Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

READ WHAT I WROTE AGAIN...THEN READ WHAT YOU WROTE!

sage advice

Would make for a fine board description tbh.

so here are some thoughts about "online discourse" / "free speech"

something that continues to be chronically under-examined is that speech itself has been radically transformed through the displacement and fragmentation of traditional subjectivity, the fracturing / proliferation of discursive methods, and an almost total lack of clarity of what we mean by "public" in terms of where, exactly, speech acts occur. our increasing inter-connectedness and the rapid transmission of information mask a deeply dehumanizing estrangement. our notions of liberty and self-determination are increasingly unhelpful, and not merely because we've learned to be complicit in de-historicizing and mythologizing eighteenth-century ideology. it's also because the majority of our conversations — and in the case of some, the majority of lived experience — occur online, in commons which were long ago enclosed; the reasons for our existence there, and what we may have to say, are largely irrelevant to the people who facilitate our interactions. what it means to stick up for our "values" and fight for "liberty" is, in this sense, an increasingly fraught problem: every step forward entails further entrenchment in a dizzying entanglement of permissions and prohibitions, asymmetrical power relations, new and hidden modes of subjugation and coercion — all while we pretend that our online personas and statements merely refer back to a world which in fact longer exists.

it's worth remembering re: social media platforms that the user experience itself is designed to emphasize and reinforce precisely those aspects of our personality / humanity that devalue contemplation, empathy, even honesty. they replicate patterns of behavior that ensure continued engagement, then monitor those behaviors and sell the data to people who further manipulate us. this is the central power dynamic of almost all online discourse. meanwhile free speech, and the broader notion of liberalism, aren't just ideas; it's ideology and a continually reiterated (and updated) foundational myth with a history fraught with racism and violent subjugation that continue to inform and / or preclude, at a structural level, the very possibilities for speech and community.

the unifying aspect of liberal speech is hysteria, the continual need to reiterate the delusion that favored institutions and positions of leadership are not largely symbolic. the very notion of a culture war seeks to affirm this, to displace our energy into an arena where nothing has any real political consequence. even purportedly leftist notions of intersectionality and "centering" e.g. black or trans voices seem to fail to take into account a basic psycho-political geography, as if a recognition of problematic elements is sufficient for their removal and some sort of nebulous substitution of more humane models for radical liberation and solidarity. what's ignored is that we've been taught, and encouraged, to regard increased visibility as a concomitant component of social and political progress. the commodification and endless replication / dispersion of categories of identity reinforces the notion that the real battleground is the sphere of legislation, court rulings, and other mechanisms of power that only ever seem to replicate the same mechanisms of repression that we ought to seek to undermine, bypass, and ultimately overcome through collective political destabilization.

while recognizing the importance of language for projects of self-determination — for the affirmation of underrepresented categories and for a sincere fight to craft a world in which our differential existences can be lived in hospitable conditions — do we not wish to consider that the conversations which are most amplified are almost always re-framed as projects which, in some way, "complete" a mythical project of liberation that was flawed, incomplete, but for some reason still worth sticking up for ? why do we continue to fetishize outmoded conceptualizations of liberation while seemingly ignoring the fact that this sort of discourse is inherently a source of violence itself ? and finally, how do we re-claim political autonomy when our avenues of "self-expression" have been cynically marginalized and perverted in such a way that dissent only ever entails a new, novel category for marketing the same old bullshit ?

these thoughts are not complete or fully thought through — just wanted to raise some questions i haven't heard being asked elsewhere. i'm open to suggestions for further reading.

If you haven't read Achille Mbembe's Necropolitics, you'd probably find it engrossing in terms of how it works with some of the problems that you're raising, particularly those related to the fetishization of certain forms of discourse, whether it be of liberal democracy or liberation politics.

I hesitantly recommend Denise Riley, too, for her work on identity formations and the subject that desire not to be hailed (or to exist outside relation) has some intersection with your concerns around idpol.

Man, my OP gets more embarrassing every year. 'Say you're discussing porn, and what happens is ...'

Little acorns...

xp the text which i periodically refer to is wendy brown's "states of injury"

it looks like mbembe cites her in the book you mention, but i wonder the degree to which her work is seen as relevant 20+ years on (tbf the work cited is 2015's "undoing the demos")

it's worth remembering re: social media platforms that the user experience itself is designed to emphasize and reinforce precisely those aspects of our personality / humanity that devalue contemplation, empathy, even honesty.

― budo jeru

i'll go further. my personal observation has been that social media's core business model, the unspoken motive that is concealed by the euphemism of "engagement", is promoting and perpetuating the cycle of abuse for profit.

