Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

basically.

Nothing says defending free speech like focusing the the history of legal battles and the power of mass media to shame some protesting college students.

it's a topic squarely in line with the "feminism might be bad?" pieces they ran endlessly a few years back.

Weird that they ran a whole article about free speech under fire at UCLA and didn't mention the attempts to get them to disinvite Cornel West from giving a talk there.

so profoundly uncomfortable with stuff like this.

https://i.gyazo.com/84e1a0ac057e1ab161c65567da46a40a.png

just the practice of "let's get this guy fired because of his comments on this facebook post" is so challenging to me--i'm a guy who believes (say) fascists should be physically confronted & run out of town on a rail at every opportunity, but something about this kind of practice is so clangorous to my soul

tbf that guy should be fired for having a Vanilla Ice haircut in 2015

who ironically is a Black Female

what you're missing is that his boss is not actually a black woman, but a white man who is striking the pose of "Black Female" ironically

'omg bros could you even believe'

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2015/10/what-row-over-banning-germaine-greer-really-about

By way of (to my mind, more convincing) counterpoint to that Helen Lewis column: http://www.out.com/news-opinion/2015/11/04/op-ed-germaine-greer-censorship-red-herring

The official NUS no-platform list is mainly populated by white nationalists and other people prone to rhetoric inciting violence. Greer is not on this list. She’s not even on a smaller list of people that the Cardiff Student Union no-platforms. (To my knowledge, there is no such list.)
Here’s what actually happened: Cardiff University’s Women’s Association had a conversation with its members about Greer’s planned lecture on November 18, 2015. They decided they couldn’t welcome Greer’s unapologetic transphobia into their community. Bearing in mind the way that ideology like Greer’s materially affects trans women—by limiting their health care options as a result of Janice Raymond’s report to the American government on trans health care, by pushing trans women out of domestic violence shelters even though trans women are disproportionately affected by domestic violence—that choice makes sense. It is also worth mentioning that this is an issue of money. Greer doubtless demands a hefty fee to speak at an institution. The Cardiff University Women’s Association seems not to want to line her pockets with money that might otherwise go towards what they view as more worthy goals.
Germaine Greer then wrote an op-ed for The Guardian, a U.K. newspaper read internationally, discussing how she’d been silenced and censored. Then she went on BBC Two, on a show called Newsnight, and she talked about how she’d been silenced and censored. In both of these outlets, she reiterated in even stronger terms her distaste for trans people. I won’t quote her remarks. The inherent irony—that The Guardian and Newsnight are much larger platforms than the Cardiff Student Union—seems lost on Germaine Greer. The facts about free speech and censorship—that censorship is categorically the province of the state, which was not involved here, and that absolute free speech does not legally exist in the U.K.—seem lost on her too.

http://www.thenation.com/article/feminism-needs-more-thinkers-who-arent-right-100-percent-of-the-time/

That Pollitt essay and the Lewis essay above both seem weirdly reluctant to deal with how the often uncritical climate around transphobic or trans-exclusionary rhetoric in 70s white feminism (by Janice Raymond, but also Robin Morgan, Mary Daly, Greer, Steinem for a time, and others) played out in terms of material consequences for trans people, and how knowledge of that history might inform contemporary feminism.

http://thenavelobservatory.com/2015/08/25/is-there-a-principled-distinction-between-refusing-to-watch-american-sniper-and-refusing-to-read-fun-home/

stupid article that can't distinguish between a class assignment in the course of studies and light entertainment sponsored entirely separately from an academic program.

at this point the thread seems to just be chronicling the ongoing efforts of the conservative oppression-complex to gin up controversy.

thread's more complicated than that

b/c liberalism is complicated

liberalism is boring

The Pollitt essay is discussed a little more here (slightly snarkily, maybe, but I agree with Thériault): https://twitter.com/anne_theriault/status/662391719535771648

ows, do you happen to know what greer's insistence on an insuperable difference between 'real women' and trans women is supposed to amount to (ontologically-politically, let's say)? i see it cited constantly and construed primarily in terms of who is included/excluded (both by her and by her critics), but never explained. how is the essential difference supposed to ground a response to gender oppression that can't be grounded any other way? i've seen greer mentioning specific (embodied) experiences of women that she says others couldn't have had, but experiences are… relatively politically fungible. and sympathies and identifications and alliances can be forged in ways that circumvent particular experiences even if the latter can't always be shared.

