Philosopher Roger Scruton Has Been Sacked for Islamophobia and Antisemitism
Government sacks Roger Scruton after remarks about Soros and Islamophobia
Scruton is a traditional conservative, so he is in many ways a long way from my own political inclinations, but I do like several of his books, and I think his treatment here is a disgrace. His knowledge and appreciation of Islam is profound, and the idea that "Islamophobia" is an invented propaganda word is a legitimate one. I don't see anything wrong with what he has said, nor have I read anything anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, racist or xenophobic in the many books and articles of his that I've read, most of which are deeply humane and thoughtful.
This has happened following an interview and article by George Eaton published in the New Statesman. To see just how reliable the writer of this article might be, here are Scruton's original words about Hungary, which he defended in the interview, and which are being presented as evidence of anti-semitism:
[quote=Scruton]Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.[/quote]
https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/276-the-need-for-nations
To present this as anti-semitic is simply dishonest. The more you look at George Eaton's behaviour--his articles and Tweets--in the context of the ongoing criticism of Scruton, the more it seems that this deputy editor of the New Statesman (!) has been part of a smear campaign.
Another reason given for his dismissal was this quote:
[quote=Scruton]Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.[/quote]
But according to others, what Scruton said was this, referring to the Chinese government:
[quote=Scruton]They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.[/quote]
See here: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/roger-scrutons-sacking-exposes-the-tories-cowardice/
It's appropriate to give Scruton the last word here:
[quote=Scruton]Although Freud’s attempt at explaining homophobia might be held to justify the use of that term to describe at least some of the negative views that some people hold about homosexuality, this is no excuse for inventing ‘Islamophobia’ as an explanation of the negative views that many people hold about Islam. The invention of this term by activists of the Muslim Brotherhood is a rhetorical trick, though it seems that my habit of pointing this out is a further proof that I am guilty. Are we then to suppose that people are repelled by Islam because of the unconscious desire to embrace it, this repulsion being part of an elaborate defence mechanism? Or could it be that murder, genocide, rape and enslavement carried out in the name of Islam have made people somewhat suspicious of the faith? My own view, expounded in The West and the Rest and elsewhere, is that the only phobia involved here is the natural revulsion against those horrible crimes, and has nothing to do with Islam, which is abused by those who commit the crimes and not by those who are repelled by them. However, I am sure that there are out-of-context sentences to be extracted here that will be useful in pinning on to me an accusation that admits no presumption of innocence, there being, as with all nonsense accusations, no gap between accusation and guilt.[/quote]
https://www.rogerscruton.com/articles/556-sin-bin
Scruton is a traditional conservative, so he is in many ways a long way from my own political inclinations, but I do like several of his books, and I think his treatment here is a disgrace. His knowledge and appreciation of Islam is profound, and the idea that "Islamophobia" is an invented propaganda word is a legitimate one. I don't see anything wrong with what he has said, nor have I read anything anti-Semitic, anti-Islamic, racist or xenophobic in the many books and articles of his that I've read, most of which are deeply humane and thoughtful.
This has happened following an interview and article by George Eaton published in the New Statesman. To see just how reliable the writer of this article might be, here are Scruton's original words about Hungary, which he defended in the interview, and which are being presented as evidence of anti-semitism:
[quote=Scruton]Many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire. People in these networks include many who are rightly suspicious of nationalism, regard nationalism as the major cause of the tragedy of Central Europe in the 20th century, and do not distinguish nationalism from the kind of national loyalty that I have defended in this talk. Moreover, as the world knows, indigenous anti-Semitism still plays a part in Hungarian society and politics, and presents an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty among ethnic Hungarians and Jews.[/quote]
https://www.roger-scruton.com/articles/276-the-need-for-nations
To present this as anti-semitic is simply dishonest. The more you look at George Eaton's behaviour--his articles and Tweets--in the context of the ongoing criticism of Scruton, the more it seems that this deputy editor of the New Statesman (!) has been part of a smear campaign.
