It seems fairly normal to me for an emotionally charged movement to attract people for whom it’s difficult to tell whether they’re not-too-bright fanatics or agents provocateur.
Here are two more hypotheses about who might benefit:
a Trump fan who realizes that Trump’s main hope for reelection involves running against the cancel culture (I doubt that Trump himself is competent enough to arrange this).
the Chinese government might want to foment something like this in order to discredit the Western idea of free speech, since that idea is in some tension with the Chinese government’s legitimacy. This would be pretty mild compared to, say, what the CIA did in Iran in 1953.
From the point of Russia or China who want to stirr up conflict it would be better to write letters that actually result in people getting cancelled and that don’t provide a setting where people can organize effectively against cancellation.
You’re certainly right, and we should expect lots of mediocre material as you describe.
Here I try to make the case, though, that this letter was not merely mediocre but in fact suspiciously bad, the kind of abject failure that it would be hard to blunder into by accident. I’m rather familiar with progressive rhetoric, and to my eye at least, even their worst arguments are more studiously advanced than this one was.
It seems fairly normal to me for an emotionally charged movement to attract people for whom it’s difficult to tell whether they’re not-too-bright fanatics or agents provocateur.
This is a very good observation, and seems like a pretty big problem for such movements.
It seems fairly normal to me for an emotionally charged movement to attract people for whom it’s difficult to tell whether they’re not-too-bright fanatics or agents provocateur.
Here are two more hypotheses about who might benefit:
a Trump fan who realizes that Trump’s main hope for reelection involves running against the cancel culture (I doubt that Trump himself is competent enough to arrange this).
the Chinese government might want to foment something like this in order to discredit the Western idea of free speech, since that idea is in some tension with the Chinese government’s legitimacy. This would be pretty mild compared to, say, what the CIA did in Iran in 1953.
Too many hypotheses, too little evidence.
From the point of Russia or China who want to stirr up conflict it would be better to write letters that actually result in people getting cancelled and that don’t provide a setting where people can organize effectively against cancellation.
You’re certainly right, and we should expect lots of mediocre material as you describe.
Here I try to make the case, though, that this letter was not merely mediocre but in fact suspiciously bad, the kind of abject failure that it would be hard to blunder into by accident. I’m rather familiar with progressive rhetoric, and to my eye at least, even their worst arguments are more studiously advanced than this one was.
This is a very good observation, and seems like a pretty big problem for such movements.
Related: Poe’s law