Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Andrew Sullivan was on 60 Minutes this weekend - anybody know if it was a plug for Grifter U., or for Substack "conservatism" more generally?

"calipers" is a fabulous word

but CALPERS is just another cryptic acronym

By mutual & amicable agreement, I'm stepping off the Board of Advisors of U of Austin #UATX, wishing them well. I'm concentrating on Rationality (the book) and Think With Pinker (the BBC radio & podcast series) & won't be speaking on this further. https://t.co/xgo7exT61C

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) November 15, 2021

Stinker out

he was revealing himself a bit too openly with that one

what is cryptic about CALifornia Public Employees Retirement System? It's not a particularly imaginative acronym

Thanks, sarahell. I never realized it before this moment, but now I see that if you expand CALPERS to show all the words it has abbreviated, suddenly it isn't even remotely cryptic! Anyone can figure it out! I'll try this with other acronyms and see if that trick works with them, too!

Sometimes I get it confused with CLASPERS, because I'm a shark pervert.

I put calpers on my pizza

Skull CALPERS

all I'm saying is that California is a very populous state with a lot of government employees and one of the main reasons people choose to work for the state government is benefits such as a pension, administered by CALPERS, from which they receive immense volumes of correspondence throughout their careers and retirement. This is not to be confused with CALSTERS -- the California State Teachers Employee Retirement System, which is separate.

oh, so that's what you were saying. sorry, that went right over my head. I'll try to pay better attention in the future.

Or CALPIRG, those bright-eyed kids with the card tables.

aiui many exhibits in the Ghislaine trial are shown only to the jury and a lot of stuff is heavily redacted, but I’m just going to wildly speculate that Pinker showed up in one too many photos from Epstein’s private collection

xp - idk to me, a cryptic acronym, is either one where you have no idea how the acronym was derived from the name of the thing, or one where even if you know what the full name is, it is still unclear what the thing actually is or does.

Like compare these in terms of "cryptic-ness"

BUTT - Bouncing Undulating Twerking Tool

vs

BUTT - Bettering Understanding Transitional Talismans

can a mod add a new ILX autoreplace?

Michael Eisen has been canned from eLife. He’s tenured at Berkley so it’s a stretch to describe it as “being canceled.” Twitter is filled with posts about free speech in defense of Eisen and, in a variety of ways, Eisen is representative of creepy liberalism.

I usually don’t have feelings or opinions about these culture or political issues but I, for whatever reason, can’t stop thinking about this today. Eisen is a great scientist but Eisen was a terrible editor.

There’s also a personal component for me. Because of his following and position he’s the major example of being a bipolar academic on social media. I genuinely feel like I’m a moment from posting something really dumb.

he can be a terrible editor and suck in a variety of ways but if he was removed from a post due to retweeting an onion article that's still worthy of condemnation.

I agree. Nevertheless, the eLife letter claims it’s because of multiple (unnamed) incidents. I believe this wasn’t entirely about posting The Onion article. Especially when that’s, compared to some of his other posts, relatively innocuous.

My first thought when I see stories like that--and I freely admit I know nothing more about this case than what you have posted here--is that there was probably sexual misconduct at the back of it.

I agree. Nevertheless, the eLife letter claims it’s because of multiple (unnamed) incidents. I believe this wasn’t entirely about posting The Onion article. Especially when that’s, compared to some of his other posts, relatively innocuous.

― Allen (etaeoe), Tuesday, October 24, 2023 5:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

could you just…say what’s on your mind here? his canning is facially, incontrovertibly preposterous. what other beef do you have exactly?

Posted about this case because it just seemed the weirdest one. But I see tweets like "an academic has been suspended" or "I lost a freelance gig" etc.

Utterly vile. "Free speech" as conducted in liberal democracies is an utter sham.

