Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

the rot set in when teacher training institutions quit calling themselves "normal schools". clearly the choice of terminology here is of paramount significance.

errbody gotta be a university these days

I've only heard "educators" as a broader category that includes teachers, counselors, administrators, aides, speech therapists, etc

I'm fine, it's like me saying "I work in IT" instead of explaining what arcane role within that realm I actually click a mouse for

http://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html

― Old Lynch's Sex Paragraph (Phil D.), Monday, August 7, 2017 12:12 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.facebook.com/LauraMoriartyAuthor/posts/10213546821600822

The issue of diversity in children’s and teen literature is of paramount importance to Kirkus, and we appreciate the power language wields in discussion of the problems. As a result, we've removed the starred review from kirkus.com after determining that, while we believe our reviewer’s opinion is worthy and valid, some of the wording fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity, and we failed to make the thoughtful edits our readers deserve. The editors are evaluating the review and will make a determination about correction or retraction after careful consideration in collaboration with the reviewer.

Fucked up to turn this around on the reviewer, claiming this was an issue of her shortcomings as a writer -- "clarity and sensitivity" -- rather than ideology.

I think the critique of this book -- that it is a clueless "white savior" narrative -- is probably valid, but the goodreads pile-on still disturbs me. Half the comments sound like bots, repeating the same social justice phrases we hear all the time: "White people: not everything is about you"; "this book silences marginalized voices" etc. The defenders of the book on there likewise repeat truisms about censorship and free speech. None of it reads like human beings putting their own thoughts into words. It's... creepy.

you're still saying the critique of the book is "probably valid" despite not having actually read it.

familiar

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/16/us/to-kill-a-mockingbird-biloxi.html

people should NEVER be "uncomfortable" as we all know

Xp fair point. I was just trying to point out that I am not opposed to these kinds of critiques in principle. But what's going on here isn't literary criticism.

literary criticism is something I enjoy but is really as an institution an ongoing judgment on the fitness of written works regarding literary merit, which is generally horseshit

I don't agree. It's an artform onto itself. The best critics show you how they read.

that said, the pile-on dynamic is unflinchingly *not* a populist one, despite people couching it in the ideals of equal representation and socially progressive goals

honestly I wonder what their favorite works are, and if they’d pass muster among their own group were they released today. the cynic in me assumes there are a bunch of Harry Potter fandom people who got real woke and are on the march to battle

literary criticism is also an art form because it distills good work to an outline and sound bites, because people who love to talk about books appreciate a narrative when they approach talking about books

Controversial opinion: They don't care about books or equality.

everyone needs a cause to believe in

They are attracted to conformity and censure. They found a creed. Now they can go around being internet police officers.

Treeship, you’ll find your day to be a cop, honest

You don't know me at all, mh. My flaw is reflexive contrarianism, not conformism.

Just as arbitrary, goes better with a leather jacket and sunglasses.

the contrarianism cop

Controversial opinion: the radical openness of art and literature is inherently threatening to all ideologies of any political persuasion because they cannot help but seek closure, finality, moral sorting. And paradoxically, the openness of the Internet makes those reared on it more attracted to ideological closure.

definitely.

more details on Kirkus tying itself in knots over this review

http://www.vulture.com/2017/10/american-heart-review-kirkus-editor-on-why-they-changed-it.html

And while the Muslim woman who wrote the original review was involved in the editing process — “the decision to retract the star was made in full collaboration with the reviewer,” he says — altering the review does not appear to have been her idea in the first place. According to Smith, Kirkus concluded internally that edits would be made before reaching out to the reviewer.

“We wanted her to consider if changing what we thought was sort of reductive word choice, and adding deeper context, is something she thought might be appropriate,” he says, though he emphasizes it was ultimately her call: “I did not dictate that to her. She made that decision on her own.”

I feel like this whole thing is super-weird and I don't get it -- everyone is sharing a review on Goodreads by Justina Ireland, who I guess is a bigshot in this world, and that review seems like ... kind of a normal negative review that focuses much more on "this book is not well written or made" than "this author should be publicly shamed." How do we get from that to Kirkus taking down their review?

I assumed they were getting angry letters and emails about it. Idk though. They might have just been responding to the volume of negative reactions on goodreads. There are many, many reviews on there that basically condemn it.

Like, here is a review from "Leah"

fuck your white savior narratives
fuck using marginalized characters as a plot device to teach the white mc how to be a decent person
fuck you for perpetuating the idea that marginalized people need to suffer in order to be worthy of "humanity"
fuck this book and everyone who thought it would be a good fucking idea

~

to my Muslim friends, i'm sorry this book and this mindset exists
Like Likes: 84

ok so yeah that is .... a bit different in tone from the ireland thing that was being shared...!

