Since there was a little discussion about that stupid whiny letter in the last set of comments, I wanted to add my take on it: They all think they are tortured souls like Bukowski, with a little bluebird in their heart that wants to get out. Except, instead of pouring whiskey on it, and inhaling cigarette smoke, their bluebird is kept in line by getting ratioed on Twitter. I know I should feel bad for them, but I don’t weep, do you?
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Ninedragonspot
My favorite part of the letter was realizing that Ian Buruma is still extremely butthurt at being shitcanned by the NYRB. Ian, u mad bro?
The Thin Black Duke
I still don’t understand why I’m supposed to feel sorry for millionaires who will always have a platform available to speak their minds.
JMG
I wish some of these people could’ve covered sports for a daily newspaper, where you get hate mail for predicting a home team loss and death threats if it does in fact lose. Suck it up, you pompous spoiled brats.
Patricia Kayden
Benw
They’re entitled jerks, sure. What’s telling is that getting criticized from the left is far, far more hurtful to them than the Prez and Republican party as a whole actively attacking them and openly calling for violence against them. Let’s ya know to whom they REALLY want to matter.
download my app in the app store mistermix
@Patricia Kayden: They left out the alligator jaw that is his current approve vs disapprove of his handling of COVID.
Tim C.
What the fuck are they talking about?
I ask this because some of the people down on the list at the end I have a lot of respect for. (Margret Atwood and Dahlia Lithwick for example) Also, because like everyone else I know I self-select content, have a busy life etc, and I’m unaware of what the hell they mean in terms of restrictions.
Genuinely asking here cause I don’t get it.
dexwood
efg’s words will never go out of style – fuck ’em.
germy
Cathie from Canada
When I read the letter I sent out this tweet:
I could not believe how these people could let themselves get played so easily. And I would love to know who was approached and DID NOT sign it because they saw it for what it was.
geg6
@The Thin Black Duke:
Exactly.
Patricia Kayden
Hunter Gathers
Just another group of rich assholes bitching about how bad they have it.
Help, help! They’re being repressed!
eric
this is easy: one day my ox will could be gored and i could lose money. Solzhenitsyn would like a word.
patroclus
I’m glad that they used a sentence to say that calls for racial justice are justified. But the fact that they then spent paragraphs whining about supposed “injustices” of a journalistic/academic kind shows what they really care about. George Floyd is dead, Elijah McClain is dead, Breonna Taylor is dead, Sandra Bland is dead, Armaud Arbery is dead, Trayvon Martin is dead and the list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. COVID is disproportionately killing black and brown people, today, right now!
They have a point. But it’s relatively minor. Get some perspective (and I’m looking at you George Packer) please.
MattF
I call it an attempt to change the subject. Injustice is boring and it just keeps recurring. Our feelings, OTOH, must be dealt with, and now.
Yutsano
@Patricia Kayden: I just need a recipe for sazón. Or someone else who sells it. Then I’m good.
Major Major Major Major
@Tim C.: There’s a bit of a moral panic going on right now and folks are getting shitcanned for alleged wrongthink. The best example is David Shor, an old Obama campaign stats guy who was fired from Civis Analytics for this tweet:
As you may be able to guess, there’s a lot of whininess and disingenuous arguments around the whole topic. The Letter is a part of it. If you read it out of context, it’s a bog-standard college-freshman-level defense of free speech. I think it was intended partly to troll others into overreacting, which has also worked.
oldster
I think a lot of people were upset by the firing of David Shor, whose re-tweeting of research by a black academic (Omar Wasow) was somehow interpreted as being an affront to the BLM movement and protests.
So, that’s one guy who was pretty clearly unjustly fired for saying something that was mis-interpreted. He was not a powerful person, what he said was entirely innocuous (i.e., “here’s some relevant research”), and he suffered the serious consequence of job-loss.
However, the Letter combined an indirect reference to Shor’s case with all sorts of other cases that really do not merit sympathy — rich people who said ugly things and don’t lose their jobs at all.
Conflating real suffering with fake suffering is not good. Complaining about fake suffering and using real suffering as a rhetorical shield is not good. Trying to protect Bret Stephens and Alan Dershowitz by pointing to David Shor is not good.
Eunicecycle
@JMG: a local weather reporter said he used to get hate mail if he predicted rain on weekends. So these idiots think he controls the weather??
ETA: He’s now retired, that’s why I said “used to get.” Current weather people probably still getting them
eric
Fact: People have the right to object and cancel a course of action they have taken or otherwise will take.
Fact: People sometimes get things wrong or go too far.
Result: Sometimes group action will be wrong people will get hurt.
Issue: Do you give up on legitimate collective action because it will inevitably lead to mistakes and some injustice, and thereby miss out on the many successful opportunities for change?
My answer: You aim for getting it right while not remaining silent. Then, if and when you get it wrong, you try to make amends and learn so it does not happen again.
Observation: I dont remember seeing all these signatories on letters supporting Norman Finkelstein while his career was being destroyed by Dershowitz.
cmorenc
um, mistermix…you’re kinda proving the Harper-letter-writer’s point with your post about it, condemning her for writing a supposedly “stupid, whiny letter”, which seemed mainly intended as a caution to progressives about not sliding into a similar narrow intolerance and close-mindedness that is so obviously a characteristic of the RW. Her letter is *not* in support or defense of “bothsider-ism” at all, but rather a caution against inadvertently becoming too much like a mirror image of the enemy we condemn.
You’re essentially shaming her by snidely mocking her…for exactly what? She has a fair point, as you just perversely, unwittingly proved.
Major Major Major Major
@eric:
It’s strange to me that this is basically the entire controversy, but none (few?) of the reactions to The Letter say anything about it.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: It’s interesting that we don’t hold employers responsible for wrongful firings.
FWIW, I agree that that tweet doesn’t seem fire-worthy.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
It’s because the letter didn’t get into it. You provided more information to me in your comment above than anything contained in that letter.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: In an at-will employment state (most states) it’s very difficult to prove wrongful termination. A number of the signatories are calling for an end to at-will employment.
@Baud: I provided some context, but the first paragraph does say things like
JPL
@Yutsano: In the previous thread someone recommended Badia. I know my supermarket carries that brand
Gravie
Had dinner with Charles Bukowski (in a small group) in Quincy, Florida back in the early ‘70s. He was a bit terrifying and that bluebird was definitely nowhere in evidence. Later that evening, he passed out on the floor in the student-housing apartment we had retired to.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
I’m not talking about legal liability. I’m talking about a reverse-cancel-culture condemnation of the employer for firing people unnecessarily. It’s like the only agency here is with the protestors and the employee.
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s pretty abstract.
HumboldtBlue
@Yutsano: I just need a recipe for sazón.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@cmorenc: Overstating your case is part of free speech too.
I’m not gonna stand with the people decrying cancel culture as long as so many of their prominent voices are people who have taken reputational hits for supporting the continued oppression of actual marginalized people.
Patricia Kayden
patroclus
@Baud: Indeed. It wasn’t until oldster mentioned David Shor that I became aware of what the Letter was actually talking about. I agree – he shouldn’t have been fired.
Any other specifics? What “journalists” are being prohibited from writing about what they want? Which “CEO’s” have been removed for merely clumsy mistakes? I think I understand the “editor” being fired for soliciting Tom Cotton’s “Send in the Troops” broadside. Any others? Why didn’t the Letter contain any of these facts and incidents?
PAM Dirac
@oldster:
But the “mob” had no power to do the firing. Someone with that power bought into the argument of the “mob”. Why isn’t that the person that ire is directed against? As I mentioned in a comment in the previous thread, I think it is because the signers have done well with the current decision makers and don’t want any of these decision makers decisions (especially the ones favorable to the signers) called into question. Bad speech should be met with good speech, unless it is my paycheck on the line.
zhena gogolia
I thought this was a pretty good response. At least, I was able to read it without being put to sleep by the prose, unlike the original letter:
https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice
zhena gogolia
@patroclus:
See my #35 link.
Martin
Fuck them.
One of my most interesting classes in college was taboo writing. How to write about topics which are taboo in public company. Ultimately a class like that is not actually about writing, but about why topics are or are not taboo, and your responsibility as the writer for establishing the correct context, and serving the taboo topic in the correct way. Clearly nobody at Harpers was in that class with me.
It is okay as an author to write ‘nigger’. Even as a white author. But holy shit do you need to do it properly such that you are not further contributing to the reason why it’s a taboo word. Their problem isn’t cancel culture, their problem is a society unwilling to actually deal with the issues that cause it to be taboo, and until that is done, their creative freedom needs to be highly self-regulated. We have spent 400 years laying mines across this country, but we are unwilling to do the much harder job of clearing them, and as a result so much of what you talk about and how you talk about it will remain a place where a wrong step blows up. And yes, it sucks to have to live that way, but fuck, we all contributed to it, and we’re all going to have to fix it together, and the good people at Harpers could use their platform to lead that charge, and to a decent degree they do, but part of what is also taboo in the US leads us to stand on the edge of a minefield while someone is placing those mines and idling wondering how they got there, because it is unfair to point at the guy doing it and accurately describe what he is doing. And should you get too close to doing that, you must idly posit that his political opponent must surely be doing the same thing somewhere else, even though nobody has ever witnessed it.
I get that they’re frustrated with it, but the houses we’re condemning didn’t just rot away in the last month, they’ve been rotting for decades because nobody fucking cared, including Harpers.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud:
The “maybe we are going too far” folks are condemning the employers, but from what I’ve seen it’s mostly commenters telling the condemners that they should be focusing on something else, omelettes and eggs, etc.
Starfish
This crap has been driving me up the wall. It is the same people whining who have always been whining. Imagine thinking that Freddie de Boer and Jesse Singal have been deeply wronged and need defending? These are some of the people least able to accept criticism talking about cancel culture.
These folks wrote a response.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I took the participation by people like Atwood and Rowling to be about the shrieking howls of outrage they get for being openly sensitive to feminists (particularly those who’ve faced a lifetime of pushback on their efforts to create space for women to feel safe) being excoriated for not warmly embracing entry of the trans community into those hard won spaces.
cmorenc
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
Whoever said that writing a (I call it dumbly un-self-aware, you call it “overstated”) post like mistermix’s above isn’t part of free speech? Usually, mistermix writes solid good stuff, and he should be forgiven for the occasional bad mis-fire. Part of my free speech is telling him he kinda sucked this time around.
Yutsano
@HumboldtBlue: I thought I had posted an edit in my original comment but I guess it didn’t take. There was a recipe in the thread but since that one allows turmeric (and I can’t get achiote here easily) I like that one more. It helps that I have all that already!
Major Major Major Major
@patroclus: The Letter was, I think, designed to be abstract and short and reasonable-sounding, goading everybody into angry reactions that are inexplicable to those who aren’t Too Online.
So mission fucking accomplished, everybody, can’t wait until next week’s news cycle so we can talk about something else.
germy
Baud
@Major Major Major Major:
I didn’t get that from the letter. I don’t really follow this issue, so forgive me if there’s common knowledge I’m not aware of.
Tim C
Okay, on the surface, the David Shor tweet seems like an overreaction, not firable. These kinds of open letters just suck though. Issues are different on a case by case basis, talking about the “culture” of things is useless with being specific on examples.
patrick II
I wrote this earlier towards the end of a thread. But I am re-posting it here.
There is supposed to be a free market of ideas where the best ideas, like the best products, rise by popular choice to the top. Theoretically, the cancel culture interferes with that. And frankly (sorry libs) sometimes it does. However, like there is no economic free market without a context of law and regulation, a free “idea market” can only exist in a context where the outcome is not corrupted by the people who own the market’s media and push falsehoods meant to further their own short term gain. Climate change is real, Cornovirus cannot be cured by anti-bacterials, in spite of what FOX, Rush push those views and large mainstream media is owned by people who’s interests roughly align.
The Vanity Fair article is an idea libertarian’s unrealistic assertion of a world that cannot be attained.
Woodrow/asim
So, there’s a thoughtful in-depth response that points out a number of issues with this Harper’s letter, both rhetorically and ethically. [Upon Edit: same link @Starfish provides]
That said — I’m exhausted by this desire for “The Left” to have to play by Marquis of Queensbury rules for online (or offline) debate. The hand-wringing over “overreactions” acts like this is some Oxford debate shit. It ain’t — what Rowling alone is doing to Trans rights by itself, is just the top of a set of horrific discussions, empowered by privilege, that these people by and large feast upon. And shame to the exceptions who knew who they were siding with, and signed on, anyway.
Rhetorical violence for me, but not for thee!
This whole shitshow reminds me a lot of this passage from Dr. King. He utterly shames people with privilege demanding oppressed folx stay in their “pacifist” lanes, while the privileges folx get to run around and do all the damn damage they wanna:
Another Scott
@JMG: I’m reminded of a recent Tweet responding to some police department going on sick-out. Because of some criticism or other.
Roughly:
“Doctors get yelled at and criticized and get death threats. So do teachers, essential workers, etc., etc. Police departments need to stop being such cry babies…”
It’s good that they’re getting pushback on their demand to be worshiped and to be beyond criticism.
Cheers,
Scott.
namekarB
Why are we even discussing this? Every post about the Harper letter helps amplify their grievance. (And quite frankly, I am unsure what that grievance was about since no facts were cited.)
The proper response is to read it, recognize that it is allegations with no facts, and move on. If a tree falls in the forest . . .
BellyCat
That poem really hit the spot right now
(says the Father
responding to divorce papers
unable to afford counsel
who can’t see his Son freely
who is four beers into noon.)
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: This whole thing is exactly as stupid as it seems.
Baud
@namekarB:
Because it’s mostly meaningless in a time where everything worth talking about in the world is shitty.
patroclus
@zhena gogolia: Thanks. Now I know what they’re talking about. I’m glad real journalists did real journalism and laid out the (possible) specifics. Unlike the authors of the Letter, who just committed shoddy journalism, of which they should be ashamed.
Shor shouldn’t have been fired (by his employer, not the mob). The others are arguable; some more, some less. But I reiterate my original point – the actual deaths of actual people are more important. They are dead and can’t get another job or publish something elsewhere. My perspective is the same – we should be focusing far more on the deaths and the real injustices.
trollhattan
@Martin:
I know it’s the usually moronic NFL but this example of Julian Edelman reaching out to DeSean Jackson over the latter’s grievously anti-Semitic Instagram spew is an example to us all.
West of the Rockies
@Patricia Kayden:
Thanks for that link!
Trump is said to be down to Biden in the over 65 age group. He is down in the suburbs. He is way down with white college-educated women. Surely he has lost and not gained any POC voters. He’s down in most of the swing vote states. We have people like Stacy Abrams doing what they can to help GOTV and protect voter’s rights. We are far more aware of potential foreign chicanery. We have the history of 2018 and special election results to point to that make one feel good about November. COVID won’t likely go away in the next 100 days. The economy will still suck. Civil unrest will continue. Trump won’t help himself on any of these issues.
I’m not saying it’s a done deal. We need to GOTV. But I don’t think it’s foolish to begin measuring the curtains.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
While we worry about whether the trans community is adequately loved by Margaret Atwood or Rowling on attempts to enter safe feminist space, police are killing people, Trump is robbing the world, people are choking to death and the LMPD is targeting the children of protest leaders (including protest-active lawyers) with pepperballs, rough handling and arrest (a 14 year old got shot with pepperballs, and had her ribs broken by being slammed into the ground for the crime of standing in a stairwell and running a video of rooftop police snipers).
Interestingly, I haven’t seen any trans participation in the marches. Want inclusion and love? Participate in the hard shit.
Roger Moore
@Cathie from Canada:
I don’t think it’s that simple. The key to a lot of this is that the Harpers letter was written to be as anodyne and inoffensive as possible; it only became clear what it was really about when you seen the list of signatories. Hilzoy talked about this a bit on twitter. She saw the letter and said she probably would have signed it as an anodyne defense of free speech, but she was distracted by other things and never around to it. The people who sent it to her mentioned some of the most distinguished signatories (like Margaret Atwood) but left out the controversial ones (like JK Rowling) who would have given away the game.
tarragon
@patroclus:
Attempted analysis here:https://twitter.com/spiantado/status/1280925848023916544
Martin
Exactly this. If your employer is such a chickenshit that they can’t stand with one of their employees that’s a problem with the employer. And yes, it’s hard, and it can be expensive, but those are the things you (rarely) need to do.
And those actions tell us something. If they are willing to bail out on an employee like that, they will probably run up to the WH and praise dear leader at the drop of the hat because they don’t have any moral code, their corporate culture is to ingratiate themselves to whoever has power – from the leader to the mob. And I say fuck them – run them out of business.
And to be fair, that is one of the problematic consequences of capitalism is that it incentivizes that kind of culture because capitalism and populism share a lot of common dynamics. What catches everyone off guard, which is the real source of all the whining is when the majority flips to the minority (in power dynamics). And that’s the moment we are in right now. Maybe just temporarily, but hopefully permanently. This is what happens when we build a coalition of marginalized people and give them a majority voice. POC now have the stage, and a lot of folks don’t know how to navigate that, and it seemingly came really quickly.
David Evans
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I agree. And since some people seem to think Rowling has nothing to complain about, here is some evidence.
https://medium.com/@rebeccarc/j-k-rowling-and-the-trans-activists-a-story-in-screenshots-78e01dca68d
Starfish
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Rowling is going beyond not embracing trans women. She is going out of her way to crap on them. Imagine having a billion dollars and spending your time on Twitter telling 1% of the population that they are not women.
Baud
Everyone focuses on Rowling, but David Brooks was a signatory too. How can you expect to be taken seriously if you have David Brooks as a signatory?
geg6
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
This is patently untrue, at least here in Pittsburgh, it is. Trans groups have been very visible at the protests here.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@David Evans:
Yup. How dare her claim her space.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Starfish:
I don’t read her that way, but you do you.
hells littlest angel
Being racist, misogynistic, homophobic and fascist-friendly, the comparison to Bukowski is pretty fucking apt.
Alison Rose
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Um, you do realize that trans people, particularly trans women of color, are also being killed? And that their killers are rarely brought to justice? And what the fuck do you mean you haven’t “seen any trans participation” in protests? Do you think you can look at a crowd of people and immediately determine the gender identity of every one of them? Do you expect any trans person at any demonstration to be carrying a trans pride flag?
This is hardly about “whether the trans community is adequately loved” by someone like Rowling. The shit she has said is dehumanizing, degrading, and fucking dangerous. Trans people are already at extreme risk of violence, assault, and murder, and Rowling using her platform to perpetuate lies and myths about them is repugnant and harmful.
VeniceRiley
Since this is open thread, I’ll share this bit of excellent news https://news.yahoo.com/senate-majority-reach-democratic-candidates-175417558.html
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@geg6:
Definitely a different vibe here. Very much working class, Black, White, old, young, some lesbian, fewer gay, even fewer clergy and no trans.
PAM Dirac
@Martin:
Exactly. Me winning is just the invisible hand of the unerring market. Can’t argue with the market. Me losing is mob rule, breakdown of society. Something MUST be done!
patroclus
@tarragon: Thanks. I’m beginning to get the gist. I was at work all yesterday and didn’t have time to catch up on the latest twitterarguments until today. I’d still like to know the actual specifics of how Sandra Bland died in a Texas jail than about whether some academic is being “investigated” for quoting something or about the specific daily assignments for reporters or about whether publishers should investigate drafts of books for accuracy about a sodomy-related alleged death 200 years ago.
Kropacetic
@cmorenc: Sorry if I wasn’t clear but I meant that to apply beyond mistermix or the context of any one conversation.
Consider any action in the public eye and you will find someone who is angry about it. Even if there is just reason to be angry, you will likely find someone angry beyond reason.
I don’t like unjudiciously applied shaming either. I try to call it out when I see it. But people have the right to do it. And what really bothers me about this letter and the broader conversation about cancel culture is the fact that we seem to hold left activists to a higher standard than mainly Republican politicians and m/billionaires who will sign this letter yet show zero compunction about threatening people engaged in speech they don’t like with legal action.
Roger Moore
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
This. The thing about the letter that’s getting people upset is it’s coming off as a defense of a bunch of privileged people who are upset they got called out for their bigotry. A similar letter that didn’t have such problematic signatories wouldn’t have aroused the same ire.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Alison Rose:
Which lies or myths are you even talking about? And please, be sure to show your work.
Tenar Arha
@Major Major Major Major:
@Baud:
Yep. It’s a brain numbingly stupid letter while also trolling for clickbait. Specifically designed so that the reader can imagine & supply their own names of people they think were wronged. And Hilzoy, as mentioned above, was right, that it seemed anodyne until you actually knew who signed it.
Lili Loofbourow has a thread about how most/all discourse works now, so that much of the response to it predictably descends into a kind of meta argument because in fact, all these arguments and points have usually been made already.
I thought her example was particularly on point.
Roger Moore
@Martin:
In some prominent cases (e.g. Rowling) their problem isn’t that they’re writing about things badly; it’s that they’ve taken the illiberal side of an argument and are unhappy they’re being called out for it. In others (e.g. Bari Weiss) they’ve been part of cancel culture themselves and are just upset they or someone they know might wind up on the receiving end for a change. And having people like that on the letter makes it look a lot more like a defense of the signers’ privilege than a serious criticism of cancel culture.
Kropacetic
I read and respect your list of important challenges facing society that threaten people’s very lives. However, I hope you recognize that trans people are frequently the targets of violence up to and including murder.
JWR
@patroclus:
I haven’t read all of The Letter, (which is a good Bette Davis movie!), and I freely admit that debating the finer points here are above my pay grade, but isn’t the line that, “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces.” a reference to NYT editorial page editor James Bennet, who resigned? Any other editors fired (or resigned) recently?
Meh. I don’t wanna spend any more time on this.
Another Scott
@namekarB:
Cheers,
Scott.
Kropacetic
It also doesn’t help that the other most common voices I hear talking about this include Trump and the various luminaries at Fox News.
Another Scott: Work is scarce these days, sorry.
