Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

yeah. fucked up speech is fucked up. the problem is how to delegitimize it.

you can try to do it through making rules or laws against it, but if the rules or laws are unenforceable then you've created an empty gesture that does nothing, while deceiving people into regarding the problem as solved.

if the rules or laws are enforceable but are enforced equitably, then you've just created a vehicle for inequality that can be used selectively by authority only against the speech they are most pleased to suppress.

if you dedicate the massive amount of time, money and force required to enforce the rules or laws against speech everywhere equally, then you've created the necessary structure for massively oppressive social institutions far beyond just suppressing illegitimate speech.

delegitimizing speech through relentlessly exposing its inherent lack of legitimacy may not eliminate illegitimate speech, but at least it avoids the other problems noted above.

enforceable but are enforced equitably

er, not enforced equitably

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/12/20/oberlin-students-cafeteria-food-is-racist.html

http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/himym/images/3/3b/DoctorX.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20121128205554

bro used to mean douchey man but i think #NotAllMen was the plank we walked into it meaning just all men

i thought bro was derived mainly from "fraternity brother"

Maybe Oberlin’s banh mi sandwich should be judged not by how closely it apes the original, but whether it tastes as good?

My wild guess is that it doesn't taste as good.

According to the students, inauthentic and inferior ethnic food constitutes an insult and a slur on the culture that originated it. I think there is a nugget of truth in that idea. One certainly wonders how the Italians feel about the world's abuse of the concept of "pizza". But in the end I suspect this is about more than sandwiches and the students may not be making themselves clear in that regard.

there's something problematic in expecting American cafeteria workers to whip up "authentic" versions of ethnic food. You're pretty lucky if you don't get whipped cream on your sushi.

the actual article this thing is picking on is no big deal and mainly people saying they're mad b/c some kid is gonna try some "sushi" and thing sushi sucks but that's because they're getting fed crap that is mislabeled as sushi.

which is like fine and no big deal to say except this article grabs onto it as PC gone made or somth.

it just students complaining about crappy food in a boring article in a student newspaper really

would be impossible to construct a cafeteria menu comprising of food commonly eaten in America that could not be conceivably labeled as "appropriative". i hate sandwiches labeled banh mi that don't have the right bread too but not for political reasons

did laugh at this line and will be using "the blurring of cultural boundaries" as my go-to euphemism for european colonialism from now on.

"For one thing, the banh mi sandwich is itself the product of the blurring of cultural boundaries: French and Vietnamese.:

I would like to invite these kids to the Sodexho at my office. Nothing is appropriated there, I promise.

this waffle-batter is insufficiently Belgian

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/12/22/yes-virginia-there-is-a-left-wing-reform-movement/

just for the record, not that i feel i have anything more to say at this particular moment.

what an exhausting stupid discussion about so very little. (except to say that this is instance is clearly students mad about bad food latching on to culture rhetoric rather than students mad about cultural etc deciding the war to be waged is on bad food).

the oberlin list of actual demands is interesting http://www.scribd.com/doc/293326897/Oberlin-College-Black-Student-Union-Institutional-Demands

i think ultimately the left that freddie is critiquing is hopelessly marginalized and unlikely to ever mount a serious threat to the status quo. that is both a case for ignoring it (as i'm more wont to do every day) and for bemoaning the way that the academic + activist left have allowed themselves to become politically irrelevant for the sake of illusory ideological purity and the fantasy of radical change. i understand why freddie, who is ultimately embedded in the academic left professionally (and apparently familially) wants to stay and fight. i think he's being quixotic - the problem isn't even the students who will leave college, enter the workforce, and begin the slow, familiar process of moderation + compromise. it's the professors, administration, and totally bankrupt (literally and figuratively) institutional academy. nb no offense to the many ppl (some ilxors among them) doing fantastic work in the academy. but clearly there is some severe rot no matter what your personal politics are and i don't think it's incidental that it manifests in the ways that freddie notes in his long paragraph beginning "What do these people object to?"

why don't all the people "objecting to" shit just go off and like, you know, actually do something

instead they seem to prefer to, well, object

like of interest is that even this stupid cafeteria food thing apparently had demands about workers' conditions but those are eclipsed in the interest of objecting to the idea that nobody cares about workers' conditions

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/persinger-psychology-class-1.3389410

heyyyo

A Laurentian University professor in Sudbury, Ont. says he has been stopped from teaching a first-year psychology class after asking students to sign off on his use of vulgar language.

Dr. Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist, said he asked students in his introductory psychology course to sign a "Statement of Understanding" during the first lecture. The statement lists a sample of words that might be used during class, and includes the F-word, homophobic slurs and offensive slang for genitalia.

Read the contract and sample questions (Warning: Some readers may find the language offensive).

"One of my techniques is to expose people to all types of different words," Persinger told CBC News. "Silly words, complex words, emotional words, profane words. Because they influence how you make decisions and how you think."

By using words in lectures that cause emotion, Persinger said he can teach students about how that affects the brain's rational processes.

But in December, two months into the course, Persinger said he was called into the office of the university provost and told he would no longer be teaching the class.

"[ I was told my ] statement of understanding interfered with the senior administration's idea of the workplace policies, specifically the respectful workplace policies. When I asked for details, I didn't get any."

Interesting. Libertarians I've argued with insist that it is one's own "fault" if one has an emotional reaction to language. This guy seems to be arguing the opposite, and I'm inclined to agree with him.

