This is Shor’s apology tweet, but he lost the job anyway. If you look at the replies to both tweets, what people think is necessary context amounts to an impossible tweet. Forget 280, even 2800 characters would be a tight squeeze for an average writer. https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1266448606321664004?s=21 …https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1266448606321664004 …
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I’m starting to converge on an odd diagnosis of Woke’s basic problem: trying to solve with language problems that are fundamentally not about language. Reality has an enormous amount of detail. There will also be vastly more tgatvremain unsaid than can be said about anything.
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The challenge of using words well is to direct the benefit of doubt around what remains unsaid in ways that keep the conversation going. But this makes demands on the listener as much as the speaker. I’d like to see people get called out and canceled for “bad listening.”
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If you want to distort the shape of the space of the unsaid around what’s said to hurt the speaker, it is *always* possible to do so. There’s always a hostile context you could assume. That somebody might do that is a risk you always take on in speaking at all.
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But it takes a bad listener to materialize that risk. Here, I don’t actually blame the person who called Shor out, or the employer for firing him. They’ve made their choices. I’m saying the caller-outer is not worth accommodating in good faith and the job not worth having.
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I’ve been saying this in private for a couple of years now — any institution vulnerable to Woke takeover should probably be abandoned to it. Salvage is not possible. Build alternatives anew. Bad Listener destruction is a power-trip drug that resists de-addiction.
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It got a lot worse for Shor, btw, beyond just losing his job. But I continue to maintain: anything you lose over something like this was never worth having in the first place.https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-racism-racism-progressive-progressphiles-david-shor.html …
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Funny thing, many people I've been saying this to in private were resisting the conclusion in 2017-18 but now agree with me. They held out hope for a long time that we could save good institutions. I have been arguing that the vulnerability is a sign of non-fixability.
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A thing that's changed since 2017 is that a gap has opened up between "criticizing Woke" and "automatically presumed to be something worse." It is now becoming possible to criticize Woke publicly without being put into one a box like "classical liberal" or "crypto fascist" Yay
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This frustration is understandable (though I think refuge in mockery is an admission of failure of sorts). When you must speak, but you also must only speak in approved extraordinarily skilled ways, the demand is that you learn an esoteric language.https://twitter.com/stedmanhalliday/status/1276563289900584960 …
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Woke, like constitutional originalism, is essentially a scholastic religion rooted in the idea that some must become saints in order that others may be free. That, coupled with recognition that the average person is not in fact capable of saintliness, leads to textual fetishism.
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To connect the dots explicitly, textualism is the Straussian belief that it is possible to be a "textbook saint" by studying some sainted text or set of discourses so closely that you can become capable of thinking exclusively in its language. You program yourself into sainthood.
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End of conversation
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