Re: that letter in Harper's and JKR, and where I'm up to with this, if anyone's interested:

Step 1: quite a good idea exists called freedom of speech

Step 2: but ah this good idea can be invoked in rhetoric, to make it look as if the speaker is victim of censorship, and thus they can cleverly claim more sympathy than their position deserves

Step 3: Step 2 goes really horribly wild on the internet specifically; the effect described in Step 2 gets multiplied by 1000s of shares and retweets whatever

Step 4: we get very bored of 'freedom of speech' and have a knee jerk reaction against it now because of steps 2 and 3. 'Stop whining about censorship when you're not being sent to a gulag, jeez ...'

Step 5: we get the Rowling case

I can't endorse the treatment of Rowling (though sure, what if you were trans and someone said terf stuff on big platform? I'd be angry)

It's very much a phenomenon of Twitter behaviour

Twitter isn't a democratic space that we the public own

Clapping along with the smashing of someone on Twitter concedes too much to Twitter itself and the cyclical slagging off mechanism that others here have mentioned

But I think blaming The Left and Cancel Culture, as the usual suspects are quick to do, misses something v important

It's the constant bad faith invocation of free speech by the right (lol as if Milo or Katie Hopkins or Tommy Robinson actually want to protect the speech of their enemies) that has eaten away at the credibility of the principle

I can't endorse the treatment of Rowling (though sure, what if you were trans)

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

what a fascinating thought experiment

But you know, the problem of what if you said something in public that got a cancel sent your way, that problem doesn't go away just because some terrible writers are rich and successful

It's a valid point to make that any of the three big beasts I mentioned, Milo, Hopkins, Robinson, have stacks of cash and hardly suffer from the 'censorship' that comes their way, yes indeed

But simply stating that observation doesn't really take a close look at what cancelling is or what happens to people after being Twitter bashed

It can also be eye opening to watch the whole cancel thing play out at less exalted levels than the blue ticks

It has certainly filtered down to the cretins on local area Facebook groups, you get dogged attempts by supposedly left morons to cancel some old moron who has burbled old people stuff or, you know, shared a JKR article ... muggins here tried to do some conflict resolution, and they ALL, both the clouds of morons, started telling me to Fuck off and die ...

There are ways of saying that this is all very sad and tedious without being freeze peach prima donna / martyr

oh

that's why people on twitter keep talking about freeze peaches

cardamon mb the famous millionaire spreading hateful nonsense doesn’t need you to non-endorse the people telling her to shut her ignorant trap

Certex2 min
'What if CANCEL CULTURE is the first ART FORM of the LIBERATED CONSCIOUSNESS of a NEW EARTH.'

cardamon you ever experienced depersonalization? you know what that feels like?

milo didn't actually have stacks of cash and went significantly into debt after being successfully being no platformed, and has basically disappeared from prominence as far as alt-right grifters go and that's a good thing

"I can't endorse the treatment of Rowling" what does this actually mean?

anyway rowling whining about free speech is great because she's previously threatened to sue people for "misrepresenting her views on transgenderism" so lol

look, i don't want to bore you, but a little history lesson here

so from prehistory up to, oh, about now-ish, who transgender and gender non-conforming people are, what we experience, how to treat such people, has been determined pretty much exclusively by people who are not trans or gender non-conforming. in the country i happen to live in now, it's predominantly been cis white men.

honestly that approach hasn't, by and large, worked out very well for us. i won't bore you with the details, but you should be able to find them, if you look.

recently certain people have had the brilliant idea of actually listening to us and treating us with dignity and respect, instead of trying to diagnose us in terms of pathological symptoms.

so it turns out that approach has yielded markedly better clinical outcomes for many of us! who knew! and the scientific consensus has taken note of this.

so, apparently, has a woman who wrote a popular novel for young adults about a boy wizard, and she just does not agree with any of this! she doesn't have any particular expertise in this field, mind you, but she's a pretty good writer!

what she says is wrong. pretty much all of us with experience being gender non-conforming, as well as, again, an increasingly widely accepted scientific consensus, tells us she is wrong. not only is it wrong, it is also, again, to be quite honest, pretty dangerous to our lives, health, and safety. the sort of things she is saying is not novel to any of us who are trans and/or gender non-conforming. her theories have been tried, they have been tested, and they have yielded measurable results.

i will not go into detail, but those results are generally very unpleasant. in short, it hurts us. it hurts us a _fucking lot_. this has made a lot of us very unhappy and a lot of us have expressed our displeasure with this famous author using her talent and fame to promote these dangerous pseudoscientific theories. unfortunately, we are not all really talented writers like this person is, particularly when we are struggling with the documented clinical consequences of transphobia, so we do not always communicate this to her with the level of civility or tact that this famous writer has come to expect.

and she is very upset about this, and she points and she says see what abusive monsters these people are, see what they are doing to me.

now, what's more important to you? is it that some of us who have suffered from transphobia for years, who have learned to communicate in a toxic and abusive environment, do not always treat other people with civility and tact? is it defending the "free speech" right of a woman to spread malicious lies about a vulnerable population, finding some clever argument to explain away the harvest of dead trans bodies those lies have produced? or is it believing the trans community when we say that there is one correct answer to the question "are trans women women?", and it is a simple answer, and it is "yes"?

