Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

jesus I think the left may be its own worst enemy. should write a book about this.

what i don't understand about the bret stephens hire is that the NYT basically poached him from the wsj bc they felt in the wake of the trump victory that their op-ed pages weren't diverse enough... so they hired another right-wing anti-trump rino??? there weren't any pro-trump pundits they could bring in to fulfill the purpose of ideological diversity??

not literate ones

the journal is pretending like there's some platonic truth about transracialism/transexualism or about the way it should be discussed, that is not just mediated by politics,

as far as i can tell the purpose of a non-STEM academic journal is to help establish the leading ideas of the day in a particular subject of study. it does this not as an objective member outside of space and time, but as a subjective member within a broader academic community. in this case, other members of that community found a particular article published by the journal to be illegitimate, and so they said so, publicly. the journal then responded in turn. and now we're discussing it here. in my opinion, this seems like common enough discourse. someone makes a claim, others disagree and make a counter-claim, and the first party either stays course or reconsiders. in this case they reconsidered.

is it political? is it subjective? of course. i don't see how it couldn't be. but so is the decision to center Shakespeare in English literature, or Adam Smith in economics, or whoever else in whatever else.

i mean eugenics was once an enlightened idea, regularly appearing in respected journals. now it's not. whether that was accomplished by polite articles written in the proper channels or by activists pressing a point seems besides the point to me.

that sounds fairly disingenuous.

xp I'm interested in whatever your point is, and why you think the "non-STEM" distinction is necessary - legal and medical journals also apply, right?

well, i'd include STEM too (a geo-centric worldview was once thought right, et al), but i figured the point would be cleaner if i sidestepped STEM altogether.

@j. how do you mean? i may be way off, but i don't think i'm being disingenuous. or i'm not trying to be.

it's not as if no one acknowledges the subjectivity, or political partiality, or whatever we call it, in the response; or as if anyone denies that it would always be a factor. but some of the voices calling for retraction don't even seem to be adhering to the sort of norms they otherwise profess to, as philosophers. and it's the criteria of adherence that are at issue.

mordy's remark was actually making that point in the other direction, i think - that the matter is contested and contestable and it's bad faith to be asserting discursive norms as if they hold some firmer authority than that. ('ok so stop doing so!' would not be satisfactory, either, since i think some of the parties involved are committed to having a stronger basis for their position than 'so we say'.)

I appreciate the way you couch mordy's comment, it helps me feel better about agreeing with it. the right way to attack this argument is with debate and not by asserting norms through tendential accusations and shouting down

it seems to me that there's a running theme through this thread that the censors are mistaking voices that are open to debate with voices that aren't, and that creates all the little gaps that FREEEEE DISCOURSE HEROZ like Jon Chait need to opine endlessly about how -

methinks myself doth protest a little loud for a monday night. fuck it, the people who want to have their voices heard over shouting need to learn how to stop shouting other people down. I hate the fucking high road but jesus goddamned christ on a camel get out of your own fucking way, for once, kids

they're not in their own way. this is their strategy.

they want to consolidate power wherever they can. dissenting voices aren't welcome in the spaces they want to control -- in this case an academic journal. the same thing happens with ideologues on the right, to much worse effect. it just is not the case that everyone is interested in the free and productive exchange of ideas or even thinks such a thing is possible.

it's not right or wrong, just illiberal.

the dissonance comes in when you agree with the goals of the censors -- in this case, protecting transgender people from violence and discrimination. when someone invokes the difficulties transgender people face in america you'd have to have a heart of stone to dismiss them. but like, i think sometimes this is invoked disingenuously, to support causes that won't ultimately help society become freer and more tolerant.

or safer.

that makes a bit more sense, thanks j.

i guess for me the discursive norms of the academy, which admittedly i am not very familiar with, seem abstract. whereas the defense of transracialism does seem to be based in anti-blackness, as the letter states. i'll need some time though to further unpack why i think that.

tuvel links to this piece by kai green on the subject that i think treats the question w/ the nuance + sensitivity it deserves tho does that thing where it more "raises questions" than it does try to answer them: http://www.thefeministwire.com/2015/06/race-and-gender-are-not-the-same-is-not-a-good-response-to-the-transracial-transgender-question-or-we-can-and-must-do-better/ --

Just want to point out that one of the sides of this battle is literally getting murdered in frightening numbers.