Unsurprisingly, the craven art world seems to be operating similarly as many universities— Artforum Fires Top Editor After Open Letter on Israel-Hamas War

More on that kerfuffle— artworks have been returned and artists told to “stay in line.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/26/artforum-artists-gaza-ceasefire-martin-eisenberg/

"In the future we'll launder money and dodge taxes with only ethnic cleansing-supportive art."

A paragraph from that Intercept link that jumped out

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967

IDK if this is exactly the right thread for this. I don't really listen to Huberman, but I find this style of "investigative" smear piece to be gross and a trend I really don't like. AFAICT, the allegations are that Huberman is flaky and a shitty boyfriend? Like if he yelled and acted jealous of a woman's past I can see that that's "toxic" but it hardly seems worthy of reporting on, esp when the woman is a full-fledged adult with education and resources and there doesn't appear to have been any coercion, threats, assault, etc. Like why is "moderately famous person isn't a great guy" worthy of reporting?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html?fbclid=IwAR3RqYspsmm0DL0VodXpthlf6DC3p-vziR-enLDDmbc9wFRHTnLpakC2P30

man alive - probably the right thread for it, i don't have much to say about it myself... the problem with a lot of this stuff is that it's so marginal that, like, the people it affects it _really_ affects, but the people it doesn't affect...

i'm particularly starting to find myself less and less online... twitter becoming overtly institutionally evil has kind of reduced my contact with it. people i know are less likely to use twitter, less likely to be engaged with the Discourse. and some of those folks are on bluesky or mastodon and some of those people are too busy getting evicted to do much on social media. i mean honestly the one upside of having a group of friends who are constantly in crisis is that it really cuts down on my exposure to twitter drama.

but i did happen to run across this:

This will be the average congressional hearing in 2055 pic.twitter.com/jbN8kV9ikZ

— Jen Deere 1986 (@oxyjene1986) April 1, 2024

and i can tell i'm getting old because i only really know like half of these. i have no idea what "the captive prince" even is. "hazbin hotel" i haven't really seen but i have a group of friends who are really into it, and i don't really know what's supposed to be "problematic" about it.

but what bothers me is kind of the flattening of "problematic", the way it gets used as code for "untouchable". i've seen this a lot with my BPD - like, i have serious problems and they affect me and the people around me and, like. if people cut ties with me as a result of my behavior i _actively support_ that, i mean it hurts like hell and it's not what i _wanted_ but it's absolutely fair. but that's not how people use "problematic", it's used like it is here, where it's like oh you have friends who have friends with this person who did this bad thing, why are you doing that?

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ok i'm gonna get deep into early christian history here, fgti if you're reading this maybe you'll appreciate my nerding out here, but what it reminds me of is this early christian heresy called donatism. it's a really interesting heresy to me and one i find really relevant to online culture.

so the big thing to know about christian persecution is that there was really only one big, major, pan-roman persecution, and that was the diocletianic persecution. after the "crisis of the third century" - basically the collapse of the First Roman Empire - after about 50 years or so rome kind of got itself together in a form that was still an "empire" but was different in a lot of ways from what came before, like more of an overt military dictatorship rather than just kind of implicitly a military dictatorship like it was before. one of the more important emperors was diocletian, who did a bunch of things and one of them was saying "ok we need to get serious about the Christian Problem", christians were, like, getting more and more prevalent. like maybe up to 10% of people in the empire were christians at this point.

so diocletian was like, goddamn, these guys are a threat to traditional roman civic religion and was all "repent or die". kind of like the spanish inquisition honestly haha. anyway a lot of christians weren't actually down with the "martyrdom" thing, including some bishops. which was important because bishops, at that time, were basically how you made new priests, you had kind of a lineage, like this person was ordained by this person who was ordained by this person, there wasn't like a Central Bishop Authority or nothing

anyway constantine, in hoc signo vinces, christianity is no longer an anti-imperialist resistance movement but a tool of imperialism, yada yada yada, but christians are mostly like, hey, cool, rome has stopped trying to kill us, that's nice.

