If this escalates further America should offer Taiwanese the same visa deal Britain offered Hong Kong: those who love freedom can come here and let China have the land. https://t.co/T4kFhsAaIX
— Megan McArdle (@asymmetricinfo) January 23, 2021
A new character is born into the political world. It's a costume, easily patched together, humorous and scary. We'll see how widespread that becomes. I remember some Wisconsin characters — in the 2011 Wisconsin protests — who tried something similar. Here's a photograph I took back then:It begins pic.twitter.com/J0ssP4VKig
— ☄ marquis de posade 🥂 LOOT CREW 🏖 (@acczibit) January 23, 2021
Twitter’s very format encourages the sort of thing that is likely to get one canceled: short and context-free, composed in an instant, posted without reflection. Moreover, that very speed and effortlessness make it easy to form — or join — a mob going after someone else’s tweets. The result resembles the proverbial standoff where everyone has a loaded gun pointed at the head of someone else.
Ideally, everyone would simultaneously disarm, but no one trusts anyone else to do so. So instead, people try to make themselves safer through preemptive revenge. Or take refuge in communities of extremists who will at least protect them from anyone on the other side, no matter what they say, as long as it is sufficiently far left or right. In exchange, of course, they demand that you smile tolerantly at the worst your own side can dish out. ...
Within each ideological space, there’s tightening conformity to radical views; between them, growing interpersonal viciousness and a total lack of understanding. This dynamic is obviously bad for the people who inadvertently blow themselves up in a few seconds of casual typing. But it’s worse for the institutions they work for, which become hostage to the stupidest or most extreme thing any employees have said in their most thoughtless moments....
I wouldn’t trust anyone who talked about me and my friends with the arrogant contempt that I routinely see emanating from journalists and academics on Twitter; we shouldn’t be surprised that conservatives don’t, either. Especially as they watch institutions be forced by Twitter mobs to hew to an ever-narrower ideological line. These costs of tweeting aren’t balanced by the benefits....
[Most Twitter users] hate what Twitter does to their organizations and friends, they hate the pervasive fear, they even hate how much time they waste that could have been spent on better work. But they’re addicted to the attention, or fear ceding mindshare to people who are willing to stay in the fray....
"Mindshare" is a term from the sphere of marketing. The OED has this quote from Wired in 1998: "When a salesman says, ‘I'm building mindshare,’ what he means is he hasn't sold a thing."
Back to McArdle:
[T]his is really a collective action problem: People feel they have to stay on because others do, and others are on for the same reason. Collective action problems can generally be solved only institutionally, which is why I think the big media outlets and the major think tanks should tell their employees to read Twitter all they like, but not to post anything more controversial than baby pictures or recipes for cornbread. Those who are lucky enough to have reputations big enough to lose — or to work for organizations that do — will be better off if they take their voices back inside the institutions that were designed to amplify their best work, rather than their worst moments. But only if they make that journey together.
If the people with the biggest reputations shut up, it leaves more room for those with less to lose. It's hard to believe big media will shut down its Twitter voices, and I think it's pathetic that these illustrious folk can't produce appropriate tweets.
I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly? How does that happen? Why did he think there were people on the left who corresponded to the "hang Mike Pence" set on the right? Why didn't he hesitate to use that most inflammatory word, "lynch"? Why does Niskanen need censorship to protect Will Wilkerson from himself?
I suspect that the people of the left — like Niskanen — need to suppress their association with violence. Right now — with Trump's trial looming — there's an exceedingly strong interest in plumping up the belief that the right and not the left is given to dangerous violence. And lynching is not just deadly violence, it is an abusive, perfunctory execution — a mockery of the due process of law. There's a special problem showing enthusiasm for lynching as the Senate gears up to summarily inflict permanent political death on Donald Trump.
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116 comments:
Explain how that permanent political death works again?
---lynching is not just deadly violence, it is an abusive, perfunctory execution
We are a civilized society, our executions should NOT be abusive. Friendly, is the goal to shoot for.
Interesting that China flew their bombers over Taiwan right after China Joe took office. China wouldn’t invade Taiwan, would it?
It's especially important to maintain a legitimate process if you're going to use the death penalty.
Lynching isn't just murder. It's a group that is not legitimate government taking on a government-like role and purporting to impose a punishment for a violation of law or something like law. The absence of due process is extreme. With a run-of-the-mill murder, you don't think in terms of a failure of due process, because the murderer is not adopting a government-like pose.
Freedom?? In America today?? You won't find that under a Biden Presidency. You must stay locked in your house afraid...and you must NEVER EVER vote for anybody but a radical Progressive or you are a Domestic Terrorist.
Besides...China is buying up a lot of land in America, so pretty soon we have have to leave and let them have it??
"Explain how that permanent political death works again?"
