
Mercy should dominate on a personal level. For society, we need justice – punishment for those who violate the law. Those who incite violence, violating the law, lose the “Free Speech” guarantee of the First Amendment by virtue of their illegal, violence inciting speech.
This is being used against (now ex-) President Trump to impeach him again. “incitement of insurrection“. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_impeachment_of_Donald_Trump
A very political, very bad precedent – but indicative of the Dem belief they will never lose another election. Also a very hypocritical action by Dems where they have accepted, or even supported, words in support of far more violent riots.
Dems accepted violent rhetoric in support of violent actions by Dem supporting groups, but now are strongly against less violent rhetoric by Reps in support of more peaceful, tho not fully peaceful, protests. This is not Zero Tolerance, this is Zero Tolerance for Reps.
The culture war problem for Republicans is that the Dems, in power, are increasingly imposing laws, and norms, which mostly are used against Reps. Most colleges have long been accepting hate speech aimed at Christians, Republicans, rednecks, males … and now, increasingly, whites.
The Big Guy (in Hunter’s emails) and his handlers are promoting laws and norms to take away the rights and freedoms of Republicans. Zero Tolerance against Reps, but usually without punishing Dems. In this case, Will, too, is getting a bit of the cancel culture he has long been arguing isn’t a problem.
It IS a problem. Enforcement of rules by rulers against their opponents, but non-enforcement against the ruler’s friends, is a huge reason to advocate for “rule of law” to have the laws apply to all.
If a person’s personal speech is Free Speech, protected by the First Amendment, the employee protection laws should not allow employers to fire somebody for their legal speech. If it was official speech, or done as part of employment, the employer should have that power.
Jason Brennan:
Jerry Taylor and Will Wilkinson’s niche seems to be pandering to illiberal lefties by presenting themselves as ex-libertarians who somehow concluded that straw man caricatures of classical liberal and libertarian thought turned out to be correct. “A ha,” donors gleefully think, “These apostates demonstrate my prejudices were right all along. Here’s some money.” Jerry and Will both spent too much time around too many smart people to actually believe these caricatures are correct. So I think the most plausible and charitable interpretation of their behavior is that they knowingly lie–or at best knowingly attack the weakest version of their old views–because that’s where the money is for them. (On the other hand, if they are sincere, it is even more damning, as it indicates they spent much of their lives believing laughably stupid things for stupid reasons, and somehow failed to learn what classical liberals actually think and why.)
Ouch.
I used to be a libertarian. But then I got grew up and got a real job stocking shelves at the grocery store. I used to spout off about how the invisible hand will help all the greedy people get along, and how natural rights come before the state, and how unions are just there to keep out minorities and women.
But then I got to see how the real world works. I’ve seen the unions in action. I’ve seen the way “socialism” works. I’ve seen the kindness and compassion of a system that never has more than a half dozen items on any shelf.
I get done stocking in like 10 minutes. Socialism is great!
Not like any grocery store around here (middle class Boston suburbs). This seems more realistic 🙂
(I can’t believe I’m going to defend the Niskanen Center…) Maybe I’m off here, but isn’t “Professional Take Haver on Twitter” part of his job? If so, this sounds like a firing for on the job performance. If one of his job duties is to advocate and message the Niskanen Center message, he’s done it poorly and that’s a legit reason to lose your job.
This was an account under his real name, and I assume he identified the Niskanen Center in his bio. Its hardly a secret in any case.
If his job “take haver”, this would be an injustice. If he was posting under a pseudonym and someone unmasked him, that would be an injustice. If he was in a job that arguably does and arguably doesn’t require take having (e.g., college professor), this would be a grey area.
But this feels like laying off a mason because he said “eff it I’m using regular bricks” when the plans call for firebricks. Or an elementary school teacher that ignores the curriculum to teach (whatever bugaboo bad people are teaching kids these days in your eyes – cops are great/bad. abortions are great/bad. intersectionality is great/bad).
I know that my employer has a rule that when I’m on social media with my real name* and I identifying them, I’m expected to act with the same professionalism as if I was in the office. And you know what, if I got on my Linkedin and posted something like this, I would expect to get shitcanned and not feel like I was done dirty.
*its not Terry, and I bet Scott Alexander can tell you why I’m using a pseudonym…
Was about to say he’s hidden himself to avoid cancel culture, but it seems that Scott Alexander is back at
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/
Time for another time sink — tho it seems real posts will be coming a bit later.
My impression is that Scott Alexander never deleted his blog, though he did hide it for a few weeks.
I apologize if I implied that he had in fact hidden his blog or been cancelled.