Glass houses, stones, etc.

Someone comes to you with a letter advocating free speech, asking if you want to sign it. You ask, “Who’s signed it so far?” You are told that the only names they’ve gotten so far are Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Do you sign it?

I don’t know about you, but I’d sign it in a heartbeat. I’d think to myself “I’m a bit surprised to see these three names, but maybe they’ve recently seen the light.”

OK, the lady who wrote Harry Potter isn’t quite as evil as those three individuals, but you get my point. It doesn’t matter who else signs a letter. I’ve signed many letters and I never once knew who else intended to sign it. You are endorsing the content of the letter, not the signatories.

BTW, I’m told the lunatics have pretty much taken over the progressive movement. But who are all these people? I feel like Pauline Kael pondering her elusive Nixon voters—I’ve never once met a single fan of the cancel culture.

The National Review is in a gloating mode, reveling in their opportunity to point out how stupid the left is getting. A recent story was entitled:

The Forehead-Slappingly Stupid Attempt to Cancel Steven Pinker

Then another article with the same theme:

These are dark times. More important, these are stupid times, and Matt Yglesias has contributed more than his share to that. But to treat his signature on a letter endorsing an open culture as a threat is, incredibly enough, more absurd than anything we can remember Yglesias himself having written.

The 21st century certainly does seem dumber than the (late) 20th century. There were a few PC outrages during the Clinton years, but I don’t recall anything as silly as the stuff going on now. It’s still hard for me to believe that people are not joking when they suggest it’s immoral to sign a letter advocating free speech because someone with different political views also signed it. Sci-fi writers imagine waking up in a universe with different laws of physics; I feel like I’ve woken up in a place with different laws of logic. Even communism and fascism merely seemed evil; this cancel culture nonsense seems utterly crazy, incomprehensible.

And yet, the National Review couldn’t be satisfied with winning a few debating points. That had to overreach. (Never forget that conservatives are the “stupid party”.) They had to ruin everything by suggesting that Matt Yglesias frequently writes stupid things. That’s just stupid.

I probably agree with the National Review about twice as often as I agree with Matt Yglesias. But sorry, he’s extremely smart, a lot smarter than most of the people at the National Review. (Look at this recent defense of the greatness of Donald Trump if you want to get a sense of some of the people who write for NR.) Heck, I’d say Ezra Klein is also brilliant, and I’m currently mad at him for his treatment of Yglesias. I lose respect for people who can’t distinguish between “stupid” and “someone who’s politics I don’t like.” When I claim Trump’s stupid it’s because he acts stupid, not because I disagree with his politics, and certainly not because of the score he got on the SAT he paid someone to take for him.

[Yeah, he’s a billionaire, but he’s an affirmative action billionaire.]

And yet even at its worst, the National Review is head and shoulders above most of modern conservatism. The leader of America’s conservatives regularly tweets out statements of . . . let’s use the NR phrasing here . . . forehead slapping stupidity. And most of the conservative movement is afraid to criticize him, afraid they will be “cancelled” if they do. Has NR forgotten what happened to David French when he criticized Trump? (Not to mention the attacks on Yglesias’s colleague.) So it’s a bit rich to write an editorial mocking the mind-numbing stupidity on the left, without at least once nodding to the elephant in the room.

Here’s Anne Applebaum:

It felt like a tidal wave — until January 20 2017, when it suddenly didn’t. Trump was the president. A lot of people felt he had legitimacy and deserved support. Others came to like his rising stock market or the judges he appointed. Trump grew increasingly popular among the Republican voters who read conservative magazines, so the conservative magazines changed their tone. Trump was supported by the Republican donors who funded conservative organisations, so they changed their attitude too. Trump had jobs to give out, and people wanted them.

OK, conservative magazines had to prostitute themselves because their readers demanded it. I’m not naive; I know how the world works. But spare us your holier-than-thou attitude.

