Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

doesn't fit into this thread at all

you guys sure turn into morons when you think you're being opposed in your moral condemnations

lol sure dude

good luck caping for guys who make bangbooks in the future

can't really fathom the impulse to, like, systematize, write down and then publish your locker room talk.

It's sort of a natural extension of the '1-10' game, the impulse to quantify and compare and the impulse to document your preferences.

if only there was a nearby messageboard that might demonstrate the popularity of this impulse

i don't think the documentarian or quantifying impulses are involved (except insofar as they are caught up in a competitive spirit that bleeds over from the intended activity of the team) so much as is a folk-traditional impulse that is probably common to a lot of sub-institutional social groupings in settings like colleges and schools, where there is a high degree of turnover, thus a low degree of institutional memory and a tendency to dissipation of the group's achievement-enhancing potential.

the academic article on microagressions and 'cultures of victimhood' that made the rounds last year distinguishes between cultures of honor, dignity, and (they claim) victimhood (there was an l.a. times reply that countered this with a culture of solidarity). the behavior internal to the men's team was clearly an outgrowth/undergrowth of honor culture, and it seems like for the most part the school's cancellation of their season is consistent with motives and reasons that are a part of sports' residual honor culture: the punishment is to lose the chance to achieve and the status that comes from it, and the reason for the punishment is that on a variety of levels the team members' behavior was dishonorable. not that it was harmful in any superficially perceptible way (maybe on their own characters, on the continuation of the team culture), or disrespectful (somehow, for sure, but in an indirect enough way that consequentialist pleading gets back into the picture, and anyone inclined toward respect-talk could just say that they certainly never would have talked this way TO anyone), but that it mars the status of the players and anyone who's getting vicarious honor from them. which maybe accounts for the very natural non-sports/sports transition made in the institution's punitive move.

i think the women's team's letter mostly recognized this, too. there's some move toward employing dignity- and respect-talk (the authors of that academic paper use a sociological frame to look for instances of any form of social control, including ways for offended or injured parties to make appeals to broader constituencies, in order to try to distinguish between the ways they function, and that kind of appeal seems to be at play in the letter), but mostly they use honor-culture language, like you would expect from athletes and high academic achievers, to vindicate their no-lesser status. their parting shot is in the same register: you will never win me (or, less prominently, they remain unaffected: a more stoic undercurrent).

It's not really non-sports related, it was fellow members of the soccer program they treated this way.

― Frederik B, Friday, November 4, 2016 12:10 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

by 'non-sports related' i mean the team was penalized in terms of their play for things they did off-field.

which in a way seems really inadequate to me! if just some dudes in a dorm with no other activity or affiliation put together a book like this, how would they be punished? what do they 'have' that the school could take from them? would they be expelled? would it be referred to law enforcement?

but since these were athletes, they 'have' this extra thing -- playing on the team -- that the school can then remove as punishment, and the community at large just sort of deems this as just.

j do you have that article handy? idk i'm not buying this 'honor culture' stuff off the bat

it's meant to be a historical/descriptive category w.r.t. the civilizing process, take agonistic greeks as a template, run it forward through history whenever there are developments of highly competitive subcultures/activities within broader societies. offences answered personally, patterns of group retribution are common, face- and status-saving considerations prevent actors from minimizing slights unless they're sufficiently superior in status to be able to brush them off, etc. trace the dignity one through, say, stoicism, christianity, the enlightenment. the authors associate it a lot with bourgeois morality, rights-and-grievances talk, etc. their hook is to try to extend it to identifying a supposed upswell of distinctly different modes/methods of social control in the last however many decades (they associate it a lot with identity politics iirc), to be identified w/ 'victimization', associated w/ microaggressions as a rich target of social control behaviors, etc.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272408166_Microaggression_and_Moral_Cultures

the reply to same in the times was by rini.

but since these were athletes, they 'have' this extra thing -- playing on the team -- that the school can then remove as punishment, and the community at large just sort of deems this as just.

on the one hand, this could be preparing them for the real market, after all isn't the point of playing sports largely to make that into your main career? professional sports players, for all their chasing a ball around, are role models, and a lot of money is riding on public perception of these players, this shit isn't going to fly any better on ESPN.

guys who play soccer for harvard aren't going pro

but they beat yale

rah!

