Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

sick burn

http://gothamist.com/2015/05/28/manspreading_crackdown.php

whew, i was getting worried we weren't arresting enough people. glad we found some new crimes.

typically I'm closer to the handwringing sjw side than mordy's meninists but in the case of manspreading—as I've iterated elsewhere—i p much think the case against it trumped up if not bunk outright

but wow, https://twitter.com/tnr/status/603642850451070978

the dwayne betts piece he links is an even better breakdown

im not entirely sure i 'get' what 'creepy liberalism' is entirely, but i would think if anything is creepy liberalism it is most sociology

To her credit, although in a rather disquieting way, Goffman does not claim that she did it for science. “I did not get into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand about violence,” she wrote. “I got into the car because . . . I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.”

There is a convention of “reflexivity” among ethnographers and certain other qualitative social scientists, in which the researcher is expected to include her “perspectives, positions, values and beliefs in manuscripts and other publications.” This is considered necessary for engagement in the “processes of self-awareness and self-criticism as an intrinsic feature of the research process.” Viewed in that context, Goffman’s reflection on her desire for “Chuck’s killer to die,” and her satisfaction with the experience, comprises a meaningful part of the whole story. But expressing a bone-deep emotion is one thing, acting on it is quite another, and impulse control would seem to be an indispensable tool for the ethical ethnographer.

Unsurprisingly, the violence in On the Run has featured prominently in most discussions of the book. So has Goffman’s role as participant-observer. Marc Parry of the Chronicle of Higher Education writes that with Mike and his friends Goffman “dodged police, partied, and discussed shootings.” In a review in the Times Higher Education, Dick Hobbs writes, “police raids, chases, guns, drugs, arrests and a cop’s boot on her neck typified her time in a community that was corralled, controlled and regularly beaten to the verge of submission.” What offends me is that Goffman has turned 6th Street into a jungle that she has braved. I come from a community, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, that’s in many ways like 6th Street. At 16, I plead guilty to carjacking and went to prison for eight years. Yet, I know that my experience, even though it was shared by friends who also went to prison, or sold drugs, or were murdered, does not represent our community.

[…]

There is one more dark aspect to On the Run. Immersing herself in the lives of her friends and subjects, Goffman nearly loses herself. One night, after a rival crew murdered Chuck, she found herself driving Mike around searching for Chuck’s killer. She tells us that she wanted Chuck’s killer dead just as Mike and the rest of the crew did. Mike did not find his target that night. What if he had? Goffman never interrogates her own motives, or how close she came, potentially, to abetting a killing. Instead, this reads as her crowning war story, the moment when she finally understood what it meant to be one of the young men of 6th Street.

University of California at Santa Barbara sociologist Victor Rios has a name for this: the “jungle book trope.” In his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Youth, Rios characterizes this trope as a self-aggrandizing fairy tale, in which an innocent white person gets lost in the wild, is taken in by the wild people, survives, and returns to society with a story to tell. I wish Goffman’s book didn’t read that way to me. But it does.

"manspreading" has got to be a nadir in these SJW neologisms. it's...not a portmanteau, it doesn't rhyme with anything... it sounds like something dane cook would have come up with

Thanks for the Maclean's link!

should have quoted more relevant passage from betts, e.g. “her unrelenting focus on criminality is just as likely to encourage more arrests and surveillance than to convince people that mass incarceration should end”

im not entirely sure i 'get' what 'creepy liberalism' is entirely, but i would think if anything is creepy liberalism it is most sociology

maybe the ‘creepy liberalism’ here is that her (well-intentioned) desire to not just empathize but identify with community she’s studying causes her to project and play out her own fantasies (largely if inadvertently based on media stereotypes)— to potentially counterproductive effect: “unwittingly, Goffman gives ammunition to tough-on-crime politicians who want to believe that urban areas are breeding grounds for crime and lawlessness”

a more objective/ distanced approach might have resulted in a more balanced, multifaceted picture— focused e.g. more on structural issues, less on the phantasmatic narrative in which she's the star

alice goffman is not creepy liberalism, she is just down for whatever

that jezebel article is excellent

omg at that perfect "the answer is no" bot below the headline! https://twitter.com/YourTitleSucks/status/603644363214729217

but the true answer seems to be yes

admitting u conspired to murder someone in yr ethnography must be the pinnacle of white privilege

should have quoted more relevant passage from betts, e.g. “her unrelenting focus on criminality is just as likely to encourage more arrests and surveillance than to convince people that mass incarceration should end”

i sorta get this, but i also feel like it's a little bit of a red herring in the overall piece. like, this is a violent community already hugely surveilled and under siege. Not that his concern there is dismissible, it's legitimate to be aware of but .. raising awareness of that in and of itself isn't the problem. like...there's a countervailing pressure to sweep it under the rug. the problem with her piece isn't just that it focuses on criminality and violence—such studies could be done, surely?