I'm amazed that people think Harpers Magazine & JK Rowling are so huge still. Wow.

JK Rowling probably more so than Harpers

following on from my last post, let me try to make this even clearer.

here's the shibboleth, ok? here are the magic words.

trans women are women.

if you can't say that, those four words, without feeling the need to qualify or explain yourself further or ask follow-up questions, you know, i'd say that's about equivalent to not being able to say the words "black lives matter."

the context here, the pattern i see, is the pattern i wrote about in this post i wrote last month:

https://weirdthingsonbetamax.blogspot.com/2020/06/john-cleese-would-like-to-have-argument.html

the post itself is not perfect (though i hope it might still be slightly helpful). mainly i share it because cleese follows very well the pattern i'm talking about. last month he only "had some questions". this month he's actively defending his right to not treat trans women as women.

i would be really interested to know how many of the signatories of the harper's letter would be willing to say the four magic words. i would, for that matter, be really interested in knowing how many posters to this thread find themselves not able to say the four magic words. i believe pretty much everybody here can, though i'm always ready to be proven wrong.

step two, which is rather more difficult and is what is driving me to post to this thread every fifteen minutes until people start expressing very serious and well-founded concerns for my mental health and i vanish from here for the next month, is attempting to persuade the steady drip-drip-drip of drive by posters who can't understand why anybody cares about this stupid j.k. rowling lady and the stupid bullshit she's saying, that such unprovoked and gratuitous statements of disbelief are, well, kind of clueless and ignorant. such statements remind me of a "joke" i have heard, and by "have heard" i mean "hear repeated to me on a regular basis by people who are kind of assholes":

q: how can you tell if a person is trans?
a: don't worry, they'll tell you!

...and i can't go any further on this post without resorting to being bitterly sarcastic, so it's probably time for me to stop.

Ugh, Toby Young and Owen Jones debating cancel culture on Sky News right now, thankfully I've got the volume turned down and am listening to Ennio Morricone instead, cancelled!

great posts rushomancy

Kate and budo's last few posts have been really great imo

thanks, i got a full head of steam up now so i'm gonna keep going

i see posts on this thread asking me why people are making such a big deal about this dumb writer, why anybody pays attention to her, because she's OBVIOUSLY WRONG and no RIGHT-THINKING PERSON would pay her any mind, and honestly, you know what, that's not been my experience. the shit she's spewing out is shit i used to believe, is a lie i was taught was the truth.

a long time ago i saw that film, what was it called, "the usual suspects". i don't remember it being a great film, i remember it thinking it was smarter than it actually was. and the big line from that is "the greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist".

honestly, i don't think that's a particularly great trick. that's, like, basic fucking sleight of hand there, the first thing any stage magician learns. all you have to do is redirect people's attention, and that's a really fucking easy thing to do. spend decades abusing people and all people ask is "come on, he's obviously gay, why won't he admit it?" dead easy.

you know what's a more impressive trick, in my opinion? convincing _me_ that _i_ don't exist. and that was my experience, for decades, and it seems to have also been the experience of pretty much every other trans/gender non-conforming person i've ever encountered.

and that is exactly the trick rowling and other transphobes are trying to pull. that's what "queer erasure" is. what transphobes seem to want most is for us to go away, for us to disappear, and to not have to think about what happens after that.

and that's why i yell and scream and rant and fight, while why i may not be "brave" i am certainly _loud_. if i am to go, i am not going to go quietly, and i am going to leave as much evidence of my existence behind as i can.

i guess the idea is that we shouldn't make a "big deal" about this because she's just one person, and we're all rational people here, and one person's voice is as important as any other person's voice. that's what we're taught to believe, right? rowling is nobody special, we shouldn't pay attention to who she is but just to the objective truth or falsity of what she's saying?

i mean, that belief is so out of touch with reality that i do consider it delusional at this point. it's as ridiculous to me as not believing in global warming, as believing covid is a "chinese conspiracy". it's dangerous, and it's primarily dangerous to the continued existence of people like me.

j.k. rowling shouldn't be anyone special, say advocates of "rational debate". in the meantime one of my friends this week deleted years worth of harry potter fanfiction she's written from archive of our own. for an entire generation, and i'm not part of that generation, rowling's work was such a really important part of their childhood, shaped them in such important ways, and Sensible, Rational people say "well why are you even worried about that, it's just a dumb book, Ursula K. Leguin is a better writer anyway". yes, yes, it's my friend's fault for being STUPID and GULLIBLE enough to, when she was a child, like a series of books that were OBVIOUSLY AND MANIFESTLY AWFUL, right? we all should have fucking known better, for shame. or, alternately, maybe my friend was stupid for deleting her writing, that's obviously an overreaction, can't she learn to SEPARATE THE ARTIST FROM THE ART?

