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Chalmette Refinery Product Slate (PADD3M)

But we don't get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who's doing it better, who's more thorough, etc. We're still missing that.

I was chagrined to see this move to put communication infrastructure as the root cause of a social-political phenomenon.

It seems like Loofbourow buys the primary claim in the Harper's letter that there is a crisis in free speech, but wants to shift the blame from progressives to Twitter and Reddit et al. Rather than accepting the existence of the crisis in the Harper's letter (which pops up in other places too), I would instead focus on how that story of crisis has itself been generated and who benefits from its telling.

The panic about "cancel culture" seems to grow directly out of the earlier panic about political correctness, continuing the rightist tradition of fear-mongering whenever new voices start to be heard.

Notice that every example of information disorder Loofbourow outlines and blames on the Internet is a rightist challenge to broadening voices and identities. Is Twitter causing a crisis? Or are rightists using Internet platforms to sow discord and worry about that discord's effects?

Blaming this manufactured crisis on the Internet smacks of technodeterminism, as if Twitter created not only the opportunity to troll, but the trolls themselves. The bigotry behind the trolling existed long before Twitter. The alarm we should sound is not that "cancel culture" has gone too far, but that otherwise well-meaning progressives are getting sucked into the rightist crisis narrative that all the new voices we are hearing are a threat to free speech.

That all said, I certainly agree with Loofbourow that Internet platforms present serious issues, all the way from Twitter's inconsistency in managing violations of their terms of service, or Facebook's practice of accepting disinformative political advertising, up to whether ad supported social platforms can ever support healthy discourse.

Exactly, although I differ with Loofbourow on where to put primary focus to fill this void.

Loofbourow is certainly correct that Internet platforms shape discourse, but I think there is another set of activities beyond the Internet that has been working hard to generate not just "'censorious' rhetorical strategies", but also a manufactured "panic" about their causes, scope and effects.

Rightists would have us believe that there is a crisis in free speech, that it is ending civilization, and that it is caused by progressive political correctness run amok. At the same time that rightists are using the Internet precisely to foment all the bad faith conversation Loofbourow describes (and often baiting progressives to join them), they are also using the information disorder they generate as proof of their larger argument that political correctness and "cancel culture" are a significant threat. I don't buy it, and neither should the signers of the Harper's letter that inspired Loofbourow's response.

Join the annotated conversation around the original Letter on Justice and Open Debate in Harper's that inspired this response and other responses from various points of view.

For me, it wasn't so much the summary, but who was it that had the best coverage. It was the comparison of the coverage. I read most of the particular stories anyway.

This reminds me how much I miss the old daily analysis that Slate use to do for the day's top news stories in various outlets in their Today's Papers segmet.