Andrew Sullivan supported the Iraq War and published excerpts of The Bell Curve in his allegedly serious intellectual magazine. He also was a Trig Palin truther. No shit people called him names.
In related news:
Funny how this shit isn’t all over KIA, etc, though. Jes Suis Charlie was about free speech, right? Those people are being silenced. Jon Chait gets paid thousands and thousands of dollars to broadcast his views to an audience of millions.
Sullivan needs to grow up.
Being aggressively, even unfairly, criticized isn’t remotely tantamount to being silenced. People with large and influential platforms have a particular need for aggressive scrutiny and vibrant critique. The world would be vastly improved if we were never again subjected to the self-victimizing whining of highly compensated and empowered journalists about how upset they are that people say mean things online about them and their lovely and talented friends.
There is a quantitative and a qualitative difference between hearing unkind things and the kind of mob shouting/cacophony that is intended to shut down opposing points of view, and/or intimidate critical voices into silence. No one cares that Vinny in the Bronx says untoward things about Brian Williams; its when the sole point is snuffing out dissent. Brownshirts be brownshirting, regardless of ideology.
Andrew Sullivan (and Jonathan Chait) is not angry about or in fear of brownshirts who will silence him. His job and his platform, which he can use to express whatever thoughts he wishes, are not under threat or at risk of being silenced. He is angry about Vinny.
There is a quantitative and a qualitative difference between hearing unkind things and the kind of mob shouting/cacophony that is intended to shut down opposing points of view, and/or intimidate critical voices into silence
This is a wonderful fairy tale to tell yourself, I get it. But sometimes people just sincerely disagree with you. Sometimes that disagreement is so strong, or over matters of such importance, that they think ill of you. If you’re so tired of getting called sexist, stop saying sexist shit.
There’s a reason you phrased this in the abstract. Sullivan and Chait’s whining here is obviously lingering fallout from how not everyone on the left mourned the housecleaning at The New Republic, because some people on the left remember the 90s. When you make it specific, when you clarify that “the mob” is calling Charles Murray a racist, and that they are calling him a racist because he thinks blacks are genetically inferior to whites… well, now. That’s not really “brownshirting”, is it?
And it’s tough to take the claims of dissent being snuffed out when the very claim is self-negated. Chait and Sullivan had huge audiences. You made that post without fear of reprisal. Who is being silenced, again? The Bell Curve got published, nobody burned it. People just said it was bad.
First they came for* the white supremacists writing racist nonsense, and I said nothing. Then they came for the misogynists sending death threats, and I said nothing.
*Brownshirts have, over the past 70 years, evolved from literally murdering dissidents to writing articles that call them racist and dumb. But I think we can all agree the spirit is the same. Goebbels just didn’t have access to Twitter, if he did he definitely would’ve replaced The Final Solution with tweets about BOFA.
Enidigm
3307
More drama for the … drama gods!
Somehow you’ve twisted yourself into defending the abusers of Anita Sarkessian, etc. too, of course, but you’ve always had more in common with them than anyone in the history of this board. People say vile shit to other people -Hey, no “biggie” to Virgil, as long as they really feel strongly about it.
Except it does matter, because no matter how ardent your feelings (and ignoring the endemic hypocrisy generally present in people hurling vile shit), they’re not as as important as veracity and the benefits obtained through greater participation in a broader exchange of ideas, which is impossible when social misfits like you (and Sarkessian’s attackers) go feral on anyone who says something you think you disagree with.
Alstein
3309
You can’t say anyone in history when we had someone actually banned from here for death threats on another member of the board.
The vile shit people said to AS wasn’t disagreement. It wasn’t engagement at all. It’s just unfocused rage, it’s not that they think she’s wrong about video games and women, they appear to think that NOBODY SHOULD TALK ABOUT THAT because it ruins our hobby. People aren’t tweeting at Chait that they are going to rape him over his heresy.
When someone calls something someone writes about race “racist”, that is engagement. It’s acknowledging the content. It might not be the response the author wanted, it might hurt their feelings, but that is an exchange of ideas.
The idea that people are being silenced by the PC police is laughable on its face, but when that idea is expressed by perhaps the leading center-left pundit in the entire country… How is anyone being silenced? AS wasn’t even silenced!
Of course, that’s conceding an incredible premise(central on the right but GG is a bipartisan cross ideology consumer revolt) that getting called “sexist” is “vile shit” equivalent to being sexist. Like you score it a draw when someone says some awful misogynist bullshit but then another person accurately labels that bullshit as misogynist.
Not how it works.
Another weighty article on a similar topic
“The fascists of the future will be called anti-fascists”
- wrongly attributed to Winston Churchill, most likely Huey Long but hey, both sides are pointing at each other and shouting fascist!, which is lulzworthy.
Chait really like to paint a bunch of academic edge cases as if it the norm and that we all living in some sort of highly constrained politically correct environment. It’s not far removed from Glenn Beck nattering on about how you should buy gold because the economy is on the brink of inevitable collapse.
Or it would be if the press didn’t fall for that crap from time to time. Sigh.
Busbecq
3316
OK, compare a random pic of the crowd at XOXO Fest to one of the crowd at any FGC event. One community is stridently anti-racist, one is stridently problematic. One is all white people, one is heavily multicultural. You and people like you are the real racists, Virgil. O_O
FGC
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat de Catalunya, a railway company in Catalonia, Spain
Friends General Conference, a Quaker organization
Female genital cutting
Family Group Conference, a social work practice
Family Groove Company, an unsigned American four piece band from Chicago, Illinois
Yikes!
Alstein
3318
The FGC’s problems come somewhat from its economic background, with a lot of low-income people. This is why you see it a lot less in some FG communities, and a lot more in others.
This does not mean they should get a pass, and I refuse to give the FGC a pass on this stuff.
Busbecq
3319
The implication was that if you want to get real about intersectionality in video games then you need to look for difficult cases like the FGC. It’s not enough to just have the right code words for your luxury entertainment activity, because then you end up like the Aryan audience at an Anita Sarkeesian XOXO fest talk. Brittle posers like Virgil think that as long as you are shrill enough then you’re inoculated from being a shitty person, but unsurprisingly he is just as implicated (maybe moreso) in all the badness he sees in others.
Much confusion is being caused by not showing this pic.
SJW haven XOXO on the left, “pasty white male neckbeard virgin nerds” from the Fighting Game Community on the right.
I wont link the latest FGC video doing the rounds, heads might explode in outrage.
