Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

On this messageboard, of all places, I should be humble?

gr8 contributions

“safe spaces like prisons” wtf

life comes at you fast pic.twitter.com/UwdWLzH0wb

— saeen (@saeen90_) July 11, 2020

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.

Has this -- someone being cancelled that should not have been -- actually happened so far?

Re: Mill on the colonies and benevolent despotism:

To suppose that the same international customs, and the same rules of international morality, can obtain between one civilized nation and another, and between civilized nations and barbarians, is a grave error.… To characterize any conduct whatever towards a barbarous people as a violation of the law of nations, only shows that he who so speaks has never considered the subject.

It's pretty facile for anyone who knows Mill's writings to see how they can be used to justify colonial venturing and exploits, which they were at the time.

But that's an aside and not really debatable afaic. Fuck Mill.

Here's a response letter to the letter. Sorry if it was already posted, didn't spot it on a quick scroll through:
https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice

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.

Pretty disingenuous to cast this as a schism between feminist theory, queer theory and trans theory imo. "Gender critical" blowhards do not own feminist theory or represent wide swathes of it, contrary to what they may say.

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

― j."

j how the hell am i supposed to read you calling out silby for making "sweeping pronouncements" as anything other than hypocrisy and bad faith argument

"Pretty disingenuous to cast this as a schism between feminist theory, queer theory and trans theory imo. "Gender critical" blowhards do not own feminist theory or represent wide swathes of it, contrary to what they may say.

― Daniel_Rf"

agree, intersectional feminism is feminism. i don't have any issues identifying as a non-binary, queer, transgender feminist woman, although i can certainly how people who accept the western Aristotelian-Enlightenment metaphysical consensus might have a hard time accepting the validity of my particular sort of self-determination.

everything, idk if ilx could have a thread on gender difficulty, but i suspect it would be difficult for me to have a productive conversation on gender theory with _you_ based on the assumptions you're bringing to the table.

one of the things that really surprised me was when i found out about fdr's 1941 state of the union address, which is known as the "four freedoms" speech. i'd say it's fair to characterize fdr as a "liberal". norman rockwell illustrated his "four freedoms".

this surprised me because everything my "liberal" upbringing up to that point had taught me told me that "freedom from want" and "freedom from fear" was socialism. i don't know, i guess maybe at some point liberals spent enough time "interrogating the tension" between their interpretation of "freedom of speech" and the idea of "freedom of fear" to decide we couldn't have both?

so here it is, 2020, and here i am, and i regularly ace the GAD-7, 100% score. constant fucking terror. i haven't gone for a walk in my neighborhood since i came out in december. usually when other white people talk about not feeling "safe" it seems like they're talking about the presence of people of color in their environment, but for me, it's a little bit different. i don't feel safe in my neighborhood because of the fairly high percentage of my neighbors who have those "blue lives" flags. those flags are fucking terrifying, i look at them and that is just blatantly fascist iconography. and liberals, you know, they may not agree with fascism but they will defend to the death somebody else's right to promote it. also, apparently, to implement and practice it.

is that a bad faith reading? maybe that's a bad-faith reading. i know that not all of my neighbors agree with this point of view. i know because one of my neighbors is using his constitutionally guaranteed freedom to erect a "biden for president" lawn sign next to an enormous inflatable image of the united states president in a diaper. see! see! this is the freedom they are trying to tell us, in other countries, you know, in other countries you could go to JAIL for criticizing the president! in america we are free!

that's great. that's just great. and the president blatantly engaging in all forms of corruption, blatantly and openly mocking the "democratic ideals" of "fairness and equality" they propose, to the point of literally setting up concentration camps for children, and what do they do about it? look, they're doing everything they can, which, as far as i can tell, consists of a "biden for president" yard sign and a yard decoration depicting the president as a giant baby.

of course, for those kids on the internet who share pictures of guillotines, you know, that's different. that's outside the bounds of appropriate liberal discourse. "freedom of speech" doesn't really apply there. it would set a _dangerous precedent_.

