Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

it doesn't need to be a slam dunk, it can just feel more right

you can define me as whatever

I've never defined you as anything! Its best not to get too caught up in labels, other than as generalities

When I see the words liberal and religious in the same sentence I can only think of one name - Tim Farron (LOL).

the creepiest

"What I took from Kate's post is not that she doesn't want to apologize but that it feels to her like when people apologize for misgendering her they're actually asking for some sort of absolution from something much bigger, they're asking her to pronounce them Good Persons.

― Daniel_Rf"

yeah, i meant to make that more explicit in that last post but i forgot. when i fuck up, which i do, often, what i try to do is accept responsibility, apologise to anybody i've hurt, accept the consequences, and move on. what i was trying to convey is that misgendering someone is a normal and common thing to do, it's something i still do all the fucking time, and of course i feel bad about doing it, but feeling ashamed of my mistakes, i've found, doesn't really help me to fix them, is more likely to send my spiraling into self-judgment, into the notion that i am a Bad Person, like lj says.

"They're probably just really afraid of being (or being seen to be) bad people! I suffer from it too; it's natural. It's why I sometimes fly off the handle when my insecurities are provoked in just the right way

― imago"

this is good. this is really insightful and thoughtful and i totally agree with it. the bit after this that i didn't quote, i feel like you kind of go into problem-solving, which i wasn't asking for and i don't need. i have problems, i do the best i can with them, which includes asking for help from other people when i need it, and i don't really think i did that in my last post.

i know very well, very well indeed, that fear of being Bad, and it was not healthy for me. i lived in constant fear of judgement, holding myself to impossible standards, never allowing myself to make a mistake or running away from the mistakes i did make.

re: your thought on my use of the word "liberal" - i think those are, again, some really good perspectives, thoughtful, and in some respects valid. i did, on consideration, go a little bit into polemic mode there, and i try not to do that. so thank you for holding me accountable for that.

to the extent that liberalism can admit to its inadequacies rather than seeking to exculpate them, well, to that extent i would agree with you that liberalism hasn't failed, but the whole history of liberalism is so dogged by that drive to exculpate that sometimes i find it hard to not see it as all-encompassing.

a song that i find really personally inspiring to me, even though it's not about me, not about my struggle, is nina simone's "mississippi goddamn". i can relate to the frustration she voices. and that was what, fifty years ago? and have things gotten better for people of color in america? for fifty years liberals in america have counseled patience, tolerance, and at the risk of being called "paranoid" again it really seems to have benefited said liberals a lot more than it's benefited the people they have so counseled.

i have a really, really, really hard time trusting liberals. i feel like when they make promises, and lately they're not even really adequate _promises_ anymore, that either they are lying to me or they are lying to themselves, and it really doesn't matter to me which.

and then you close off by going into this whole thing here:

"Speaking of which, what are your alternatives, my fine anti-liberal friends? I never do hear how we're going to bring about full communism, or what price there is to pay. Will your life and the lives of those you care about be made better by liberals like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn, or by an armed struggle in which you'll probably die?

― imago"

i mean, this is what i fucking mean by invoking fear of the other. it's not enough for liberals to point out an injustice, a wrong, a failure. we have no right, no standing, to complain about a problem unless we also bring to them, tied up in a neat little bow, an infallible solution. from my youth i have heard this lousy defense of capitalist democracy - "yeah, it sucks, but everything else is worse. i mean, have you seen the other guy?"

how much worse do things have to fucking get, lj? look, i'm white, all of this shit is theoretically being done for my goddamn benefit, and i'm fucking miserable. everybody around me is half-mad with anguish and fear. and that's your answer? it could be worse? lj i've already got a perfect score on the GAD-7, you can't make me more afraid than i already am!

and please, please, please, quit with the tokenizing, quit using people who as far as i know have never written you a personal letter of recommendation to support your disingenuous misrepresentations. that last sentence of yours? that is terrible. absolutely terrible! it doesn't make you look better and it makes it really hard for me treat you with the kindness and respect you deserve.

