Conversation

Any job you could lose over a tweet like this is probably not worth having. I’d expect more critical context in an essay-length review of the paper but this is fine for a tweet.
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Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. omarwasow.com/Protests_on_Vo.
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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.
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While I strongly admire @owasow ‘s work, it’s clear that I have not been, due to both my background and words, an effective messenger of his findings about the power of non-violent protest. I regret starting this conversation and will be much more careful moving forward. twitter.com/davidshor/stat…
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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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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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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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