Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

its just exhausting to be a party to, and to be perfectly frank no one in the house is willing to challenge the politics of her claims because no one wants to meet "i have had an awful and racism-filled month" with "but you totally decontextualized that audre lorde line and are clearly using the political edge of your thinking as a bludgeon to get your way here"

Yes. We have a self-proclaimed leader in some circles here whose views about women and LGBTGNC members are causing problems, but any scrutiny of his ideas is labeled racist...sooo.... Not sure how the organizing community is going to handle it but it's obv going to have to come from some deeply intersectional members.

jargon: now in its nth century of wrecking the Revolution.

xp

i recently joined a collective that runs an art/performance space and this

essentially there are interpersonal conflicts that are being cloaked in the language of critical theory and trauma recovery.

is _exactly_ what's been going on. your situation sounds much more intense with the refugees and race dimension (i guess ours has a race dimension but the dispute is between two women of color.) the tension level is insane. instead of just allowing it to blow up & let it all out it's all super formal & diplomatic social-work language. last meeting we had a 30 min discussion to find out whether we were all using the same definition of "accountability." everyone's always setting a boundary or starting an accountability process, except in a really passive aggressive way. "i'm setting a boundary" "ok well then i'm setting a boundary, too." i hate being the str8 white guy rolling my eyes at it all "what is this, portlandia?" (i mean not that i am literally doing that i mostly just sit and nod approvingly during meetings) but i can't imagine that this is the use this kind of language was created for. frustration compounded cuz we're getting kicked out of our space and should really be spending energies towards fixing that problem instead of whatever is going on here

casting one's feelings about external reality as a true image of external reality always feels so right to the person who is doing it. good luck sorting it all out, hoos.

she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe. she has "had bad experiences with eastern europeans being racist before," and so having an eastern european in the house at this time would make her feel emotionally unsafe.

are you planning to move out of this place anytime soon

interpersonal conflicts that are being cloaked in the language of critical theory and trauma recovery

this is what every rightwing asshole thinks is going on whenever anyone uses this language, sucks to see their viewpoint validated

and yeah Hoos idk how you deal with living there

xxp

crut otm

hoos, that's the most insane story I've read in weeks.

amazing

And to be clear, neither I nor anyone else in the house think she is being insincere--just that she's wrong about the forces at play here, but we don't really have the language to make that case.

I can type something up if you think its help but...

haha ty dmac but i think we will muddle through in our way

Peter Tatchell and Mary Beard seem to have been particularly targeted on Twitter (apparently 100s of messages over the last 24 hours) for signing this:

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2015/feb/14/letters-censorship

Quite a few of the names on this list (Ditum, Criado-Perez, etc) are seem as red flags by trans / sw activists.

*seen*

Her views on the sex industry found hostility in a minority of the Goldsmith’s Feminist Society, and Smurthwaite alerted the Comedy Society to the potential for a protest of some sort. The show was cancelled and a statement put out by the Comedy Society: "Despite many complaints from students about the content of Kate’s act in the past we were planning to go ahead with the gig until Kate told me 24 hours before that there was likely to be a picket with lots of students and non students outside the venue. I couldn’t verify this. Up to this point we had only sold eight tickets so I decided to pull the plug."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/society/11386478/Kate-Smurthwaite-the-comedian-who-confused-no-interest-with-no-platform.html

She take a different line in her blog, naturally:

http://www.cruellablog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/goldsmiths-and-me-full-story-proof.html

Not just a different line to be fair. She has screengrabs of the whole conversation. The Goldsmiths promoter botched the whole situation and then tried to make her look bad.

In July 2010 Smurthwaite protested at the lavish funeral of writer and renowned user of prostitutes Sebastian Horsley with a sign reading "Where are the horse-drawn carriages for the VICTIMS of prostitution?",[21] attracting both praise and criticism.[22]

waht

xp: good catch

xp - victims = prostitutes, presumably

http://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/15/you-are-oppressing-us/

"Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power."

