Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

with polite discourse iirc

how many of these fucking letters have there been by now? you only have to change a few words of this from 2015:

https://feministkilljoys.com/2015/02/15/you-are-oppressing-us/

...the explanation of the cancellation seems to be in the end what the cancellation was about: the desire for more evidence of the stifling of debate and the censoring of some [critical feminist] views. These views then get expressed again as if they are being stifled. They get repeated by being presented as prohibited.

Whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.

...

Of course people protested against this letter. I protested too: I felt deeply enraged by it. But this will happen quickly ... those who protest against the letter will be understood as the harassers. Mark my words! The protests against the letter can then even be used to confirm the truth stated by the letter; this is what is generative about it; that is how it is working...

These intellectuals would've counseled MLK to be patient.

In defense of cancel culture, a thread:

One of the markers of canceling is that it is crowd action. Being canceled is not being fired, being jailed, being excommunicated. It can lead to these things, but they are separate acts, carried out by agents with official power. 1/10

— William Clare Roberts (@MarxinHell) July 8, 2020

lol

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eca-g8PU0AA98Kw?format=png&name=small

if the cancelling cancellers cancel the cancellers then who will cancel the canceller cancelling cancellers?

he had this one prepared before he even signed

i fucking hate that guy's fucking guts

Good to see you can still get paid for taking a shit online, consuming that shit (for money) and then vomiting it up again for yet more money. If you’re a lazy reactionary, you never need to stop writing the same thing over and over again.

yeah that is obviously self-serving crap

re: MLK i did use the term 'graceful direct action' tbftm

True intellectualism is only achieved by reflexively supporting every person whose positions you disagree with no matter how vile. I agreed because I also disagreed and that’s how we can all agree. Debateception. https://t.co/wD7DqN6Jbz

— della - anachronistic labor organizer (@della_morte_) July 8, 2020

the only way out of this Fucked mess (sorry dril) is tbh good-faith engagement between different coalitions, and it feels like things are increasingly entrenched

otm -- on a tactical level regarding taking down the fascists in charge, this type of stuff is just not productive. But there are other goals and agendas going on ... and not just getting rid of the fascists in charge. There definitely is a shit-ton of insular posturing and power plays with these letters and thinkpieces and call-outs, etc.

but also not otm -- Though when one is inside, or kinda inside or familiar with the inside, these things are important. ... Like on the one hand you have the "we just have to think of the big picture" ideology that is dismissive of stuff like outrage over white supremacy and/or rape culture in academic poetry circles. ... But, people have daily lives and work and some of that involves academic poetry circles, and if they see injustice and grossness in these smaller cultures, then they shouldn't be shamed for that. ... It's like shaming the abused partner of a righteous activist or everyone's favorite musician or whatever. ... it often results in this feeling of "you should shut up and suffer for the greater good." ... And if the "greater good" is supposed to entail equity and uh, people not being abused by their more powerful partners, then it would make a fuckton of sense for you to stop and say, "wait a minute ... so, this greater good is what exactly?"

I think there's also the historical "sons killing the fathers and taking their place in power" thing going on ... the people signing this letter have power that is threatened. It is natural that they would be defensive. It is also natural that those they are afraid of feel like it is "their turn."

Idk on a local level, I've seen good examples of "cancel culture" and some really egregious bad ones that are like the caricatures the "creepy liberals" pose. ... I'm not going to go into detail because no one involved is like "important" ... except for maybe to a couple of people on this thread, and we can discuss it privately ... Hi Ted! Miss you!

Argue as much as you want, but obey!

— Asad Haider (@generalityiii) July 8, 2020

classic

Good to see you can still get paid for taking a shit online, consuming that shit (for money) and then vomiting it up again for yet more money.

2 girls 1 open letter

hot take incoming! i agree with jesse "virtue" singal's extremely trenchant headline - the reaction _does_ prove why it was necessary! if singal and crew don't act, repeatedly and blatantly, in bad faith, the intersectional left would have nothing to do but have arcane debates on theory with no relevance to anybody's life. it's only when important liberals pull this sort of horseshit that anybody has any reason to _listen_ to us when we talk about why this is a fucking huge ongoing problem. people learn slowly, over and over again, and it's not through repeated applications of "edge cases", it's through repeated uncalled for, unnecessary, and egregiously wrong actions taken by "public intellectuals". if they didn't keep setting up big neon signs pointing to their privilege it would be a lot harder for people to see.

mmhmm

It sorta feels like a bunch of large nutritious fish hurled themselves into our boat before we could even bait the water

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 7, 2020

Hilariously ridiculous. And several people on there who have tried to cancel me personally. The weakness of liberalism is totally out in the open.

— Dave Rubin (@RubinReport) July 7, 2020

this is lol tho

lol he’s so mad they didn’t ask him, the one guy so dumb most of the IDW keeps him at arm’s length

I hope J3ss3 Sing@l gets a loathsome disease btw

otm

Please burn my book

I signed the Harpers letter because there were lots of people who also signed the Harpers letter whose views I disagreed with. I thought that was the point of the Harpers letter. https://t.co/ozFsAmXq9R

— Malcolm Gladwell (@Gladwell) July 8, 2020

weirdly gladwell's tweet is only the second worst there, even if he is a colossally awful human

Please burn my book

― anvil

please publish my book and then burn it

I hope J3ss3 Sing@l gets a loathsome disease btw

― all cats are beautiful (silby)

am really straining to imagine something that would make them more loathsome

I feel like McWhorter gave away what he thinks is being cancelled, saying he doesn't get invited to linguistics conferences because of his views on things not related to linguistics, and that students are prevented from hearing his important ideas. And yeah I guess this is the kind of stuff leftist profs complained about back in the 70s, but it's just academic conferences- wgaf? McWhorter's voice is amplified a lot more than most linguists' are.

HOT OFF THE PRESS

What kind of demand would you have liked? Someone’s firing? That was the point of the letter, to simply express support the right of people to disagree without consequence. https://t.co/HP4PaGu1pZ

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) July 8, 2020

And yeah I guess this is the kind of stuff leftist profs complained about back in the 70s, but it's just academic conferences- wgaf? McWhorter's voice is amplified a lot more than most linguists' are.

Yeah, but if (as he has stated many times) he would rather be known as a linguist, and build his stature within the academy, than as a political pundit, lining up Sunday morning talk show bookings, I could see how this could be a real problem.

does taibbi pay people to search his name to defend him on twitter or does he just have a lot of sock puppets

there are certain things about him you can’t say w/o being swarmed & i can see what he wants to maintain that state of affairs

"certain things"

he’s a rapist

oh no is that cancellation

Maybe if you keep trying hard enough.