Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

I bring joy to this forum. all the time. for free. and you want to cancel me. I stand with Noam Chomsky against all of you.

i do kind of remember sleeping bag now that i think about it. But maybe because of user:sleep.

follow the posts toward the troll-filled land

esby comes from a land of ice and snow iirc

he is our overlords

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9jTonnpRo0

Oh no Taibbs is on Chapo, this will not end well

Cancellations all round folx

this is actually one of the few debates I'd watch/listen to (very) select people square off on at length tbh, like Nwanevu vs one of the less moronic signees or something

ILX: Love it or Leave it

― sarahell, Thursday, July 9, 2020 3:17 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Both of those things are hard to do

This thread is worth reading:

I get the longing--I even share it--but the naivete is annoying. Online pundits should know (and factor in) that social media as a "public square" where "good faith debate" happens is a thing of the past. Disagreement here happens through trolling, sea-lioning, ratios, dunks.

— Lili Loofbourow (@Millicentsomer) July 10, 2020

I find her fatalism a tad off-putting but that's more otm than not.

In case you're still not following this, after Emily VanDerWerff expressed dismay publicly about her Vox colleague Yglesias signing the letter, both his and J3ss3 Sing@l's armies of ghouls descended on her with non-stop harassment and death threats to the point where she left temporarily. The latter, of course, has used this as an opportunity to explain once again how he's the real victim here.

Obviously anyone threatening Emily is a vile pos but I did find her decision to speak out in this way kind of puzzling considering iirc the letter had nothing to do with trans people or trans rights, it just happened to be signed by a few transphobes. But presumably if you dug into the writing of everyone who signed you’d find plenty of objectionable shit. For example I don’t think anyone would infer Chomsky is sympathetic to Bari Weiss’ anti Palestinian campaigns.

Obviously the whistle had nothing to do with the local greyhound track, it just so happened all the dogs started barking when I blew it.

i actually read that thread (god help me, i actually read a thread, _on twitter_, posted by a slate writer). it's a nice eli5.

i agree with what she says. i would, me being me, go further.

DUMPLINGS!! is poisoned in part, yes, due to difficulty in telling who is acting in good faith and in bad faith, but most of the difficulty is around boundaries, around the unwillingness (_not_ the inability) of these platforms to control and diminish the effect of bad faith actors on their platforms. the libertarian nostrum i learned in my youth was that "the solution to hate speech is more speech", but having had 25 years to test that theory, it doesn't seem to bear out in practice. rather, i have observed a sort of gresham's law of discourse, where bad faith discourse drives out good faith discourse.

i did see that new republic article attempting to reconcile the intersectional left's focus on deplatforming with liberalism. it's compellingly written and persuasive, and maybe for some intersectional leftists, it's true! having thought about it, it's not true for me.

i feel that construing unconstrained discourse as a universal good is a key tenet of at least american liberalism, both "classical" and contemporary, as is the notion propounded by george carlin that "words can't hurt". i feel that my desire to place constraints on that discourse places me fundamentally at odds with liberal thought.

over my long history of the internet i have seen many, many online communication spaces, from usenet onward, fail because of an unwillingness or inability to place proper constraints on what is expressed there, because of a foundational belief, both technologically convenient and panglossian, that all people are acting in fundamentally good faith. the internet early on developed a strong culture of ridicule and shame in large part, i suspect, because those were the only methods of social control available to those users.

we can do better, _need_ to do better, but when some of us dare to suggest such things the response from key bulwarks of the liberal establishment is that we are the _real_ monsters.

it's not a question of whether it's "worse" to be naive or trolling - it's that there's no functional difference in terms of outcomes.

ignorance of the coded meaning of one's words is no excuse.

not helping things of course is the adorably cute habit this board has of replacing certain words it deems less than conducive to good-faith discussion in such a manner as to render what i'm saying absurd and nonsensical. i'm perfectly capable of being absurd and nonsensical without your help, stet.

the twitter thread parts about subtext & meta-arguments are extremely true & underacknowledged in these discussions. but granting things are worse in some ways now this does sort of seem to imply social media, or any online or offline space for that matter, was once a genuine public square where good faith debate happened? I’d want to acknowledge that ideal as impossible & also weaponised in bad faith in harmful (& meta-argumentative) ways

I wonder what speech the rich transphobes signing that letter are in favour of, and how platforming that might threaten the safety of a trans woman. I wonder how co-signing a letter amd therefore adding your tacit support to the famous wizard author who’s enraged she can’t talk about trans people without pushback might come across as a slap in the face to a colleague?

