The increasingly trivial Mr. Sullivan has decided to relive the Greatest Conservative Hits of the 80s by feigning deep concerned over the "academic left" forming "virtual lynch-mobs" as a means of "cultural control and coercion".
Mr. Sullivan finds this especially to be true in New York, based on the 11 minutes he spent living there.
No, really.
The Rebirth Of Political CorrectnessMAR 26 2014 @ 2:38PM...I am mercifully insulated from the academic left, so I cannot know all the details of Freddie’s observations. But it seems to me that the ideology that virulently (and rightly) opposes racism, prejudice, homophobia, sexism, et al. has a weakness. These new sins of the left can easily become the only sins that really matter (which is ridiculous), and the punishment for those sins can easily morph into an attempt at cultural control and coercion. That’s particularly true, as I found living in New York, when there’s almost no one who disagrees with you. In that climate of epistemic closure (far more acute in the academy), these sins can get out of perspective and morph into eternal truths that require of the zeal of virtual lynch-mobs to enforce them...
Mr Sullivan continues:
The impulse to punish and purge sin through these kinds of illiberal tactics is not reserved to the left. But I wonder how many leftists willing to suppress bad speech understand their similarity to their Christianist opponents on the right. At some point, you have to pick between liberty and social purity. I pick liberty every time.
You know, maybe getting baked a lot really does fuck up your short-term memory. Especially the memories of Conservatives, which -- lets face it -- already come to the party redacted, emended, revised, elided, Etch-A-Sketched and generally Mementoed
--to the point of being ridiculous.
Otherwise I remain at a loss to explain how this righteous Defender of Free Speech against the academic left's virtual lynch-mobs could possibly be the same guy who, just a few short months ago, was leading his own virtual lynch-mob against Alec Baldwin
and doing his own, very-public happy dance once his mob pressured MSNBC into canning Baldwin over something mean said to a paparazzi who was stalking his child.
3 comments:
Andrew's a sensitive soul, and it hurts him on a deep psychic level when people insist on using proper terms or accurate language.
Now, the churls amongst you may find that rather strange, coming as it does from someone who makes a very good living doling out wordsmithery as Mr. Sullivan does. But that's because you are churls, and don't appreciate the finer points of Mr. Sullivan's professional space. When you insist on (for example) saying that apes and humans have a common evolutionary ancestor, it deeply offends the people who wish to make a simplistic and erroneous point by saying that modern humans are descended from apes. Such political correctness injures Mr. Sullivan in ways you cannot possibly appreciate.
And so, when approbation properly reserved for bunco artists attempting some sort of scam on the public through the vehicle of imprecise or offensive language, the real blame lies with those who would seek to re-establish the discussion using precise terms. Which means, as always, that it's libruls who are the real racists/homophobes/war mongers/you name it.
How in the hell he thinks "virulent" is an apt word for being against bigotry is beyond me.
Crack your dictionary, Sully, it doesn't mean what you think it means.
To have expectations of intellectual consistency from anyone on the right is like eating a shit sandwich.
Wholly unsatisfying.
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