A very profane fisking but I can’t believe that Washington Post was so tone deaf that the wrote something likes this. I always thought Bond Villains were unrealistic but I guess I have to take that back. Fisking the WaPo Editor Who Is Sad He Doesn’t Get To Act Like The Mafia Anymore
A progressive parent’s rant about the politics surrounding school reopening
Slate Star Codex vs NYT is a battle within the same faith
Texas frozen wind power – outages ensue, electricity now at unheard of $9000 per megawatt-hour
The New York Times came out explicitly against freedom of speech in that piece, the reporter Metz believes that everything is power relations (much like that Washington Post article), that’s really not the same kind of thing as rationalism at all.
Thank you for representing a common rationalist complaint about that piece. Personally, I think the complaint is certainly is true as far as it goes. But I don’t think most of the people making that complaint fully understand the point of the piece. There are deep and important differences between Catholic Doctrine and Baptist Doctrine on all sorts of the things but that does not mean you can’t make the observation they have things in common.There is more to modern secular thought then just whether you support free speech or not.
What’s in common between a point of view that interprets all speech as power moves, and a point of view that interprets speech as about specific things? Those are such radically different things – even though they combine phonemes and graphemes in similar ways sometimes – that calling them both “thought” is confused.
Your are abstracting out one aspect (Speech and how to view it) and thinking it represents the totality of a world view. To take just one example, in neither camp are you likely to find anyone who would say that gay marriage is wrong. Such a position would be nonsensical to both parties because there is nothing in their shared world view on which you could base such a statement. The article that you object to is a broader point about how it is a civil war with the secular community about the nature of speech. There are still large parts of the worlds population who could not be viewed as having a secular world view. This is a point many liberals tend to forget when they assume that all people of color will naturally share their point of view.