+1 for the sentiment that Freddie is often insightful (I subscribe to him) but sometimes he kicks random people in the shins in a pointless and uncalled-for way.
Indeed, he kicked me in the shins when I apparently was patronzing to him. I've never had anyone famous react to any comment they've made on the blog/substack, I'm a nobody with no significant web presence, so this kind of surprised me. Apparently, however, it's par for the course.
Don't know if you were able to see it after the ban but a couple people (well, me, and one other) stuck up for you after that exchange. To no effect, of course; he's now on righteous tear about moderation and locking down comments the minute he brooks a challenge. I'm a decade-long fan who has absolutely had it with the way he treats his readers and I'm beginning to think it's unethical to support him financially.
I would not go as far as to say it's unethical to support him but I also unsubscribed a few months ago b/c I got similarly fed up with how he treated people. This is also an interesting difference w/ Substack compared to old media models. If a columnist at a print magazine wrote something that got on your nerves, you might still like other writers at that magazine and you likely wouldn't get to see that writer telling readers things like "Cry more" and such. But when it's one person's Substack and you see them act that way it's a lot easier to say "Nah, I'm not paying for this anymore."
Maybe I have an overdeveloped sense of fairness, but I think a few factors combine to make it unethical, as opposed to just, like, morally suboptimal. One is that fact that his remarks sometimes go above generic verbal abuse and are specifically, personally cruel, in way that would ruin my week if it happened to me. I remember him recently telling a long-time, frequent commenter how much he despises seeing that they've commented. Another is that this behavior is wholly unrepentant. But most saliently, it disturbs me that basically no one, myself included, is willing to tell him to his face when he's being a top-shelf jerk. I assume because no one wants to be on the receiving end of his rage, or get banned from what is otherwise a fruitful comments section. (It's also possible people are cutting him some slack for bipolarity, but having impulse control issues is not incompatible with self-reflection and self-improvement.) It's like enabling that little tyrant from the one episode of the Twilight Zone because his parents throw an awesome rager from time to time. If people directed their money and energy elsewhere, other comments sections might bloom. But paying him for access to the kind of people his writing attracts is also straightforwardly enabling an unrepentant bully who casts a long shadow.
He must have seen my comment above because my subscription was not so randomly cancelled today. I intended to put this argument to him and give him a chance to response before I did as much myself, but I guess I'l have to develop it more fully elsewhere. Apologies to Kat for writing this much about it on her blog as it is.
And yeah, Kat is probably sitting in the corner with a cup of tea and a polite smile plastered on her face wondering "Oh my God, when will these guys ever shut up?" :)
He's a genius, and his behavior in the comments section led me to unsubscribe. I VERY politely brought his behavior up to him once, he went on some kind of incel-esque tirade at me, I told him he was proving my point and, viola, Matt Taibi gained another subscriber while FdB lost one.
The thing is, he's a just a miserable piece of shit. He's constantly melting down and throwing fits and just cannot handle in the slightest engaging in public discourse like a sober adult. When people point this out, it's because they're all meanie meanie mean girls and sad careerist writers desperate for hipster cred among their fellow Brooklynites, SO unlike our hero Frederik, a resident of Kings County until very recently, who causally drop his book advance numbers, constantly remind you of every last legacy outlet he's ever published in, and will make sure you know in great detail about his superior, esoteric, astonishingly vast knowledge of all music, film, and literature ever worth knowing. Plus he knows everything about linguistics, geopolitics, and political theory, so there, you meanies, you poop-heads, how dares you be meanies to Fredrik.
But! Give him this: it's so much fun to read someone so desperately lacking in self-awareness and so willing to be make a spectacle of himself.
The accusation of hypocrisy doesn't even work in reverse in a general sense, either. A 23 year old adult at the head of a public protest calling for violence against a specific person isn't the same as an underage person saying something bad in a time when it wasn't seen as that bad in that context. The point of your tweet is very specific to the kind of people who believe in holding even children accountable for diverging from their standards of decorum while being okay with an adult breaching it in a much more profound sense as long as it's in service of their activism, simply saying "This is the reverse of that" doesn't apply at all.
That’s a good and fair point. One goal of civil disobedience is to show the public that the protesters are willing to suffer the consequences of disobeying laws or norms in order to bring broader attention, awareness, and sympathy to their cause.
A random teenager taking smack with peers on Snapchat is not taking any of that social contract on. Maybe there need to be consequences for that teenager, maybe not, but there are vanishingly few circumstances where the New York Times needs to get involved.
