Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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

aside from actual malice, three of the main causes of dysfunctional debate, which often give rise to efforts to shut it down or exclude people from it, are 1) people introducing claims into a debate that are not readily amenable to scrutiny at the time of debate (e.g. maybe they compress too much into too little space, or maybe they are obscure, or maybe they just presume too much cognizance with some realm of experience or some manner of speaking, with which the claims would be sufficiently clear), 2) people who believe they have introduced claims which are so open and invulnerable to scrutiny that nothing more can be said about them and they thus occupy indefinitely defensible positions which no challenge or query could possibly budge, and 3) people couching their contributions in terms which imply ethical deficiencies or intellectual deficiencies in anyone who does not affirm the contributions without questioning their terms.

these sound like plain errors but i don't think it's that simple. (1) for example can often happen because debates are not just canned rehearsals of pre-set tropes (though they often are), and may produce new formulations and new insights that strike us as good or important enough to bring the debate to a pause or a permanent end; this makes people who produce these novel contributions more inclined to prevent debate's continuation, if it might seem to undermine or unmask the seemingly novel, productive, powerful step in the debate, and it makes people who have some interest in the debate continuing, or continuing in a certain pattern or on certain terms, more inclined to resist insights that might otherwise speak to them or eventually get through to them or expose a weakness in their position. or (3) can be a problem not just for abortion-is-murder (a common example of the negative valence of choice of terms spoiling a debate) reasons but because notwithstanding the dubious ideals of intellectual neutrality in the search for the truth, we often link the kinds of ideas we think to be true with the kinds of people we want to be, and it's hard to resist couching those linkages in terms that make those who espouse the ideas in debates out to be good or better people just by virtue of having taken debating positions.

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.

― j.

ah, ok, you've got me intrigued now. so why, would you say, is the field difficult to debate? like, uh, i was raised catholic. my grandfather was educated by jesuits. to me, jesuits like suarez and athanasius kircher are actually extremely relevant to understanding the liberal tradition and how to approach it.

my feeling is that what a lot of what we call "liberalism" is motivated as much, if not more, by fear of revolutionary change than it is by genuine intellectual inquiry. the jesuits, catholic humanism, only came about after the catholic church got so fucking terrified about the protestant revolutions that they felt the need to do damage control, to suppress revolution, and when the jesuits had done as much as they seemed capable of doing, well, then, the catholic church suppressed them in turn. catholicism is a deeply occult religion, has a deeply rich intellectual history going back 1700 years, a tradition it is, apparently, deeply ashamed of, a tradition it has gone to great lengths to keep most of its adherents from knowing about.

so, so much of the parameters around which liberal discourse is framed, classical, thomist, go back to this paradigm - debate as a form of social control, rhetoric as a contest in which the goal is to score points and make your opponent look foolish. the end may not justify the means, but under liberal orthodoxy, the means often seems to justify the ends. as long as "democratic norms" are followed (these are, in practice highly plastic democratic norms, with liberals reserving for themselves the right to declare a "state of exception"), there can be no further remedy for injustice.

given all this, i think i disagree with you about the necessity of engaging with liberal pudding at all, and i am, for certain, deeply skeptical at your invocation of fear of the Other as justification for this stance.

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

― Never changed username before (cardamon)

looking back over your contributions to this thread, the absolutist literalism you provide here seems to be fairly selectively deployed

(1) (2) and (3), full house

xp what invocation of fear of the other?

aside from actual malice, three of the main causes of dysfunctional debate

― j.

christ, this is bordering on clinical lack of insight here. i don't know how much more clearly i can put this, i don't know what on earth can possibly persuade you to quit dancing around the issue here.

liberals fucked up! they fucked up really fucking badly. specifically in terms of their treatment of trans lives, but many, many times before that, and in hardly any case do i see any genuine willingness to acknowledge that they don't have all the fucking answers, that they can't solve every fucking problem with their Rational Principles. try to point this out to a liberal, try to ask them to acknowledge, accept, take responsibility for the mistakes of liberalism, for the victims their ideals, in practice, have created, and they will insist that you just don't understand them properly and Explain things to you at great length further. this seems like one of those weird mental blindspots certain people have, like racists' inability to say "black lives matter", like transphobes' inability to say "trans women are women" - this messianic faith in the Process. the Process can never fail, it can only be failed.

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!

― The Mandymoorian (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, July 12, 2020 5:57 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I don't think it's just semantics though, trans women are generally claiming something more than that the same word should be used to describe them and AFAB ppl.

I feel like I've seen AFAB and AMAB being used more frequently in conversations recently, particularly by cis women who would describe themselves as pro-trans, and it sometimes seems like a way to make similar arguments to the TERFs, about the specificity of AFAB experiences/the specfic ways in which AFAB ppl are oppressed as AFAB ppl and the legitimacy of distinguishing between cis women and trans women in certain contexts, but without getting shouted at for being a TERF?

If it really is just about semantics then couldn't you eventually have a situation where we talk about sex and gender in basically the same way that we did before trans went mainstream as a concept, but subbing thee word 'AFAB' for 'women' and 'AMAB' for 'male'? and then argue that there should be AFAB only prisons, AFAB only domestic violence shelters, quotas for AFAB ppl on company boards and in political parties, that AFAB ppl should have more authority when talking about AFAB issues than AMAB ppl? but it seems to me than this outcome is most trans advocates would be happy with?

trans women are women, and most true liberals would agree

but it seems to me than this outcome is most trans advocates would be happy with?

― soref

It does?

well, all true liberals, even, freedom to transition identity is part of the mainstream liberal canon now

Where are the true liberals

What makes someone a Trve Liberal

in their ivory towers polishing their silver

but it seems to me than this outcome is most trans advocates would be happy with?

― soref

It does?

― all cats are beautiful (silby), Sunday, July 12, 2020 8:57 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sorry, that should have said 'but it seems to me than this outcome is most trans advocates would NOT be happy with?'

getting ppl to say "trans women are women" seems beside the point, because it's not just about semantics, depending on how you define 'women' it would be consistent to say both that trans women are women and than there should be separate spaces for AFAB people from which AMAB people are excluded because of oppression of AFABs by AMABs, because AFAB ppl are at risk of violence and sexual assault by AMAB ppl, - isn't just just the TERF argument with different semantics?

a lot of liberals are illiberal dickheads

a trve liberal surely believes in free self-expression except where this impinges upon the free expression of others

nobody is hurt by trans women being women, ergo belief in the position is liberal

sorry if this is some oversimplified childish nonsense that could be dashed to bits by a thorough grounding in modern crit theory

Where are the true liberals

― all cats are beautiful (silby)

scotland, i believe

xp ah that’s pretty different then, yes! Personally I am in favor of the complete undermining of the gender system, I wrote a tiny amount of writing about that a while ago, partly copy-pasted from other ilx threads, and informed by tweets of sometime ilxor rev. dollars, cf http://jklol.net/on-ending-gender.html

one thing above all seems clear to me: we need more trans voices on ilx, especially given the genuinely excellent debates and discussions that must occur constantly within 'the trans community' concerning all of these issues

xp to soref that is