The Coddling Of The American Mind (Trigger Warning Article In The Atlantic...)

i mean it used to be a rite of passage to pretend to make a difference during one's college years, but maybe modern kids are more savvy now.

idk but i'm glad at least that grownups are still playing at the wisdom thing

I said I was worried it was worse, even though it may be no different. Not trying to make solid claims.

Wasn't Freddie de Boer going to stop writing? He promised! But the last piece I saw by him was about us being nicer to rapists as well, this time Nate Turner (who was never convicted, I know, I know, the piece was about rapists in general, though)

what's funny is that of course i have no way of being sure it's not worse, it's just that i feel like i read a new friederschait article EVERY WEEK saying "it's obviously much worse than ever and a near-crisis" and i find it so obvious that that's not obvious that i just get an ingrown hair about it

friederschait

winner

i dunno i'm sorta thinking now i should have gone with chaitersdorf

deboer is a little different in that he constantly cites his own experience on an Actual College Campus as evidence that political correctness has run amok. and some of his points are valid, but he doesn't seem to grasp that even his supposed ground-level observations still don't rise above the level of anecdote.

He is good sometimes when not writing about that sort of thing, but his Last Reasonable White Man schtick is really tedious.

But the last piece I saw by him was about us being nicer to rapists as well, this time Nate Turner (who was never convicted, I know, I know, the piece was about rapists in general, though)

― Frederik B, Monday, September 5, 2016 5:28 AM (seventeen hours ago)

i am not even a deboer fan but this is an obscene mischaracterization of that piece, which was about coming to terms with the fact that ending mass incarceration will involve more than just releasing nonviolent drug offenders:

I want to argue that this situation demonstrates an absolute fissure in contemporary progressive politics, that there is a direct and unambiguous conflict between our efforts to address mass incarceration and the insistence that people accused of crimes such as sexual assault should be presumed to be guilty and that those who are guilty are permanently and existentially unclean. I want to argue that there’s nothing particularly hidden about this conflict, that acknowledging it is as simple as noting the direct contradiction of two progressive attitudes: the belief that certain crimes, particularly sex crimes and domestic violence, should be treated not only with harsh criminal punishments but with permanent moral judgment for those guilty of them; and the idea that we need to dismantle our vast criminal justice industrial complex, to oppose the carceral state, and to replace them with a new system of restoration and forgiveness. I further want to argue that progressives are not doing any of the moral and legal reasoning necessary to resolve these tensions, and that if we don’t, eventually they’ll explode.

i thought it was a good essay. it describes a real tension on the american left.

deboer's social media presence, however, was really stupid and rarely helped his case.

"was"? has he retired from the internet?

and yes the essay you quoted was a good one. here's a similar piece: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/incarceration-is-not-the-best-way-to-fight-rape-culture.html

he claims to have retired from the internet

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/08/18/thats-my-time/

I think it’s time I finally make good on all these hints and leave blogging and Twitter and such behind. I have to find a different way to engage with the world. There just isn’t any place for me in contemporary politics, and at some point, you have to stop yelling at people.

coming to terms with the fact that ending mass incarceration will involve more than just releasing nonviolent drug offenders

i feel like the problem with this argument is that while it is right on the facts it undermines nonviolent drug offender incarceration reform by demanding something (violent offender release) that has no chance of gaining consensus in the contemporary climate. nonviolent drug offender reform has a lot of popular support and makes a lot of intuitive sense. starting with that could open the door for other reevaluations. but i don't see how we get from here to releasing violent offenders without midsteps. the v coming to terms that freddie wants is the incrementalism he dismisses. instead he calls for replacing our 'vast criminal justice industrial complex' 'with a new system of restoration and forgiveness.' it's a very nice thought but what moral and legal reasoning does he think the left can possibly do to convince a majority of the american public that we should let much more violent offenders out of prison??

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what a drama queen (FdB)

something so self-regarding about people who publicly declare that they are leaving the internet (and just b/c 99% of them return after a few months/weeks/hours). though if he can stick to it, more power to 'im.

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mordy, i think e.g. doing away with mandatory sentencing requirements is not necessarily a lost cause. eventually that will lead to a serious reduction in mass incarceration.

and as long as we do imprison violent offenders, we should probably make sure to enforce the law equally and not have an entire category of violent offenders (rapists) that escape justice for non-reform related reasons. iow, yes, reform violent incarceration. but don't start that process by denying justice to historical victims. that's a bad foundation.

