Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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.

Nor does it carry the same meaning from country to country,

Blame the *Liberal Party and successors for that.

(*the UK one)

READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN...THEN READ WHAT YOU WROTE!

sage advice

Would make for a fine board description tbh.

so here are some thoughts about "online discourse" / "free speech"

something that continues to be chronically under-examined is that speech itself has been radically transformed through the displacement and fragmentation of traditional subjectivity, the fracturing / proliferation of discursive methods, and an almost total lack of clarity of what we mean by "public" in terms of where, exactly, speech acts occur. our increasing inter-connectedness and the rapid transmission of information mask a deeply dehumanizing estrangement. our notions of liberty and self-determination are increasingly unhelpful, and not merely because we've learned to be complicit in de-historicizing and mythologizing eighteenth-century ideology. it's also because the majority of our conversations — and in the case of some, the majority of lived experience — occur online, in commons which were long ago enclosed; the reasons for our existence there, and what we may have to say, are largely irrelevant to the people who facilitate our interactions. what it means to stick up for our "values" and fight for "liberty" is, in this sense, an increasingly fraught problem: every step forward entails further entrenchment in a dizzying entanglement of permissions and prohibitions, asymmetrical power relations, new and hidden modes of subjugation and coercion — all while we pretend that our online personas and statements merely refer back to a world which in fact longer exists.

it's worth remembering re: social media platforms that the user experience itself is designed to emphasize and reinforce precisely those aspects of our personality / humanity that devalue contemplation, empathy, even honesty. they replicate patterns of behavior that ensure continued engagement, then monitor those behaviors and sell the data to people who further manipulate us. this is the central power dynamic of almost all online discourse. meanwhile free speech, and the broader notion of liberalism, aren't just ideas; it's ideology and a continually reiterated (and updated) foundational myth with a history fraught with racism and violent subjugation that continue to inform and / or preclude, at a structural level, the very possibilities for speech and community.

the unifying aspect of liberal speech is hysteria, the continual need to reiterate the delusion that favored institutions and positions of leadership are not largely symbolic. the very notion of a culture war seeks to affirm this, to displace our energy into an arena where nothing has any real political consequence. even purportedly leftist notions of intersectionality and "centering" e.g. black or trans voices seem to fail to take into account a basic psycho-political geography, as if a recognition of problematic elements is sufficient for their removal and some sort of nebulous substitution of more humane models for radical liberation and solidarity. what's ignored is that we've been taught, and encouraged, to regard increased visibility as a concomitant component of social and political progress. the commodification and endless replication / dispersion of categories of identity reinforces the notion that the real battleground is the sphere of legislation, court rulings, and other mechanisms of power that only ever seem to replicate the same mechanisms of repression that we ought to seek to undermine, bypass, and ultimately overcome through collective political destabilization.

while recognizing the importance of language for projects of self-determination — for the affirmation of underrepresented categories and for a sincere fight to craft a world in which our differential existences can be lived in hospitable conditions — do we not wish to consider that the conversations which are most amplified are almost always re-framed as projects which, in some way, "complete" a mythical project of liberation that was flawed, incomplete, but for some reason still worth sticking up for ? why do we continue to fetishize outmoded conceptualizations of liberation while seemingly ignoring the fact that this sort of discourse is inherently a source of violence itself ? and finally, how do we re-claim political autonomy when our avenues of "self-expression" have been cynically marginalized and perverted in such a way that dissent only ever entails a new, novel category for marketing the same old bullshit ?

these thoughts are not complete or fully thought through — just wanted to raise some questions i haven't heard being asked elsewhere. i'm open to suggestions for further reading.

If you haven't read Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics, you'd probably find it engrossing in terms of how it works with some of the problems that you're raising, particularly those related to the fetishization of certain forms of discourse, whether it be of liberal democracy or liberation politics.

I hesitantly recommend Denise Riley, too, for her work on identity formations and the subject that desire not to be hailed (or to exist outside relation) has some intersection with your concerns around idpol.

Man, my OP gets more embarrassing every year. 'Say you're discussing porn, and what happens is ...'

Little acorns...

xp the text which i periodically refer to is wendy brown's "states of injury"

it looks like mbembe cites her in the book you mention, but i wonder the degree to which her work is seen as relevant 20+ years on (tbf the work cited is 2015's "undoing the demos")

it's worth remembering re: social media platforms that the user experience itself is designed to emphasize and reinforce precisely those aspects of our personality / humanity that devalue contemplation, empathy, even honesty.

― budo jeru

i'll go further. my personal observation has been that social media's core business model, the unspoken motive that is concealed by the euphemism of "engagement", is promoting and perpetuating the cycle of abuse for profit.

Re: that letter in Harper's and JKR, and where I'm up to with this, if anyone's interested:

Step 1: quite a good idea exists called freedom of speech

Step 2: but ah this good idea can be invoked in rhetoric, to make it look as if the speaker is victim of censorship, and thus they can cleverly claim more sympathy than their position deserves

Step 3: Step 2 goes really horribly wild on the internet specifically; the effect described in Step 2 gets multiplied by 1000s of shares and retweets whatever

Step 4: we get very bored of 'freedom of speech' and have a knee jerk reaction against it now because of steps 2 and 3. 'Stop whining about censorship when you're not being sent to a gulag, jeez ...'

Step 5: we get the Rowling case

I can't endorse the treatment of Rowling (though sure, what if you were trans and someone said terf stuff on big platform? I'd be angry)

It's very much a phenomenon of Twitter behaviour

Twitter isn't a democratic space that we the public own

Clapping along with the smashing of someone on Twitter concedes too much to Twitter itself and the cyclical slagging off mechanism that others here have mentioned