Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

:D that's gonna be stuck in my head all day

this is fucking wild, and I imagine many around these parts are familiar with Clover (he wrote for Spin in the 90s, right?)

THREAD: I'm on record as saying that there are a lot of sincere and principled people working the campus politics/free speech beat, but lately I've grown much more cynical about the entire thing. I'd like to give you an example of why.

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 18, 2019

and he did the Sugar High blog

that's nuts

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

I agree. I kinda doubt the left is going to rally around him since white guys talking about killing a bunch of people are not a popular groups nowadays

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

― Mordy, Monday, March 18, 2019 2:33 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

the police are not a protected class

I'm also not really outraged or anything, seems like the only people who care about this are republicans, let them wear themselves out and if he gets fired I'll be mad

i don't see why they're being a protected class or not has to do with anything and i don't think clover should lose his job. but i don't think it's some terrible hypocrisy that the right is going after this guy for calling for police to be killed while defending right wingers for less dramatic statements. if you can show me right wing media rallying around someone calling for anyone to be killed (protected class or not) as a free speech issue then i'd agree w/ the original tweeter's conceit.

the point of free speech is that it's supposed to not be dependent upon the content of the speech, so calling for his head for this speech while defending other speech is kind of by definition hypocritical

I think maybe we agree broadly that there is a lot of cherry-picking that goes on whenever people write these sorts of "why isn't anyone paying aTtEnTiOn to tHiS" pieces. often there are people 'talking about it' that the writer chooses not to highlight. also, not every example is interesting or worth writing about (this one prob is tho!)

sorry just talking to myself now

You guys are right on the question of the will to defend Clover, but of course it's hypocrisy. Sure, swapping in "minorities" for cops makes it seem real bad, but how about: “People think that terrorists need to be reformed. They need to be killed.”

bad analogy. people talk about killing terrorists all the time

At first I read that as 'People that think terrorists need to be reformed should be killed.'

xpost that is exactly my point? If a professor were fired for saying that about terrorists, right-wing "free speech" advocates would obviously be outraged. I don't see any difference in 1A terms.

"terrorists should be killed" isn't quite the same since "terrorist" is essentially synonymous with "bad guy," but if they said, "liberals should be killed," i imagine there'd be a good chance they'd be fired and a small chance republicans would try to defend it as protected speech.

even tho both "cops should be killed" and "liberals should be killed" should both be protected speech and also both should be protected vis-a-vis academic freedom. but the hypocrisy charge in general is a lazy one and here seems particularly dumb to me.

Mordy, my dude -- there's a conservative provocateur who literally called for gunning down journalists

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/06/28/milo-yiannopoulos-confirms-his-gunning-down-journalists-comments/743561002/

and who SPECIALIZES in showing up on college campuses and complaining that his free speech is being shut down by liberals, including a few months ago at NYU:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/10/students-call-nyu-cancel-milo-yiannopoulos-lecture-181030170250806.html

The professor who invited him to talk has the Twitter handle "antipcnyuprof" for the love of God

I still don't get why this doesn't count as hypocrisy, but I would def agree that hypocrisy is an ineffective line of attack

I mean here is Ann Coulter's famous quote on the Muslim world and she, too, is someone college students are widely counseled to welcome to their campuses lest they deprive themselves of the benefit of exposure to her ideas:

"We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren't punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That's war. And this is war."

tbc they're gross + often hypocritical but also milo and coulter have both lost jobs bc of their comments

Free speech, in the "anti-PC get over it snowflakes" sense, has ALWAYS included "speakers have the right to advocate the killing of disfavored classes of people and if you don't like it you should argue against it in the marketplace of ideas." ALWAYS.

iirc coulter lost her NR job specifically bc of the invasion comment above?

petitions and protests are forms of speech too I've been told

Clover was never properly punished for his writing as "Jane Dark" so I'm OK with this.

I think that many stupid people on the internet (forums and Facebook and Twitter etc) probably can be found who are all for letting murder advocates speak but would then change their tune as soon as someone advocates killing 'goodies' instead of baddies

I don't know how often that obvious hypocrisy is enacted by paid and official conservative politicians and journos though so I can see what mordy's saying

I think a v common stumbling block is for people to advocate general freedom of speech without thinking through or acknowledging all those kinds of speech they, in fact, don't agree with

coulter's comment mostly offends me because it's completely fucking factually wrong.