I’d want to acknowledge that ideal as impossible & also weaponised in bad faith in harmful (& meta-argumentative) ways

― If you choose too long a name, your new display name will be truncated in (Left)

nah i'd say this is a "perfect is the enemy of the good" thing, for me at least it's not about achieving an ideal of an Enlightenment salon or whatever, it's just about doing the work to make things less awful.

you want to know what my goal here is? i would love it if dealing with mental health crises, either that of one of my friends or my own, wasn't a nearly daily feature of my life. maybe, for instance, i could get to the point where i would only have to talk someone down once every two weeks or so. that would be so fucking amazing.

not helping things of course is the adorably cute habit this board has of replacing certain words it deems less than conducive to good-faith discussion in such a manner as to render what i'm saying absurd and nonsensical. i'm perfectly capable of being absurd and nonsensical without your help, stet.

Don't blame stet for that; that string substitution dates back to my moderation tenure.

ok, sorry stet. could someone on 77 at least provide a list of string substitutions? i'll be honest with you that was a pretty nasty surprise there.

kate I genuinely hope that happens, I would love for something better than that to happen. just saying there are things left out in the (v mild version of a) before-the-fall narrative hinted at in the twitter thread & some of those things led to where we are now. but that’s not the main point of it anyway so nm

I was really happy when I stumbled across the trigger tbh

i agree with you left, the internet was never eden. this idea of a wonderland despoiled by corporations, bullshit. the internet grew out of a military intelligence project and had its social structure defined by a small group of highly intelligent people, most of whom were white men, most of whom were not particularly socially adept. fuck "original intent", we need something that _works_.

I "met" VDW long ago on a pod and they were nice knowledgeable and cool. Yglesias otoh is pretty reliably a dumbass. that said i confess i don't quite get what VDW was hoping to accomplish by making their issue w Yglesias public as opposed to private/internal

I am into this Goya boycott.

xp: A lot of people live their lives online in some form of radical transparency, particularly people who are Verified(TM) on various platforms and feel they need to make statements for their audiences. It is entirely possible that they received DMs from people asking for them to take a stand; it's also possible that those hurt by the letter who follow them would take silence as agreement and this was meant to clearly delineate that their stance didn't match that of the signatories.

My personal take on the letter is "voicing an opinion ALWAYS carries risk and it's actually a good thing when people interrogate their thoughts before saying them, you giant babies"

i would argue that the internet is a city, and mark zuckerberg is its bob moses, tearing down the hastily and poorly constructed shantytowns of geocities and replacing them with the gleaming and highly convenient superhighway we were promised. expressing displeasure with his work doesn't imply a desire to bring back the shantytowns.

My personal take on the letter is "voicing an opinion ALWAYS carries risk and it's actually a good thing when people interrogate their thoughts before saying them, you giant babies"

― shout-out to his family (DJP), Friday, July 10, 2020 7:57 AM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

otm!!!

Yep

Call me crazy, Kate, but while I appreciate your admittance to being at odds with liberal thought and agree with you in most ways, I'm also wondering why any of us treat liberal democracy as a thing that has ever existed? Or free speech as anything other than a cudgel with which to foment hatred toward an Other and displace violence onto non-"enlightened" populations? Maybe I'm too lost in the sauce, but I'm just not really sure that either are anything except myths.

Unable to face up to the basic fact that what once belonged to the exception is now the norm (the fact that liberal democracies, like any other regime, are capable of incorporating criminality into their system), we find ourselves plunged head-deep into an endless racket of words and gestures, symbols and language, delivered with increasing brutality like a long series of blows to the head. There are mimetological blows too: secularism and its mirror image, fundamentalism. All this, every blow, delivered with perfect cynicism. For, let’s face it, all the surnames have lost their first names, as it were, and there are no more names to name the outrage, no more language to speak the unspeakable. Almost nothing stands up any longer, except in the form of a kind of viscous and rancid snot, draining from the nostrils without even a single sneeze. Everywhere, appeals to good sense, to common sense, appeals to the good old Republic – as we watch it bend over, bearing the weight and grinning while its spine cracks – appeals to our old friend the humanism of cowards...