The 21st century is dumb and getting dumber every day. And it’s not just here. More and more you can find statements of Trumpian stupidity all over the world, by nationalist leaders (left and right) on almost every continent. Check out Brazil (right) or Mexico (left). Perhaps political systems (and news shows) are becoming more efficient than in the days of technocrats like Zedillo, giving voters (and viewers) what they really want—good and hard.

Tyler Cowen is almost invariably polite, or at least cautious and thoughtful, so you won’t see him call people stupid just because he disagrees with them. But this comes pretty close:

The actual problem is that we have a new bunch of “speech regulators” (not in the legal sense, not usually at least) who are especially humorless and obnoxious and I would say neurotic — in the personality psychology sense of that word.  I say let’s complain about the real problem, namely the moral fiber, emotional temperaments, and factual worldviews of the individuals who have arrogated the new speech censorship functions to themselves.

If that’s what Tyler is willing to say publicly, I can’t even imagine what he thinks privately.

Freddie deBoer says:

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

Maybe they aren’t pretending. Maybe they actually are as dumb as they seem. I know that’s hard to imagine, but can we totally rule out the possibility that it just might be true? Is there any objective evidence showing that they are faking their stupidity?

The internet was supposed to make us smarter. Maybe it’s all a horrible mistake. Maybe it’s making us dumber.

PS. OK, the Kael anecdote is apocryphal. But remember the line in that old John Ford film, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Update: I use the term “prostitute” as a metaphor; actual prostitutes are more honest than politicians—giving value for money.


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43 Responses to “Glass houses, stones, etc.”

  1. Gravatar of Mark Mark
    10. July 2020 at 08:18

    There’s another elephant in the room everyone missed: apparently Trump was about to ban TikTok: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-09/tiktok-teens-try-to-trick-trump-campaign-again (as India and possibly Hong Kong already have).

    Regardless of one’s feelings about modern PC or cancel culture (to be clear: I’m against), it’s clearly a much greater threat to free speech to shut down the main social media platform used by an entire generation of Americans, especially given that said Americans used it to campaign against Trump (and it seems pretty clear that stopping young people who overwhelmingly oppose him from communicating with one another is the real motivation here, the states goal of punishing China for COVID seems only very tenuously connected to TikTok, which had nothing to do with COVID). Yet the media, blogs, my social media, etc. were all talking about the Harper’s letter last week and this threat to ban TikTok was hardly mentioned (at least among non-TikTok users such as myself—according to the Bloomberg article, young TikTok users were in fact outraged and successfully pushed back on Trump’s plan).

    I wonder if people in the intellectual establishment aren’t just old and out of touch now. Someone who writes for Vox or is an untenured professor at a liberal arts school might be walking on eggshells in case of offending someone, but your typical young person who works at an apolitical organization and uses TikTok frequently probably faces zero threat from cancel culture but would find his ability to express his views curtailed if TikTok were cancelled. Such a young person might view Trump trying to portray himself as a defender of free speech and the intellectual establishment focused primarily on the threat to free speech from cancel culture and wonder what world those people are living in.

  2. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    10. July 2020 at 08:23

    Mark, You said:

    “I wonder if people in the intellectual establishment aren’t just old and out of touch now.”

    Guilty as charged. I don’t use social media, so I did not realize that Trump’s move against TikTok had a political dimension.

  3. Gravatar of Carl Carl
    10. July 2020 at 08:39

    I don’t think we’re getting dumber. I just think that before social media it was harder to gather a mob.

  4. Gravatar of POWELL POWELL
    10. July 2020 at 08:54

    I will indulge your steel man. Wouldn’t some level of beyesian updating be reasonable in that scenario? If they are the only signatories, something is happening that I don’t understand. And I think my time would be better spent trying to understand it then rushing to sign.

    TC once wrote growing up with the internet would be like trying to learn chess by always immediately checking what the best move is. If the internet has made us dumber, perhaps it’s that. And looking up the answer has become, check what your favorite Twitter users say. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone from avoiding cosigning with Hitler, but we should certainly have a strong enough prior than to care what jkr thinks.

  5. Gravatar of Brian Brian
    10. July 2020 at 09:00

    People used TikTok to muster fake registrations for the Tulsa re-election campaign rally in June. As is well known this resulted in a turnout that disappointed the campaign. It’s quite transparent why TikTok is a more of a target now, than in the past when there were just vague worries about something popular offered by a company that started in China.

  6. Gravatar of mbka mbka
    10. July 2020 at 09:04

    Honest, I am so glad that I don’t live in the US right now, it has become a horror show. It’s like a Maoism kind of Cultural Revolution. Factions battle factions, on each side, there is no logic, only allegiance matters, and ideological purity. When I read US editorials these days, carefully worded, snaking around the tripwires, it is shocking. It’s not just the PC enforcement of conformity that’s shocking, on the right and the left, it’s the gutlessness of the respective media, the writers, most of which just fold, repent, recite their sins, and toe the party line… I am really scratching my head right now. Stalinism evolving in front of my eyes, in the world’s leading liberal democracy.

  7. Gravatar of Josh Josh
    10. July 2020 at 09:59

    I don’t understand the confusion. There isn’t some secret agenda; everyone is being very clear what they believe. The progressive left has identified a handful of protected groups and if you are not in one of those groups you simply don’t get free speech. They don’t keep it a secret – this is literally spelled out in every article, media appearance or tweet. They feel that oppressor groups (which they have identified) cannot be allowed to speak unless the words they are saying are within a very narrow range of acceptability (technically it’s more like a hierarchy with each higher level of oppressor given narrower and narrower ranges). Again, they don’t hide this – it’s stated explicitly at every opportunity.

    Is this stupid? Not if you feel you can guarantee you’ll always be in one of the protected groups. (Which is probably why making the protected groups based in immutable factors like race and gender is so important – that way they can’t shift out from under you.) Overall it seems incredibly well planned, the opposite of stupid.

    (Btw I agree with you about Yglesias. I rarely agree with him politically but he’s very smart and he doesn’t ever seem to play these games. He’s one of the most numerate and substantive political writers out there, even if I usually think he comes to the wrong conclusion. It will be really sad if he’s forced into some form of submission because of this).

  8. Gravatar of bb bb
    10. July 2020 at 10:07

    @mark,
    On a side note, I got on TikTok about six months ago because I like to be at least a little bit aware of what my kids are seeing. TikTok is amazing. At a glance it is stupid, but after you spend a little time there it is very creative and just fun. It’s not unusual for me to realize that I had just been watching TikToks for 30 or 45 minutes.
    It’s also been very effective in sharing videos from the BLM protests- admittedly the feed is taylored to your preferences.
    It also made me appreciate K-Pop culture, which is extremely cool.
    It does have serious privacy issues, but I don’t think that’s why Trump is interested in it.

  9. Gravatar of John hall John hall
    10. July 2020 at 10:17

    Interesting perspective.

    I agree that the “cancel culture” is a problem throughout politics. Elements of the right-wing historically have used the same behavior. It is wrong when both sides do it.

    However, I think you are lumping a few different behaviors in your criticism. I identify personal attacks, pushing people to be fired, cancelling a subscription, and no longer donating as a few different behaviors that you mention. I am pretty firmly on the side against personal attacks and pushing for people to get fired as being wrong, absent criminal or truly despicable behavior. However, the other two are a little more nebulous. If a person has a subscription to a periodical that they determine (for whatever reason) is no longer worth the cost, then why would that person have an obligation to continue paying for it? Donating money to an organization is similar. If an organization is no longer consistent with a donor’s views, then why should they continue to support it?

  10. Gravatar of Carl Carl
    10. July 2020 at 10:23

    @Josh
    Good point. I have had a number of arguments with people recently where they tell me that only white men can be racist. I find the belief mind-numbingly stupid, but at the same time it’s sort of flattering to be considered part of the only group that has moral agency.

  11. Gravatar of bb bb
    10. July 2020 at 10:26

    Scott,
    I tend to think PC is overblown, but this one got my attention. Matt Yglesias seems like one of the nicest people on earth. If he is getting cancelled, I may need to adjust my priors.
    Quick search on the subject only yields right wing publications, which is interesting.

