Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

the people who'll say they support the message but didn't know that fucking X dumbass signed it as well

idg why this should matter. If you agree with the message who cares who else signs it? I guess birds of a feather and all that but JFB's sniveling apology is going to give her enemies and detractors a whole lot of "lol the irony" ammo

If I sign an open letter to, say, prevent people from killing puppies for sport, and unbeknownst to me the head of the local KKK chapter also signs it, I can still publicly denounce the Klan without apologizing for supporting the message, no?

agreed that open letters are problematic in general though

this third-way culture war uprising

lol, Chomsky is a Clinton, huh?

This is why i am only a Groucho Marxist. Whatever it is, I'm against it.

I quite like the coinage 'third-way culture war'. Represents a coalition who aren't necessarily MAGAs or Petersonians, but aren't Of The Online Left either - they're all kind of Piers Morgans and Gary Linekers, and they will tut while the world burns and they will care deeply about the 'idiots' on 'both sides'. Also they probably have deeply suspect views on trans rights for reasons that aren't quite clear

there is definitely a vituperative mob mentality to a lot of this and a desire to banish the wicked witch

how does this restrict the right to free speech? how do you prevent multiple people from expressing their anger at the same time on open media platforms? whose job is it to win the hearts and minds of people who express ideas that support or amplify the language of violent prejudice? how do you cancel somebody who lacks a public platform? when is a fit of the vapours a concrete example of an existential threat to somebody's ability to express their thoughts - without regard for the wellbeing or safety of other people?

in short, what are the "cancel cancel culture" people actually concerned about?

but didn't know that fucking X dumbass signed it as well

Guilt by association is generally a dumbass concept. ILX loves it.

in short, what are the "cancel cancel culture" people actually concerned about?

According to a British academic friend, people calling for unclean authors to be purged from syllabuses and libraries.

something that isn't gonna happen, or has happened throughout the history of canon-forming then

interesting response here

https://newrepublic.com/article/158346/willful-blindness-reactionary-liberalism

she is the only person on the left I've seen where you have comments below with 2k likes from people saying 'yeah I come from the alt-right but you've really made me reconsider'

this is hardly true (outside your own experience that is). There's much debate about this right now re that Rising show.

(should you go on Fox News / work with Mike Lee to get out of Yemen / play beer pong with Steve Bannon / go on Joe Rogan / delete as appropriate, depending on your stance)

a chilling look into the future

To the day I die, I will never forget the moment Darren Grimes repurposed Martin Niemöller’s poem about the Nazi slaughter of Communists, socialists, trade unionists and Jews, replacing them with statues, comedians and racists pic.twitter.com/QL2PYGNudO

— Owen Jones 🌹 (@OwenJones84) July 2, 2020

presumably all the replies to that are "sounds like SOMEBODY doesn't believe in free speech after all!"

and tbf they'd have a point, this is cowardly vacillation is it not

― imago, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 5:58 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oh, don't worry, J3ss3 5ingal called out her, as well as another trans woman and a Black woman so that his army of idiot followers could go dogpile them. Because he's against cancel culture, you see.

interesting response here

https://newrepublic.com/article/158346/willful-blindness-reactionary-liberalism

― Anti-Cop Ponceortium (Camaraderie at Arms Length)

awesome

That TNR piece is really good. Much better than anything I would have expected from that magazine (is it still a magazine?).

the problem with any statement against "cancel culture" is that we're talking about a wide range of things. There is someone local here who has been accused of rape by many, many girls. There is now a viral FB post circulating, detailing these claims from specific people. That kind of thing is important, because those types of predators could have flown under the radar decades ago. People who say "what about innocent until proven guilty?" in instances like that are bad actors, especially we tend to believe other accusations with far less evidence.

Likewise, circulating business owners who say extremely racist shit in reaction to BLM (which has been an issue here), or send offensive messages suggesting old people were expendable during Coronavirus, like one local Tampa business did, is useful. People can decide for themselves whether to spend money at these places, and I certainly won't. And obviously celebrities like Louis C.K. deserved the backlash he got, as did Dave Chappelle.

But...I do see an emergence of the cancellation getting ahead of the facts in some cases. For instance, a friend of mine and others observed a local FB poster harassing BLM supporters with highly offensive racist FB posts, calling Black people "monkeys", posting pics of monkeys in response, and also posting racial slurs at Black individuals. This friend contacted the business he worked at (listed on his profile), and shared with the owner the messages, and he was terminated not long after. So this dude learned about the consequences of his speech real hard and real fast - ok, cool!

Unfortunately, said friend seemed to have gotten a high from being the person to get this asshole cancelled, and started seeking out other instances online, and pursuing calls to boycott/get people fired that were fairly dubious in nature. For instance, she started calling for the boycott of a CPA who practiced hundreds of miles away from us (meaning none of us were likely to use this guy anyway). Because he had a racist employee that he refused to fire! On digging, the crime of the employee was that he posted a picture that said Florida Cracker, which my friend insisted meant "slave master", insinuating he was making a racist statement that he endorsed slavery and Black subjugation. That isn't at all what "Florida Cracker" means - Florida Cracker has a very different history than the generic term "cracker", and even the latter isn't believed to mean "slave master", but usually a term for poor white men who raised cattle, and later on, just as kind of a catch-all derogatory term for white people. There was nothing to suggest the guy was racist at all - based on her incorrect memory of what "Florida Cracker" meant, she immediately assumed hate speech and got in a prolonged conversation with the owner, attempting to get him to fire him, which was unsuccessful.

