Jesse Singal and/or his defenders are apparently denying he ever threatened legal action to get anyone fired, under the theory that repeatedly pointing out someone has a "very punchable face" is different from threatening to punch them.
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His threats (or "polite words to the wise," if he prefers) only worked and only had a chance of working because he has massively more social capital and privilege than his target, something he must have known. But he chooses to believe his targets have the power, as amoral alibi
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Jesse Singal still has his career, and was able to get someone else fired from her job in journalism by his word. Yet when people talk about the "dangerous, censorious mob" of "cancel culture", they list him as victim rather than part of the problem.
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"But he's got people going around saying he shouldn't be allowed to write on certain topics!" A of all, he still writes on them. There's no power. B of all, he shouldn't be. And no, that's not a perversion of journalism. It's called standards, and journalism has them.
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It is not "Jesse Singal shouldn't be allowed to write about trans people." as in The High Queen of Allowable Speech Hath Decreed That We Are Not Amused. It's "You don't assign a cub reporter with no geopolitical background to write about complicated geopolitics."
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And also "You don't assign someone with a clear ax to grind to do factual reporting on a topic." For heaven's sake, multiple Black journalists have mentioned recently that they were kept from covering stories on race, out of a seeming fear they couldn't be objective.
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And yet when The Harper's Letter mentioned journalists not being allowed to cover certain topics. I'm almost 100% certain the writers weren't thinking of that kind of case, but were thinking of people on the internet saying "Singal shouldn't be allowed to write on trans issues."
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Like, this should tell you where the story is. I know, I *KNOW*, that trans people writing and pitching about trans issues face the "Well, you're not exactly objective, are you?" issue, and no one calls that "cancel culture". But the mere idea that Singal might not be objective?
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Jesse Singal's sole qualification to write about trans people is that he has a lot of opinions about us. Like, a lot. He has devoted a significant number of waking hours to thinking about us. That somehow makes him both objective and an authority, in the eyes of cis editors.
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You wouldn't hire someone as a science reporter who said, "Now, I'm not a scientist, and that's my advantage. I can be objective about this. I haven't bought into the idea of a scientific consensus. I think for myself. And I don't trust scientists." Well, maybe you would. *sigh*
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To put it another way - if you assigned someone to cover a street fair, or someone came to you with a story covering one, and you ran it and you got a bunch of responses going, "It wasn't like that. The stuff he's complaining about didn't even exist. He made up whole vendors."
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and you went to your reporter and your reporter said, "Look, those people? They were there at the fair. They were too close. They lost their objectivity. Some of them have lived in the very neighborhood for decades. Me? I've never been there. Didn't even go to the fair."
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and it transpired that he had written the article based mostly on his suppositions about what the street fair and what that neighborhood must have been like, filtered through some leading conversations with friends who had gone, or at least walked past it?
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You would think this was bananas. You would think this is a heck of a way to run a railroad. And if there was some weird slant in his article, like he kept singling out bizarre and dangerous behavior by, say, smoothie restaurants, you might wonder if that was the actual point.
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And here's my point: no one thinks it's "censorious" or "cancel culture" to suggest that the guy who doesn't go to street fairs and just really hates smoothies should not keep getting hired to cover street fairs so he can write about how much the smoothies there suck.
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I mean, as I write this, I realize this example sounds ridiculous. The question of if you would keep hiring that guy to cover street fairs sounds ridiculous. Because journalism, for all its wretched sins, does have standards.
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But privilege, that horrible p-word that the Free Speech squad doesn't think we should say, has an imbalancing effect on how standards are applied, and so arguments that sound ridiculous about a street fair can be made acceptable when applied to the wrong people by the right ones
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And you can think I'm wrong here. You can think my comparison to Jesse Singal's trans writing to a guy who doesn't go to street fairs and hates smoothies turning in a story saying "This street fair sucked because they served gross smoothies." is inapt in some fashion.
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And if you think I'm wrong about Jesse Singal, then... you are entitled to say so. And that's it. That's all. "The remedy of speech you disagree with is more speech." Which is what the Free Speech Defenders supposedly want, right?
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But the notion that "cancel culture" exists and is uniquely dangerous, uniquely a threat to free speech, means that my speech about Jesse Singal *must be stopped* in order to preserve his speech.
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"Cancel culture tries to get people fired in order to silence them" so it's okay to get someone fired to stop them from saying a cancel culture. That's how it works. That's the dynamic. That's why words like "cancel culture" exist.
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And even if you think I'm wrong about Singal: so long as you understand that it IS my opinion of him and so long as you understand why street-fair-smoothie-guy wouldn't be hired to keep writing about street fairs, you understand why I don't think he should write on trans issues.
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It being a free world means you are entitled to have your own opinion. You having your own opinion does not change mine, and I am no more required to view the world through the lens of your opinion than you are mine. Freedom! Isn't it grand?
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End of conversation
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