Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

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

oh so everyone you disagree with is a nazi? so much for the tolerant left

Yes everyone I disagree with is a nazi. I don’t see any other conclusion can be drawn.

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.

tennyson had some good lines. but "i am a part of all that i have met" takes on a chilling dimension when juxtaposed with his seeming indifference to the irish famine, which i guess he witnessed firsthand...

it's a lot harder to forgive artists for being complicit in state crimes -- cowards or else worse, indifferent -- than it is to forgive them for other kinds of transgressions, like byron sleeping with his sister or whatever. which is interesting to think about, because when it comes to our contemporaries, it's the opposite.

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

― unpaid intern at the darvo institute (Simon H.)

dolan/brecher are no doubt extremely intelligent but it seems very.... rhetorical. i just don't understand who they're Explaining all these things to and why. the issue is a lack of precision on the modern-day front - they are certainly capable of being extremely precise and clear when it comes to supporting the historical fact that the potato famine was a political act that was discreetly supported by nearly the entirety of the upper classes of british society. what i'm having trouble with is how any of this relates to contemporary events, where they seem content to just throw around words like "cancel culture" without much at all in the way of concrete referents.

i think they're just saying that having an intelligentsia obsessed with personal morality doesn't mean the culture itself is especially moral. which is a solid point -- we all agree that was true of the american right wing in the 90s and 00s, when they were hopped up on self-righteous christian moralism. so maybe the left wing's moral turn -- their move away, from like, a more laissez faire approach to language and expression -- should be taken with some skepticism.

just skimmed it though. they definitely do not "prove" cancel culture is hypocritical or anything.

nor is that the angle he's interested in taking

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

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

ftr I am totally cool with this, esp. since "deplatformed" basically means "loses money/prestige/a job" and not "gets murdered by cops who then get promoted"

once the punching up becomes in any way comparable to the punching down, wake me up. until then, shut the fuck up with your liberal whining.

Is this in regard to Adolph Reed, Alex Morse, or who?

I don't really understand what antideplatforming as a stance even means, does it mean if I run an organization I don't choose who to invite, I just have open-mike night and whoever shows up...?

people talk (or don't talk) about "platforming" like it's some natural state of affairs instead of an actual choice made by actual people advancing actual interests

hm

an actual materialist analysis of the issue would be p useful, like what has made student-age ppl of the left so suspicious of and exhausted by the dismissive commentary of well heeled pundits and tenured scholars, also of the left, but born between, like, 1945 and 1970?

reed might actually be pretty good on this, it's his beat

also lol that adolph reed snr called him adolph in 1947, v strong trolling

Are you saying that horseshoe theory is real?

an actual materialist analysis of the issue would be p useful

this is why The Letter should have published everyone's age and salary next to their names, would have saved everyone a lot of time

look clearly adolph with a "ph" is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from adolf with an f and anybody who would _ever_ associate the two is just not being _logical_

this is why The Letter should have published everyone's age and salary next to their names, would have saved everyone a lot of time

― unpaid intern at the darvo institute (Simon H.)

if we're going all occam's razor on this not publishing The Letter at all might have been even easier

harsh but fair

https://youtu.be/HIWY8UyW9bw

lol they're very bad at faking the performance

amazing song though

lol they're very bad at faking the performance

― treeship

ridiculous, i have never seen alex chilton giving less than his all

anyway a great song obviously but i am still fond of this one

https://youtu.be/veB0UkFuRls

The Dolan/Brecher piece seems to be making a point that quiet complicity with state violence is insidious, and that it arguably has more lasting effects than the hucksters selling fascist snake oil during a rightward swing in consciousness. In relation to cancel culture, it seems to be making the argument that simply calling out those who openly proclaim fascist tendencies, for example, is not enough, particularly since the machinations behind those tendencies tend to run deep.

I tend to be a both/and sort of person in this regard— why not de-platform people AND try to get at the underlying structures that form their shitty views?

This is unclear though, who is it we are de-platforming? Fascists? right wing people in general? Reed? Sunkara/Jacobin?

Leftists treating Leftists with somewhat different ideas as dangerous people who need to be shut down is like some stuff that’s never happened before in history And will probably work out fine

table, I think Dolan would agree w u

anvil, in my above post, i'm referring specifically to fascists and right-wingers, genocidaires, etc.

In general, I don't think that a disagreement over politics that leads to someone like Reed deciding not to give a speech is dangerous or deplatforming at all. I think it's a disagreement over politics, one with many nuances, and one on which both sides have a good argument. There has always been factionalism, particularly in socialist circles, and in the case of Reed, I don't totally get the hand-wringing. People don't have a "right" to give speeches to groups that don't want to hear their speeches!