She has no interest in actual WW2 history or how that might relate to USA versus Islamists in our century

Sometimes you see people who advocate for free speech not based on the importance of speech, but because they believe it's completely impotent.

tangent, but the jarring thing about this for me is that the photo they're using is the Wikimedia Commons photo (i.e. why they're probably using it) of his 2015 EMP Pop Conference panel that I was also on

right wing idiots conflate freedom of speech with freedom from
consequences of being asswipes

The mayor of Old Forge, PA said on FB that Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, and Chuck Schumer "should be shot"

https://wnep.com/2019/03/06/old-forge-mayors-facebook-post-calls-for-high-profile-democrats-to-be-shot/

He still has his job. And conservative response is "obviously this is not an actual threat" which surely is equally true of an English professor.

but his influence over the young

jeez. i find clover to be an insufferable (but very clever) ass (and the internet hardman comments that inspired this whole fiasco are sadly totally in character), but seeing what is happening to him is terrifying. i wouldn't wish this sort of fascist pogrom on my worst enemy.

it doesn't help that of all the mundane fascistic details of everyday american life, i find cop-worship the most despicable.

yeah clover is exactly the sort of dumb tankie asshole i can't imagine defending in any other context but this one.

coulter also said that the only bad thing about tim mcveigh was that he didn't blow up the NYT building. she's made some thinly veiled anti-semitic remarks too iirc. right-wingers basically never suffer any consequences for this shit.

he has an incredible way with words. he's incredibly sharp and pointed. i actually enjoy, for a certain amount of time, reading his poetry and prose. but it all sours quickly because the common denominator -- the thing that really seems to animate his work, beyond his putative political commitments -- is self-regard.

it'd be easy to accuse him of performative radicalism, because i do think that's what a fair bit of his writing is, but it'd be too easy, because he's definitely put his own privilege on the line at times, by design and (seemingly, now) by accident.

whats his login

well now

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/fake-outrage-machine-right-radical-professors/

There’s no reasonable defense for Clover to call for the death of cops. And, by the way, there’s no reasonable defense for Carlson calling Iraqis “semiliterate primitive monkeys.” Criticizing or condemning Clover and Carlson is proper and justifiable. As I tweeted when the Carlson story broke, if the trending hashtag was #CriticizeTucker, then I was all-in, but since it was #FireTucker, I was all-out. Similarly, attempts to fire Clover (absent concrete evidence of on-the-job misconduct) are not just improper, they’re almost certainly unlawful.

Who really cares what an English professor at Davis thinks about police violence? Who really cares about what a random Fresno State teacher thinks about Barbara Bush? No one does. Not really. They have no meaningful impact on any public debate.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

I've never seen a political analogy that actually works though.

French basically right about the difference between being dragged for your expression of personal views and getting harrassed or fired. Honestly, if I were Clover's department chair or dean and saw that tweet, I would feel fully within my professional responsibilities to say "hey I can't tell you what to say on Twitter but please remember that some of your students could be police officers or people planning to be police officers and you might be compromising your ability to be an effective mentor to those students, so I would prefer if you toned it down" and you know what, maybe his department chair did say that, because it doesn't seem like Clover has tweeted that stuff particularly recently, and maybe it's not because he's under a chilling threat of losing his job for his free speech, maybe he just realized he was being kind of a dick.

Who really cares what an English professor at Davis thinks about police violence? Who really cares about what a random Fresno State teacher thinks about Barbara Bush? No one does. Not really. They have no meaningful impact on any public debate.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

― Frederik B, Tuesday, March 19, 2019 10:01 AM (twenty-three minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right. Tucker deserves to be out of a job far less for what he said on a radio show 10 years ago than for what he says to millions of TV viewers every night in 2019.

This is kinda where the analogy breaks down, though, as what Tucker Carlson thinks about Muslims actually does have a meaningful impact in many many ways.

lol the commenters see this in the exact opposite way--Tucker is just a opinionator, Clover is TEACHING OUR CHILDREN and being PAID WITH OUR TAX MONEY

a local woman who i have only encountered as a server at a bar apparently also does art. she did a book with poems in it, like a small, diy type thing. it was for sale at the art book fair here.

she's been cancelled because in the text r kelly raping/peeing on girls is mentioned, and she doesn't specify that the girls were black (therefore this is erasure)

she is white

Move to Montreal. I swear it's worth it.

What does cancelled mean? The art book fair will no longer sell it? That sounds nuts.

What does cancelled mean? The art book fair will no longer sell it? That sounds nuts.

― All along there is the sound of feedback (Sund4r), Monday, October 21, 2019 10:25 AM (twenty seconds ago)

nah, the book fair is finished. "cancelled" as in is being subjected to criticism by various people on social media or whatever.

There's this quote from somebody about removing the mote from your neighbor's eye that may apply here.

lest ye be nudged off shelves