What seems like a long time ago, The Atlantic had a section called Notes. The idea behind Notes was something between a curated comments section and letters to the editor; it was thought that various TA writers would be encouraged to respond to the strongest good-faith dissents related to articles they themselves had published on the main site.
"For the record, I don’t have any huge opinions on Williamson as a writer; my main familiarity with his work is from this story."
There was one other interesting controversy with K Williamson. At some point, I think at NR, he wrote a piece about small towns that basically concluded "good riddance, let them die." It was a right/libertarian learn to code paean that lost him a lot of fans on the cultural conservative right.
Back when I was still reading print copes of NR, I did like him as a writer, though.
"So it was that TA’s only sorta-conservative wrote an article where he explained that while Williamson’s views were clearly repulsive and had no place in public discourse, he opposed them on the basis of a narrow principle he totally understands most people don’t hold:"
In this paragraph, what is the "them" he opposes? The firing, or the views on abortion/capital punishment?
I liked The Atlantic for a time, and stopped reading after MSM all got TDS. (No, I stopped reading after I got over my TDS ~2017(8)?) I heard about the K. Williamson thing, 'cause I was still reading National Review, I never read Conor F.'s opinion piece on the matter. Reading what you wrote it sounds like he found a narrow path through his workplace and free speech. I think you should give C.F. a bit of a break. To come out too strong is to lose his job. He may make up all sorts of reasons in his mind for this. I kinda feel the same way about Neil Young dissing on Joe Rogan. I think Neil is wrong, but I want to give him a break because he is in his own 'liberal bubble' and doesn't know better. (of course I could be totally wrong.) I've stopped reading MSM, I get my news from ACX, Lex Fridman podcast, and other random blogs on substack.) (Well and my co-workers. I'm MSM adjacent. :^ ) I'm libertarian left, and find most in common with the libertarian right.
I do actually want to give Conor several breaks. First, he's a good writer in a prose sense, and consistently interesting enough that I've been aware of him for at least several years and at least semi-frequently read his stuff. If that sounds qualified or backhanded, it's not meant to be; I don't read as much as I should, but I still occasionally go "Oh, Conor wrote this", click the link and read the article.
On top of that, his takes on several things are generally good, consistent in a way that describes a level of principles being involved, strikes out fairly equally at both big partisan sides, and protects things I think are worth protecting, like speech and dialogue.
I don't even mind him writing an article protecting his employer from criticism (which I think he did, while others might reasonably disagree). To be clear, things like "stood by silently while a comments section was closed, or a dialogue-encouraging section of his employers website was softly encouraged to just die already" don't automatically make anybody a fundamentally bad person.
But they do have relevance to certain topics and contexts. In this case, he's establishing a space in which he's going to encourage dialogue among and from the commenter-class, with some hints of "let's be high-quality in a way that promotes something beyond the normal social media catfighting". And he's doing that on a website that has just in the past few years made several moves indicating they won't tolerate strong opinions from the other side of the aisle. Where they happen in a space they control, they destroy or disable that space; where they happen in the thoughts or words of someone they employ, they fire that person.
So I'm harsh here, but I don't have many options if I want to talk about Conor's project. Either he's going to make sure strong right-wing opinions are never aired, or he's going to give them a platform and TA's history indicates they are likely going to tell him to muzzle the dogs or face the consequences. And whether or not I like Conor, whether or not I think he's a good writer or a decent person overall, his history on TA squelching dialogue it doesn't particularly care for (especially from its readers) is to shrug his shoulders, keep his mouth diplomatically shut, and care very much about speech in ways that are less personally costly for him to care about.
Yeah, I feel your pain, we all lost something when MSM was split along political lines. IMHO TA is long gone. No one not of their tribe reads it. (Well I guess except for you. :^) I was watching live streaming from Ottawa, awesome and heartwarming. (Viva Frei)
Totally agree about the way The Atlantic has suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome. It may well be that the true legacy of Trump is a permanent breaking of long-lasting institutions.
It really bothers me a lot, because there was a point where I actually really enjoyed The Atlantic, where I felt like I really was getting a lot of competing opinions from a lot of people, both in terms of TA writers and things like the comments section and notes.
It gets into a weird semantic issue, but I think there are probably a lot of people at TA who really do care about abstract concepts like discourse, and who want to hear from the readers and think that criticism makes them better, etc. But they are either being thwarted by the group (in the normal way that works, where a couple loud people dominate how everything works) or thwarted by competing, more terminal values - i.e. Trump must be stopped by any means.