When I say "the Senate gears up to summarily inflict permanent political death on Donald Trump," I don't mean to say that they will be successful, only that this is the goal. I don't know if the votes are there, and maybe some Senators will approach their role like honest juror, though all are compromised by self-interest.
If the vote is to convict and the disqualification from holding office again is imposed, will that work to take Trump out of American politics? I think the answer is obviously no. I think that's what GOP Senators want to do, but they're deluded to depend on that.
My employer has been clear that my personal and non-company social media use may result in my termination, even for topics that do not directly affect or reference the company.
They clearly recognize a risk to the brand reputation for employee conduct.
This does cause me to moderate my speech in public. It’s not that kind of chilling effect that the Constitution protects.
Say lynch all you want, as far as I'm concerned.
The idea that it matters is part of "changing the locks" to keep the out-people from making it in. You never know what will be the next rule unless you're the one making the rules.
No locks, is the answer.
I think there are many companies that discourage the use of social media for things that would be unflattering *to them*. The thing is, the loudest voices on Twitter work for companies who are happy have one sided, ever-escalating voices. And many corporations feel they, too, must join in the various social causes of the day. How many emails did you get about BLM? I got them from just about every American company I get an email from. And they tsk tsk on Twitter and Facebook, too. Silence became violence.
So it's no wonder people lose what the boundaries are. Right now, it's pretty simple. If you don't hate Trump, shut up.
I think the companies won't tell their employees to stop this because it is exactly what they want.
I'll say to McArdle, these are your friends. You - not in social media but in your column- warned that Trump was going to start a nuclear war. Instead, he did the exact opposite. What part have you played in this escalation? Why did you feel comfortable doing it?
Diogenes would have been in trouble with tweets. Just another cancelled guy you never heard of.
All the fuss over Twitter will be a great subtopic in the future U.S. History textbooks. The students will say to their teachers, you could only write a hundred characters and people lost their jobs because of it? Didn't they have Instathink?
Let’s say the Senate decided to follow the House and shortsightedly decide to summarily inflict political death?
Wouldn’t a sizable portion of the country look at that as a martyrdom?
KJE said...
My employer has been clear that my personal and non-company social media use may result in my termination, even for topics that do not directly affect or reference the company.
They clearly recognize a risk to the brand reputation for employee conduct
Exactly.
I remember when Facebook first got big, all the parents warned that kids were being bullied! And kids needed to stop putting their party pictures out there because it would stop them from getting into the colleges they wanted.
And then, fast forward...the adults are doing all the bullying and unflattering self-portrayals right out there in public. And being praised by their peers!
Speaking of murder. I had a nightmare last night where I accidentally killed someone with the left edge of my iPad. Because I am outspoken, the pretrial publicity was a concern. I hired Steve Johnson as my lawyer. I used to work with him, but he does real estate. In my dream I thought I had hired the wrong Steve Johnson.
Get off all of these social media.Starve the Beast.
I assume Megan was fine with what happened to native Americans.
"The Land" kind of underplays what China is/would be taking over, does it not?
It's the Forsworn.
:)
My friend worked for a company that did background checks. Their first stop was Facebook. And that was before social media became turbocharged with political fanaticism. Now, depending on the employer's political leanings, social media comments are either a resume enhancement or the death knell for a job. Why take the chance?
Trump's tweets disputed "changing the locks" as a leftist power move. That's probably why it's necessary to get rid of Trump.
If the left can't change the locks every day, any old lowlife can get in on the inside.
Trump: we don't need no fucking locks.
So Trump wound up being a racist bully, trying two locks on him.
It seems strange that there is no tune out movement on social media.
Yet here I am posting. And you reading...
I’m aware enough to recognize the dichotomy here.
KJE said...
Let’s say the Senate decided to follow the House and shortsightedly decide to summarily inflict political death?
Wouldn’t a sizable portion of the country look at that as a martyrdom?
1/24/21, 6:30 AM
---
It would be "political death" only in the holding office sense of the phrase. Otherwise, Trump's influence would remain and would likely grow. He would be still around, still very much alive, and with even more of a grudge than he has now. How many people he would inspire, how many he would influence to destroy the current establishment?
The important thing about locks is that you can never say what you think. This is handy for the lockmakers.
The way to defeat lockmaking is to tweet more. The thing is, twitter sees that and will cancel you off.
The parallels between the prevailing culture's treatment of Trump, culminating in this trial, and the treatment Jesus met with on Earth, also culminating in a trial, are striking. If you treat the Cheeto Jesus like Jesus, a country that responds viscerally to the Jesus story will start to see the guy the same way - as a persecuted savior.
When the entire world looks like it's contained by chastity belts, picking locks is the solution to every problem.
"...how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly?" He said what he thought. A Kinsley gaffe.
"If you treat the Cheeto Jesus like Jesus, a country that responds viscerally to the Jesus story will start to see the guy the same way - as a persecuted savior."