i think the relevance of the honor-culture framing is that it gives a context for evaluating the players' talk/'report'-making that has its own resources for resisting a slide into frictionless liberalist interpretations of the privacy that was involved.

it seems significant that they were focused on their women's team counterparts, just as frats tend to focus on sororities despite in theory being able to project their sexual-competition attitude onto any potential conquests. but in a sport like soccer, by now, the women's team are probably nearly on a par in terms of out-group status, so maybe more than in many other sports (i doubt football players focus their in-group status games on i dunno volleyball players) the teams might realistically think of themselves as (sports) separate-but-equals, each fighting for CRIMSON VALOR or whatever, which urges a certain perspective on the question of the worthiness of (sexual) competitors, particularly when the gender division between the teams is taken to mean that there can be no actual sport competition between them. so their egregious refusal to adopt that perspective (whereas you can at least imagine a team chastising itself, internally, for disparaging opposing men's soccer teams in this way, however little they do that in reality) with respect to the women reads as a kind of substitute or proxy competition, a form of internal status-enhancement engaged in for largely homosocial purposes. the team's overt purposes provide some interpretive cover for bad-faith members who want to think of their 'scouting report' as subject to the kind of in-group privacy that a team used to sizing up competitors would claim a right to. but the need (due e.g. to the breach of decorum, common decency, etc.) to keep the report private, because it would be shameful for it to get out, reflects on the 'proxy competition' badly, as ill-won, or worse as not even won or not even contested at all. which diminishes their status qua sports competitors.

Punishment probably hits them where it hurts (good) but does it do anything to unpick the mindset that led up to the bangbook? Does it need to?

(I suppose I mean 'that led up to making and sharing around the bangbook every year'. I get the idea of ranking sexy people as a lol idea that pops into the head, I suppose everyone does, but as usual there should have been a barrier between idea and acting on it.)

laurie penny

http://thebaffler.com/blog/against-bargaining-penny

Months ago, thousands of “citizen therapists”, mental health professionals in the United States, produced a manifesto airing their concerns about what “Trumpism” was doing to the American psyche:

The public rhetoric of Trumpism normalizes what therapists work against in our work: the tendency to blame others in our lives for our personal fears and insecurities and then battle these others instead of taking the healthier but more difficult path of self-awareness and self-responsibility. It also normalizes a kind of hyper-masculinity that is antithetical to the examined life and healthy relationships that psychotherapy helps people achieve. Simply stated, Trumpism is inconsistent with emotionally healthy living—and we have to say so publicly.

Sanity is socially and politically determined—and when politics change, the definition of who is well and unwell, who is sane and who is sick, tends to change with it. The traits of good mental health, of the supposedly well-balanced individual, are often suspiciously similar to those of the compliant citizen, the obedient worker, the dutiful woman—whatever those traits might be, depending on the mood of the world and the whims of the powerful. Those who oppose the existing order can count on being labeled as deranged, as irrational, especially if they make the mistake of showing emotion in a power regime that considers all emotions weakness, all feelings laughable—except the rage of the “white working class,” as long as it is properly harnessed in service of vested interests. What happens, then, when an attitude of outrage, of resistance, becomes reclassified as mental illness?

Is this the thread for this?

https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/hiding-the-tears-in-my-eyes-boys-dont-cry-a-legacy-by-jack-halberstam/

A report of what happened when they tried to screen "Boys Don't Cry" at Reed College in Portland, Or., last week. The director was in attendance and it did not go well.

Both Reed faculty and students are in the comments.

the remark of one of the reed faculty commenting is interesting: 'many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts'

the latter is not really special for many students, and probably not exactly true to the manner of belief students actually do demonstrate, which is to credit some facts but to advert to a lack of belief in objectivity when it is comfortable or convenient to do so at this point in their lives when their beliefs are in flux, and they do not always know how to balance acknowledgement of facts with the assertion of the validity of e.g. moral norms whose validity is not established in the same way as mundane or scientific facts are.

but i would guess that it's not that they don't ~believe~ in historicity, they just lack any real understanding of it or pre-formal-education sense for it. the scripts that my students reach for whenever we do material on social justice topics to place abstract moments of critique and progress that obviously have some relativity to historical eras, and determine their implications for themselves in the present, are generally so crude that they tend to abet all kinds of evasions and confusions.

could you fill out your third paragraph further? I am intrigued but not clear enough on what the "scripts" in question are, nor on how crudeness is being measured.

