Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

should have quoted more relevant passage from betts, e.g. “her unrelenting focus on criminality is just as likely to encourage more arrests and surveillance than to convince people that mass incarceration should end”

i sorta get this, but i also feel like it's a little bit of a red herring in the overall piece. like, this is a violent community already hugely surveilled and under siege. Not that his concern there is dismissible, it's legitimate to be aware of but .. raising awareness of that in and of itself isn't the problem. like...there's a countervailing pressure to sweep it under the rug. the problem with her piece isn't just that it focuses on criminality and violence—such studies could be done, surely?

it's the narrative which is drawn from it, which in this case only serves to reinforces a mythic pathology, dehumanizing individuals, reinforcing a status quo. she's not saying anything new—oh, the police are more aggressive? what year did "batterram" come out

not that i've read the book, but the fact that a gang convinced her to do a drill suggests i might be better off

while we're at it here's kelefa sanneh on sociology & black pathology in the NYer earlier this year: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/02/09/dont-like

sorry if this is a bit of a derivation from creepy liberalism's concern with free speech but

i meant deviation

I liked Goffman's book a lot and felt like this "desire to not just empathize but identify with community she’s studying causes her to project and play out her own fantasies" was entirely absent. She really doesn't come off as the star. Nor does it read as "white woman survives in the jungle." It reads, throughout, as someone who is on the one hand a human being among human beings but who on the other hand is maintaining a strange rigorous distance from the other humans in the room, in something like the way a psychoanalyst does.

Violence does not play a very big role in the book. It's mostly about spending a lot of time in waiting rooms and owing money to people and to the state of Pennsylvania.

these sorts of ethical entanglements are all over the place w/r/t anthro. i think its telling that Sudhir Venkatesh's "Gang Leader for a Day" didn't come in for the same vein of criticism, probably because the underlying point of his book was to pathologize rather than sympathize.

his book also came out pre-social media tbf

but actually even at the time i remember hearing some criticism about it, how relative to his earlier more academic work it seemed so 'marketed'

http://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/law/ethics-on-the-run

these seem like fundamental problems btw

same author, right?

i'm not sure how much "i asked some people and they said it didn't sound right to them and btw those people have degrees" really stands up as a valid criticism btw, standardswise

That's ...not what that is

But what if... it is?

thx for sanneh article deej

eephus, have not read goffman's book myself; so faik your description may be more accurate

From the manspreading story, this has nothing to do with free speech but it is insane:

A young African-American woman, a student at LaGuardia College, had three punitive interactions with NYPD officers in a year's time: the first was a summons for swiping her school MetroCard on Memorial Day; next was another summons, this time for having her foot on a subway seat; in the third encounter, the officer charged her with being in a park after dusk and cuffed and arrested her because she hadn't shown up in court for her two summonses. Her failure to appear had resulted in her becoming one of the more than one million fugitives from justice who live in NYC, an unfortunate status achieved by not keeping a court date to clear up a ticket for a minor infraction. "I'm a criminal now," she said in a bewildered tone, "even though my friends call me such a good girl."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/05/chuck_c_johnson_suspended_from_twitter_why.html

That has nothing to do with Free Speech, twitter is not a public space. It's about not tolerating harassment.

so if twitter were a public space we should tolerate harassment there?

Well, that seems to be the policy at US universities, right?

not really - a lot of US universities have [possibly unconstitutional] speech codes

If dude wants to start his own internet social network he's free to do so.

he said he's going to

but meanwhile he's socking it up on twitter still

I believe Louise Mensch has one he can join.

From the manspreading story, this has nothing to do with free speech but it is insane

it has everything to do with goffman's book though

why is the Goffman story making the rounds now? Didn't she write about that in her book, which came out a year ago. Granted, she wasn't a "famous sociologist" back then.

http://m.chronicle.com/article/My-Title-IX-Inquisition/230489/?key=HG4gdAI5NSFLM31gZT8SZD0GandvYk4nZXdIbnkjbl9WEA%3D%3D

laura kipnis, northwestern prof who authored one of the why-u-so-sensitive articles no doubt linked somewhere above, on her title ix proceedings (stemming from having written that article)

Sounds to me like a super bonanza for the lawyers hired to investigate the complaints. Also, she has a huge point about how murky and opaque the rules are. It is a marvel to me she avoided using the word Kafkaesque anywhere in that essay.

holy shit that kipnis article, i am so happy i'm not a professor. it sounds miserable.

i beg you, mordy, don't believe that universities are maoist re-education zones, it's just not like that

I'm sure some institutions are better than others but part of why I left my program was that I knew that if I wanted a job I wasn't going to get a ton of say in where I went.