j., Greer's writings on trans issues (I'm thinking of her chapter on trans people in The Whole Woman, her review of Jan Morris's admittedly problematic transition memoir Conundrum, her condescending comments on April Ashley in The Female Eunuch, and her statements in 1996 while attempting to block Rachael Padman from a fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge on the basis of Padman's trans status) seem to be motivated mostly by disgust and a dogmatic insistence on the objective truth of sex assignment at birth. Her main claims seems to be that trans people reify existing gender roles by claiming to have a gender identity different from their birth assignment, and secondarily that trans women endanger cis women's spaces by their presence. In The Whole Woman, for instance, she claims that

When a man decides to spend his life impersonating his mother (like Norman Bates in Psycho) it is as if he murders her and gets away with it, proving at a stroke that there was nothing to her. His intentions are no more honourable than any female impersonator’s; his achievement is to gag all those who would call his bluff. When he forces his way into the few private spaces women may enjoy and shouts down their objections, and bombards the women who will not accept him with threats and hate mail, he does as rapists have always done.

Whatever Greer's ideas about political strategy are, I can't really overlook the kind of disgust that seems to motivate that kind of rhetorical slippage.

*"Her main claims seem to be"

well that seems stupid of her.

i don't recall if it's come up, i'm not well versed in political philosophy, but i've wondered lately how much the creepy-liberalism-and-discontents phenomenon could be summed up as a form of left communitarianism rather than just highlighting its anti-liberalism, likening it to totalitarianism for alarmist purposes, etc.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/11/09/a-clash-between-administrators-and-students-at-yale-went-viral-why-that-is-unfortunate-for-all-concerned/

the yanked student letter linked there seems like a really pure expression of that possibility. it's interesting how it frames free speech as an ideal or as a venue pertaining to intellectual matters in opposition to the duties of care pertaining to community.

Re: getting people kicked out of their jobs upthread about Ed Roy and a feeling that it was wrong - I agree with that feeling. At least partly because I've seen it blow up on facebook where the target is someone much less obnoxious than that

There's also the problem that however awful someone is you'll never know if they have any kids or dependent relatives that they support

About the Greer thing, the furthest I've been able to get is something like: 'She seems to hate trans people, but she doesn't think trans people even exist; she can only see men dressing up as women so they can invade female spaces; does that make a difference? But then don't a lot of racists think their target is trying to invade their space ...'

j. could you expand on what you mean by left communitarianism?

it's funny, there's almost something sort of valorous in the way that students are willing to define the boundaries of their communities so explicitly--that this often makes us older liberals so uncomfortable is often a function, I think, of our own rather complacent (and rather outdated) notions of what a tolerant liberal community is supposed to look like.

liberalism can even be defined in strict opposition to "safe spaces" because it includes the possibility of actual politics in the schmittian sense: real antagonism and conflict. the notion of a "safe space" can always be interrogated: who's safe space?

goddamn autocorrect: "whose"

I should clarify what I mean a little better: rather than being naive or childish or "coddled" one could argue that the students see the biopolitical situation (i.e., whose safe space is at issue, whose mental health and security matters, etc) better than their elders.

i think there's a kind of paradox in that these students tend to be extraordinarily privileged w/ wealth + educational opportunities that are both globally and historically unique so that the demands for safe spaces within what already constitutes the safest of spaces can seem bizarre.

it does. and there's a cynical reading that would surely point out that these highly privileged universities are perhaps the first thing they have encountered in their lives that doesn't care about their feelings. (not saying I go along with that reading)

but if that's the case their response is interesting because it's a demand to expand the sphere of biopolitical "care" which is to demand in effect to be identified, determined, delimited, etc. it's a highly risky trade off.

which is to say: there are both good and bad effects of an institution taking an interest in your feelings.

i guess i mentioned this (maybe a few too many times?) on the "coddling..." thread, but fredrik deboer speaks to these issues in this piece http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/magazine/why-we-should-fear-university-inc.html=

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-and-the-free-speech-diversion

whole series of non-sequitirs there, an attempt to graft a general discussion of "climate" onto a host of very different issues with different particulars. what's happening at yale is not what's happening at mizzou is not what happened to a teenage girl in SC. and conflating the responses to these things--and implying that the same people criticizing e.g. the students calling for someone's firing at yale are those blaming the victim in the SC case--is not helpful.

yeah but The New Yorker wants Friedersdorf's hits

like NOBODY i know is actually making this argument:

Two weeks ago, we saw a school security officer in South Carolina violently subdue a teen-age girl for simple noncompliance, and we actually countenanced discussion of the student’s culpability for “being disruptive in class.”

that is plainly a red herring argument. whatever this girl did has no bearing on the awfulness and brutality of what was done to her.

there's a slipperiness in that "we actually countenanced..." line. who is "we"? what does "actually countenanced" mean? simply allowed to exist?