  12. Gravatar of Capt. J Parker Capt. J Parker
    10. July 2020 at 10:35

    This piece starts out very strong, discussing a logical fallacy, and doing so in the context of the right to free speech, an extremely vital right of a free society. But then Dr, Sumner ends with exactly the kind of intellectually lazy tactic of calling people you disagree with “stupid” that he justifiably derided a few paragraphs earlier. We all have bad days, I guess.

    I think the internet has made many of us more informed. But it has also made us more divided and contentious. And that contentiousness can cause even very bright people like Matt Yglesias to write some very st… Well, here: https://www.dailywire.com/news/11-stupid-things-voxcoms-matthew-yglesias-has-said-aaron-bandler

  13. Gravatar of marcus nunes marcus nunes
    10. July 2020 at 11:47

    “The 21st century is dumb and getting dumber every day.”
    Exactly!

  14. Gravatar of Nathan Taylor Nathan Taylor
    10. July 2020 at 12:09

    There’s a nice post by Tom Chivers on categorizing people as couplers or decouplers. It’s about Sam Harris-Ezra Klein, but the idea still applies.
    https://unherd.com/2020/02/eugenics-is-possible-is-not-the-same-as-eugenics-is-good/

    Let me quote:
    Nerst uses the term “decoupling”, and says that some people are “high-decouplers”, who are comfortable separating and isolating ideas like that.

    Other people are low-decouplers, who see ideas as inextricable from their contexts. For them, the ritual lacks magic power. You say “By X, I don’t mean Y,” but when you say X, they will still hear Y. The context in which Nerst was discussing it was a big row that broke out a year or two ago between Ezra Klein and Sam Harris after Harris interviewed Charles Murray about race and IQ.

    As a high-decoupler, Harris thought that it was OK to talk about what-ifs; if there are genetic components to racial differences, then we still need to treat everyone with equal dignity, etc: “I’m not saying there are, but if there are…” He thought he’d performed the ritual.

    Me again. I think default human psychology is to be a coupler, in particular about politics. It’s all who/whom. People with an analytic bent decouple the ideas of the letter from who signs it. But folk psychology is not like that. Impurity is contagious. So you say it doesn’t logically make sense to couple the idea and who signed it. Which is true enough. But most people don’t think that way. And assuming most people are like yourself is an err, when most people are not. To be clear, I’m a high decoupler myself. But I know most are not, and even have trouble understanding someone who is.

  15. Gravatar of Bob Bob
    10. July 2020 at 12:19

    I don’t know man, a brief google search for this thing turns up a bunch of right-wing outlets trying to gin up a story. Then I just listened to the latest Weeds podcast and Klein and Yglesias are talking about Covid, same as always. A writer tried to make this a thing, and nobody seems to be taking it very seriously. Is there some grand kerfuffle that I’m missing? Because I check Washington Post, Atlantic, Guardian, Vox, and CNN every day and this is literally the first that I heard about this.

    All the top hits trying to make this into a debacle are Fox News, Daily Mail, and National Review…because I guess there isn’t any other news to cover right now. It’s not like those outlets are actively spreading disinformation and supporting a President who is actively sabotaging our nation’s efforts to stop a deadly disease…or anything like that.

  16. Gravatar of Ray Lopez Ray Lopez
    10. July 2020 at 12:21

    Sumner: “You are told that the only names they’ve gotten so far are Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Do you sign it [a petition for free speech]? I don’t know about you, but I’d sign it in a heartbeat”

    Sumner has officially jumped the shark…most people would pause, not jump in wholeheartedly, if three –and only three– of the worse 20th century dictators were on a petition.

    Stalin: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.” often translated as: “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.”

  17. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    10. July 2020 at 12:25

    Scott,

    “Stupidity” as major explanation seems a bit too simple, even for explaining certain parts of the left. But I can understand that it is very tempting, and you gave plausible arguments, too.

    Maybe Yglesias is “stupid” as well, if he hasn’t realized before with what kind of people he is working in his company? Does the reaction of these Stalinists come as a surprise to him? Then he knows his own people pretty badly.