I shared that I believed she was mistaken and shared the accepted meaning of the term, and she responded politely, but doubled down that she believed he meant it in a racist way. Fortunately, other people didn't really see much merit in it and it died out.

There was also instances like this: http://www.citypages.com/arts/the-smear-a-career-killing-lie-almost-ruined-this-rising-minneapolis-dance-star/504712371. Where a case of mistaken identity lead to someone with a similar name having their career targeted, with letters documenting the hateful things they allegedly done to people in their industry who could ruin her career (when it happened to be someone else with the same name).

I've also seen people attempting cancellation over things as weak as who these people are following on Twitter. When for people who protect their tweets, the only way to message them is to follow them first. so if you were trying to call this person out in a DM for shitty behavior, you'd have to follow them, and sometimes you forget to unfollow after (or you're having an ongoing discussion).

and then there's the past digging. I have a ton of posts from USEnet under my government name still out there on the internet from when I was a teenager (mid-late 90s). At the time, I went to a Fundamentalist church that had backward views on homosexuality, and I also didn't know any gay people or have any gay friends (though I did have a gay cousin), so unfortunately, my views were largely governed by my church and not wisdom. I definitely wrote some things about homosexuals that I'd consider homophobic today. By age 19, I had left this church and had done a complete 180 on my views, and renounced my old views. I was also anti-affirmative action because I was uneducated on the matter and believed what my father said about it, so I would post anti-affirmative action messages. I reversed course and supported affirmative action in my early 20s when I realized what it really entailed after taking a series of college courses. Yet these things are out there on the internet, from 18-20 years ago, and if I ever became notorious for something, somebody could dig them up to cancel me for my past transgressions. the chances are slim of that happening, since I'm a fairly unremarkable person, but I don't know that digging into someone's distant past is ALWAYS fair game, as it largely depends on the context.

I don't think that it's fair to say cancel culture is inherently toxic because its definitely helped the marginalized and abused have a voice and brought monsters' crimes (literal or proverbial) into the public eye. But there are definitely times when individual instances of cancel culture result in toxic pile-ons that may exceed the actual crime they're in response to.

as for this letter? yeah, fuck this letter - I don't think their aims were very noble here.

Never put me on. A colleague in a professional org my sis belongs to added my sister's name without her consent. So mad at this person rn.

— Kaitlyn Greenidge (@surlybassey) July 8, 2020

From a medium that apoligized from signing The Letter™️, this is how I think it happened.

I think Singal and Herzog being there despite being absolute nobody losers, tells me TERFs organized this. First, they got some big name first.

Then... pic.twitter.com/2vMefvJPfn

— Eme🌼Flores (@devoted_pupa) July 8, 2020

the TNR piece is excellent and should put to bed a lot of the arguments oh if only

This is fantastic:

The general tenor of these arguments should be familiar. The rhetoric of toughening up and relying on individual willpower also features not only in our discourses about racism and sexism but in our debates about the plight of the working class and the poor. This is the ideological ground reactionary liberalism emerges from, and given this, the folly of believing identity politics can be conceptually detached from our other concerns should be plain. What is ultimately at stake in our debates about identity is the very principle of solidarity.

how does this restrict the right to free speech? how do you prevent multiple people from expressing their anger at the same time on open media platforms? whose job is it to win the hearts and minds of people who express ideas that support or amplify the language of violent prejudice? how do you cancel somebody who lacks a public platform? when is a fit of the vapours a concrete example of an existential threat to somebody's ability to express their thoughts - without regard for the wellbeing or safety of other people?

― Committee of Public Scampi (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 8 July 2020 11:45 (forty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

all of these are valid points but they also don't address my point which is: what do these fits of vapours actually achieve except further entrenchment and perpetuation of a culture war that only serves to strengthen the hand of revanchists?

as Limmy has been recently saying: BAMO - block and move on - don't give these ghouls the oxygen of conflict

If you support trans rights, support trans art and the positive accomplishments of trans people, don't engage your projection of JK Rowling in some sort of zero-sum war

The other result of this letter I've seen on Twitter today has been Owen Jones trying to engage in an argument with David Baddiel about Chomsky, and yes, this horror could have been prevented with BOMO.

Sorry, BAMO

Limmy has spoken.

The vapours I was referring to are coming from the free speech belle letterists

OK well my point stands! What does leftist social media anger achieve?

(As opposed to direct action etc)

The rhetoric of toughening up and relying on individual willpower also features not only in our discourses about racism and sexism

I get the intended point, but life is hard, and we die alone.

