Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Maybe it’s fine to suffer the harm of being mercilessly harangued when you say hateful ignorant things about marginalized people, then continue doubling down on it forever. Is that not impartial

As we all know I think it’s good not bad to hurl abuse at people posting harmful and ignorant things

It might get them to stop posting, which would be good

well, take care that you don't have too metaphysical a view of the nature of that act of abuse

on utilitarian terms (apt for people who care about alleviating harms and social ills) the occurrence of abuse can have consequences with uncontrollable or unforeseen downsides

We also all know I’m not a utilitarian!!

if we are having a discussion about freeze peach, other rights, and harms and sufferings then you can't take utilitarians' terms and ideas into account even if you don't agree with them, they're just basic to the controversy as it exists in present-day society

Feel like “rights” can survive as a concept outside of the consequentialist fishtank

certainly, but the fishtank often supplies tools for critiquing existing codifications/tacit understandings of rights.

Idk surely we’re far afield at this point, my only real point is that I assume whatever this letter says is stupid and I don’t object to anyone hassling its presumably mostly rich, comfortable, and famous signatories for signing stupid letters.

And, I guess, that I don’t understand why anyone would have so much time as cardamon does for worrying about how poor Jo Rowling, wealthy intellectual property magnate, feels about being told she’s a dummy.

READ WHAT I WROTE… AND THEN READ WHAT YOU WROTE

No I’m already tired of reading.

ah well it's back to shitposting i guess

“Back”?

charity my man charity

the perfect union of 19th century enlightenment philosophy and shitposting, at least achieved

I mean I’m not gonna front like I’m never mad and I think this is all just a gas, all this posting, but I’m pretty dumb and I mostly post to see what words look like in an order, I’m v glad you and the Enlightenment thinkers are so confident in universal principles but I’m just trying to figure out my own if u feel me

any principles are already on the road to being universal principles

Guess I shouldn’t have any.

I mean I ascribe to a particularist religion, it’s against my religion to believe everyone should follow the principles of my religion

xps yes you were not meant to disagree with me because i am trying to reframe what i presume is one of your beliefs so that you acknowledge it is in tension with the other line you seem to be taking, that sometimes for the sake of some ends some people can be (substitute most apt option here) written off, destroyed, abandoned to the twitter mob, removed from the circle of concern about sufferings unjust or otherwise, etc.

as far as i was following it the latter is the sort of thing that was giving some itt pause.

― j.

ok i'm just going to ignore all the posts after this because i can't follow them.

no, nobody _should_ be just blithely written off as unimportant or "unmutual" or toxic or whatever. all lives matter, humans have fundamental inalienable dignity, yadda yadda yadda, you want me to affirm all those liberal nostrums i will. what i'm saying is that i do not have the _luxury_ of governing my life entirely by abstract ideals, that i value a particular expression of an abstract ideal based mostly on the results it produces, particularly and especially as those results bear on me and the people i care about. you want to hold me accountable for those actions, you want to hold me accountable for violating liberal norms, well, you just go right ahead. based on my observation, i believe those norms have, in practice, failed, and anybody who clings to them, without question, as the only hope for DUMPLINGS! is someone whose allyship i trust and value, and for that matter someone whose judgement i fear, about as much as mitt romney.

that's not an inflexible or universal belief. however, tut-tutting at me about how i am failing _your_ fucking Universal Human Principles does nothing to persuade me.

i am tired, motherfucking tired, of public intellectuals talking about "justice". fucking show me it, show me what your "justice" looks like, and i'll tell you whether it's something i can get behind or not. how's that sound?

Basically want to say that Kate's recent posts in this thread are justification for the existence of this stupid thread.

There are flaws in our notions of impartiality, agrees the liberal, but why are we throwing the baby out with the bath water ? Don’t you also agree that there is an approaching-good impartiality?

