If all my conversations went this way, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on Medium long ago. No, this may actually be the worst misunderstanding I've encountered.

But so I'm still going to suggest, though, that you didn't - and don't - have to posit anything about me ever. Whenever anyone chooses to engage with me (or anyone else) at all, then they always have a choice of whether to posit an assumption, or to ask a question instead.

In this thread, you led your interaction by telling me that I had been "out of line and wholly inappropriate". We know the course of the resulting conversation, but if you had led with a question, I think it could have gone more like this:

You: Are you suggesting that the actions of activists today are somehow moraly equivelent to those of the white supremacists who killed MLK? Because that's certainly how I'm reading it.

Me: No, murder is an entirely different thing from merely demanding someone to be deplatformed, and so I was not trying to draw a moral equivelency. This seems obvious to me, so it didn't occur to me that someone might interpret it that way. I'm sorry for the confusion, but please understand that that is not the point I was trying to make at all.

You: So what is the point you're trying to make? Frankly, I don't see any other way you could have expected that to be interpreted.

Me: When I try to get a handle on what everyone means when they say 'cancel culture', what I think it boils down to is just specifically the desire, or attempt, to quiet or silence someone's voice through the use of some power or influence. The obvious modern example is trying to deplatform people. But a more banal example would be someone blocking another user from posting on their Medium articles. And of course murder would be an extreme example. The idea that that it's a slippery slope from Medium blocking to murder is, to me, clearly absurd - which is why did not anticipate your interpretation at all.

But I didn't see MLK's boycott organizing as fitting into what I see as the real main pattern of what we tend to call 'cancel culture', since it's more about organizing people to send their own message, rather than silencing someone else's message. The analogy I made with MLK's killers, calling their act "the pinnacle" of cancel culture was intended to emphasize the difference between MLK's tactics from the broader spectrum of cancel culture generally that were actually working against him in this case - not to conflate a racist killing with antiracist requests to deplatform.

I do regret the analogy, but I hope you can at least see that I did not mean it in the way that you interpreted.

And the we could proceed from there.

Do you see how asking questions, rather than proposing assumptions, can lead to a better conversation? And can you see how you can literally turn any assumption into a question - which therefore eliminates the need to ever actually state any of your assumptions?

So from that perspective, is there another question you'd want to ask me?

And if not, that 's fine. But please just do not let any more of your responses include any more assumptions about me. And if there is an assumption you find yourself wanting to make, please try to turn it into a question instead.