Another reason given for his dismissal was this quote:
[quote=Scruton]Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.[/quote]
But according to others, what Scruton said was this, referring to the Chinese government:
[quote=Scruton]They’re creating robots out of their own people by so constraining what can be done. Each Chinese person is a kind of replica of the next one and that is a very frightening thing.[/quote]
See here: https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/roger-scrutons-sacking-exposes-the-tories-cowardice/
It's appropriate to give Scruton the last word here:
[quote=Scruton]Although Freud’s attempt at explaining homophobia might be held to justify the use of that term to describe at least some of the negative views that some people hold about homosexuality, this is no excuse for inventing ‘Islamophobia’ as an explanation of the negative views that many people hold about Islam. The invention of this term by activists of the Muslim Brotherhood is a rhetorical trick, though it seems that my habit of pointing this out is a further proof that I am guilty. Are we then to suppose that people are repelled by Islam because of the unconscious desire to embrace it, this repulsion being part of an elaborate defence mechanism? Or could it be that murder, genocide, rape and enslavement carried out in the name of Islam have made people somewhat suspicious of the faith? My own view, expounded in The West and the Rest and elsewhere, is that the only phobia involved here is the natural revulsion against those horrible crimes, and has nothing to do with Islam, which is abused by those who commit the crimes and not by those who are repelled by them. However, I am sure that there are out-of-context sentences to be extracted here that will be useful in pinning on to me an accusation that admits no presumption of innocence, there being, as with all nonsense accusations, no gap between accusation and guilt.[/quote]
https://www.rogerscruton.com/articles/556-sin-bin
Comments (706)
Off with his head?
Fast and loose are our reactions, and atonal rage is our rhythm.
The Kafka trap springs again...
It’s a politicized move and one driven by the low standard of journalism in the UK. I wouldn’t be overly worried about this though and look to how less prominent figures are being effected rather those with an actual public platform.
But why should I or anyone really care that Roger Scruton is losing a Government position because of this?
Knowing that you've seen the full quotation, I have to say that this is beneath contempt.
Quoting Maw
You attempt to push his position outside the realm of reasonable opinion, but really you just disagree with him. I happen to agree with him.
Quoting Maw
A predictable and thoughtless question. It's not for any personal sympathy for him or his agenda as a government housing adviser, but--obviously--because of what it shows about the state of public debate, of government, of cultural mores, and of journalism.
It is well known that broadcasts in the UK are screened for so called “antisemitic” remarks - it has been conflated to such a degree that criticizing the Israeli government is seen by some as “antisemitic”. The BBC has a policy about this.
The whole deal with Ken Livingstone was quite silly to fro what I understand. He said some pretty silly things (given he should’ve realised how he’d be attacked for them; but it happens). His defense of what he said was perfectly reasonable because he was stating historical facts and continually voiced that he wasn’t a Nazi - it as yet another political game to defame a party (the irony being most voters don’t give a toss about this kind of thing and it is the governmental games that produce the hatred on purpose in order to manipulate others ... sadly it’s been taken to such an extent they’ve managed to catch themselves in their our traps).
No doubt we’ll see attempts made by naive student protesters soon enough calling for him to be sacked from his actual job. If that happens ... sad, sad state of affairs (it wouldn’t surprise me though).
The exception is the following quote, reported in Eaton's article:
"The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East.”
I would need to see the context to fully understand it but on the face of it, the use of the word 'invasion' to describe desperate refugees fleeing a horrific war sounds heartless at best and bigoted at worst.
Given Eaton appears an unreliable and tendentious source, I would want to see corroboration about what Scruton actually said in that regard.
How does the second half of the full quotation justify the first half regarding a "Soros Empire", and "Jewish intelligentsia networks", which are in and of themselves, antiSemitic remarks? Not to mention his defense of Orban, saying that accusations of antisemitism were "nonsense".
Quoting jamalrob
And just because you agree with him, doesn't mean his views are inside the "realm of reasonable opinion". They are demonstrably Islamophobic and outright absurd.
Quoting jamalrob
Yes so sad for the state of the world in which a prominent old white guy was let go from a public position because a journalist printed his exact words. So sad that his name will undoubtedly be forever tarnished, that he will live in destitute poverty for the rest of his years. I will play the world's smallest violin for both Scruton and the death of public discourse. Surely this is what Kafka and Orwell were alluding too in their novels.
Tells how restrained and Limited public speech has become today. Shows the reality.
