Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

by the way, anybody who thinks "large segments of American culture has convulsed into censoriousness" hasn't looked at a news site response thread lately. Before the last ten years or so I had never read so many insanely racist messages outside of a bathroom stall.

vast understatement actually: 40 years of graffiti did not produce the amount of hardcore genocidal hate reading that a few years of checking out just Yahoo news threads alone provided. What censors.

"Censorship" only ever translates to "consequences" for people who complain about it though.

everyone has to deal w/ consequences. chait worrying about coalition building is doing some concern trolling, but if ppl - whether right or wrong - decide that there isn't a place for them in parts of the left (even if it's bc they confuse consequences w/ censorship), they aren't going to sign up. this seems like freddie's complaint - and there are certainly some sorts of authorities in the left even tho as a movement it is so disenfranchised that they barely stack up as authorities compared to business/mainstream politics/MSM/etc. maybe it's a good thing tho to build an ideological pure movement. i think US communists tho might caution against it.

When trans ppl, WoC, and others with the least power have to listen to their supposed "allies" disparaging them and their experiences, treating them like exotic houseplants while keeping them away from leadership, funding, and the good silver, being insulted and erased right to their faces, that is the opposite of ideological. That is real.

And anyone that thinks it's advantageous to trade those people for "business/mainstream politics/MSM/etc" has already made clear what they consider worth fighting for.

Also, everyone does not deal with consequences, Chait's precise complaint is that when the rabble didn't have a stage, he didn't have to deal with them at all.

i was reading an interesting leo strauss piece* last week (where he claimed the problem w/ liberalism is that it holds itself above politics. i guess it's understandable that someone else's principles are just 'ideology' when yours are 'real'.

* Leo Strauss, "The Crisis of Our Time", 41–54 in Howard Spaeth, ed., The Predicament of Modern Politics (Detroit: University of Detroit Press, 1964) 47–48.

well he has consequences. he gets yelled at on twitter. it's not particularly high stakes, but he doesn't seem to like it.

http://i2.cdnds.net/11/43/618_odd_tiny_violin.jpg

What's MSM? Some kind of text message thingy?

well obv idgaf about chait's complaints - i mean ffs he's angry at some activists on the internet. but i do think there is a real ideological split between the left + liberalism. also he's an idiot bc while he mentioned charlie hebdo it was as an aside + if you really want to discuss this issue why not talk about it in the arena where there's an actual body count and not yr hurt feelings

MicroSoftMetwork?

i was reading an interesting leo strauss piece* last week (where he claimed the problem w/ liberalism is that it holds itself above politics. i guess it's understandable that someone else's principles are just 'ideology' when yours are 'real'

according to reinhart koselleck this is a gesture that goes back to the beginning of the enlightenment (where a sense of absolute "morality" became the utopian position from which to critique the political process).

i appreciate how he let's the marxist critique hang there and then just walks away from it

Pareene's point is ultimately accurate, I think - Chait isn't complaining about being censored, he's complaining about finding himself in a dialogue with people he would prefer to, and was able to previously, ignore

xp

― Οὖτις, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 6:33 PM (1 hour ago)

this is so otm

also just want to say for the hell of it, i read that satirical column chait linked and while obviously that writer and i come from very different political positions, it was actually pretty well-done in parts, for a college paper

yay free speech http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter

The notion that our perception of reality necessarily reflects a particular cultural matrix is hardly open to question. Ironically, this type of thinking has been politically applied most effectively not by progressive leftists seeking to undermine unjust power structures, but by cynical, right wing opinion engineers like those at the Fox News Network. It should hardly surprise us when, unencumbered by any impetus to even feign "objectivity", the rich and powerful prove far better able to propagate the narratives that suit them than the poor and oppressed.

That's why I'm suspicious of any suggestion that the value of speech is dependent the speaker's identifiable cultural identity. Insistences of this sort may present themselves as righteous political action, but I doubt that such nakedly partisan line-drawing will, in the long term, provide a more powerful weapon to progressives than those whose interests they oppose.

The naïve veneration of ostensibly universal liberal moral principle, however, has tended to benefit progressive causes. As Οὖτις points out, "freedom of speech is maintained and enforced by those in power - historically disenfranchised minorities don't actually have the political power to silence the speech of the capital class or anyone else. They have the right to call out the speech that reinforces the power of the capital class for what it often is - sexist, racist, classist, fascist, corporatist, whatever..."

This is the argument Chait should have made, ie examining the negative patterns of groupthink and self-censorship in all groups rather than acting as if it was limited to this one.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2015/01/27/chait-speech/

contenderizer otm

kinda feel like the chait piece is a favor to 'call-out' culture (or whatever we're calling it) - by treating it as a serious movement/problem and not just a fringe phenomenon he gives it credibility. he could've just been like "look at these idiots," but instead he made it sound like they're an actual danger to someone somewhere

oh boy:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/27/the-lefts-intensifying-war-on-liberalism/

https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/560256932049874944

alfred i was a little disappointed to see that yr inevitable blog post on chait was just rephrasing the gawker/ilx CW

Aw shit u gonna take that Alfred? Straight up called your blog post redundant! In front of everybody!