but conflating that red herring argument with the legitimate concerns about free speech raised by yale situation is, again, not helpful. she's tarring a disparate group of concerns with the same "this is distracting from racism" brush.

sure, some people said the girl in SC had it coming, or politer versions of the same thing. and some of those people are the same people pointing at the situations at missouri and yale and crying foul. those people by and large would be conservatives.

but there are also plenty of leftists concerned about aspects of what's gone down at e.g. yale--folks who are plenty concerned with racism, and appalled by the SC situation among many others--who don't deserve to be lumped in the former.

sorry, that post got garbled by some clumsy copy and paste. it should have read:

like NOBODY i know is actually making this argument:

Two weeks ago, we saw a school security officer in South Carolina violently subdue a teen-age girl for simple noncompliance, and we actually countenanced discussion of the student’s culpability for “being disruptive in class.”

the argument cobb synopsizes there is plainly a red herring argument. whatever this girl did has no bearing on the awfulness and brutality of what was done to her.

but conflating that red herring argument with the legitimate concerns about free speech raised by yale situation is, again, not helpful. she's tarring a disparate group of concerns with the same "this is distracting from racism" brush.

sure, some people said the girl in SC had it coming, or politer versions of the same thing. and some of those people are the same people pointing at the situations at missouri and yale and crying foul. those people by and large would be conservatives.

but there are also plenty of leftists concerned about aspects of what's gone down at e.g. yale--folks who are plenty concerned with racism, and appalled by the SC situation among many others--who don't deserve to be lumped in the former.

there's a slipperiness in that "we actually countenanced..." line. who is "we"? what does "actually countenanced" mean? simply allowed to exist?

i'm not sure about freddie's materialist argument; as tempting as it is to ascribe student reactions to the corporate university (or in a variation on that theme - on the uncertainty produced by the exploitive economic machine of the corporate university + the educational loan industry), this is not just something happening in the university. even ilx has numerous topics that one would be wise to avoid bc any hint of dissension or break w/ the "correct" POV is anathema to a particular expression of left-wing righteousness. this totalizing paradigm where the suppression of bad opinions is itself virtuous exists beyond the academy and if it is unique to the academy i think that's only in the sense that the academy has always been a locus for avant garde political action (particularly on the left). which is not to say that this is a "problem," in that it's unclear to me how widespread this ideology exists at all and it seems to me like the vast majority of people still believe in liberal values of conversation / freely sharing ones opinion / polite argumentation / etc. but i don't need to name names to point out that plenty of ppl no longer agree that this is an appropriate way to handle what i'll charitably refer to as "opinions that go over the line," or "opinions that reify oppression and domination," or "speech that is harmful," and that all it takes is a few ppl making a lot of noise to make things uncomfortable enough that the vast majority of ppl will just keep their mouths shut. to some this suppression of particular 'harmful speech' through non-illegal means (merely the shaming of those with whom we disagree) is a victory! but not to me. even discussing this i feel like is to court controversy. "oh look at the poor [white/male/wealthy/whatever] complaining about how they're oppressed," but really it's not an oppression issue but more of a way of shaping public discourse. if i walk to work every day past someone screaming and smearing their shit on the wall and i decide to stop walking that way bc it's unpleasant i'm not being oppressed, and truly the shit-smearer is probably experiencing far more degradation and alienation than i can even imagine. but it does ultimately result in me no longer walking that way bc of the sheer unpleasantness. i think when i first started posting to ilx i really appreciated the forum bc it gave me an opportunity to discuss things i couldn't in my real life but now i find myself in a constant state of self-censorship here not bc "woe is me" but bc i don't want to deal w/ some psycho smearing their shit at some perceived offense. it cheapens the value of ilx (to me, but maybe shit smearers are thrilled w/ the status quo) but i mean this is really just a metaphor bc ilx value is fairly superficial to begin w/, but it inevitably cheapens the value of the university too.

http://www.philebrity.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/smokey_04.jpg

j, what does that image mean in this context?

OVER THE LINE

line breaks, mordy. :)

i always feel more inclined to use "beyond the pale" as the operative idiom in place of "over the line" but bc of its racial etymological baggage i try to avoid it

lol no line breaks extremely long paragraphs are my new ilx style. i'm looking to have as few readers as possible while still satisfying my personal need to express.

lol

i would be hugely surprised if you knew what beyond the pale meant?

no i know bc my family is from the pale of settlement so at some time in college i [mistakenly] put two + two together and then looked up the actual etymology and educated myself a little bit about ireland

<3

also hugely otm obv