the thing is that a lot of christians who renounced christ so as not to get killed, they were all "well, i only did that so i wouldn't get killed, i actually really believe in christ". and some of them were bishops, and since they were bishops, they started ordaining people.

and the donatists were like, hey, wait, that's bullshit, people were out there dying for what they believed in and you actively renounced your faith and now you're saying basically "psych!" and going on ordaining priests like nothing happened here? like you kinda gave up your moral authority to ordain priests when you renounced christ to save your own skin.

i mean honestly i can't say they didn't have a point, but the thing was it didn't, like, really work out in practice. because there's this lineage, and there's no central authority, and it devolves into well, was the bishop who ordained you actually ordained by a fake bishop, so for all you know you're a "real priest" but the donatists are like no you're not, and ultimately i guess like the woke donatists wound up eating themselves. or something.

like sometimes yeah it sucks that people who actually denounced christ are out there saying "oh yeah i'm super duper christian" like fuck you where were you in chicago?, but man you just gotta let that shit go

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anyway tho i wanna get back to "problematic" as a euphemism for "untouchable" because of the two of the media properties in that tweet i _do_ know, they're like very different. i mean i haven't seen "attack on titan", it's not really the kind of animne i go for, but my understanding is that there's some questionable fascist subtext in there somewhere, the kind of stuff that makes you go "hmmm i wonder if there's something deeper going on here". like "problematic" in the same way that... like another deep cut, there was this debate for a while over whether "the celestial toymaker" was racist against asians. because it turns out "celestial" was an old obscure derogatory term for chinese folks and if you look at it michael gough's getup in the episode has kind of a chinoiserie thing going on. and i think eventually they figured out that it's not racist against asians and apparently RTD brought back the character in a special last year which i didn't watch because clinical depression, but without the "celestial" part because that bit was maybe a little bit problematic. like the bigger problem with that story is the gratuitous use of the n word for no goddamn reason in the story's second episode, that's not really _problematic_ that's just goddamn racist is what that is.

now i could be wrong here but i feel like attack on titan is "problematic" in the same sense that, like, the celestial toymaker was arguably a racist caricature of a chinese person. (which contrast with "talons of weng-chiang" which _does_ contain severe racist caricatures of chinese folks, again, not "problematic" just racist.)

anyway contrast that with harry potter which, again, i haven't really read... i've heard that there are some problematic depictions in there and i honestly can't speak on that one way or another. of course that's not the problem with harry potter. the problem with harry potter is that its author is, like, probably the most influential person in the british anti-trans movement, which has been _very_ effective and which has been _very bad_ for anybody in the uk who happens to be trans. and it's still very effective, and things keep getting worse for trans people, and rowling is still working really hard to keep making things worse for trans people over there.

like to me that goes a little beyond just "problematic". and if someone says that none of that has anything to do with harry potter, respectfully, i call bullshit on that. i only speak for myself, other trans people can and occasionally do differ from me on that. speaking as a trans person, though, i do think supporting harry potter serves to make rowling powerful and influential, and the effects of that power and influence are directly harmful to trans people in the uk. to me that goes beyond "problematic".

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see when you flatten out all this stuff it becomes this moral equivalency thing. i mean shit i got _problems_, i got shit-tons of problems. i've done some fucked up shit, i've had some supremely bad takes, past and very probably present. i have _problems_ and i deal with them the best i can. i mean my whole BPD thing, i act in certain ways and sometimes people are like "yeah i can't deal with that". fair! more than fair! but then some people are like "oh don't talk to kate she's _problematic_". like i do my best to take responsibility for my problems and deal with them. "ok nobody talk to kate" doesn't, like. doesn't help.

the thing i keep coming back to is when kendrick put out "mr morale" or whatever and the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was "auntie diaries". and within 24 hours of that song coming out some person, who was trans, was tweeting that anybody who had a problem with kendrick saying "faggot" in that song was a "secretly racist tenderqueer".

