Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I wonder what speech the rich transphobes signing that letter are in favour of, and how platforming that might threaten the safety of a trans woman. I wonder how co-signing a letter amd therefore adding your tacit support to the famous wizard author who’s enraged she can’t talk about trans people without pushback might come across as a slap in the face to a colleague?

I’d want to acknowledge that ideal as impossible & also weaponised in bad faith in harmful (& meta-argumentative) ways

― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left)

nah i'd say this is a "perfect is the enemy of the good" thing, for me at least it's not about achieving an ideal of an Enlightenment salon or whatever, it's just about doing the work to make things less awful.

you want to know what my goal here is? i would love it if dealing with mental health crises, either that of one of my friends or my own, wasn't a nearly daily feature of my life. maybe, for instance, i could get to the point where i would only have to talk someone down once every two weeks or so. that would be so fucking amazing.

not helping things of course is the adorably cute habit this board has of replacing certain words it deems less than conducive to good-faith discussion in such a manner as to render what i'm saying absurd and nonsensical. i'm perfectly capable of being absurd and nonsensical without your help, stet.

Don't blame stet for that; that string substitution dates back to my moderation tenure.

ok, sorry stet. could someone on 77 at least provide a list of string substitutions? i'll be honest with you that was a pretty nasty surprise there.

kate I genuinely hope that happens, I would love for something better than that to happen. just saying there are things left out in the (v mild version of a) before-the-fall narrative hinted at in the twitter thread & some of those things led to where we are now. but that’s not the main point of it anyway so nm

I was really happy when I stumbled across the trigger tbh

i agree with you left, the internet was never eden. this idea of a wonderland despoiled by corporations, bullshit. the internet grew out of a military intelligence project and had its social structure defined by a small group of highly intelligent people, most of whom were white men, most of whom were not particularly socially adept. fuck "original intent", we need something that _works_.

I "met" VDW long ago on a pod and they were nice knowledgeable and cool. Yglesias otoh is pretty reliably a dumbass. that said i confess i don't quite get what VDW was hoping to accomplish by making their issue w Yglesias public as opposed to private/internal

I am into this Goya boycott.

xp: A lot of people live their lives online in some form of radical transparency, particularly people who are Verified(TM) on various platforms and feel they need to make statements for their audiences. It is entirely possible that they received DMs from people asking for them to take a stand; it's also possible that those hurt by the letter who follow them would take silence as agreement and this was meant to clearly delineate that their stance didn't match that of the signatories.

My personal take on the letter is "voicing an opinion ALWAYS carries risk and it's actually a good thing when people interrogate their thoughts before saying them, you giant babies"

i would argue that the internet is a city, and mark zuckerberg is its bob moses, tearing down the hastily and poorly constructed shantytowns of geocities and replacing them with the gleaming and highly convenient superhighway we were promised. expressing displeasure with his work doesn't imply a desire to bring back the shantytowns.

My personal take on the letter is "voicing an opinion ALWAYS carries risk and it's actually a good thing when people interrogate their thoughts before saying them, you giant babies"

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Friday, July 10, 2020 7:57 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm!!!

Yep

Call me crazy, Kate, but while I appreciate your admittance to being at odds with liberal thought and agree with you in most ways, I'm also wondering why any of us treat liberal democracy as a thing that has ever existed? Or free speech as anything other than a cudgel with which to foment hatred toward an Other and displace violence onto non-"enlightened" populations? Maybe I'm too lost in the sauce, but I'm just not really sure that either are anything except myths.

Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more language to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. Everywhere, appeals to good sense, to common sense, appeals to the good old Republic – as we watch it bend over, bearing the weight and grinning while its spine cracks – appeals to our old friend the humanism of cowards...

That's Mbembe, btw.

My ex has a infuriating habit of posting uninformed shit and then when getting called on it politely by friends who have more knowledge on the subject who are trying to share their perspective, she erupts and shuts down the conversation because people had the audacity to disagree with her. She'd go into attack mode ("READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN...THEN READ WHAT YOU WROTE!"...omg 0wned!)

This is naturally one reason why she's an ex, but I find it amusing when people think their words, written or spoken, are sacrosanct, no matter how ill-informed or offensive they are.

I get disagreed with often and hey sometimes I get called out on something I said that's upsetting to somebody and I learn from it. It's called life, y'know. Don't start a discussion if you just want hi-fives

DJP OTM

also i like the zuckerberg as moses analogy a lot

I'm also wondering why any of us treat liberal democracy as a thing that has ever existed? Or free speech as anything other than a cudgel with which to foment hatred toward an Other and displace violence onto non-"enlightened" populations?

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

i get and respect where you're coming from and i do think there are certain foundational myths to such things as the free press (it's seldom mentioned, for instance, that Publick Occurrences was edited by someone who had a history of using the press to foment anti-Catholic violence), but honestly, that hasn't been my experience with "free speech". when i was young "free speech" crusaders were opposing the communications decency act and all of that sort of neo-Comstockery. censorship can be as much a cudgel as free speech is.

xpost I also hope my post wasn't read as trying to shut you down, wasn't my intention. Maybe Neanderthal's post right after just made me anxious...

