@hilzoy I don't understand the connections you're making among these ideas. A few thoughts on this thread: I agree the essay you cite is worth reading for the useful distinction it draws between freedom of association and free speech. 1/x
@hilzoy I do think that it misses the aspect of liberalism that Jonathan Rauch writes about in Kindly Inquisitors. 2/x
@hilzoy Turning to free speech and the ways it is chilled, violent threats and swatting are scary and uncontroversially illegal--they get less attention partly because they are not in fact contested.
@hilzoy What's more, as a journalist who gets occasional death threats, and knows many others who do too, it often isn't true that they're more chilling than other sorts of attempts to constrain debate.
@hilzoy As for police killings and identity politics, notice that e.g. Reason magazine is chock full of people who've been treating police violence as an emergency for twenty years... & also worry about cancel culture and identity politics. The debates seem logically separable & distinct
@hilzoy As for identity politics and police killings, there are both iterations I find unobjectionable-- "black lives matter" as a slogan for a movement seems reasonable to me--and ways in which its excesses lead many astray
@hilzoy (To cite two examples, people underestimate the connection between mental I'll was and police killings and have no idea that Native Americans are killed by police at the highest rate, both worth knowing)
@hilzoy I'd be curious to know what thinker in particular personifies your confusion or disagreement with (if we must) "reactionary liberalism" or whatever you want to call the thing your disagreeing with.
Because from where I'm sitting...
Because from where I'm sitting...
@hilzoy If you put (say) Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Kmele Foster, Matt Welch and Robby Soave in charge of American policing tomorrow you'd have the whole slate of Campaign Zero reforms plus drug legalization and prison reform instantly.
