And confusing. Over at the New York Times, Emily Bazelon has a humongous take on freedom of speech in the era of “Big Tech”, though working my way through umpteen thousand words of vaguely authoritarian liberal hand-wringing over what we should do about people who say things Ms. Bazelon doesn’t want to hear (and doesn’t want you to hear) is definitely not my cup of tea, so I skimmed the whole, concluding that while Emily thankfully doesn’t have the nerve to come down outright in favor of outright censorship, she sure thinks “something” needs to be done and she sure wishes someone would do something about it. Not “punchy”, I know, but not outright repulsive either.
But Emily, like so many liberals, can’t understand why everyone doesn’t think like her, and so she goes looking for, well, conspiracies, though she carefully doesn’t connect the dots. She’s just reporting the facts, that’s all, a heterogeneous collection of, I guess, just about everything she’s read on the subject over the last year or two, coming out vaguely in favor of something that will stop “misinformation”, which, clearly, I think is a terrible idea. The idea that any issue can be resolved by looking at “the facts” is ridiculous, because there are so many of them, so many ways of organizing them, and so many different ways of assigning significance to each. Ms. Bazelon is, unsurprisingly, very impatient with those who “deny” climate change. But one can acknowledge that the earth is getting warmer, and that human behavior is contributing significantly to that warmth, and still reject the “solutions” offered by the standard-issue liberalism that is the sum and substance of Emily’s thought. There is plenty in Rachel Carson’s seminal text of environmentalism, Silent Spring, that constitutes “misinformation”, as this 2012 article in Reason magazine by Ron Bailey demonstrates. More recently, Ron has examined a new report on the environment from the United Nations, Human Cost of Disasters, examining the same data and coming to conclusions opposite those of the report’s authors. From whom would Emily “protect” us?
UPDATE
Continuing my Reason kick (those guys get everything right except the economics), Elizabeth Nolan-Brown has a “real time” take on “misinformation” issues that is both more pithy and more prescient than Emily's.