(in many cases "half-mad" is putting it charitably, tbqh)

i will cop to slipping into disgruntled polemic at the end there; sorry about that. obviously there are a shitload of terrible problems with society in the US, UK and many other places, and it isn't really my place to bumptiously ask how people plan to solve them given how borderline impossible they've proven to solve over many generations; it's flippant and not needed

but then again, we are going to need solutions. maybe not armed ones. that was silly of me. but i do want to talk solutions!

Not being nice to liberals is part of the solution

Jeremy Corbyn is a Socialist, not a liberal.

― The Fields o' Fat Henry (Tom D.), Monday, 13 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

Clueless bantz from Louie aside Corbyn was more of a mixed bag. How much of a socialist can you be to get to the top of the Labour Party? If anything his open to all views liberal-ish points were his undoing. He should've totally stuck the knife in and taken the whip from the worst wreckers, for a start!

The mix comes in with his anti-imperialist viewpoints (which included solidarity with the likes of Cuba that provoke havoc in the liberal mind), anti-war, anti-militarism in the whole nuclear weapons debacle.

which included solidarity with the likes of Cuba that provoke havoc in the liberal mind

Depends:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada–Cuba_relations

(You'll need to copy/paste that link, obv.)

uk pol profs will talk about the liberal left to mean yr progressive left that supports identity politics and so on

― rumpy riser (ogmor), Monday, 13 July 2020 13:23 (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Since ukpolprofs are worse than scum on twitter I am thinking ogmor was saying that liberal left is mislabelled by them as progressive left, because the liberal left often walk right past identity politics?

good work defining liberalism everyone. maybe we can decode "and" soon, that'll get is 2/5ths of the thread title

'And' is just 'cum'.

Pom - from that article it seems the reason for Canada to play nice with Cuba is to use Cuba to differ themselves from the US.

That isn't really an anti-imperialist mindset to me, which would mean backing (with words if not arms, and certainly not cutting off trade relations) Cuba right through its involvement in the Angolan civil war.

then why did we elect Castro's kid huh??

'And' is just 'cum'.

I think this has been linked to on ilx before, but this article is pretty convincing imo - arguing that Corbyn is a better liberal than the supposed 'liberal' centrists he is sometimes unfavorably compared to

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/jeremy-corbyn-defender-of-liberalism

― soref, Monday, 13 July 2020 bookmarkflaglink

The Corbyn labour party was said to be a compromise solution. While I partly agree I think the British state in Corbyn's hands would've meant solidarity with the likes of Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela, the need for dialogue in almost all circumstances, a reckoning with the legacy of Empire (with opening of the archives) and -- post Prince Andrew -- even a reckoning with the Royal Family as they are run.

And looking at Covid that would've given license to go even further in restructuring much of the British state. And finally really opening the floodgates to a potential left-wing hegemony, with the likes of BLM being listened to by a black home Secretaary!

Poor Louie would have struggled with all of this!

but then again, we are going to need solutions. maybe not armed ones. that was silly of me. but i do want to talk solutions!

― imago

i don't have solutions. i'm worried and frustrated and i often feel at wit's end. here are some things i try to do.

i try to listen to other people. particularly other people who are not like me. particularly people who are vulnerable in ways that i'm not.

i try (and fail, regularly, lol) to not monopolize conversations, to not suck all of the air out of any space i operate in. the default way i was taught to talk to other people, to treat other people, tends to intimidate them, to shut them down, to silence them.

i keep my personal beliefs and judgements to myself. if someone shares something with me, i don't try to argue with them or persuade them that my beliefs are more empirically correct than theirs, even when i really believe that to be true. it's more important to me to allow people to feel how they feel without having to find justifications for it, to move the grounds of a discussion away from debate, away from defensiveness.

i try not to defend myself when criticized. this doesn't mean that i accept or agree with the criticism, that i roll over for it, but i will not make others' judgements of me a subject for debate. i take responsibility for my mistakes but i do not apologize when i do not feel i have done anything wrong.

