Yesterday's trip down to the link-vault for the sunspot post immediately below resulted in a bit of happy serendipity as on the same (metaphorical) shelf was a tweet with the annotation:
This is Why Izabella Is the Best
Which reminded me of this 2018 post and got me wondering about the future of panels, TED talks, and the conference biz in the post coronavirus world.....Was the panel economy as extensive in the 60s, 70s and 80s as it is now? Are we approaching peak panel yet? Is there a historical precedent for panel fetishism of this sort? How does anyone gain expertise at all if they’re always on panels?— Izabella Kaminska (@izakaminska) October 22, 2019
And although I have a sneaking suspicion that is not the point of her latest post, I have had a slowly-dawning realization that the panels, like the poor, will always be with us.
From FT Alphaville's editor:
Censortech strikes again
We suggested a few weeks ago that “censortech” had spun out of control, with platforms starting to flag even mainstream dissent of the government-imposed lockdown strategy as problematic and in need of suppression.
Well, it seems, the faceless mandarins governing what does and does not make the grade on social media sites were only getting started.
News comes our way on Wednesday that a clip of an Institute of Ideas virtual panel featuring The Spectator’s Toby Young -- who happens to be the general secretary of the “Free Speech Union” -- has been removed from YouTube* for daring to question lockdown strategy.
We appreciate that the views of Toby Young are not everyone’s cup of tea. But until recently we lived in a society that had the capacity to process opposing view points and make its own mind up about them. Those who don’t like the views of The Spectator don’t have to buy The Spectator. And if the majority of people agree -- perhaps because those views really are too distasteful for any collective to absorb -- the market will silence the miscreants by imminently making the publication fail.
The People’sTube told Young they had taken the clip down because of an investigation triggered by a single complaint, with the social media platform concluding the clip violated its community standards.....MUCH MORE
We’ve watched the panel and the decision is very hard to rationalise. The only justifiable case against the clip, which was only showing Toby Young’s comments, is that it was decontextualised from the counter-arguments expressed in the wider panel. His key argument, by the way, is that the strongest case against lockdown isn’t the economic case but rather the civil liberties case and the bad precedent it can set. But if decontextualisation is to be considered a thought crime worthy of deletion from the web, must not every media outlet shutter itself immediately?
Young wasn’t the only lockdown critic on the panel. Nobel-prize winning biophysicist Michael Levitt also presented the case that governments may have rushed into lockdowns when more targeted measures may have been more effective. The other two panellists’ views were slightly ambivalent, with each seeing some potential benefits from the lockdown strategy but also acknowledging the downsides. In other words, there were actually counter-arguments.
If you watch the clip, which Young has now posted on Bitchute, you will -- we think -- agree that the views being expressed could not really be considered extreme in any way.
Which requires us to be blunt. What’s happening here is literally the sort of thing we, the free press, are used to bemoaning in authoritarian states elsewhere.
We seem to have forgotten that a society that does not permit the questioning of government policy or consensus cannot be classified as a free society. By that measure it is not a liberal society either....
