Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

obviously with 'misrepresentations' you could have been talking about me dichotomising leftism as either liberal peaceability or armed conflict, with the implication that the non-liberals seek gunplay, which was also obviously flippant and kind of bullshit as a rhetorical technique; i'm sorry for that too and i fully believe that you want peaceful change

rereading my latest post i can see that it might come off as patronising. i shouldn't force positivity on anyone and i should certainly not try to persuade someone not to question their complicity in inequalities that i am even more complicit in myself. so i guess i'm sorry if my words seem at all out of place or backwards-thinking.

Did this get posted yet? I refuse to keep up

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/harpers-letter-free-speech/614080/

Hannah Giorgis knows what she's talking about in that piece.

Missed that it was a newer Atlantic piece on this than I thought, actually, so apology for lazy, exhausted snark.

Yeah, good piece. Sometimes writers at the Atlantic get it right.

After reading endless takes, I finally dug into The Letter myself and I was shocked. pic.twitter.com/Y1lbZd3OYB

— Alan Levinovitz (@AlanLevinovitz) July 13, 2020

Amid a worsening pandemic and ongoing protests against lethal state violence, using glib internet-speak to describe the president of the United States betrays a deep detachment from the carnage wrought by his policies and ideology.

lmao literally everyone is guilty of this though

"your post reads like a terrible confession, but you have done nothing wrong!"

yeah, i knew that part would be difficult. honestly, i think the stuff you say in this paragraph - i believe that you are misreading my post. i know i'm verbose. i know i say a lot, and a lot of it is pretty densely packed. i regret that "read what i wrote, then read what you wrote" is so embedded as a _debate_ tactic, but a lot of the stuff you're arguing against is stuff that i don't believe and didn't say, and i'm not sure right now i'm totally up to rewriting what i said in other words. can i put a call out to other folks on this board? does what i wrote make sense? do you think what i was saying is closer to what lj is reading in it, or is it something else? if it's something else, could you try to explain it to him as best you understand? like, to me, one of the more important sentences of that paragraph is this one:

"i accept that without guilt, without shame, accept it as a fact."

i know i have a lot of troubles with depression, with negative self-talk, but when i was writing that post, i didn't feel bad, i didn't feel miserable. putting those words down was an act of liberation for me, an act of joy. i am not asking for forgiveness, not seeking exculpation.

"the word 'hope' appears three times in your post, all at the end. i wish it had appeared more times. have hope. do the work, yes, but do it in hope. the world is salvageable and you can help to salvage it, actively.

― imago"

time and a place, lj. time and place. i have hope, and having hope _is_ the work i have to do, a place i have to get to, genuine hope rather than blind faith.

i'm not trying to "salvage" the world, to "save" the world. i want, well, the same thing liberals want - to make the world a better place. part of that is having as clear a head as i can about what i need to do and about what i can do, what i can and can't fix, what i might have to let go of, what i might have to lose in order to do so. all of the things i've lost, all of the things i may still lose, to have hope i need to be able to lose those things without despair.

a lot of the things i have to lose are things that, upon further consideration, we can live without. if america goes, if britain goes, if _democracy_ goes - we are still here, "the world" is still here. and that, that is why i have hope.

lmao literally everyone is guilty of this though

― trapped out the barndo (crüt)

for the record i try really hard not to do this. when i talk about him directly, i try and make a point to refer to him only as "the president of the United States".

Thinking a little more this morning about what Simon said a couple days ago, about viewing my experience in religious terms. I don't think of myself as religious, but a lot of what I've been through this last year, a lot of how I see things, is sometimes easier for me to explain in religious terms than secular philosophical terms. And when I try to do that, it occurs to me that secular philosophy of course is not opposed to religion, is riddled and shot through with religious ideas and assumptions.

I have a lot of challenges, as a non-binary trans woman, dealing with a world grounded in philosophical dualism. It's easy to view my transition as kind of a conversion experience, of being born again as a new person. Certainly I'm pressured to behave in ways that confirm that hypothesis. Before Thanksgiving break last year I left work dressed as a "man", and then when I came back in December I was dressed as a "woman", and people called me by a new name and new pronouns.

That experience was awkward for me, artificial, not in keeping with my experience. Gender isn't, for me and for a lot of people I know, an on/off switch, but a gradual process of change. Even while I am going through the process of working to be more authentic, more who I am, I still have to do a lot of pretending to accommodate other people.

When I think of myself in religious terms, I find it easier to relate my experience to certain concepts described in Buddhism than the ideas promulgated by dualist religion. I think a lot about, for instance, non-attachment.

Transition for me has been a radical practice of relinquishment. One of the many challenges I faced in transitioning was the idea that I was choosing to give up my male privilege. That was scary to me. I already had such a hard time of things, my life was already so difficult, and I was deciding that the answer to that was to try and get through with even less?

