Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

honestly having read a significant chunk of her book a lot of it seems like poverty/violence porn to me. she went in (nominally) intending to write something about police abuse of underprivileged populations but (surprise surprise) ended up writing a study of habitual criminals.

Did you read the part of the book where she talked about other poor people in the same neighborhood who weren't involved with the justice system at all, and their strategies for maintaining that, or poor people who lived in nearby neighborhoods for whom staying out of the justice system wasn't even a very big challenge? It's one of the things her book is about.

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/10/8753721/college-professor-fear

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122010/professors-do-live-fear-not-liberal-students

hadn't heard of the S.C. legislature's funding moves before

this basically gets it right. Hostile state legislatures defunding scientists who work on climate change, poverty, policing, etc. are a real-world threat to academics 100x that posed by humorless radical feminists policing our tweets

http://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/

xpost -- yup!

deej that essay had me shifting from one foot to another ("come on it's a little rich to generalize about the crimes of the genre of conceptual poetry by choosing two recent terrible people who happen to write it") but then i got here

In the domain of fiction, for example, Dave Eggers’s second novel, You Should Know Our Velocity, centers on straight white men who feel an emptiness in their lives and try to find their social conscience in a foreign country. If this problem was autobiographical, Eggers solved it by situating his next two books around the traumas of men of color: Zeitoun, the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian man who survives Hurricane Katrina only to find himself mistakenly targeted by the War on Terror; and What Is the What, a novel told from the point of view of Valentino Achak Deng, a man who fled the Civil War in Sudan to find freedom in America. If Eggers’s first few novels are primary documents of white feelings of insufficient soul and excessive privilege, these next two books showed the elixir: for the white author to vanish and achieve derivative authenticity by telling stories through the mask of a traumatized person of color.

and my dissent basically evaporated

idk much about ConPo but it can't all be about stuff like this, right?

I guess maybe people find the whole enterprise gross, or pointless, or anti-art (this is the argument I see on FB about VP--someone calling her GOTW twitter "basic bitch poetry")

there's also printing out giant piles of garbage from the internet and putting it all in a bit stack in a museum

and a 200-page motion-by-motion description of goldsmith getting up to piss one day

lotta angles

gone on that wind

idk much about ConPo but it can't all be about stuff like this, right?

― Is It Any Wonder I'm Not the (President Keyes), Friday, June 12, 2015 1:54 PM (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

you're right, it definitely isn't, that's what i was getting at.

I'm only part way through reading it ... really captivatingly well-written. I got to the Eliot part, which felt inevitable.

http://www.inkedmag.com/cant-get-fucking-neck-tattoo-jane-marie/

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/14/fearful-symmetry/

http://alicedreger.com/Hunt

so fuckin boss

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jun/15/suicide-dropped-sociology-exam-a-level

The narratives share a surprising number of other similarities. Both, for example, identify their enemy with the spirit of a discredited mid-twentieth century genocidal philosophy of government; fascists on the one side, communists on the other.

this isn't really true; people who don't like "sjws" call them fascists too. everyone is a fascist.

yes, it misunderstands that the right these days believes that fascists were leftists

that's a little nitpicky imo. yes there are jonah goldberg acolytes maybe who totally buy into that whole Nazi = leftism meme but I think as a general statement it's fair to say that the left is perceived as identifying w/ communism. 'fascism' as a derogatory term has come to mean something so broad that you could call someone a fascist and mean that they're a Soviet-style totalitarian

is that because they were, like, the successful totalitarians?

is what because

'has come to mean something so broad…', what you just said

like if u haven't noticed that right-wing critics of sj are framing their opponents as PC communist ideologues trying to censor any POV they deem insufficiently left-wing, and not as volk/land white supremacists that want to maintain conservative systems of exploitation then i guess now you know.

i think it's bc ppl like the way 'fascist' sounds as an insult

here are some arguments i came across just this weekend

https://twitter.com/JonathanDBrown/status/610163252610269184
https://twitter.com/JonathanDBrown/status/610170977989689345

https://twitter.com/Chriss_m/status/610311001653837825

yeah so i don't think these tweeters are using fascism to mean the political movement associated w/ Hitler/Mussolini/Franco, they're using the term a lot looser than that

like he's not accusing SJWs of using mob shaming in order to protect the volk. if he had any real historical knowledge he would probably sooner draw a comparison to struggle sessions, but he doesn't and the term 'fascist' in american society just means 'something bad that forces ppl to do/act/think X'

Does the social justice internet actually use the term "fascist" a lot, as that article states? I don't feel like I've seen the term used that much in what I've read.

i've been hearing leftists (including myself in one embarrassing situation as a teenager that i'd love to forget) calling ppl further to the right fascists for years and years