and i mean i like that song, even though it's probably not the best song on that album, which i admit i've only really listened to once. i agree with that song. i self-identify as a "faggot", though i'm careful about how or when i do because some trans people are uncomfortable with that and i wanna be respectful.

and i keep coming back to it because it says something important about how, like, purity culture or cancel culture or whatever works. like the people who they go after the hardest, it always seems to be marginalized people. i mean i don't believe in all that "punching up/punching down" stuff, like the idea of privilege hierarchies, i don't think that works out too well in practice, but like the person who made hazbin hotel isn't a white man, this is a show that speaks deeply to queer experience, and, like, what... one of the characters is homophobic? like you can't really give an authentic representation without representing homophobia, without representing sexuality sometimes in some pretty blunt terms. and if that's "problematic", it's not the problem of the people depicting them.

none of this is remotely _new_, people were saying shit like this about gangsta rap when i was an ignorant teenager in the early '90s, and it was just as fucking stupid then. it just irritates me that you try to talk about genuinely hateful and bigoted people like rowling and suddenly it turns into dunking on, like, kendrick lamar or w/e. come the fuck on.

I feel like many young progressives have unwittingly adopted the strategies of Fundamentalist Christians. my youth group leader back in the day used to warn us our brains were little computers and even exposure to questionable ideas could warp our mind, so we should abstain from anything that contradicted or criticized our beliefs.

like the whole "six degrees of complicity" thing that is Twitter's steez has become exhausting and seems less focused on actually righting any wrongs and more about competing for social manna.

and if you dig deep into the people doing a lot of the finger-wagging, especially on Twitter, often times they aren't who they portray themselves as. such as the person who was publicly and dramatically berating my friend a year ago for being a 'COVID minimizer', and turned out to be someone who was actually an abusive person themselves and had an entire Twitter thread started by someone detailing their abusive behavior.

I often have distrust of anybody who I've known for years and never seen publicly apologize about anything, because everyone has stepped in it before and needed to be humbled, but those that repeatedly seem to avoid said humbling are often taking extra measures behind the scenes to stage-manage how they are perceived, so that they 'wriggle' out of it.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal)

right the isabel fall thing fucked me up for a long time, like she wrote this amazing story and twitter went after her so fucking hard she apparently wound up detransitioning and i'm like shit, well, i better not let anybody read any of _my_ stuff then

yeah, i _am_ in a crouched position ready to pounce at all times. i'm hypervigilant. it's a trauma response. it's not healthy. but trauma responses aren't, like. there for nothing. i'm hypervigilant because i _need_ to be, because there are _legitimate threats_ that marginalized people need to watch out for. and sometimes i do see things as threatening when they're not, really. because they remind me of past things that _were_ threatening. people tell me "assume good intent" sometimes and honestly i don't necessarily have that luxury sometimes. some spaces are, "safe space" for me isn't absolute but relative. twitter was never a particularly "safe space" for me, someone with rejection sensitive dysphoria and a tendency to take things that don't really have anything to do with me very personally, and it's _really_ not safe now. for me it's almost better because being what gets called a "highly sensitive person" things are problems for me that aren't problems for most people, and twitter is now a problem for, like. pretty much everyone? so in an odd way it helps me.

anyway dembo apologized but also as soon as people found out dembo was wrong everybody turned around and dogpiled on _them_ (not sure their pronouns), like, hello, cycle of abuse much? there's this tendency to attribute _malice_ or _ill intent_ in cases where none exists. and you can apologize, but you make a mistake and ever after you're "problematic". it's not like... nobody has to _accept_ dembo's apology, people can be like well that's all well and good but isabel fall's life was kind of ruined by what you did so i'm not sure i wanna like hang out with you, but _they're_ not problematic. the _behavior_ was, i'm not even gonna say "problematic", they did something that seriously negatively affected somebody else's life, they weren't fair to fall, and to me, you know, someone knows that and accepts the consequences, that's the _opposite_ of threatening to me, the opposite of "problematic", because the standard of "don't ever make mistakes" is a shitty standard. my standard is "if you make mistakes can you accept the consequences of those mistakes". which is a pretty fucking high standard on its own, it's asking a lot of people, but at least it's, like, _attainable_.