    I agree that the National Review approach is quite good. Almost all sides have their say and in fairness. Trump rejecters, Trump supporters, and neutrals, they are all there. I cannot see anything stupid about this either; on the contrary, this is exactly how a media outlet should be run.

    What was the joke about internet and stupidity again? In the past, there was this theory that one major reason for stupidity is lack of information. Since the Internet we can rule this one out.

    As I said, I would not claim that all of these people are completely stupid; let’s just say they see the world with completely different eyes, for whatever reason.

  18. Gravatar of Randomize Randomize
    10. July 2020 at 12:29

    “You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine.”

    This is the fatal flaw the the censor-crowd’s tyranny: they won’t be the censor. The censor will be whoever won the last presidential election and they may not like who that is. That’s why democracy and civil liberties work best in conjunction. The whiplash of tyranny being foisted upon the losing party every four years would break us.

  19. Gravatar of Christian List Christian List
    10. July 2020 at 13:14

    Scott,

    I think your example with Hitler, Stalin and Mao is a little too extreme. When these three people sign an appeal, it’s clear that it’s about very different things. You seem to assume that words have a neutral meaning relatively regardless of who says them. But at least since Orwell and Rorty we know that words can be recharged with almost any meaning.

    Otherwise I agree with Nathan’s good points. In general you can decouple any topic and one should do so.

    Nevertheless one should also become suspicious when people like Hitler, Mao, Stalin suddenly talk about “freedom” and “democracy”. They use exactly the same words as we do, but they mean entirely different things.

    These left-wing Stalinists, too, would never claim to be against freedom of speech. They “just” mean something else entirely when they use the term.

  20. Gravatar of sd0000 sd0000
    10. July 2020 at 13:17

    @Bob – you should probably expand the range of sources you get your news from – you seem to only digest news from solidly left-of-center sources. I’m not even saying go full right wing… but maybe include a WSJ or a Reuters or something in there. Do you feel confident you could pass an ideological turing test? From your posts in the last few threads it really seems you don’t really understand right-of-center views at all.

  21. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    10. July 2020 at 13:20

    Powell, Maybe, but of course not to the extent where one would blame others for signing.

    mbka, You said:

    “Honest, I am so glad that I don’t live in the US right now, it has become a horror show. It’s like a Maoism kind of Cultural Revolution.”

    But in a sense don’t we all live in the USA right now? One only meets these people on the internet, never in real life. It’s all one global internet village.

    John, I understand that there’s a market for writing what people want to hear, not what the reporter believes. But I don’t have to respect that market.

    Carl, Yes, the people saying that don’t know how racist they are being. Sad.

    Captain, You said:

    “But then Dr, Sumner ends with exactly the kind of intellectually lazy tactic of calling people you disagree with “stupid””

    Actually, I said exactly the opposite. One should never do that.

    Nathan, Interesting distinction.

    Bob, You said:

    “Because I check Washington Post, Atlantic, Guardian, Vox, and CNN every day and this is literally the first that I heard about this.”

    Trying reading the twitter feed for Yglesias if you want to know what happened. And of course they’re being civil. They are mature people with self-control, and they don’t want to provide ammunition for their enemies.

    Christian, You said:

    “I agree that the National Review approach is quite good.”

    Agree with whom?

    Randomize, Yes, they’ll be the censor until they are not. Until another group turns on them. Perhaps they never studied the French Revolution (or Maoist China.)

  22. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    10. July 2020 at 13:22

    Christian, You said:

    “I think your example with Hitler, Stalin and Mao is a little too extreme.”

    LOL. Not at all! It’s a perfectly plausible example. 🙂

  23. Gravatar of Alan Goldhammer Alan Goldhammer
    10. July 2020 at 13:27

    Cancel culture is present on both sides of the political spectrum as Max Boot documents in this op-ed: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/10/conservatives-have-cancel-culture-their-own/

    I don’t read Twitter feeds at all so maybe I am missing some amazing debates. I also never knew who Scott Alexander was until I read The New Yorker article on the contretemps with writer from The New York Times.

