Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

i will say in capitalism's defence that i haven't come across a system of economic distribution that's conquered mortality

no other monster has been this successful at eating up life through work/dispossession/incarceration/enslavement/war/genocide/ecocide on such global industrial scales before

had anyone asked the congolese child miners this conversation depends on for their take on this whole cancel culture business? seems you have to have capital in the first place to be at risk of cancellation, extracted from others who are always cancelled already

no letter demanding "tolerance" ever seems to be accompanied by a demand for a decent life for all. These calls for free speech don't even make a call for a moderate sort of proposal to make it illegal for bosses to fire workers at will

This, by one of the signatories of the Harper's letter, was published a day before the letter was, and was one of the first articles published on a site affiliated with a number of the other signatories:
https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-better-remedy-for-cancel-culture

Look, I just reposted it because I thought she brought up some good points. Did the letter mention ending at-will employment? No. Lol the woman teaches full time and just won the Pulitzer

Like it was published on her blog.

So sure, some of these people might bring up points she would have them bring up.

That doesn't mean she's full of shit, and it certainly doesn't mean the letter signatories aren't full of shit. Because they definitely are.

the anne boyer piece was good and i'm glad you shared it here

seconded

Good stuff on the thread (and the thread within) on how liberals have lost it big in the UK.

associating around this point and thread a bit.... I think one of the ways in which 'liberalism' is kind of debased at the moment is the idea (which you see everywhere) that key liberal values include the assumption of good faith and consensus-oriented debate https://t.co/c7Hf5XUZQm

— Lafargue (@Lafargue) August 8, 2020

good thread, yes

*yawn*

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/aug/12/nick-cave-political-correctness-bad-religion-run-amuck-cancel-culture

I'm sure his concern for redemption and mercy has nothing to do with Warren Ellis.

Different Warren Ellis. His concerns with "political correctness" have to do with him being a 62-year-old Australian man.

oops, I always thought they were the same guy and he wrote comics as a sideline

er, I guess music would be the sideline actually

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/14/us/adolph-reed-controversy.html#click=https://t.co/QFoFx1Yly6

And then they came for Adolph Reed

jfc

this guy has been moving right for a while

academics, pundits, celebs who live in fear of their increasing irrelevance know at least there’s a receptive market for this kind of shit atm so they’re pretty much engineering their own cancellations for it

Lol at “moving right”

You are a straw man come to life

I haven't followed his entire career but his form of class politics seems pretty conservative & he seems relatively unbothered by his popularity on the white supremacist social democratic left

Who exactly is the white supremacist left? I can’t tell what is your Personal hyperbole and what is existing tankie dogma

no hyperbole & tankies have called me a liberal/trot/fascist/CIA plant too many times for me to be accused of being one

I mean the leftists who use the (v selective) criticism of identity to reduce class struggle to an ironically particular nationalist reformist agenda & dismiss action against the colonial state, capital, patriarchy etc as a betrayal of this. If this isn't an accurate interpretation Reed he certainly leaves it open enough for every fan of his I've encountered to run with it

also lol he cancelled his own fucking speech

Yeah, Left summarizes a lot of the criticisms of Reed that I've heard from other scholars.

I dunno, Reed seems to be in pretty much the same place as Bernie/Jacobin/etc. Saying that he's the John McWhorter or Glenn Loury is a fantastically huge stretch. Also, is there any cancelling incident that won't be handwaved away on this thread? Signs point to No.

jacobin has published enough genocide deniers, antisemites, misogynists, cop lovers & red-brown adjacent shitheads over the years that it's hard to make a clear cut distinction

the whole concept of cancellation is the problem here- as I said before it seems to depend on having capital to lose in the first place- those without are automatically deemed cancelled by the anti-cancel-culture brigade itself. this entire moral panic is a bunch of celebrities, pundits, adademics & social climbers terrified of the prospect of their own irrelevance as social/cultural/political/moral authorities & of being treated like they treat everyone else without the institutional protection they currently receive

there are countless people who are "cancelled" in the sense of being silenced for who they are or what they do or say but they don't get op eds in major publications to whine about it or have rich & famous mates to rally round them so they're irrelevant as victims. in fact it's them who are most accused of cancellation if they speak out of turn to their social betters

^^^

Jacobin is quite literally socialism lite for middle-class white kids who don't want to think about their racism because it makes them uncomfortable.

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

The answer is yes, we will always hand wave

I like reed, his ideas aren't really that in-step with dsa types ideas so this controversy is unsurprising. Storm in a demitasse sums it up p well

is reed actually "moving right" or is the popular discourse of the past ~5 years just providing him many more opportunities to reiterate

I think that ideas of intersectionality have taken off, and rightly so, and so those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people...and perhaps also by those of us who teach the Combahee River Collective and Crenshaw's work, too.

this is true but has included a lot of clueless or cynical appropriation of the language from various political & corporate interests which has given more life to this part of the left by appearing to confirm all their suspicions. that class politics can & has frequently been co-opted in similar ways seems mostly uninteresting or incomprehensible to them

I've been accused of class reductionism & identity politics many times from different crowds, sometimes for the same position. one thing that would help would be if everyone acknowledged how slippery all these terms have become & how many agendas they can serve- even the good critiques of either are used to give cover to a lot of bullshit

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table),

Can we get a name for this person, and something more than a paraphrase?

I don't think its necessarily doing any good to throw these terms around without referring exactly who we're speaking about and what it is they've done. those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people is really quite vague, this is what leads to talking at cross purposes

The attempted cancelation of Alex Morse is an issue. I'm not sure how close that has come to working

xp this is true but insofar as there are sides here it's coming from both/all of them. everything about this already interminable debate becomes that much worse when it turns into another fucking proxy war over US presidential candidates

It may be coming from all of them, but we don't have to be part of it?