That's a good response. Though I'm sure Beard and Tatchell signed the letter in good faith, there are plenty of people on that list with significant media voices who have conflated getting stick on Twitter with 'silencing' in the past.

yeah, and from what I've seen the largest part of the response to Beard and Tatchell that's been highlighted has been along the lines of "disappointed to see @marybeard and @petertatchell in there" rather than people proper 'avin a go.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/view_from_chicago/2015/02/university_speech_codes_students_are_children_who_must_be_protected.html

There is a popular, romantic notion that students receive their university education through free and open debate about the issues of the day. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Students who enter college know hardly anything at all—that’s why they need an education. Classroom teachers know students won’t learn anything if they blab on about their opinions. Teachers are dictators who carefully control what students say to one another. It’s not just that sincere expressions of opinion about same-sex marriage or campaign finance reform are out of place in chemistry and math class. They are out of place even in philosophy and politics classes, where the goal is to educate students (usually about academic texts and theories), not to listen to them spout off. And while professors sometimes believe there is pedagogical value in allowing students to express their political opinions in the context of some text, professors (or at least, good professors) carefully manipulate their students so that the discussion serves pedagogical ends.

lol pedagogy

http://i57.tinypic.com/raaliu.png

the brane-plasticity point about teh youth is oft made nowadays in higher ed

my brain is now as hard as a rock. go ahead. punch it as hard as you can.

lol @ law professors saying anything about undergrad pedagogy. then again, it's Slate, what else should I expect

In the responses to Beard and Tatchell that I read the problem seemed to be the assumption that if you sign a letter you're not just endorsing the words of the letter but the words, past and present, of all your co-signatories, thus implying that those two endorsed transphobia. I don't believe that's a reasonable assumption.

I've come to distrust every account of what happens on Twitter because everybody quotes the worst abuse from their critics and ignores the worst behaviour of people on their side. To take one example from the Feministkilljoys essay, those "understandably strong reactions to Cathy Newman’s racist rant" included the foulest misogyny, violence and anti-semitism (even though Newman isn't Jewish afaik), which the writer ignores. Equally, Newman's defenders ignore the legit criticisms and quote only that foul abuse. Unless you can be bothered to track someone's mentions column in real time, you can never be sure what the mix of responses really was.

The letter didn't appear out of nowhere, though. It's part of a vicious ongoing dispute in the feminist left and is going to look, to a lot of people, like an attempt from one side of that dispute to claim the moral high ground and paint its detractors as irrational and illiberal. It's a bit like signing a letter asking for a good faith debate on immigration organised by Migrationwatch and signed by half the staff of the Daily Telegraph.

It definitely seems like Beard and Tatchell signed in good faith, as it were, but I can see why people might be disappointed given the source.

I'm not sure a good faith debate is possible at the moment tbh but I like Beard's subsequent blogpost:

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2015/02/no-platforming-1.html

There has to be a real word for "whorephobe" right?

I hope not to see the term catch on.

can't ppl dislike something like sex work w/out the presumption that their feelings come from a phobia?

like does everything have to be a phobia now? when you attach phobia to a word, is it even supposed to imply that you have a pathological response anymore, or is it just supposed to make u sound silly?

I think it compares gay and trans people with prostitutes. No wonder I don't follow feminist stuff online. It's lost touch with ordinary women.

The trans issue and sex worker issue are separate. It's typically framed as "exclusionary" rather than phobic.

is it just supposed to make u sound silly?

First google result for ephebophobe

gay women, trans woman & sex workers are ordinary women

Sex workers aren't "ordinary". Their situation should not be compared to people who are born a certain way.

Also people who say this often spend ZERO time on class issues that affect a lot of women. We should be doing stuff for women struggling to make ends meet, not distracting people with controversy.

Also, IMO there's a difference between stripping and hooking.

lotta opinions in those two posts

second-wave feminism: 'show us some women who are not sex workers'

Is the sw / trans thing as bitter in the US as it is in the UK? I don't seem to hear as much about it.

It's bitter here too, but most of the US TERFs don't have the kind of media exposure that, say, Julie Burchill has. Really, though, arguing with TERF trolls is tempting but seems exhausting and not as politically useful as other forms of activism.

if anything US TERFs seem to be perpetually on the defense any time they rear their heads & get exposed

which is as it should be

Sectarianism in left progressive politics is almost as bad as in Protestantism.