Yeah, I guess that so often what I view as "real" censorship at present is done by the very people who are pretending to uphold the supposedly magnanimous, humanistic values of "liberty" and "free speech" and so on, so it becomes part and parcel of the mythos. Historically speaking, though, I tend to agree with you a bit more.

really what this thread has made me appreciative of is what a dizzyingly high-context culture we are in the internet age, that intersectionality doesn't just mean correctly decoding high-context information within the context of one culture but dealing with the byzantine web of non-overlapping referents, or referents that overlap but have different meanings - to take just one example that fetty wap song is not about what i as a white person initially took it to be about.

and this is what frustrates me so much about "liberals", they are so committed to their particular culture as the monoculture. not only do they tend to not understand that "free speech" isn't about their right to say "fuck the draft", especially given that the us hasn't had a draft since the fucking 1970s, but they have the tendency view any questioning of their axiomatic ideals, some of which have strong empirical evidence against them, as the greatest possible danger next to which all others must wait in line. oh they want to fix things, but they have to be at the reins. it has to be done their way. and after seeing what a fucking balls-up they've made of things in my lifetime, you know, i don't really see how it can possibly benefit me to consent to that.

^^^ that last sentence tho

'liberals' is reductive as fuck though

like are we talking neoliberal power hegemony here or are we talking the liberals who early-adopt lgbt rights and are instrumental in changing social mores for the better or everything in between or what

like, would it be so crazy to claim that BLM is a liberal movement

not “crazy” but more way reductive than what you’re complaining about

it's not a question of whether it's "worse" to be naive or trolling - it's that there's no functional difference in terms of outcomes.

― Kate (rushomancy)

are you talking about you or me there

when did 'bourgeoisie' elide into 'liberals' exactly, there is overlap sure but not as much as the complete overlap we seem to see claimed here

if you can't construct a good-faith reading of what i'm saying, neither you or i benefit from our discussing this.

like, what is liberal monoculture, it feels to me that there are lots and lots of very different liberal cultures, many of which are constantly changing

sorry, that was harsh, lj if you want to discuss this with me send me an ilxmail and we can talk about it in email, i think any discussion we have would probably be really in-depth and time-consuming and bore the pants off of everyone else here and i want to leave room for other people here.

kate have you read ilx lately we're all incredibly boring

yeah this is the place to have the discussion

I wasn't trying to pressure anyone I just couldn't resist

ilx will genuinely benefit from people writing more lengthy, considered, nuanced posts

One of the good things about early ILX.

HI DERE

I support walls of text also. sometimes I even read them!

here's the thing imago, i know you have been around for a while, i am _sure_ you mean well, and if you want to have it in public fine we will have it in public: you have said some ignorant-ass shit lately, and it kind of pisses me off when people who i expect better of say ignorant-ass shit, and i politely as i could expressed my disagreement and nothing, and it got ignored, everybody moved on. fine. i haven't moved on, and if you want to make that a point of public intellectual debate, if you want this to be the fucking agora here, fuck it we can do that because i ain't super strongly committed to posting here, am in fact looking for an excuse to quit posting here, again, and move on with my life.

a lot of my conversation with "liberals", and you can define that however you fucking want lj, go ahead and call dr. king a "liberal" if it makes you happy, consists of them poking me with a stick in some very tender spots and kindly asking me whatever could be wrong, they are just trying to have a _reasonable discussion_ like a _reasonable person_.

i'm not unsympathetic. because that was how i was raised to act, how i was raised to behave, and it took a long time and a lot of patience shown by many, many other people who did not owe me that patience before i started to get even slightly better. and i think, uh, if i can learn to recognize the stupid bullshit i was taught and parroted as stupid bullshit, then there's probably hope for a lot of other people as well.

and that's why i post here, and also because it is friday and i'm exhausted and i'm trying to avoid work.

now, having said that... what was your question again? thanks.

I, for one, am interested in seeing you two respectfully duke it out, it’s what this place is for, among other things (Simon otm).

like, would it be so crazy to claim that BLM is a liberal movement

BLM is a radical movement whose success depends crucially on it having forged a robust alliance with a liberal movement of the same name; also crucial is that neither the liberals nor the radicals admit this

i found that imago’s questions have literally nothing to do with what’s being discussed itt but fair i tuess

what’s meant by liberal in this discussion is fairly obvious to me as... the kind of liberal who would sign that letter

so imo “PLEASE DEFINE WHAT YOU MEAN BY LIBERAL” is a fuckin distraction

like, what is liberal monoculture, it feels to me that there are lots and lots of very different liberal cultures, many of which are constantly changing

― imago, Friday, 10 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Please write a book about this,, sir

surely plenty of liberals would have smelt (and did smell) a rat and refused to sign though - i'd not have signed it as i don't think it's the right way of going about anything and it feels purely self-aggrandising if anything, these people are fairly pathetic

my question is why you would blanket-criticise 'liberals' rather than seek to pry the fault-lines within 'liberalism' which is where all the juicy stuff is!

because i am not a liberal and i have no interest in cleaning their filthy, stinking house for them

it may be helpful to note that the definition of "liberal" has shifted a bit in recent years, and in some sense has merged with "neoliberal"

Nor does it carry the same meaning from country to country, even in the English-speaking world. That said, #notallliberals is generally not a winning stance on ILX.

true enough, but I think there's a lot of people who would self-identify as liberals who are probably not aware of the shifting connotation.

it may be helpful to note that the definition of "liberal" has shifted a bit in recent years, and in some sense has merged with "neoliberal"

― Mario Meatwagon (Moodles)

thanks moodles, reading back i may have possibly been unclear in my post where i started talking about "the byzantine web of non-overlapping referents", and i think that's a little of what frustrated me - i voiced what i thought was a perfectly clear and cogent complaint about liberals' inability to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on its context - and then lj came out and provided what struck me as a pretty blatant real-world example of the problem. it boggles my mind to think that anybody could read what i wrote in good faith and think that i was talking about harvey fucking milk.