----
If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can imagine.
I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly? How does that happen? Why did he think there were people on the left who corresponded to the "hang Mike Pence" set on the right? Why didn't he hesitate to use that most inflammatory word, "lynch"? Why does Niskanen need censorship to protect Will Wilkerson from himself?
The death of free speech begins with, “You shouldn’t say that.”
And it’s followed by an extensive lecture of why the lecturing person is superior.
If we’re foolish enough to start a values competition, it ends with seven billion minus one of us being forced to shut up.
McArdle is friends with Wilkinson and she "admires" the Niskanen Center.
Figures.
The cancelled Wilkinson approved the cancellation of people who had expressed their honest, non-violent opinions on important issues.
The president of Niskanen Center, Jerry Taylor, is an Antifa fan who advocates attacking private citizens on their own property and beating them to death. (Same link, above).
I enjoyed McCardle's columns until she disappeared behind the WaPo paywall. (I think Jeff Bezos has enough money, thanx.)
"The parallels between the prevailing culture's treatment of Trump, culminating in this trial, and the treatment Jesus met with on Earth, also culminating in a trial, are striking."
And as the Pharisees tried to snuff out the movement, it ultimately spread like wildfire. You have to admit, the libs specialize in unintended consequences.
Gamaliel's in the book of Acts: "I say to you, stay away from these men and leave them alone, for if the source of this plan or movement is men, it will be overthrown; but if the source is God, you will not be able to overthrow them; or else you may even be found fighting against God.”
A new character is born into the political world. It's a costume, easily patched together, humorous and scary.
That guy is cool in the costume. Iconic.
BUT...for 10 years there has been Techno Viking. He didn't hide HIS face. If you are going to be revolutionary...be out and proud.
(I really need more coffee this morning. We have been up since 3am because we forgot to turn off the water in the shop to avoid a water break... and it is 14 degrees this morning....sorry for my weirdo posts ��)
I don't see a Jeasus comparison. But I do see a mob mentality by the democrats. This last impeachment has a rather sad justification of, "We don't like and we never want to see you again. You didn't play by our rules."
I think I was correct in that with Donald Trump the political class saw their access to graft severely impeded. The democrat base who are more than a little lite in the reason department took up the outrage banner without real understanding what was at stake because they had no way to directly benefit from the graft. Public sector employees who are direct recipients of public corruption are more than willing to express the party meme of the day. They are the partys foot soldiers. We see that here every day. They use the same words and phrases. They hold the same opinions-which they somehow fail to logically support-of their political betters and their betters in the public media. Which is always the same paraphrased message.
There is not one democrat who is willing to serve the public good unless they can define that good and collect the graft from it.
These people are not the friends of this country or its constitution.
If one is foolish enough to communicate in a medium that is "short and context-free, composed in an instant, posted without reflection," then one is foolish.
"Ideally, everyone would simultaneously disarm, but no one trusts anyone else to do so. So instead, people try to make themselves safer through preemptive revenge. Or take refuge in communities of extremists who will at least protect them from anyone on the other side, no matter what they say, as long as it is sufficiently far left or right. In exchange, of course, they demand that you smile tolerantly at the worst your own side can dish out. ..."
-- The right has been asking the left to disarm for years; the right is just now truly entering the "cancel culture" wars of Twitter. For many years, they let people say stupid things. Think, people who made rape jokes about Christine O'Donnell and Sarah Palin got slaps on the wrist! If Republicans were "armed" in this exchange, those people would be gone. They're not.
Telling two sides to stop fighting, when one is kicking the other while they're down, shows an incomplete understanding of the situation, which is surprising, since I thought McCardle might have a better understanding.
Taiwan is not Hong Kong. Typical of McCardle, an over-sold superficial twit. But she’s right about twitter. Nobody who uses their real name should do more than post cat pics.
Exactly. Worshipping the anti-christ (pseudokhristos) is predicted in the new testament. Can I get an Amen, Brother?
Twitter's actions over the last month really make me appreciate the Althouse blog and its commitment to free speech.
and she probably voted for the faction that put taiwan in danger, we were the last hope mcardle,
Ann, I think you missed the most salient point. McArdle wants the Left off of Twitter because, in the grotesque, ugly tweets the Left posts--especially those in the media, conservatives see just how much they are hated. McArdle notes that, of course, conservatives distrust the media; the media has shown conservatives exactly who they (the media) are.
Stop tweeting! Don't betray your true nature!
Her first instinct is to tell Taiwan to surrender--and America to help them retreat.
She may be right--nobody in the current power structure is going to stand up to China.
Interesting that McCardle euphemizes "proverbial standoff" to avoid use of the proverbial name "Mexican standoff," likely because she is aware that using it could result in cancellation.
And now, like the professor who was fired for using the n-word in a discussion of the perils of using the n-word, I have probably opened myself up to potential cancellation.