That's Mbembe, btw.

My ex has a infuriating habit of posting uninformed shit and then when getting called on it politely by friends who have more knowledge on the subject who are trying to share their perspective, she erupts and shuts down the conversation because people had the audacity to disagree with her. She'd go into attack mode ("READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN...THEN READ WHAT YOU WROTE!"...omg 0wned!)

This is naturally one reason why she's an ex, but I find it amusing when people think their words, written or spoken, are sacrosanct, no matter how ill-informed or offensive they are.

I get disagreed with often and hey sometimes I get called out on something I said that's upsetting to somebody and I learn from it. It's called life, y'know. Don't start a discussion if you just want hi-fives

DJP OTM

also i like the zuckerberg as moses analogy a lot

I'm also wondering why any of us treat liberal democracy as a thing that has ever existed? Or free speech as anything other than a cudgel with which to foment hatred toward an Other and displace violence onto non-"enlightened" populations?

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table)

i get and respect where you're coming from and i do think there are certain foundational myths to such things as the free press (it's seldom mentioned, for instance, that Publick Occurrences was edited by someone who had a history of using the press to foment anti-Catholic violence), but honestly, that hasn't been my experience with "free speech". when i was young "free speech" crusaders were opposing the communications decency act and all of that sort of neo-Comstockery. censorship can be as much a cudgel as free speech is.

xpost I also hope my post wasn't read as trying to shut you down, wasn't my intention. Maybe Neanderthal's post right after just made me anxious...

Yeah, I guess that so often what I view as "real" censorship at present is done by the very people who are pretending to uphold the supposedly magnanimous, humanistic values of "liberty" and "free speech" and so on, so it becomes part and parcel of the mythos. Historically speaking, though, I tend to agree with you a bit more.

really what this thread has made me appreciative of is what a dizzyingly high-context culture we are in the internet age, that intersectionality doesn't just mean correctly decoding high-context information within the context of one culture but dealing with the byzantine web of non-overlapping referents, or referents that overlap but have different meanings - to take just one example that fetty wap song is not about what i as a white person initially took it to be about.

and this is what frustrates me so much about "liberals", they are so committed to their particular culture as the monoculture. not only do they tend to not understand that "free speech" isn't about their right to say "fuck the draft", especially given that the us hasn't had a draft since the fucking 1970s, but they have the tendency view any questioning of their axiomatic ideals, some of which have strong empirical evidence against them, as the greatest possible danger next to which all others must wait in line. oh they want to fix things, but they have to be at the reins. it has to be done their way. and after seeing what a fucking balls-up they've made of things in my lifetime, you know, i don't really see how it can possibly benefit me to consent to that.

^^^ that last sentence tho

'liberals' is reductive as fuck though

like are we talking neoliberal power hegemony here or are we talking the liberals who early-adopt lgbt rights and are instrumental in changing social mores for the better or everything in between or what

like, would it be so crazy to claim that BLM is a liberal movement

not “crazy” but more way reductive than what you’re complaining about

it's not a question of whether it's "worse" to be naive or trolling - it's that there's no functional difference in terms of outcomes.

― Kate (rushomancy)

are you talking about you or me there

when did 'bourgeoisie' elide into 'liberals' exactly, there is overlap sure but not as much as the complete overlap we seem to see claimed here

if you can't construct a good-faith reading of what i'm saying, neither you or i benefit from our discussing this.

like, what is liberal monoculture, it feels to me that there are lots and lots of very different liberal cultures, many of which are constantly changing

sorry, that was harsh, lj if you want to discuss this with me send me an ilxmail and we can talk about it in email, i think any discussion we have would probably be really in-depth and time-consuming and bore the pants off of everyone else here and i want to leave room for other people here.

kate have you read ilx lately we're all incredibly boring

yeah this is the place to have the discussion