I had a tweet a while ago, which I can’t seem to find now, about how one of the things that draws me to conservative circles is that you can mostly just say what you mean and expect that you’ll get a fairly charitable response in return, whereas in progressive circles the norm is to do a lot of throat clearing and, “to be clear,” and 20 or 30 rounds of, “of course we’re just talking about averages and there are exceptions” that won’t ever be enough, because there’s always somebody who says, “you say that’s the average, but how can you explain that I just thought of an exception?” no matter how careful you are.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s a gender dimension to this. The thing about young men is that when they are together in a group they like to be crass, they like to generalize, they like to throw out absurd hypotheticals they can’t defend, they like to have arguments just for the sake of it.
It’s basically the exact opposite of every progressive norm.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn there’s a gender dimension to this. The thing about young men is that when they are together in a group they like to be crass, they like to generalize, they like to throw out absurd hypotheticals they can’t defend, they like to have arguments just for the sake of it.
It’s basically the exact opposite of every progressive norm.
It couldn’t be clearer that progressives no longer even believe that these are mere preferences, that you could of course have an environment like the one I describe and that would be fine, it’s just that it’s not for them. No, they really quite clearly believe that their mode of discourse is correct and the other mode of discourse is immoral. They don’t think you’re allowed to just talk about anything you want any way you want. This came for the workplace first, but these norms have spread to every organization they influence. They genuinely believe that the mode of discourse I’m describing is deeply wrong, immoral, and illegitimate.
Certainly this is part of what’s going on with the debate about misinformation. And its core, they don’t like the way a guy like Joe Rogan approaches the world. They think there are things you just shouldn’t talk about in certain ways. They start with that proposition and then backfill specific instances of things he’s said that are convenient for making the argument they were already emotionally committed to.
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