Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

also just want to say for the hell of it, i read that satirical column chait linked and while obviously that writer and i come from very different political positions, it was actually pretty well-done in parts, for a college paper

yay free speech http://femfreq.tumblr.com/post/109319269825/one-week-of-harassment-on-twitter

The notion that our perception of reality necessarily reflects a particular cultural matrix is hardly open to question. Ironically, this type of thinking has been politically applied most effectively not by progressive leftists seeking to undermine unjust power structures, but by cynical, right wing opinion engineers like those at the Fox News Network. It should hardly surprise us when, unencumbered by any impetus to even feign "objectivity", the rich and powerful prove far better able to propagate the narratives that suit them than the poor and oppressed.

That's why I'm suspicious of any suggestion that the value of speech is dependent the speaker's identifiable cultural identity. Insistences of this sort may present themselves as righteous political action, but I doubt that such nakedly partisan line-drawing will, in the long term, provide a more powerful weapon to progressives than those whose interests they oppose.

The naïve veneration of ostensibly universal liberal moral principle, however, has tended to benefit progressive causes. As Οὖτις points out, "freedom of speech is maintained and enforced by those in power - historically disenfranchised minorities don't actually have the political power to silence the speech of the capital class or anyone else. They have the right to call out the speech that reinforces the power of the capital class for what it often is - sexist, racist, classist, fascist, corporatist, whatever..."

This is the argument Chait should have made, ie examining the negative patterns of groupthink and self-censorship in all groups rather than acting as if it was limited to this one.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2015/01/27/chait-speech/

contenderizer otm

kinda feel like the chait piece is a favor to 'call-out' culture (or whatever we're calling it) - by treating it as a serious movement/problem and not just a fringe phenomenon he gives it credibility. he could've just been like "look at these idiots," but instead he made it sound like they're an actual danger to someone somewhere

oh boy:

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/27/the-lefts-intensifying-war-on-liberalism/

https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/560256932049874944

alfred i was a little disappointed to see that yr inevitable blog post on chait was just rephrasing the gawker/ilx CW

Aw shit u gonna take that Alfred? Straight up called your blog post redundant! In front of everybody!

Yeah, the dozen or so people who comment on this thread or read my blog = CW

even small communities need iconoclasts

Sullivan's post = "bros before hoes"

the julian sanchez post RM/RM linked a while back is excellent, worth a read before it drops from sight

good digby post http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/01/from-blogofascism-to-pc-police-its.html

I like Bryan Lowder's response too. "The truth is, identity grants experience (and experience should be valued to a point); but it does not automatically grant wisdom, critical distance, or indeed, unassailable righteousness." I don't trust anyone who thinks there was nothing of worth in Chait's piece beyond all the posturing melodrama.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/outward/2015/01/28/jonathan_chait_s_anti_political_correctness_essay_unpacked.html

That piece is fantastic.

it really is

Belle Waring also weighs in, and makes a lot of the same points as Lowder, although several orders of magnitude more caustically. Seems like the consensus is coalescing around, "Whatever slivers of points Chait made, they were lost in the continuous showing of his ass."

alfred i was a little disappointed to see that yr inevitable blog post on chait was just rephrasing the gawker/ilx CW

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:23 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Aw shit u gonna take that Alfred? Straight up called your blog post redundant! In front of everybody!

― da croupier, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i like this cafeteria shit stirring croup

https://twitter.com/freddiedeboer/status/560256932049874944

― Mordy, Wednesday, January 28, 2015 4:21 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

for reasons i don't completely understand freddie catches a lot of shit but i think on this stuff particularly he's coming down from just the right angle--all the cred in the world from me.

xp I know clowning Chait is fun and all but I feel like the best responses get past that level pretty quickly.

for reasons i don't completely understand freddie catches a lot of shit

he argues with other leftists and doesn't stop when they tell him to fuck off. at least, that's what i've seen with e.g. sady doyle and i think some of the TNI type people

He frequently gets clowned by the crew at Lawyers, Guns & Money.

oh god and the whole kendzior bro argument. i had happily forgotten all that

ugh i don't even want to touch that one

he argues with other leftists and doesn't stop when they tell him to fuck off. at least, that's what i've seen with e.g. sady doyle and i think some of the TNI type people

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 5:29 PM (42 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right but it seems like i mainly see him giggled over by media types? i get the TNI-crew scorn (they're precisely the academic-radical-left axis i think chait is accidentally right to pinpoint) but he seems like the target of like blog-media-ppl derision too

anyway i liked what greenwald got down on this

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/28/petulant-entitlement-syndrome-journalists/

he's got a combo of zero-irony anti-jokeman and true-leftist "more committed to your cause than you are, can't you see" about him. i don't think he's wrong, maybe on a parsing of this or that issue, sure, but generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

All of that can create a disincentive for engaging on those topics: the purpose of it is to impose a psychic cost for doing so, and one is instinctively tempted to avoid that.

