Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

able was i ere i saw elba

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

I'm assuming imago didn't read the New Republic article that was posted upthread.

imo the idea of getting deplatformed as made several powerful bigots soooooo scared, and overall i think that slaps

I wasn't saying that trans people and their allies should aim to act more respectably (and they should be as out-there and queer as they damn well please) but that they shouldn't waste their energy in the Fight

fighting is tiring and debilitating

also Milo didn't fail because he was more evil than the others, he failed because he showed weakness and because the revanchist right would only tolerate a gay spokesman so far

meanwhile professor beef is borne aloft on comatose bed by the wellwishes of a million radicalised sadsacks

fucking Greil Marcus and David Blight signed the letter

well at this point i want to make it clear that this Harpers thing seems completely gratuitous and you shouldn't need a letter signed by a bunch of 'public intellectuals' (i.e. mostly reactionary windbags) to affirm the free-speech rights of people who very much will always have free speech. my point is more about cancellation and online struggle as a useful tactic for the progressive left

I wasn't saying that trans people and their allies should aim to act more respectably (and they should be as out-there and queer as they damn well please) but that they shouldn't waste their energy in the Fight

the other thing is if i ignore these people they get published by the fucking atlantic or whatever

they don't care what happened to Milo, the right is always more than happy to blame one of their own and have them banished, and they never seem to think they'll be the next one

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Never in the history of ILX have more keystrokes been wasted on such a non-issue. Concern over cancel culture is so much conservative concern-trolling. They have no love of free speech and would welcome the fascist boot if it meant putting undesirables (non-white, LGBTQ, etc.) in their place.

There are significant efforts to undermine trans people’s freedom and to make their lives difficult in this country and that effort is underpinned by the slow drip drip drip of this nonsense in every “respectable” paper in the country along with its bestselling living authors. Even the most benign stuff out there has someone feeling the need to say “most trans children are autistic” like the implications of that aren’t alarming.

― scampos mentis (gyac), Wednesday, 8 July 2020 15:06 (forty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah obviously i know this and the times newspaper should be sunk into thames mud through the direct action of the people of london, but it feels like this discourse - pro or anti - enjoys talking about trans people rather than engaging with them. why aren't there more trans people on television, in films, in parliament? that's where the pressure should be

unfortunately i'm pretty sure representation won't save us

if only it were contained to this thread, or to conservatives, PBKR.

the other thing is if i ignore these people they get published by the fucking atlantic or whatever

the other thing is if i ignore these people they get published by the fucking atlantic or whatever

― mellon collie and the infinite bradness (BradNelson), Wednesday, July 8, 2020

This letter is basically an admission that their home publications would!

"are trans people people? just posing this question in the spirit of free debate"

you can stand in defiance of bigotry without letting them dominate your agenda? yeah ghouls like helen lewis exist but no you don't have to respond. how did dr mlk respond to racists? a combination of graceful direct action and rhetoric of unity iirc

There are significant efforts to undermine trans people’s freedom and to make their lives difficult in this country and that effort is underpinned by the slow drip drip drip of this nonsense in every “respectable” paper in the country along with its bestselling living authors. Even the most benign stuff out there has someone feeling the need to say “most trans children are autistic” like the implications of that aren’t alarming.

― scampos mentis (gyac), Wednesday, 8 July 2020 15:06 (forty-two seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah obviously i know this and the times newspaper should be sunk into thames mud through the direct action of the people of london, but it feels like this discourse - pro or anti - enjoys talking about trans people rather than engaging with them. why aren't there more trans people on television, in films, in parliament? that's where the pressure should be

as Neanderthal carefully pointed out, there are certainly instances where we can argue whether people have been unfairly or too-harshly targeted or punished (such as the guy who was fired recently for simply citing scholarship on Twitter, I'm not going to bother refreshing my memory on the specifics, I'm sure most of you know what I'm talking about). the problems arise when people a) start conflating those incidents with folks facing consequences for genuinely vile speech and behavior, and b) act like this whole blob of unrelated stories with markedly different inputs and outcomes is endemic of some larger, creeping fascism.

terfs are so pathetic and dislikeable though, really my phrase 'the oxygen of conflict' above is key to their cachet, they feed from the fight

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

― imago

i'm gonna try to be respectful even though i'll be honest it's difficult for me

for me it's not a matter of _who_ you're speaking for but a matter of who you're speaking on behalf of. being directive that, telling people how to best ally with trans people, look, it's not your place, and it's not because you're cis, it's because it violates intersectional self-determination. i got trans friends who espouse the same views you expressed and we've had it out as well. we're all different.

some people don't fucking want to be confronted with j.k. rowling that all the fucking time and that is absolutely fair and there _does_ need to be uplifting of positive trans role models as well but to me, no, i don't hold with "ignore them and they'll go away", i think if someone says something hateful that needs to be pointed out. for me, for far too long this sort of hate speech has gone unacknowledged and unchallenged and it's really important to me that we not go back to that way of doing things.

but that's my belief, i wouldn't dream of telling other people, trans or cis, that they _need_ to call out rowling no matter how important it is to me. that wouldn't be appropriate of me to do, wouldn't be my place.