Accuracy in reporting is crucial, and misreporting what Scruton said as a hot-button phrase like 'Jewish intelligentsia networks' is inflammatory.
I think is academic philosophers make terrible government officials. Scruton isn't an official, but just sitting in one committee or more (haven't researched the backstory more), makes you one. Once having that committee seat however unimportant, free speach does go the drain. You are talking as if representing the British government in this case. And naturally someone like Scruton will speak his mind bluntly even if angers Hungary or China (or people think these sovereigns are angered about the comments) as it surely angers those who are in the left. I assume this incident won't be seen in this light, but the narrative will be that this is an example on how conservative speakers are attacked today. Another example of this is Jordan Peterson and Cambridge University rescinding a two month employment after a student union protested about it. All I can say that people shouldn't engage in what they criticize, hence the victimhood card shouldn't be used here.
Well, hopefully (and likely) the bogus accusations don't effect Scruton status. And likely they will just increase interest on what he says. I think he makes a good point especiallly about the humanities. Humanities should be against the kind 'scientism' that does lead to nonsense when applied to the humanities.
No islamophobia, anti-semitism or hate speech here either.
dangerous developments in western politics. It's not so much what he says - though there are examples that are indefensible - but what he doesn't say.
What the heck would "antisemitic" refer to if either of those are sufficient to be antisemitic? (Not that he even used the phrase "Jewish intelligentsia networks," but we can pretend that he did.)
I imagine that no one was actually offended by what he said, but the potential for what he said to be found toxic or prejudiced (even if being done in a smear job) was what got him ousted. I'm, ironically maybe, reminded of Zizek here; we don't have to be of the opinion that what he said was toxic in order to believe that it is - we simply need to defer belief to our community, they may find it toxic, they will find it toxic, so it is - nevermind what we think about it.
But the community is schizophrenic and prone to Trumping and Brexiting. I wouldn't leave anybody's career in the community's hands.
Also, I dont think china has ever valued individuality. Where it show up there, it's where China has absorbed western values.
Well it could, up to a point. But generally, I don't expect people who are 'somewhat suspicious' to burn mosques, attack people for wearing particular clothes, or commit random mass murder at Islamic centres.
Here are over 200 'incidents'. But some of these incidents are like, The Bosnian War, the Chad riots, the Genocide of the Rhohingya. At some point rather a long way before all these massacres, genocides random attacks and killings, 'reasonable suspicion' becomes untenable, and unreasonable fear, hatred and prejudice becomes the only possible explanation.
But Scruton is not naive or foolish or ignorant. Therefore he is malevolent.
All words are invented. And just cause it may be applied inappropriately too frequently doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Remember when people were joking about sending soldiers into Iraq and elsewhere with bullets doused in pig fat? It very definitely and absolutely exists.
And yes, the etymology is odd considering Freud's original intent behind "homophobia," but as a culture we've adopted and altered the meaning of the "phobia" suffix, and it's a bit of a red herring to debate that at this point in time.
https://blogs.spectator.co.uk/2019/04/roger-scruton-an-apology-for-thinking/
But unfortunately, you don't get to be a media star by choosing your words carefully, but by being controversial and using inflammatory innuendo.
As I said above, if it was a [s]young right wing irresponsible nonhuman[/s] some mediocre pundit, we could put it down to foolish naivety. But right here in this piece, Scruton claims the superiority of his humanity, his maturity, and his responsibility. He makes no apology and explicitly denies that he has any excuse. Why wouldn't a professional writer and thinker, dealing with a highly controversial issue choose his words a bit fucking carefully?
I mean think about choosing carefully the words to address a complaint such as this on the topic of antisemitism and islamophobia, think about the whole dehumanising processes - tattooed numbers, cattle trucks, and industrial death camps, and ask yourself whether this is appropriate _ "what a mistake it is to address young leftists as though they were responsible human beings." I start to wonder about dementia, because at this point it is not merely tastelessly offensive ,it's doubling down in a completely ridiculous way that only serves as further evidence for his critics.
Reading your recent posts, so do I.
Edit. Actually, I think my response to the site owner suggesting I was suffering from dementia and giving no reason and no response to the points I have made, was unaccountably restrained. It was a completely unjustified flame, that he will defend as humorous but is in fact highly offensive.
