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Cancel Culture
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Contrarian Ideas
Someone interested in writing essays asked how I dealt with contrarian ideas in the era of cancel culture. I said I expressed them obliquely, so that good faith readers would understand what I meant, but bad faith readers wouldn't find a quote to rally a mob around.
It's slightly worrying to have to express ideas obliquely. It's against my general m.o., which is to say things as clearly as possible. But it may actually be ok, because the most controversial ideas in an essay are rarely the most exciting.
All it means for an idea to be controversial is that a lot of people are currently agitated about it. But what people get most agitated about is very random. The way to get cancelled in 1600 was to have unorthodox views about the Trinity. Today's minefields are equally boring.
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