i'm not just afraid of the police, of course. not only do i not go for walks in my neighborhood anymore, i haven't left my house in months. i'm afraid, a lot of other people are afraid, of a deadly pandemic that right now is spreading more or less unchecked in america. oh, but of course, that's republicans' fault. i live in a _democratic_ state where our governor has set out orders mandating common sense precautions against the pandemic, like public masking.

i mean, oregon businesses don't feel like they have the authority to enforce that mandate, even if they want to. people come through and they don't agree with the governor and they want to express their "freedom of expression" by literally serving as a vector for a deadly virus, by killing people who are presumably more vulnerable than they are, who have more to fear than they are, and they don't feel _safe_ enforcing our governor's mandate, and they're not wrong. telling an angry white person that they have to wear a mask puts you at the risk of violence, as much as we try to ellide this uncomfortable possibility. what option is there, really, but appeasement?

one of my friends, her elderly parents run a bar. the governor's mandates, her common sense precautions, didn't prevent the state lottery commission from banging on their door the second total lockdown was lifted and demanding they open their bar, on pain of having all their lottery machines removed. they didn't feel safe opening the bar? too fucking bad, they had an AGREEMENT to sell lottery tickets and if their bar wasn't open the second it was legally possible to do so, they were in _violation_ of that agreement.

this is what i see, this is my experience, of liberal "freedom" in a liberal state.

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

― j.

but it's the _left_ who spend all their time arguing arcane theoretical points with no application whatsoever to reality

liberal freedom is an impossibility - and therefore either a hypocritical lie or a naive one - in a society with sufficiently large gulfs in power, whether those gulfs are economic or social, racial or gendered or whatever. even freedom of speech, which i think is commonly reduced to freedom of thought in ways that render it meaningless, is a lie where such disparities of power exist. weird that you rarely see the people currently bleating about the threat to freedom of speech addressing the conditions that currently give it the lie.

or in short nothing is free in a marketplace of ideas

NV, I'd add that liberal discourse isn't free when the violence that supports its systems of governance has historically been outsourced to other, supposedly lesser populations. I know I've talked about and quoted Mbembe a lot here, but his idea that western liberal democracies are now facing an inversion of the violence they used to more effectively displace is pretty spot-on

I've been interested reading what you've quoted from Mbembe, I'll go to the source at some point. And yeah I agree, I think it's clear that the claims of Liberal democracy are suspect to challenge from a lot of angles

despairing lol @ ‘hard-earned sex-based rights’ being presented as a reasonable non-ironic opinion on here, think Kate is correct that ilx probably couldn’t have a gender thread if people are just going to regurgitate that kind of shit.

NV, if you message me I'll send you a PDF of 'Necropolitics,' here's the second chapter: https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/the-society-of-enmity

Similar and related reading:
- Chamayou's 'Manhunts' and 'Drone Theory'
- Sayak Valencia's 'Gore Capitalism'

thanks for the offer! i just got hold of a pdf while i was looking to see if i could find an epub version :)

i'd argue that COVID-19 in the united states presents as a symbiosis of two separate epidemiological phenomena - the coronavirus itself using the corrosive thought virus of trumpist conservatism - "brain worms" - as one of its key transmission methods. having failed thoroughly in its attempts to control the latter, liberal capitalist democracy has no hope whatsoever of containing the former.

Hard agree

Are other contemporary liberal capitalist democracies as vulnerable to Trump-style brain worms as the US?

i'd say yes, but i felt my argument was strengthened by limiting my scope there

are other liberal capitalist democracies either as militarised, as exceptionalist or as cobbled-together as the fifty states of america though

(i mean i can think of one, hi dere)

the whole "being a TERF" thing is so remarkably stupid on just a base level.

