Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

my problem is, criminalization
in absence of irl threat, criterion here seems completely arbitrary
& (esp since we’re talking criminal law here) imo threat to free speech
nb this isn't even case of 'hate speech'
not opposed to org/corps/platforms (twitter, reddit, ilx) implementing certain mechanisms to deal with this kind of thing, to weed out certain forms of online harassment
but i don’t think internet trolls (who don’t represent any irl threat) should be arrested & go to jail

xp i think 'public speaker' is still a relevant distinction because it tracks the way that a person on twitter has opted for public visibility/audiblity/accessability. like, you give a lecture, there are gonna be people there talking back, even annoyingly so. you can keep them out of your house; if they follow you around when you're going to the supermarket, you can shut that down. but 'talking at the places and times i'm talking in public'? when someone tweets at you, in reply to your public tweets, where is the personal space?

like, i don't think it's useful to automatically equate personal existence (of the sort that can be threatened, stalked, etc.) with online presence. it may be that it is appropriate to treat them as analogous for these purposes, but at first glance, it seems to get a lot of the weirdnesses of the internet wrong.

Neither of those articles, or the other articles that came up when I googled his name, provide the content of the tweets in question as far as I can tell. Really no idea what is going on here.

― how's life, Thursday, July 16, 2015 2:50 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

as far as I can tell the content was him criticising and mocking Guthrie's politics, I think Guthrie's position is that the volume of the messages is what was threatening, not the content

xp e.g. i think some distinction pertaining to choice of and control over 'social distance' might be relevant. any old creep can ask a question from an audience after a public lecture, but not any old creep can do so in a neighborhood meeting, or a departmental colloquium. if you're a 'public figure' even in some minimal way, you add some slack to the degree of social distance from you within which interactions are acceptable: it's no longer required just to be friends or family or to live on the same side of town or be the same race, there's also an additional presumption that because of your visibility, others are entitled to at least begin interactions (even if you're not obliged to continue them, or even if it's on them to try to make the interactions good ones if they have any antagonistic intent).

but when you're tweeting out into the void… aren't you entering into a space in which there are virtually no checks on 'social distance' of that sort?

Accepting "there are no checks on social distance" as a condition of twitter or "the internets" (or really any space) has the condition of ending up with an environment where only the strongest and most relentless will occupy space, will "win" and be able to choose their terms of engagement with others. I think this is pretty obviously unacceptable to everyone except the most blinkered self-described Libertarians or w/e. What to do about it exactly idk but I'm pretty sure the answer is not "wait until someone gets physically menaced by their stalker to say that it's unacceptable."

yeah well we could just mob up, no problems there thankfully

We certainly don't need more people in jail.

I think platforms should institute some kinds of restraining order type mechanisms that go beyond blocking. Or maybe moderators should have the ability to fine people for misconduct. They could put something in the user agreement about that.

Admittedly, i think some online harrassment should be a criminal issue, like those adults who relentlessly cyberbully children or whatever. Idk the specifics of this Canadian case but apparently there were no direct threats or anything so it would be really hard to define how, legally, this behavior was different from ordinary obnoxiousness.

couldn't someone just find this guy and kick the crap out of him

i'm trying to determine the degree to which i'm kidding there

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/we-cannot-let-the-internet-trolls-win/2015/07/16/91b1a2d2-2b17-11e5-bd33-395c05608059_story.html?tid=sm_tw

stoel frmo HOOS tweeter cmon buddy jump on in to the creepy liberalism thred we luv u

i can't deal tbh

it is true our luv is a difficult one

<3

http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/192439/dont-forget-to-laugh

HITLER NO JOKE

the part where it switches over to defending Dunham, Schumer etc is p gross

http://pitchfork.com/news/60536-tyler-the-creator-says-hes-been-banned-from-australia/

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/07/everything-is-problematic-university-explains.html

Preferred: people of advanced age, old people*

Problematic/Outdated: older people, elders, seniors, senior citizen

*Old people has been reclaimed by some older activists who believe the standard wording of old people lacks the stigma of the term “advanced age”. Old people also halts the euphemizing of age. Euphemizing automatically positions age as a negative.

Preferred: person living at or below the poverty line, people experiencing poverty

Problematic/Outdated: poor person, poverty-stricken person

Preferred: person of material wealth

Problematic: rich

Being rich gets conflated with a sort of omnipotence; hence, immunity from customs and the law. People without material wealth could be wealthy or rich of spirit, kindness, etc.

Preferred: people of size

Problematic/Outdated: obese*, overweight people

Preferred: person who is blind/visually impaired

Problematic: blind person, “dumb”

Preferred: U.S. citizen or Resident of the U.S.

