Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

i think it's fair game to address an opposition position and try to show that it fails on its own terms as long as you're honest in what you're doing

Mordy, doesn't it depend on whether the ideal is inherent in the original critique or just bolted on?

Why call it "creepy liberalism"? I haven't encountered any true liberals that have been this way, it has usually always been conservatives/libertarians or just plain ignorants.

― Neanderthal, Tuesday, July 2, 2013 5:11 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really? I see liberals (you know people who read the Guardian or the NYT) making comments like the ones mentioned in the OP very often, especially the third type. like if you followed the recent discussions around the EDL in the UK you'd see self identified "lefties" (ugh @ that term, but I use it specifically to differentiate from leftists) saying "well yeah the EDL are bigots but hey - free speech" or condemning antifash groups for confronting fascists instead of "engaging in reasoned debate" or some bullshit (also see the Tea Defence League thing or a typical Guardian CiF thread). Usually the people invoking free speech in this context aren't the ones who are affected by the bigotry in question, makes it easy.

how do lefties vs leftists pls

i mean i suppose people on all sides do it, I did when I was 19, but just didn't get why he picked that side in his description

i assume "leftie" = kneejerk football fan leftists and "leftist" = anybody who holds left-leaning political views

lol fuckin splitters

nah cos the former is a subsection of the latter? i mean, i am avowedly a leftist but i try hard not to be a leftie on the whole

but you are v much distancing yrself from them

i don't think it's a "them" so much as an attitude to be deplored, i would argue that you do plenty of sniping at that same kind of attitude on ilx

sorry, i meant to say it's not a group of people, it's a behaviour that any leftist can slip into. i'd argue the same for the right except everybody knows there are no thoughtful, nuanced right wing shitheads

not sure im not just one of em tbrrr

haha xp, xp!

Sorry, meant to write "lefty" in the 1st instance, I suck at spelling/thinking. But wrt to the difference, I think the word "lefty" itself as an infantilised, cutesy form of "leftist" or "left-wing" also reflects the infantilised, shitty politics unconcerned with nuance and removed from actual left-wing thought of the people who self-identify with it.

For context as to where I'm coming from with this criticism, I'm sort of a #combatliberalism type of person.

There's also a sense online that some people who are mainly interested in free speech - may have a reasoned, valuable commitment to it - sometimes 'swoop' into discussions merely to assert that free speech is more important than anything else and then swoop out again.

To me free speech as a concept is basically a legal one. It mainly bears on whether a person can be treated as a criminal for saying something. I am not quite an absolutist on this question, but very close. I would say that the state must have overwhelming interests at stake to justify criminalizing speech. Civil liability is a different question and I'm willing to treat it by looser, but still restrictive, standards.

But just because some kinds of expression ought not be criminalized, it doesn't mean they are socially acceptable in any way. I'm fine and dandy with calling people out for anything they say that's harmful or offensive, even organizing boycotts or protests over offensive speech. It is when the law gets into it that I grow exceedingly cautious.

Add to that that I think a lot of the early promoters of free speech were literally talking about printing presses, pamphlets and public speaking. Now we have the telephone, the television, cinema, the internet, all of which alter communication massively each in their own way and together. Dunno if that should make a difference or be registered by free speech arguments. Maybe, maybe not, but it seems like something that gets missed a lot.

The internet analogizes pretty well to printing presses and publication, with the owner of the server as the publisher. I can upload my posts to ilx or my photos to flickr, just as I can write a letter to the editor and use the newspaper to disseminate my letter, but that use is conditional on the editors of the newspaper wanting to publish it. Similarly, paid space on a server is subject to the conditions of sale, as imposed by the owner and accepted by the buyer, as with ads in a newspaper.

ppl who don't think liberals do this apparently haven't met every white ex-hippy/deadhead/pink floyd megafan boomer dude i've met
this:

There's also a sense online that some people who are mainly interested in free speech - may have a reasoned, valuable commitment to it - sometimes 'swoop' into discussions merely to assert that free speech is more important than anything else and then swoop out again.

they do it, I just didn't originally get why he only zeroed in on liberals.

I once saw a Wikipedia argument on someone's talk page where he had content removed as it was original research (which he didn't deny), and he replied saying that he would file a lawsuit if it wasn't reinstated, as Wikipedia had violated his free speech, and he had won a similar case like this before.

can't find it anymore but wish I could, it was really funny.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116842/trigger-warnings-have-spread-blogs-college-classes-thats-bad

What began as a way of moderating Internet forums for the vulnerable and mentally ill now threatens to define public discussion both online and off. The trigger warning signals not only the growing precautionary approach to words and ideas in the university, but a wider cultural hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense. And yet, for all the debate about the warnings on campuses and on the Internet, few are grappling with the ramifications for society as a whole.

hard not to read this article as a combo WE AINT HURTIN NO ONE CMON and SHUTINS STAY HOME, but the framing does kind of suggest that the spread of trigger warnings mistakenly accepts the liberal scheme for the public management of wrongs/risks: class it as a harm, institute safeguards.

i don't know much about liberal theory. are there recognized classes of things that are proscribed because they might do harm, but it can't be known in advance whether they would in fact do so (thus the logic of a trigger warning, to issue a precaution to permit those who expect harm to exclude themselves)? (if pertaining to speech, would that just traditionally fall under 'decorum' and 'decency'?)