There's a lot of that language of "harm" in those Goodreads reviews, which I can't believe we're still doing.

and here's "Nick"

Basically because I want to piss off the people who gave this book one star without having read it. So I'm giving it five stars also having not read it. My instinct is always to push back on PC bullshit wherever I encounter it. Have no idea whether this is a good book or not but FIVE STARS!

ugh

Isn't the democratizing effect of the internet great? Literary debate is no longer the sole province of critics.

I have no idea what's going on here at all.

http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/grad-student-sounds-alarms-over-penns-response-to-online-attacks/120693

swarmed by online nazis for claiming to use 'progressive stacking' as a classroom discussion management technique

I often wonder how those who teach at institutions designed to perpetuate privilege square that fact with their progressive ideals and I think I now have my answer.

(That being said that story strikes me as a silly controversy.)

probably

seems like we really need a solution to right-wing mobs engaging in permanent civic warfare with universities at this rate

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/us/cub-scout-colorado.html

When a group of Cub Scouts met with a Colorado state senator this month, they asked her about some of the most controversial topics in the nation: gun control, the environment, race and the proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico.

But questions from one Cub Scout, Ames Mayfield, 11, got him kicked out of his den in Broomfield, Colo., according to his mother, Lori Mayfield. At the meeting on Oct. 9, for which the scouts were told to prepare questions for State Senator Vicki Marble, Ms. Mayfield recorded her son asking the senator why she would not support “common-sense gun laws.”

Oh an 11 year old whose mother records him asking senators her questions how cute

sorry, lady, but as much as I can sympathize with you about the weak-ass laws governing gun purchases, that phrasing constitutes what is known as a "loaded question", similar to "when will you stop beating your wife?"

I feel bad for the kid who now has to join another scout den. The Den leader kicking the kid out of the den, apparently because his mother shared the video of the questions, puts the blame on the wrong person (in addition to excusing the Colorado state senator).

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/453303/confederate-monuments-slippery-slope-shunning-founders-real-dangerous

"Confederate monuments slippery slope shunning founders real dangerous!" said Donald J. Trump.

The reality is no movement to end thanksgiving will ever get off the ground because most people like Thanksgiving. No one gives a shit about Columbus Day. Next.

i thought this was pretty interesting:

It is easy to imagine a writer who grew up reading Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the First White President” looking back at Bouie’s assertion that we have statues to Jefferson on account of his authorship of the Declaration of Independence with a jaundiced eye. That future man of letters will observe that the Declaration’s invocations of liberty and its pretensions of universalism were merely Whig propaganda against a King. He will assert that Jefferson did not actually believe that all men were so endowed by their creator. He will hasten to add that as America achieved the political sovereignty, Jefferson became more convinced of white supremacy, more secure in the view that white liberty could be guaranteed only through black bondage. Many reading this argument will conclude that by raising statues to Jefferson we are crediting him only for his hypocrisy, a privilege only white racists and slavers get in America. They will conclude, in other words, that America has spent centuries sanctifying its foundational hypocrisy. Land of the Free, home of the enslaved.

Seen from this vantage, the statues and the faces on federal coins and the convenient February holidays are part of a centuries-old campaign to whitewash the Revolutionary cause as a noble one. Why should we credit the Founders with their ideals of human liberty and their constitutional genius when the system of government they bequeathed was so uniquely resistant to the emancipation of slaves that the “American exceptionalism” of the 19th century could be said to reside in the fact that America was the only Western nation where abolition required a cataclysmic civil war?

Why raise statues to Washington for his leadership of the Continental armies when those armies were partly motivated to destroy the British as vengeance for emancipating America’s slaves? Scores of thousands of slaves ran to the British army seeking emancipation, including many owned by George Washington. This fact incensed the America Revolutionaries. Tom Paine decried the British as “that barbarous and hellish power which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us.”

a case against the founders is i think ideologically consistent w/ the moment and if we haven't reached it yet it's only bc we're working our way there.

nb i am pro taking down confederate statues i just think that he makes a fairly compelling argument that true fealty to our ideological commitments cannot end there. we have to decide if we're okay with that.

wait, wrong thread? Suddenly I don't see the post I was responding to

yeah wrong thread but this discussion is maybe more appropriate to this thread i was thinking

this thread and the coddling threat overlap a lot and i tihnk thats what happened

tldr if our founders created a country based on slavery and genocide of indigenous people then why are we celebrating them -- this is a logical and obvious route for the culture war. and it's going to be messy if it happens.

Ha, I just posted a related thing on the coddling thread. Those arguments are already commonly made by activists in Canada.

some of that article seems like projection and self-examination

so you’re saying maybe the first continental congress was made of humans and they weren’t given the constitution on engraved tablets directly from a higher power? hmm, interesting!

it’s also why the authorial intent angle on constitutional law is so intellectually bankrupt