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also i do wanna clarify with the harry potter thing, even then i'm personally not gonna be like "well you can't be my friend if you like harry potter", particularly because, like, the reality is that most harry potter fans have no fucking clue. they don't. so personally - and this is personal, not everybody is going to do this or has to do this - what i do in those situations is _talk_ about jk rowling, what she's doing, how it's affecting trans people. like again, some of this shit _i_ don't even know why it's "problematic" and i'm more online than i'd like to be.

great post Kate....thank you as always for your insight and thanks for redirecting as needed. always learn a lot from your posts.

fair play for pulling genuinely damning quotes rather than ones that suggest the the woke dweeb reviewer is appalled

If you're not taking flak you're not over the target. pic.twitter.com/gnsJ1RmvJ8

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 16, 2024

Was very disappointed to see a musician whose work I like, and with whom I've had some really enjoyable interview/conversations, praising this book on Twitter. He's revealed himself as a small-c conservative many times, but since he's a white dude from the Midwest I kinda figured that much was to be expected, but lately he's been loudly praising Freddie DeBoer, and now this...

the new yorker review is a great review btw

"you're either hated or irrelevant"

https://blog.beeminder.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/why-not-both.png

a genuinely weird story, but i have to say that this seems absolutely targeted. (i don’t agree with much in the Uhuru movement and certainly not the Black Hammer movement, the latter of which relies on reactionary politics)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/activists-russian-propaganda-florida-trial.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.tTBa.7YvxMQ3oBtem&smid=url-share

a genuinely weird story, but i have to say that this seems absolutely targeted. (i don’t agree with much in the Uhuru movement and certainly not the Black Hammer movement, the latter of which relies on reactionary politics)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/activists-russian-propaganda-florida-trial.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.tTBa.7YvxMQ3oBtem&smid=url-share🕸

The Nazis tried to radicalize Native Americans--the "Nazis declared the Sioux Aryans because a journalist was part Sioux" story was disinformation related to that.

I hear that when Hitler gave a speech he'd point to a guy in the crowd and say, "There's my Native American."

Good Nicole Hemmer essay:
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-right-to-be-hostile/the-actual-politics-of-free-speech-is-fueled-by-a-right-wing-political-strategy/

Nothing new for those who've been paying attention, but I appreciate how clearly she lays it all out.

folks, you need to be aware of this.

https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

one of the things that is scariest about being an out trans person is that it significantly limits our sources of income. historically, sex work has been one of the only sources of income available to trans people.

targeting work which monetizing explicit content exhibits the same pattern of behavior as those who seek to punish and repress sex work, and has the same effect. it is an act of systemic violence against queer and trans people. it is important that we and our allies understand it as such.

please understand what is at stake here. this is not a niche issue. this is directly economically devastating to many of my personal friends and many, many people in the trans community i belong to.

otm

I just edited a friend's academic article about this exact thing (she's a porn studies scholar). What's appalling about the moral panic behind this is the incidences of CSAM on Meta absolutely massively outweigh those found on adult sites, but they will never be subject to these kinds of policies.

right! it's not like queer people don't know that CSA takes place and it's a serious problem because A LOT OF US ARE VICTIMS. not that we can say that without some assholes pulling some gaslighty "well maybe you're just queer because you're abused, DID YOU EVER THINK ABOUT THAT?", shut the fuck up already and let me enjoy my furry vore porn in peace

(note, my fetishes have been anonymized because i'm super fucking insecure about my sexuality, GEE WONDER HOW THAT HAPPENED. probably NOTHING TO DO with only being able to find trans representation on porn sites fetishizing my gender identity for the benefit of cisgender men. NOPE.)

