Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

sometimes both. some shitty opinion could be one person's iconoclasm and another's received wisdom.

omar otm, I am still guilty of getting overwrought on ilx or in some casual conversations about things but my general tendency in life is to stick with "that's fucked up" or "I disagree" or "I stand with that guy" on things where my personal stakes are low

just too much effort to get too invested and it puts you out in a way that just standing firm and saying "nope" doesn't

I think part of the problem in 2018 with playing devil's advocate is that people are invested in trolling for the sake of trolling and just want people to get caught out. Really playing devil's advocate is about helping to define and firm up a position counter to what you're postulating, but people are putting out positions where their personal stances are vague or undefined and they're more invested in the argument than they are the stakes of the issue.

Devil's advocate is a good position for challenging your own position, not for defining it from scratch. And you have to be willing to find the correct take in the balance of responses.

i do read things other than NYT op-eds, fwiw, but I saw this as a bit of a companion piece to that nabisco essay I posted last week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/magazine/who-gets-to-decide-what-belongs-in-the-canon.html

This is to say that fandom and spectatorship, of late, have grown darkly possessive as the country has become violently divided. Especially in this moment when certain works of canonical art are in fact at risk of becoming morally obsolete — both art that degrades and insults and the work of men accused of having done the same. There’s a camp of fans — who tend to be as white and male as the traditional canon makers — who don’t want that work opened up or repossessed. They don’t want a challenge to tradition — so please, no women in the writers’ room, say superfans of the animated comedy “Rick and Morty,” and no earnest acknowledgment that Apu is a bothersome South Asian stereotype, say the makers of “The Simpsons.” It’s all too canonical to change.

You can see the reactionary urge on every side. We’ve reached this comical — but politically necessary — place in which nonstraight, nonwhite, nonmale culture of all kinds has also been placed beyond reproach. Because it’s precious or rare or not meant for the people who tend to do the canonizing. If Korama Danquah, writing for a site called Geek Girl Authority, asserts that the sister of Black Panther is more brilliant than the white billionaire also known as Iron Man, she doesn’t want to hear otherwise. “Shuri is the smartest person in the Marvel universe,” goes the post. “That’s not an opinion, that’s canon. She is smarter than Tony Stark.” “Black Panther,” according to this argument, is canon not only because it’s a Marvel movie but because it matters too much to too many black people to be anything else.

But that’s also made having conversations about the movie in which somebody leads with, “I really liked it, but ...” nearly impossible. This protectionism makes all the sense in the world for a country that’s failed to acknowledge a black audience’s hunger for, say, a black comic-book blockbuster. But critic-proofing this movie — making it too black to dislike — risks making it less equal to and more fragile than its white peers.

The intolerance of the traditional gatekeepers might have spurred a kind of militancy from thinkers (and fans) who’ve rarely been allowed in. Bloom’s literary paradise is long lost, and now history compels us to defend Wakanda’s. But that leaves the contested art in an equally perilous spot: not art at all, really, but territory.

interesting part at the end noting how the stifling of dissent by gatekeepers is a universal phenomenon. you could argue the single example by a website I've never heard of makes a somewhat flimsy case, but I think most would acknowledge this happens everywhere if they're being honest

It very much does, anything important and “canonical” has its own police who attempt to exert control over the discourse around it. Cf. ILM

Has this been posted yet? One of the weirder and creepier campus stories of late: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/1/17417042/niall-ferguson-stanford-emails

LGM got real heated about that but I think lemieux and loomis both already had google news alerts tuned for Niall Ferguson, they hate that smarmy fuck (and with good reason)

Aside from all the larger things that are wrong with this, it's just stunningly petty. Wtf mid-50s dude who has Chaired programmes at Ivies and advised a leading government and American Presidential candidate gets invested in digging dirt on a 19- or 20-year-old undergrad running for a position in his student government.

It’s like he feels threatened!

Would love to hear a Niall Ferguson-themed parody cover of Losing My Edge

A bit off-topic, but a good enough place for this piece by K.T. Nelson on comedy in the Trump era

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nekqvg/the-conservative-war-on-comedy-is-full-of-shit

I love everything about this proposal for a conservative, Omaha-based Saturday Night Live rip-off https://t.co/4dNnE3BDtw pic.twitter.com/3o9lhsbUvl

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 7, 2018

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further and (2) somehow a bunch of comedy writers and performers will just materialize in omaha, along with all of the crew needed to produce a high-quality television show. Well thought out

I think they first need to create a conservative UCB and Groundlings from which to snatch up and coming wingnut comic performers. It will take maybe 3 months if they are motivated.

That whole thing is itself a perfect SNL sketch about beleaguered right wingers trying to create their own late night comedy show.