As so many theorists have shown, violence can also appear in the form of civility, empathy, absence, indifference and non-appearance.

i'm not on board for this sentence

don't get me wrong, i think there are all kinds of situations in which imposition of "civility" is a bad thing to do to people, I just think there are different bad things in the world, that's one of them, violence is a different one

Whoa @ the Reed College students. I have to say, even though I am just a few years older than these kids, and hung out in activist circles in college, their manner of thinking about representation is totally alien to me. Also just the idea of shouting at someone for being a "cis white bitch" and having that not be seen as radically misogynistic. Is it common for generational gaps to emerge so instantaneously?

First, younger trans oriented audiences want to know if Peirce herself is trans. And they understand her as a non-trans person who is making money from the representation of violence against transgender bodies.

This seems so cynical. I would love to see more transgender actors cast in roles that reflect their lives, but the failure of a filmmaker to do this in the past hardly makes them a bigot.

treeship, do you view anyone younger than you as exemplary of their generation?

why do these shits think that kind of language is fine? seems to be completely undermine their "position".

1. We need to situate this film properly within the history of the representation of transgender characters.

this is key. when engaging w shit you need to look at it in context. there is something about Like/Dislike culture that seems to disable critical thinking. this blogger does a nice job employing that here. great write-up.

1saethyr, no. What i was saying is that the attitudes expressed by these kids seems very unfamiliar based on what I remember from college (but not grad school!) i went to a kind of non politicized college but i hung out with the lefty antiwar crowd. Lots of people were concerned with fighting homophobia and transphobia, but literally no one would have claimed that a lesbian filmmaker didn't have the right to make a film like boys don't cry, that doing so is itself transphobic

that comment thread needs a "so did we get this sorted"

hey stupid college performative "radicals" donald trump is now president of the united states i think you have some more serious things to worry about than imposing your incoherent values on your fellow students.

It seems like activists like to throw around the charge of "making money off of" as though there was some kind of trans movie equals $$$$$ space to be exploited 15 years ago

It seems the student's issues (judging by the comments) are that the film is not an authentic and current enough example of activism. Seems like we've come to a point where it's about who is more progressive than anyone else and more authentic. Observing the turning points in media historically is a beautiful thing, have we reached holier than thou critical mass?

I hope so or we might never hear whiney and lex performatively shut up about it.

lol

Well, people with relatively more privilege than their artistic subjects do get to control the art/media space and grab the $$ that comes from their art or media. I don't have the mental space or patience to read up on this specific example but it's not crazy to say that it would be preferable if more of the benefits went to the subjects or someone (more?) representative of the subjects.

I guess it sorta depends on how "representative" is close enough for you, and the quality and nature of the portrayal, and probably a lot of stuff. I'm sure in terms of objecting to the profitable objectification of marginalized ppl there's a point where you're just harming the chance of any art getting made about them at all? I don't have any zeal for judging anyone else's tipping point though.

Totally agree it would be preferable in orbit, a good example of this would be "Tangerine". Not meaning to come across as judgmental here :)

I liked this, and it hadn't occurred to me how both safety pins and swastikas had a brief convergence in late 70s British punk iconography.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/01/safety-pin-box-richard-spencer-neo-nazis-alt-right-identity-politics/

Also,

As a result, being critical of the safety pin was an even woker position to take. This led to confused treatments of the issue like Christopher Keelty’s Huffington Post column, “Dear White People, Your Safety Pins Are Embarrassing.” Keelty’s prose awkwardly lurches back and forth between first and second person, both identifying as white and addressing white people as a group external to himself. It implies two competing definitions of whiteness: one, as a state of corrupt decadence that Keelty has heroically transcended, and the other, as a biologically determined characteristic that remains immutable.

