NYT reporter falsely accuses tech investor of using a slur

The irony is that this piece is, to use Glenn’s words, “penny-ante, trivial bullshit”.

Again, it’s a 3,000 word polemic rant in response to… a mistaken allegation in a tweet. It’s not speaking truth to power. It’s not shedding light on corruption. It’s just Glenn up on his high horse, spewing the same boring right-wing outragebait that he’s peddled for years.

> there's no compelling evidence that her original accusation about Andreessen was made in bad faith.

Yes there is. According to others on the call, the word "retard" was uttered by a woman, and in a completely appropriate manner given the context. Taylor claimed Mr. Andreesen said it, and that he said it in a manner that warranted calling out. When her "mistake" was revealed, she responded not with an apology, but another lie to divert blame. Her claims had no apparent relation with reality, and her recent antagonism of Mr. Andreesen gives us no reason to assume this was all a big misunderstanding.

She had a Clubhouse invite and reported on what (she thought) she heard. That's not surveillance any more than watching TV is surveillance. Would Greenwald appreciate his methods being referred to as KGB-like espionage? Because working a source to reveal classified material is how they would do it.

And it's seriously rich of him to accuse another journalist of pursuing an agenda.

I largely agree with you and think that my views fall closer to yours than the GPs. I'd endorse free speech absolutism as probably the best system in the vein of "Democracy is the worst system of government except for all the others". That being said

> Even if, like me, you think conservative ideas are generally worse than liberal ideas, you should want conservatives to rally around the best, most respectable conservative ideas rather around the worst ideas. They aren't going to convert from bad conservative ideas to good liberal ideas by way of coercion or suppression; rather, the best hope is for conservatives to see their best, most respectable ideas face off against the best, most respectable liberal ideas so that if/when they lose, as many as possible feel that their side's ideas were given a fair shot and they perhaps leave with a changed opinion (even if only incrementally).

I fully agree with this sentiment, but I think it misdiagnoses the biggest problem facing speech on the right. As I see it, the main problem is not ring wing views being drummed out of centrist publications (though this undoubtedly does happen and is a problem). Rather, it is instead 'respectable' conservative ideas being driven out of rightwing circles in favor of anti-intellectualism and conspiratorial nonsense.

I acknowledge the context of this article is bad behavior by censorious figures, I'll admit it is a serious free speech problem, but unfortunately I must dispute that it is the most important.

I think the mirror of this on the left manifests as performative wokeness, e.g. using whatever leftist language is at hand as a cudgel to settle political scores.

> It shouldn't surprise us that abandoning objectivity and neutrality for relativism and activism in our epistemological institutions would degrade trust and result in a rise of extremists; this is not only intuitive, but it's a historical pattern.

I'd moderate this statement slightly. We never had objectivity -- that's just an impossible yardstick for humans in human institutions. What we had was something like the pretense of objectivity, which was probably good enough for what we needed. I don't think people are wrong to point out that the old standards of objectivity were X which is problematic (where X might be white, or male or cis, or christian, or upper middle class, etc.) I agree that, granting this failing, explicitly turning to subjectivity is a bad response. But I think that needs to be explicitly argued to our friends on the left who might be tempted into the left's censorship spiral, and to just sweep it under the rug as an assumption will make them distrust your argument.

>It's not size, but power. Twitter's curation algorithms have massive unilateral influence on public opinion (reaching far beyond its own user-base) probably including the ability to sway national presidential elections.

Yes, and? "The ability to sway national presidential elections" (or any other elections) was of course one of the founding points of free speech in America. You just described major newspapers and publishers throughout the history of our nation, even before the advent of broadcast radio and television. Fox News also has massive unilateral influence on public opinion, as does CNN. That doesn't make them quasi-government at all

>I'm not aware of any utility companies with such power.

Then I must assume you aren't aware of any utility companies. It's not particularly challenging to imagine utility companies getting together and just deciding to cut off Republicans or Democrats. Like, literally just denying them any access to the electric grid, water/sewage, or data transfer beyond what they could then jury rig together themselves in regions where that's possible. You think that's less power then fucking Twitter? Are you for real?

>What proportion of your speech is by telegraph these days? I'm guessing it's a lot less than it would have been in 1891. For much of America, much of our speech especially our political speech takes place on social media, and thus "traditional" channels enjoy a much smaller proportion.

So what? It's not like we're forced to do that, and indeed I do not.

>Moreover, social media introduces an entirely new dimension: it's multicast. Your telegraph or phone call conveyed information to 1 other party at a time. A Tweet can be seen by millions or more.

I seem to vaguely recall these things, like way back in the day when we rode dinosaurs to work, called "newspapers", "books", "radio", "TV", and "web sites". All seemed somehow to have the ability to "broadcast" the ideas of individual people to large numbers of the public at a time. We seemed to do ok. And indeed that more recent one, the "web site" (I won't try to break your mind with "email", "IRC", or "newsgroups", baby steps), let you put out whatever you like to the world. It was lightweight and quite possible to host even on computing power of the level we now have in cereal box gadgets. It could All seemed to predate social media by a bit.

Oh wait we've still those? You can still use them? Oh.

What was your point again?