I wasn't aware of DeBoer's comment, and FWIW, I'm sorry, I admire you both. But if forced to chose, I'd say Kat was more reliably level-headed than Freddie. Freddie gets out over his skis from time to time...
Yeah, that's my sense of him to. I think he is frequently insightful, but just as frequently he's kind of obtuse. And he writes with equal confidence in both situations.
Agreed. He has written some very insightful pieces (I recently enjoyed a piece of his a friend sent me about how there is never any consistency whatsoever about which celebrities get canceled), but he's also got a mean streak a mile wide and massive blind spots on a few issues and he will never, ever, ever even slightly consider he might either be wrong, overstating his case, or needlessly off-putting.
Most heterodox lefties who make a habit of calling out the bullshit amongst their kinship also regularly play the "Yes, yes, Republicans are the real icky ones, BUT..." card. Freddy does this in spades. He will write a whole paragraph about their ickiness and how he's been mainlining Marx since he was 14, before going on to really skewer leftist bullshit.
This though was a particularly weird example. I'm not even sure what statement he was trying to make about Kat.
This is why I enjoy your writing; I'm a free-speech medium liberal and am unwilling to put my stamp of approval on every single thing the further Left does. I enjoy FdB but he often gets weird and mean for no reason.
It seems like a weird accusation for FDB of all people to level considering this rhetorical strategy could easily be deployed at him for some things he's written in the past. He'd say it's ludicrous to call him a Republican, and he'd be right, but it's equally ridiculous for him to call you one.
In general he reaches for the "just admit that you're an [x]" or "just admit that you really believe [x]" way too easily. When people supported funding Ukraine he did a whole post, "just go ahead and say AMERICA FUCK YEAH and be done with it." Then in a follow-up he was hurt that people were being short with him in response.
And also, what is wrong with being a Republican?? I mean, I’m not one, calling someone a Republican is not a mic-drop moment. Half the country are Republicans. It’s childishly simplistic to act like you’ve made a sick burn by saying someone belongs to the other political party.
True and there's also the risk that by employing that strategy you're essentially encouraging people to just make the leap into being a Republican. "If everyone's telling me my beliefs now make me a Republican, maybe I should start voting that way." I don't recommend people do that but if someone hears it enough I could see them doing it. The liberalism that attracted me as a college student in the 90s understood the point was to build bigger coalitions and have more people in the tent. This tactic is the opposite of that.
It's also just inherently ludicrous and puritanically conformist to expect people to march in lock step on every ideological hot button issue. Just b/c someone isn't as relentlessly pro-Palestine as FDB doesn't mean they're a closet Republican.
Yep. I've had the R word thrown at me so much on the last few years that I decided to actually look up the Democratic Party platform for 2024.
And guess what? it's largely hot garbage. I disagree with the DEI word salad they use to frame everything, I disagree with their descriptions of the issues, and I disagree with their proposed solutions. So where I was of course going to vote for Biden in November, now that I see that party platform? I don't know. I was actually shocked at how stupid the whole thing sounded.
I think we see it working less, at any rate, right? Like, organizations and activists pulled out all the stops to try and cow the NYT into apologizing for its trans coverage, but the Times just stood by it and nothing happened to them.
It feels like we’re in a transitional period. A lot of people are embarrassed about how hysterical they all got between 2017-2021. A lot of institutions have realized how damaging that period was to both their reputations and their ability to actually achieve anything. So there has been a real effort to walk the excesses of that period back. But ships are slow to steer, and lots of people are still true believers or have a vested interests in things not changing.
The greater reliance on reputation violence I think is more a product of social media as a medium and is likely to be with us forever, independent of the rise or decline of “wokeness” per ce.
Oh yeah, I don't think it will ever go away from social media or the internet. Since it doesn't involve face to face contact, the internet will always be a magnet for the vicious (who won't have to worry about getting punched or having a drink thrown at them for their cruelty), the socially inept, the emotionally stunted, the insufferably pedantic, and the extremely neurotic. And the relatively well adjusted people just leave, making those types even more dominant. Also, it's a shame but no one should ever assume being on friendly terms with someone online means they're actually you're friend.
Indeed. But the tough thing about mass hysteria is that outside of a few sacrificial lambs the only way out of it is a sort of collective forgetting that it ever happened. Try to hold the great mass of people accountable for being idiots and they just double down on their idiocy.
Way to keep it classy, Kat. One of the many things I enjoy about your work is not having to watch you take side swipes at other writers as I make my way toward your point.
