Comment by motohagiography

It was predictable that Scott Alexander would be called out for his blog and the people attracted to it. For people driving change in society today, he's the most problematic type of person of all: reasonable, moderate, thoughtful, and a fair minded person who equips intelligent and charismatic people with critical tools for deflecting histrionics.

Journalism is broken. What was news in its imagined golden age, and what news is now are very different things. The essential ingredient that makes a story news is conflict. If there is no conflict, there is no news story. Without it, it's a puff or a think piece, or a listicle, or comment, it's not news. What's missing in news is the legitimacy of the conflict.

The problem, and the reason editors and journalists themselves can't understand it, is that what people popularly call "fake news," is not necessarily about fabricated facts. Reporters and editors will say stuff like a quote is a quote, those were your own words (basically) and you don't get to define context or how people interpret them.

The problem of "fake news" is that it is not necessarily the facts, but the conflict itself that is manufactured. Setting up the subject of a story in opposition to someone who doesn't have standing in their field, elevating fringe views to being on an equal shared platform with mainstream ones, propping up a weak straw man to represent unpopular opinions vs. a protected establishment figure, are all examples of standard news items that people reject as fake. Outing Scott Alexander's personal identity is a way to set up a manufactured conflict between the individual psychiatrist as an imperfect man, and a mob who see his charitable views as equipping their opposition.

What once may have been an interesting battle of ideas among public intellectuals is now just a series of predictable fixed fights, using the same hackneyed tropes, and the same story line over and over again of victims and their oppressors, with the same stock underdog characters triumphing over the same cast of cliche villains. Throwing people to an angry mob is manufactured conflict - and therefore I would argue, fake news.

It would be just as harmlessly entertaining as professional wrestling if it weren't the gate keeping institution for public discourse being reduced to a propaganda mouthpiece for an ideology that is predicated on belief in permanent struggle and conflict for its own sake.

Alexander is one of the more popular writers online and his view is important and essential to public discourse. It would be a shame to see him cancelled too, but it is a predictable stage in a path we've marched down before. If nothing else, his blog should be seen as a canary for some grim inevitabilities to come.