Scott Alexander has deleted his enormously popular blog Slate Star Codex after NYTimes promised to dox him and put his life in danger.
This is how the public space will be cleansed of all dissident voices, one by one.
Now let the yes-butchiks explain how it’s not a big deal.
Saw the news this morning and it made me incredibly sad. I’ve been a long time reader and have much admiration for Scott Alexander. 😦
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The guy was simply expressing his fascinating views, in a very polite, nerdy way. Wasn’t hurting anybody. This is terrible. Even slightly dissident voices are being silenced.
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// When I expressed these fears to the reporter, he said that it was New York Times policy to include real names, and he couldn’t change that.
Don’t Right wing media sources follow a similar policy? NYT didn’t intend to silence him, though it worked like that. I understand how dissident voices may be silenced using this tactic, excluding the cases of true extremists who don’t care about anonymity like the founder of Stormfront.
However, may not the relative recency of Internet play a role too? This profound transformation happened less than three decades ago – before that time few people blogged; new norms regarding degrees of anonymity on the web and in official media are yet being developed. Why not raise this issue publicly?
One may act like Rod Dreher saying he verified somebody’s identity but not revealing it. Don’t media already do it when they receive leaks from politicians? They could be pressured into granting the same courtesy to bloggers.
Of course, with numerous hoaxes, one doesn’t know whom to believe, even with real names. I am afraid some media would hide behind ‘anonymous’ sources (they invented 2 seconds ago) and go 10 steps further in inventing their own reality with fake names and blogs and what not.
Scott Alexander mentions ” NYT’s strategy of doxxing random bloggers for clicks” . Wouldn’t the same number of readers be interested in this story regardless of his name? There is no scandal here, no crime with public being curious ‘who did it’.
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“Don’t Right wing media sources follow a similar policy?”
“NYT didn’t intend to silence him, though it worked like that. ”
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Forgot to mention Scott Alexander’s blog was in my favorites and I am personally sorry to see him go.
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“NYTimes promised to dox him and put his life in danger”
I’m betting they’re going to dox him anyway unless there’s a lot of pushback before they do (at which point they’ll ‘leak’ it somehow).
I’m somehow unfamiliar with the blog but have only heard good things about it from smarter people (which means that the NYT must hate it).
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// All the people planning to cancel their NYT subscriptions over the doxxing of Scott Alexander are going to get another dose of NYT ethics when they try to do it. To make it harder for you to cancel, they make you do it by phone or chat.
// It was so hard in fact I had to cancel my credit card and change its number. Not joking. Dispicable. They never get to the chat and wgeb they do they tell you to call. That takes forever.
// Conscious decision by media companies.
Easy to subscribe.
Extraordinarily difficult to cancel.
That strongly resembles the business model of a dying business.
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My husband actually called me on the phone while I was out running errands, to tell me about this. We are both devoted SSC readers. I almost cried. This is horrible.
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I only read sporadically but what a great loss. A brilliant, very original thinker. Absolutely disgusting what’s been done to him.
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OT: In the “things that make you go….. hmmmmmmmm” dept.
Close friend of the Clintons and Epstein has “committed suicide” by jumping off a building…. what a weird coincidence!
https://deadline.com/2020/06/steve-bing-dead-philanthropist-film-financier-1202966891/
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