Sabitlenmiş Tweet
“The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one’s time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.” - H.L. Mencken
So I see Kimmel got fired last night and we’re now at defcon 1. I have thoughts.
Let’s forget that the world kinda shrugged when a woman hopped on a plane after making a tweet and landed 12 hours later with half the world hating her. Let's forget that we missed that great opportunity to join together and say 'no'.
Let’s forget that a man was hounded from the company he founded for donating to a ballot initiative campaign, a ballot initiative that _passed_, in blue California.
Let’s forget that a professor was fired for pronouncing Chinese correctly.
Or that another professor was fired for questioning whether a policy explicitly benefitting blacks was racist.
Let’s forget that the editor of the New York Times was forced to resign for publishing an opinion piece by a sitting US senator.
Let’s forget that academics were fired, or censured, for doing science; not for doing bad science, but for doing good science that provided uncomfortable answers.
Let's forget that a political consultant was fired for saying political violence was politically counterproductive.
Let’s forget that a rocket scientist was fired for _wearing a shirt_ with women on it, an act that lacked any discernible political valence at all. A shirt that was actually made, and gifted to him, by a friend, _who is a woman_.
Let’s forget that a race car driver lost sponsorship because his father used a racial epithet before he was even born.
Let’s forget that none of those people got their lives back, or even much of an apology.
Let’s forget that the very worst of these acts is orders of magnitude more acceptable than cheering for the public assassination of people one disagrees with.
Let’s even forget that what Kimmel in particular said was anodyne by comparison to cheering for public murder, and even kinda funny. I chuckled at the bit about the fourth stage of grief being construction.
Let’s forget that most of you screaming about Kimmel in particular today sat idly by as the things I’ve mentioned above happened. At best you didn’t care. At worst, you tacitly approved. But let’s forget about that. Let’s forget about who started it.
You are asserting, now, today, that people - not just randos, but people in positions of trust; doctors, school teachers, bureaucrats, airline pilots, nurses, etc - should be able to openly celebrate assassination without consequences in their professional lives.
That is a spectacularly libertarian position to take! Congratulations! I agree with you! I could quibble, but fuck it, let’s go with that.
We have an opportunity to move forward.
Moving forward, especially with 'endorses murder' as a floor standard, means also accepting a lot of far less objectionable speech:
It means not firing or banning people with restrictionist ideas about immigration and who should be allowed to come here.
It means not firing or banning people who believe men cannot ever be women or that there are only two genders or that people who claim otherwise have a mental illness. It means not firing or banning people who refuse to use designer pronouns.
It means not firing or banning people who believe women shouldn't be allowed to vote.
It means not firing or banning people who believe that Islam is poison and cannot be integrated into the West.
It means not firing or banning people who hate Jews, whether they are on the right or the left.
It means not firing or banning people who hate black people, or believe them to be inferior.
It means not firing or banning people who believe group differences are at least in part due to genetics.
It means not firing professors who research this or other controversial ideas. It means not gatekeeping public research data to prevent such research. It means not gatekeeping PhD and peer review to prevent such research.
It means you have to give up on 'hate speech.' It means you have to confront the outraged with the fact that they have no right to not be offended. It means growing a skin.
It doesn't mean you have to like these people; it doesn't mean you have to be friends with them. But it does mean you have to behave civilly with them at work, and it means you have to give their ideas equal space in public debate.
More critically than anything else it means, as Mencken says above, actually defending everyone's _right_ to say the most horrible things you can imagine, without sanction. It means loudly objecting and demanding redress when anyone's livelihood or ability to participate in civic discourse is threatened, regardless of the reason.
That might sound expensive, but it's the only off-ramp. What's happening today is not innovation, it's escalation. If you can't do this, we just keep spiraling. We've been on this road for at least a decade.
If you can’t do this, can’t do _all of this_, then you are no better than Brendan Carr or Pam Bondi. You are _exactly the same_.
I opened with Mencken; I'll close with his much-less-quoted coda: “The trouble when people stop defending scoundrels is that they stop defending human liberty.”
So that’s where we are. Which way, Western Man?
English