i do not insist that people do things my way, and i am most definitely not committed to the way of the ancestors. when people talk about things that might be disruptive or destructive, i do not take it upon myself to try argue them out of it, even if i do not personally agree with the ideas they're expressing. i do _not_ mirror or validate any manifestations of ideas that inspire unease in me. i trust myself, trust my instincts and my feelings, when it comes to identifying that unease and its possible sources.

i am ready, at any time, to walk away, to cut myself off from a person, if i don't feel safe around them. this can be because they are a "tankie", because they are justifying violence and terror as an end in itself, or just because they are behaving in an abusive way towards me. these are dangerous times and anything that keeps me from being the person i need to be is something i need to do without.

i work against anybody attempting to normalize this moment, this situation. there is, there _must be_, a time for healing, there is a time for de-escalation. we are not ready for that. before reconciliation, there must be truth, and the truth is that the time we are living in, what is being asked of many of us, is profoundly wrong, profoundly terrible.

my observation, as well, is that this time, this profound aberration for so many of us, is also a culmination of many things, over a long period of time, that i took for granted as normal, acceptable compromises, or even positive goods. my experiences, the experiences of other people i trust, have led me to the conclusion that many of my assumptions, my liberal assumptions, were wrong, were dangerous, were harmful, brought about these terrible and awful outcomes for so many people.

it was easy for me to accept many of those injustices, is hard for me to oppose these injustices, because the injustices benefited and continue to benefit me. i accept that without guilt, without shame, accept it as a fact. i work to accept that the change we need may potentially disadvantage me more than it advantages me, and to accept that that is always going to be difficult for me. it scares me. it is a challenge to my self-interest to work to center voices other than my own, center those whose interests are not my interests.

i don't have control over what happens to the world from here. i _shouldn't_ have control over what happens to the world from here. my struggle, my fight, is not violent. i suppose i am, if it comes to it, willing to die for my beliefs, but nobody's fucking asking me to do that. the world has too many dead trans bodies already, and i can't possibly see what benefit another one added to the pile would have. what is more difficult for me to do is to _live_ for my beliefs, to tell my story to others, what i used to believe, the mistakes i made, what i was wrong about, what i am still learning. i can't heal the world, but i can work to heal myself, work to teach what these words, compassion, kindness, self-determination, respect, justice, what they mean to me now, because those meanings are not the same as the meanings i was taught. my hope, and i do not know if it is a reasonable hope, is that by doing this work we can reclaim these words from today's pudding-masters, from the people to whom "free speech" means license to abuse and erase.

that's what i got. that's what i have to offer right now. i hope it helps!

^ as we say here on ilx, booming post

yes

you say this

i keep my personal beliefs and judgements to myself. if someone shares something with me, i don't try to argue with them or persuade them that my beliefs are more empirically correct than theirs, even when i really believe that to be true. it's more important to me to allow people to feel how they feel without having to find justifications for it, to move the grounds of a discussion away from debate, away from defensiveness.

but earlier you said this

and please, please, please, quit with the tokenizing, quit using people who as far as i know have never written you a personal letter of recommendation to support your disingenuous misrepresentations. that last sentence of yours? that is terrible. absolutely terrible! it doesn't make you look better and it makes it really hard for me treat you with the kindness and respect you deserve.

interestingly it is the former that i have more of a problem with. i don't mind being called out on anything so long as it isn't disingenuous; while i'd still defend placing Sanders or Corbyn within a liberal tradition i'm aware that it comes off as flippant just straight-up calling them 'liberals' without qualification. not that i think i deserve to be treated less kindly as a result but that's your call obviously.