    I will boycott Goya products but that’s an individual decision.

  24. Gravatar of Postkey Postkey
    10. July 2020 at 13:59

    ‘Guff’ from the N.R..

    “Although it cannot of course be proved, one nevertheless feels about America — and about Americans generally — an essential decency. We may have our pathetic snobberies and cultural inadequacies; injustices doubtless linger throughout our social institutions. But we also live by a set of definably American ideals, believing in equal opportunity, in encouraging ambition, in an ultimate fairness for all. As national ideals, these remain admirable and go a long way toward making America the country it is.”

    https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2020/07/27/america-warts-and-all/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

    “Decency” for the ‘plutocrats’? “Ultimate fairness” for the plutocrats?
    “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens
    Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page
    Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented. A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues. Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism. “
    https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf

  25. Gravatar of bb bb
    10. July 2020 at 14:18

    @Bob
    – “I don’t know man, a brief google search for this thing turns up a bunch of right-wing outlets trying to gin up a story. Then I just listened to the latest Weeds podcast and Klein and Yglesias are talking about Covid, same as always. A writer tried to make this a thing, and nobody seems to be taking it very seriously. Is there some grand kerfuffle that I’m missing? Because I check Washington Post, Atlantic, Guardian, Vox, and CNN every day and this is literally the first that I heard about this.”

    I did my own search and found an article from the Washington Post. Oh wait, it’s a column by Megan McCardle. Found tweets from Ezra and Matt both expressing that they support the woman’s right to express her views on Matt signing the letter. This does seem to be a nothing burger as far as Vox goes. Not commenting on the larger controversy, but the Vox angle seems to be overplayed.
    As for signing letter: I would never sign a letter or memo without knowing the distribution, who the other signers are, and concurrence from the other signers on the final draft. I don’t work in academics or media, but in my business we are pretty careful about what we sign.
    But I’ll admit that I have no experience in the academy and limited experience with the press. When journalists go public against their employers they seem to be taking a risk, but I imagine it can go both ways. At Vox it seems like you can take a shot at the king and live to fight another day.

  26. Gravatar of Bob Bob
    10. July 2020 at 14:26

    Scott, I check Twitter about once a week and immediately regret my decision every time. An entire medium that constrains communication to 280 characters is inherently going to reward snarky quips and punish well-thought-out discussion.

  27. Gravatar of Bob Bob
    10. July 2020 at 14:30

    bb are you referring to this? Doesn’t even seem to address Yglesias by name:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/10/real-problem-with-cancel-culture/

    And I do love the standard that the right fights to maintain everyday:
    – What the President Tweets every day doesn’t matter.
    – Whatever any journalist ever tweets is a scandal!

  28. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    10. July 2020 at 15:49

    Ezra Klein
    @ezraklein
    ·
    Jul 9
    A lot of debates that sell themselves as being about free speech are actually about power. And there’s *a lot* of power in being able to claim, and hold, the mantle of free speech defender.

    —30—

    Oddly enough, Klein’s demented narrative may have been somewhat true 40 years ago. There was Free Speech, but who owned the major newspapers, and TV networks, radio stations etc. ?

    Today, people such as Scott Sumner can mount up their own small platforms and gain a reading audience. Certainly there is much more quality copy to read today then before the internet, and i count Sumner in that category (despite his acerbic nature).

    I wish Sumner would look at yen-dollar exchange rates since 2015.

    Did Sumner once say monetary policy works in part through exchange rates? Probably not. Interesting and perhaps educational topic.

  29. Gravatar of Benjamin Cole Benjamin Cole
    10. July 2020 at 17:14

    Aside—

    The Econlog blog is evidently run by a zealous martinet, who polices the site with all the censorious and hysterical minute-scrutiny now associated with the American left.

    Cancel culture is everywhere! Even in “libertarian” blogs.

    Scott Sumner deserves kudos for rarely censoring anyone.

  30. Gravatar of Russ Abbott Russ Abbott
    10. July 2020 at 18:10

    Scott,

    The “cancel culture” is more a creation of the right than of the left.