Book Burnings are pretty heavily associated in American society with fascists--also misguided critique of art. We learned about that in high school and not a thing about Mao.

savonarolist doesn't roll off the tongue so well

also we've all seen the last crusade

Here’s another strong term: “hatred”. The activist who got Mencius Moldbug banned from Strange Loop reassured us that he would never want someone banned merely for having unusual political views, but Moldbug went beyond that into “hatred”, which means his speech is “hate speech”, which is of course intolerable. This is a bit strange to anybody who’s read any of his essays, which seem to have trouble with any emotion beyond smugness. I call him a bloodless and analytical thinker; the idea of his veins suddenly bulging out when he thinks about black people is too silly to even talk about. The same is true of the idea that people should feel “unsafe” around him; his entire shtick is that no one except the state should be able to initiate violence!

i don't think scott alexander 'gets' moldbug

why am i even reading this

Do you 'get' moldbug? Bc he's right that mb is super dispassionate

https://twitter.com/roastfacekilla/status/436514007382372354

I call him a bloodless and analytical thinker; the idea of his veins suddenly bulging out when he thinks about black people is too silly to even talk about.

can't find it now but there was twitter chatter from bay area tech types about running into him socially and having him slowly bring out the edgy casual racism after about a half hour.

anyway, here's a poem mencius moldbug wrote, about seeing some young black men on a pedestrian bridge, and how it made him want to kill all black people:

http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2011/09/demons.html

i can't attest to any bulging veins

it's like when you're chilling with a new friend and after a couple beers they start talking about who _really_ runs everything

kinda disturbed that I live right by the freeway overpass described in that poem

I don't feel comfortable defending that poem which imo fails on aesthetic merits and betrays a racist mindset but to claim that it's an example of hate speech when he clearly struggles w these ideas in the very poem is a misreading. I've read lots of hate speech in my life and whatever this is (racist) it isn't that (hate speech).

Fascism term maybe appropriated by 70s conservatives from overuse by 60s liberals/hippies/revolutionaries and 80s conservatives by 70s punks/political nihilists? Like, as a word with shock value and all the marketing power that adds a la "Network".

Campion acknowledges that suicide can be a sensitive topic. But she’s confident that strong pastoral care and an emphasis on sociology as a rigorous, academic discipline lessens the risk of any distress.

I think this is probably true but the combination of sociology being perceived as one of the easiest A Levels and AQA being perceived as the least challenging exam board makes me wonder whether that's easier said than done. Most schools would only have one sociology teacher, with the variable quality you'd expect, and there is probably a case for saying you want to be pretty careful who you put in the position of talking about suicide to a bunch of seventeen year olds.

this article predates this thread by a few months

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/511276/free-speech-in-the-era-of-its-technological-amplification/

i haven't read it yet, but how could it not be included here (if it hasn't been already)

lol curriculum trolling http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/06/13/teacher-why-i-dont-want-to-assign-shakespeare-anymore-even-though-hes-in-the-common-core/

this op-ed is about BDS but it's interesting as it applies to censorship + speech in general, particularly this quote where the author is interrogating Judith Butler's writing:

But here too it is illuminating to consider Judith Butler’s position. She is a world-renowned theorist of violence, and she has repeatedly recommended the academic boycott as a form of nonviolent political action. Key to understanding Butler’s stance may be the fact that she is friendly to Walter Benjamin’s account of “nonviolent violence”: political action that attacks not individuals but the coercive power of a legal order that is itself corrupt. “When a legal system must be undone,” Butler writes, commenting on Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” “it is important that [the coercive] bonds of accountability be broken.” In order to “dissolve” a body “of established law that is unjust,” following what the law determines is precisely what needs to be “suspended.” Nonviolent violence is action that is “unleashed against the coercive force of that legal framework, against the accountability that binds a subject to a specific legal system and stops that very subject from developing a critical if not revolutionary point of view on that legal system” (Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism, 2012).

[...]

However, even if the idea of violence that is not violent is attractive, and has already been made to apply to Israeli reality — movements administrating the refusal to military service work along similar lines, as do organizations such as Breaking the Silence — boycotting academics doesn’t fit into the same category. A sticky point remains, and it is one we would be wise to insist on: silencing individuals can never be nonviolent. Butler must certainly agree about this, because she knows that human individuals “require language in order to be” (Introduction, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, 1997).

no they don't tho that's just something someone said

^lol

agree with him on bds; that is my least favorite aspect of judith butler

i've never really liked butler tbh :/ i think she's had some useful ideas but most of the time she's a poster child for academic language is often purposely obfuscated

not a fan myself, but i've enjoyed her readings of hegel