ugh, hope kipnis prevails

tbh mostly agree with her views on campus speech

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/05/what-can-t-you-say-stephen-fry-slavoj-i-ek-elif-shafak-and-more-say-unsayable

poll

the last new statesman special edition poll was a laugh

would feel obligated to vote for the ilxor tbh

btw that kipnis stuff is terrifying and while i feel obligated like a good liberal fuckboy to check my privilege in saying so, the people savaging her on social media lack the empathy they claim as their standard

was just coming here to post the kipnis thing.

the essay against her she links to is sorta food for thought though: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lauren-leydonhardy/whats-a-president-to-do-trampling-title-ix-and-other-scary-ideas_b_7001932.html

the claim is basically that she took a defamatory public position on a case handled by the university, which is not actually nuts, on the face of it.

like you can say false things in a number of contexts and not get in too much trouble. but if you in fact say false things in the midst of a legal imbroligo involving your employer and anti-discrimination law.. whether or not you're acting independently, it smells of coordination, etc. on the other hand, it also raises questions about the tradeoffs of the title IX retaliation stuff, however well intentioned it might be.

also i think its worth noting that they university basically has to go thru this process once ppl have leveled the complaint -- its not university vs. kipnis, but more that she stepped into the middle of an already litigious mess and so got caught in the suing everyone crossfire.

idk. the students are almost certainly in the wrong here, maybe i'm not going to be able to see the "two sides" to this. but it does seem worth getting the actual complaint right -- which seems like some very fraught controversy on campus over a particular case and then kipnis writes an editorial taking a clear stand

But Kipnis' op-ed was alarmingly inaccurate. And immediately after its publication, several individuals reached out to her directly to correct the myriad misrepresentations of fact that she harmfully published as gospel. Kipnis acknowledged these emails, but refused to correct the record, suggesting instead that folks simply agree to disagree. That's a strange response, a bit like telling a math tutor that you "agree to disagree," or a civil engineer who's concerned about the integrity of your bridge, or... you get the point. When someone in a position to know reaches out to let you know that you're off base, one tends to think the appropriate response is anything but Kipnis'.

Lorraine Adams · Novelist at Alfred A. Knopf · 1,087 followers
I am cordially and respectfully asking that just three of the wild inaccuracies could be documented.
Reply · · 43 · Yesterday at 6:40am

also i think its worth noting that they university basically has to go thru this process once ppl have leveled the complaint -- its not university vs. kipnis, but more that she stepped into the middle of an already litigious mess and so got caught in the suing everyone crossfire.

i think this is a key point (that obv has no place in an article like that huffpo one). at the same time i don't think Kipnis' 2nd article is incompatible with it. doesn't sound like she's blaming the administrators more than the policy.

a bit like telling a math tutor that you "agree to disagree"

^ seems to misunderstand the role of proof in mathematics, where if you make an assertion of fact and there is any dispute as to its truth, you show your proof. doesn't matter if you are the tutor or the student, the proof is what settles it.

a bit like telling a math tutor that you "agree to disagree"

^ seems to misunderstand the role of proof in mathematics, where if you make an assertion of fact and there is any dispute as to its truth, you show your proof. doesn't matter if you are the tutor or the student, the proof is what settles it.

also it is rhetorically interesting that kipnis is cast there in the role of the student being tutored and the author of the piece is cast in the role of authority.

oops, sorry. my slow connection slopped over into my making a double post.

This is a confidence that any self-respecting administration should regard as inviolable, as absolutely sacred. It is staggering that Schapiro has so recklessly and entirely undone the legitimacy of that confidence. This is an absolute betrayal.

talk about melodrama

https://www.facebook.com/janice.dowell.58/posts/10152939033266156

http://dailynous.com/2015/05/30/northwestern-and-title-ix-whats-going-on/

more on kipnis, against and against

doesn't sound like she's blaming the administrators more than the policy.

agree

think her point is problems are systemic atm— i.e. “anyone with a grudge, a political agenda, or a desire for attention can quite easily leverage the system”; there’s problematic asymmetry in speech risks/ consequences, which (as s.c says) “raises questions about the tradeoffs of the title IX retaliation stuff, however well intentioned it might be.”

think her point is: even if in certain particular case from certain angle student may be “right” (e.g. professor said something indisputably assholish), what current policy prescribes as response is wrong qua policy: in the balance, current ability/ incentive for students to resort to this kind of academic litigation has deleterious consequences for speech on campus— e.g. self-censorship that’s not motivated intellectually or ethically but purely out of fear (of frivolous reprisal etc)

ps actually not sure if she's criticizing the system more than those who misguidedly misuse the system

(and of course just bc a system fucks up doesn't mean there's some better alternative)

she is certainly criticizing the current system, which allows people to "misuse" it.

and that facebook post linked above is far too elliptical and vague to be of any use.

If the dailynous article is correct, that's pretty fucked up, though.