Only a Republican would think it’s crazy for someone to publicly say at a rally that the president of the United States should be killed! The Atlantic piece captured an aspect of the campus meltdown well: it’s not only well-meaning lefties getting cancelled for saying “river to the sea.” The 23-year-old quoted called for Joe Biden’s death and continued to stand by it! This isn’t hippie-punching some rando who wore a keffiyeh.
Being pro-Palestine is virtually a religious tenet for leftists. There’s nothing more low-status than being associated with the pro-Israel, and there’s no associated “get out of jail free” card, like when leftists excuse social conservatism for class solidarity with workers. It’s probably very hard to see the genuinely bad behavior from some pro-Palestinian activists, especially when your beat is writing about illiberalism in left wing movments!
They always act like they aren’t being conformists though, that their pro-Palestine posts make them “brave” because Israel has more power than Palestine, which they see as existing in a vacuum. It’s so obvious that being openly pro-Israel=going against the status quo
What’s funny is that Deboer understands this perfectly well in most contexts, but then when this issue comes up he turns on a dime and talks about how the pro-Palestine cause has zero power.
I hope you’re wrong about the cancel wars not quite being as over as we may have hoped.
From here it seems the tactics are “working less” - like there is more of a general sense of cancellation-isn’t-great. I feel like the era of McCarthyism probably ended similarly.
Perhaps those of shorter public statures who are/were just repeating these tactics are finally beginning to understand that under their regime, no one is immune to being marred by the actions of their 7-year old selves. Or maybe they’ve just moved on to new-to-them ways of not thinking things through that we have not caught onto yet; or better, don’t have as much consequence.
Whatever the case, the ghosts of this period of public engagement will always be lurking and haunting, just like they have with the red scare.
I didn't like the pointless shot FdB took at you either, though I did like most of the rest of that piece he wrote. I think he's correct that some people in heterodox land just keep punching left over and over until they just end up becoming Republicans. It's a tough trap to avoid.
He's going through a tough time right now; he built his newsletter on the back of being Left Wing Guy Who Critiques Woke Madness, which is something we all badly needed. But now he's getting frustrated that significant chunks of his audience are TERFs and Zionists, and he's worried about how that makes him look.
I don't understand DeBoer's argument (if there is one) and he seems to be - at minimum - disingenuous about the plates issue which, if you pay attention when reading the Grauniad link he provides, displays the classic "from the river to the sea" denial of the existence of Israel.
Frankly I think a lot less of him now and have stashed him in the "usually wrong but occasionally insightful" pile along with Piers Morgan
My understanding is he seems to be arguing Kat is a hypocrite b/c he thinks she is for canceling pro-Palestine activists as some sort of tit-for-tat for cancellations that happened during peak woke times (I take Kat's point in the essay about it not being overwith but I do think there's less of it now).
*I don't think his argument is valid in this case for reasons Kat detailed in her essay.
For the record (as someone who has definitely struggled with being a douche to people at times in my life), that was a very douchey way Freddie DeBoer employed to call someone out.
“and you'll notice that nobody who employs them ever takes aim at someone bigger than they are, someone who it might actually be a risk to criticize.”
I heartily agree in principle. However, in this particular, I disagree. It seems that half of what FdB does is blowing darts at institutions and people that are orders of magnitude more powerful than him. In this instance, Freddie’s the exception that proves your broader role.
(Ironically, in that way, you isolating him for this particular criticism is the same type of error for him isolating you for his particular criticism in the article in question: correct point, inappropriate illustration.)
A little confused by the allegation that I’m “isolating” FdB for criticism when I say explicitly in the post that I’m not talking about him; if anything I’d think I isolated him *from* the criticism?
I probably misphrased. Instead of “isolating… this particular crucial,” maybe “highlighting this particular criticism and using it as a jumping off point (and, implicitly, an exemplar/avatar) for a broader generalization.”
I’m not sure how to succinctly word it without losing precision. Hopefully you get my point, regardless.
+1 for the sentiment that Freddie is often insightful (I subscribe to him) but sometimes he kicks random people in the shins in a pointless and uncalled-for way.
Indeed, he kicked me in the shins when I apparently was patronzing to him. I've never had anyone famous react to any comment they've made on the blog/substack, I'm a nobody with no significant web presence, so this kind of surprised me. Apparently, however, it's par for the course.