Among other things, this confusion presented a business opportunity. Enter Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac, with Safety Pin Box.

http://jezebel.com/the-campus-free-speech-battle-youre-not-seeing-1791631293

And those who want to write critically, to disagree with the mainstream, to call out perceived injustice, will have to weigh the ever-increasing costs. It’s a calculation Rabab Abdulhadi, Jasbir Puar, Simona Sharoni and dozens of others are now used to making before they write, before they attend an event, before they speak to anyone in public. It’s a calculation I had to make in writing this article—balancing whether it was worth it to publicize what I believe is an injustice against the cost of ending up on a list (or several), and possibly subject to the harassment of a thousand Twitter trolls. To paraphrase Rabab Abdulhadi, when does the cost get high enough that you just shut up?

i watched a jonathan haidt speech yesterday that i thought was interesting. considered bumping this thread w/ it bc i'm sure ilxors will hate it but then i forgot about it :p

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqUtgFBWezE

re the jezebel article i'm pretty sure he'd say that the problem is that the universities have opened this kind of activism on themselves. when you allow activists to set the policy for what is taught you open the door for ppl whose opinions you disagree w/ to do the same. that's why all of it needs to be opposed - the opposition of speakers, the marginalization of political opinions, etc. ultimately he decides that activism studies (race studies, gender studies, resistance studies - that was a new one to me) don't have a place in the traditional academy. i think that to the extent that these things study these topics they don't need to be entirely eliminated but to the extent that they are just vehicles for activism he's probably right. you can't do political activism and truth at the same time. one will come to take precedence over the other. it would be incredible (impossible to believe) that our current hegemonic political inclinations in the 2017 academy just happened to coincidentally line up perfectly w/ the /truth/.

This is absolutely insane:

It’s also impossible to know whether the Israeli government is involved in the harassment—for example, whether they are choosing which professors and students to target, or helping the U.S. nonprofits coordinate. Some argue that simply providing funding to some of the nonprofits, without any strings attached, or knowledge of how that money might be used is tantamount to subsidizing the harassment.

What is known is that at least since 2010, a think tank closely linked to Israel named the Reut Institute has been working on a “delegitimization” campaign meant to call into question anyone who criticizes the existence of Israel. And in 2015 the Israeli government got even more directly involved, spending $25 million to set up a new government agency dedicated to combatting what Israel saw as a growing threat posed by the BDS movement.

“We have failed to produce a solution to stop this movement,” one member of Israel’s parliament said when the agency was created. “With time, the pressure exerted on Israel [against the BDS movement] will steadily increase.”

The agency is run by former military captain Gilad Erdan, and keeps a relatively tight lid on its activities. One former Israeli intelligence officer told an Israeli newspaper that the agency participated in “black ops”—covertly waging smear campaigns against critics of Israel and directing online attacks against them. Erdan did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

But one clue to just how directly involved Erdan’s agency is in battles on U.S. college campuses comes from what happened to a student-created course at UC Berkeley last fall.

UC Berkeley allows students to create their own courses overseen by a faculty advisor. Berkeley senior Paul Hadweh, who was raised as a teen in the West Bank, submitted a course called “Palestine: A Settler Colonial Analysis.” The course was approved by the school’s administration, and a faculty advisor was assigned. Then in early September, news sites based in the U.S. began to draw attention to the course. It was the first Hadweh says he had heard about controversy over it. Then a letter writing campaign, coordinated by Amcha, one of the larger pro-Israel nonprofits in the U.S., and signed by 40 other pro-Israel nonprofits, asked UC Berkeley administrators to cancel the class. And then, with no warning to Hadweh, the class was canceled.

Amcha did not respond to several requests for comment.

As the course and the controversy over its cancellation brewed at Berkeley, Hadweh was contacted by one of his friends in Israel, who said he’d seen Hadweh’s course mentioned on Israeli news: a reporter for a local Israeli TV news station had interviewed Gilad Erdan, the head of the government’s anti-BDS efforts. The report said he and his agency had covertly put pressure on UC Berkeley to cancel the course. UC Berkeley communications officer Dan Mogulof said the school did not receive any direct communications from the Israeli government, but did receive many emails from pro-Israel nonprofits.

After weeks of protests from UC Berkeley students, the course was reinstated. But the full repercussions of the course have yet to shake out: Hadweh is Christian, and when he is back in the West Bank for the holidays, he and his family usually cross into Jerusalem for Christmas, which requires a permit sponsored by a Jerusalem-based church. For the first time in his life last year, Hadweh’s says his permit to cross was denied by the Israeli government.

imho the article is a bit overstated for dramatic effect

"Some argue that simply providing funding to some of the nonprofits, without any strings attached, or knowledge of how that money might be used is tantamount to subsidizing the harassment." -- ok, some argue. israel subsidizes nonprofits and some nonprofits that they subsidize may or may not have something to do w/ harassment. therefore it's tantamount to subsidizing harassment.