It wasn't until I had already relinquished it that I was able to see how much that "privilege" was hurting me, how much damage I was doing to myself by contorting myself into the shape of the man I was supposed to be. My maleness was a burden that I insisted on carrying, under the mistaken notion that it would "protect" me.

It's sometimes hard to explain to people pre-transition how amazing transition is. People look at it and say "Wow, that looks really hard. You face so much prejudice. I'm not sure I could do that." And yeah, it is hard, it is super fucking hard, but all I can say is it's worth it. It's hard for me to to describe in terms that don't smack of religion, that don't smack of the conversion experience, scales falling from one's eyes and so forth. The only alternative I can offer is that of liberation, of radical liberation.

And, I guess, I can say that where I've found myself is not where I thought I would find myself when I began this journey. One of the things I struggle with most, with regards to liberal/dualist framing, is this insistence on the homogenous nature of the Other. I mean, even trying to understand how people can think that way kind of breaks my brain. When I see liberals opposing intersectional leftism on the grounds that we are "conformist", I have a hard time getting out any words other than "What the fuck? Seriously?" Look, I'm trying to be kind, I'm trying to be patient, but, uh, hate to break it to you, but y'all are a _lot_ more conformist than we are.

And yeah, I used to live in that space. When I transitioned, I crossed the border out of it and found myself not in another land, but in a place without borders, a vast liminal space extending farther than I can see in all directions, an endless field of Becoming. From out here, the fortress I had walled myself in, for my own "protection", looks more like a prison.

It wasn't until I had already relinquished it that I was able to see how much that "privilege" was hurting me, how much damage I was doing to myself by contorting myself into the shape of the man I was supposed to be

spinoff thought: I think this is, in one form or another, a battle that every "socially conscious" man or at-the-time-male-identified person has to reckon with. or at least I do, regularly! which is part of my problem with some areas of ironic/not-ironic man-hating idpol discourse, this meme that men should be thankful for male privilege. (at least this is the implication I so often detect.) I have long resented male privilege even as I doubtlessly continue to benefit from it, knowing full well my ability to limit its power is, well, limited. at the end of the day of course we all do what we can and try to stay awake to these things. but to me it rarely feels like "enough"

(I wasn't accusing you of that implication, rusho, just to be clear! just thinkin baout things)

SCOOP alert: Bari Weiss is leaving the New York Timeshttps://t.co/5gjPfZGRRQ

— Katie Drummond (@katiedrumm) July 14, 2020

spinoff thought: I think this is, in one form or another, a battle that every "socially conscious" man or at-the-time-male-identified person has to reckon with. or at least I do, regularly!

― k*r*n koltrane (Simon H.)

oh yeah! i know what you're talking about there. what i was talking about is different from that, but it is definitely something i had to struggle with. when i identified as male, i worried a _lot_ about "toxic masculinity", about how to be a man in a healthy manner. so many of the things i was taught or encouraged to do as a man were bullshit and i hated them, hated the constant emphasis on power, violence, domination. i was really frustrated, though, because i didn't know how to be better, didn't know how to offer alternatives, to not be any of those things.

ironically, now that i've started transition the solutions to such problems seem obvious to me, now that it's no longer my problem to solve, my burden to carry. i struggle to express it, though, in ways that Old Me, Cis Me, would understand. i'm in a particularly weak position, honestly, to oppose toxic masculinity, to oppose destructive gender norms. i still believe, for instance, that it should be totally ok and fine for men to wear dresses and skirts, that a lot of the bullshit cis male standards a railed against are genuinely bullshit and can and should be opposed by cis males. it's not a convincing argument i can make, though. what cis man is going to believe me when I say "Sure, it's fine to wear a dress, it doesn't make you less of a man or anything"?

i think that's part of why i have so much respect for trans men. trans men are men, not intrinsically better or more valid than any other man, they are capable of exhibiting many of the same problems, making many of the same mistakes, cis men do, but they, as a group, have unique and uniquely valuable experiences that cis men don't. they are not raised with all of the bullshit cis men were raised with. nothing about their gender is assumed, nothing about it is taken for granted. they understand so much about manhood that i as a "cis man" just never fucking got, and i don't think it's just because i never was a cis man. you want to learn more about how to be a better man, a less toxic man? listen to trans men!

re: Bari, can't wait for all the whinging about how cancel culture "forced" her to "self-expel" into her next cushy media job

🤔🤔🤔https://t.co/KfPWyUKR3a pic.twitter.com/SB3Wz1kZBu

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) July 14, 2020

I read an excerpt from that letter and I think the Times made a strategic mistake hiring an opinion writer who can’t fucking write, you could get better prose picking someone at random from a college newspaper.

worst barry imo

Oh no! Bari Weiss, whom I don't read, resigned from the New York Times, which I don't read. Back to watching YouTube train vids.

