1. The newsroom uprising against James Bennet at the New York Times, along with media controversies about racism, has led the the usual handwringing from the usual suspects about PC, SJWs, safe spaces, blah blah blah. A new entry into this discourse is @mtaibbi.
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3. Strangely, people who say "Cotton's ideas deserve to be debated" are unwilling to actually Cotton's ideas are. None of them, as far as I can tell, comment on this tweet, posted before the op ed:https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1267448171636174848 …
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4. "No quarter" means "kill them all." Insurrectionists means "this is a civil war." The Times op ed was a whitewashed version of Cotton's idea, one that allowed himself to present a respectable face to polite company.https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1267448171636174848 …
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5. Of course Cotton walked back the tweet & said "no quarter" just means being hardline. But was was using the eliminationist language commonly used to egg on a massacre, i.e. "Jakarta is coming"https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1267459561675468800 …
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6. Also it's amazing that Taibbi accepts at face value the idea that the army would only go after criminals, not protestors. Is the American military really skilled at distinguishing between civilians & military targets? Is that the experience of Vietnam, Iraq & Afghanistan?
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7. More thoughts here on pundits who would rather focus on their culture war fetish than on an American Senator using eliminationist rhetoric against American civilians.https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/taibbi-cotton-free-speech/ …
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Does it? We already have police to deal with criminals, and they chose to flee the scene and target peaceful protesters/news crews instead.
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Cotton made that distinction on paper, but his rhetorical move aims to blur those boundaries; those categories are all blurry and built to expand. Relatedly, see this petition of 700+ academics denouncing Cotton and Trump's call for military force https://forms.gle/aikqUWAD8NT8nyna7 …
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Isn't taking
@mtaibbi's entire essay, picking this one sentence, and then asking him to defend *Cotton's* thesis (instead of his own) a pretty classic example of exactly the debate-club tactics you railed against, like, two days ago? -
I think the fact that Taibbi ends up whitewashing Cotton shows the problem with his approach to things.
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Sending in U.S. troops to combat U.S. citizens on U.S. soil is a horrible idea. It changes the whole dynamic of trusting and supporting our military. I am disappointed in Matt Taibbi.
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