Like, yes, there's literally some difference in the lived experiences of most ppl who are assigned women at birth and most ppl who transition later in life... but why can't they both be called "women"?! Why do you even give a shit? Why are you throwing away all the goodwill of your career on defending some weird semantical tic. It's like being a kid in the back of the class screeching that Pluto is still a planet. Shut the fuck up!

It's like being against "safe spaces." What is bad about "safety" or "spaces"? Get a life!

j how the hell am i supposed to read you calling out silby for making "sweeping pronouncements" as anything other than hypocrisy and bad faith argument

well you could realize that silby is just saying shit that doesn't make sense and that he's declared himself a fond proponent of abuse so it's funny to prod him for it.

except in certain respects, which lagged behind (this is the main respect in which silby had a point), the enlightenment was a reaction to institutionalized 'aristotelianism' that had accrued in certain sectors of the sciences and intellectual life more broadly (mainly via the church), and it doesn't make sense to run it together with anything supposedly 'aristotelian', such as the fixity of certain categories (for saying what things or beings are, with respect to nature, i.e. in a way that could serve as a suitable basis for an ethics or a social theory or politics based on giving an account of nature, as contrasted with inflexible conformist tradition or religious authority or something else—oh shit the enlightenment project inherits thousands of years of critical reflection on and opposition to existing societies! fuck! how did that get in there! and what are we supposed to do with its legacy of tools for critiquing prejudice and unaccountable power with inquiries into the natural world and nonparochial, universal human values! oh shit maybe they continue to be useful and remain in use to this day!), since a general tendency of enlightenment thought, taken as a whole, was toward conceptual apparatuses and pictures of the world that undermined the fixity of a variety of categories of supposed long standing. i said that there were respects in which some aspects of this phenomenon lagged others, but in some of the respects i think silby had in mind, those too were caught up in enlightenment-style intellectual revolutions of the 19th century (the others already having gotten going a few hundred years earlier).

in any case,

people who accept the western Aristotelian-Enlightenment metaphysical consensus might have a hard time accepting the validity of my particular sort of self-determination.

silby's 'western-aristotelian-enlightenment metaphysical consensus' sounds mostly like mumbo jumbo marketing copy that's supposed to paint late 20th century inheritors to the enlightenment tradition as more radical than their predecessors in order to give them an edge in the market for intellectual exchange and the sublimated political struggle for institutional power. ('you're being more metaphysical than we are!' being a genre of intellectual retort that has its roots mostly in that very enlightenment.) one of the reasons i mentioned utilitarianism, among other ideas and theories, earlier is that what silby called 'the transfeminist project' seems to be dependent in many respects on the views on the priority of self-determination, individual autonomy, and the corresponding appropriate social order that took center stage in left-leaning history from the early 19th century onward (and among those views mill's is one that still has currency today, and resources for pragmatic and political interventions and critiques that are so basic to contemporary efforts that people often do not appreciate the debt). there might be deep internal disagreements between one segment of the present-day landscape and others, just like that letter has signatories that include people who are more right than left, more reactionary than not, but taken together they probably have more in common as inheritors of the enlightenment than as the remnants of unenlightened parts of society. probably a lot of the internal-to-left (from a distance, this would be inclusive of liberals supposedly beyond the leftist pale) disputes sometimes have something to do with the concern by heirs of the enlightenment that some of their peers are promoting unenlightened politics or ethics that either stand not to achieve their intended goals, or stand to undermine other enlightenment ideals on which they're premised (which could itself impede the realization of political or ethical goals).

