If there is one thing the experiences of Stephens, Weiss, McArdle, and Williamson has clarified for all objective observes, it is what true courage in writing really is. The kind with personal and professional consequences.
— Noah Rothman (@NoahCRothman) April 20, 2018
Best wisecrack so far:
Shivering in the gulag, Williamson chivalrously offers his last crust of focaccia to McArdle -- then pulls it back, asking, "you've never had an abortion, have you?" https://t.co/Rfmjd9Kjyi
— Roy Edroso (@edroso) April 20, 2018
All this on a day when we're learning that another Russian journalist has died under suspicious circumstances:
A Russian investigative journalist who wrote about the deaths of mercenaries in Syria has died in hospital after falling from his fifth-floor flat.Oh, but Borodin never faced a "Twitter mob," so what did he know about courage?
Maxim Borodin was found badly injured by neighbours in Yekaterinburg and taken to hospital, where he later died.
... a friend revealed Borodin had said his flat had been surrounded by security men a day earlier.
Vyacheslav Bashkov described Borodin as a "principled, honest journalist" and said Borodin had contacted him at five o'clock in the morning on 11 April saying there was "someone with a weapon on his balcony and people in camouflage and masks on the staircase landing".
In Williamson's piece, he seems to argue that not just a professional opinion-monger's tweets but his extended discursions in podcasts are to be ignored, because they're not really speech acts.
I was fired [by The Atlantic] on April 5.If Williamson wasn't asked what he really thinks, perhaps it's because he already told us what he thinks. When you're a professional journalist-slash-pundit and you choose to tweet, you tweet as a professional journalist-slash-pundit. When you do a podcast in which you revise and extend the words in your writing, you do that as a professional journalist-slash-pundit. (And please note that, in the podcast, Williamson's elaboration on the tweets went on for several minutes, in which he pointedly disagreed with fellow conservative Charles C.W. Cooke's suggestion that it might be appropriate to have variable punishments for different kinds of murder, which is what both agree abortion is.)
... The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”
... The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy. (The sole exception was a reporter from Vox.) Did I think I was being portrayed accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions.
The point of Williamson's Journal op-ed seems to be that a writer deserves a mulligan for anything he says in a podcast, even at great length, and even if the podcast is expressly intended to be an auditory elaboration of his writing, and also that, of course, a writer really deserves a mulligan for tweets, which don't count as his opinions even if the whole point of his having a Twitter account is to spread those opinions through social media. Hey, you can't know what a guy thinks just from what he types in short form and says at great length in non-print long form -- that doesn't count!
Sorry, Kevin, that still doesn't make sense. You had your say, and you're justifiably paying for it.
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