i was watching a documentary from the late '00s about this adult content website from the early '00s, which i'm not gonna name but which was fairly well-known as an extreme kink site. i personally am not into the kind of stuff that was on this website, not to that extent at least, but i was aware of it at the time it was operating. and it was interesting because i didn't know the story of how it was shut down, and i found it really enlightening.

see, what happened is that what the american government did, some clever lawyer in the GWB administration said "you know what, we can't go after the site directly", which they couldn't because in the '90s there was this unanimous, far-reaching supreme court decision striking down the Communications Decency Act. all of the edgelord bullshit around at the time, it was and presumably still is protected by that supreme court decision. i'm not aware of that decision having been overturned, though i have no doubt that the american supreme court of today _would_ overturn it in a heartbeat.

but this was the first time the government decided to go after the payment processors, sent out some memo saying something about the war on terror and making some threats against the payment processors. and the payment processors caved. this site, which did absolutely feature some pretty extreme and horrifying content, was shut down, because they couldn't process credit card payments.

the funny thing is that this site... this guy was a fucked up person who did some shitty, manipulative, abusive things. but none of those things had _anything to do_ with how extreme the content is. people look at the content of it and think it looks like, you know, a snuff film or something. nobody's actually ever _seen_ a snuff film, is the thing, all we have is these ideas of what we think a snuff film _would_ look like. i mean, you know, maybe something like the infamous NIN "broken" video, which i haven't seen.

but i do know that guy featured in the "broken" video. he was a guy named bob flanagan. he was really well-known in the kink community, i think there was a documentary about him too, which i haven't seen. the thing is that he _enthusiastically_ consented, as we say in the kink scene nowadays, to all that stuff. you look at some of this stuff and you think that there's no way someone could possibly consent to that, but people not only consent to it, some of us actively desire things like that, and experience great joy when we get the opportunity to experience those things. and you can say oh that's fucked up, people shouldn't be _allowed_ to consent to that, like the british government said with the spanner case in the '90s. it's considered horrific, extreme, like, i don't know, having your dick cut off or something.

am i making a direct comparison between my GRS and extreme consensual torture? no, actually, no i'm not. what i am arguing is that to me, freedom is the freedom to _enthusiastically consent_ to things that might shock or appall the "community standards" of, let's say, the George W. Bush administration. i'm saying that i have actually seen, in person, acts which i would, in the abstract, consider incredibly shocking and terrible. and that it was a really interesting experience seeing them in person, because being there, it wasn't about the acts themselves, it was about people being kind and loving towards each other. like... and i've never seen this, i've never done this, like people talk about fist-fucking as if it was this brutal, violent act, and having heard other people talk about fisting, it does occur to me what a completely silly and wrong-headed take that is. like what you punch someone in the butt so hard that your fist goes entirely up their asshole? i _have_ done anal and, uh, no, that's not how anal works. fisting, as i've heard it described, is a slow, meditative, gentle act, and this makes a lot more sense to me than thinking of it as violent. anyway i'd apply that mindset to any number of consensual "extreme" acts.

so when the movie talks about the fucked up shit this guy did, the fucked up shit is, like... negotiating a boundary ahead of time with a performer, and violating that boundary, and then not only _not_ recognizing that boundary but being controlling and manipulative with the performer when she tried to bring the boundary violation to his attention. what the boundary was doesn't particularly matter, but i will say it didn't involve doing anything physically dangerous. it was a psychological boundary. and she did wind up going along with him, because of the way he determined remuneration. he had a _great deal_ of personal discretion on how much to remunerate a performer, and if a performer kept him happy, they got more money. and if a performer made him unhappy, by, say, _safewording_, they got much less money, and he wouldn't hire that performer again.

i do not think this is a healthy approach to consent, and unfortunately, i have seen a number of cases where... within a system, there are larger dynamics, and sometimes one party has disproportionately more systemic power than another. and the people who hold disproportionately greater systemic power are, very often, COMPLETELY UNAWARE of this systemic imbalance. they also often tend to get defensive and hostile when there systemic imbalances are brought to their attention. "what do you want me to do about it?" like, don't set up a payment structure that disincentivizes the people you're paying from advocating for their own safety? recognize that you do have disproportionate power and take responsibility for it? don't be a mealy-mouthed little shit about it? don't justify your bad behavior as "art"? i don't know, lots of things.