If u keep making good posts in response to my bad ones how will I ever learn to stop making bad posts

you have to relinquish the dogmatic belief that bad posts teach people anything, it's the only way

That might be true

today i have the idea that the most important thing in the world to liberals is gatekeeping. they want all the pudding. as long as they have that, it seems like they figure, they can have anything else they want.

in some ways, harry benjamin is the paradigmatic liberal. if you're not familiar with the name, he's the father of transgender medicine, still revered and lionized in the scientific establishment for his beneficence. WPATH initially named themselves after him, not because he was affiliated with them, but simply out of respect for his pioneering work.

harry benjamin was also the father of transmedicalism. benjamin, a cis white man, was a tireless advocate for transgender people. he did a lot of scientific research, a lot of hard work, and came up with objective scientific standards for "transsexualism".

and if someone didn't happen to meet those standards, clearly we weren't actually "transsexuals". i mean, you have to do a differential diagnosis on this sort of thing. can you imagine what a disaster it would be if you just let anybody and everybody be trans on nothing more than their say-so? madness! sheer madness!

ok, sure, we know now there were some slight problems with benjamin's taxonomy. a lot of what we would call "false negatives" - people who failed benjamin's criteria who were, nonetheless, transgender. like, for instance, his standards sort of made the assumption that "transsexual" people were heterosexual, which is to say, that for instance all "transsexual" women wanted to have sex with men exclusively.

ok, sure, that maybe caused a lot of problems for a certain number of people. people like me. people like a shitload of other trans people i know. but come on, i should cut him some slack, right? before benjamin and his rational science, we had nothing! probably hundreds upon hundreds of people benefited from benjamin's codification of rigorous standards! i mean, doesn't that make him a hero?

thanks to his work, his research, transgender women who met his standards were given new opportunity - the opportunity to have surgery, disappear, and live happy, fulfilling lives as normal, healthy heterosexual women. i mean, sure, they had to bury and hide everything they were before their transition, they had to spend their lives keeping a secret that they could never, ever let anybody else learn, but that's a small price to pay, right?

look, that's all liberals really want. they just want to help people, the way harry benjamin helped people. is that so wrong?

terfism is basically a mechanism for reproducing patriarchal violence by exploiting the trauma it produces & projecting it onto a scapegoat, the theory is whatever works best which atm is a pincer movement of radical & conservative conceptions of gender. doesn’t make much sense on the surface but it’s all subtext & implicature using liberal literalism for plausible deniability. so even less cooperative parts of liberalism are unable to understand or oppose it on their own terms

trans liberalism is an attempt to make transness legible within these v limited terms, as is demanded, to then blame transness for the liberalism here is an example of the pincer movement in action

j. i'll be honest with you here i don't actually want to discuss, or particularly understand, the "western Aristotelian-Enlightenment metaphysical consensus". like people keep recommending me i read philosophy books and stuff and i find some of the stuff they get into a little dense, dare i say even a little bit obfuscatory. i got limitations in far as my ability to engage with really in-depth conversations about, what was the name of the guy you name-dropped, suarez? i'm committed to doing the work at least insofar as looking him up on wikipedia instead of making a led zeppelin joke (ok possibly in addition to making a led zeppelin joke), but the field of debate you're setting here is a field which i find very difficult to navigate. i really don't think i'm, like, stupid or anything. i feel like most people would struggle to have a conversation about the Aristotelian yadda yadda yadda in the context of Suarez, and i think asking us to do so in order to do so when i'm just trying to talk about my life and experiences as i understand them seems, i don't know, maybe a little unfair?

i'm gonna be honest with you my sympathy kind of lies with silby on this one, i can see why they've (sorry silby can't remember your pronouns :( ) resorted to shitposting, because for god's sake, what the hell else are they supposed to do, take a post-graduate course on humanist philosophy before they're granted the right to engage in pudding with you?

suarez is a joke, i think almost no one should read suarez, i haven't

imo this field of debate IS very difficult to navigate, not for reasons imposed by me, and one of the main reasons to try anyway is that there are many parties to the debate (i.e. people and groups in society) who will not care if it's difficult to navigate and will deliberately or inadvertently exploit the difficulty to shut down debate and exclude people from contributing to it.

Re: the post asking would I respond to JKR the same if she'd made a racist argument which involved reaching for 'race science'

I do not know, is the answer, because she hasn't done that yet

I don't think it very likely that she would do that