I think one of the issues is we can end up at a totalizing point. A point where its assumed everyone has already made up their minds, not just on big picture stuff but on individual cases. Reed is good. Reed is bad. I've not seen anything to suggest Reed is "bad" or that he is overly class-reductionist. BUT this is partly because I've only seen or read 'some' Reed (in common with most people?). It's unclear to me why he is someone that shouldn't even be speaking somewhere. This is where I get really lost.

These terms are doing a lot of work, seem to mean different things to different people - there's a lot of skipping to the conclusion. Things just are. Is what Reed is saying so bad that it shouldn't even be engaged with? (caveat - I may well be missing part of whats happening here)

And now we have a post that says that "someone" at the Jacobin said "Black people of "not knowing what's good for them", but this is in paraphrase. Even on this board we see how much heavy lifting and paraphrasing does (can look at the Biden thread to see just how many posts are immediately paraphrased to mean something else)

There seems to be a lot of shortcutting to landing hits on individuals. I don't think is is 'bad faith' per se, it's more like "We know person x really means y, regardless of whether they said it". Maybe thats inevitable to some extent, but something we should be trying to avoid, unless entrenchment is the aim

some of it is just pattern recognition. which patterns & how real or significant they are will depend on what someone is familiar with

I'm familiar enough with the usual beats of this debate to be suspicious of certain lines of argument, or of people associated with a certain mileu. I think everyone does this

We all do it of course, but its better if we try not to!

The danger is it becomes impenetrable to people unfamiliar with the patterns, and sets a high bar by requiring people to not only also have this background information but to have processed it the same way too. This leads to the so called bad faith conversations that might not be bad faith at all, merely pattern recognition, or pattern assumption. The likes of "well, people like you usually say". Its deciding what people have said before they've said it, and it doesn't go anywhere

I saw a small section of a debate a left-wing person had with Sargon of Akkad a while ago. The other guy 'knew' what Sargon really meant, but the viewer doesn't necessarily. He took short cuts with performativity and grandstanding to win, not engaging with what was actually said. This kind of victory is a false victory

Anvil, I went to college with this person and I'm not going to name them as we still share many friends.

In terms of my 'vague' post about younger people, as someone who has been involved in radical political movements for years, what I can offer is that the language and forms of rhetoric have changed on social media and in actions in recent years... Class reductionist stances are viewed as suspect by a Blacker and younger crowd, and a radical intersectionality has become more de rigueur, even for those who've never read the literature. While you could say this is all just echo chamber stuff or merely anecdotal, I think that the multi-racial but Black-led quality of many of the ongoing uprisings is sufficient evidence.

And all views that are deemed suspect must be deplatformed. Totally cool.

I never said that I agreed with what happened to Reed. Just explaining the phenomenon.

I liked this Dolan/Brecher blog post about the targets "cancel culture" tends to miss, as primarily explained/demonstrated via Victorian-era literature.

The key to effective silence is to coopt, not alienate, your intelligentsia. The hick Nazis drove out or killed their intellectuals; the Empire suborned and coddled its writers and poets, often promoting those of little talent (whose works are still vaguely canonical), adding intellectual insecurity as another motive for collusion.

Tennyson makes a good start here. Anybody associate Tennyson with genocide? Didn’t think so. He never mentioned it — in his canonical writings. He and Victoria were neighbors, chums, and he won every honor the Empire could bestow, despite being by general consent the stupidest “major” poet in the canon.

You’d never link Tennyson to genocide, until you look at his private letters and his friends’ memoirs. Then you see the perfect melding of silence and violent hatred, as in Kingsley, as in case after case after case that you never hear about — and if you do dare to mention one of the cases, will get you a grumpy, “Oh yes, we know about all that, they held some pretty objectionable opinions, as was common at the time…” (I wish I could do the inflection on “pretty objectionable.” It’s one you hear often among Commonweath academics, especially after the second drink.)

I once read Tennyson’s letters and found to my shock that he had visited Famine Ireland. Even in his letters there is not one mention of the dead. What you do get is a set of rules he laid down, as a celebrity, to his hosts as he made his way from one vampire castle to the next (never mind Mark Fisher, these guys were the real thing): he was not to be spoken to about “Irish distress,” and the window shades of the carriages in which he rode from one Ascendancy manse to another were to be kept completely shut, lest he see the bodies.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/the-war-nerd-amateurs-talk-cancel-pros-talk-silence.html

lol i generally like brecher when he's writing as the war nerd but the implication that tennyson was in fact talentless is p fucking silly (don't think i've ever read anything memorable by dolan)

i first encountered reed bcz pre-heel-turn hitchens gave stirrings in the jug a rave review -- memory says in the v.voice but that seems highly unlikely -- and so i bought it, and was surprised how stiffly and jargonishly written it was, given how much of hitchens's thing was "good writing".

maybe reed's a better stylist these days and i shd probably reread the book anyway. i have little doubt looking back that hitchens' motive was the other kind of stirring, in regard to intra-left feuding.

looks like the hitchens review was actually of class notes: posing as politics and other thoughts on the american scene, so maybe that's better written than stirring lol -- i just reread the hitchens and elements i was already p bored with in his shtick in the late 90s are now like applying a cheese grater to yr face

another reviewer describes it as sparkling with wit and wisdom, which i find highly unlikely -- reed writes like and wants to be read as an engaged academic first and foremost, sorry if this offends