and the most galling thing is that the site in question being shut down had nothing at all to do with any of the wack bullshit he was pulling, and more to do with the bush administration disapproving of the stuff he was selling, which is ironic because some of what that site was doing bore a lot of resemblance to that administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques", with the difference that, and again this is very fucking important, _the performers having these techniques practiced on them enthusiastically consented_. instead, they went after the payment processors, and already in the late 2000s people like this guy were calling it out explicitly and directly - the bush administration is using payment processors as a means of censoring content they didn't like. i really would consider this site being shut down for that reason as what, in my line of work, would be called a "sentinel event".

that site's stuff, it still circulates, frequently in questionable-looking "upscales", and i don't think it's just that the guy behind the site had a unique creative vision or whatever. it's that there _hasn't_ been anything that extreme on the internet since. i've been aware of this fact since the site shut down - even if i didn't know the details, it was clear to me that the site was shut down for being "too extreme", and that since then the stuff people have been doing on the internet has gotten less and less and less extreme. a couple of years ago i realized, with horror, that, functionally, _you can't say fuck on the internet anymore_.

because theoretically you can say what you want on the internet, except that the internet now consists of a series of walled gardens. if you want to make money doing creative work on the internet, you have to do it through one or more of these gardens, which means you have to play by their rules. no, we don't have "free speech" on the internet. it's a myth, and it's been a myth since the day that site was shut down. do i think it's a loss that this extreme fetish site was shut down? yes. yes, i think it is a loss that nobody is doing stuff like that anymore. because, like i said, the problem wasn't that the stuff was _extreme_. the problem was the same problem we see with every other fucking cis white man in a position of systemic power. they have the power, and the rest of us are expected to bear the responsibility. this is about the only place on the public internet i'm still visible, and it's specifically because this space isn't one of those walled gardens. i don't think we're the future of the internet or anything, but those walled gardens, my god, those places are _cooked_.

i happened to run across some ai slop on the net today. someone depicting a fantasy of young women wearing "free palestine" t-shirts being kidnapped and tortured. honestly, this didn't bother me. seeing as how i fantasize about being kidnapped and tortured, i figure it's only fair enough if someone wants to fantasize about kidnapping and torturing me. yes, it's clearly politically revanchist, but frankly, i think most kidnapping and torture fantasies are at least implicitly political - if he's gonna make it explicit, well, at least i know where i stand with him. in other words, i consider him patently unqualified to consensually kidnap and torture me.

no, what bothered me was that he titled it something like "liberal girls get what they deserve", or some such thing. well this was a bridge too far. i had to speak up. if someone is demonstrating for palestinian liberation, we're not liberals, we're _leftists_. i don't see how this fucked up country is ever going to get better if our enemies don't start at least recognizing us for who we are.

i do, incidentally, wonder how that person would react if they knew i was a trans woman. would they say "oh, forget it", and stop sexually fantasizing about my being kidnapped and tortured? or would the fantasy just make them _harder_?

the answer doesn't really matter. i just figure asking the question would make them really, really uncomfortable. worth it.

I don't know where to put this, but I'm struggling with what I see as the extinction of discourse due to the enshittification of social media communities.

10-15 years ago, I regularly witnessed productive, open-ended discussions where people worked through their feelings in tandem. Less rushing to a canon take and more assumption of good faith.

Nowadays, I only really experience that here. Scold culture really took off during the pandemic and now what I see in these spaces are people who are hesitant to express any view until a respected 'authority' comfirms the proper take everyone should adopt.

Ignoring the issue that this leads to inadvertent monolithic thinking, with the implication that authorities on a subject can't possibly have degrees of reactions, I also think people are afraid of public shaming and humiliation. Or being labeled with a Scarlet letter.