I don't understand your logic, unenlightened.
What is this malevolence you are talking about?
Is Scruton encouraging to burn mosques, giving a green light for the Burmese government to persecute the Rohinda?
But isn't it good that you have non-Muslims like George Eaton, and a few people here, to protect you from offence? :wink:
Maybe they'll say you have internalized Islamophobia.
The idea that this was invented by Muslim Brotherhood activists had I thought been long discredited. Here a person calling themselves a counter-jihadist is eager to explain the error in case annoying lefties seize on it. The term was propagated into general circulation by the UK Runnymede Trust's report of 1997. The claim by activists was just their vanity.
To me meaning is mostly use: the term was promoted by liberal multi-culturalists and has since been adopted by lots of factions. To claim its origin among Muslim activists is a rhetorical trick by Scruton, cleverly disguised by him by his counter-claiming that it was a rhetorical trick on others' part. He's a clever bloke and knows what he's doing. He knows perfectly well that 'the Soros empire' is an anti-Semitic trope. Orban in Hungary specialises in such language: language loaded with implication without ever quite speaking its name. Of course Orban is a politician trying to hold his ground given that 20% of the Hungarian population support an openly anti-Semitic far-right organisation (with which, sadly, their left is also flirting).
To add: the journalism in the New Statesman was crass, 'phobia' is usually a rubbish term because it condescends to real fear, and Scruton writes brilliantly on music, for example. But he is deeply reactionary, in a sometimes charming and seductive way, and his appointment as commissioner of building late last year was a symbolic expression of the terrible state of British Conservatism: he knows nothing about building but has the right sort of reactionary views on aesthetics. There are plenty of right-wing public administrators, engineers and architects who would have been infinitely preferable, as at least they would have got something done and known how it was done: but the Tories have reached a terrible level of ineptitude. That's where the UK is. That's why 'we' are bungling Brexit so spectacularly.
Thank goodness for philosophy, I say. I'm going back to my Wittgenstein immediately. Somewhere comforting to bury my head.
No, certainly not. It's more akin to holocaust denial than holocaust promotion.
.
Islamophobia is invented as an explanation of the negative views people hold. It is a rhetorical trick. But he is playing with the etymology as if there is some substance, would it be more grammatically correct to talk about 'anti-islamism' rather than 'islamophobia'? Well possibly, but whatever we ought to be calling it, the wiki list I linked constitutes a real persecution of Islam, not an invention, and not a rhetorical trick. These are the unacknowledged realities that are replaced with "murder, genocide, rape and enslavement carried out in the name of Islam".
Which shall be henceforth known as anti-infidelism, or if a mere rhetorical invention, as infidelophobia. Or would you think that such linguistic contortions are a way of dismissing these crimes against humanity?
I am focusing very narrowly on a couple of things here, but I am not alone in my criticism, and this is not a new criticism of Scruton. So my own dementia is not really a factor. My arguments and complaints are mirrored by others citing other things he has said at other times.
Certainly not? That's your answer?
OK. :chin:
What holocaust is he denying here?
Again, where is the malevolence?
I think your problem is simply that you are too much interpreting what Scruton is saying and trying to find some subtle and hidden agenda that is malevolent or something.
It's like if I start to talk about the active measures that Putin's Russia does, means that I would be a russophobe. And perhaps, as the only existing political narrative seems to be the US narrative, that I even start to speak about it I has to be that I am an offended liberal Hillary-voter that clings on to the Trump-Russia connection. Even if I wouldn't be talking about it. (That I come from a country that naturally has long been influenced by Russia simply because of geography wouldn't be the reason. And that I like Russians, have been there, now Russian and love especially their cuisine and culture doesn't matter either.)
Quoting unenlightened
Yes, indeed there are many others.
Now I don't want to sound harsh and I do value your comments, but I think that you are showing the symptoms of the creeping political tribalism. When this tribalism takes hold, we don't even listen anymore to what actually the other side says, but just try to interpret in the worst possible way. He must have meant this, because he is on the opposite side as me. And this is an universal phenomenon.
So where can Scruton be wrong?
Well, is it indeed that 'islamophobia' was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood is a question that we do have a chance of finding an objective yes or no answer. He maybe wrong with that.
