Reflections on Reflecting

The critique  “hit me hard,”  Silverman later said, and led her to take another look at her act.

It’s rare that a review has that kind of effect, and as part of a series of wide-ranging conversations Scott is having with artists, he and Silverman recently sat down via video call to discuss that moment and why admitting you’re wrong (as Silverman asked our critic to do as well) can be freeing. 

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

More broadly, we’re particularly bad as a society right now at engagement. Arguments from people with different political, cultural, and class views tend to simply be dismissed altogether making productive dialog next to impossible.

The OTB commentariat is better than most at this and I’ve certainly learned a lot over the 18-plus years I’ve been engaging here. Still, we’ve managed to run off essentially all of the thoughtful conservatives and become something of a monoculture.

When I started commenting here, a really long time ago (I remember commenting on the Benghazi hearings, but I was probably here even before then), I was pretty much a conservative, at least in my political preferences (I didn’t vote Democrat in a Presidential election until 2016, for example). Over the last 10 or so years my views have changed significantly, and a lot of that is due to discussions here.

One example is why I remember commenting on the Benghazi hearings because I got into an exchange with commenter Jukeboxgrad in which he/she stated something in a way that made me go “wait, I need to re-think this” and led me to understand my position at the time was wrong.

There were other instances but that one sticks out because it was one of the earliest in the whole process.

"She depends on the assumption that only someone secure in his or her own lack of racism would dare to make, or to laugh at, a racist joke, the telling of which thus becomes a way of making fun simultaneously of racism and of racial hypersensitivity."

From Publisher: Outside the Beltway