The Wikipedia entry for "Mexican standoff" suggests an alternative term, "mutual zugzwang," where parties involved are compelled to act, but acting puts them in a weaker position. Unfortunately, using the term also requires defining it.
America should offer Taiwanese the same visa deal Britain offered Hong Kong
That depends on whether the refugees would vote Democrat or not. There is a reason that the Australian Labor party didn't want Hong Kong refugees setting up in Australia.
"...how did Will Wilkinson screw up so badly?"
In the olden days there was a rule about what could be said in "mixed company". The women could tell dirty jokes etc. amongst themselves and likewise for the men. The swamp critters just need to exercise a little more discretion, like MM did when using the phrase "The result resembles the proverbial standoff". Proverbial is not generally a synonym for Mexican.
China threatens Taiwan immediately after Xiden is sworn in? Oh, say it isn’t so! “How can that be?” cried the Democrat moron.
"I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly? How does that happen? Why did he think there were people on the left who corresponded to the "hang Mike Pence" set on the right? Why didn't he hesitate to use that most inflammatory word, "lynch"? Why does Niskanen need censorship to protect Will Wilkerson from himself?"
TDS has spread far and wide during the last five years. Especially among the so-called elites that believe they are our betters.
“Right now — with Trump's trial looming — there's an exceedingly strong interest in plumping up the belief that the right and not the left is given to dangerous violence.“
Truth is what supports the State, comrade.
McArdle used to be useful reading for getting a feel about how the DC/NYC professional class thought about the world. But her TDS became so overwhelming that her usefulness declined to nothing.
he was tongue in cheek like bill maher, now jerry taylor, his boss, jerry taylor, was dead serious about giving the mobs 'room to destroy' one might argue that one of the purposes behind the spread of wuhan flu, was to suppress whatever embers were in the hong kong resistance,
Allowing China to take Taiwan while offering citizenship to any Taiwanese refuges would trigger a backlash across the Pacific that would destroy our reputation, as well as the entire global trade system that McArdle professes to support.
I used to read McCardle a lot, and considered her very interesting when she wrote on economic issues.
Since migrating to the Washington Post, her columns became much more political, much less analytical, much more wrong in their analyses (in my view).
I found it very disappointing, but not surprising. The last 4 years caused a lot of reasonable people to lose their marbles.
Blogger jeremyabrams said...
"The parallels between the prevailing culture's treatment of Trump, culminating in this trial, and the treatment Jesus met with on Earth, also culminating in a trial, are striking."
Althouse, there's never been a better time for my long advocated "Trump is like Jesus" tag!
Twitter is one step away from Thoughtcrime.
If this escalates further America should offer Taiwanese the same visa deal Britain offered Hong Kong: those who love freedom can come here and let China have the land.
Isn't this the same destructive instinct that pushes the US toward war, like in Syria? When faced with a totalitarian threat, drain the populace of all its most productive, freedom loving people who would be essential to a functioning society.
Send them machine guns made with highly modular parts instead.
So does she say how we're supposed to handle an influx of Taiwanese refugees and the migrant caravans that will soon be streaming to our southern border? How are we going to find jobs, housing, medical care, etc. during the long dark winter of the pandemic?
Regarding Twitter, as my mother used to say about television, you can always turn it off.
As to GOP senators voting to convict Trump, it all depends on how they feel about keeping their jobs. There will be a trial at which it will be shown that the riot at the Capitol was planned on Facebook and Twitter long before Trump ever opened his trap on January 6. And the most Trump said was standard “be strong” political rhetoric.
How would you vote on impeachment because of “incitement”? I predict Romney and Murkowski and one or two others will vote to convict, with Manchin voting to acquit.
And when Romney and Murkowski cast those votes, their careers in the Senate will have an end date guaranteed.
I used to read McCardle a lot, and considered her very interesting when she wrote on economic issues.
Since migrating to the Washington Post, her columns became much more political, much less analytical, much more wrong in their analyses (in my view).
When I taught intelligence analysis, I used as an example of how cultural differences can shape perceptions and decisions one of her articles on the cultural differences between city and rural folk as it relates to housing and cars.
Almost all the cancellations are people on the left......they have a cartoon vision of how life works and Twitter is like catnip for them. LET THEM TWEET!
Let them tweet and let them take the consequences when they screw up. Free speech was always thus.
Let the Will Wilkersons show us who they are.
McMegan lives in DC and is married to a think-tank guy. The day Trump won the presidency, every one of her work and social peers lost their effing minds. I can't blame her for getting caught up in the TDS.
On the main topic, everyone should know by now that sarcasm does not work in written form. Especially on the Internet. The problem is that you think you are writing something so absurd that it is obvious that it must be sarcasm. However, there is nothing so absurd you could write sarcastically that someone else has written with dead seriousness.