but i have a big problem with the stated intention to 'keep my personal beliefs and judgements to myself' when you are literally participating in a messageboard discussion! two reasons being: it's therefore obviously contradictory to say that you even do, and worse, you SHOULDN'T keep your beliefs and judgements to yourself when they might prove useful or helpful! it comes across like you are paying lip-service to some kind of miserablist self-sabotage; earlier, you even said without me quite noticing "look, i'm white, all of this shit is theoretically being done for my goddamn benefit" - to have the attitude that the world is being worsened expressly so that you can prosper just because you're white is not only wrong but extremely dangerous imo! you seem to have fallen into a rhetorical trap whereby you have assimilated the mantle of oppressor despite being manifestly nothing of the sort. please do not think that the world is being badly governed for you! it is not! if anything the revanchist conservatives leading america down a dark path are much likelier to directly oppress you than anyone else in this entire thread! i mean, i'm sure you don't need me to tell you that, but please - there is no need to frame yourself as someone who is guilty of anything. your post reads like a terrible confession, but you have done nothing wrong!

obviously you need to do whatever you do to protect yourself and i am rooting for you to feel safer and more beloved as the weeks and months go by. but you have agency, and it is not bad!

i know it is a struggle for you and for millions of americans right now, i do not deny this. but the way out is not through despair, through self-negation.

the word 'hope' appears three times in your post, all at the end. i wish it had appeared more times. have hope. do the work, yes, but do it in hope. the world is salvageable and you can help to salvage it, actively.

obviously with 'misrepresentations' you could have been talking about me dichotomising leftism as either liberal peaceability or armed conflict, with the implication that the non-liberals seek gunplay, which was also obviously flippant and kind of bullshit as a rhetorical technique; i'm sorry for that too and i fully believe that you want peaceful change

rereading my latest post i can see that it might come off as patronising. i shouldn't force positivity on anyone and i should certainly not try to persuade someone not to question their complicity in inequalities that i am even more complicit in myself. so i guess i'm sorry if my words seem at all out of place or backwards-thinking.

Did this get posted yet? I refuse to keep up

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/07/harpers-letter-free-speech/614080/

Hannah Giorgis knows what she's talking about in that piece.

Missed that it was a newer Atlantic piece on this than I thought, actually, so apology for lazy, exhausted snark.

Yeah, good piece. Sometimes writers at the Atlantic get it right.

After reading endless takes, I finally dug into The Letter myself and I was shocked. pic.twitter.com/Y1lbZd3OYB

— Alan Levinovitz (@AlanLevinovitz) July 13, 2020

Amid a worsening pandemic and ongoing protests against lethal state violence, using glib internet-speak to describe the president of the United States betrays a deep detachment from the carnage wrought by his policies and ideology.

lmao literally everyone is guilty of this though

"your post reads like a terrible confession, but you have done nothing wrong!"

yeah, i knew that part would be difficult. honestly, i think the stuff you say in this paragraph - i believe that you are misreading my post. i know i'm verbose. i know i say a lot, and a lot of it is pretty densely packed. i regret that "read what i wrote, then read what you wrote" is so embedded as a _debate_ tactic, but a lot of the stuff you're arguing against is stuff that i don't believe and didn't say, and i'm not sure right now i'm totally up to rewriting what i said in other words. can i put a call out to other folks on this board? does what i wrote make sense? do you think what i was saying is closer to what lj is reading in it, or is it something else? if it's something else, could you try to explain it to him as best you understand? like, to me, one of the more important sentences of that paragraph is this one:

"i accept that without guilt, without shame, accept it as a fact."

i know i have a lot of troubles with depression, with negative self-talk, but when i was writing that post, i didn't feel bad, i didn't feel miserable. putting those words down was an act of liberation for me, an act of joy. i am not asking for forgiveness, not seeking exculpation.

"the word 'hope' appears three times in your post, all at the end. i wish it had appeared more times. have hope. do the work, yes, but do it in hope. the world is salvageable and you can help to salvage it, actively.

― imago"

time and a place, lj. time and place. i have hope, and having hope _is_ the work i have to do, a place i have to get to, genuine hope rather than blind faith.

i'm not trying to "salvage" the world, to "save" the world. i want, well, the same thing liberals want - to make the world a better place. part of that is having as clear a head as i can about what i need to do and about what i can do, what i can and can't fix, what i might have to let go of, what i might have to lose in order to do so. all of the things i've lost, all of the things i may still lose, to have hope i need to be able to lose those things without despair.

a lot of the things i have to lose are things that, upon further consideration, we can live without. if america goes, if britain goes, if _democracy_ goes - we are still here, "the world" is still here. and that, that is why i have hope.

lmao literally everyone is guilty of this though

― trapped out the barndo (crüt)

for the record i try really hard not to do this. when i talk about him directly, i try and make a point to refer to him only as "the president of the United States".

