[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by PepsiFree

I'll offer this up to read in response (which touches on some of the same ideas, same examples, and even lightly addresses our social media conversation): https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily...wflake-defense

Thanks. It's an interesting way to frame the dichotomy. What immediately jumped out at me was the reference to Haidt and Lukianoff, who I was thinking about specifically while I read the Taibbi article I posted above. Marantz comes to the conclusion that their analysis is fine as far as it goes in the college setting, but that once you get into the real world and the stakes raise, that it doesn't translate, i.e.:

There was a national uproar over the column, and a backlash to the backlash. Much of it took a familiar form. The free-speech stalwarts accused the contextualists of being coddled snowflakes who couldn’t handle the rough and tumble of debate. But things have gone too far in this country for an old script about campus culture wars to be of much use.

First, while I'm sure that was much of the backlash, it isn't really the center of what the criticism is from Taibbi, which is that effectively what the New York Times has done in responding to the Cotton op-ed in the way that it did was to tell its audience, "look, we understand that this is a viewpoint shared by millions of Americans and apparently the President. But we can't have someone express it here. For that, you need to go watch Tucker Carlson. If you're interested in our view of the world exclusively, feel free to stick around".

That response is, I think, fatal to what he calls a "contextualist" view that views like Cotton's are so odious as to be dangerous to be allowed to be given air. Leave aside the fact that I do not trust anyone, let alone New York Times staffers with twitter accounts, to decide what views are adequately odious to be placed in that category. The reality is that refusing to air the disagreement and respond to it substantively is not somehow going to prevent violence from occurring. Rather, it fans the flames, by radicalizing isolated ideological elements. At this point, it seems inevitable that at some point, the polarization in the United States is going to reach a point where the mob who stormed the Michigan state house in April comes face to face with the mob that set fire to a bunch of buildings in Atlanta in May, and no amount of editorial discretion by mainstream news outlets is going to stop that from happening. It can't possibly. That's just not how people work. If anything, it will simply ensure that any such clash (or the thousands of others that happen on a smaller scale) will be all the more bitter for the entrenching the certainty that the other is evil, stupid, full of liars, and so on and so forth.

But second, I think the issue in newsrooms is precisely what Lukianoff and Haidt were talking about, five years later. Those same students in liberal arts disciplines have graduated and have found their way into the newsrooms of the Times and the Intercept, and this is the obvious, predictable result. If you go back and read the original piece by Haidt and Lukianoff that Marantz is referencing, it's actually a short-form psychological profile about the way those people, like Akela Lacy, deal with conflict and with viewpoints that make them uncomfortable. This was all wholly predictable, years ago.