If you support trans rights, support trans art and the positive accomplishments of trans people, don't engage your projection of JK Rowling in some sort of zero-sum war

― imago, Wednesday, July 8, 2020 5:40 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

.... ok

noodle vague and the tnr piece otm

idk what my projection of jk rowling is, all i know is she’s transphobic

Cancel "culture" (still barf at dignifying this internet phenomenon that is barely divorced from 4chan collective antagonizing with that word) is trash, that letter and all "open" ones like it are trash, and basically all of the responses and arguments stemming from/in response to it are insufferable trash too.

i think everyone should be canceled

(xp) Ah, "everyone's stupid but me," the most Internet of all positions.

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

people really need to stop saying james bennet got fired for publishing the cotton column! he got fired because he published it *without reading it*, which was part of a pattern of him being totally negligent on the job. sulzberger explicitly said this in his statement!

— Jack Hamilton (@jack_hamilton) July 8, 2020

I've literally never thought about J.K. Rowling once in my life like even as I type this I wish you all the peace that I enjoy.

— 💜💜🇺🇸ƈօɛɖ ռǟӄɛɖ ƈɨռɛքɦɨʟɨǟ🇺🇸💜💜 (@NickPinkerton) July 5, 2020

I've been following Nick Pinkerton on Twitter for a while, because some of his opinions on movies were at least smart enough to be worth reading, but in the last few months he's revealed himself to be kind of an asshole. Not a racist or anything, just a smirking "lookit me, the only smart person in this room" dickbag.

On another note...

Pretty lame of @Harpers to remove the Letter's illustration pic.twitter.com/mt3PXrDEoE

— Eli Valley (@elivalley) July 7, 2020

yeah I come from the alt-right but you've really made me reconsidert

why is this approach is so appealing to these types (who are still terrible when they call themselves leftists)? I assume for the same reasons it’s offputting to those who’ve been accused of cancelling said youtuber (you can’t win with these cancel culture takes when any dissenting response is more evidence of cancellation)

If you support trans rights, support trans art and the positive accomplishments of trans people, don't engage your projection of JK Rowling in some sort of zero-sum war

This is a very good take on the whole mess btw

Hamilton Nolan’s satisfying takedown of “today’s letter, published in Harper’s and signed by more than 100 of the worst people in the world of public intellectualism”: The Coddling of the Elites - In These Times: https://t.co/EMV25OH9hu

— Lisa Duggan (@TheFunFury) July 8, 2020

I think what bothers me about the Harper's letter is that it reminds me so much of that "gotcha!" troll approach to public discourse, like that horrible "political compass" that's been floating around the Internet as long as I've been there that somehow magically finds some way to tell everybody who takes the quiz that surprise! they're libertarians. Call up the President and say that you're Canadian prime minister "Jean Poutine" and call him an idiot when he doesn't immediately hang up on you. Send Salman Rushdie a vaguely worded letter defending "freedom of expression" in no concrete terms and then get the most prominent TERF on the planet to sign it.

They make Rowling look good to the same extent that they make Rushdie look bad, this awful fucking zero-sum logic of "both sides" liberalism. I don't know, maybe every prominent public intellectual who signed this went in with both eyes open knowing full well what they were signing onto. If they didn't, maybe that is their responsibility, that they should've expected to be betrayed in this manner. It's none of my business and I shouldn't take it so personally, probably. It's just another in an endless stream of daily disappointments slowly chipping away at my ability to function.

Pinkerton is self-deprecating as well as funny, unp, so i'm not sure what youre seeing.

If you support trans rights, support trans art and the positive accomplishments of trans people, don't engage your projection of JK Rowling in some sort of zero-sum war

― imago

imago, all due respect, but please don't fucking tell me what ways it is _acceptable_ for me to support trans rights

i was speaking to the cisgendered normie-left massive there tbh. the sorts who tweet stuff like 'i burnt all my harry potter books, jk rowling you are cancelled forever!!!'

like, rowling is a bad person and is heading down a dark, glinnery path, sure, but the best way of dealing with this is surely to completely ignore and thus delegitimate her as a public presence, no? otherwise you take jk rowling, human with bad opinions, and reify her as JK ROWLING, TERF MONSTER. and it is this monster that the revanchists can really get behind

Ok but she’s a very high profile person espousing transphobic views in a country where the government just went against the results of a consultation (70% in favour!)on liberalising the self id process to dog whistle to the sake revanchists? Like, trans children are at high risk already and this kind of stuff legitimises dangerous and harmful views that prevent them getting the care they need. What does it achieve? Maybe ‘just’ solidarity, but isn’t that intrinsically worthwhile in this context?

To return to my earlier question, how are you gatekeeping who's allowed to take the piss or tell terfs to fuck off and who is just being naughty?

Cos an unruly mob of bad faith *insert straw man here* and a group of individuals expressing their individual pain, anger and disdain in a public space looks ever so similar

i am not gatekeeping! this is all just advice. you can post 200 tweets a day about how awful jk rowling is for all i really care, i just don't think it'll achieve much. the normalisation and visibility of trans people is the only way to beat the terfs

Trans people and their allies should aim to act more respectably?

I repeat: isn’t showing trans people that you don’t agree with this worthwhile in and of itself? That they’re not alone?