I was tempted yesterday to rebut some of the things that David Silverman got wrong in his brief conversation with Justin Vacula last night, but it’s going to be easier and vastly more productive to just focus on what Dave got right.
- David was absolutely right to choose discourse and dialogue over banning and blacklisting.
- David was right to say that we should be discouraging particular behaviors rather than individual activists.
- David was right to say that we should be actively discouraging acts of hatred, harassment and bullying in particular.
- David was right to point out that people will indeed judge others by their relations and associations rather than their own individual words and actions.
I’m not sure if Justin would actually disagree with any of these above points, and I don’t feel like the show delved nearly enough into specifics on point 3 to make any real progress. That said, I’m not sure if that would really be worth it at this point, as we’ve yet to see any examples of public call-outs having a deterrent effect within the movement.
