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Ok, let's take that at face value. Are the unspecified others who would burn them down justified? At the end of the day, is there any positive moral case for

Ok, let's take that at face value. Are the unspecified others who would burn them down justified? At the end of the day, is there any positive moral case for this?

fatbird 6y ago
The others aren't burning them down, the others are making clear that they have conditions on participating, and if they're met, they're happy to do so. Triaging your project to get it done by excluding the one person who makes five others leave, by forcing the one guy out, is basic management. It's the basic stuff of editorial decisions. As for the larger case of "blacklisting", as Kunin describes it, the moral case is that amplification is bad, that by appearing onstage with a villain, you dignify his villainy by taking it seriously, when it should be rejected out of hand; you provide a platform for odious ideas that, even met with a superior response, get more airtime and borrowed legitimacy than they would otherwise. You can certainly disagree that avoiding amplification justifies cancel culture, but acting like there isn't a moral case for not getting onstage with someone you don't want to amplify, begs the question.
- refenestrator 6y ago
  How many degrees of separation can you get in here and still feel justified? Kunin opposed the idea of blacklisting in general, he didn't even endorse any person. So now, for those who refuse to be published in the same magazine as him, the chain goes "unspecified other" -> Kunin didn't disavow -> they can't publish anything where Kunin might also publish? There's not even a specific idea they're condemning besides general open-mindedness. What about if the magazine had allowed him to publish, and you had been in there as well? Would you deserve censure as the third link? After all, you shared a stage with someone, and god only knows how many stages they've shared with how many people.
  - fatbird 6y ago
    Kunin opposes blacklisting that resulted from others voting with their feet. He heaps scorn on the editors of the magazine, who have, I think, the best defense of their actions, namely that it was him or them, and they chose them so they could continue publishing. Kunin's target is really the other contributors who effectively strongarmed the editors into ejecting him, and he later in his essay falls back on the old chestnut that the best response to terrible speech is better speech--an idea that the amplification argument is explicitly trying to reject. So what's really being discussed here is whether the other contributors leaving is justified, and I think that this is the best form of freedom of expression. It's the most powerful form of expression to walk away from someone uttering something you find terrible to express. And when they sputter that you should engage them to demonstrate your own superiority of thinking, that's just demanding you amplify them as the price of showing off yourself. Sometimes, the better response is really to just walk away. This is the marketplace of ideas at its most effective.
    - refenestrator 6y ago
      It's really funny to me that this is 'inclusivity'. We have a tiny clique of upper-middle-class people who want to control all discourse in the name of 'inclusivity'. If you're one million percent sure that you're right about everything, that's justifiable. You're maximizing inclusivity. But if you're not?
      - fatbird 6y ago
        No, what's really funny is suggesting that the editors of the Chicago Review and their contributors somehow CONTROL ALL DISCOURSE. It's as if Kunin has no other medium for the written word available to him. Of course I don't think I'm right about everything. But, as should be obvious, maximizing inclusivity means more than just ensuring an edgy, white, male poet with a university position is provided an audience.
        refenestrator 6y ago
        Well, they're controlling what they can. And if we're gonna bring ethnicity into this, those people are mostly white too, no? The average tech team I've been on is way less white than the woke median. And most of them don't buy it if you talk to them.
- dklp111 6y ago
  "Villain", "odious ideas"? Name them explicitly instead of the usual general ranting employed by demagogues like McCarthy in the past and the left inquisitors these days.
  - fatbird 6y ago
    I'm not naming them because I'm not addressing any specific ideas, I'm saying something about the mechanism of amplification and why there's a moral case for cancelling some people. It works in all directions. It's the marketplace of ideas.

Ok, let's take that at face value. Are the unspecified others who would burn them down justified? At the end of the day, is there any positive moral case for this?

fatbird 6y ago

The others aren't burning them down, the others are making clear that they have conditions on participating, and if they're met, they're happy to do so. Triaging your project to get it done by excluding the one person who makes five others leave, by forcing the one guy out, is basic management. It's the basic stuff of editorial decisions. As for the larger case of "blacklisting", as Kunin describes it, the moral case is that amplification is bad, that by appearing onstage with a villain, you dignify his villainy by taking it seriously, when it should be rejected out of hand; you provide a platform for odious ideas that, even met with a superior response, get more airtime and borrowed legitimacy than they would otherwise. You can certainly disagree that avoiding amplification justifies cancel culture, but acting like there isn't a moral case for not getting onstage with someone you don't want to amplify, begs the question.

refenestrator 6y ago
How many degrees of separation can you get in here and still feel justified? Kunin opposed the idea of blacklisting in general, he didn't even endorse any person. So now, for those who refuse to be published in the same magazine as him, the chain goes "unspecified other" -> Kunin didn't disavow -> they can't publish anything where Kunin might also publish? There's not even a specific idea they're condemning besides general open-mindedness. What about if the magazine had allowed him to publish, and you had been in there as well? Would you deserve censure as the third link? After all, you shared a stage with someone, and god only knows how many stages they've shared with how many people.
- fatbird 6y ago
  Kunin opposes blacklisting that resulted from others voting with their feet. He heaps scorn on the editors of the magazine, who have, I think, the best defense of their actions, namely that it was him or them, and they chose them so they could continue publishing. Kunin's target is really the other contributors who effectively strongarmed the editors into ejecting him, and he later in his essay falls back on the old chestnut that the best response to terrible speech is better speech--an idea that the amplification argument is explicitly trying to reject. So what's really being discussed here is whether the other contributors leaving is justified, and I think that this is the best form of freedom of expression. It's the most powerful form of expression to walk away from someone uttering something you find terrible to express. And when they sputter that you should engage them to demonstrate your own superiority of thinking, that's just demanding you amplify them as the price of showing off yourself. Sometimes, the better response is really to just walk away. This is the marketplace of ideas at its most effective.
  - refenestrator 6y ago
    It's really funny to me that this is 'inclusivity'. We have a tiny clique of upper-middle-class people who want to control all discourse in the name of 'inclusivity'. If you're one million percent sure that you're right about everything, that's justifiable. You're maximizing inclusivity. But if you're not?
    - fatbird 6y ago
      No, what's really funny is suggesting that the editors of the Chicago Review and their contributors somehow CONTROL ALL DISCOURSE. It's as if Kunin has no other medium for the written word available to him. Of course I don't think I'm right about everything. But, as should be obvious, maximizing inclusivity means more than just ensuring an edgy, white, male poet with a university position is provided an audience.
      - refenestrator 6y ago
        Well, they're controlling what they can. And if we're gonna bring ethnicity into this, those people are mostly white too, no? The average tech team I've been on is way less white than the woke median. And most of them don't buy it if you talk to them.
dklp111 6y ago
"Villain", "odious ideas"? Name them explicitly instead of the usual general ranting employed by demagogues like McCarthy in the past and the left inquisitors these days.
- fatbird 6y ago
  I'm not naming them because I'm not addressing any specific ideas, I'm saying something about the mechanism of amplification and why there's a moral case for cancelling some people. It works in all directions. It's the marketplace of ideas.