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) July 14, 2020

really if you read the nyt op page, it's on you

I don’t think I have much personal sway over masculinity because I’m a fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma

Morbz I say this with love but is there literally no topic about which you don't think ILX needs to hear Dennis Perrin's opinion?

what cis man is going to believe me when I say "Sure, it's fine to wear a dress, it doesn't make you less of a man or anything"?

I do, for what it's worth! (But then again I already thought that)

Morbz I say this with love but is there literally no topic about which you don't think ILX needs to hear Dennis Perrin's opinion?

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

if perrin had actually posted a link to the train video he was watching i might possibly have been interested

fewer hot takes, more train videos, that's what i want. honestly i would rather watch a video by the _band_ train than hear someone's twitter hot takes. that's how little i want to hear his hot takes.

I don’t think I have much personal sway over masculinity because I’m a fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma

― trapped out the barndo (crüt)

oh! this is one of my least favorite things ever, when people i care about talk shit about themselves. crut, you are an awesome person and i care about you and anybody who makes you think you are a "fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma" is wrong and mean. you deserve to be treated better than that.

the nyt should replace bari weiss with dennis perrin obv

perrin sure can deliver pith in 256 words or leth

lol

bari weiss? more like....uh, barry white's "your political correctness is my political core weakness"

I assume these people quitting think this is some John Galt-type revolution, when in reality everyone is going to ignore the fuck out of them now.

nah, would be shocked if bari weiss isn't writing in a big publication soon enough.

nah, would be shocked if bari weiss isn't writing in a big publication soon enough.

Speculation is that she's going to be joining Andrew Sullivan and Ben Shapiro in some kind of horrifying new right-wing project that will be feted in the Atlantic, TNR, etc. and ignored by the sane reading public.

The Alt White

Weiss does mean 'white' in German (sorry if that was the joke).

i wish cancel culture actually canceled these people :(

Speculation is that she's going to be joining Andrew Sullivan and Ben Shapiro in some kind of horrifying new right-wing project that will be feted in the Atlantic, TNR, etc. and ignored by the sane reading public.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, July 14, 2020 2:25 PM (eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

god i was prepared for these clods to toil away in their lil online enclaves, but this sounds like a rw vox and i cant deal

The Internets should have destroyed and eliminated every single Opinion department at every newspaper...and yet they survive.

opinion is the only thing that gets reliable clicks anymore

we have Times Radio over here, and given how Weiss has just left the NY Times, makes sense that the virus would spread to you lot as well

Agreed, Traces. And think what the NYT et al would look like if the page was formatted like Reddit and things were voted to the top.

Would actually be pretty great if the NYT posted number of clicks next to each section, article, byline, etc.

Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand) at 2:57 14 Jul 20

opinion is the only thing that gets reliable clicks anymore

local sports

lol all the Bari fans are on twitter doing the “but she didn’t say that” bullshit to anyone who implies she thought her coworkers at the NYT should have been punished for not liking her

the entire shtick is so insanely thin, she writes drivel with absolutely no substance but with an obvious ~subtext~

if you get the subtext right, she and all her goons say “she didn’t say that! you’re the bad guy!” and if you get it wrong then it doesn’t matter

she’s basically someone blowing a giant dog whistle and if you can’t hear it, she just looks like a moron blowing into a whistle that makes no noise, a completely useless venture

local sports

true

local sports are canceled too! haha

personally love the culture of cancel

Dennis Perrin never tweets about local sports

*begins Morbs stopwatch*

new republic is quite good these days many xxxpost

keeping with the dog whistle theme, it’s COMPLETELY SURPRISING that every conservative dipshit (including Ted Cruz!) is tweeting about how sad it is that the terrible nytimes.. didn’t fire her? idk, something bad apparently happened but it’s hard to say what

mysterious how all these dogs are showing up to comment, as if they... heard something

Glenn Greenwald had planned to produce a documentary about Martina Navratilova, with Kimberly Peirce of Boys Don't Cry renown. And then...

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/14/cancel-culture-martina-navratilova-documentary/

fyi if anybody is interested i have a little postscript to my rampage this weekend itt up on my blog

https://www.alanauch.org/wtob/2020/07/14/list-of-animals-with-fraudulent-diplomas/

Glenn Greenwald had planned to produce a documentary about Martina Navratilova, with Kimberly Peirce of Boys Don't Cry renown. And then...

https://theintercept.com/2020/07/14/cancel-culture-martina-navratilova-documentary/

― brooklyn suicide cult (Dr Morbius)

fascinating. what does dennis perrin have to say about all this?