Seriously, if people took Swift's eating Irish babies thing seriously, your "obvious" sarcasm is not that obvious.
I mentioned that financial thriller series, based on the book by an italian honcho at julius baer, devils, where it showed some of the backstory behind various global events like the subprime bubble, the fall of qaddaffi, one of them was the fall of berlusconi, the populist bete noire of the lawfare class in italy, as part of the attack on the pigs, his successor salvini, was routed in a parliamentary maneuver, since he was an opponent of the chinese colonization of the peninsula
I enjoyed McCardle's columns until she disappeared behind the WaPo paywall. (I think Jeff Bezos has enough money, thanx.)
I read her too, back when she was pretending to be a libertarian.
Not to worry. J. Farmer has assured us China has no interest in Taiwan.
Trump is like Trump is like Trump. His presence dominated and, it seems, his absence is creating a giant absence which is also dominating. But how and what an absence will effect in this country in the digital age of information and pictures is just impossible to say. Yet I think it will be quite obviously predictable and recognizable as soon as we see it. His absence, for instance, completely dominated the 2020 inauguration. I would never have predicted that particular effect yet it was an obvious consequence as soon as it happened. China is overflying Taiwan - in Trump's absence, not in Biden's Presidency. Naturally. Antifa is attacking the Democrats - in Trump's absence. Naturally. And so it will go - naturally yet totally unpredictably, where? till they want him back more than we do?
For some ppl social media is an addiction, just like alcoholism. Their best intentions are thrown out by a disease. One hundred yrs since AA and we've discovered/created a new substance. Eventually we'll adopt the same rigor for the afflicted.
Her error is thinking that posting cornbread recipes will be treated as innocuous. It will not, it will be “cultural appropriation”.
wendybar: Recently I've been thinking about how I had more freedom as an elementary schooler in 1980s America than I have as an adult in today's Progressive oligarchy.
It is instructive and edifying to note that Marie Antoinette and, later, Robespierre were killed after a certain amount of due process. A lynching is the will of the mob. An execution is The Will of the People. If you want industrial scale, mass produced murder there's no better vehicle than The Will of the People. Lynchings are an inefficient and retail way of eliminating enemies. Guillontines and gulags are the way to go if you want to eliminate not just one particular enemy but the Enemies of the People. Trump, if convicted, is just a start. After Trump the deluge.
I was a huge Megan fan for many years. She used to be pretty libertarian and interesting.
Even at Atlantic she still was able to keep her voice. Now at WaPo she s just another one tottering the company line.
I really detest the ideas that a company can discipline someone for what they do in their non work life. Provided one is not identified with the company like a spooks or ceo or the like and is not referencing the company.
I don't know what to do about other than perhaps throwing out back in the fascists faces. They want to do it to us? Fuck t hat, right back Atcha explicitly including their company affiliation.
We may be deplorable white supremacists but we are still 73mm people who spend money. What company wants to risk that many potential customers. Deplorable as we are, our money is still green.
John Henry
Yeah, she used to be interesting; her deconstruction of the racist trope(s) around fried chicken was outstanding.
And now I'm hankering for some 'pone.
Narr
Let N equal any term
President Trump should take the impeachment and embrace it.
"they are so scared shirtless of you that they had to impeach me not once but twice! Even though I am no longer in office. That's soon incredible power you have"
In the senate trial, if that happens, he needs to defend himself vigorously calling witnesses, going on tv (newsmax, oan) rumble, YouTube, his own website etc and being out and loud.
Make it as painful a process as possible.
John Henry
The word "Lynching" tends to have racial overtones but isn't it another word for vigilante justice?
Vigilante justice represents a failure of the regular, govt, justice to work. The failure may be real or perceived.
Remember the undertaker in the Godfather? There was one, legitimate justice for others but it did not work for immigrants. "for justice one must go to the godfather"
If the justice system becomes perceived as illegitimate (see general Flynn) people will seek non - governmental justice and it will not be pretty.
Perception is the key it almost doesn't matter if the system is legitimate or not. It must be perceived as legitimate.
Actual legitimacy does help with the perception, of course.
Ditto elections.
John Henry
Love the fact that McCardle doesn’t have the huevos to say “Mexican stand-off”. There is no plausible rationale one could articulate to support the proposition that the term demeans Mexicans (much less all lateeninks), but she knows she’d be denounced as racist anyway, and is too big a pussy to risk defending herself.
I was a regular reader of McCardle for many years—-before Twitter, before she joined WaPo. Her husband (Peter Suderman) is a regular on the Reason Podcast which I listen to pretty regularly. They were both openly anti-Trump bank in 2016, but they still managed to think and speak reasonably about the world in spite of that.
Running up to the 2020 election their Trump Derangement Syndrome boiled over and seemed to drench and scorch all of their critical faculties. I had to turn away from both of them. I may check back on them sometime in the future.