    As you say, “I’ve never once met a single fan of the cancel culture.” I haven’t either–and I read the liberal Twitter posts all the time. I don’t know anyone on Twitter who seriously wants to can cancel Stephen Pinker.

    There may be people on the left that talk that way. (There are people everywhere who say silly things.) But the emphasis on the “Cancel culture” comes from the right. It was created by people who want to find something to criticize about the left.

    Tucker Carlson had to make up the story that Tammy Duckworth “hates” the US because there really wasn’t much else to ding her for. In the same way, many on the right claim that the left is establishing a cancel culture because they aren’t capable of finding a coherent argument against them.

    We see it in Trump all the time. He had to claim that if Biden is elected the US will become a communist society (or like Venezuala, or whatever other horror story he makes up) because he can’t make a coherent argument against him.

    The way to cancel the cancel culture is not to agree that it’s a bad thing but to ignore it. It was no serious power. Ignore it, and it will fade away.

  31. Gravatar of Mark Z Mark Z
    10. July 2020 at 22:43

    The NR said that Yglesias says stupid things, not that he’s stupid. The two aren’t the same. Generally smart people can believe and say dumb things, and almost every smart person believes at least one stupid thing.

    Russ: “The way to cancel the cancel culture is not to agree that it’s a bad thing but to ignore it. It was no serious power. Ignore it, and it will fade away.”
    Right, if your boss fires you, just ignore it, keep showing up to work, I’m sure it’ll just go away.

  32. Gravatar of Mark Z Mark Z
    10. July 2020 at 23:06

    (other) Mark, if Harper’s is the intellectual establishment here (if anything it’s charitable to the establishment to characterize the Harper letter as representative of it; the NYT would be a better mascot), then it’s not that the intellectual establishment is focused on cancel culture (it clearly isn’t; if you read the letter, it focuses on Trump and the far right), but that it timidly asserts that leftists can be illiberal too, and that’s bad. And the fact that Trump can’t legally ban TikTok but employers can legally fire their employees factors into the calculus.

  33. Gravatar of mbka mbka
    11. July 2020 at 04:54

    Scott,

    “But in a sense don’t we all live in the USA right now? One only meets these people on the internet, never in real life. It’s all one global internet village.”

    Very true, and in many ways I participate more in “public discourse” in and about the US, than I do in Singapore where I live. And this is largely due to the pro-eminence of US cultural woes and debates, the sheer visibility of the US, on the internet.

    That said: much of the recent culture wars arriving here from across the Pacific just feels so alien to me that it might as well come from Mars. It’s not just that I don’t meet the people, I rarely “meet” that kind of people locally either. But the cultural concerns just seem so alien and distant. The world works differently here. The debates from the US feel like some TV show or stage play, and I feel more like an audience member observing some strange Kabuki theatre. Hard to describe. I used to feel more connected, but the latest BS coming over is just too far from my daily lived reality. For starters, I can’t read US media anymore. I used to, as a source of information on US and international affairs. But these days, whatever you read just feels like hysterically overwrought propaganda, both left and right. It feels like every piece is a hit piece, and the daily news on most US websites is just a droning hammering in of their respective tribal affiliation. It’s absolutely predictable and therefore utterly boring. The same opinion sauce over any and all events, totally unreflective.

    There’s still some beacons where a gifted author would make differentiated statements every single time and for every single issue. Your site is one of those. Then SSC, even more long-form and incredibly data based, now in peril. MR is a good news aggregator and of course less biased than typical news media, though not genuinely a source of deep insight in my experience. And a few others.

    But overall the internet has become a tribal war zone. I guess I’ll just read more books, I have lost interest in “current affairs” except for entertainment in small doses.

  34. Gravatar of Michael Sandifer Michael Sandifer
    11. July 2020 at 05:37

    Very well put post. The transformation of Rich Lowry has been particularly disturbing, though not as disturbing as that of Lindsey Graham.

