Patrickov wrote:The article assumes that people saying the sentence "this is ridiculous! We are free!" are being emotional and giving a knee-jerk response, but the very fact that this kind of article can be published without any repurcussions proves such claims to be factual. In some sense, the article's very existence is its own best rebuttal.
Are you sure you are not posting some implicit China apologist propaganda?
Indeed it can be considered propaganda although I don’t take this to mean untrue as much that people write things with agendas which can be explicit or inplicat.
And it largely is a criticism of the idea of a free press which is captured by a capistlist class and its interests and is in fact not some plurality with a marketplace of ideas.
I don’t think single article in criticism of such isn’t as damning as you think it is when it is quite rasy to tolerate such things while they are largely weak in influence. But that readily goes out the window if deemed a significant threat.
https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/loyaltyoath/symposium/schrecker.htmlThis only contradicts what is the appearence of a marketplace of ideas but is wuite sensible that liberals seek to defend a liberal order even in contradiction to its principles. Just as other regimes may seek to defend their hegemony. As such a state isn’t a matter of consensus, but the dictates of a ruling class, just as thr article rightly emphasizesthe class character of the press.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/macintyre2.pdf Maintenance of the illusion of “objectivity” is essential, and MacIntyre sees the universities as playing a crucial role in the maintenance of this illusion. Since academics rely for their livelihood on disproving each other’s theories, the resulting interminable and esoteric debate continuously re-establishes the impossibility of consensus.
“In the course of history liberalism, which began as an appeal to alleged principles of shared rationality against what was felt to be the tyranny of tradition, has itself been transformed into a tradition whose continuities are partly defined by the interminability of the debate over such principles. An interminability which was from the standpoint of an earlier liberalism a grave defect to be remedied as soon as possible has become, in the eyes of some liberals at least, a kind of virtue”. (p. 335)
Far from this failure to find any firm ground undermining liberalism, MacIntyre believes that it reinforces it, because one of the fundamental bases for liberalism is the conviction that no comprehensive idea (to use Rawls’ term) can enjoy majority, let alone unanimous, support. This then justifies the ban on governments pursuing the general good.
“Any conception of the human good according to which, for example, it is the duty of government to educate the members of the community morally, ... will be proscribed. ... liberal individualism does indeed have its own broad conception of the good, which it is engaged in imposing politically, legally, socially, and culturally wherever it has the power to do so, but also that in doing so its toleration of rival conceptions of the good in the public arena is severely limited.” (p. 336)
Such a ban on governments pursuing the social good of course serves a very definite social interest.
“The weight given to an individual preference in the market is a matter of the cost which the individual is able and willing to pay; only so far as an individual has the means to bargain with those who can supply what he or she needs does the individual have an effective voice. So also in the political and social realm it is the ability to bargain that is crucial. The preferences of some are accorded weight by others only insofar as the satisfaction of those preferences will lead to the satisfaction of their own preferences. Only those who have something to give get. The disadvantaged in a
liberal society are those without the means to bargain.” (p. 336) and consequently,
“The overriding good of liberalism is no more and no less than the continued sustenance of the liberal social and political order”. (p. 345)
In each of the historical settings that MacIntyre investigates, he is able to show that the type of justice and the type of rationality which appears to the philosophical spokespeople of the community to be necessary and universal, turns out to be a description of the type of citizens of the community in question. Accordingly, the justice of liberalism and the rationality of liberalism is simply that justice and that rationality of the “citizens of nowhere” (p. 388), the “outsiders,” people lacking in any social obligation or any reason for acting other than to satisfy their desires and to defend the conditions under which they are able to continue satisfying their desires. Their rationality is therefore that of the objects of their desire.
And this need not be some apologetics for China in any specific case, but emphasizes the hegemony in western ress that coalesces around core talking points and frames issues in a particuar way across the board while somehow characterized as independent entities meant to represent a plurality of ideas. The point being on the qualities of the western press than the specific content of articles on China. That you take the article specifically in that way suggests only your fixation on China as opposed to the points in the article which you suggest vaguely are performativrly contradicted by the article existing.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics