Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

^^^

Jacobin is quite literally socialism lite for middle-class white kids who don't want to think about their racism because it makes them uncomfortable.

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

The answer is yes, we will always hand wave

I like reed, his ideas aren't really that in-step with dsa types ideas so this controversy is unsurprising. Storm in a demitasse sums it up p well

is reed actually "moving right" or is the popular discourse of the past ~5 years just providing him many more opportunities to reiterate

I think that ideas of intersectionality have taken off, and rightly so, and so those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people...and perhaps also by those of us who teach the Combahee River Collective and Crenshaw's work, too.

this is true but has included a lot of clueless or cynical appropriation of the language from various political & corporate interests which has given more life to this part of the left by appearing to confirm all their suspicions. that class politics can & has frequently been co-opted in similar ways seems mostly uninteresting or incomprehensible to them

I've been accused of class reductionism & identity politics many times from different crowds, sometimes for the same position. one thing that would help would be if everyone acknowledged how slippery all these terms have become & how many agendas they can serve- even the good critiques of either are used to give cover to a lot of bullshit

I know an editor there, and her social media posts essentially accusing Black people of "not knowing what's good for them" when Bernie was still in the race were so abhorrent I blocked her.

― healthy cocaine off perfect butts (the table is the table),

Can we get a name for this person, and something more than a paraphrase?

I don't think its necessarily doing any good to throw these terms around without referring exactly who we're speaking about and what it is they've done. those who reduce problems to class are viewed as hopeless ideologues by a lot of younger people is really quite vague, this is what leads to talking at cross purposes

The attempted cancelation of Alex Morse is an issue. I'm not sure how close that has come to working

xp this is true but insofar as there are sides here it's coming from both/all of them. everything about this already interminable debate becomes that much worse when it turns into another fucking proxy war over US presidential candidates

It may be coming from all of them, but we don't have to be part of it?

I think one of the issues is we can end up at a totalizing point. A point where its assumed everyone has already made up their minds, not just on big picture stuff but on individual cases. Reed is good. Reed is bad. I've not seen anything to suggest Reed is "bad" or that he is overly class-reductionist. BUT this is partly because I've only seen or read 'some' Reed (in common with most people?). It's unclear to me why he is someone that shouldn't even be speaking somewhere. This is where I get really lost.

These terms are doing a lot of work, seem to mean different things to different people - there's a lot of skipping to the conclusion. Things just are. Is what Reed is saying so bad that it shouldn't even be engaged with? (caveat - I may well be missing part of whats happening here)

And now we have a post that says that "someone" at the Jacobin said "Black people of "not knowing what's good for them", but this is in paraphrase. Even on this board we see how much heavy lifting and paraphrasing does (can look at the Biden thread to see just how many posts are immediately paraphrased to mean something else)

There seems to be a lot of shortcutting to landing hits on individuals. I don't think is is 'bad faith' per se, it's more like "We know person x really means y, regardless of whether they said it". Maybe thats inevitable to some extent, but something we should be trying to avoid, unless entrenchment is the aim

some of it is just pattern recognition. which patterns & how real or significant they are will depend on what someone is familiar with

I'm familiar enough with the usual beats of this debate to be suspicious of certain lines of argument, or of people associated with a certain mileu. I think everyone does this

We all do it of course, but its better if we try not to!

The danger is it becomes impenetrable to people unfamiliar with the patterns, and sets a high bar by requiring people to not only also have this background information but to have processed it the same way too. This leads to the so called bad faith conversations that might not be bad faith at all, merely pattern recognition, or pattern assumption. The likes of "well, people like you usually say". Its deciding what people have said before they've said it, and it doesn't go anywhere

I saw a small section of a debate a left-wing person had with Sargon of Akkad a while ago. The other guy 'knew' what Sargon really meant, but the viewer doesn't necessarily. He took short cuts with performativity and grandstanding to win, not engaging with what was actually said. This kind of victory is a false victory

Anvil, I went to college with this person and I'm not going to name them as we still share many friends.

In terms of my 'vague' post about younger people, as someone who has been involved in radical political movements for years, what I can offer is that the language and forms of rhetoric have changed on social media and in actions in recent years... Class reductionist stances are viewed as suspect by a Blacker and younger crowd, and a radical intersectionality has become more de rigueur, even for those who've never read the literature. While you could say this is all just echo chamber stuff or merely anecdotal, I think that the multi-racial but Black-led quality of many of the ongoing uprisings is sufficient evidence.

And all views that are deemed suspect must be deplatformed. Totally cool.

I never said that I agreed with what happened to Reed. Just explaining the phenomenon.

I liked this Dolan/Brecher blog post about the targets "cancel culture" tends to miss, as primarily explained/demonstrated via Victorian-era literature.

The key to effective silence is to coopt, not alienate, your intelligentsia. The hick Nazis drove out or killed their intellectuals; the Empire suborned and coddled its writers and poets, often promoting those of little talent (whose works are still vaguely canonical), adding intellectual insecurity as another motive for collusion.

Tennyson makes a good start here. Anybody associate Tennyson with genocide? Didn’t think so. He never mentioned it — in his canonical writings. He and Victoria were neighbors, chums, and he won every honor the Empire could bestow, despite being by general consent the stupidest “major” poet in the canon.

You’d never link Tennyson to genocide, until you look at his private letters and his friends’ memoirs. Then you see the perfect melding of silence and violent hatred, as in Kingsley, as in case after case after case that you never hear about — and if you do dare to mention one of the cases, will get you a grumpy, “Oh yes, we know about all that, they held some pretty objectionable opinions, as was common at the time…” (I wish I could do the inflection on “pretty objectionable.” It’s one you hear often among Commonweath academics, especially after the second drink.)

I once read Tennyson’s letters and found to my shock that he had visited Famine Ireland. Even in his letters there is not one mention of the dead. What you do get is a set of rules he laid down, as a celebrity, to his hosts as he made his way from one vampire castle to the next (never mind Mark Fisher, these guys were the real thing): he was not to be spoken to about “Irish distress,” and the window shades of the carriages in which he rode from one Ascendancy manse to another were to be kept completely shut, lest he see the bodies.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/07/the-war-nerd-amateurs-talk-cancel-pros-talk-silence.html

lol i generally like brecher when he's writing as the war nerd but the implication that tennyson was in fact talentless is p fucking silly (don't think i've ever read anything memorable by dolan)

i first encountered reed bcz pre-heel-turn hitchens gave stirrings in the jug a rave review -- memory says in the v.voice but that seems highly unlikely -- and so i bought it, and was surprised how stiffly and jargonishly written it was, given how much of hitchens's thing was "good writing".

maybe reed's a better stylist these days and i shd probably reread the book anyway. i have little doubt looking back that hitchens' motive was the other kind of stirring, in regard to intra-left feuding.

looks like the hitchens review was actually of class notes: posing as politics and other thoughts on the american scene, so maybe that's better written than stirring lol -- i just reread the hitchens and elements i was already p bored with in his shtick in the late 90s are now like applying a cheese grater to yr face

another reviewer describes it as sparkling with wit and wisdom, which i find highly unlikely -- reed writes like and wants to be read as an engaged academic first and foremost, sorry if this offends

And all views that are deemed suspect must be deplatformed. Totally cool.

oh so everyone you disagree with is a nazi? so much for the tolerant left

Yes everyone I disagree with is a nazi. I don’t see any other conclusion can be drawn.

He and Victoria were neighbors, chums, and he won every honor the Empire could bestow, despite being by general consent the stupidest “major” poet in the canon.

tennyson had some good lines. but "i am a part of all that i have met" takes on a chilling dimension when juxtaposed with his seeming indifference to the irish famine, which i guess he witnessed firsthand...

it's a lot harder to forgive artists for being complicit in state crimes -- cowards or else worse, indifferent -- than it is to forgive them for other kinds of transgressions, like byron sleeping with his sister or whatever. which is interesting to think about, because when it comes to our contemporaries, it's the opposite.

I liked this Dolan/Brecher blog post about the targets "cancel culture" tends to miss, as primarily explained/demonstrated via Victorian-era literature.

― unpaid intern at the darvo institute (Simon H.)

dolan/brecher are no doubt extremely intelligent but it seems very.... rhetorical. i just don't understand who they're Explaining all these things to and why. the issue is a lack of precision on the modern-day front - they are certainly capable of being extremely precise and clear when it comes to supporting the historical fact that the potato famine was a political act that was discreetly supported by nearly the entirety of the upper classes of british society. what i'm having trouble with is how any of this relates to contemporary events, where they seem content to just throw around words like "cancel culture" without much at all in the way of concrete referents.

i think they're just saying that having an intelligentsia obsessed with personal morality doesn't mean the culture itself is especially moral. which is a solid point -- we all agree that was true of the american right wing in the 90s and 00s, when they were hopped up on self-righteous christian moralism. so maybe the left wing's moral turn -- their move away, from like, a more laissez faire approach to language and expression -- should be taken with some skepticism.

just skimmed it though. they definitely do not "prove" cancel culture is hypocritical or anything.

nor is that the angle he's interested in taking

And all views that are deemed suspect must be deplatformed. Totally cool.

― Muswell Hillbilly Elegy (President Keyes)

ftr I am totally cool with this, esp. since "deplatformed" basically means "loses money/prestige/a job" and not "gets murdered by cops who then get promoted"

once the punching up becomes in any way comparable to the punching down, wake me up. until then, shut the fuck up with your liberal whining.

Is this in regard to Adolph Reed, Alex Morse, or who?

I don't really understand what antideplatforming as a stance even means, does it mean if I run an organization I don't choose who to invite, I just have open-mike night and whoever shows up...?

people talk (or don't talk) about "platforming" like it's some natural state of affairs instead of an actual choice made by actual people advancing actual interests

hm

an actual materialist analysis of the issue would be p useful, like what has made student-age ppl of the left so suspicious of and exhausted by the dismissive commentary of well heeled pundits and tenured scholars, also of the left, but born between, like, 1945 and 1970?

reed might actually be pretty good on this, it's his beat

also lol that adolph reed snr called him adolph in 1947, v strong trolling

Are you saying that horseshoe theory is real?

an actual materialist analysis of the issue would be p useful

this is why The Letter should have published everyone's age and salary next to their names, would have saved everyone a lot of time

look clearly adolph with a "ph" is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from adolf with an f and anybody who would _ever_ associate the two is just not being _logical_

this is why The Letter should have published everyone's age and salary next to their names, would have saved everyone a lot of time

― unpaid intern at the darvo institute (Simon H.)

if we're going all occam's razor on this not publishing The Letter at all might have been even easier

harsh but fair

https://youtu.be/HIWY8UyW9bw

lol they're very bad at faking the performance

amazing song though

lol they're very bad at faking the performance

― treeship

ridiculous, i have never seen alex chilton giving less than his all

anyway a great song obviously but i am still fond of this one

https://youtu.be/veB0UkFuRls

The Dolan/Brecher piece seems to be making a point that quiet complicity with state violence is insidious, and that it arguably has more lasting effects than the hucksters selling fascist snake oil during a rightward swing in consciousness. In relation to cancel culture, it seems to be making the argument that simply calling out those who openly proclaim fascist tendencies, for example, is not enough, particularly since the machinations behind those tendencies tend to run deep.

I tend to be a both/and sort of person in this regard— why not de-platform people AND try to get at the underlying structures that form their shitty views?

This is unclear though, who is it we are de-platforming? Fascists? right wing people in general? Reed? Sunkara/Jacobin?

Leftists treating Leftists with somewhat different ideas as dangerous people who need to be shut down is like some stuff that’s never happened before in history And will probably work out fine

table, I think Dolan would agree w u

anvil, in my above post, i'm referring specifically to fascists and right-wingers, genocidaires, etc.

In general, I don't think that a disagreement over politics that leads to someone like Reed deciding not to give a speech is dangerous or deplatforming at all. I think it's a disagreement over politics, one with many nuances, and one on which both sides have a good argument. There has always been factionalism, particularly in socialist circles, and in the case of Reed, I don't totally get the hand-wringing. People don't have a "right" to give speeches to groups that don't want to hear their speeches!

Like, when I lived in an anarchist cooperative housing situation, did we have socialists come speak at events? No. Tankies? No. We didn't prevent people sympathetic to those tendencies from coming to anarchist-led talks or events unless we thought it was going to cause safety concerns, but as many other people have said previously in this thread and elsewhere, many of the people making a tempest out of such "de-platforming" cases hold immense amounts of power and feel they have a right to be listened to and not questioned by rapt audiences who agree with them totally. They're elitists, plain and simple, who utilize the cudgel of free speech to maintain their positions.