Thinking a little more this morning about what Simon said a couple days ago, about viewing my experience in religious terms. I don't think of myself as religious, but a lot of what I've been through this last year, a lot of how I see things, is sometimes easier for me to explain in religious terms than secular philosophical terms. And when I try to do that, it occurs to me that secular philosophy of course is not opposed to religion, is riddled and shot through with religious ideas and assumptions.

I have a lot of challenges, as a non-binary trans woman, dealing with a world grounded in philosophical dualism. It's easy to view my transition as kind of a conversion experience, of being born again as a new person. Certainly I'm pressured to behave in ways that confirm that hypothesis. Before Thanksgiving break last year I left work dressed as a "man", and then when I came back in December I was dressed as a "woman", and people called me by a new name and new pronouns.

That experience was awkward for me, artificial, not in keeping with my experience. Gender isn't, for me and for a lot of people I know, an on/off switch, but a gradual process of change. Even while I am going through the process of working to be more authentic, more who I am, I still have to do a lot of pretending to accommodate other people.

When I think of myself in religious terms, I find it easier to relate my experience to certain concepts described in Buddhism than the ideas promulgated by dualist religion. I think a lot about, for instance, non-attachment.

Transition for me has been a radical practice of relinquishment. One of the many challenges I faced in transitioning was the idea that I was choosing to give up my male privilege. That was scary to me. I already had such a hard time of things, my life was already so difficult, and I was deciding that the answer to that was to try and get through with even less?

It wasn't until I had already relinquished it that I was able to see how much that "privilege" was hurting me, how much damage I was doing to myself by contorting myself into the shape of the man I was supposed to be. My maleness was a burden that I insisted on carrying, under the mistaken notion that it would "protect" me.

It's sometimes hard to explain to people pre-transition how amazing transition is. People look at it and say "Wow, that looks really hard. You face so much prejudice. I'm not sure I could do that." And yeah, it is hard, it is super fucking hard, but all I can say is it's worth it. It's hard for me to to describe in terms that don't smack of religion, that don't smack of the conversion experience, scales falling from one's eyes and so forth. The only alternative I can offer is that of liberation, of radical liberation.

And, I guess, I can say that where I've found myself is not where I thought I would find myself when I began this journey. One of the things I struggle with most, with regards to liberal/dualist framing, is this insistence on the homogenous nature of the Other. I mean, even trying to understand how people can think that way kind of breaks my brain. When I see liberals opposing intersectional leftism on the grounds that we are "conformist", I have a hard time getting out any words other than "What the fuck? Seriously?" Look, I'm trying to be kind, I'm trying to be patient, but, uh, hate to break it to you, but y'all are a _lot_ more conformist than we are.

And yeah, I used to live in that space. When I transitioned, I crossed the border out of it and found myself not in another land, but in a place without borders, a vast liminal space extending farther than I can see in all directions, an endless field of Becoming. From out here, the fortress I had walled myself in, for my own "protection", looks more like a prison.

It wasn't until I had already relinquished it that I was able to see how much that "privilege" was hurting me, how much damage I was doing to myself by contorting myself into the shape of the man I was supposed to be

spinoff thought: I think this is, in one form or another, a battle that every "socially conscious" man or at-the-time-male-identified person has to reckon with. or at least I do, regularly! which is part of my problem with some areas of ironic/not-ironic man-hating idpol discourse, this meme that men should be thankful for male privilege. (at least this is the implication I so often detect.) I have long resented male privilege even as I doubtlessly continue to benefit from it, knowing full well my ability to limit its power is, well, limited. at the end of the day of course we all do what we can and try to stay awake to these things. but to me it rarely feels like "enough"

(I wasn't accusing you of that implication, rusho, just to be clear! just thinkin baout things)

SCOOP alert: Bari Weiss is leaving the New York Timeshttps://t.co/5gjPfZGRRQ

— Katie Drummond (@katiedrumm) July 14, 2020

spinoff thought: I think this is, in one form or another, a battle that every "socially conscious" man or at-the-time-male-identified person has to reckon with. or at least I do, regularly!