Don't know if you were able to see it after the ban but a couple people (well, me, and one other) stuck up for you after that exchange. To no effect, of course; he's now on righteous tear about moderation and locking down comments the minute he brooks a challenge. I'm a decade-long fan who has absolutely had it with the way he treats his readers and I'm beginning to think it's unethical to support him financially.
I would not go as far as to say it's unethical to support him but I also unsubscribed a few months ago b/c I got similarly fed up with how he treated people. This is also an interesting difference w/ Substack compared to old media models. If a columnist at a print magazine wrote something that got on your nerves, you might still like other writers at that magazine and you likely wouldn't get to see that writer telling readers things like "Cry more" and such. But when it's one person's Substack and you see them act that way it's a lot easier to say "Nah, I'm not paying for this anymore."
Maybe I have an overdeveloped sense of fairness, but I think a few factors combine to make it unethical, as opposed to just, like, morally suboptimal. One is that fact that his remarks sometimes go above generic verbal abuse and are specifically, personally cruel, in way that would ruin my week if it happened to me. I remember him recently telling a long-time, frequent commenter how much he despises seeing that they've commented. Another is that this behavior is wholly unrepentant. But most saliently, it disturbs me that basically no one, myself included, is willing to tell him to his face when he's being a top-shelf jerk. I assume because no one wants to be on the receiving end of his rage, or get banned from what is otherwise a fruitful comments section. (It's also possible people are cutting him some slack for bipolarity, but having impulse control issues is not incompatible with self-reflection and self-improvement.) It's like enabling that little tyrant from the one episode of the Twilight Zone because his parents throw an awesome rager from time to time. If people directed their money and energy elsewhere, other comments sections might bloom. But paying him for access to the kind of people his writing attracts is also straightforwardly enabling an unrepentant bully who casts a long shadow.
He must have seen my comment above because my subscription was not so randomly cancelled today. I intended to put this argument to him and give him a chance to response before I did as much myself, but I guess I'l have to develop it more fully elsewhere. Apologies to Kat for writing this much about it on her blog as it is.
Incredible.
You gave a thoughtful response.
And yeah, Kat is probably sitting in the corner with a cup of tea and a polite smile plastered on her face wondering "Oh my God, when will these guys ever shut up?" :)
He's a genius, and his behavior in the comments section led me to unsubscribe. I VERY politely brought his behavior up to him once, he went on some kind of incel-esque tirade at me, I told him he was proving my point and, viola, Matt Taibi gained another subscriber while FdB lost one.
The thing is, he's a just a miserable piece of shit. He's constantly melting down and throwing fits and just cannot handle in the slightest engaging in public discourse like a sober adult. When people point this out, it's because they're all meanie meanie mean girls and sad careerist writers desperate for hipster cred among their fellow Brooklynites, SO unlike our hero Frederik, a resident of Kings County until very recently, who causally drop his book advance numbers, constantly remind you of every last legacy outlet he's ever published in, and will make sure you know in great detail about his superior, esoteric, astonishingly vast knowledge of all music, film, and literature ever worth knowing. Plus he knows everything about linguistics, geopolitics, and political theory, so there, you meanies, you poop-heads, how dares you be meanies to Fredrik.
But! Give him this: it's so much fun to read someone so desperately lacking in self-awareness and so willing to be make a spectacle of himself.
The accusation of hypocrisy doesn't even work in reverse in a general sense, either. A 23 year old adult at the head of a public protest calling for violence against a specific person isn't the same as an underage person saying something bad in a time when it wasn't seen as that bad in that context. The point of your tweet is very specific to the kind of people who believe in holding even children accountable for diverging from their standards of decorum while being okay with an adult breaching it in a much more profound sense as long as it's in service of their activism, simply saying "This is the reverse of that" doesn't apply at all.
That’s a good and fair point. One goal of civil disobedience is to show the public that the protesters are willing to suffer the consequences of disobeying laws or norms in order to bring broader attention, awareness, and sympathy to their cause.
A random teenager taking smack with peers on Snapchat is not taking any of that social contract on. Maybe there need to be consequences for that teenager, maybe not, but there are vanishingly few circumstances where the New York Times needs to get involved.
I wasn't aware of DeBoer's comment, and FWIW, I'm sorry, I admire you both. But if forced to chose, I'd say Kat was more reliably level-headed than Freddie. Freddie gets out over his skis from time to time...
I will never force anyone to choose!
Yeah, that's my sense of him to. I think he is frequently insightful, but just as frequently he's kind of obtuse. And he writes with equal confidence in both situations.