Of course, all of that can be unpleasant or – if one allows it to be – worse than unpleasant.

But that’s the price one pays for having a platform. And, on balance, it’s good that this price has to be paid. In fact, the larger and more influential platform one has, the more important it is that the person be subjected to aggressive, even harsh, criticisms. Few things are more dangerous than having someone with influence or power hear only praise or agreement. Having people devoted to attacking you – even in unfair, invalid or personal ways – is actually valuable for keeping one honest and self-reflective.

It would be wonderful on one level if all criticisms were expressed in the soft and respectful tones formalized in the U.S. Senate, but it’s good and necessary when people who wield power or influence are treated exactly like everyone else, which means that sometimes people say mean and unfair things about you in not-nice tones. Between erring on the side of people with power being treated with excess deference or excess criticisms, the latter is vastly preferable. The key enabling role of the government, media and other elites in the disasters and crimes of the post-9/11 era, by itself, leaves no doubt about this. It also proves that one of the best aspects of the internet is that it gives voice to people who are not credentialed – meaning not molded through the homogenizing grinder of establishment media outlets.

generally he's just kind of a goober which does throw the cliquishness of a lot of discourse into relief i guess

― goole, Thursday, January 29, 2015 6:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right especially put next to the cool kids at TNI--whom "utilize the language of social justice without particularly caring if your speech contributes to the cause" is totally a shot at--his earnest and serious stuff on actually building class power makes him look v much the stuffed shirt

I don't understand what Chait has supposedly added to the argument, it's a rehash of talking points. A rehashedhash.

Example: Jill Filipovic criticized trigger warnings far more substantively almost a year ago:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/05/trigger-warnings-can-be-counterproductive

well and tellingly

https://twitter.com/JillFilipovic/status/560096208983953408

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

i mean, in the sense that if youre going to formulate yr media criticism around yr conception of the ny media social and work scene itd be helpful if you had an accurate one i guess

tbf max, he's not the only one to boil all mediac criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids ;)

i like freddie a lot but he has an unfortunate tendency to boil all of his media criticism down to cool kids vs unpopular kids (of which he self-identifies as one). which is not wrong but also not right.

― max, Thursday, January 29, 2015 7:03 PM (14 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

isn't his point about adopting social justice language without nearly as much regard for its actualization a more substantive crit of the TNI style though

i dont actually know what you're getting at mordy!

max, you're a Greenwald star

Ygelsias also good: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identity-politics

This is, I think, the problem with idea of "identity politics" as a shorthand for talking about feminism or anti-racism. The world of navel-gazing journalism is currently enmeshed in a couple of partially overlapping conversations, about "PC culture," diversity, social justice, technological change, and shifting business models. One thread of this is the (accurate) observation that social media distribution creates new incentives for publications to be attuned to feminist and minority rights perspectives in a way that was not necessarily the case in the past. But where some see a cynical play for readership, I see an extraordinarily useful shock to a media ecosystem that's too long been myopic in its range of concerns.

The implication of this usage (which is widespread, and by no means limited to people who agree with Chait) is that somehow an identity is something only women or African-Americans or perhaps LGBT people have. White men just have ideas about politics that spring from a realm of pure reason, with concerns that are by definition universal.

You see something similar in Noam Scheiber's argument that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went astray by emphasizing an "identity group agenda" of police reform at the expense of a (presumably identity-free) agenda of populist economics. For starters, it is actually inevitable that a New York City mayor would end up spending more time on his police department management agenda (something that is actually under the mayor's control) than on tax policy, which is set by the State Legislature in Albany.

But beyond that, not addressing a racially discriminatory status quo in policing is itself a choice. Indeed, it's a kind of identity group appeal — to white people, whose preferred means of striking the balance between liberty and security, in many contexts, is that security should be achieved by depriving other people of their civil liberties.

