Free society reading for July 18-19
Topics: Cancel culture, Andrew Sullivan returns to blogging
The world is slowly turning its mind to the catastrophic consequences of growing debt and long-term unemployment. This topic will grow in the months ahead and will lead to significant political and economic disruption.
Top issues facing the free society atm:
Pandemic and the consequences of mishandling the crisis
Cancel culture and threats to free speech
Racism and efforts to combat racism
Riots and disorder in US cities
Rising government debt
Cathy Young writes an in-depth piece on “cancel culture”: In Defense of the Letter
“Collective decisions to ostracize people for bad opinions can have a very real chilling effect on speech, ideas, art, literature, scholarship, and so on. This is not to say that a free society cannot or should not make such decisions: it inevitably will. But in a free society, the lines that demarcate unacceptable speech should be very clearly and narrowly drawn, and the scope of acceptable — i.e., not socially punishable — discourse should be as broad as possible. Declaring viewpoints and ideas held by large segments of the public to be “beyond the pale” should require an extraordinarily compelling case.”
The legendary Andrew Sullivan is going back to blogging. He writes about why he’s leaving the mainstream media:
“If the mainstream media will not host a diversity of opinion, or puts the “moral clarity” of some self-appointed saints before the goal of objectivity in reporting, if it treats writers as mere avatars for their race and gender or gender identity, rather than as unique individuals whose identity is largely irrelevant, then the nonmainstream needs to pick up the slack.”
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A former Prime Minister of Iceland writes about the power of social media from the point of view of someone who used social media and outrage culture to attain power: The state of things to come