Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

xp to s clover

greenhall's characterization of her working relationship with shanley as abusive is taking up all the oxygen here; she also accuses her of still being a racist, which is the charge shanley's harassers are now running with

that she’d had a months long, live-in relationship with the sadistic harasser and internet troll “weev” and that she had had a racist past. These issues have been written about extensively, following a pretty awful article where weev discloses their relationship and her racist past in an effort to hurt her and the diversity in tech cause in general...

What concerned me about these revelations was not that Shanley has had a relationship with weev where she participated in making racist jokes, but that she did that so recently before starting a publication focused on diversity. Had I known about these things before we were well into running the company, I doubt I would have chosen her as a co-founder. As it was, at the end of our 6+ months of working together, I came away unsure if she had actually fundamentally changed from that past or not.

the feminist conversation about tech right now feels like “You’re either with Shanley or you’re with weev.” And I think there should be room for a third option

i'm more sympathetic to the part in scare quotes, at least for the time being

ok so say somebody wants to make a choice and i know this person well, is my only option to accept this choice and decide what to do about it? is attempting to sway somebody necessarily something that should go by the name manipulation? and is attempting to sway somebody and being passionate about it therefore necessarily coercion and abuse? i don't see how we can have human interaction then. there's a huge rhetorical arsenal of 'i am going to attempt to change your mind' options and some are clearly a priori off limits in decent society, but i feel like a whole bunch of others shouldn't be?

dude these questions are uncomfortably broad - you're not defining the action that was called abuse beyond "being passionate" and then saying "well then what ISN'T abuse?" if you want validation that someone is being alarmist but not letting us have the perspective to make that claim.

if you want validation

this isn't to say i'm not sympathetic to being rankled by popular word choice - i've huffed at people using "mansplain" when "condescend" seems accurate enough - but when i did that it came from a defensive place. stepping back, that kind of linguistic overreach is still a piddly problem compared to what it's describing. and i'd rather people not be afraid to speak up for themselves in potentially abusive situations than accuse some amorphous sector of our culture of taking it too far. that road leads to being alec baldwin.

on the subject of shanley i do think she's an incredibly unempathetic raging bully online--it doesn't surprise me at all to hear that she's the same kind of bully in the work environment, and finding out she had a relationship with weev sort of brings it full circle--they're like a yin and yang of cause-driven id

i'm not trying to ask for validation that someone is being alarmist. there's an element where you have to say "insufficient information" on all this stuff and sorta not care about prying for more. i'm responding to what's put out there though.

and at this point the "being passionate" isn't attempting to be about shanley per se -- its about the question, when does attempting to sway someone's opinion become "hostile" in a way that we should view as negative. are certain forms of hostility ok? necessary even?

and i'm connecting this to lots of other things i've seen that i'm not being specific about (so apologies) where it just seems like "disagreeing with me is itself abusive", which is why this thread is where i wanted to raise this. "i don't want to have this conversation" is something that should be respected, i think. however, "the fact that you want to have a conversation is wrong" often seems to be tossed in the mix.

also there's a sense in which "i feel x" has a different sort of truth-status than "x is the case" -- you necessarily have to believe the former in some sense, but you have to believe it in a different way than the latter. does the current way we're learning to have conversations allow us to make that distinction?

yes

glad we solved it

also there's a sense in which "i feel x" has a different sort of truth-status than "x is the case" -- you necessarily have to believe the former in some sense, but you have to believe it in a different way than the latter. does the current way we're learning to have conversations allow us to make that distinction?

i think much of the social justice rhetoric and general tendency to empathize with victims on the activist left leads to much of the weight being on the former ("I/he/she feels x") because what is decided to be "x is the case" is historically weighted towards those in power. so there's (good!) pragmatic and political reason to lean that way in general as a kind of corrective to those tendencies. that doesn't mean, though, that we arent responsible when we get it wrong.

tyfr

to better answer your (very good) question, i want to say that "the conversation we're having on the left tends to intentionally and strategically occlude that distinction, and sometimes those who do want to make that distinction are also doing it for pragmatic reasons (because they want delegitimize victims of oppression/abuse/etc), but that we should reserve the right to make that distinction if/when we feel we need to." i dont think there's any way forward that isn't loaded with some risk of being wrong.

sorry if im babbling on.

i've come to peace w/ the fact that when we talk about the left we're really talking about a very small percentage of political society and maybe they should take on radical positions that occlude distinctions for pragmatic reasons (attempting to draw the discourse further to the left).

i've always been fascinated by how this dynamic replicates itself--i've only been in one relationship i'd genuinely call abusive, and that person had the most horrific childhood & adolescence of anyone i've ever met. i want to know more about why this happens the way it does.