and there's no reason anybody shouldn't know better now, in any case. transphobia, of course, isn't a problem us, trans people, have, it's a problem with those poor saps who are irrational, ignorant, deluded enough to be transphobes, to be unable to decode the Empirically and Rationally Correct meaning of words. when people we consider friends, people in some cases we have considered friends for decades, come to us and say that rowling "seems sincere", that her opinions on trans people are "complicated", that she's just trying to be a "good ally", well, they're obviously wrong and that's _their_ problem. it's certainly not _our_ problem that seemingly every day somebody we thought we trusted starts expressing doubts about what we are, doubts that resonate deeply with the imposter syndrome every single one of us was fucking raised with.

right, i'm gonna take a smoke break, be back in about 15 minutes apparently.

I'll read this later.

9. More thoughts on the current free speech kerfuffle: https://t.co/gLU34GMz2L

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 10, 2020

it's not _our_ problem if our "friends" decide to trust the writings of a talented and famous writer over what people they know personally have to say about our own fucking lives. right?

Thank you for these posts, Kate.

Kate and budo's last few posts have been really great imo

Agreed.

I don't really know what I'm talking about so please take this with a grain of salt but I feel like resistance to statements such as 'trans women are women' stems from an inability to understand womanhood (or manhood, for that matter) as an unstable category that fluctuates over time, inwards as well as outwards, which ties into what budo was saying about the subject (my soft take on that can of worms being: there is a self… more or less, as long as the caveat trumps the postulate that precedes it).

Trans people taking the fight to the post-enlightenment Aristotelian consensus more effectively than any philosopher and winning

1. I've been reluctant culture wars controversies because I they are often distractions from bigger things going on -- I mean, people are fucking dying right now, dying in droves. But as Trump reminds us this morning, free speech is under threat. pic.twitter.com/BinhEbFLbD

— Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) July 10, 2020

wow go to hell jeet

i mean i know he's not earnestly quoting trump but it certainly makes me wonder what his point is and if he even has one. maybe we could debate it

Pretty sure he's being sarcastic.

I don't really know what I'm talking about so please take this with a grain of salt but I feel like resistance to statements such as 'trans women are women' stems from an inability to understand womanhood (or manhood, for that matter) as an unstable category that fluctuates over time, inwards as well as outwards, which ties into what budo was saying about the subject (my soft take on that can of worms being: there is a self… more or less, as long as the caveat trumps the postulate that precedes it).

― pomenitul

it's a theoretically interesting question. i can't answer it because i can't speak for other people - my feeling is that just there is lots of diversity among trans people, there's probably a lot of diversity among transphobes. when i was transphobic, my transphobia was primarily based in my (culturally determined) inability to differentiate gender from biology. didn't make me a bad person; i was just ignorant, and fortunately for me that ignorance proved remediable.

for someone like rowling, i do _not_ think her ignorance is quite so tractable. i really do get the sense that her inability to say "trans women are women" with a straight face is indicative of deeply rooted hatred and prejudice, in the same way that being unable to say "black lives matter" is indicative of deeply rooted hatred and prejudice.

whoops i've had all the nuance drained out of me from the culture wars xp

now, what's more important to you? is it that some of us who have suffered from transphobia for years, who have learned to communicate in a toxic and abusive environment, do not always treat other people with civility and tact? is it defending the "free speech" right of a woman to spread malicious lies about a vulnerable population,

Not to be all 'Did you read what I said?' but, if what I said reads as a boilerplate freeze peach argument, then ... there has been miscommunication

I doubt we have any disagreement about trans rights or about those dangerous slanders against trans people that swirl around the internet

I think where we differ is you see JKR as having crossed a line into the just fuck off zone, where it's just not worthwhile to care about what happens to her, whereas I think that there's interest in discussing and analysing the latter

I think that operation is different to defending her position on gender or attacking people who don't like her etc

Nor am I attempting to 'police' the responses to JKR, of ilxors or anyone else

What could possibly be interesting about talking about what happens to JK Rowling, a genre fiction author who is richer than her decrepit Queen and who derives no income from posting online

Nothing will happen to her, she’s not going to get murdered in her castle by trans terrorists

Has money, won't be murdered - end of discussion!

I mean. Yeah?

Are you worried about how she feels???

Literally nothing has happened to any of these people. They’ve made bad posts online and other posters are telling them to stfu because they don’t know what they are talking about.

Some of them were targeted by fatwas iirc.

What is a fatwa but a post by another name

A fatwa is a 'formal legal opinion' in Arabic, so it checks out.

I think what is going on is more like if the mullahs issued a fatwa and everyone clowned them mercifully.

lol, mercilessly