Weird thing to worry about in an age when there are fewer barriers to people viewing all different kinds of content than ever before. Everything is accessible at every moment; things like trigger warnings are just there to help people navigate life without having negative emotional responses forced on them. It has nothing to do with "free speech."

The trigger-warning-requiring "trauma" strikes me as a little bit like the gluten allergy -- a very real but not extremely common phenomenon that gets co-opted by attention seekers.

treezy the reason i put this in this thread (besides tnr lol) is that the framework seems to be the liberal framework, in which speech is traditionally one of the acts least thought to fall within the scope of the harm principle. since the rationale for trigger-warning seems to involve avoiding the inadvertent causing of harms (or maybe that's not the right description, which would matter?), it seems like it's worth asking what a more widespread use of trigger warnings implies about our conceptions/perceptions of ourselves and our speech. say, as harmful to ourselves, beyond our ability to control or to bear it, because of what has been done to us or what has happened to us. and of speech, the words of others, as a danger to our mundane capacity to play a part in the sphere of speech, to relate to others in public.

like, the more is classed under traumas of that sort, the conception becomes an appeal to liberalism's hatred of cruelty, because the triggerable person would be regarded as bearing persistently or permanently tender wounds which any sensitive responsible person would forbear to touch. but i'm not sure a practice of free and open discussion is compatible with that degree of wariness about speech as potentially cruel.

counterpoint

“People brutalise everything. They get up noisily, go about noisily all day, and go to bed noisily. And they constantly talk far too noisily. They are so taken up with themselves that they don’t notice the distress they constantly cause to others, to those who are sick. Everything they do, everything they say causes distress to people like us. And in this way they force anyone who is sick more and more into the background until he’s no longer noticed. And the sick person withdraws into his background. But every life, every existence, belongs to one person and one person only, and no one else has the right to force this life and this existence to one side, to force it out of the way, to force it out of existence. We’ll go by ourselves, as we have the right to do. That’s part of the natural course.”
— Thomas Bernhard — from Concrete

as harmful to ourselves, beyond our ability to control or to bear it,

I may not be following all the parts of your argument, but my response to this bit is, why does it have to be "unbearable" to be unacceptable? Can't people determine for themselves what level of pain or discomfort or aggravation they're prepared to accept at that moment? Trigger warnings are just to let those people know that they may, for their own mental and/or emotional health, want to exercise their right to that limit.

xp I think that last post gets at my point more.

you realize a trigger warning doesn't actually prevent anything from being said.

the more widespread use of trigger warnings implies that more people know what triggers and trigger warnings are and want to create welcoming environments for people who need them. it allows people to mentally prepare themselves if they need to, or bail altogether if they need to. i don't even have 'triggers' and i appreciate them for my own sake. if i were in a hypothetical class right now and i saw a PPT with the header "Trigger Warning: Suicide" i would bail. i'm not sure how any discussion benefits from me freaking out in the middle of a classroom. 15 million american adults share my disorder.

xp

Imo to reject the idea of triggers and trigger warnings as unnecessary or RUN AMOK or w/e is basically to say, "Regardless of who you or I am or what our relationship is, I claim the right to add to your pain today. Fuck you. Deal with it. Not my problem." And then you expect friendship or scholarship or obedience or agreement or anything from that person afterward?

i know it doesn't prevent the things from being said, but it effects a greater regimentation of speech that seems to parallel the contractualization of all human relations under late liberalism, which seems like maybe not the soundest tactic xp

I'm just not seeing a problem with that.

Maybe I don't know what "late liberalism" means? But I think framing it as an issue of "contractualization" and moreover of that being a BAD thing is loading the dice.

cool with putting the well-being of people with disabilities over the greater regimentation of speech that seems to parallel the contractualization of all human relations under late liberalism

well, i think the picture of self-culture in a liberal like mill is predicated on a certain degree of personal risk-taking in the pursuit of growth, and on a certain health of spirit (the kind he suffered a lack of during his depressive episode)

if you take bernhard's metaphor w/o worrying too much about the fit, and say ok, society is now such that so many more of us are just sick (in some sense, wounded, whatever), and no one has the right to force us to suffer any more than we already do, where in anticipation of the sort of harms under consideration here, we require ourselves to engage in this kind of more extensive regimentation of our public interaction, it seems like something that is not going to improve our health any—at best, maybe maintain our sickly condition without it worsening.

something very nietzsche's last man about that picture. xp

Dude. If one of my loved ones died alone and was eaten by their cats and now I'm traumatized when anyone talks about feeding their cats, that is not something one could reasonably predict might have that effect. But when we're referring to rape, assault, grief, disability, trauma, a whole lot of things that we all agree have a lasting harmful effect on people's well being, to protest having to observe some sensitivity about that is really, really lame. And defensive. Aaaaaaand...do those people not have anything worse than that in their lives to be offended about? Like, if having to limit your speech so as NOT TO HURT PEOPLE is the most you've ever been infringed on, you might want to get to, I dunno, go outside once in a while.