  35. Gravatar of Alan Goldhammer Alan Goldhammer
    11. July 2020 at 08:30

    @Benjamin Cole – Yes, I have had posts on Econolog disappear several minutes after they were successfully up on the site. It is weird to me as I don’t use profanity of call people names. I do occasionally point out when someone is wrong or there might be an alternative explanation.

  36. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    11. July 2020 at 08:56

    bb, You said:

    “When journalists go public against their employers they seem to be taking a risk”

    So signing a petition favoring free speech is going against your employer, when your employer is a newspaper?

    You said:

    “Found tweets from Ezra and Matt both expressing that they support the woman’s right to express her views on Matt signing the letter.”

    So you don’t think these two had a pretty bitter dispute? Not sure if you missed the relevant tweets or if you just aren’t very good at reading people.

    The mark of a civilized person is the ability to appear calm and polite as they seethe with anger.

    Bob, You said:

    “And I do love the standard that the right fights to maintain everyday:
    – What the President Tweets every day doesn’t matter.
    – Whatever any journalist ever tweets is a scandal!”

    True, but this is also a problem with the left. The left is much harder on their fellow leftists than they are on right wingers—who get off scot free from stuff ten times worse than the minor errors of left leaning journalists and academics. For the right to get into trouble they must be as racist as the writer for Tucker Carlson.

    If I were a left winger my blog would have been cancelled long ago—instead it’s ignored. The left is destroying itself.

    Mark Z, You said:

    “The NR said that Yglesias says stupid things, not that he’s stupid. The two aren’t the same.”

    Don’t get cute. Stupid is as stupid does. In any case, Yglesias does not frequently say stupid things. He frequently says left wing things that the NR disagrees with. There’s a difference.

    mbka, I also feel like I’ve arrived from another planet.

  37. Gravatar of Tacticus Tacticus
    11. July 2020 at 09:14

    As an admitted (extremely-privileged) elitist, I really hate both democracy and the internet. The internet should have stayed NSFNET and the vote should never have been given to everyone.

    Re: TikTok: as far as I understand, the app is practically malware and probably should be banned. Kids are adaptable; they’ll find a new platform in no time.

  38. Gravatar of bb bb
    11. July 2020 at 09:18

    @scott,
    -“So signing a petition favoring free speech is going against your employer, when your employer is a newspaper?”
    Here I was talking about the Vox employee calling out Matt, who I assume has more power there. I was also thinking about the NYT reporters calling out Bennet. They took a risk in doing so. It appears they won, but they might find themselves picked off one by one over time. Maybe their expense reports have flaws. My point is that these people have real skin in the game. I think that is different than a twitter mob or a group of college students. Just making a distinction.

    – “So you don’t think these two had a pretty bitter dispute? Not sure if you missed the relevant tweets or if you just aren’t very good at reading people.

    The mark of a civilized person is the ability to appear calm and polite as they seethe with anger.”

    Good point. I have no clue what’s going on behind closed doors.

  39. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    12. July 2020 at 09:34

    Tacitus, You said:

    “as far as I understand”

    But isn’t that the problem? How much do any of us understand? Isn’t it better to let customers decide, when in doubt?

  40. Gravatar of Tacticus Tacticus
    12. July 2020 at 15:57

    Well, I’ve been receiving warnings about TikTok from myriad private security and private intelligence companies since late January. My point was more that banning the app is not necessarily a ‘political’ act to hurt the youngsters.

    I may be horribly wrong, but I believe it will no longer be a ‘thing’ one year from now.

  41. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    13. July 2020 at 09:45

    Tacitus, I’m not saying it won’t be banned, but I’ve seen zero evidence of it being a security risk.

    Feel free to provide links to such evidence. Without evidence, I won’t change my mind.

  42. Gravatar of KevinK KevinK
    16. July 2020 at 05:22

    Scott, on the TikTok front, here’s a twitter thread with links that I find fairly convincing: https://twitter.com/d1rtydan/status/1277081198624337920

  43. Gravatar of ssumner ssumner
    16. July 2020 at 10:56

    Kevin, I have no problem with consumers being warned about those features.

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