(er, NOT just b/c)

am, i don't think it's a lost cause either but why pooh-pooh something that has wide consensus and will ultimately put blows in the edifice bc it doesn't go far enough. obv this is not a critique limited to this particular issue but the foundational problem at the heart of the deboer Weltanschauung

absolute fissure

I guess I don't see the absolute fissure. Surely people on the left (I am not really one, I'm a liberal squish) don't take opposition to the carceral state to mean "rapists and murderers shouldn't be imprisoned." Leftists, or at least lots of leftists, DO think rapists and murderers should be imprisoned. "Opposition to the carceral state" means we don't have accept a status quo in which whole ethnic and class communities live under the impossible condition of having sizable proportions of their population in jail.

There's an "absolute fissure" there only if you think a sizable proportion of those communities consists of rapists and murderers. There are people in America who believe this, but they are not the leftists.

i think the fissure is that a. non-violent drug offenders make up a fairly small % of inmates b. therefore attempts to alleviate the carceral state that do not deal w/ violent offenders lack real impact - where he seems to go from here to c. therefore you should stop advocating for the imprisonment of rapists is where the wheels totally come off

it's a very nice thought but what moral and legal reasoning does he think the left can possibly do to convince a majority of the american public that we should let much more violent offenders out of prison??

― Mordy, Monday, September 5, 2016 10:38 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isn't him proposing this (i'm not agreeing w/ deboer just w/ the idea that prison reform should push past dealing just with nonviolent drug offenses) the beginning of creating a lane where...we convince the majority of the american public of just that?

like it sounds like youre saying "why is he proposing this unpopular idea' when its like, he's proposing it bc it is unpopular

my objection isn't w/ his goal, my objection is that he thinks the route to achieving his goal runs through not putting rapists in prison. if he wants to convince americans to let more ppl out of prison why doesn't he start w/ a group that has wide consensus (non-violent offenders).

DeBoer piece was a class example of what I call 'tough question' rhetoric, where every political situation is dealt with by tangling it up until it becomes a tough question, or a 'dilemma', or, as here, an 'absolute fissure'. But every question is tough if your dumb enough. And DeBoer is dumb as fuck. Or rather, he is dumbing the public down, through obfuscation and misinformation. Mordy and eeeephus has already described why the fissure is less absolute than it seems - really, every dilemma DeBoer puts forth can be solved be thinking it through in terms of gender, race and class, though of course that's exactly the thought process he's trying to legitimize - but I'd like to mention a few obfuscations:

There's the strawmen. The attacks on Nate Parker are tangled up with 'believe all victims', as if people are just mad because he was accused, and not because of the behaviour depicted in the court records, the callous attitude he displayed in the interviews, or, perhaps, people coming to the conclusion that in this case specifically it seems more likely than not that the victim was right. It's kinda mind-blowing to me, that a woman can accuse two men of raping her in the same room, on the same night, and one will be acquitted and one will be found guilty. Like, wtf? How did Celestin rape her without Parker knowing about it? And yeah, his case was then thrown out, but it seems to have more to do with the victim not wanting to be drawn through the mud once again.

All that extra information would limit the 'fissure' in this case, so DeBoer just ignores it. You have to forgive Parker, otherwise you're against carceral reform. That's bullshit. And when that bullshit argument falls apart, you're left with: You have to forgive rapists. Read this part, and tell me it doesn't say 'be nicer to rapists.'

Many have responded to questions like these by arguing that the presumption of innocence until proven guilty is a legal standard, not a moral one, and that outside of a courtroom no one is obligated to presume innocence. In this telling, there is no contradiction between the legal presumption of innocence and the social presumption of guilt. I agree that no one has any obligation to believe Nate Parker or Brandon Winston are innocent, or to like them, or to go see Parker’s movie, or to hold back in their personal judgment. But in the broader perspective, the thinking falls apart with even minimal review. To begin with, we know for a fact that public perception of guilt or innocence influences our criminal courts. The idea that there is some high and hard wall between public perception and what happens in trials is simply naive. Racial inequality in criminal justice certainly reflects racist attitudes in the public writ large. And you only need to look at prominent cases to see the way that public convictions influence criminal proceedings. Cases like the Central Park jogger or the Satanic ritual abuse panic are unambiguous examples of how public belief in guilt leads to deeply unjust outcomes in criminal law. In both cases, with the passage of time we’ve come to see them as an obvious and terrible miscarriage of justice, and in both cases, public outcry undoubtedly helped lead to unjust convictions for sex crimes. The idea that a social presumption of guilt won’t influence legal proceedings simply does not bear scrutiny

