Nastiness vs Persuasion
When Elon Musk bought Twitter in the spring of 2022, many progressives abandoned the Twitter platform and transferred to another social networking service, Bluesky. Like George Orwell’s “Party’s Ministry of Truth”, progressives, by memory-holing themselves, soon forgot what debate required. What looked like an invincible weapon (cancel culture) turned out to just be another temporary advantage, writes Noah Smith, as reported by James Freeeman of the WSJ.
Welcome to the Big Tent, only if You Drink the Kool-Aid
Progressive culture’s substitution of nastiness for persuasion and argument has robbed America of the incisive commentary of which intelligent progressives would otherwise be capable.
Progressives got addicted to the power of cancel culture—their seemingly invincible H-bomb—and when it stopped working, they just didn’t know what else to do, because they had forgotten everything they used to do in the time before Twitter. . . .
When the Music Stops
Undoubtedly, the Bluesky progressives think that they’re just socially shunning people—exercising the age-old power of social ostracism to show the door to people whose opinions are beyond the pale of polite society.
Live by the Sword, Die by the Sword
But the cultural spaces that progressives still dominate are shrinking; … few people are likely to think of Bluesky as anything resembling “polite society”. Instead of ostracizing the people they hate, Bluesky’s progressives are only isolating themselves.
NPR without Guardrails
You wouldn’t necessarily be off in thinking that Bluesky is a sandbox of haughty, high-minded, mean-spirited lackeys.