Martin
Of course it does. I don’t think that’s even really in question. Our culture has always been centered around ingratiating to the majority. That’s sort of a core tenet of ‘the free market’ – build the largest customer base and you win. And the majority knows that they can abuse their position in that kind of dynamic, and we have hundreds of years of history that proves that over and over. But for 400 years we had 3 majority demographics – whites, men, and protestants. And for the 2nd time we’re having to deal with that changing. The first time was in 1865, when so much property got turned into citizens that the majority by power were turning into the minority by count. And even though we had just passed a bunch of amendments to sorting that out, the majority by power abused their position to preserve that status. And we are in that moment again, not because blacks or latinos or LTBTQ or muslims have achieved majority status, but because by some Democratic design and some repulsive force by Trump, we now have a majority coalition that is interested in giving voice to all of those groups together. I don’t know if the coalition will hold. It never has before. But if it does, all of those institutions so finely tuned to appeal to the wants of the majority are going to have to turn on their heel for the new majority.
And just like the old majority, the new majority will abuse their power. Some by accident. 2 months ago accusing some rando employee of an insensitive retweet wouldn’t have resulted in a firing, so people could sort of causally throw that out there with insufficient evidence. But today, that’s taken much more seriously, and I do see a lot of people now saying ‘whoa, we need to be more careful here’. And no doubt there will be abuse by intent. That is the nature of how this works. And if there is too much abuse, it’ll swing back, or coalitions will break apart and reform. That was not an uncommon problem among Democrats before – we get power, we deliver benefits to subgroup A but not B, and B is like ‘I’m outta here’, and the majority is gone.
Those of us from the historical majority know precisely how easy it is to abuse – simply don’t bother thinking about it. Repeat the racist sentiment, vote in the most selfish way possible.
There’s a old sentiment in the programming world of ‘don’t optimize prematurely’. Basically, get your code to work, and then figure out how to make it perfect, knowing that it will never be, but the stuff you never get to will be minor. We’re worried about a handful of people getting unjustly fired, and that is indeed bad, but we’re trying to solve the problem of black people being murdered in the street, latinos being locked up in cages at the border, LGBTQs being denied basic human rights, non-Judeochristans being accused of being terrorists.
We can be sympathetic to the collateral damage, and we should be, but that damage is still insignificant to the damage we are trying to prevent. Those are 2nd order problems to solve. We do our best in the meantime, but we can’t stop everything because the pizza guy got fired.
senyordave
Pretend this phrase had never been written:
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”
This was written by Evelyn Beatrice Hall as an illustration of Voltaire’s beliefs (many people think Voltaire himself wrote it, but that is not the case).
If you were a writer and asked to be a signatory to this statement should you decline because David Brooks is also a signatory?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Another Scott:
There will be those who now wish to cancel Pierce because he isn’t taking their hyperbolic whines seriously enough, and is diminishing their VERY IMPORTANT emotions and feelings….
Kropacetic
@Martin: This. All this.
Starfish
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: You may not read her that way, but I have read from the sources that she is reading to come to her view point. I read them while I was having a hard time with my acceptance of my own friends transitioning and also preschoolers declaring themselves trans.
It turned out that those folks embraced denying the right to pee to trans people the same way that the religious right did. After that, I was done. Everyone needs to be allowed to pee during the day.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@senyordave:
I wouldn’t put my name to that anymore. Might have done it 15-20 years ago before I understood the power of a really stupid mob with a dumb or harmful notion, but not now.
catclub
Isn’t it actually the most viral memes that rise to the top. Good genes means most successfull at spreading. lIkewise memes.
DougJ
Time for a remake of Barfly with Jesse Singal and Bari Weiss in the place of Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.
catclub
and also it is more, “Managers fire editors when they run controversial pieces that cost the paper money.”
DougJ
@oldster:
Honestly, if they’d just specifically mentioned Shor and Steve Salaita, I would have said “good for them, sticking for the little guys”. But they didn’t.
Gin & Tonic
Is there one American in 10,000 who has even the vaguest idea of what this is all about?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Starfish:
It is intimate space, and everyone should be comfortable in that intimate space. I’ve never had an issue with any of that (basic training and an open set of about a dozen toilets on a platform without separation will do that), but I know plenty of men who have trouble even taking a piss in front of other men at a urinal (my dad among them). Women have their own hang ups, judging by my wife. Short of decreeing that all toilets be unisex, how do you make the intimate space for more shy women feel to safe?
Formica
@Woodrow/asim:
Which is exactly why I give zero fucks about the rhetorical brutality of The Lincoln Project. It is well passed time that the “left” (or whatever the reality/not-cruelty-based polity calls itself) got out of its erudite echo chamber and started slinging mud, so we can win some goddamned elections. If that means I have to cozy up to Rick Fucking Wilson for an election cycle, I will make at least a favourable reference of the Devil in the House of Commons, so to speak. We don’t even have to lie or bend the truth – we just have to point out that the emperor has no clothes, feed Chuck Todd some alprazolam, and move on.
As for cancel culture, Twitler’s implementation of it is literally killing people, so it burns my retinas to see rich conservative jackholes attempting to tie themselves to the railroading of a legitimate data scientist like David Shor.
japa21
@catclub: And manager fired for running oped without even reading it first.
Served
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I forgot you were a transphobic moron.
Roger Moore
@catclub:
It just means that you have to have a careful definition of “best”.
Baud
deleted.
japa21
OT: Trump cancelled rally in NH set for tomorrow. Reason: It might rain and he is concerned about the safety of the attendees. There is a degree of irony there.
Amir Khalid
@Baud:
David who?
different-church-lady
As I said in a previous comment: the world is too full of people who read “Harrison Bergeron” and took all the wrong lessons from it.
Martin
I will add one last thing on this before I get back to work – one of the reasons I consider myself a capitalist is that even though it’s often doing the wrong thing, it’s a system that moves very quickly. And that too is what you’re seeing. It’s frustrating that it’s so transparently pandering, suddenly the NFL is VERY CONCERNED about how black people are treated, and you can’t really be cynical enough about what that means, but it actually does work. If we can get enough people to withhold our dollars and berate them on Twitter or Yelp or whatever, they will change. At the end of the day, money is a neutral force. How it’s concentrated isn’t, but if Latinos stop buying Goya, there aren’t enough white people buying Goya to make up for that, despite the disparity in population and wealth. And Goya will either go out of business, or they will change in non-pandering ways. And it is the rapidity with which companies like Facebook find themselves on the wrong side of things that really rattles them.
Cancel culture is just capitalism. You can move dollars VERY quickly. And it can be shocking just how quickly. Your ideas were always catering to a particular market and seemingly overnight that market changed. You have to change with it, and as rapidly. That’s hard. But that’s how we have always wanted it to work. Now is not the time to start whining about it. Grab those bootstraps and start pulling, Harpers staff.
different-church-lady
@japa21: CUE A MILLION MEMES OF OBAMA CAMPAIGNING IN THE RAIN!!!
MattF
OT. If your iPhone or iPad apps were crashing on launch this morning, blame Facebook.
prostratedragon
There are only approximately 16.758 million seconds to go until the next inauguration.
Roger Moore
@DougJ:
They didn’t name those people for a reason. If they had named Shor and Salaita, they would have had to name everyone they were defending, and that would have given the game away. By keeping it non-specific, they could hide cases they care most about, like Bennett being fired at FTFNYT, without having people reject the letter out of hand for defending someone like him.
ciotog
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’m sorry, did you poll everyone at the protest about their gender identity and sexuality?
Salaita tweeted that he wanted no part of that Harper’s letter, that it was people like many of the signatories who drummed him out of academia in the first place.
Martin
Yes, but guess what – he was paid very well to run controversial pieces. That was his job. And that salary should be considered hazard pay because the NYT wanted him to run risky pieces, and he did, and he got fired when he took too much risk.
So nobody should feel sad here. He did what they wanted. He was paid accordingly. That’s why executives get paid so well – they’re supposed to take risks. Put that salary in the bank, and not spend it on yachts and shit, and you won’t care if you get fired for fucking up as you’ll be set for life.
Gin & Tonic
@japa21: Other reason: somebody may have told him nobody was going to show up. By tomorrow afternoon the weather will be fine.
Yutsano
@VeniceRiley: It sucks we won’t get Nebraska or Arkansas because the Democratic parties there screwed up. But other than those two I want every Republican seat. Especially all the open ones. And PLEASE make the Republicans nominate Kobach in Kansas again! But as far as I’m concerned it doesn’t matter. We need to go all in on Dr. Bollier whoever the opponent is. That’s true for everywhere.
trollhattan
@japa21:
Bet it’s 90% concern for the fiberglass atop his noggin.
RSA
@Major Major Major Major:
That’s exactly how I did read it, being unaware of most of the context. Good summary.
PAM Dirac
@Martin:
I love it. I will sign up for your newletter.
Starfish
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: The unisex bathrooms also known as the “family” bathrooms are usually the more private spaces.
When they are intentionally created, they usually shift away from having stalls to having doors that go all the way down to the floor.
When I was in graduate school some 15 years ago, for the LGTBQ center, we started identifying where on campus those bathrooms were. Lesbians who were butch were being harassed. Women were yelling at them because they felt that these women were not women enough to share the bathrooms. Single-occupancy bathrooms gave them a harassment free space to pee.
It is expensive to retrofit schools and other places that have multiple-occupancy bathrooms with them.
Some tiny restaurants and such in New York were easiest to convert to unisex because they only had one bathroom or two single-occupancy bathrooms. They did not have space for anything bigger.
Kent
You mean the Norman Finkelstein who started the whole academic food fight with Dershowitz in the first place by trying to get Dershoweitz’s book canceled?
germy
jk
Should Philadelphia Inquirer Executive Editor Stan Wischnowski have been pushed to resign days after uproar over the newspaper’s “Buildings Matter, Too” headline? I strongly disagree with the use of that headline, but pushing him out the door for this decision was an absolutely bullshit over reaction.
Kropacetic
Good to see that “saying the quiet part out loud” is becoming more and more embraced by the right.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Starfish:
That doesn’t surprise me at all.
Of course, as my wife put it, “I don’t care who shares my bathroom as long as they sit. That standing to pee thing is gross.”
Alison Rose
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: We can start with the lie that trans women aren’t women. They are. The idea that they don’t deserve a place in feminism is bullshit. Feminism is not the domain of cis women only. This lie then perpetuates the myth that trans women are just men dressing up as women, or they’re just confused, or they’re mentally ill, or whatever other garbage people come up with.
All of her other bullshit is based in that original lie. I’m not going to patiently spoon-feed you explanations as to why. Google is free, and plenty of trans people (and non-trans people) have responded to her statements and that stupid blog post. You clearly don’t care though, so you can save everyone here the time and your pseudo-intellectual posturing by just saying you’re a transphobe, too.
oldster
@DougJ:
Steve Salaita! Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
Yeah, there’s a guy that got *genuinely* canceled, like, fired from his job, had his career derailed, for saying the wrong stuff.
Trouble is, I’d put good money on it that Bari Weiss was all in on persecuting him at the time.
Brachiator
@Martin:
The Unanue family is supposedly the second wealthiest Spanish American family in the US. I absolutely welcome the protests, but they can take the hit. The plutocrats who support Trump are happy to do so. Very little touches or concerns them.
Kropacetic
I’m confused about this line of thinking. So does JK think that trans men are women? Do they have a place in feminism? What about cis male allies?
patroclus
@oldster: Here’s a quote from Steven Salaita about this controversy: “If you support or signed the (Harper’s) Letter, don’t invoke me as an example of someone who was “cancelled.” My academic career was systematically destroyed by the same institutional forces the vast majority of signatories uphold (and from which they benefit).”
LongHairedWeirdo
@cmorenc: I disagree, though gently.
There’s an implicit criticism in the letter:
And that includes an implicit assumption: that right-wing demagogues are arguing in good faith.
Earlier this year, right wing demagogues freaked out that OMG a witness in the impeachment hearings just announced that the President’s son is… NAMED ***BARRON!!!!!!!1!!!eleventyone!***, a pointless fact in the public record, having no perceivable harm, and used only for a cute pun about the difference between naming a child Barron and naming a child *a* baron.
They then found no problem with the assumption that a President could decide his own re-election is best for the country, and therefore, the President wouldn’t be “abusing his power” by cheating – he’d just be doing what he thought was best for the nation! One itty bitty, teensy, tinsy problem: the idea that one man was due deference because he was Special was *precisely* what we rejected in the Declaration of Independence.
They argued that the President is too stupid to carry out a “plan” (like running for President?), meaning he can’t cut deals for the US (that takes planning, eh?), BUT… should stay President. They also argued that the President didn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground (which always struck me as strange; donkeys don’t look like a hole in the ground…) , maybe *HE* thought the baseless accusations he was leveling had basis… but again, though he can’t be swayed by facts, or the law, he should remain President.
They argued that abusing his power, to try to put the Bidens in legal jeopardy was just fine and dandy. Okay, not *FINE*, not *DANDY*, but why remove a President for abuse of power, even one done in a way that makes much of the Bill Of Rights meaningless? If it’s horrible and wrong for the government to use investigations and trumped up charges to harm *anyone*, how does it become okay to do it by proxy? Well, it isn’t, obviously.
And now, every single one of them who isn’t pointing out that “goddamn it, we know Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have screwed this pandemic-pooch, we effed up,” is gaslighting you into thinking that it’s somehow normal, or acceptable, for the President to completely, and totally, walk away from trying to protect America.
The letter is, in fact, a bit like the movie The Hunt, which (I’ve heard) suggests that there are, in fact, liberals (who revere civil rights) who’d hunt down and kill Trump supporters who they call “deplorables” – remember, the line is that white supremacists, gay-and-trans-haters, and other assorted fascists were “deplorable”, not generic Trump supporters. So, “yeah, there are murderously hateful liberals out there” is the position they’re staking.
Such a movie, or letter, isn’t courting controversy; it’s accepting the bad faith lies that are told to justify hating liberals. See, if Republicans were just flat out hateful, that would look bad, but if they can spin any reason, any (used?) tissue of lies, any hook to hang their hatred on, they can insist that they’re just defending themselves.
Let’s look at this next piece of utter, blatant, unthinking stupidity:
“We don’t care if some of the incidents we listed were actually quite reasonable on their face; we still think they were wrong, because of other, independent, actions”.
You know what this reminds me of? Black people were complaining the US didn’t allow them to travel on interstate buses, even though it was expressly lawful; and the Soviet Union was using that as propaganda. People were demanding black folks just STFU to stop giving the Soviets a propaganda win. “Don’t kick up a fuss – sure, y’all and some Freedom Riders are brutally murdered, but come on, it *LOOKS* bad!”
What’s that? It’s harsh, making these folks sound like the enemies of freedom in that day? Wow, boy, am *I* glad they think that couldn’t possibly be a problem, since I’m just exchanging an idea.
Finally, for the crowning achievement of stupidity, for people who are failing to notice the right wing doesn’t argue in good faith:
There are infinitely many bad arguments that can be made; good arguments are restricted by having to be true. More importantly, during impeachment, we’ve learned that a sound, well-constructed, cogent argument will be rejected wholesale by the right wing. We also know that they’re just fine with people wanting to see protestor blood on the streets – they just wouldn’t want people to get *upset* with it, they want people to say “no, no, you shouldn’t murder protestors!” while right wing people say “see, they just don’t understand that sometimes, force is needed; and thankfully, since we’re Republicans, they’ll just quote the bit about force being needed, sometimes, and fail to note I’ve presented absolutely no justification for the use of force. Um, is this mic on?”
My word to the letter writers and signatories is, stop lecturing people on subjects you just don’t comprehend/; people will think you’re a Republican.
Mary G
Trans writer at Vox wrote a memo to her editors saying the fact that Matt Yglesias signing this made her uncomfortable and received a deluge of death threats and insults:
Kent
@Kropacetic: Here is the whole controversy blow by blow: https://www.glamour.com/story/a-complete-breakdown-of-the-jk-rowling-transgender-comments-controversy
Butter Emails!!!
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I suppose the only good answer is to make transmen and transwomen deficate and urinate in their pants because otherwise some person somewhere could be uncomfortable about the possibility that the person three stalls or urinals down has/had different equipment.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Alison Rose:
Way to overextrapolate motives, torture language and hyperventilate while accusing me of monstrous attitudes.
That clearly wins friends for the movement. But you know, in the end, you do you. I’ll just do better to not give a shit….
Fair Economist
@Martin:
OMG that’s brilliant.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Butter Emails!!!:
Yeah. That is TOTALLY what I said.
Doug R
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Is trans people being murdered just for being trans hard shit enough for you?
download my app in the app store mistermix
@hells littlest angel:
You know, at least the guy hated himself and drank in a way that showed it — I have to give him that.
geg6
@senyordave:
David Brooks would have nothing to do with my decision not to sign it, though it would be a piece of evidence that it would be the right decision.
I wouldn’t sign it because, as you say, the phrase attributed to Voltaire pretty much says it all. Except that’s not at all what the letter is saying. Voltaire, I’m pretty damn sure, would agree with me that the rightness of allowing free speech does not mean speech can never be criticized. The letter basically says we are criticizing those who criticize us, but the criticism of us cancels us, some of the biggest MoUs in politics, journalism, academia and literature. Whereas those know nothings who criticize us are totally cancelled and pwned by us every day so shut the fuck up.
PJ
@oldster: I knew when I saw the headline to this post that it had to be Mistermix, who almost always has his head up his ass.
The point of the “letter”, which was as about as anodyne a defense of free speech as one could make, was not to say “oh, boo hoo, poor rich and famous person is being criticized for his or her statements,” but to point out that powerless people are being fired from their jobs for statements or conduct which are innocuous, or at worst, stupid mistakes, by a relative handful of people on Twitter whose views are in no way mainstream. The people who signed it did so precisely because they have “names”, and are pretty immune to being cancelled. If a bunch of unfamous people had signed the letter, no one would have paid attention.
One of the more egregious examples is David Shor (not a household name), who lost his job for retweeting a study which showed that non-violent protest was more effective at creating progressive political change than violent protest. The pilers-on on Twitter declared that this was tantamount to blaming protestors for police violence. Shor recanted, but that didn’t save his job.
Another example is the 55-year-old woman the Washington Post did a story about, who wore blackface to a Halloween party two years ago to mock Megyn Kelly, who had said she didn’t understand what the big deal about blackface was. It was stupid, but it was intended to mock Kelly, not black people. People at the party pointed out that it wasn’t funny, she left in tears, and called the host the next to apologize. The Post decided this was newsworthy because it was better than having to fire their Pulitzer-winning cartoonist, who held the party, and falsely denied knowing who the woman was, when accused by two party crashers who were seeking justice two years later. Two years later, when she told her employer about the impending article, the 55-year-old woman was fired. She may never get another job again, because the first that comes up when a prospective employer does a name search will be that article, and they don’t want to have anything to do with a controversy.
Most employers are extremely averse to bad PR, and having their employee associated with being a racist, no matter how unfair the charge, is not something they want to deal with. It’s far easier to fire someone than explain to a prospective client what the controversy was about and how the employee in question did nothing wrong, or did something stupid but realized their mistake and apologized for it.
This stuff happened in the past (Shirley Sherrod, anyone?), but Twitter in particular amplifies everything in a way that’s impossible for outsiders who aren’t active on it to parse. Most of it is never reported on in a newspaper (the Post incident is a weird exception). The natural inclination is for people to throw up their hands and avoid whomever the subject of the attack is. This is why it’s important to defend the right of powerless people to say things that may be unpalatable to some people. If you don’t, then the terms of acceptable discourse will be set by a handful of overly online people who get no greater pleasure than wielding the power that gives them.
geg6
@DougJ:
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Epic.
Butter Emails!!!
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
It’s not what you said, but it is the end point of the logic. If transwomen can’t use women’s restrooms, are they supposed to use men’s restrooms, or just hope there’s an available family restroom?
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
They are apparently concerned enough to whine about their “free speech” being limited. Rich people get amazingly sensitive about money even when they can easily afford to lose it. Plus, manufacturing can be pretty sensitive to market share losses due to high fixed costs and contractual obligations.
PJ
@Baud: That hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know, most likely because it’s one powerless person being fired whom Twitter mobs do not care about at all. It’s easy to get a mob together to take someone down, not so easy to organize a mob to support someone.
catclub
@download my app in the app store mistermix: Did the discussion move to Joe McCarthy?
PJ
@Major Major Major Major: It was also designed to be broad enough to appeal to writers across the political spectrum, which is one reason it is so bland.
Chyron HR
@Kropacetic:
Yes, she has literally said that feminism includes trans men because they’re really women.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Of course, capitalism is largely amoral. You cannot assign any particular social or moral value to market dominance.
It all comes down to winners and losers, and the winners get to gloat.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: Most excellent! Thanks for the link.
germy
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
https://www.protestchicago.com/2020/06/23/black-trans-lives-matter-a-blm-pride-protest/
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/15/nyregion/brooklyn-black-trans-parade.html
etc.
Fair Economist
@PJ: The letter is not about powerless people getting fired for misinterpreted parodies of blackface opinions. The letter is about James Bennett being (presumably) forced to resign because he had the nation’s paper of record publish a pro-fascist essay calling for state violence against justified peaceful protestors. Note: they don’t complain people have been fired *unreasonably*, they complain that anybody is getting fired at all – which means the real complaint is about *reasonable* firings.
PJ
@Kropacetic: That’s the whole point of the letter, to not have the left turn into the right in its intolerance for non-Twitter approved opinions.
oldster
@PJ:
Well, I don’t agree with you about mistermix, but we’ll leave that aside.
The case of Shor, or Salaita, or the low-level WaPo worker you refer to, are cases in which powerless people were severely damaged for no good reason.
Martin up above has compared cancel culture to capitalism, and that’s a good comparison. I am glad that I can boycott Goya foods because their CEO decided to throw in with the Russian usurper. Sorry, CEO — if I don’t like your politics, I can take my business elsewhere.
But capitalism has many ugly sides, and one of them is the at-will employment and firing of contingent workers. David Shor got fired because his employer got scared, and Shor had no protections. Capitalism preys on the weak and the powerless. Ditto for the WaPo drone. Getting fired for a stupid thing you did at a party several years ago, when you are not even a public figure, is the ugly side of capitalism.
So if Martin is right and cancel culture is capitalism, then I am not going to celebrate cancel culture, any more than I celebrate unfettered capitalism. Sometimes they give the weak a chance to punch up at the strong — like when I boycott Goya. But more often, capitalism and cancel culture give the strong more means to punch down at the weak. Just look at the cancelation of Salaita, of indigenous voices, of anti-racist voices, and so many more of the years who have been fired, ostracized and ruined.
geg6
@PJ:
Then they should have actually said that. They didn’t.
PJ
@japa21: The fact that, as the editor, he solicited the piece, knowing it would be controversial (because it’s from Tom Cotton), and never bothered to read it is, in my mind, some grounds for firing.
zhena gogolia
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
How do you know?
Bill Arnold
It’s worth reading Margaret Atwood’s recent “Am I a bad feminist?” essay.
Am I a bad feminist? (MARGARET ATWOOD, January 13, 2018)
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Depends on how rich they are. And Trump is still getting plenty of plutocrat money as political donations.
And this guy has not moved from his support for Trump.
And when you get down to it, he is echoing what a fair chunk of Hispanic Americans believe, sad to say.
Trump has been a racist piece of crap for all of his presidency. Meanwhile the top .1 percent has seen their wealth increase over the same period.
PAM Dirac
@PJ:
But doesn’t that make a complete mockery of
patroclus
@PJ: I suggest you read zhena’s link at #35.
In my view, the point of the Letter was to be as non-specific as possible, thereby enabling readers to conflate the example of Shor (about which I agree with you although he was fired by his employer; not a twitter mob) with other less-meritorious more-arguable, more-gray examples that zhena’s link goes into some detail about. And all of them are journalistic/academic examples and all the “victims” will have a chance to find another job or publish something elsewhere.
Meanwhile, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain and Sandra Bland and Armaud Arbery and Michael Brown and LaQuan McDonald are dead and won’t be coming back. Which do you think is more important? Are they “more powerful” than the James Bennett’s of the world that the authors of the Letter are treating as more victim-like?
PJ
@Mary G: At the same time as she said she didn’t want Yglesias to be fired for his indefensible moral error in signing the letter and defending free speech, she said it made her “feel unsafe”, which are triggering words for HR. The whole point of her tweeting to the world what was purportedly an internal letter to the management of Vox was passive-aggressive way to get Yglesias fired. It sucks that people harassed her for this, but both her tweet and the reaction to it are an example of what Yglesias was trying to advocate against.
Gin & Tonic
@Brachiator:
PJ
@oldster:
@Brachiator:
I agree entirely. As Brachiator pointed out above, cancellation is not about trying to build a more moral, just world, it’s about winners and losers.
Calouste
@germy: I’m seeing the marketplace of ideas in action here. He’s trying to sell a rotten product, and people don’t buy it. And because of that rotten product, people are also having doubts about other things he sells. As a company, your image is also part of what you sell.
PJ
@PAM Dirac: Companies don’t care about exposure, argument, and persuasion unless it boosts the bottom line. Sure, someone like David Shor is free to keep tweeting peer-reviewed articles about the efficacy of non-violent protest now that he’s been fired, but he’s still out of a job.
PJ
@patroclus: I don’t know why you think that people can’t support free speech and decry the murder of black people by police at the same time.
Chyron HR
@zhena gogolia:
It’s the standard transphobe logic: “You can always tell, unless you can’t in which case they’re trying to trick you into sleeping with them.”
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That’s generous phrasing for essentially arguing against Trans women’s right to exist.
I’d like to think that we can have some areas that are off-limits for debate because they’re so harmful. Like how denial that Hitler’s holocaust happened is rightfully off-limits.
We’re allowed to have standards.
PAM Dirac
@PJ:
Are you saying that she was lying when she said she felt unsafe? Or are you saying that since she should have know that HR could be a bunch of cowardly idiots, all the responsibility falls on her, not HR, and she should just shut up? And if Yglesias is defending free speech, should he defend hers? Shouldn’t he just react to bad speech with good speech? Or when the paycheck of someone important is on the line the rules have to change?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Woodrow/asim:
Sums it up.
patroclus
@PJ: And I don’t know why, when asked a direct question about the murder of African Americans, you instead choose to imply that I don’t care about free speech. Do you care about the murder of black people? At all? Or is it just free speech you care about? At least the authors of the Letter devoted a sentence to it – you didn’t even bother.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@japa21:
he’s concerned about his personal comfort, the safety of his coiffe a windy rain storm and crowd size, not necessarily in that, or any, order
Bill Arnold
@PAM Dirac:
The mob, in that case, was essentially arguing that violent protest is good, and that any academic arguments arguing that violent protest/struggle might often be worse than non-violent protest/struggle are forbidden thoughts, are taboo arguments. They are wrong[1], and given the stakes, arguably dangerously so (DJT & enablers are actively seeking violence to campaign against etc), yet they won that argument because their arguments somehow convinced an employer that the company (or their department or whatever) would be better off without a certain employee.
[1] OK arguably wrong: Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2008, Maria J. Stephan and Erica Chenoweth)
PAM Dirac
@PJ:
Right, so if there are plenty of times when exposure, argument, and persuasion doesn’t work, why do they claim that is the only proper response? Or does it only matter when “important” people suffer adverse consequences?
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Alison Rose:
Thank you. The shit that’s being said about our Trans friends and neighbors on this thread is enraging.
Fuck that noise.
“Trans rights are human rights“ – Joe Biden
Alison Rose
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Oh, we could all already tell you don’t give a shit about anyone except yourself and bigots like Rowling. YOU DO YOU. Which apparently means being an insufferable prick.
senyordave
@PAM Dirac: And if Yglesias is defending free speech, should he defend hers? Shouldn’t he just react to bad speech with good speech?
This seems like an argument in bad faith. It is hard to argue that she is trying to get MY in trouble, if not fired. If someone is trying to destroy your career you are not going to sit by idly and say go right ahead.
IMO the worst that happen to MY should be something like “gee Matt, maybe that wasn’t such a good idea to sign that statement. Think about it next time.”
Gin & Tonic
@PAM Dirac: I don’t really know the people involved here, but I think anyone employed by anything larger than a Mom & Pop in the USA of 2020 knows the implications of saying “my co-worker makes me feel unsafe.”
patroclus
And I guess I’ll just re-iterate that I believe that the systemic historic and ongoing murders of African Americans (and trans people, for that matter) is MORE IMPORTANT than complaints by journalists and academics about how they might not be able to publish things as easily as a result of the much-needed and timely focus on redressing injustices that actually cause deaths and ruined lives. COVID is currently killing, today, black and brown people disproportionately. The idea that James Bennett’s victim status in any way compares to the ongoing crisis is absurd.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Mary G:
Damn. Emily is a treasure. This is an example of harmful silencing that is an actual problem.
PAM Dirac
@Bill Arnold:
I think they are wrong too, but I’m not the employer. I think Donald Trump was a disastrous choice for president, but just because that happened I don’t think the people that voted for him should be denied the vote. A large part of the free speech rhetoric is about the market place of ideas. But it seems like what people really believe is that when I win, it is the market functioning as as it should, but when I lose it’s mob rule, breakdown of society, something MUST be done!
Barbara
@PAM Dirac: I have read a couple of really intelligent, well-thought out responses to the Harpers letter. I am linking to one of them because you can read it for free: New York Magazine
This response pays due attention to the unfairness of getting someone fired for a casual misstatement. But it puts it in a much larger context.
The other response was in The New Republic, and focused on the “freedom of association” aspects of the first amendment, as a natural counterpoint to the first amendment rights of freedom of speech. It’s very subtle and I am not quite sure I agree with it in total.
Even David Brooks (today’s column) points out the tin ear of the free speech defenders’ response to what are mostly heartfelt, even desperate demands for justice: I seek justice. You lecture me on process. Brooks then goes off the rails with his suggested fix, but that’s Brooks for you.
Betty Cracker
@Starfish: Where did you land on the preschoolers issue? I’m attempting to educate myself on this, and while I had a reaction similar to yours on the bathrooms thing (just put in proper stalls/make single occupancy bathrooms unisex, and let people who need to pee, pee!), I do find some related issues troubling, mainly the idea of medicating children.
I don’t pretend to understand all aspects of this issue, and I’m trying to figure it out for myself via my own research. But since you mentioned you’d also struggled to understand it, I figured maybe you could point me toward some resources if you’re so inclined…
Doug R
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Pierce has a steady job writing.
HumboldtBlue
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
This march took place less than a month ago and it’s not an anomaly, trans folks have been a presence in marches across the country.
Doug R
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Most Starbucks around here have 3 toilets, ALL of which are accessible and unisex.
Barbara
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I embrace trans people but I have long noted the irony that as trans women work hard to be accepted as women, women who have been identified as women all their lives often have to work really hard to be accepted as people, and not pigeon holed as “only” women. Sometimes trans women embrace stereotypes that biologically born women have fought against all their lives. The overarching tension comes with the entire construct of gender and what it means and what it should mean.
In other words, there is tension there, but I believe that people of good will can work on it. Not all women face the same issues. If feminism stands for anything, it is that no quality or trait should be defined solely by gender. I have yet to hear of transgendered women who are actually denigrating female aspirations they don’t happen to share.
geg6
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
All the bathrooms on my campus (excluding in dorms) are unisex. No one has had a problem with it. It’s been in place for the last six years. Not one single complaint.
Jinchi
But does anyone call it “cancel culture” other than the people who complain because they are targets of it? It’s meant to assume a mindlessness on the part of the people engaging in it.
When Tom Cotton wrote his screed to give “No Quarter” to people protesting the police violence, it was not “cancel culture” when the public reacted by calling the editorial obscene or to condemn the NYT for considering it a point of view worth printing.
What they refer to as “cancel culture” is typically the only venue for speech for the powerless. We don’t get to write opinions in Harpers or the New York Times. We don’t get invited to speak on college campuses. Being made to feel uncomfortable is a small price to pay for their status as “thought leaders”.
Tim Wayne
What post has discussion of the “stupid letter” ?
Barbara
@geg6: A lot of elementary schools have moved to “private” bathrooms for each classroom simply as a classroom and risk management strategy.
RSA
@oldster:
I looked up “cancel culture” online, not really knowing what it was. For what it’s worth, I found it in an “Online shaming” Wikipedia article, described as a “a form of boycott.”
PAM Dirac
@Barbara: Thanks for that link, It does look interesting and I think it is getting at what bothers me, a very narrow view of what the problem is. Speech has consequences and to pretend otherwise is only allowed to the privileged. It seems that part of the pretending is to dump all the responsibility for those consequences on those with less privilege. The rabble need to shut up, no matter how true what they are saying is, because our institutions are so screwed up that the consequences of that speech can lead to unfair outcomes. I can see why the privileged would defend the status quo, but it really burns me that they also what to be seen as brave defenders of freedom.
svendson
One man’s
terrorist“harassment” is another man’sfreedom fighter“accountability”Barbara
@Jinchi: The New Republic article I referred to above termed it an expression of freedom of association — I am not going to associate with an entity or company that includes this kind of material. For instance, I don’t subscribe to the National Review because I consider it to be a compendium of views I find mostly wrongheaded and appalling if not downright hateful. I am not engaging in cancel culture because I don’t want to give it money. Occasionally, it proves me wrong. No one is going to be perfect, but everyone is mostly going to align with people, publications, politicians and so on that they mostly agree with. This ain’t rocket science.
On the other hand I deplore threats of violence always and everywhere. They are always wrong.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That’s called being anti-trans and it’s bigotry. You are aware of what a TERF is and that Rowling is one, yes? Not sure about Atwood, but Rowling is a TERF
Betty Cracker
@Barbara: Excellent comment — thank you.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Fuck you. How the fuck do you know whether any trans people have participated or not? Newsflash, they have!
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Really struggling to find where I’m all these things you claim I am.
You just can’t help yourself, can you?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Welp, I just lost a ton of respect for you. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise. You’ve spewed misogyny before. I guess transphobia naturally follows
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
You’re spewing anti-trans TERF propaganda. It’s not that hard to figure out
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@geg6:
Precisely – absent a choice, people don’t give a damn (except when somebody leaves it filthy). Give the choice, then identity becomes powerful.
Course, you might have to give up the cushy couches….
PJ
@patroclus: I maintained that both issues are important, and both can be addressed. However, I don’t feel the need when addressing any particular issue to say “but this other issue is also/more important”, as you seem to want me to do. There are numerous critical issues facing us now (Covid-19, police brutality, impending collapse of the economy) and perennially (freedom of speech, racial injustice), but they don’t all need to be lumped into one blog comment.
J R in WV
I’m glad your gaydar is capable of IDing peoples sexual orientation while walking in a huge amorphous crowd. Plus who works for a church, just by the halo over them.
Get real — you have no idea if those people are gay or not, trans or not, clergy or not. Hopefully you can’t tell if they’re your cousin since they should be wearing masks…
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Fair Economist
@Alison Rose: What’s up with the personal attacks on Le Comte? Haven’t we learned with Twitler’s election that it’s counterproductive to mount nasty personal attacks over moderate disagreements?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
….are you for real? It all comes down to being “forced” and people should be given a choice to treat other people like human beings? People like Rowling think that the very existence of trans women undermine real women. “Choice has nothing to do with it”.
Roger Moore
@Bill Arnold:
I thought it was pretty telling that nobody tried to serious argue the facts. There’s a long-standing belief that, for example, MLK was much more effective when he could present his non-violent protests as the alternative to Malcolm X. The research regarding the violence after MLK’s murder is probably more relevant to what was happening with BLM protests, but in the long run it might be helpful for there to be a scarier force out on the wings for BLM to contrast itself with. But it didn’t seem that people were even willing to engage that much; they just denounced Shor for not wanting to back the protests uncritically.
Barbara
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: @Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I don’t agree with either of you, at least not fully. Steinem and Atwood appear to be singling out transwomen when the truth is, even among biologically born women, there is serious debate about what the primary goal of feminism should be. I don’t know that I would go so far as to say that their clueless comments amount to denying the existence of transwomen, because many women feel left out by definitions of feminism that don’t include what they view as their primary issues as women. It’s more like, you are just the latest to be pissed off at the women at the head of the table who think they have the prerogative to decide whether your needs count.
Mostly, the debate ends up being about whether the proper role of feminism is to address inequities that arise out of child rearing. Other women bristle at this because they think it reflects a judgment that whatever progress has been made, it’s always up to women to deal with the fall out of children. A lot of us are in between.
I am all too happy to hear the perspective of women who happen to be transwomen, which is probably really different. They can choose whether to frame their opinions in terms of their identity as transwomen, or not. And I am sorry if I am not using the proper verbiage.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Fair Economist:
These aren’t “moderate disagreements”. Le Comte is being disingenuous. Or obtuse. People like Rowling, TERFs, are using their platforms to delegitimize trans women and trans people in general.
Cacti
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t Bari Weiss make her name by trying to get professors at Columbia fired for hurting her zionist fee fees?
Jinchi
It’s really not that hard to find evidence of them participating in marches.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Jinchi:
He didn’t look for any because he didn’t want to. Or he knew and didn’t care
Cacti
As for Jo Rowling, she’s using her wealth, celebrity, and platform to punch down.
That’s just repulsive.
Major Major Major Major
@J R in WV:
To be fair, mine is.
J R in WV
@senyordave:
Does anyone in the English-speaking world who knows who Brooks is actually think Brooks would sign that statement? Because I do not.
Sloegin
It’s stupid how everyone has glommed onto the phrase “Cancel Culture” when it’s a fucking right-wing construct. It’s people participating in the conversation, wanting two-way discussions when so many on the other side of the conversation only want it to be one-way. Words aren’t bound to the abstract plane of ideals, they’re weapons in an ongoing war. The only cancellation that the people who cooked up the phrase “Cancel Culture” want is the cancellation of minorities.
senyordave
@Cacti: As for Jo Rowling, she’s using her wealth, celebrity, and platform to punch down.
If you believe something, you believe something. Doesn’t matter if she’s wealthy. You just disagree with her. I disagree with her, but I would disagree with her if she was a poor nobody.
svendson
I don’t know.
This kind of shit plays out in almost every single progressive “community”. It’s just disingenuous to pretend this is all about national figures. Dunk on them all you want, but I do believe something has gone sideways in a lot of progressive spaces.
Most of these communities have adopted social norms that incentivize jumping in and taking sides as quick as possible and de-incentivize waiting to comment until you actually know things. This kind of behavior is easily hijacked by unethical people.
For example, it is now just normal in progressive communities for personal beefs to play out as mutual accusations of “abuse” where each party tries to spin the behavior of the other as abusive and frame themselves as a victim. The whole point of this is because the current social norms require everyone in the community to rush in, take sides, and condemn the “abuse”. Shit. I just saw another case of this when one party framed it as an act of abuse that the other party (an ex-friend) let them live with them rent-free for months. This was framed as some kind of cold-blooded predatory plan to build “dependency”. Of course, the other side claimed the same thing as a form of abuse where they were “manipulated” into letting the other party move in. Of course, the friends of each party were going around demanding that everyone pick their friends side and saying that anyone who didn’t cut off the other party and their friends was complicit in “abuse”.
This kind of shit happens on a pretty regular basis now in progressive spaces. It’s not national news. It’s not important in the big picture. However, it is really annoying and unhealthy.
Roger Moore
@senyordave:
He did. He went on Twitter and said people should leave her alone:
Jinchi
@Cacti: Agree. People aren’t recoiling from Rowling because of her views on feminism. They’re recoiling because of her very explicit and derogatory views on trans people.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Jinchi:
I’m speaking specifically of the marches I’ve participated in, repeatedly. And yeah, when it comes to who is gay or not, I’m pretty observant regarding people’s interactions with intimate partners.
These protests are a tremendous couples draw, so it’s pretty damned obvious who’s paired up and who isn’t, as there’s not a whole hell of a lot else to do but go protest together.
And I stick by my “absence of Christian clergy” statement. They’re just not in evidence – if they were, there’d be a lot more white men in my age bracket showing up.
One curious thing regarding TERFs though – I’ve been repeatedly told that I have no way of knowing who is trans and who isn’t based on outward mien and attire. Doesn’t that kind of make the point for feminists who want to maintain their own safe spaces in work and leisure by their own definitions?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
lol
What do you think of the tropical storm NYC is going to get?
Cacti
What color is the sky in your world?
The opinion of a wealthy person will always carry more weight in this world than the opinion of a non-wealthy one.
senyordave
@J R in WV: I think he would. I won’t pretend to know how he really feels but I would bet he would research it and decide it would be a good move to sign it. If its your livelihood you make calculations like that all the time. When I was working I occasionally got behind projects that I was lukewarm about because of the people involved with those projects.
Fair Economist
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Rowling at least caches her concerns about trans people in polite reasonable-sounding language. You can’t just assume everybody will consider Rowling a TERF off the bat. Why not cite more problematic things she’s said and establish some baseline before jumping into personal attacks?
There’s also tactical issues to consider, aka the “Joe Stalin principle”. We are in an existential fight against fascism, and left splittism – over legitimate issues even – has long been a route to the bad guys winning. We’re going to need a lot of people who hold problematic opinions working hard for our side in November.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
No, because that assumes that all trans women will be predators. It’s like assuming all black men are criminals.
And using “feminists” implies that feminism as a whole supports that viewpoint. It doesn’t. Only TERFs do and they are not the mainstream
senyordave
@Cacti: I’m saying it doesn’t matter to me. You can ascribe my comments as you like but don’t tell me how I feel.
Jay
@Roger Moore:
My favorite piece of grafitti comes from Hong Kong, after the Protestors seized the Parliament Buildings.
They spray painted on the walls:
“Peaceful protest does not work.
You taught me that.”
Looting and arson is fine, as long as you Incorporate or form an LLC first.
Cacti
@senyordave: Feel however you want. J.K. Rowling is using her celebrity status to punch down at people in an inferior position.
Them’s the facts.
Frankensteinbeck
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Only if you start with the assumption that trans women are men dishonestly pretending to be women. Without that inherently transphobic assumption, it becomes evidence that the reasoning TERFs use is not based on actual physical reality, but on hatred.
Roger Moore
@senyordave:
Sure, but because she’s a famous author she has a gigantic platform. That bigger a platform someone has, the more important it is to call them out for expressing abhorrent views.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Fair Economist:
Le Compte has a pattern. He’s said some seriously misogynist things in the past. I had hoped that he had moved past that, but unfortunately has not.
It’s hard NOT to know she’s a transphobe at this point. And again, Le Compte has a pattern. I suppose I could point out Rowling’s anti-Semitic banker elves/goblins whatever the fuck they were in her Harry Potter books.
Also, before she became famous, she wrote a trans person as a villain (not just a villain who happened to be trans. The “transness” is what you were meant to be disgusted by) in a detective story.
I’m not concerned, because mainstream feminism and most people view TERF arguments as bullshit. There are already efforts by conservatives underway in the UK trying to split the trans community from the wider LGBTQ+ community. The group LGB Alliance is an example of this. These people need to be pushed back against.
I agree if the person is arguing in good faith, then by all means engage. But I don’t believe Le Compte is arguing in good faith given his history
Jinchi
I doubt you can accurately estimate the number of trans-people in a crowd.
Bill Arnold
@Cacti:
FWIW a search suggests that Bari Weiss has also been targetted for firing.
Petition: New York Times: Fire Sexual-Assault-Defender Bari Weiss
And yeah, she would have fired e.g. Noam Chomsky, also on the list, if it were in her power. (GG/Intercept alert)
NYT’s Bari Weiss Falsely Denies Her Years of Attacks on the Academic Freedom of Arab Scholars Who Criticize Israel (March 8 2018)
Betty Cracker
@svendson: I’ve seen similar dramas play out as you describe. I’m not sure it’s an affliction specific to progressive spaces, though the language and ideology involved would vary.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Frankensteinbeck:
This too. All of their arguments, including those of Rowling, are based on hatred. It’s like they think there would be all these men lining up to perv in a women’s restroom. Trans women can go into women’s restrooms now. And there’s literally never been one case of it happening anywhere to my knowledge.
Shocker, right?
J R in WV
@jk:
I disagree, strongly. Comparing buildings being damaged with murder is completely out of line in a community newspaper.
Especially in a town where the cops used fire bombs dropped from their air force to burn out buildings with women and children in them, and shot people trying to escape.
Exactly like tactics used during the genocide of the Cathar religion in southern France 800 years ago. They conquered the communities, forced whole populations into the Cathedrals, nailed the doors shut, and burned them to the ground. And in Philly more recently.
I would hope we have advanced a wee bit since then. But obviously probably not.
Major Major Major Major
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
My jeans wet, so far.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
statistically, 99.6% of all child abuse is comitted by cis-het people.
maybe TERF’s should focus on that relationship rather than hypotheticals about public bathrooms.
Bill Arnold
Don’t know the history of Atwood’s thoughts on the matter, but there is this from 3 days ago:
Margaret Atwood schools transphobes on the ‘flowing bell curve’ of gender using slug sex, gay penguins and transgender fish (Vic Parsons, July 7, 2020)
Barbara
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ll just throw out there that I have not participated in any marches for a variety of reasons, mostly, I am concerned about infection and I am of an age that makes me higher risk.
However, regarding safe spaces for feminists — If Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling want a safe space (I mean, really?) then they can claim one in a group they create, but writ large, they should not be in charge of defining who gets to participate in the feminist enterprise. I don’t even understand why they would try. It’s fine to argue with individual women including transwomen about the goals of that enterprise, but treating transwomen a priori as interlopers who don’t belong no matter what their views are is really unfair. Seriously, if they have an example of a woman joining a feminist group insisting that feminism should be limited to their own concerns as transwomen, then I am listening. Otherwise, I don’t understand where they are coming from.
ETA: I am probably getting confused on which feminist said what. Hopefully, you understand the point I am trying to make.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Major Major Major Major:
So not too bad then?
@Jay:
Right. What’s even better is that there have been documented cases where cis-women have been mistaken for trans and gotten attacked in public restrooms. It’s a gigantic waste of time on TERF’s parts. What even the odds that they’ll run into a trans person? Fairly low
Jay
@Bill Arnold:
Attwood isn’t a TERF, there are people who were basically “conned” into signing a bland anodyne letter by deliberately concealing the names of the cosigners and creating the illusion of whom they were “allies” with and “the issues” the were creating the illusion of defending.
J R in WV
@LongHairedWeirdo:
Well said, beginning to end!
Another Scott
@PAM Dirac: DeLong points us to Holbo – https://www.bradford-delong.com/2020/07/holbo-this-maxim-is-patently-grossly-inadequate-for-governing-a-blog-comment-box-let-alone-public-reason-a-public.html
People arguing in bad faith is a huge, huge problem. It’s the poison pill of civic discussion.
Cheers,
Scott.
LesGS
@Betty Cracker: Hey, Betty, not Starfish, but I’m thinking the phrase “preschoolers coming out as trans” means the kids want to live as their gender in a social sense. Wear the clothing, play with the toys, get called by their preferred name and pronouns of the gender they identify as. If by “medicated” you mean given testosterone or estrogen, ethics aside, that wouldn’t have any “practical” purpose in a pre-adolescent child.
Medication options in an adolescent are more complicated.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
the really stupid part about it is over 30 fucken years ago, a Staff Member where I worked at the time, ( 500+ employees), transitioned.
HR gave us guidance and education, and when the Staff Member returned, nobody, absolutely nobody, fucked up, not even a little slip of the tongue.
Hate is a choice.
Ignorance is a choice.
JK has not only made a choice, but she has doubled down on it.
Villago Delenda Est
@dexwood: I wish I could upfist your comment.
PJ
@svendson: It’s more important to elevate yourself within the group by taking someone else down than to actually accomplish any of the policy goals of the group.
I also think there’s a peculiar pleasure people take from being able to cast themselves as morally superior and punishing their moral inferiors.
Jay
@LesGS:
it’s not that difficult. Here, if you have “lived” socially in public as your gender identity, for 2 years, you get to medicate to suppress the onset of biology until you can transition.
senyordave
@Jay: statistically, 99.6% of all child abuse is comitted by cis-het people.
I’m always fascinated when I see a statistic like this. Do you have a data source for that?
In 2018, according to the National Children’s Alliance, there were 678,000 unique incidents of child abuse. Based on the statistic 99.6% statistic that you use, there were only 2,712 cases of child abuse that were committed by non cis-het people.
LongHairedWeirdo
@Jinchi:
Why, sure! The entire right wing calls it cancel culture, regardless of whether they’ve been the target of it. Just like they insist that everything but the coasts is “flyover country” to liberals (or Democrats, depending on whether they’re being general or specific).
You know, that brings up another issue with the letter. They’re saying “don’t complain too much or OTHER PEOPLE will do EVIL THINGS and then the right wing will COMPLAIN!”
Why not direct your ire at those who actually did the bad things, rather than those who spoke angrily? OR, better question, why are you not just trying to counter the bad arguments that get people fired, with GOOD arguments that will retain their jobs? Isn’t that what was said to be necessary? No need to be all angry, and stuff?
And if it takes time for your good arguments to do any good, well, always remember, justice delayed is justice denied, which proves… um… oh. I guess it supports my point, not theirs.
Betty Cracker
@LesGS: Thanks. Re: medication, I meant medications to suppress the onset of puberty.
Jay
@senyordave:
StatsCan and CIS studies based on reported cases, (Police/Child Welfare) and self reported cases by victims later in life.
Sister Golden Bear
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: It clearly seems to be something Rowling and some other TERFs are using as club to silence those who’ve criticized Rowling’s recent TERF spewing, but Atwood has been staunchly pro-trans women.
Barbara
@Another Scott: Yeah, sort of like people in favor of prolonging the war in Afghanistan who argue that those seeking the exit of American troops are selling out the civil rights of Afghani women. When they don’t give an FF about women’s rights anywhere else in the world. I didn’t finish it but this is what The Tulsa School was about, at least partly — the killing of civil discourse by atomizing and weaponizing words. Rather than trying to parry and respond to a point in good faith.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Betty Cracker:
Far as I’m concerned, that sort of medication is abusive, unethical, and I can think of no family court judges in my jurisdiction that would sanction their use. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that a parent that insisted in opposition to the other parent would likely be deprived of decisionmaking rights.
Sister Golden Bear
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
You were saying….
New York – How a March for Black Trans Lives Became a Huge Event (FTFNYT warning)
London – Black Trans Lives Matter protest: ‘Why we’re marching’
Los Angeles – Thousands show up for black trans people in nationwide protests
San Francisco – Hundreds show support for black trans rights in Tenderloin protest
There was even one in little old Palo Alto, CA, near where I live.
All organized by Black trans people, who have been active in number other marches. Just because you’re ignoring them, doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Jess
I have mixed feelings about the letter. On the one hand, I do believe that academia and the arts should be citadels of free speech; while unpleasant ideas will inevitably be aired, in the end the good ideas will triumph. I do support a free market of ideas. But on the other hand, I understand that having a platform to speak within this citadel is a privilege, and that one needs to earn that privilege and understand that it confers responsibility as well as power. If you abuse that power, or fail to recognize when you’re saying stupid shit, then you need to be called on it. You need to self-regulate (but hopefully not self-censure). However, I do agree with the point made in the Harper’s letter that closed-minded dogma and blackballing is a cancer in any movement, and I hope we can resist that on the left. I’ve seen the academic hard left support some seriously stupid shit, and viciously attack and “cancel” those within their ranks that try to point it out. I had one professor try to expel me from my grad program for critiquing the tactics (not values) of one of her darlings.
I think it gets tricky when academics try to become public intellectuals. I’m thinking about Steven Pinker here. Maybe that’s what needs to get debated next–how to balance free speech with social responsibility in the real world outside of the ivory tower. The point about the need to support collective action instead of poking holes in it is a good one. And if you want the limelight that comes with being a public figure, and step out of the protective bubble of academia, then you can’t whine about getting publicly attacked. It’s a different set of rules out there.
catclub
I cannot let this thread die before noting that it is my guitar that weeps, gently.
J R in WV
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Well, you lost me there…
I don’t think holding puberty back, when it means a person who feels their gender is mistaken inexorably moves toward manifesting the “wrong” gender, is nearly as despicable as you make it out to be. You may need education about that type of medication, if you ever work with a client with those issues.
Otherwise you are likely to harm youngsters with definite ideas and feelings about their prospective gender, with serious negative effects later on. I’m an old white guy, and I have compassion for people with gender issues as youths… I’m not sure why you don’t.
You sound as if you would support in court giving a parent hostile to their own child’s gender issues sole custody of that child, which to me is a despicable path. Maybe I should just put you into the pie safe so I don’t have to communicate with someone with despicable views like that…
Chyron HR
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
That’ll put an stop to people calling you transphobic, I tell you what.
Sister Golden Bear
@Betty Cracker:
That said, there are a few potential downsides, mostly missed growth spurts. But I’d rather have a short trans kid than a dead one.
@Barbara:
It worth noting that being to blend in can literally be a life or death matter for trans people. Being “visibly trans” can make you vulnerable to being attacked or even killed. Besides rampant TERF-ism in the UK, trans women are regularly attacked there.
Not to mentioned some women also “embrace stereotypes.” Some do it intentionally and subversively, like femme lesbians (who also tend to get shit on by many feminist).
Darkrose
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: In my 50 years on this planet, I have never seen another woman’s hoohah in a bathroom. On the rare occasions when a stall door isn’t completely locked, everyone involved avoids eye contact. In fact, women in the bathroom generally pretend to ignore each other. I can’t think of any situation where I’d be watching someone closely enough to be able to tell if their a trans woman or not.
On the other hand, if a trans guy—or anyone male presenting— came into the women’s room, I’d raise an eyebrow. Rowling doesn’t think that’s a problem though, because she’s said that she considers trans men to be woman. I guess they’re supposed to be grateful trhat she’s misgendering them.
Sister Golden Bear
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
When the TERFs have the same talking points as the bible humpers who want us eradicated (and I do mean that literally)….
How J.K. Rowling helped kill a proposed American LGBTQ civil rights law
It’s not the first time they’ve made an unholy alliance. Notorious TERF Janice Raymond worked with Jesse Helms back in the Reagan era to helped dismantle the trans community’s ability to access trans health care through public and private insurance.
So yeah, it’s fucking personal.
BTW, you could save a lot of time by just skipping the rhetorical gymnastic and just come out and say that I, and my sisters, aren’t actually women (and that trans men aren’t men).
On second thought, I don’t need put up with listening to someone who denies my very existence. Enjoy your pie.
joel hanes
One of the least consequential controversies of 2020
Ignoring it was the right approach.
Darkrose
@Fair Economist: No, she really doesn’t. Her essay explaining her views is basically “trans women aren’t really women, and trans men are really women.” She literally said that hormonal transition is the equivalent of conversion therapy. And that’s before you get into her fiction, like the way Rita Skeeter is described as having an “unusually deep voice” for a woman and “mannish” hands, or how the protagonist in her psuedonymous mystery series threatens the trans villain with prison rape as a joke. She’s decided to go full-on TERF (although honestly, there’s nothing radical or particularly feminist about her brand of gender essentialism) and it ugly as fuck.
Darkrose
@Kropacetic: JKR thinks trans men are women. She held up the fact that she supports trans men as part of the feminist movement because they are women as proof of her allyship. She’s also said that she’s concerned about young trans men transitioning because she was a tomboy, and if she’d been aware it was a possibility as a teenager, she might have felt pressure to transition to give her father the son he wanted.
Which is to say that she doesn’t actually understand how gender identity works, and she’s happy to misgender and concern troll trans men while insinuating that trans women aren’t really women, because what defines a woman is your reproductive organs. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that an author who believes that a woman’s highest calling is to be a mother is a gender essentialist.
Barbara
@Sister Golden Bear: That is an excellent point. And really, it’s also worth noting that lots of biologically born women dress exactly the same way. No one should be shunned for it.
Darkrose
@oldster: One of the people who criticized Salaita was Bari Weiss, who is always ready to push for the firing of anyone who criticizes the state of Israel. She signed that letter, which should have been a huge red flag.
Darkrose
@Bill Arnold: Atwood also pointed out the big flaw in the gender essentialist argument: if women are defined by our ability to reproduce, do we stop being women after menopause?
Barbara
@Darkrose: Well, she must be shitting bricks at the NYT op-ed by Peter Beinart, itself a distillation of a longer article in a Jewish magazine.
Darkrose
@Betty Cracker: No one is advocating hormonal transition for children–for one thing it wouldn’t work because their bodies haven’t finished developing yet. At most, doctors might prescribe medication to delay puberty in conjunction with therapy and other non-medical gender-affirming strategies.
There seems to be this idea that 12-year-old kids are going to Kaiser and getting scheduled for transition surgery in a couple of weeks. That’s not how any of this works.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Sister Golden Bear: Great to see you joined the thread. This discussion could use some non-cis representation.
Darkrose
@Cacti: That would be correct.
Cancel culture for me, but not for thee.
MoxieM
@Doug R: You say that like “they” stopped killing women–just for being women–already.
As in, “Men worry that that women will laugh at them; women worry that men will kill them.” (Yes, the evil Margaret Atwood.)
One of my beefs with the vasty oversimplification in this not-dialog, is the “R” in TERF. I mean, I get that it makes a better acronym and all, but I doubt that anyone to the left? right? of Shulamit Firestone would actually call JK Rowling a Radical Feminist.
Where a great tweeting horde seem to see TERFs, I see misogyny (remember that?) and a lack of clarity in naming. I would never call myself a Radical Feminist either, because to me, that is a term with specific meaning. “Radical” isn’t just like “very” or “lotsa” or “highly convinced” or something when used to modify Feminist.
Sister Golden Bear
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: Thanks.
I really didn’t need to spend emotional labor on this today while I’m prepping for an important job interview, but I’m not gonna let this shit go unchallenged.
Also, many thanks to all the cisgender allies who stepped up.
Darkrose
The thing is that JK Rowling is all about gender essentialism. The main message of the Harry Potter series turns out to be that motherhood is a woman’s highest calling. All of the “good” female characters are either mothers themselves, or involved in raising children, like McGonagall. Petunia Dursley and Narcissa Malfoy are presented as not-nice, but their one redeeming feature is that they love their children. Dolores Umbridge and Bella Lestrange are evil, childless harpies; Lestrange meets her fate at the hands of UberMom Molly Weasley. Rita Skeeter, who is described as having “mannish” features, is evil, while Tonks, who is presented as being kind of non-binary, only becomes truly happy when she falls in love with Remus and starts popping out babies. The epilogue is literally about how everyone marries their middle-school sweethearts and has kids.
When I realized that Rowling’s wizarding world assumes that children’s personalities are set at age 11 as determined by a hat, her insistence that people are defined by the genitals they were born with makes a lot more sense.
Sister Golden Bear
@Darkrose:
Or women who are infertile for whatever reason; or who never menstruate; or who have hysterectomies; or are born without uteruses; etc.
@MoxieM:
The “radical” comes from TERFism origin in second-wave radical feminism, specifically folks like Sheila Jeffreys and Janice Raymond. The latter’s notorious 1979 “The Transsexual Empire” laid the foundations for TERFism.
While second-wave rad-fems, who ironically had a strong streak of biological essentialism, were often hostile to trans woman, not all were. For example, Andrea Dworkin viewed surgery as a right for transgender people.
I personally prefer to refer them as FARTs: Feminism-Appropriating Reactionary Transphobes.
Darkrose
The term TERF was originally used to apply to women who did identify as radical feminists. This argument goes back to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which started in 1976 and in the ’90’s implemented a policy of limiting attendence to “womyn born womyn”. The irony was that by defining women by their genitals, their reinforced an anti-feminist essentialist framework, just as Rowling does today.
Betty Cracker
@Darkrose: Well, medicating prepubescent humans is medicating children, IMO. SGB makes a great point about the upside of doing that at #258, but I think there are legit questions to ask about the practice. Are there health risks that need to be weighed, aside from missing growth spurts? How widespread is demand for this treatment? When is the kid considered old enough to make a decision? (Not asking anyone to supply me with answers, just noting some of the questions I’m exploring.)
LesGS
@Betty Cracker: Are you considering the child’s state of mind? Puberty can be hell for kids that are *not* dysphoric and absolutely crazy-making for those that are. Do we prescribe meds to control their depression and their rage, often self-destructive? I’m not dismissing your concerns or trying to be confrontational, but that is also medicating children, causing long term effects on their brain chemistry.
Sister Golden Bear
@Betty Cracker: Here’s a fairly detailed description of puberty blockers and their side-effects, protocols for usage, with references to clinical research.
Research shows that puberty blockers are safe with minimal side effects, and the effects of the treatment are both temporary and reversible. Aside from potentially missing growth spurts, the other known risk is potential adverse effects on bone mineralization. Research on the long term effects on brain development is limited, but a 2015 study published in Psychoneuroendocrinology observed the executive functioning in 20 transgender youth treated with puberty blockers compared to untreated youth with gender dysphoria and found that there was no difference in performance.
But as the report notes: “it is more difficult to align the body with one’s affirmed gender once physical changes in secondary sex characteristics occur, especially for male-bodied individuals. Changes in facial structure, facial hair, Adams apple, and voice will not reverse with hormone treatment once puberty is complete.” (Or why I’ve had to do 350 hours, and counting of facial electrolysis—something I would not wish on any trans girl.)
As far as prevalence of usage of puberty blockers, I don’t have any stats readily available, but the best estimates are that adult trans people are about 0.5% of the U.S. adult population, so that would be (by far) the ceiling for trans kids. Realistically though, the actual number of trans kids receiving puberty blockers is significantly lower, since many trans kids don’t have supportive parents who would allow them to do so, as well as it’s often not covered by insurance (thanks Janice Raymond….) Of those being considered for puberty blockers, about 60% were approved (per the study I linked to). Plus a number of doctors are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the option of puberty suppression, which further reduces the number children affected.
As the name implies, puberty blockers aren’t administered until the first signs of puberty (specifically the Tanner II or III stage of puberty).
As far as hormone therapy (i.e. estrogen for trans girls and testosterone for trans boys), and/or surgeries, these are not even considered until the child reaches 16-18, and is considered capable of informed consent. Parental consent is also required.
It’s extremely rare for surgeons to be willing to do genital reassignment surgery for trans girls who are under 18. (Even if you’re over 18, there’s major gate keeping—per WPATH guidelines, surgeons will require approval letters from two therapists/psychologists/psychiatrists before they’re willing to operate. (These letters are not automatic, my therapist has declined to do so for other patients.) I understand the need for approvals from a CYA legal liability POV, but it does raises some major bodily autonomy issues—literally no other surgery requires this.)
Darkrose
How can we make this a thing? This needs to be a thing.
Caphilldcne
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: this is fucking Bullshit. There have been trans organized feminist marches and it’s not hard to find the evidence. Second wave feminism has spiked itself over trans exclusion and even the Michigan Womyn’s festival is pretty much over it. Fuck off.
Sister Golden Bear
@LesGS: Good point.
As a doctor from the CNN article I linked to earlier (warning auto-play video) said:
Darkrose
@Betty Cracker: That’s why I said:
The “medicating children” stuff I’ve seen conflates puberty blockers with actual hormonal transition. Rowling, specifically, claimed that children were being encouraged to transition instead of accepting their sexual orientation, and that it was damaging their fertility and sexual function. This was the reasoning, if it can be called that, behind her recent “trans kids getting hormones is the modern version of anti-gay conversion therapy”.
Betty Cracker
@Sister Golden Bear: Thank you! I’ll take a look at that study.
@LesGS: Definitely agree that state of mind is relevant. Regarding medicating kids in other situations, that worries me too. Some kids definitely need it, but I think it’s the go-to option too often. Probably because our healthcare system sucks.
MoxieM
@Darkrose: I take your point. Thanks for that. When did the Michigan festival end anyway…? Never could stand that music, although it’s not the point. As an on and off again denizen of Women’s Colleges, I’ll never forget the feeling of Oof! safety I experienced when I first experienced it. Back that, (a looong time ago) yes, I would think there was terrible transphobia. Even tacit denial of the proud tradition of lesbians who were staff, faculty, students at these places. But above all, they were (and some still are) safe place in which to exist in a female body.
And that’s the question isn’t it: what defines a female body, and who gets to do the defining? Is it hormones, and not a vagina, or vice versa? Or? The notion of the potential of reproduction is obviously stupid. As a woman with 2ndary infertility, and now quite menopausal, um, yeah, that’s just really stupid from any angle.
Are you female b/c you say you are? what to do then with the shared yet wildly different experiences.
Certainly not an oppression olympics: i mean we obviously know, historically how women have been (mis)treated due to their external sex appearance. We know less about how trans women may and likely were also mistreated, at least in western culture.
My point, sort of, is that there is, there are, and there have been women’s cultures, as such. And I find the current climate of poo-flinging denial immature and un-thoughtful in its erasure of that reality. It’s also true that while not all women give birth, many of us do. And with the except on one or two individuals in all of recorded human history, that is a female thing–very much a thing of women’s culture, once you are indoctrinated into its mysteries. (Much to the sorrow of infertile women who long to become mothers.)
I guess I’m kind of saying let’s not throw the women out with the bath water here. I am generally in favor of both/and as opposed to either/or.
I do notice however that I’ve not seen the same agita over ftm identities–men don’t go around saying they feel “unmanned” by the presence of transmen (or do they?). It’s just the women who get picked on, as far as I can see. Why is that, do you suppose. With an historical lense, it’s pretty obvious. Educate me.