This is where the at-times tiresome concept of privilege becomes very useful. The truth is that almost all politics is, on some level, about identity. But those with the right identities have the privilege of simply calling it politics while labeling other people's agendas "identity."

damn thats a pleasant surprise from him imo

http://emutalk.org/2015/01/talking-back-to-the-emu-aaup-about-yik-yak/

haven't seen a link to the main story yet, as it's behind a chronicle of higher ed paywall

yeah I wanted to read that story too, should probably just ask on yik yak about it right?

don't see what the tech angle adds to this though, unless it's this: social media today engenders meanness and in particular meanness toward women and minorities, in some way that past gossiping did not.

http://emutalk.org/2015/01/a-new-faculty-challenge-fending-off-abuse-on-yik-yak/

bit more

i think the tech angle is that the power to speak has been substantially redistributed relative to many old arrangements. i saw one comment, seemingly from a student, about how perhaps this was just a way of compensating for a felt lack of voice in courses, with student evaluations at the end of the semester not being enough. but with e.g. live-tweeting of media events, with comment boxes on newspaper sites, with those crazy kinds of presentations where the presenters project real-time audience comments behind them while sessions are in progress… the standard lecture hall experience is one that can create lots of discontent that would otherwise be suppressed, expressed elsewhere, or whatever. having an avenue for its backchannel expression simultaneously with the event causing it is… pretty unprecedented, in education (where ways of dealing with authority are pretty old and slow-moving).

i'm still reading through these posts, but this:

Harassment– particularly sexual harassment– involves a power relationship. It is clearly possible for a professor to sexually harass a student– heck, that’s one of the clear ways that a tenured professor can get fired. Is it possible for a student to sexually harass a professor? And can that happen anonymously? Honestly, I don’t think so because professors have all the power.

strikes me as way way off, esp in light of the technology involved

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/stripping-a-professor-of-tenure-over-a-blog-post/385280/

In my view, McAdams' blog post offered one valuable criticism of the graduate instructor: her after-class suggestion that gay marriage opponents should keep quite in the classroom to avoid the possibility of offending gay classmates was wrongheaded (and especially absurd at an avowedly Catholic university). She ought to be met with forceful, intelligent, polite counterarguments—and to reflect on the fact that gay marriage is blessedly legal in so many states right now thanks in large part to the success advocates have had persuading so many opponents to change their minds. If the subject is taboo, a far greater number of freshmen who enter college opposing gay marriage will graduate four years later never having been forced to defend their views. It's social conservatives who ought to hope opponents keep quiet in philosophy class—they're losing most of the arguments that are conducted on the merits!

There are all sorts of valid criticisms of McAdams' blog post that could be made. "He should instead have reacted to the undergrad student’s story by approaching the philosophy department chairman, or the director of graduate studies, or the teaching assistant’s mentor if known to him, or (very gently) the teaching assistant herself," Matthew J. Franck argues at First Things. "The point is to make poor teachers better ones, not to throw others on the defensive about matters they feel strongly about. If the urge to blog about the incident was irresistible, McAdams should have left her name out of it, which was unnecessary to his point."

But even assuming that he erred there, got some of the facts wrong, and that the post could've been written more charitably, his sins were hardly beyond the pale of behavior commonly exhibited by college faculty, =and falls far short of what ought to be required to terminate a tenured faculty member with decades of contributions. As the reasoning set forth by Holtz shows, the precedents created in this case could be used to terminate basically any professor, tenure or not.

I think that of all places, an ethics + philosophy class needs to be a totally open space for ppl to express their opinions. Even offensive opinions.

I dunno I agree in theory but I'm less and less enamored with classrooms and higher education more generally being seen by students as an arena for the "expression of opinions."

http://crookedtimber.org/2015/02/10/response-to-freddie-deboer-just-like-i-done-promised-ye-of-little-faith/

Here is a real article someone could write about P.C. culture if this was actually what worried them. It would address young political activists, but also people on the internet. To these latter people it would say, ‘this isn’t a game. Your desire to feel righteous fury is outweighed by the need for justice.’ To the former it would say, ‘hey, something bad is coming out of a good place! Your economic privilege is blinding you to the ease with which you accessed the tools and language of activism. Other people with good intentions who would strengthen our movement with diversity weren’t so lucky. Feeling right isn’t as important as making allies. We need to reflect on how P.O.C. have been shut out of activist communities in the past and learn from that hard lesson. It isn’t one wrong word that makes someone an enemy. It is acts of hate.’

xp idk in general i agree that like yr average humanities class (let's say a lit class, or a sociology class, etc) are not the place to express yr opinions. but an ethics class should be able to directly handle any opinion - odious ones too - otherwise i don't get the point. is it just to teach ppl the right thing to believe, or is it about teaching students methods of thinking about controversies + ideas and subjecting them to close readings + the contexts of various ethical programs/ideologies? like i think the biggest issue here is that the teaching assistant didn't let ppl disagree or agree about whether this particular ethical principle justified gay marriage - which should've been a totally different conversation to whether gay marriage should be legal or not. some ethical systems may justify gay marriage while others (like some naturalism ethical systems) may not. if you're not able to discuss it you probably don't understand the precepts you're supposed to be discussing.

To me, the most chilling issue is the death threats. I must admit I get stuck on the fact that the graduate student got so many death threats she changed university.