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, January 21, 2015 9:54 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it's pretty simple ime, people do what they know.

io otm.

the problem isn't that people are overrusing the word abuse but that it's more prevalent than people care to admit and why would anyone want to shake that status quo if it's benefitting them or stands to.

i have nothing to say specifically about these fascinating people s.clover is talking about ftr

http://girlempowered.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/screen-shot-2012-09-02-at-2-58-53-pm.png?w=300&h=294

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/01/not-a-very-pc-thing-to-say.html

Twitter has already handled that article this morning, I'm not even reading it.

chait was so good at DC congressional budget politics type stuff i have to say it makes me a little sad to see him turn into another #actually blogger. idk if he had that kind of streak in him the whole time or what

is it possible for someone to write about these kinds of situations without extrapolating nightmarish scenarios of life under "pc culture"

yeah, add a footnote saying - 'obv this is only a problem for terrible university facility and their hysterical students - the rest of us can point + laugh'

pc culture vs pc music

The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious.

oh ick

thank u based liberalism

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/B8YQQNRCYAEDUrE.png

Trigger Warning: Amanda Palmer

lol those quotes from the Binders fb group are great. very ilx'y.

lol do you even go here

in the chait

Her response since then has been to avoid committing a provocation, especially on Twitter. “If you tweet something straight­forwardly feminist, you immediately get a wave of love and favorites, but if you tweet something in a cranky feminist mode then the opposite happens,” she told me. “The price is too high; you feel like there might be banishment waiting for you.” Social media, where swarms of jeering critics can materialize in an instant, paradoxically creates this feeling of isolation. “You do immediately get the sense that it’s one against millions, even though it’s not.” Subjects of these massed attacks often describe an impulse to withdraw.

i've been reading a lot of ancient greek stuff lately and i was struck by how common exile was as a punishment. it was used later on of course, with some esp. famous cases (napoleon?). but i wonder if 'banishment' isn't more of a practice that's antithetical to liberalism.

Under p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the individuals doing the expressing.

LOL, can it really, Jonathan Chait, white male? You may want to ask a local woman to enlighten you more on this topic.

u tell him, phil D, white male

Oh, shut up, you tedious fart.

*clink!*

Didn't you killfile me? If not, can you?

https://twitter.com/HannaRosin/status/560183792854634496

come on

http://i.imgur.com/SkmKyYu.jpg

wait what would retweeting…

liberals, we must not turn back the clock to the heinous days of 1991

oh internet, you drain and sustain me all at once

*farts*

gotta love "the incident would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier."

That's hack writer speak for "I have to go back 23 years to find another relevant example."

"the incident would not have shocked anybody familiar with the campus scene from two decades earlier."

Sounds like a sentence from an X-Files report

https://twitter.com/HannaRosin/status/560183792854634496

come on

― goole, Tuesday, January 27, 2015 9:40 PM (31 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol tho

megalol tbh

http://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-chait-takes-on-the-entire-internet-1682078451

this felt good to read

I don't really care about this but lol'd at:

His philosophical position is that it is undemocratic—dangerously undemocratic, in fact—to tell Jonathan Chait to "shut up and go away." It might be rude, and personally hurtful to Jonathan Chait, to tell him to shut up and go away (trigger warning: telling Jon Chait to shut up and go away),

As we get to the end of Chait's essay, we can tally up the casualties of political correctness. One anti-abortion protester was shoved and had her sign vandalized. A few millionaires were disinvited from college campuses, and performances of two plays were canceled. Various people feel disinclined to engage in online debates. Participants in a Facebook group had to deal with a Bad Thread. And a college student was fired from his school newspaper. That's one person whose life was in any meaningful way made materially worse by the scourge of political correctness, in nearly 5,000 words of dire warnings about the philosophical threat posed by left-wing speech policing.

chait is just a hysteric, and pareene is right that he's taking way out of proportion a phenomenon that mostly applies to tumblr, twitter and college dorm rooms. but i think he gets to the central ideological issue here:

The Marxist left has always dismissed liberalism’s commitment to protecting the rights of its political opponents — you know, the old line often misattributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it” — as hopelessly naïve. If you maintain equal political rights for the oppressive capitalists and their proletarian victims, this will simply keep in place society’s unequal power relations. Why respect the rights of the class whose power you’re trying to smash? And so, according to Marxist thinking, your political rights depend entirely on what class you belong to.

The modern far left has borrowed the Marxist critique of liberalism and substituted race and gender identities for economic ones. “The liberal view,” wrote MacKinnon 30 years ago, “is that abstract categories — like speech or equality — define systems. Every time you strengthen free speech in one place, you strengthen it everywhere. Strengthening the free speech of the Klan strengthens the free speech of Blacks.” She deemed this nonsensical: “It equates substantive powerlessness with substantive power and calls treating these the same, ‘equality.’ ”