Quoting unenlightened
But the rhetorical trick you use is that if Scuton talks about people fearing attacks by Islamists, that SOMEHOW means that he refutes the persecution of Muslims! Does Scruton say that? Where?
Do you think that an academic philosopher like Scruton would deny that Muslims have been persecuted? That makes him the 'holocaust denier'?
Again this is the typical tribalism I hate. If one talks let's say the bad things of X, then I MUST be praising the virtues and turning a blind eye on the bad thing Y has done. It doesn't make sense.
The problem is the conflation, which makes things worst. It creates the percieved if not actual "PC-culture" environment of "if you open your mouth on this subject, you are persecuted", that actually nobody really is truly promoting. Yet this conflation of people like Scruton as being the malevolent Islamophobe / anti-Islamist spreading the gospel of bigotry if not racism simply makes things worse as there indeed are those kind of people.
No. What I am complaining about is that he is down-playing (as in completely ignoring) it, while up-playing the atrocities of Muslim extremists, in a way that gives comfort to rightwing extremists. And his talk of George Soros having an Empire is similarly loose and inflammatory. One talks loosely of a 'financial empire' and one can talk of a financier having political interests and aspirations, but again, he knows full well that Soros is a particular target of extreme right wing antisemitic conspiracy theories, and he is equivocally but knowingly lending legitimacy to such abhorrent ideas.
Quoting ssuI don't think I am doing that, and i don't think that is being done by every other critic of Scruton.
In this case he conjoins criticism of the term widely used to identify crimes targeted at muslims, with the mention of crimes perpetrated by muslims. He does the both together, it's not me presuming. What's the connection in his mind that puts these two in the same paragraph?
Thus he shouldn't have a job teaching philosophy?
I'm strongly against him--or anyone else--being sacked for anything they've expressed (at least insofar as it's not a contractual issue--non-disclosure clauses someone might have signed, etc.)
I think it's a good thing for philosophy professors to be provocative.
Re being a moderator, I don't want anyone to be a moderator if they're going to do much. ;-)
Students need to practice coming up with objections/counterarguments. That needs to occur on a spectrum from easy to not-so-easy, as we progress from 101-level courses to graduate-level courses.
'Converts' are traitors invading from the inside. They should be send to the Middle East where they belong and not be allowed to exploit European lands and institutions. As moslems do not belong in Europe, this moslem does not belong to a Western Philosophy forum. He should stop quoting the murderer and pedophile muhammad in philosophy forums and go proselytize elsewhere. And this is not 'islamophobia', it's common sense, which most Europeans finally begin to recognize.
Those who left Hungary to work abroad are traitors too and because of that Mr. Orbán was completely justified in passing the overtime law. Hungarians that complain about 'slavery' should get rid of their invader mentality, thinking that they are above the Nation and its salvation.
Well I've done my bit with Scruton, over to you to deal with the above.
I'm not very interested in what he said. I don't know if Scruton has ever said much of anything I've agreed with. I'm primarily interested in the fact that he was sacked over saying something. That's what I care about.
You merely picked out some apparent offense you took by his reprimanding of a political inclination that was espoused with the clear intent of smearing his name resulting in him being sacked from an unpaid governmental position - and don’t forget the purposeful selective quotes as well.
The moment you converted to islam, you denied your European heritage and embraced the moslem heritage. Enjoy your moslem heritage, but please do it outside Europe. Islam is not a part of European heritage.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
You have access to the internet, so you can google and read Orbán's comments. It shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes, since he's one of those men who are not afraid to speak their mind. The way you exploit Europe has been described by Orbán, Scruton and others. By taking what belongs to Europeans. Moslems and moslem culture are alien to Europe and they should stick to what is their own.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
It's not an accusation. It's what you said.
"how else are we to call people to our religion if we stop them from talking and asking questions".
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
They are not accusations, they are historical facts. You better post your thread on moslem forums. If your fairytales keep other moslems from marrying kids and killing 'dis-believers', something good will have come out of it. We on the other had don't need your fairytales to denounce pedophilia.
You know how much of our 'European heritage' derives from ancient Islamic culture right? We're the inheritors of the Islamic Golden Age just as much as we are of Plato and Aristotle.