Agreed. He has written some very insightful pieces (I recently enjoyed a piece of his a friend sent me about how there is never any consistency whatsoever about which celebrities get canceled), but he's also got a mean streak a mile wide and massive blind spots on a few issues and he will never, ever, ever even slightly consider he might either be wrong, overstating his case, or needlessly off-putting.
DeBoer is an A+ critic of professional class manners and hypocrisy, and basically a crank on all other things.
Most heterodox lefties who make a habit of calling out the bullshit amongst their kinship also regularly play the "Yes, yes, Republicans are the real icky ones, BUT..." card. Freddy does this in spades. He will write a whole paragraph about their ickiness and how he's been mainlining Marx since he was 14, before going on to really skewer leftist bullshit.
This though was a particularly weird example. I'm not even sure what statement he was trying to make about Kat.
I got the feeling he was trying to wind up the part of his readership he feels most ambivalent about.
My sentiment too. Most of all, I just didn't get it.
This is why I enjoy your writing; I'm a free-speech medium liberal and am unwilling to put my stamp of approval on every single thing the further Left does. I enjoy FdB but he often gets weird and mean for no reason.
It seems like a weird accusation for FDB of all people to level considering this rhetorical strategy could easily be deployed at him for some things he's written in the past. He'd say it's ludicrous to call him a Republican, and he'd be right, but it's equally ridiculous for him to call you one.
In general he reaches for the "just admit that you're an [x]" or "just admit that you really believe [x]" way too easily. When people supported funding Ukraine he did a whole post, "just go ahead and say AMERICA FUCK YEAH and be done with it." Then in a follow-up he was hurt that people were being short with him in response.
And also, what is wrong with being a Republican?? I mean, I’m not one, calling someone a Republican is not a mic-drop moment. Half the country are Republicans. It’s childishly simplistic to act like you’ve made a sick burn by saying someone belongs to the other political party.
True and there's also the risk that by employing that strategy you're essentially encouraging people to just make the leap into being a Republican. "If everyone's telling me my beliefs now make me a Republican, maybe I should start voting that way." I don't recommend people do that but if someone hears it enough I could see them doing it. The liberalism that attracted me as a college student in the 90s understood the point was to build bigger coalitions and have more people in the tent. This tactic is the opposite of that.
It's also just inherently ludicrous and puritanically conformist to expect people to march in lock step on every ideological hot button issue. Just b/c someone isn't as relentlessly pro-Palestine as FDB doesn't mean they're a closet Republican.
Yep. I've had the R word thrown at me so much on the last few years that I decided to actually look up the Democratic Party platform for 2024.
And guess what? it's largely hot garbage. I disagree with the DEI word salad they use to frame everything, I disagree with their descriptions of the issues, and I disagree with their proposed solutions. So where I was of course going to vote for Biden in November, now that I see that party platform? I don't know. I was actually shocked at how stupid the whole thing sounded.
I think we see it working less, at any rate, right? Like, organizations and activists pulled out all the stops to try and cow the NYT into apologizing for its trans coverage, but the Times just stood by it and nothing happened to them.
It feels like we’re in a transitional period. A lot of people are embarrassed about how hysterical they all got between 2017-2021. A lot of institutions have realized how damaging that period was to both their reputations and their ability to actually achieve anything. So there has been a real effort to walk the excesses of that period back. But ships are slow to steer, and lots of people are still true believers or have a vested interests in things not changing.
The greater reliance on reputation violence I think is more a product of social media as a medium and is likely to be with us forever, independent of the rise or decline of “wokeness” per ce.
Oh yeah, I don't think it will ever go away from social media or the internet. Since it doesn't involve face to face contact, the internet will always be a magnet for the vicious (who won't have to worry about getting punched or having a drink thrown at them for their cruelty), the socially inept, the emotionally stunted, the insufferably pedantic, and the extremely neurotic. And the relatively well adjusted people just leave, making those types even more dominant. Also, it's a shame but no one should ever assume being on friendly terms with someone online means they're actually you're friend.
Very well said!
Lots of people are fleeing the scene of the crime, trying to act innocent.
Indeed. But the tough thing about mass hysteria is that outside of a few sacrificial lambs the only way out of it is a sort of collective forgetting that it ever happened. Try to hold the great mass of people accountable for being idiots and they just double down on their idiocy.
Way to keep it classy, Kat. One of the many things I enjoy about your work is not having to watch you take side swipes at other writers as I make my way toward your point.