For example, I have a strong visceral reaction to the n-word and the f-word, regardless of who is using the word and why. I'm sure it is conditioning from hearing repugnant people using those words.

http://tressiemc.com/2016/01/06/when-your-curriculum-has-been-tumblrized/

I have taken to sending some terms on vacation in my class (e.g. privilege) and pulling others out of retirement to play first string for a bit (e.g. power). I ask students to consider these other terms as ways to explain their ideas and ways of knowing for twelve to thirteen weeks before we revisit the more popular words.

There is some resistance at first. The biggest challenge so far has been confusion when I may not give the right amount of credit or praise for using words that I think students have intuited as being “right” and laudable. But, by the middle of the semester students tend to be taking more risks with new ideas and readings. And, by the end when I do throw the gates back open to talk about privilege, oppression and microaggressions students tend to use them much less often than they did at the start. I hope that is because they’ve developed a tool-kit with more scalpels than hammers.

For example, students are very comfortable talking about “oppressions”, “intersections”, and the macks of them all, “privilege and microaggressions”. Those are all core sociological concepts. I teach them. You have to learn them if you are going to say that you successfully learned anything about contemporary U.S. sociology.

my god that essay is such a relief to read

Yes, it's fantastic.

interview with eileen myles in the nyt

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/magazine/eileen-myles-wants-men-to-take-a-hike.html?smid=tw-nytmag&smtyp=cur

You’ve written: ‘‘If the poetry world celebrated its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence, poetry would wind up being a largely female world, and the men would leave.’’ What if society as a whole recognized women that way?

I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation. There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books. I think men should stop making movies or television. Say, for 50 to 100 years.

man-exclusionary radical feminism

MERFs

If the poetry world celebrated its female stars at the true level of their productivity

gonna have to wait for the labor dept. stats on whether mostly female poetry shops produce more lines per fiscal year than male ones

i'm helping the cause by never writing a book

If the poetry world celebrated its female stars at the true level of their productivity and influence

"celebrated at" is some shitty writing, shouldn't that be "celebrated for"

i found the interview really amusing but i'm not sure what it has to do w free speech + creepy liberalism?

more like free verse & creepy lyricism

"celebrated at" is some shitty writing, shouldn't that be "celebrated for"

No, I think she means "at", i.e. "at what level are they celebrated?"

Maybe a more precise way to say it is

"If the poetry world celebrated its female stars to a degree commensurate with the true level of their productivity"

but that's a bit wordy and it's pretty clear to me what she's getting at.

The essay that j posted is interesting. I think one of the problems with the current discourse is the obsession with a few magic words that are used so often and so bluntly that they not only become a substitute for original thought but lose the precision of their original meanings eg intersectionality. Scalpels vs hammers is exactly the image that kept springing to mind.

I see u president keyes

I think one of the problems with the current discourse is the obsession with a few magic words that are used so often and so bluntly that they not only become a substitute for original thought but lose the precision of their original meanings

but this is also the problem with every discourse that has ever existed, that's why we keep needing new discourses

they just lose that new discourse smell after a while

Discourses for dose horses

aggressive microhorse this cause

What do people make of the recent hebdo cartoon?

Well, I know I can't say "someone should shoot them again", but maybe a bit of a kicking?

i've read ppl say it is a mockery of ppl who believe that immigration should be limited bc of the actions of a few individuals, and i've read ppl say it is raising the important question of whether emotional appeals to humanitarianism can override rational policy. that it can be read either way is probably a pt in its favor - unless yr complaint is specifically about how tactless + vulgar it is to use an image of a dead child to make any kind of argument but hebdo is all about being tasteless right?

the defense that I've heard from ppl is that it's satirizing the hypocrisy of the tabloids and right-wing media IE they publish tear-jerking stories about the tragedy of Alan Kurdi's death, but had he lived to adulthood they would have demonised him like all other refugees? I don't really know enough about the context to tell if this is more than special pleading, or if that would be enough to make it 'acceptable' if that was the intent

For me (no expert) it feels like these defenses/readings are legit until ... you start to ask questions about responsibility when putting out images in public ... by analogy, there's an old prejudice that casts gay men as paedophiles ... if I put out a cartoon that I know millions will see and circulate depicting a gay man as a paedophile, when 'gay = paedophile' is the obvious reading, is it still reasonable for me to say 'But it's attacking the prejudice'

And I'll be honest: I hadn't got round to thinking of the readings Mordy and soref present (i.e. both are news to me) because I couldn't get past the 'fuck this, taking piss out of dead kid' reaction stage ... wonder how average my reaction there was, am I 'soft' etc

Wee bit soft.

hebdo is definitely not careful about ppl's sensitivity and they often use replications of bigoted ideas as satire. in the end the image of Aylan Kurdi is both an image of an actual human being who actually died, and also [and really moreso] an image that has a certain amount of social meaning beyond [tho inextricably tied to] the real human. to not be allowed to comment on the latter before of the former would be a kind of self-censorship. is there a way they could've interrogated these issues (the media's relationship to the refugees, the current situation in europe, the syrian crisis, the use of emotionally potent humanitarian arguments to forward policy, etc) without possibly exploiting the image of a dead child? yes, certainly. but hasn't that image already been exploited and isn't that part of the point they were trying to make here? i think so.

because* of the former, i meant to write

im always just grossed out by their love of gleeful racial caricatures - arab, jew, black - whatever the satirical motivation.