Good For Harpers and the signatories.
From Harpers: A Letter On Justice and Open Debate
As to some responses to the responses: The Weinsteins are ahead of a likely new Left, supporting freer speech and thought, the pursuit of truth and new knowledge through the sciences, but also visions of sometimes drastic and radical social change (they’re on the Left).
I find myself somewhat sympathetic to their outside-looking-in critiques of much insitutional overbuild as well as those rolling over on speech (many in our universities, many in our media outlets, many in HR departments, many in our bureaucracies).
It would have taken very strong individuals and principled leadership in our institutions to resist much decay, inertia and bad incentives, apart from the radical speech capture, but here we are.
Oh, I’ll take a crack at it.
A) Heads of Newsrooms/Liberal magazines hired young hip kids to get clicks.
B) Those kids terrorized everyone else outside of the media liberals who hired them & held immunity no one else had.
C) Those kids are now turning on those who hired them. https://t.co/RjLVE7uMRw
— Eric Weinstein (@EricRWeinstein) July 8, 2020
From the quite libertarian Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:
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.
Many middle-of-the-road folks carrying something (a marriage, a job, reasonable thoughts, military duty, kids, a spot on the school board), seem to be realizing that many radicals driving social change aren’t necessarily leading us to a better place, but are leading us to a different place, which can include justified violence, mob logic, as well as speech and thought prohibitions.
Rod Dreher, writing for a liberal newsroom audience and a deeply religious audience, generally from the Right, on the Harper’s letter here:
Overall it’s a good letter. As I said, the people who signed it range from the center to various reaches of the Left. It’s exactly the kind of thing that people of the Right ought to welcome from men and women of good faith to our Left.
Take people guided by ideas at their word, and when they don’t allow your words, you’ve been warned.
“It has often been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools; it would be more accurate to say that socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.” —Theodore Dalrymple
— Steve Conatser (@conatser_steve) July 7, 2020
You don’t want to sin against the Church Of Secular Human Justice and The Right Political Opinions.
They are always with us, as are many of the same impulses within us:
There’s something very funny to me about the Quakers trying to stay hip with social-justice appeal:
Which maps are you using?