And they themselves don't believe something like "you are hysterical over Trump in a counterproductive way" is a real thing; it probably seems to them like they are being very reasonable and making tough-but-necessary choices.
That's why I think they greenlight stuff like this even though it can't survive in their company culture; they can't imagine themselves as being anti-dialogue, since at every step of the way shutting down conversations seemed like the clear, reasonable choice.
Yes, I think that's right. But also TA is in the business of giving the readers what they want. (Positive feedback... which is a bad thing if you're making electronic control loops. Things go to one rail or the other. We need more negative feedback to find the happy middle.)
I think it's sort of an open question how bad that is. I'm a little more bothered by that in TA's case, because they very much claim they *aren't* doing that, that they care very much about dialogue and truth and aren't purely in the pocket of one party or the other.
So where they cut the comments, it was because the comments were fundamentally evil and irreparable, instead of (as was thought in some circles at the time) because people would sometimes point out their more indefensible positions there. Where they replaced them with "Letters", it was in a carefully controlled way as to avoid any real dialogue and with only minimal attempts at promotion.
Where they closed Notes, they did so by giving it to Fallows, a reliably left-wing voice who had about as much chance of giving strong right-wing views a good-faith airing as I have of looking good in a two-piece swimming suit. And where they allowed someone to make another stab at dialogue, it was Conor, who cultivates a "all about dialogue" image but who has been very reliable in terms of reading the room and toeing the line.
All that to say that the abstract action of taking a partisan position as a publication or having a particular enforced institution-wide bias isn't necessarily a cardinal sin and very clearly isn't rare. But I'm a little more bothered by it in TA's case, where they still try to brand-build around *not* doing that. And I'm a little more bothered still because I used to like them so much back before I thought all these things were generally true about them.
I stopped reading TA in 2009 or so, when they referred to the Tea Party as "Teabaggers" - in print. It made it perfectly clear where they considered the limits of acceptable opinion to be. They've only moved further to the Left since then.
I'm sorry, I stopped reading TA long ago. With positive feedback all systems will go to one power rail or the other. Left and/or Right for the political case. That's what I've seen in all MSM. With positive feedback there is no middle ground.
"For the record, I don’t have any huge opinions on Williamson as a writer; my main familiarity with his work is from this story."
There was one other interesting controversy with K Williamson. At some point, I think at NR, he wrote a piece about small towns that basically concluded "good riddance, let them die." It was a right/libertarian learn to code paean that lost him a lot of fans on the cultural conservative right.
Back when I was still reading print copes of NR, I did like him as a writer, though.
"So it was that TA’s only sorta-conservative wrote an article where he explained that while Williamson’s views were clearly repulsive and had no place in public discourse, he opposed them on the basis of a narrow principle he totally understands most people don’t hold:"
In this paragraph, what is the "them" he opposes? The firing, or the views on abortion/capital punishment?
uggh, I wrote that crappy. editing, but should have been something like "opposed his bosses' decision"
I liked The Atlantic for a time, and stopped reading after MSM all got TDS. (No, I stopped reading after I got over my TDS ~2017(8)?) I heard about the K. Williamson thing, 'cause I was still reading National Review, I never read Conor F.'s opinion piece on the matter. Reading what you wrote it sounds like he found a narrow path through his workplace and free speech. I think you should give C.F. a bit of a break. To come out too strong is to lose his job. He may make up all sorts of reasons in his mind for this. I kinda feel the same way about Neil Young dissing on Joe Rogan. I think Neil is wrong, but I want to give him a break because he is in his own 'liberal bubble' and doesn't know better. (of course I could be totally wrong.) I've stopped reading MSM, I get my news from ACX, Lex Fridman podcast, and other random blogs on substack.) (Well and my co-workers. I'm MSM adjacent. :^ ) I'm libertarian left, and find most in common with the libertarian right.
I do actually want to give Conor several breaks. First, he's a good writer in a prose sense, and consistently interesting enough that I've been aware of him for at least several years and at least semi-frequently read his stuff. If that sounds qualified or backhanded, it's not meant to be; I don't read as much as I should, but I still occasionally go "Oh, Conor wrote this", click the link and read the article.
On top of that, his takes on several things are generally good, consistent in a way that describes a level of principles being involved, strikes out fairly equally at both big partisan sides, and protects things I think are worth protecting, like speech and dialogue.
