Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

yes

glad we solved it

also there's a sense in which "i feel x" has a different sort of truth-status than "x is the case" -- you necessarily have to believe the former in some sense, but you have to believe it in a different way than the latter. does the current way we're learning to have conversations allow us to make that distinction?

i think much of the social justice rhetoric and general tendency to empathize with victims on the activist left leads to much of the weight being on the former ("I/he/she feels x") because what is decided to be "x is the case" is historically weighted towards those in power. so there's (good!) pragmatic and political reason to lean that way in general as a kind of corrective to those tendencies. that doesn't mean, though, that we arent responsible when we get it wrong.

tyfr

to better answer your (very good) question, i want to say that "the conversation we're having on the left tends to intentionally and strategically occlude that distinction, and sometimes those who do want to make that distinction are also doing it for pragmatic reasons (because they want delegitimize victims of oppression/abuse/etc), but that we should reserve the right to make that distinction if/when we feel we need to." i dont think there's any way forward that isn't loaded with some risk of being wrong.

sorry if im babbling on.

i've come to peace w/ the fact that when we talk about the left we're really talking about a very small percentage of political society and maybe they should take on radical positions that occlude distinctions for pragmatic reasons (attempting to draw the discourse further to the left).

i've always been fascinated by how this dynamic replicates itself--i've only been in one relationship i'd genuinely call abusive, and that person had the most horrific childhood & adolescence of anyone i've ever met. i want to know more about why this happens the way it does.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, January 21, 2015 9:54 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's pretty simple ime, people do what they know.

io otm.

the problem isn't that people are overrusing the word abuse but that it's more prevalent than people care to admit and why would anyone want to shake that status quo if it's benefitting them or stands to.

i have nothing to say specifically about these fascinating people s.clover is talking about ftr

http://girlempowered.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/screen-shot-2012-09-02-at-2-58-53-pm.png?w=300&h=294

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html

Twitter has already handled that article this morning, I'm not even reading it.

chait was so good at DC congressional budget politics type stuff i have to say it makes me a little sad to see him turn into another #actually blogger. idk if he had that kind of streak in him the whole time or what

is it possible for someone to write about these kinds of situations without extrapolating nightmarish scenarios of life under "pc culture"

yeah, add a footnote saying - 'obv this is only a problem for terrible university facility and their hysterical students - the rest of us can point + laugh'

pc culture vs pc music

The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious.

oh ick

thank u based liberalism

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8YQQNRCYAEDUrE.png

Trigger Warning: Amanda Palmer

lol those quotes from the Binders fb group are great. very ilx'y.

lol do you even go here

in the chait

Her response since then has been to avoid committing a provocation, especially on Twitter. “If you tweet something straight­forwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens,” she told me. “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.” Social media, where swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant, paradoxically creates this feeling of isolation. “You do immediately get the sense that it’s one against millions, even though it’s not.” Subjects of these massed attacks often describe an impulse to withdraw.

i've been reading a lot of ancient greek stuff lately and i was struck by how common exile was as a punishment. it was used later on of course, with some esp. famous cases (napoleon?). but i wonder if 'banishment' isn't more of a practice that's antithetical to liberalism.

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

LOL, can it really, Jonathan Chait, white male? You may want to ask a local woman to enlighten you more on this topic.

u tell him, phil D, white male

Oh, shut up, you tedious fart.

*clink!*

Didn't you killfile me? If not, can you?

https://twitter.com/HannaRosin/status/560183792854634496

come on

http://i.imgur.com/SkmKyYu.jpg

wait what would retweeting…

liberals, we must not turn back the clock to the heinous days of 1991

oh internet, you drain and sustain me all at once

*farts*

gotta love "the incident would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier."

That's hack writer speak for "I have to go back 23 years to find another relevant example."

"the incident would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier."

Sounds like a sentence from an X-Files report

https://twitter.com/HannaRosin/status/560183792854634496

come on

― goole, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 9:40 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol tho

megalol tbh

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-chait-takes-on-the-entire-internet-1682078451

this felt good to read

I don't really care about this but lol'd at:

His philosophical position is that it is undemocratic—dangerously undemocratic, in fact—to tell Jonathan Chait to "shut up and go away." It might be rude, and personally hurtful to Jonathan Chait, to tell him to shut up and go away (trigger warning: telling Jon Chait to shut up and go away),

As we get to the end of Chait's essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That's one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.

chait is just a hysteric, and pareene is right that he's taking way out of proportion a phenomenon that mostly applies to tumblr, twitter and college dorm rooms. but i think he gets to the central ideological issue here:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”

I never know who "the left" is supposed to BE in any of this, which is weird because I am definitely somewhere in it. But a very great deal of what "feminists," "liberals," or "the left" are said to be, or do, or think, or say, doesn't match my experience.

obv your average phil d or whatever doesn't have a sophisticated enough political ideology to know where they come down on free speech as inherently virtuous or not - but there is a very real division between liberalism and a more radical left. and it's not easily dismissed - i don't think mackinnon's quote is wrong, and i say this as someone who believes neo-nazis should be allowed to march in skokie, or deny the holocaust, or whatever.

i mean to say that like if you think that protecting ppl from hurtful speech is a more important virtue than letting ppl say whatever they want - i'm not 100% sure you'd be wrong. it isn't my ideological pov but it's not self-evidently insane.

Hey, Mordy, why don't you go fuck yourself?

i say this as someone who believes neo-nazis should be allowed to march in skokie

I like how you always trot this out

but let's keep it civil, kids

sheesh

well it's a particularly dramatic example (that the ACLU defended), but another example, when ahmadinejad spoke at columbia (iirc?) i don't like the guy but i wasn't against him speaking

pc left is not "Marxist" - they frequently turn out to be class clueless.

Also not to be confused with trying to maintain basic civil rights (which for some reason is also "the left")

Basically an incoherent critique all around.