Yes, I know. Nothing at all.
Got a wee bit reading to do then. The link I gave is a place to start.
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/apr/10/roger-scruton-calls-for-dismissal-islamophobiad-soros-remarks?CMP=fb_gu&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR268zYfowD1_FhGJyHbRL6KrvpLaAMwntn_6D9_ekuBMzFRm18OwiNKI1c#Echobox=1554906736
I wouldn't normally bother, on the assumption that folks can click a link and read an article. But it seems that some folks think I am doing something extraordinary in making a critical analysis. So I feel obliged to make explicit that there is support for this interpretation from both major parties, and from other interested parties, and not solely on the basis of one unkind and partisan interview.
That there is now evidence in the thread that Scruton has given comfort to the far right will I hope give some good reason to reconsider.
I'm familiar with it because it's a nearby University, so it's in the local news.
We live in a world where we search to be offended, usually to delegitimize and neutralize an opponent regarding something other than the merits of their position. What we need is a leader who speaks with no filter, does what he wants, and responds to critics with childish taunting and trolling as his followers celebrate in amusement. That's what we got at least.
When you will point me to some members who chose to study Plato and Aristotle in moslem countries, I will begin reading your link.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Yes, you denied it. European culture has nothing to do with islamic culture, they don't mix. You can keep your postmodern identities, just have them somewhere else.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Christianity and islam are not the same and it is no wonder that they don't mix either. The fact that Christianity was capable of becoming a part of European culture does not mean that islam can or that it should.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Multiculturalism and postmodernism which is how leftists try to destroy European culture is as alien as islam is.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
The only problem is that you try to deny that the European region has a culture and a history of its own. I have news for you though, it does have one and it's not compatible with islamic culture. Those who embrace the islamic culture, have effectively denied their European one, no matter how blonde their hair is or what their passport says.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Nice try.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
I didn't say you did.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
No one said it's an obligation. Keep twisting words. I only said that as a matter of fact you moslems marry kids. Good luck explaining to other moslems why they're not allowed to do what their role model did.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Knowledge requires that it be based on reality. Reality says that those who want to study Plato Aristotle or physics study in the West and those who want to memorize the koran study in moslem countries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelianism#Islamic_world
Guess you have to start reading.Quoting sunknight
What is European culture? What food do they eat, language do they speak, religion do they have, and government system do they use? Quoting sunknight
Why did the Germans bomb London if they all had the same culture?
Also, what is the primary religion of these European nations: Albania, Kosovo and Bosnia and Herzegovina?
If I make the effort to sugarcoat it you mean. Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Yes, I could. But I don't have to. This post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/5535/the-wests-moral-superiority-to-islam/p1 does not do it, this post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/274112 does not it, this post https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/275054 does not it. Most posts don't it.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
I've done nothing different than most here habitually do or what Mr. Orbán, whom Mr. Scruton defended, does. The lol factor is that this is what this thread is about.
Sunknight: Best Practice is to proceed forward cautiously until you have established what you can get away with and what the moderators will stomp on. Like all members here, the moderators have uniquely sensitive corns on their toes which, when stepped on just so, send them into tizzies. As far as I know, the idiosyncrasies of the moderators' sensitive toes have not been mapped.
Generally 'slash and burn' approaches will get bad feedback. Try to avoid.
It is the case that if you want to disparage Islam, transgenders, gays, (anybody, basically, to whom the suffix "phobia" is regularly attached) you should do so in an unusually elegant fashion.
My beloved Traitor don't overestimate your ability to read my emotions! My intentions shouldn't be in your concerns either, or anyone else's. I appreciate your humanistic concern though. I must confess I almost like you. The cancer of islam hasn't consumed all your Europeanness after all :lol: How about reverting to the Good? Please, don't ban me for proselytizing :rofl:
Deus vult! Deus vult! Deus vult!
Remind me not to give rope to strangers as a present. :broken:
You then have to give the a concrete example of the downplaying or ignoring a question put to him. So the interviewer really has to ask something that Scruton really avoids. And I ought to emphasize just what the whole topic of the discussion was!