it's the narrative which is drawn from it, which in this case only serves to reinforces a mythic pathology, dehumanizing individuals, reinforcing a status quo. she's not saying anything new—oh, the police are more aggressive? what year did "batterram" come out

not that i've read the book, but the fact that a gang convinced her to do a drill suggests i might be better off

while we're at it here's kelefa sanneh on sociology & black pathology in the NYer earlier this year: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like

sorry if this is a bit of a derivation from creepy liberalism's concern with free speech but

i meant deviation

I liked Goffman's book a lot and felt like this "desire to not just empathize but identify with community she’s studying causes her to project and play out her own fantasies" was entirely absent. She really doesn't come off as the star. Nor does it read as "white woman survives in the jungle." It reads, throughout, as someone who is on the one hand a human being among human beings but who on the other hand is maintaining a strange rigorous distance from the other humans in the room, in something like the way a psychoanalyst does.

Violence does not play a very big role in the book. It's mostly about spending a lot of time in waiting rooms and owing money to people and to the state of Pennsylvania.

these sorts of ethical entanglements are all over the place w/r/t anthro. i think its telling that Sudhir Venkatesh's "Gang Leader for a Day" didn't come in for the same vein of criticism, probably because the underlying point of his book was to pathologize rather than sympathize.

his book also came out pre-social media tbf

but actually even at the time i remember hearing some criticism about it, how relative to his earlier more academic work it seemed so 'marketed'

http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/law/ethics-on-the-run

these seem like fundamental problems btw

same author, right?

i'm not sure how much "i asked some people and they said it didn't sound right to them and btw those people have degrees" really stands up as a valid criticism btw, standardswise

That's ...not what that is

But what if... it is?

thx for sanneh article deej

eephus, have not read goffman's book myself; so faik your description may be more accurate

From the manspreading story, this has nothing to do with free speech but it is insane:

A young African-American woman, a student at LaGuardia College, had three punitive interactions with NYPD officers in a year's time: the first was a summons for swiping her school MetroCard on Memorial Day; next was another summons, this time for having her foot on a subway seat; in the third encounter, the officer charged her with being in a park after dusk and cuffed and arrested her because she hadn't shown up in court for her two summonses. Her failure to appear had resulted in her becoming one of the more than one million fugitives from justice who live in NYC, an unfortunate status achieved by not keeping a court date to clear up a ticket for a minor infraction. "I'm a criminal now," she said in a bewildered tone, "even though my friends call me such a good girl."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/05/chuck_c_johnson_suspended_from_twitter_why.html

That has nothing to do with Free Speech, twitter is not a public space. It's about not tolerating harassment.

so if twitter were a public space we should tolerate harassment there?

Well, that seems to be the policy at US universities, right?

not really - a lot of US universities have [possibly unconstitutional] speech codes

If dude wants to start his own internet social network he's free to do so.

he said he's going to

but meanwhile he's socking it up on twitter still

I believe Louise Mensch has one he can join.

From the manspreading story, this has nothing to do with free speech but it is insane

it has everything to do with goffman's book though

why is the Goffman story making the rounds now? Didn't she write about that in her book, which came out a year ago. Granted, she wasn't a "famous sociologist" back then.

http://m.chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/?key=HG4gdAI5NSFLM31gZT8SZD0GandvYk4nZXdIbnkjbl9WEA%3D%3D

laura kipnis, northwestern prof who authored one of the why-u-so-sensitive articles no doubt linked somewhere above, on her title ix proceedings (stemming from having written that article)

Sounds to me like a super bonanza for the lawyers hired to investigate the complaints. Also, she has a huge point about how murky and opaque the rules are. It is a marvel to me she avoided using the word Kafkaesque anywhere in that essay.

holy shit that kipnis article, i am so happy i'm not a professor. it sounds miserable.

i beg you, mordy, don't believe that universities are maoist re-education zones, it's just not like that

I'm sure some institutions are better than others but part of why I left my program was that I knew that if I wanted a job I wasn't going to get a ton of say in where I went.

ugh, hope kipnis prevails

tbh mostly agree with her views on campus speech

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/what-can-t-you-say-stephen-fry-slavoj-i-ek-elif-shafak-and-more-say-unsayable

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