But everything about this scandal is still garbage :(

But in a lot of ways I think 'fuck philosophy', basically. Not everything is fit for the same discourse.

Zzzz

otm

jesse singal's summary of the situation, very supportive of tuval:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html

highly critical thread from zoe samudzi:

A whole gender studies professor wrote this article, y'all. pic.twitter.com/wpXTzPG0Lw

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) April 28, 2017

should note that in second pic-quote, tuval does explicitly say that if we are to be pro-trans we should also be pro-dolezal, which is, uh, hoo boy

whoa when did ilx start doing that with tweets??

do feel like sometimes political correctness gone mad is a thing. like if you were someone who saw the negative reaction to dolezal and thought "this is transphobic" you should probably go and bile yer heid

easy there or youll be put in the corner with me n mordy

I haven't read the article, so for all I know it may just as bad as its critics say. The title doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage. Seeing people circulate that as a credible take on a philosophy article, even a really bad philosophy article, is disheartening.

so is the error in seeing it from the perspective of society (they changed their sex) rather than the person's perspective (they found the true sex they always were) it is like a collision of realities. but one reality is one we have been living with for thousands of years that your identity is at least partially shaped by your role in society and hence not entirely up to you to decide. isn't that part of the social contract?

that there is the taste of distilled ad bru my friends

adam how dare you even ask such a thing

i signed nawhin

But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage.

It mostly made me think of a "what is up with THAT?" sort of standup routine.

to circle back on my comments from yesterday, i think there could be a nuanced discussion of transracialism, of what that is and what it could mean and how it might relate to transgenderism. here's an article from the new inquiry from last year that i think does just that.

the problem in Tuvel's case is that she uncritically centers her understanding on Rachel Dolezal while largely ignoring the contributions of black and trans academics on the topic. here's an article from 2015 that sums up some of the problems of such an approach.

i think it's a worth examining too why a white woman (Tuvel) should be able to use another white woman (Dolezal) and an array of white sources (see Zoe Samudzi's analysis goole linked too) to make a claim on blackness.

how could these things be examined if the article's “continued availability causes further harm"?

as far as i can tell, no one here is saying that the article was great or that it is wrong for people to raise objections to it. the problem is that it was characterized not as misguided, not as naive, not as inconsiderate, not as poorly researched, but as "violent."

these issues live beyond this particular paper. i linked two other perspectives above. try google for others. and, yes, white people policing the borders of black identity is violent.

stphone: did you read the article? If so, did you find a way to get it for free? I'm curious enough to read it, but I've never paid Wiley to download a PDF and I don't intend to start now.

here's a link JRN. i read a few pages but no not the whole thing.

Thanks!

when did it become so commonplace and acceptable to use "violence" to describe bad art and half-assed academic journal articles? the police are violent.

death threats are violent
swatting is violent
doxxing, serving as an invitation to the above, can be violent
harassment is violence

dumb ideas are not violent

well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

Even if one were to accept that definition of "structural violence", a journal article is not a social structure or social institution. You could maybe argue that it is "cultural violence" by the definition below there but you'd probably end up calling a lot of things cultural violence in that case.

I know where it comes from. I guess I'm asking why anybody thinks that using that kind of terminology so broadly helps their argument or makes them sound serious and thoughtful or whatever the goal is.

What sund4r said.

like, at work, where I'm one of the plain language emo kids, it's not a good thing when people take a term with jargon and regular meanings, even when they're related, and use the jargon definition in the wrong context. It's sloppy.

It's not sloppy it's disingenuous

It's the left wing equivalent of right wingers calling liberal policies "social engineering." It gives a conspiratorial, sinister edge to things they disagree with.

i don't think terms like structural or symbolic violence are foreign to people who study philosophy, women's studies, or any other humanities field, which is where this conversation is taking place. they certainly were common in the english department at my school.

We can still dispute their usage.

didn't know nymag.com was part of the humanities literature but it makes sense

didn't intend for my link to sound like I was supporting the journal's accusation, which is yeah problematic like Sund4r said, but I thought it was worth throwing into the conversation. I always associated struc. violence w/ ingrained prejudice/hatred that's baked into political/economic institutions, for the most part.