Wow, that is a truly atrocious letter.

"We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters" is really something. Woulda been better if they'd just said "we want to stake our right to troll, edgelord and devils'-advocate for reaction, then back away to the safe quarters of our sinecures to sip brandy when people react."

'

Helen Lewis article quite interesting actually

damn, very weird of the Times to publish this pic.twitter.com/NGmupknhj1

— Dr. 1312 Strategy (@inthesedeserts) July 8, 2020

HLew article is embarrassing, like all her stuff tbf.

can you get a badge and certificate that sells Gender Constable

sorry, was pretending the fake times article was by helen lewis, agreed that she can get in the bin.

i approve entirely of savage parody as a response form, good work lol

btw Justin Vivian Bond doesnt consider 'tranny' a slur

i don't use it and aint planning to, but ppl in that community disagree

that one is actually complicated, and it's not what anyone's talking about here

sorry, should've tagged that with </thought-police>

Rowing, Linehan, and the Guardian newspaper don't present themselves or think of themselves as RW...its more of radicalized center. Does this make a difference? maybe, not sure - but they're not PJW, Shapiro, thriving off the reaction and attention. It is hurting their brand, Lineman has essentially thrown away his career over this and does Rowing write books anymore? I'm not sure on the figures for the failing Guardian newspaper

the problem isn’t tweeting at JKR and company, it’s the fact they’re so insanely thin-skinned that they think a thousand people tweeting “fuck off” means they need to double down on their hateful rhetoric because so many people are so mean

one or two people tweeting vile hate at or posting personal details of a single trans person on twitter — which happens all the goddamn time — is infinitely worse than a hundred people telling the wizard fiction lady to suck their collective dicks, because the latter has no power in the interaction other than hurting her precious feelings

I guess the only small thing to be gained by ignoring the transphobes completely is they might shut up and just keep writing ignorant and hateful things into their work read by thousands, if not millions!

I don’t think the crowds tweeting insults affect things either way, because they were preceded by people who tried to engage thoughtfully who were ignored or trivialized

maybe the bigger issue is that any person on twitter with a significant following is going to get a basic level of noisy responses and engagement that are low quality, and these idiots have been taking the noisy praise as useful and the noisy disagreement as personal attacks

"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?"

Let bigotry dominate discourse without any consequences.

The daftness - I'm being gentle here - is thinking of spontaneous bursts of "fuck you" as a coordinated strategy.

Bitching at the wind

does Rowing write books anymore?

I hope not.

i am saying precisely that it shouldn't dominate discourse, exactly

JKR has a book for younger children out right now, her twitter is 90% retweeting kids pictures of the ickabog, peppered with 10% transphobic freeze peach bollocks.

could I get the list of signatories broken down by age, net worth, and whether or not they have or had an active twitter account? could Vox help with this

https://lgbtqnation-assets.imgix.net/2020/05/EZMe7K9WkAESo1L-500x534.jpg

i am saying precisely that it shouldn't dominate discourse, exactly

― imago

yeah i got opinions too but telling people what i think they should or shouldn't talk about is about as effective as going out there and telling people that "gay" should mean happy. people gonna fuckin' people and i don't have any expectation that people are gonna change what they do just on my say-so.

https://m.soundcloud.com/citationsneeded/news-brief-the-harpers-letter-and-our-extremely-narrow-self-serving-definition-of-cancel-culture

"Ignore the troll" has been a losing strategy online for...as long as I've been online at least, but it's doubly preposterous when applied to Rowling, who is literally one of the most successful authors in the world and I doubt will suffer the sort of consequences that a middling British comedy writer might. You might as well ask people to ignore Disney.

Also, LJ, this:

how did dr mlk respond to racists?

You mean well but if there's something no one should be doing in the year of our lord 2020 it's ask any social movement to behave more like the popular perception of MLK.

I was about to say: bringing in the sanitized version of MLK into this argument is some truly sophomoric shit.

Pasteurized MLK.

bravo

remember how they still killed him