Like, when I lived in an anarchist cooperative housing situation, did we have socialists come speak at events? No. Tankies? No. We didn't prevent people sympathetic to those tendencies from coming to anarchist-led talks or events unless we thought it was going to cause safety concerns, but as many other people have said previously in this thread and elsewhere, many of the people making a tempest out of such "de-platforming" cases hold immense amounts of power and feel they have a right to be listened to and not questioned by rapt audiences who agree with them totally. They're elitists, plain and simple, who utilize the cudgel of free speech to maintain their positions.

One of the big mistakes that people make, too, is that they think that just because the DSA Brooklyn chapter disinvited Reed that they won't march and struggle alongside people who disagree with them slightly, which is absurd, as the immensity of crowds at protests this summer have shown.

People don't have a "right" to give speeches to groups that don't want to hear their speeches!

But if you call it "deplatforming" it sounds so much more sinister than that! By coining a neologism it removes any prior context and allows the speaker to impose whatever new context they desire.

About the Reed incident: A lot of leftist writing about the New Deal misses how its legislation and execution kept black citizens from its most transformative elements. That's all I say.

There is a difference in not inviting someone to start with and rescinding an invitation after uproar (or creating a hostile environment, as with Reed’s talk).

Now that you've identified a difference between these two actions, how do you think they differ in their effects?

The latter certainly creates a more obvious break in camaraderie.

A lot of leftist writing about the New Deal misses how its legislation and execution kept black citizens from its most transformative elements.

This is fine, but ]which leftist writing? We keep running into the same issues here of vagueness, we never really know who or what.

'a lot of writing', paraphrasing of statement from "someone I know", which then comes to stand in as a shorthand for all. I can't think this is the intention, but it doesn't help with clarity. I can never tell who is being discussed or what they said because its too often inferred and implied

The Dolan/Brecher piece seems to be making a point that quiet complicity with state violence is insidious, and that it arguably has more lasting effects than the hucksters selling fascist snake oil during a rightward swing in consciousness.

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

ah, see, i do think this is a super interesting point. i agree! cultures of complicity are insidious. honestly, it's something i struggle with a lot - i was raised to respect the rule of law, to respect authority. i was taught well the dangers of non-compliance. i mean, christ, it's my literal job. i work in compliance. my job is to make sure that regulations are obeyed. i don't know how i am supposed to obey any of the crazy shit the president says. i don't know how any of us are supposed to do it.

and this i think is one of the reasons i am, right now, afraid of liberals in a way i am _not_ afraid of donald trump. i just have a hard time describing the president, himself, as "insidious". to me this implies some sort of gentle persuasion, of gaining your trust and persuading you to "compromise" on things you normally wouldn't. insidiousness relies on gradualism, which is just not something the president seems _capable_ of.

biden/harris are peak insidious imo.

People don't have a "right" to give speeches to groups that don't want to hear their speeches!

I get this, but what about people that wanted to hear something that was booked, and was no longer booked because some other people didn't want to hear it. Why can't they just not go?

I think they’ll live

Can't argue with that:) I'm not that sure anyone wants to hear from anyone anyway!

Welt: can you imagine how awful it would have been if we’d had cancel culture after the war and former SS officers hadn’t been able to teach children?

apparently not a german onion style parody. I don’t know how cancel culture discourse is ever going to top this

Welt-Chefkommentator (!) schreibt einen bizarren Artikel darüber wie gut es war, dass Nazis noch 45 nicht der bösen Cancel Culture zum Opfer fielen. U.a. sein Heimleiter Kraas, SS-Brigadeführer, Generalmajor der SS u. letzter Kommandeur der 12. SS-Panzer-Division „Hitlerjugend“ https://t.co/zY7xmViMLX

— Annika Brockschmidt (@ardenthistorian) August 16, 2020

From what I can tell, it seems like DSA leadership didn't consult with members, and many members were like, "This is bogus, we don't want this class reductionist jabbering to us." So, they made their concerns known, and Reed decided not to do the speech. The reason it matters is that if the DSA is going to ever be viewed as anything besides a stomping ground for white, well-educated leftist 18-40 year olds, then it needs to stop booking class reductionists like Reed.

For an insight into the DSA's race issues, look no further than this article from TNR. The person I was speaking of above, btw, is quoted in the article, if you want to sleuth. https://newrepublic.com/article/152789/americas-socialists-race-problem

Again, I'm not saying I'm in agreement with this approach, but from what I can tell, these are the terms that are being used in this particular argument.