Only a Republican would think it’s crazy for someone to publicly say at a rally that the president of the United States should be killed! The Atlantic piece captured an aspect of the campus meltdown well: it’s not only well-meaning lefties getting cancelled for saying “river to the sea.” The 23-year-old quoted called for Joe Biden’s death and continued to stand by it! This isn’t hippie-punching some rando who wore a keffiyeh.
Being pro-Palestine is virtually a religious tenet for leftists. There’s nothing more low-status than being associated with the pro-Israel, and there’s no associated “get out of jail free” card, like when leftists excuse social conservatism for class solidarity with workers. It’s probably very hard to see the genuinely bad behavior from some pro-Palestinian activists, especially when your beat is writing about illiberalism in left wing movments!
They always act like they aren’t being conformists though, that their pro-Palestine posts make them “brave” because Israel has more power than Palestine, which they see as existing in a vacuum. It’s so obvious that being openly pro-Israel=going against the status quo
What’s funny is that Deboer understands this perfectly well in most contexts, but then when this issue comes up he turns on a dime and talks about how the pro-Palestine cause has zero power.
I hope you’re wrong about the cancel wars not quite being as over as we may have hoped.
From here it seems the tactics are “working less” - like there is more of a general sense of cancellation-isn’t-great. I feel like the era of McCarthyism probably ended similarly.
Perhaps those of shorter public statures who are/were just repeating these tactics are finally beginning to understand that under their regime, no one is immune to being marred by the actions of their 7-year old selves. Or maybe they’ve just moved on to new-to-them ways of not thinking things through that we have not caught onto yet; or better, don’t have as much consequence.
Whatever the case, the ghosts of this period of public engagement will always be lurking and haunting, just like they have with the red scare.
I didn't like the pointless shot FdB took at you either, though I did like most of the rest of that piece he wrote. I think he's correct that some people in heterodox land just keep punching left over and over until they just end up becoming Republicans. It's a tough trap to avoid.
He's going through a tough time right now; he built his newsletter on the back of being Left Wing Guy Who Critiques Woke Madness, which is something we all badly needed. But now he's getting frustrated that significant chunks of his audience are TERFs and Zionists, and he's worried about how that makes him look.
I don't understand DeBoer's argument (if there is one) and he seems to be - at minimum - disingenuous about the plates issue which, if you pay attention when reading the Grauniad link he provides, displays the classic "from the river to the sea" denial of the existence of Israel.
Frankly I think a lot less of him now and have stashed him in the "usually wrong but occasionally insightful" pile along with Piers Morgan
> You get that the accusation of hypocrisy works exactly as well in the opposite direction, right? You get that, right? Tell me you get that. Please.
I actually don't. Really - can someone explain it?
My understanding is he seems to be arguing Kat is a hypocrite b/c he thinks she is for canceling pro-Palestine activists as some sort of tit-for-tat for cancellations that happened during peak woke times (I take Kat's point in the essay about it not being overwith but I do think there's less of it now).
*I don't think his argument is valid in this case for reasons Kat detailed in her essay.
For the record (as someone who has definitely struggled with being a douche to people at times in my life), that was a very douchey way Freddie DeBoer employed to call someone out.
If you'll forgive me for self-promoting, I've similarly grown rather tired of some Freddie's tics and lacunae, particularly when it comes to a specific controversial topic: https://firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com/p/contra-deboer-on-transgender-issues
I just find him to be a bit if a blowhard and didn’t value his opinions enough to not mute him.
“and you'll notice that nobody who employs them ever takes aim at someone bigger than they are, someone who it might actually be a risk to criticize.”
I heartily agree in principle. However, in this particular, I disagree. It seems that half of what FdB does is blowing darts at institutions and people that are orders of magnitude more powerful than him. In this instance, Freddie’s the exception that proves your broader role.
(Ironically, in that way, you isolating him for this particular criticism is the same type of error for him isolating you for his particular criticism in the article in question: correct point, inappropriate illustration.)
A little confused by the allegation that I’m “isolating” FdB for criticism when I say explicitly in the post that I’m not talking about him; if anything I’d think I isolated him *from* the criticism?
I probably misphrased. Instead of “isolating… this particular crucial,” maybe “highlighting this particular criticism and using it as a jumping off point (and, implicitly, an exemplar/avatar) for a broader generalization.”
I’m not sure how to succinctly word it without losing precision. Hopefully you get my point, regardless.
You get that the accusation of isolation works exactly as well in the opposite direction, right? You get that, right? Tell me you get that. Please.
If this is a joke it's pretty good
Lol
Yes, that’s 100% a joke.
Weird how that worked, right??