Also you might want to reconsider the fedora as a personal style choice.

well, i think the picture of self-culture in a liberal like mill is predicated on a certain degree of personal risk-taking in the pursuit of growth, and on a certain health of spirit (the kind he suffered a lack of during his depressive episode)

if you take bernhard's metaphor w/o worrying too much about the fit, and say ok, society is now such that so many more of us are just sick (in some sense, wounded, whatever), and no one has the right to force us to suffer any more than we already do, where in anticipation of the sort of harms under consideration here, we require ourselves to engage in this kind of more extensive regimentation of our public interaction, it seems like something that is not going to improve our health any—at best, maybe maintain our sickly condition without it worsening.

something very nietzsche's last man about that picture. xp

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:30 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

ok, this thread has taken a turn toward the ad hominem. let's clear out for the night and get some sleep. this thread will still be here in the morning.

it was a serious question

i want to

1. understand the liberal point of view from which there might be reasonable resistance to the increasingly broad practice of issuing trigger warnings outside of special, self-chosen contexts

2. ask whether fully taking over the liberal way of managing this issue (viz. add more safeguards, more opt-outs) is the best way of achieving the underlying goals. i am not sure, but i gather that many people to whom trigger warnings seem beneficial are also interested in changes to society that would make trigger warnings unnecessary. but adding another procedure to our interactions may be a more attractive way to 'solve' the problems without changing anything that causes them.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

it was literally a serious question i'm not kidding

what kinds of spaces need trigger warnings? presumably we don't need to slap one on the front page of the NYT bc you can reasonable expect that a newspaper will cover sometimes traumatic events and will only take care to give a trigger warning for particularly graphic images (like when they showed the death photos of saddam's sons). similarly other public spaces like tv/movies + radio already take precautions to only show certain content at certain times, to rate themselves, and even censor certain kinds of profanity (or even depravity - like jeffrey dahmer getting bleeped in 'Dark Horse'). so really we're just talking about internet spaces, and particularly places like blogs that might cover a range of content and only occasionally something trauma-related. if that's really the entire context of the 'trigger warning' convention it's really a very small bunch of ppl working out group ethics and not really anything srsly compromising free speech ethics imho.

mordy, the spaces contemplated in that article include classrooms, syllabi, etc.

Oberlin College has published an official document on triggers, advising faculty members to "be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression," to remove triggering material when it doesn't "directly" contribute to learning goals and "strongly consider" developing a policy to make "triggering material" optional. Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more." Warnings have been proposed even for books long considered suitable material for high-schoolers: Last month, a Rutgers University sophomore suggested that an alert for F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby say, "TW: suicide, domestic abuse and graphic violence."

Well yeah, this seems pretty silly. I had a chat w/ a lit. teacher at one of the local Orthodox Jewish orthodox in Philly about the kinds of books he was allowed to assign and any insinuation of sex, violence, etc was problematic + really restricted his ability to compose a syllabus. It's hard to imagine you could have a functional Lit department w/out teaching this kind of literature. Violence + trauma themselves are major motifs of contemporary humanities.

that's all. if you can't talk about that without getting abusive then i think you should ask yourself whether you are capable of having discussions about things at all.

― j., Monday, March 10, 2014 12:55 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and ok this wasn't like my point with the fart thing but do you not see maybe a teensy shred of irony here

how loudly do you allow yourself to fart in public

I do not ever purposely lend impetus to my farts when I am in a public place. I do not go to great lengths to suppress them, either. I let nature take its course with minimal interference, but under the right circumstances I will make a bit of effort to mitigate them.

This is a different situation from publically venting an opinion which may greatly offend and requires only a trivial act of will to suppress. Farts are not willed into being and even the most poisonous farts should generally be forgiven as being beyond human control.

There absolutely should be a debate about the use of trigger warnings in a college setting, especially re: literature. I can see a strong case for warning students about books which contain graphic scenes of rape or child abuse but it's unhealthy to not discuss where lines should be drawn.

To take Oberlin's TWs on Things Fall Apart as one example, it's meant to be an upsetting book. Any anti-racist novel you can think of might trigger a reader who has experienced racism but that's the point. I worry that to trail it with a long list of warnings will have the effect of putting some readers off.

I'll tell you, one book that coulda done with a trigger warning is Jude the Obscure; because sweet merciful christ, I did not see that shit coming at ALL

When Trigger Warnings become spoilers

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, it states, is a novel that may "trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious persecution, violence, suicide and more."

"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?

-

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

-

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".

-

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.