By Meta-Content Generator A.J. Liebling
with Nellie Bly in New York
The late winter gloom was pierced by a bit of good news, when birdwatchers reported that Minerva's owl, having fled its winter perch in Alma Mater's robes, was found in a tree just outside the Main Reading Room of the New York Public Library in Bryant Park:
A beautiful barred owl in Bryant Park last night, perched outside the Rose Main Reading Room of The New York Public Library. #birds #birdwatching #urbanwildlife #wildlife #nature #birdcpp pic.twitter.com/SNNXoCDTYl
— David Lei (@davidlei) March 19, 2022
Well-informed ornithologists said that the bird had originally tried to perch two blocks west near Eighth Avenue and 42d Street, but, finding no wisdom anywhere in the vicinity, fled east.
And now we know why. Print subscribers will have to wait until Sunday, but online readers of The New York Times have been treated to a 2,500 word hissy fit (we don't hyperlink to pisspoor content) from Times editors who have had it up to here with people being mean to them on Twitter:
the New York Times editorial board published an editorial equating actual government censorship with the "fear of being shamed or shunned" for expressing an opinion in public.
Really, "equating" is an overstatement. The editorial makes it quite clear that the board sees shaming-and-shunning as exponentially worse than actual government censorship.
"For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned," the diatribe about mean tweets begins.
Many thanks to Salon's Amanda Marcotte for actually reading all the way through this pos, so we (and you!) don't have to.
Lest you think the great minds of the Times editorial board are not being fair and balanced, they get to other random threats to free speech, like state censorship laws, eventually:
For one thing, the issue of actual censorship at the hands of conservatives is not addressed in any depth until paragraph 30 — long after most people have stopped reading. And even then, it's only glancingly discussed before the writers get back to the cancel culture handwringing. In this 2,500 word essay — not including multiple polling charts — 413 words are dedicated to legislation passed by Republican-controlled legislatures to ban books and silence educators.
We're not going to rattle on at endless length about the ridiculous argument that the left's supposed “cancel culture” is somehow an attack on free speech, because of course it isn't. You have the right to say something stupid. We have the right to say you said something stupid, like masks don't help prevent the spread of pandemic (a current Times favorite). That's how free speech works, or should work.
Another reason we're not going to spill millions of pixels on this is because we already did, just over a year ago:
As Jane Coaston of The New York Times pointed out, there's always been guardrails defining the limits of acceptable discourse in America; the question is what they are.
We'd say the question isn't just what those limits are, but who gets to set them. For generations, the boundaries of permitted speech were set by white male supremacists. Any idea that threatened their supremacy, or any person who articulated such sentiments, had to be canceled. Ask Paul Robeson, or W. E. B. DuBois, or Colin Kaepernick. They were all silenced as “un-American.”
If you are pushing to remove Critical Race Theory from the universe of acceptable discourse, that's because you don't want to hear, and you don't want anyone else to hear, the stories of people who suffered from systemic American racism, or people who look like them.
What has given rise to all the nonsense about the supposed threat of Cancel Culture is that the rules about who gets to place the guardrails have changed. The power of the white men who silenced generations of social critics, especially women and minorities, while exalting the character and glory of racists and hatemongers like Robert E. Lee, Strom Thurmond, or even St. Ronald of Bitburg, is under assault.
That's what's intolerable – it's not that there should no limits on acceptable discourse, it's that those limits are being set by those who have no business issuing orders, or even requests, to fine innocent fragile white folks like that Smith librarian or Matt Schlapp or those who recall how funny Rush Limbaugh was.
The only consolation for the propagandists of Cancel Culture: those who claim they are being silenced, whether it's Bari Weiss or Bretbug Stephens (who bemoaned Cancel Culture while trying to fire a professor who made a joke at his expense), or Marjorie Taylor “Time for my Training Session, Rodolfo!” Greene, do not in fact shut up, nor do they appear to suffer any adverse economic consequences for speaking nonsense.
They just, like Ol' Man River (but unlike Paul Robeson), keep rolling along.
The Times editorial can best be understood not as argument but as an example of a privileged class whining about its loss of privilege, in this case the privilege to define what's acceptable discourse and what isn't.
They really would have done better to make their, um, case not in a crapcan editorial package accompanied by a bs push poll but in their long suit: the gaming section.
Since they couldn't or wouldn't, we'll do it for them:
It's simple and fun, and best of all, no matter how many times you play, you can never win!
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