Lucien said...
(much less all lateeninks)
I believe you are using the word ironic here but please don't. Whenever you use it, even ironically, you demean hundreds of millions of people.
I am pretty sure that was not your intention.
John Henry
Ann, There is a long-standing legal debate over whether an impeached and convicted president can be barred from elected office. Compare Josh Chafetz, "Impeachment and Assassination," 95 MINN. L. REV. 347, 351 (2010) with Seth Barrett Tillman, "Interpreting Precise Constitutional Text: The Argument for a “New” Interpretation of the Incompatibility Clause, the Removal & Disqualification Clause, and the Religious Test Clause—A Response to Professor Josh Chafetz’s Impeachment & Assassination," 61 Cleve. St. L. Rev. 285 (2013). This debates predates the rise of Trump and is not partisan but rather technical. It’s not up to the Senate to decide, either. It would eventually get to the Supreme Court on appeal by an impeached and convicted president in a suit for an injunction against some state official who has refused to put the former president on the ballot.
And when Romney and Murkowski cast those votes, their careers in the Senate will have an end date guaranteed.
Romney’s not up for re-election until 2024. That gives him a couple years, early 2023 to late 2024, to pretend to have seen the light. Also he’ll be 77 in 2024 and he may choose to retire (to prevent himself from being retired) if he sees the writing on the wall. Lisa Murkowski is up for reelection in 2022 and may be more vulnerable. First, she’s arrogant. She survived losing a primary to a Tea Party candidate in 2010, where she won in the General via a write-in campaign, so she feels completely invulnerable. But Sarah Palin is available as a legitimate primary opponent, and there is no love lost between Sarah Palin and the Murkowski family. So if Joe Biden does something stupid with respect to Alaska oil (and thus far his energy-related executive orders have not displayed an ounce of sanity), I think Murkowski will be vulnerable.
Fun fact about Lisa Murkowski. Although she has won all three of her senatorial elections, in 2004, 2010, and 2016, she has never achieved as much as 49% of the vote. She won a three-way race in 2010 with less than 40% of the vote.
I’m not so sure R Senators can buy their peace by convicting Trump and barring him from running for office.
Four years from now, if he tries to run again, someone will try to keep his name off of a primary or general election ballot, at which point it seems like his right of action to challenge the constitutionality of the ban will ripen. Better yet, voters may challenge such a ban to the ground that it tramples on their right to vote for the candidate they want. (I think this is why attempts at federal term limits failed.)
So Republicans could just be buying themselves a whole heap of trouble in the future if the ditch Trump.
"A new character is born into the political world. It's a costume, easily patched together, humorous and scary."
Yes, indeed, I saw my first such a character -- a 20-something crossing SE McCloughlin with a Viking Horned hat, everything else was normal 20-something pdx guy.
I enjoyed it, took it as definitely a message, the new #Resistance.
I’m certain R Senators cannot buy their peace by convicting Trump and barring him from running for office.
@Lucien, FIFY. Their voters will hate them and Democrats will treat them with disdain anyway.
Is Alcee Hastings a precedent? A federal judge, he was impeached, convicted and removed.
3 year later he ran for congress and has been there nearly 30 years now.
An enterprising journalist might ask him if he thinks impeachment/conviction bars president trump from running in 2024.
Or whether it should.
John Henry
There is a lot to unpack here, and I am not sure where to begin, so let's start with this from Ms. McArdle:
"This dynamic is obviously bad for the people who inadvertently blow themselves up in a few seconds of casual typing. But it’s worse for the institutions they work for"
Sorry, but this is just horseshit from a writer I used to read and admire regularly. The institutions aren't being taken down by the cancel mob- it is the individuals. Sorry, Megan, you are just full of it here. The institutions are part of the fucking problem, and really the biggest part of it. Niskanen fired Wilkinson. No one forced them to do it- they did it under basically no pressure at all.
Now, I am no defender of Will Wilkinson- to me he is basically a fraud who sold whatever principles he appeared to have 10 years ago for a paycheck from rich progressives (a complaint I have about McArdle, too), but what he wrote wasn't even remotely worth firing him over, and I strongly suspect that if he had written "arrest and execute Pence", no one would have fired him, especially Niskanen. The thing that got him into trouble was the word "lynch". Additionally, he wouldn't have been fired for writing "lynch Pence" if he hadn't been one of Niskanen's named "libertarian" thinkers, and one that had actually been a libertarian at one point in the past. Had he been, for example, Brad DeLong, nothing would have happened to him.
I enjoy schadenfreude a great deal- in one very real sense Wilkinson deserved to get fired, but it is still just another example of the double standard where the left gets away with what would get someone on the right fired. Wilkinson's problem was that the mask he is wearing identified him as on the right, a place he hasn't been in over half a decade.