Which, despite being pooh-poohed aa nbd, for some folks (like myself), social ostracization is extremely anxiety-inducing. I'm not talking about being called out or criticized - I've akways said my best shrinks were the ones unafraid to call me on my bullshit, and I fired those that didn't.

But online mobs of familiars and strangers widely sharing wrong takes and heaping on abuse or encouraging exclusion of this person. I get it for some things - obv if I had a mutual friend expressing open, hostile transphobia, I'd want to know so they would no longer be in my life.

But it is usually not just that, it's often "this person does not think like us, ergo the entirety of this person is garbage and any verbal abuse to any degree is warranted". Like, ok, I don't like centrists much myself and will argue harshly with them, but I am not going to rush to dismissing the entirety of their worth and being.

Also, though, targeted ostracization and abuse of those with the 'wrong' thoughts is fairly similar to tools fascists use.

Again, there's degrees to these things. But "lol you're a shitlib therefore I can unleash unfiltered misogyny on you because you're not on the right side" is a growing trend.

Also, though, I feel like this creates a lot of people pretending to house beliefs in order to avoid ostracization, who do not actually live the values beyond talking about them. Or in public , admit more openly that they're not as convinced of the views they espoused electronically as they pretended to be. Is that useful?

Disagreement is now seen as hostile. "You didn't adopt my 100% canon take without reservation, which is an act of aggression", basically.

This is one reason I've been working on reducing screen time. I don't see this happen as much in public. I still have great conversations with colleagues.

I've not been the target of anybody's wrath, but I have witnessed plenty in my own community. One particularly toxic example involved a local theater attendee who died suddenly in 2024, I'll call D. While her family, in shock, was posting news of D's passing and funeral arrangements on FB, one friend of mine. I'll call B, tagged the D, so that her friends and family could read it, and wrote an unhinged rant about her.

The offense? D had once taken umbrage at the price B bad set for one of his shows and complained about it on FB once. Rude behavior? Sure, more rooted in ignorance and incuriosity about what goes into setting prices. This wasn't just one example of a pattern of behavior. He made clear this was *the* incident that made her stop being friends with her, that there was no discord prior, and no contact after. Which, fine! I've stopped being friends with people for less.

But the rant written was vitriolic, written as if he was speaking of Ike Turner, saying that now he was glad that all the people she hurt could get closure and that he was glad she couldn't hurt anybody else.

It was bizarre not because we can never speak ill of the dead, but because he had clearly seen other examples of an abusive figure having their legacy rightfully ripped apart upon their passing, and somehow felt that the minor rudeness he experienced rose to the level of systemic abuse and that this warranted a public evisceration in front of friends and family.

More accurately, he saw an opening to tee off on the legacy someone who upset them once because he felt he had the appropriate prerequisite - and he appeared stunned when both my ex and I publicly called him out for what he said (in much calmer language).

I have fairly bad OCD. Because of the nature of online discourse now, that OCD has manifested itself in being unable to write any opening message without pre-addressing the vicious objections i think may come in response. Everything is 5 paragraphs lol

One thing I've noticed is that things on social media become so politically charged that if someone makes a factual correction to someone's righteous rant it is taken as a defense or an apology for nefarious forces.

I have fairly bad OCD. Because of the nature of online discourse now, that OCD has manifested itself in being unable to write any opening message without pre-addressing the vicious objections i think may come in response. Everything is 5 paragraphs lol

You're not the only person I know who suffers from this (and I really do think of it as suffering). I am "fortunate" (in the sense of "suited to online discourse") in that I'm somewhat sociopathic — I'll tell you exactly what I think, because who gives a fuck what you think? If you disagree with me, I might fight you about it, but more likely I'll just ignore you. (I don't killfile anybody because I'm low-tech and lazy, but there are multiple ILXors I don't respond to anymore, because there's no exchange to be had.)

That said, I find your posts in particular not just welcome but consistently interesting.