― k*r*n koltrane (Simon H.)

oh yeah! i know what you're talking about there. what i was talking about is different from that, but it is definitely something i had to struggle with. when i identified as male, i worried a _lot_ about "toxic masculinity", about how to be a man in a healthy manner. so many of the things i was taught or encouraged to do as a man were bullshit and i hated them, hated the constant emphasis on power, violence, domination. i was really frustrated, though, because i didn't know how to be better, didn't know how to offer alternatives, to not be any of those things.

ironically, now that i've started transition the solutions to such problems seem obvious to me, now that it's no longer my problem to solve, my burden to carry. i struggle to express it, though, in ways that Old Me, Cis Me, would understand. i'm in a particularly weak position, honestly, to oppose toxic masculinity, to oppose destructive gender norms. i still believe, for instance, that it should be totally ok and fine for men to wear dresses and skirts, that a lot of the bullshit cis male standards a railed against are genuinely bullshit and can and should be opposed by cis males. it's not a convincing argument i can make, though. what cis man is going to believe me when I say "Sure, it's fine to wear a dress, it doesn't make you less of a man or anything"?

i think that's part of why i have so much respect for trans men. trans men are men, not intrinsically better or more valid than any other man, they are capable of exhibiting many of the same problems, making many of the same mistakes, cis men do, but they, as a group, have unique and uniquely valuable experiences that cis men don't. they are not raised with all of the bullshit cis men were raised with. nothing about their gender is assumed, nothing about it is taken for granted. they understand so much about manhood that i as a "cis man" just never fucking got, and i don't think it's just because i never was a cis man. you want to learn more about how to be a better man, a less toxic man? listen to trans men!

re: Bari, can't wait for all the whinging about how cancel culture "forced" her to "self-expel" into her next cushy media job

🤔🤔🤔https://t.co/KfPWyUKR3a pic.twitter.com/SB3Wz1kZBu

— Osita Nwanevu (@OsitaNwanevu) July 14, 2020

I read an excerpt from that letter and I think the Times made a strategic mistake hiring an opinion writer who can’t fucking write, you could get better prose picking someone at random from a college newspaper.

worst barry imo

Oh no! Bari Weiss, whom I don't read, resigned from the New York Times, which I don't read. Back to watching YouTube train vids.

— Dennis Perrin (@DennisThePerrin) July 14, 2020

really if you read the nyt op page, it's on you

I don’t think I have much personal sway over masculinity because I’m a fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma

Morbz I say this with love but is there literally no topic about which you don't think ILX needs to hear Dennis Perrin's opinion?

what cis man is going to believe me when I say "Sure, it's fine to wear a dress, it doesn't make you less of a man or anything"?

I do, for what it's worth! (But then again I already thought that)

Morbz I say this with love but is there literally no topic about which you don't think ILX needs to hear Dennis Perrin's opinion?

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

if perrin had actually posted a link to the train video he was watching i might possibly have been interested

fewer hot takes, more train videos, that's what i want. honestly i would rather watch a video by the _band_ train than hear someone's twitter hot takes. that's how little i want to hear his hot takes.

I don’t think I have much personal sway over masculinity because I’m a fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma

― trapped out the barndo (crüt)

oh! this is one of my least favorite things ever, when people i care about talk shit about themselves. crut, you are an awesome person and i care about you and anybody who makes you think you are a "fuckin dweeb with less than zero charisma" is wrong and mean. you deserve to be treated better than that.

the nyt should replace bari weiss with dennis perrin obv

perrin sure can deliver pith in 256 words or leth

lol

bari weiss? more like....uh, barry white's "your political correctness is my political core weakness"