Lynching and murder are the same thing. The victims die either way. No murder is run-of-the-mill. Elevating lynching over murder encourages the habit of diminishing the humanity of victims of murder, for precisely the same reason lynch mobs diminished the humanity of their victims.
Consider the systemic legal leniency that placed incredibly violent offenders back on the streets or didn’t bother to take them off the streets in the first place, starting around 1966 and escalating until sentencing reform in the mid-1990s. If the hundreds of thousands of murders that ensued over that bloody quarter century don’t represent a failure of due process, I don’t know what does. Call it three decades of lynching by the defense bar and the liberal bench.
If you look at the article Fernandinande links to, you’ll see that both Wilkinson and the head of the Niskanen Center who cancelled him repeatedly endorse cancelling or killing people, just the right kind of people. And McCardle approves of them? OK.
Annie-I-am is right: this is a sleazy feint by McCardle to encourage her peers and pals to stop telling conservatives how much the MSM and their corporate sponsors plan to diminish their humanity in coming years.
Regarding the guys running around wearing horned hoods, they remind me of a Sioux buffalo headdress, though how an iconic Native American headdress came to be worn by a Russian is a good question. IMAO those who have called it a Viking helmet are mistaken, and I note that European historians insist that Vikings didn't wear helmets with wings or horns on them.
As to Will Wilkerson, anyone who casually suggests that someone be lynched has no judgement whatsoever, and does not belong in the marketplace of ideas.
Everyone who has ever criticized Twitter has made an embarrassing social media posting (or several). Is that ironic? Or contradictory? Or does the first thing follow logically from the second?
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Do irony and sarcasm really not work in print or online? Or do they work too well? And does everything one posts simultaneous mean what it literally says and its opposite? Does that complicate things or simplify them?
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Letting areas of the world be taken over and providing asylum here for everyone who doesn't like it there would a very foolish and nearsighted policy, but it's the sort of thing one expects from libertarians, and now post-libertarians, who have apparently become a thing lately.
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The Niskanen Center (which I never heard of before) looks to be something like a "false flag" operation, the libertarian version of the Lincoln Project, an organization funded by wealthy progressives (or at least wealthy climate change crusaders) to influence those on the other side.
The Lefties are just mad because Will tipped their hand.
Horned helmets: Maybe the deradicalization/deprogramming should involve a staging of Wagner's Ring cycle.
Scott Patton said, "In the olden days there was a rule about what could be said in "mixed company".
John Henry said, "I really detest the ideas that a company can discipline someone for what they do in their non work life."
I think this is a big part of the issue. Twitter broadcasts the private-joke-in-poor-taste to a world of mixed company. It's a virtual and anonymous world as well. No friends to help you recover from a faux pas.
Free speech supporters (and I'm certainly one) like to say, "The antidote to bad speech is more speech". This is true for topical public speech. Maybe Twitter enables too much irrelevant speech that should and normally would remain private.
Also, this violence-endorsing fellow Jerry Taylor, the head of a purported think-tank, doesn’t know the difference between “whose” and “who’s.” Plus, he repeatedly endorsed a double lynching of innocent people by a large mob — a rare event even in the terrible Red Record years. Some think-tank.
Again, Megan McCardle approves of these people. And the idiot fringe who stormed the Capitol were the detritus of her political philosophy and that of Reason Magazine — the libertarian-leftitarians. Or Liberaltarians, as Steve Sailor puts it. Not the social conservatives. Not the old guy libertarian conservatives either.
The truthers types from both fringes whom Matt Taibbi brilliantly describes in his latest book.
Bob Smith said...
The Lefties are just mad because Will tipped their hand.
They're upset because cancel culture's been turned back on them and rightly so, since the majority of them have seem to lack self control and always go for the hot take.
How about McArdle move somewhere else and let enemy strangers and invaders have her home?
History has a couple of prior examples of McArdle's idea --
The plan to ship Blacks back to Africa so that whites could have their homes.
The plan to ship European Jews to Madagascar so that Aryans could have their homes.
Forcible relocation is a form of GENOCIDE you asshat.
"It’s time for major institutions to make their employees get off of Twitter."
No. It's time for major institutions to tell the Cancel Culture to STFU. "What Josephine Blow does on her own time is on her, not on us. Stop trying to ruin their lives"
Typical, instead of forcing free speech on citizens, democrats want to restrict their free speech for "their own good". Fascists.
Balaji Srinivasan is worth following on this right now he is bouncing around a lot of thoughts about pseudonymity including this little thread: https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1353380909219602436
The War of the Intellectuals has been going for 20+ years. Blogging really turned it hot when professors could escape the gatekeepers of media and publishers and speak directly to a wider off-campus audience. Twitter gave the "journalists" a new weapon to build brand and attack opposition. Intellectuals make the case for the legitimacy of the State or some faction in exchange for their sinecures. It's nice work if you can get it. The market ripped open when the media/publisher stranglehold was broken. How many times have we heard the lamentation that people can just say stuff without an editor sign off.