But the worst part, is that he claims to write from a position of concern for the victims and activists. His conclusion is I don’t think the presumption of guilt in cases of sexual assault or domestic violence is compatible with current efforts for social justice. This mainly reminds me of gaslighting. He is lying, he is obfuscating, he is bullshitting, now he's on jezebel yelling at people, but oh, he does it out of love and concern! Bullshit. The thing 'tough question' rhetoric does is lead to paralysis. We can't do anything against rapists, otherwise we're harming prison reform. We can't campaign against racism on campus, otherwise we're harming free speech, in the end harming anti-racism! But of course, what has DeBoer done for prison reform? What has he done for any of the 'current efforts for social justice'? Nothing. He just wedges it as a cudgel against people he disagree with.

xp I honestly have no idea how you are getting "you have to forgive rapists" or "be nicer to rapists" as the message of that paragraph you quoted

I mean, "forgiveness" would only come into it after you accept that someone is indeed guilty, surely?

It does raise my eyebrows a little though when someone chooses rape as the platform to express their anti-carceral state views. Obviously the views should apply equally to everything, but rape is so rarely even prosecuted that it's really not that big a part of the problem.

yeah especially when lathered over with so much hand-wringing over the miserable lot of accused rapists, which in 2016 sets off very loud alarm bells to me.

I'm not a deboer fan and I don't think centering the question around better justice for rap victims makes much rhetorical sense. But ending nonviolent drug offenses isn't really going to make a dent in the problems of the carceral system, and we really do need to think past that to the ways we treat violent offenders--up to & including murder imo. We have to rethink the entire nature of the punitive system, to the point where there's not a vein of American comedy based around "you killed someone but thankfully you're going to prison where we are ok with people brutally raping you in the shower."

anyone can be against non violent drug offenses, I mean that's a basic tenet of libertarianism ffs

*rape victims not rap victims

I just disagree w the thinking that the moderate, incremental goal of reducing the terms of non violent offenses is much more than a band aid on a broken system

as usual with FDB he's onto something and missing the pt all at once.

it's not, rhetorically at a least (a big "at least"), that hard to square this circle: we want more people who commit rape and abuse to be accused, tried and convicted.

we want all lawbreakers and those who have harmed others, violent and otherwise, to get just punishments, which our system doesn't deliver. shorter sentences are in order for a whole host of crimes for a whole host of reasons, and alternate punishments to incarceration need to be found and given legitimacy too.

w/o reading him again, FDB has a prob with the cloud of shame that is very purposefully generated around people accused of rape but never punished (or under-punished, compared to others). i don't have a clear answer about that myself. is it just? fuck if i know. maybe? a lot of the time? is it inevitable?

Meanwhile, there's this, and i hope this is the right thread:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/lionel-shrivers-full-speech-i-hope-the-concept-of-cultural-appropriation-is-a-passing-fad

And the accompanying bunches of responses and responses-to-responses

not trying to claim i'm universally well informed in letters but i have no idea who lionel shriver is

that is too long and boring to read but i support her right to write it.

she wrote a popular book. We Need To Talk About Kevin. which was turned into a movie.

ohhhhhhhhhhhh ok no thanks

I agree with her that fiction authors should be able to write about whatever they want and reviewers should not waste time dithering about whether writers have the proper quality and quantity of lived experience to be able to realize characters

her sombrero scandal metaphor of somebody dressing up as a stereotypical bavarian is dumb

In The Mandibles, I have one secondary character, Luella, who’s black. She’s married to a more central character, Douglas, the Mandible family’s 97-year-old patriarch. I reasoned that Douglas, a liberal New Yorker, would credibly have left his wife for a beautiful, stately African American because arm candy of color would reflect well on him in his circle, and keep his progressive kids’ objections to a minimum. But in the end the joke is on Douglas, because Luella suffers from early onset dementia, while his ex-wife, staunchly of sound mind, ends up running a charity for dementia research. As the novel reaches its climax and the family is reduced to the street, they’re obliged to put the addled, disoriented Luella on a leash, to keep her from wandering off.

was all set to accept the idea that authors should be able to write about the experiences of people from social groups other than their own, but now i have changed my mind

why does anyone take schriver seriously. she is a seriously bad writer.

wait, so this family actually wanders the streets with an african-american woman on a leash? yeesh, yeah, ban that plot. although i guess if it was some absurdist agit-prop play i could see it working....

i do kinda wish there were a punk/cool female novelist who could be the feminist answer to the fight club guy. a gross-out body horror punk lit kinda person. maybe there is someone out there like that and i haven't read them. i guess a.m. homes was kinda like that.

kathy acker maybe?

Acker otm

well yeah but i mean now.

Dodie Bellamy does a lot with abjection, but she's probably not chasing a wide audience the way Palahniuk tends to.

i got to read kathy acker when i was a kid but who do weird kids now get to read?