Brad Pearce: "You shouldn't become a writer for the money- there isn't any- or the prestige- there also isn't any- or to change the world- because no one cares.
You should become a writer because you have personality problems, are otherwise unemployable, and have no other marketable skills."
,P.
One can apply this quote to dozens of major controversies that have erupted over the past five years.
Omar El Akkad:
"One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this."
If only I could conjure up a sprawling, complex, monied and politically-interconnected system of prophylactic gaslighting in order to protect me from any criticism at all for my own egregious misconduct. I don't have those resources.
I would need a very powerful social and economic system, indeed, to sell "logic" as idiotic as this: Whenever you criticize me for despicable things I actually did, you are criticizing my puppy, the Apple tree in my backyard and my second grade music teacher. That sad state of affair is where we currently are, as Glenn Greenwald describes.
Truly, it would take an immensely powerful political/economic force to sell that level of bullshit on a nationwide basis. It would take the kind of overwhelming power capable purchasing CBS and TikTok, as well as purchasing hundreds of members of Congress through AIPAC. With that kind of power and money and reach, we now see that one could even incentivize (or frighten) a college president to implore to her college students that 2 + 2 = 5.
What we are seeing in these modern times is that sufficient money and power can dispense with the simple logic and clear meaning of this Venn diagram:
Fun little street experiment. Statements about Iran are bad because Trump said them. But actually, Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris said them. Ooops. Too late to retract the venom.
Q: "I'm really curious to hear from you why you think free speech has the branding issue that you know it tends to have, and why for young people, there's this perception that you know is warped. "
Greg Lukianoff: "This is probably a rough thing to say in a group full of educators, but I do think that a lot of the quote, unquote, branding issue with freedom of speech came out of K through PhD. When I was working at the ACLU back in 1999 I could see something happening, what I called the slow motion train wreck on college campuses in particular. We qualified for public assistance when I was a kid, and then I ended up at a place like Stanford Law School. And this was definitely a very weird experience for me, and it was the first time I really ran into kids who were pretty mediocre, a little ambivalent about freedom of speech. Working Class liberals were very pro freedom of speech. I thought that's what made a liberal, a liberal. But it was only when I started meeting more upper class people who came from, you know, the 1% and tended to go to the fanciest schools, that I started really running into this very anti liberal kind of idea, and that's a very typical dynamic that essentially, once your politics become a super majority of an institution--you want free speech when you're the minority, because free speech protects minority opinions. You don't need it to protect the majority. The popular vote protects the majority power. And in higher ed, there was this intentional, clear shift that free speech started being problematized partially because the people in charge of higher ed kind of thought, well, if I'm the one deciding what will get you punished and what won't, I can be trusted with that. And that's the temptation of power always."