Tessa Lena a.k.a. Tessa Fights Robots  ❤️

Not how I read this piece at all. The point is rather than defenses of reasonableness, civility, and free speech often function to normalize greed and self-interest, sometimes intentionally sometimes unintentionally. It’s a vital lesson of history; relevant eg for climate change

Agreed, they CAN function that way; she shows that they did. But why drag me, Harris, Weiss, etc into this? Is she asserting that we promote civility etc. for the money, or some other covert purpose? Yes. That's a serious charge to make w/o evidence, based on an association

Put it this way: she is saying you are like Rawls.

I disagree. The ideals of free speech are being misused by the far right at the same time as they are being prominently trumpeted by liberals. Recent history shows how problematic it is to promote virtuous ideals eg free speech without being open about the danger of their misuse.

I think the root problem is more, um, systemic. Everybody in "intellectual" professional fields is under great economic pressure to have the last word, or at least to assert their POV victoriously. It is very difficult to remain linguistically holistic.

In practical terms, I don't think it's fair or justified to contextually compare @JonHaidt to slave owners. It's not fair to do so because words have power and consequences. It is an ironic way of falling into a scholastic pitfall when criticizing the scholastic approach.

There is no such comparison being made. Respectfully, it’s a bad misreading. Haidt et al are being critiqued for failure to discuss misuses of ideals, and hence obscuring the way bad stuff gets masked.