Then along came Donald Trump, whose media presence had the effect of herding the cats. Now he's off-line. Now those who aspire or simply want to maintain will fight each other. The fights are so vicious because social media is middle school girl wars writ large. Why produce something valuable when you can just tear down others.
And let's face it, middle school is most uncivil. Calls for civility are really just attempts to find advantage, the knives sharpened for the opening.
"There's a special problem showing enthusiasm for lynching as the Senate gears up to summarily inflict permanent political death on Donald Trump."
From Wilkinson's silly tweet to that characterization of it is a bit much, no? "Enthusiasm for lynching"? Hardly -- just the usual dumb Rambo-speak trying to convey something other than the wimpy reality of whoever writes like that. The whole thing deserves the 'civility bullshit' tag.
Ann Althouse said...
It's especially important to maintain a legitimate process if you're going to use the death penalty.
Lynching isn't just murder. It's a group that is not legitimate government taking on a government-like role and purporting to impose a punishment for a violation of law or something like law.
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Hello Prof : a violation of law or something like law. >>> so how is this different from a private group upholding and applying /Community Standards/ which seems to be legally tenable?
Sure, let the Taiwanese in. They're smart and work hard.
But first throw out every current illegal (or put them in jail, your choice) first.
We should absolutely have the right to choose who comes to live here or visit here.
Just like you have the right to say who visits or stays in your house.
To think otherwise means you're either a moron or a liberal...but I repeat myself.
"If the vote is to convict and the disqualification from holding office again is imposed, will that work to take Trump out of American politics? I think the answer is obviously no. I think that's what GOP Senators want to do, but they're deluded to depend on that."
Why have you not chimed in on the legality of this, AA.
Unlike real law professors, we've only stayed at a Holiday Inn Express...
First: I have no interest/use in Twitter, FB etc... Got rid of Instagram because it triggered too much spending!
My Big Law employer trotted out some kind of widget/app last year that linked employee's social media accounts to the firm - in some way. Don't fully understand it (maybe someone here knows more) as that is an email I generally delete after determining: "Has nothing to do with billable work." Not sure if any problems have arisen due to this or how many employees use this - but this seems like an unecessary feature to add to one's social media and rife with potential problems.
I continue to believe that Wilkinson's firing was arranged as part of a publicity campaign to support his paid subscription activity at Substack.
There is a tremendous amount of money to be made.
McArdle's proposal is just an echo of Mencken's that the US should allow Jews fleeing from Nazidom to emigrate here, made publicly in January 1939.
But it's even more unrealistic than his was.
Narr
Apfels and Mandarins
Ideally, everyone would get off twitter and go back to individual blogs. I left twitter 2 years ago and have not missed it. I even quit looking at Twitchy. Left Facebook 3 weeks ago and have not missed it either. MeWe is clunky, but better than FB. Instapundit, Althouse, MeWe, Parler when it gets online more consistently. Leave twitter to the fascists.
Planned Partisan? An elective abortion/cancellation for social progress.
I have no real problem with the tweet because it starts with the word IF.
It's not really a directive.
Althouse, your statement that if good people don't engage on Twitter then it just means that worse people will be left on the platform ignores the problem of compelled speech. I read your comments overall as encouraging people post robustly on Twitter but "simply" moderate themselves and avoid posting obvious violence. But we know better!! Silence = Violence in today's brave new world. You just posted about a woman whose life was blasted because she didn't jump quite high enough in her enthusiasm for BLM! It's not a matter of "avoiding obvious nasty posts" about lynching.
The only safe sane position is to just not BE on Twitter.
But Sarah Palin is available as a legitimate primary opponent, and there is no love lost between Sarah Palin and the Murkowski family.
I doubt Sarah Palin could win an election in Alaska. The Democrats did a very good job destroying her. The assault on her with a flood of ethics attacks that forced her to defend at her own expense was a master stroke.
Murkowski is as big a crook as her father but she has paid off a lot of Alaska pols.
I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly?
He's a leftist. He's used to living in a world where only the other guys have to watch what they say.
Welcome to the New Rules, pal.
I disagree with McMegan. We need to keep all these idiots on Twitter, so they can show the world how pathetic they actually are
"I mean, how did Will Wilkerson screw up so badly?" It could be that alcohol was involved. It's not exactly "in vino veritas." It's usually a flash of an idea that gets published before the mind has the ability to determine if it is a real and true belief that is appropriate to be published. After a few drinks, some people will post things that they would never post if they were thinking clearly. One of the big problems with social media is that people still have access to it when they are impaired. Maybe the next improvement that Apple should make to the iPhone would be to put a breathalyzer in it.
I thought she was talking about Megan Markle.
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