I don't even mind him writing an article protecting his employer from criticism (which I think he did, while others might reasonably disagree). To be clear, things like "stood by silently while a comments section was closed, or a dialogue-encouraging section of his employers website was softly encouraged to just die already" don't automatically make anybody a fundamentally bad person.
But they do have relevance to certain topics and contexts. In this case, he's establishing a space in which he's going to encourage dialogue among and from the commenter-class, with some hints of "let's be high-quality in a way that promotes something beyond the normal social media catfighting". And he's doing that on a website that has just in the past few years made several moves indicating they won't tolerate strong opinions from the other side of the aisle. Where they happen in a space they control, they destroy or disable that space; where they happen in the thoughts or words of someone they employ, they fire that person.
So I'm harsh here, but I don't have many options if I want to talk about Conor's project. Either he's going to make sure strong right-wing opinions are never aired, or he's going to give them a platform and TA's history indicates they are likely going to tell him to muzzle the dogs or face the consequences. And whether or not I like Conor, whether or not I think he's a good writer or a decent person overall, his history on TA squelching dialogue it doesn't particularly care for (especially from its readers) is to shrug his shoulders, keep his mouth diplomatically shut, and care very much about speech in ways that are less personally costly for him to care about.
Yeah, I feel your pain, we all lost something when MSM was split along political lines. IMHO TA is long gone. No one not of their tribe reads it. (Well I guess except for you. :^) I was watching live streaming from Ottawa, awesome and heartwarming. (Viva Frei)
Totally agree about the way The Atlantic has suffered from Trump Derangement Syndrome. It may well be that the true legacy of Trump is a permanent breaking of long-lasting institutions.
It really bothers me a lot, because there was a point where I actually really enjoyed The Atlantic, where I felt like I really was getting a lot of competing opinions from a lot of people, both in terms of TA writers and things like the comments section and notes.
It gets into a weird semantic issue, but I think there are probably a lot of people at TA who really do care about abstract concepts like discourse, and who want to hear from the readers and think that criticism makes them better, etc. But they are either being thwarted by the group (in the normal way that works, where a couple loud people dominate how everything works) or thwarted by competing, more terminal values - i.e. Trump must be stopped by any means.
And they themselves don't believe something like "you are hysterical over Trump in a counterproductive way" is a real thing; it probably seems to them like they are being very reasonable and making tough-but-necessary choices.
That's why I think they greenlight stuff like this even though it can't survive in their company culture; they can't imagine themselves as being anti-dialogue, since at every step of the way shutting down conversations seemed like the clear, reasonable choice.
Yes, I think that's right. But also TA is in the business of giving the readers what they want. (Positive feedback... which is a bad thing if you're making electronic control loops. Things go to one rail or the other. We need more negative feedback to find the happy middle.)
I think it's sort of an open question how bad that is. I'm a little more bothered by that in TA's case, because they very much claim they *aren't* doing that, that they care very much about dialogue and truth and aren't purely in the pocket of one party or the other.
So where they cut the comments, it was because the comments were fundamentally evil and irreparable, instead of (as was thought in some circles at the time) because people would sometimes point out their more indefensible positions there. Where they replaced them with "Letters", it was in a carefully controlled way as to avoid any real dialogue and with only minimal attempts at promotion.
Where they closed Notes, they did so by giving it to Fallows, a reliably left-wing voice who had about as much chance of giving strong right-wing views a good-faith airing as I have of looking good in a two-piece swimming suit. And where they allowed someone to make another stab at dialogue, it was Conor, who cultivates a "all about dialogue" image but who has been very reliable in terms of reading the room and toeing the line.
All that to say that the abstract action of taking a partisan position as a publication or having a particular enforced institution-wide bias isn't necessarily a cardinal sin and very clearly isn't rare. But I'm a little more bothered by it in TA's case, where they still try to brand-build around *not* doing that. And I'm a little more bothered still because I used to like them so much back before I thought all these things were generally true about them.
I stopped reading TA in 2009 or so, when they referred to the Tea Party as "Teabaggers" - in print. It made it perfectly clear where they considered the limits of acceptable opinion to be. They've only moved further to the Left since then.
I'm sorry, I stopped reading TA long ago. With positive feedback all systems will go to one power rail or the other. Left and/or Right for the political case. That's what I've seen in all MSM. With positive feedback there is no middle ground.