Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

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.

― Mordy

i'm less interested in how we feel about "the founders" than our beliefs about their work, which i for one _have_ been re-examining over the past twelve months.

can you expand?

i can try. what i'm wondering is if it is sufficient to pass moral judgment on historical figures as "good" or "bad" without thinking about how who they were affected what they did, to critically evaluate the principles they put into practice and codified into the american state, such as, for one example institutional racism, and evaluate whether those principles are an intrinsic part of that state and whether that state can meaningfully exist absent those principles.

and yes, the white supremacist principle is no longer formally codified in the american constitution, but there is, we know, a silent extinction beyond the zero (i got to page five of gravity's rainbow).

actually the second paragraph is stupid and distracting, ignore that one

Of course Lionel fucking Shriver found someone to pay her to talk about the Kirkus review thing discussed upthread.

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.

too bad we stopped teaching The Enlightenment otherwise we could skyhook off the founders' enthusiasm for it and set the historical difficulty at a more abstract level to protect it from moral critiques that are destructive of social cohesion

but as is, americans (outside of liberty fund type geeks) have to believe that the founders were nearly without precedent in history so undermining them would somehow be a denial of what are actually the same enlightenment values

ok, having imbibed suitably to loosen my inhibitions, i'll go on. please don't take me for some moldbug. i don't want to deny the fruits of the enlightenment, but to re-affirm and, where possible, extend them. i think that in order to do so we should also allow ourselves to think critically about whether many of the tenets of Enlightenment rationalism - particularly the basic assumption that an independent person will pursue their rational best interest rather than their _perceived_ best interest - are in accordance with the empirical knowledge we currently possess, and whether political systems based on these philosophical assumptions are best suited to bring about liberty and equality.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/judith-butler-on-the-power-of-hateful-speech/548138/

lol yeah what a dimwit. love the sparks that fly in dynamic debate between Judith butler and some guy that writes for the Atlantic

https://thepointmag.com/2017/examined-life/letter-on-reformation

As the initial shock began to wear off, there ensued a debate about the best way to publicly channel disgust and disappointment—that is, about how to freak out as effectively as possible. Almost hourly, new advice was made available on how to express oneself in the right tone of voice, for the correct audience, and with the appropriate breadth of intent. It was imperative that outrage be bipartisan, intersectional, systemic, even gender-balanced. (Not only Leon Weiseltier but also Tina Brown; not only Ben Affleck but also Lena Dunham). Moreover, and perhaps even more importantly, we should remember our own burden of responsibility. Some of us had been complicit in the cases of “individual villains,” as Rebecca Traister put it; the rest, in the “political and public power structures” that had produced and enabled them.

Many of these appeared to be good recommendations, although it was not clear what kind of actions should follow from them. The problem is not, or not merely, one of ignorance or ideology. Many of the most prominent perpetrators are educated men, artists, literary critics, academics, subjects of ambiguously favorable profiles in the New Yorker, contributors to the Hillary Clinton campaign. Most have shown they can speak and act appropriately when they know someone is paying attention. To be sure, their power and privileges—the on-call Mossad agents, the magic hidden buttons—must have abetted their presumption of immunity. Some are simply bullies. But given the breadth of the problem it is also worth acknowledging what used to be understood as the most common reason we do what we know to be wrong, which is that we lack the discipline, or the strength of will, or the self-understanding, to practice the values we profess.

Fortunately, in the history of religion, there is a term for occasions when what is called for is less the creation of new ideals than a recommitment to the ones we already are supposed to hold. A time when the tools of revolution look too crude and public, those of introspection too narrow and private. This is the time for reform—or, if the reform that is required is broad and sweeping enough, for reformation.

●

“When our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ He called for the entire life of believers to be one of penitence.”

https://i.imgur.com/5Hr9bnC.png

i know this goes in gff's thread or the future-of-liberalism thread but i can never find them

http://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/04/11/on-turning-left-into-darkness/

The way Canadian media has been covering this story has been driving me insane and really fits with the sort of discourse described in the OP. (That's one of the better ones.) Basically, a 22-year-old TA showed a clip of Jordan Peterson arguing against special pronouns for trans people in a tutorial on grammar and sparked a debate, which resulted in complaints. She secretly recorded a subsequent meeting with the prof and administration, where they used some OTT rhetoric and she cried. Their profoundly oppressive resolution to the situation was that the prof would see her lesson plans in advance and sit in on her tutorials and asked her not to play controversial stuff like that without contextualizing it. She went to the media with the recording; they managed to frame it as a free speech issue with pieces like "Thought police strike again" and "Inside Lindsay Shepherd's... Fight for Free Speech. The university and the professor ended up publicly apologizing to Shepherd (the TA) and she has become a celebrity for free speech warriors.

This gets at a lot of my issues: I'm a free speech libertarian but TAs have never had academic freedom, nor should they. Her job is to assist the professor with teaching his course. Reading over a TA's lesson plans, sitting in on his or her tutorials, and providing guidance on how to conduct them is not only normal and reasonable but generous and helpful. Literally no one's right to free speech has been compromised. If there is an academic freedom issue, it is that the professor has been made to publicly apologize and vilified by the media for doing his job.

That's one of the better ones

= the Star story in the first hyperlink is one of the less ridiculous takes from the MSM.

Well he accused the TA of violating Human Rights Codes right? Seems a bit hostile.

Also the video she played was of a round table discussion where Peterson was one of several participants. And he was arguing against laws requiring people to use preferred pronouns.

lol that information puts a different spin on this story

"Fortunately, in the history of religion, there is a term for occasions when what is called for is less the creation of new ideals than a recommitment to the ones we already are supposed to hold. A time when the tools of revolution look too crude and public, those of introspection too narrow and private. This is the time for reform—or, if the reform that is required is broad and sweeping enough, for reformation."

"reformation" was, of course, only ever a polite euphemism for "revolution".

i know this goes in gff's thread or the future-of-liberalism thread but i can never find them

http://jmrphy.net/blog/2017/04/11/on-turning-left-into-darkness/

― j

i hope i never start to enjoy arguing about politics that much

i disagree you can reform institutions but in revolutions you smash them xp

i guess you could say that the platonic forms of institutions exist even in the transition btwn pre-revolutionary / post-revolutionary states so it's only ever really a 'reform' (this seems like an exceptionally bleak analysis!) but i wouldn't say vice-versa that all reforms are really polite euphemism for revolution