It's one thing to speak your mind at a newspaper in Saudi Arabia. It's another thing to do it at the Washington Post in America, in the capital.

It was a profound lever of power that suddenly had been given to a person who

wasn't afraid to speak out. He became a force in a way that no other journalist had ever been in Saudi Arabia.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My name is Matt Lutz. I am a professor of philosophy at Wuhan University and I am a

contributing writer for persuasion. I want to talk a little bit about my article,

rhetorical Calvinball. The rhetorical Calvinball article was inspired by the

controversy over the Harper's letter that was published several months ago.

There's two sides of this debate where some people are coming out in favor of free speech

and other people are coming out against free speech.

I thought that that was not the right way to frame the debate. People who are

on the liberal left, the locusts, the practitioners of the successor ideology, whatever you want to call that.

They're responding with speech.

The thing is they're just responding with weird and different kinds of speech.

They weren't playing by the same rules of rational debate that most people who are involved

in public discourse try to play by.

They're doing another game, which is a game that I called rhetorical Calvin Ball.

It's based on a game that the protagonists in Calvin and Hobbs play.

It's what I call a meta game,

or it's a game about the game.

The way that you win is by changing the rules on your opponent to make it so that whatever you

are doing counts as winning and whatever they are doing counts as losing.

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