Yeah, the dozen or so people who comment on this thread or read my blog = CW

even small communities need iconoclasts

Sullivan's post = "bros before hoes"

the julian sanchez post RM/RM linked a while back is excellent, worth a read before it drops from sight

good digby post http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/from-blogofascism-to-pc-police-its.html

I like Bryan Lowder's response too. "The truth is, identity grants experience (and experience should be valued to a point); but it does not automatically grant wisdom, critical distance, or indeed, unassailable righteousness." I don't trust anyone who thinks there was nothing of worth in Chait's piece beyond all the posturing melodrama.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/01/28/jonathan_chait_s_anti_political_correctness_essay_unpacked.html

That piece is fantastic.

it really is

Belle Waring also weighs in, and makes a lot of the same points as Lowder, although several orders of magnitude more caustically. Seems like the consensus is coalescing around, "Whatever slivers of points Chait made, they were lost in the continuous showing of his ass."

alfred i was a little disappointed to see that yr inevitable blog post on chait was just rephrasing the gawker/ilx CW

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Aw shit u gonna take that Alfred? Straight up called your blog post redundant! In front of everybody!

― da croupier, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like this cafeteria shit stirring croup

https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/560256932049874944

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for reasons i don't completely understand freddie catches a lot of shit but i think on this stuff particularly he's coming down from just the right angle--all the cred in the world from me.

xp I know clowning Chait is fun and all but I feel like the best responses get past that level pretty quickly.

for reasons i don't completely understand freddie catches a lot of shit

he argues with other leftists and doesn't stop when they tell him to fuck off. at least, that's what i've seen with e.g. sady doyle and i think some of the TNI type people

He frequently gets clowned by the crew at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

oh god and the whole kendzior bro argument. i had happily forgotten all that

ugh i don't even want to touch that one

he argues with other leftists and doesn't stop when they tell him to fuck off. at least, that's what i've seen with e.g. sady doyle and i think some of the TNI type people

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 5:29 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but it seems like i mainly see him giggled over by media types? i get the TNI-crew scorn (they're precisely the academic-radical-left axis i think chait is accidentally right to pinpoint) but he seems like the target of like blog-media-ppl derision too

anyway i liked what greenwald got down on this

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/petulant-entitlement-syndrome-journalists/

he's got a combo of zero-irony anti-jokeman and true-leftist "more committed to your cause than you are, can't you see" about him. i don't think he's wrong, maybe on a parsing of this or that issue, sure, but generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

All of that can create a disincentive for engaging on those topics: the purpose of it is to impose a psychic cost for doing so, and one is instinctively tempted to avoid that.

Of course, all of that can be unpleasant or – if one allows it to be – worse than unpleasant.

But that’s the price one pays for having a platform. And, on balance, it’s good that this price has to be paid. In fact, the larger and more influential platform one has, the more important it is that the person be subjected to aggressive, even harsh, criticisms. Few things are more dangerous than having someone with influence or power hear only praise or agreement. Having people devoted to attacking you – even in unfair, invalid or personal ways – is actually valuable for keeping one honest and self-reflective.

It would be wonderful on one level if all criticisms were expressed in the soft and respectful tones formalized in the U.S. Senate, but it’s good and necessary when people who wield power or influence are treated exactly like everyone else, which means that sometimes people say mean and unfair things about you in not-nice tones. Between erring on the side of people with power being treated with excess deference or excess criticisms, the latter is vastly preferable. The key enabling role of the government, media and other elites in the disasters and crimes of the post-9/11 era, by itself, leaves no doubt about this. It also proves that one of the best aspects of the internet is that it gives voice to people who are not credentialed – meaning not molded through the homogenizing grinder of establishment media outlets.

generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right especially put next to the cool kids at TNI--whom "utilize the language of social justice without particularly caring if your speech contributes to the cause" is totally a shot at--his earnest and serious stuff on actually building class power makes him look v much the stuffed shirt

I don't understand what Chait has supposedly added to the argument, it's a rehash of talking points. A rehashedhash.

Example: Jill Filipovic criticized trigger warnings far more substantively almost a year ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-be-counterproductive

well and tellingly

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/560096208983953408

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

i mean, in the sense that if youre going to formulate yr media criticism around yr conception of the ny media social and work scene itd be helpful if you had an accurate one i guess

tbf max, he's not the only one to boil all mediac criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids ;)

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

― max, Thursday, January 29, 2015 7:03 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isn't his point about adopting social justice language without nearly as much regard for its actualization a more substantive crit of the TNI style though