Problematic: American

Preferred: White people, European-American individuals

Problematic: Caucasian people

Preferred: Folks, People, You All, Y’all

Problematic/Outdated: Guys (when referring to people overall)

Preferred: Other Sex

Problematic/Outdated: Opposite Sex

Preferred: Children who are gender non-conforming, Children who are gender variant

Problematic/Outdated: Girlie or Tomboy

problematic: one word
preferred: a shitload of words

Problematic: drawing your attention to a quality potentially seen as undesirable
Preferred: calling extra attention to how anxious the speaker feels about the quality

a lot of these language changes seem like a shell game to try and replace words w/ negative connotations (generally bc what they describe is something ppl associate w/ something negative, not bc the word itself is problematic) w/ more awkward phrasing bc it doesn't have any negative associations yet. maybe if it's awkward enough and no one agrees to use it, it can always stay value neutral.

person of sizeable money

yeah this is mostly just shifting negative connotations around to new/different terminology

it's the awkward phrasing/extra words that makes these so ridiculous, language follows the path of least resistance

Problematic: University dept gets paid based on the amount of policy you write.
Preferred: NY Mag writer forgot to do latest piece. Wants to turn in screenshot of a website to cover ass.

hmm, i was wondering why chait's link seemed to be dead

http://www.wmur.com/news/unh-president-offended-by-biasfree-language-guide/34421812

seems the guide was old, recently TRENDED by conservative media, and once it was the university president bus-threw it bc problematic

State Sen. Jeb Bradley, a Republican from Wolfeboro, said he was outraged by the guide and would remember it when lawmakers next consider how much money to provide to the university.

That seems fair, to punish a handful of overly sensitive policy writers by denying money to a state university. /s

Problematic: blind person, “dumb”

i thought "dumb" meant mute, not blind?

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

that mom looks like paulie's mom from the sopranos

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/thats-not-funny/399335/

caitlin flanagan visits the annual National Association for Campus Activities convention

The colleges represented were—to use a word that their emissaries regard as numinous—diverse: huge research universities, tiny liberal-arts colleges, Catholic schools, land-grant institutions. But the students’ taste in entertainment was uniform. They liked their slam poets to deliver the goods in tones of the highest seriousness and on subjects of lunar bleakness; they favored musicians who could turn out covers with cheerful precision; and they wanted comedy that was 100 percent risk-free, comedy that could not trigger or upset or mildly trouble a single student. They wanted comedy so thoroughly scrubbed of barb and aggression that if the most hypersensitive weirdo on campus mistakenly wandered into a performance, the words he would hear would fall on him like a soft rain, producing a gentle chuckle and encouraging him to toddle back to his dorm, tuck himself in, and commence a dreamless sleep—not text Mom and Dad that some monster had upset him with a joke.

'blind person' is problematic, but not 'person who is blind'? this makes zero sense. all the second one does is add unnecessary words, while the meaningful words remain unchanged.

That's overwrought writin'.

in that excerpt

there's some more

gotta justify the junket

https://www.uillinois.edu/common/pages/DisplayFile.aspx?itemId=278006

document dump from the salaita affair

"This place is so messed up."

otm

also those campus activity conventions have been lame since the 90s. I went to one as an undergrad when I was involved in that world. by contrast when we actually hosted events on campus things were less hung up (iirc the unofficial rider of the Village People was to score them coke, which was not a problem). good times, great oldies.

lol up to like at least halfway through the emails they're all just calling salaita 'this guy'

guess you saw that the chancellor resigned? joy in mudville today

yeah but what l31t3r said seems plausible - she had to go, probably was scheduled to go.

actually what i found most aggravating was the condescension about the unionization efforts among faculty - i assume the chancellor was not the only faculty member among that group of emailers, either.

yeah there were other faculty against the union in those mails, and they're the only faculty the chancellor "consulted" re SS

I don't read the blog you mentioned anymore and his inside contacts are tainted fwiw

like his butt

otm

A young gay man with a Broadway background named Kevin Yee sang novelty songs about his life, producing a delirium of affection from the audience. “We love you, Kevin!” a group of kids yelled between numbers. He invited students to the front of the auditorium for a “gay dance party,” and they charged down to take part. His last song, about the close relationship that can develop between a gay man and his “sassy black friend,” was a killer closer; the kids roared in delight, and several African American young women in the crowd seemed to be self-identifying as sassy black friends. I assumed Yee would soon be barnstorming the country. But afterward, two white students from an Iowa college shook their heads: no. He was “perpetuating stereotypes,” one of them said, firmly. “We’re a very forward-thinking school,” she told me. “That thing about the ‘sassy black friend’? That wouldn’t work for us.”

i saw this guy in honolulu the other day (on a bill also including a short movie a friend was in, and as it happens that "if a robbery report were treated like a rape report" video) and "delirium of affection" is about right but i was mortified to the point of flight-impulse by the sassy black friend song and got a miffed look for my unenthusiasm so apparently i am part of caitlin flanagan's problem

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/

Some recent campus actions border on the surreal. In April, at Brandeis University, the Asian American student association sought to raise awareness of microaggressions against Asians through an installation on the steps of an academic hall. The installation gave examples of microaggressions such as “Aren’t you supposed to be good at math?” and “I’m colorblind! I don’t see race.” But a backlash arose among other Asian American students, who felt that the display itself was a microaggression. The association removed the installation, and its president wrote an e-mail to the entire student body apologizing to anyone who was “triggered or hurt by the content of the microaggressions.”

lol

long article by social psychologist jonathan haidt and some dude from FIRE

The only thing I know about FIRE is that right-wing people keep referring me to it to prove something about PC culture or whatever.

yeah i don't know anything about it, just the name makes me apprehensive - and i don't exactly trust haidt to pick appropriate collaborators

still, hella scholarlyish

Thank god, we have so many colleges and universities like Oral Roberts University, which are run by right-thinking conservative evangelicals to compete with all these effete mind-coddling colleges and universities, so we are all safe and the problems cited above are trivial. After all, the free market is always right, and a healthy competition will solve the problem effortlessly via the Invisible Hand without our having to lift a finger.