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hogposting wrote

they didn’t want to challenge him and have a friendly interview

What are the situations where you really need to challenge someone, and what are the situations where someone can say something you don't 100% agree with and you just let it go? I don't recall Taibbi saying anything so out of line that it demanded opposition, and it's fine to have some discussions where different viewpoints are raised but you don't reach a consensus at that time.

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shellac OP wrote (edited )

Well the context of course is that Taibbi had just published that article decrying so called cancel culture, which caused a shitstorm as Taibbi is generally well respected on the left.

His article is filled with examples of things that are not actual threats to free speech. For example, Taibbi is upset that Lee Fang got called out on twitter because he went around asking “what about black on black crime”, that nonsense right wing refrain to BLM. Fang never lost his job and was right to get called out. Taibbi was just mad that people were mean to his friend on twitter.

I think everyone can agree that losing your “at will” employment over your speech is not a good precedent. But Taibbi is extending that to defending NYT Oped Editor Bennet losing his job. Please, that guy was doing an objectively shit job.

Maybe that example you mention in your other comment is an actual legit example of cancel culture gone amok, but even so the issue is greatly exaggerated IMO. I would have liked to see Will and Amber challenge him more on the examples from Taibbi’s article.

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hogposting wrote (edited )

For example, Taibbi is upset that Lee Fang got called out on twitter because he went around asking “what about black on black crime”

Well no, it looks like he didn't. Here's the interview Fang got in trouble over, linked to in that article. It looks like he wasn't asking people about black-on-black crime; a black person mentioned that as part of a two-minute comment about his thoughts on the protests. And Fang posted the whole two-minute comment, not just an edited "black-on-black crime" soundbite. The man who made that comment apparently didn't think Fang was baiting him or suggesting a certain answer, either: “I couldn’t believe they were coming for the man’s job over something I said... It was not Lee’s opinion. It was my opinion.”

It seems unlikely that Fang was proactively raising the topic of black-on-black crime, and it seems unlikely he was acting in bad faith in some other way. Putting someone's career on the line over that is pretty thin.

But Taibbi is extending that to defending NYT Oped Editor Bennet losing his job.

His take on Bennet is shit, but that's one anecdote provided to support some larger points. If the discussion gets too far into the specific facts of each underlying anecdote, all you do is end up exhuming a bunch of semi-obscure stories and you never get to the more substantive, more interesting points. Say I said "never take a running back in the first round of the NFL draft" and provided 10 players as examples. If a number of my underlying anecdotes (say 8 or 9 of those players) do a decent job of supporting my point, but you take issue with my factual description of 1 or 2 of them, we're never going to get to whether it's a good idea to take a running back in the first round if we spend all day arguing about whether my assessment of player number 10 is a good one.

I don't mind focusing on that larger point as long as it's (a) not based on complete bullshit and (b) raised in good faith.

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