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further

yes its a SNL copy

Oh joy, Jonathan Haidt has gotten worse, and has apparently doubled-down on fetishized reasonableness against all else

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review

The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. The fact that Lukianoff and Haidt claim the authority to police discourse becomes clear the first time they discuss the role “overreaction from the right” has played in recent campus wars – at least halfway through the book. They quote death threats that Princeton professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor received in 2017, including “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum” put in her head. “One might conclude,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, that if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”.

fetished reasonableness is actually an innate foundational human value

a-a-and some ELBOW PATCH jackets too!!

if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”.

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence, your honor.

The assumption here is that the anger directed at these professors was grounded not in a violent disagreement with their positions, but was merely an overreaction to the tone in which they were presented. Observation of current political discourse will quickly uncover thousands of examples which contradict this assumption.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/anthony-ekundayo-lennon-black-white-theatre-director-job-people-of-colour-actor-artist-tawala-a8617011.html

In which a new Dolezal contender emerges.

My best friend's daughter attends the preeminent NYC arts high school. Let's call it Fame HS.

The big musical production opening tomorrow is The Sound of Music. What has the new principal decreed? I guessed.

No swastikas.

...

But yeah, liberal fascist thought-policing is just a delusion on the part of ol' Dr Morbius.

(for those who don't know, the show takes place in 1930s Austria, and the Nazis are the villains)

What about armbands with two thick black Xs instead?

It's just not TSOM without the swastikas, is it? For me they are absolutely key to its enduring appeal.

So the Von Trapps decide to flee what? Austrian Grinches?

I mean Liberal-fascist thought-policing is kind of a delusion, it would be more reasonable to say "there's a cadre of well-meaning idiots in the world" and they've always been with us

Should be "well"-meaning but too many quotation marks

I can’t believe you are defending these people who changed a play so it wouldn’t stigmatize Nazis.

the chances that that was their motivation as basically zero

lol

Perhaps it would be helpful to change it completely because I don't want to support nazis but otoh by the end of TSOM I am sort of rooting for anyone who can stop the Von Trapps continuing to sing and they are in the best position to make that happen.

xp. damn it, i thought you were being earnest, that's your MO

If you hate TSoM you *are* the Nazis basically

This sounds a bit silly.

This sounds fine with me. I don't really need the Nazis in The Sound of Music to have authentic period uniforms for me to know they're Nazis.

yes, plus TRIGGERS! OOOH, TRIGGGERSSSSSSSS

sensssssssitivity > history

pick a different fucking play

I understand instead of goose-stepping, they'll be popping and locking

*'knuck if you buck' plays* smile if you heil

lollll

:D that's gonna be stuck in my head all day

this is fucking wild, and I imagine many around these parts are familiar with Clover (he wrote for Spin in the 90s, right?)

THREAD: I'm on record as saying that there are a lot of sincere and principled people working the campus politics/free speech beat, but lately I've grown much more cynical about the entire thing. I'd like to give you an example of why.

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) March 18, 2019

and he did the Sugar High blog

that's nuts

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

I agree. I kinda doubt the left is going to rally around him since white guys talking about killing a bunch of people are not a popular groups nowadays

there are lots of examples of hypocrisy re free speech but i'm not sure this is one. would anyone get away with calling for a the murder of minorities even as a joke? it's obviously a different character of offense than what normally makes the "free speech on college campus" beat rounds.

― Mordy, Monday, March 18, 2019 2:33 PM (thirteen minutes ago)

the police are not a protected class

I'm also not really outraged or anything, seems like the only people who care about this are republicans, let them wear themselves out and if he gets fired I'll be mad

i don't see why they're being a protected class or not has to do with anything and i don't think clover should lose his job. but i don't think it's some terrible hypocrisy that the right is going after this guy for calling for police to be killed while defending right wingers for less dramatic statements. if you can show me right wing media rallying around someone calling for anyone to be killed (protected class or not) as a free speech issue then i'd agree w/ the original tweeter's conceit.

the point of free speech is that it's supposed to not be dependent upon the content of the speech, so calling for his head for this speech while defending other speech is kind of by definition hypocritical

I think maybe we agree broadly that there is a lot of cherry-picking that goes on whenever people write these sorts of "why isn't anyone paying aTtEnTiOn to tHiS" pieces. often there are people 'talking about it' that the writer chooses not to highlight. also, not every example is interesting or worth writing about (this one prob is tho!)

sorry just talking to myself now

You guys are right on the question of the will to defend Clover, but of course it's hypocrisy. Sure, swapping in "minorities" for cops makes it seem real bad, but how about: “People think that terrorists need to be reformed. They need to be killed.”

bad analogy. people talk about killing terrorists all the time

At first I read that as 'People that think terrorists need to be reformed should be killed.'