"What is known is that at least since 2010, a think tank closely linked to Israel named the Reut Institute has been working on a “delegitimization” campaign meant to call into question anyone who criticizes the existence of Israel." -- this sounds terrible, unless you think about it for a second. they are delegitimizing people who criticize the /existence/ of Israel. not ppl who criticize Israel. why shouldn't a think tank funded by a country delegitimize people who are opposed to the existence of that country?

"One former Israeli intelligence officer told an Israeli newspaper that the agency participated in “black ops”—covertly waging smear campaigns against critics of Israel and directing online attacks against them." -- black ops, very dramatic. what exactly does it consist of? oh, writing articles and blogs critiquing critics? this of course ends up being the direction of online attacks as well (nb iirc you are one of the ppl who believes that when glenn greenwald or that other dude who lost his blogging job tweet about someone they are directing harassment at them).

the course i think we've discussed before. imo universities should not be giving credits for any student taught courses. why is a student qualified to teach a course on a major complex geopolitical event? why shouldn't we be concerned that someone w/ a vested interest in that event wouldn't skew the material? he should be allowed to speak all he wants about it and have student orgs sponsor his talks etc but i don't think it's appropriate to give credits for that kind of thing (and i'd feel 100% the same way about a zionist student teaching a similar course - just totally inappropriate). re denying his permit that's shitty - not surprising that someone who hit the news as a critic of israel would get repercussions from the govt of the country he's criticizing but it still sucks.

ok, some argue. israel subsidizes nonprofits and some nonprofits that they subsidize may or may not have something to do w/ harassment. therefore it's tantamount to subsidizing harassment.

The argument is even worse than this. Israel subsidizes nonprofits, and some nonprofits, that we don't know Israel is funding, organizes harassment. It could be anyone, Sheldon Adelson is probably a good guess?

However, there seems to be a new level to the organizing and the viciousness, and it coincides with the establishment of a new agency in Israel, the leader of which has admitted they do some kind of this exact same thing. And yes, it could be a coincidence, but it does look bad.

And if - IF - it's true, then Israel is engaging in orchestrating cyber-attacks on American citizens, which could in a worst case lead to them being killed. Which is horrible, no matter the political opinions of the victims.

(on a kinda unrelated note, then yeah, I think everyone has a responsibility to combat harassment on the internet, and if you're behaviour results in death-threads, and you keep on doing it, I'll probably think less of you. Which is Greenwald. But ok, that's not as bad as Bruenig and Beijer, who also defends and validates campaigns of harassment. And what Canary Mission does sounds even worse, in doxxing potential victims. There are degrees to this.)

i think sometimes the accusation of "cyber-attacks" or "online harassment" are used v broadly. i read the article jezebel links to in the opening paragraphs that calls Sharoni a "shill" (and insinuates that this sort of thing incited the harassment) and while i thought it was dumb and poorly written i don't think it was abusive or out of line. this sort of thing can become a way of trying to suppress other ppl's free speech rights while masquerading as protecting others. i hate the whole "pox on both houses" discourse but re israel/palestine online activism it might be most appropriate - neither of these sides are innocent. they both demonize each other, make disingenuous arguments, dox, spread libel, get extensive funding from govt and non-govt actors (for the pro-palestinian version of govt funding harassment cf tuvia tenenbom's book), lie, misrepresent, call the other side evil shills, etc.

Israel isn't funding Sheldon Adelson btw. Adelson would be the guy doing the funding. Unless I don't understand what you meant? He's not a representative of the Israeli govt though he does have connections to Bibi.

Tuvia Tenenbom has written three books, none of which seem to be about pro-Palestine harassment campaigns. Could you be a bit more specific? Just a bit?

And yeah, I meant Adelson could be funding Canary Mission, etc. The Koch brothers could. It could be a false flag operation by George Soros!

xp it's called Catch the Jew!

it's about palestinian politics in general but a number of chapters focus specifically on european funding of anti-israel NGOs operating in israel and the territories