Our impartiality, says the conservative, will naturally lead to white nationalist outcomes

The “flaws” in our notions of impartiality are not flaws but are actually how the system works, that these are its intended outcomes, and the liberal and conservative are playing a parlor game debating whether it’s a bad system with intent or by accident

*those are its effective outcomes. The conservative and liberal debate if it’s by intent or accident

if jkr had started posting white supremacist stuff (maybe vaguely disguised as 'scientific' 'just asking questions about racial bias in IQ' nonsense to seem a little more respectable) and got the same angry pushback with some of it being straight up abusive, would cardamon still be saying 'she's bad, sure but people should have been a bit nicer about it'

Mill is an ass, utilitarianism is colonial bullshit, and all current systems of law in the West occur under the aegis of state violence. Gtfoh

Like one of the most foundational texts of the philosophy of law in the US states that legal interpretation occurs in a field of pain and death. It's not some mystery--

How is utilitarianism colonial bullshit?

A schism exists between feminist theory, queer theory and trans theory. Eg. gender-based rights vs. sex-based rights when applied to female-only safe spaces like prisons, rape shelters etc; how and when trans people should compete in sex-segregated sports; age of consent for minors to transition; & a couple of other topics. There are similar nuances in the BLM conversation which are beyond stating if you are for or against. It's more complicated than that.

Supporters of the Harpers article see that it's not a request by the signatories to not be flamed but that these conversations have become difficult to have in left-ish groups such as academia, the arts, non-profits, unions and so on. Meanwhile the right-wing look on & laugh.

ILX leans left and it's unlikely that there could be a thread on gender theory here. Several posts are already saying that this is a stupid thread - a reaction to some posts getting close to difficult viewpoints being aired. It's worth thinking about.

Hmm

Many of the signatories are not anti-trans and it seems odd to frame it in that way. Essentially older generation liberals who are out of step with younger generations' ideas and resent being flamed on Twitter

I doubt any signatories think its about being flamed on Twitter.

Hmm

the issue is that the contents of the letter itself are fairly benign (if uselessly vague) but a significant numbers of signatories are the sort of bad faith actors who are trying to use claims of free speech to silence criticism of them, with it seeming like many of those signing it in good faith were duped into it through claims that it was 'promoting tolerance and racial inclusion' etc. and only being told that chomsky etc. were signing it. the contents of the letter do not exist in a vacuum

examples of said bad faith actors are jk rowling who has threatened to sue people who've called her transphobic and bari weiss who rose to prominence calling for pro-palestinian professors to be fired, but there's many many others

also 'sex-based rights' as a term only started being used ~5 years ago to justify excluding trans people, it's not a meaningful phrase outside of that context, so i'm very wary of someone bringing it up. the people advocating against trans inclusion are typically uninterested in nuance, only insisting that trans people are a danger to women, that biology is paramount and immutable, that trans children are just confused gays being forced into it by their homophobic parents, etc.

Multiple signatories have tried to get people fired for things they said on the internet or threatened to sue when criticized so I'm not sure it can be easily discounted that this is a culture war salvo not unrelated to online discourse on social media. They may just be so lacking in self awareness that they dont see the hypocrisy but I think they're just being machiavellian

probably a mix of both

trying to use claims of free speech to silence criticism of them

are you sure they weren't using claims of free speech to answer criticism of them? this would be an extremely weak answer to any even halfway valid criticism, but at least it doesn't meet the standard of trying to actively silence the voices of others (which I'm not sure how that silencing could even be done short of threats).

I doubt any signatories think its about being flamed on Twitter.

Do you have a citation for that?

A schism exists between feminist theory, queer theory and trans theory. Eg. gender-based rights vs. sex-based rights when applied to female-only safe spaces like prisons, rape shelters etc; how and when trans people should compete in sex-segregated sports; age of consent for minors to transition; & a couple of other topics

i feel like the answers are so axiomatic that almost none of these are "conversations"

also ufo otm

people trying to have "debates" about these topics and present "difficult viewpoints" on them are ime almost always trying to undermine the womanhood of trans women

Before I go to bed I do want to offer that part of the reason that trans people are so troubling to certain liberal orthodoxies is that the very existence of trans lives is an attack on the western Aristotelian-Enlightenment metaphysical consensus. The transfeminist project is in explicit opposition to the foundations of European thought, and the fixity and reliability of its categories.

Which, I hasten to add, is good. Fuck a Aristotle

lol suarez died in 1617 your timeline might be a little garbled

I already told u I don’t actually read things

yet you persist in making sweeping pronouncements about the things that are in books

Well duh

What else is there to do, in life