Quoting unenlightened
And how inflammatory is it to talk about the Koch brothers having an Empire or the Mercer family? And as George Soros is from Hungary, it's no wonder that he has ties to the country. Here you should really concentrate on what Scruton actually says. NOT what some alt-right conspiracy theorist alleges Scruton to have said. I assume that obviously the topic of the discussion was Hungary and it's political situation.
Quoting unenlightened
Ok, so discussing a topic that conspiracy theorists make their absurd theories is 'knowingly lending to abhorrent ideas'. Well, this is again an example of the political tribalism and show the inability in handling issues openly.
Good points.
And if we talk about the true hostility against muslims (and jews etc), one noticeable thing is that extreme-right terrorism deliberately uses the "lone gunman" tactics. No extreme-right organization takes ever credit of any terrorist attacks. And those who are terrorist perpetrators distance themselves from others. This strategy has been noticed for example by the FBI. This is contrary to how any loonie that decides to be a home grown mujaheddin is accredited to ISIS and make's the terrorism instantly "international".
The extreme-right also seeks to use anything that could be interpreted as being supportive to their views and naturally the left notices this. And then you people (who generally oppose anything from the right) making the conclusion that Roger Scruton is encouraging extremism.
Quoting Mr Phil O'Sophy
Actually it's not strange. Just think of putting everything you don't like together and assume it makes a coherent entity. Eases the ranting about it.
(Oh, he got banned... of course, the tidiness of the forum is actually very nice. Thank you!)
Quoting Terrapin Station
His exact quote was, "many of the Budapest intelligentsia are Jewish, and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire," and which is a hairsplitting distinction from outright saying, "Jewish intelligentsia networks", and committed or even casual antisemites wouldn't see any significant difference. Further, the concept of a "Soros Empire" is at least a two decade long antisemitic trope, and particularly pervasive in Hungary. It's the idea of manipulative elitists Jews who act as puppet masters behind global and state affairs, and policies.
I should also note the audacity behind saying that the term Islamophobia is mere propaganda, less than a month after 50 Muslims were brutally murdered in their Mosque.
Sunnis are dependent on secular authority to outlaw child marriage, slavery, and domestic abuse. It just means that an imam can only sort of indirectly condemn these things. For a westerner, this is strange, because Christian clergymen were a crucial element of the elimination of slavery in the west. Christians depend on their clergymen to lay out strong condemnations of whatever the community hates.
To an atheist, it might seem childish to depend on the condemnations of preachers. But it is what it is.
Quoting Maw
is antisemitic? That Jews are part of the intelligentsia, or that they form a network? That they are in Budapest? That they are associated with the "Soros Empire"? Can't Soros have an empire?
Would we say that "many of the Budapest intelligentsia are [GAY], [ENGLISH], [CHINESE], and form part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire" is homophobic, anglophobic, or sinophobic?
Slightly off-topic but I'm glad to see this thread.
One of your mods thinks Australia has a rape culture, another thinks the modern extreme left is benign. I thought perhaps I was dealing with some kind of extreme left-wing forum owner but I don't know if someone like that could make a thread like this, it seems that way to me. I'm glad to see this forum's owner is more balanced than that.
I disagree. To me the gulf between the two is unfathomably large.
The topic and Scruton's remarks could be used for the purpose you're suggesting, since skilful dog whistling does usually look like that. Though in this case I do doubt that their original intent is like that though.
In the unsympathetic/outrage ladened media narrative and most reactions there won't be much of a distinction between Scruton's remarks and their vulgarisations, however. In that regard they're already co-opted and should be treated with suspicion; though how much suspicion depends heavily on the context of discussion.
Do governments sack their housing advisers because of them being [something]-phobic? Of course not. They sack them because what they uttered makes them look bad in the eyes of someone else who holds power whatever needs to be held power over. As much as discussing validity of his claims can be interesting, it is useless when it comes to politics.
That's pretty much my view on it too.
I don't want to step too far away from the issue, but I've been flailing against this kind of over-sensitive censorship for a few years now.
When thinkers/writers/academics/speakers that we value listening to are de-platformed or otherwise marginalized (unfairly), it's not just the individual being de-platformed that is harmed, it's us as well (our right to hear the ideas of others).
Free-speech is also meant to protect our right to listen if we want to. I'll be the first to point out that nobody is entitled to the private platforms of others, but we've managed to create a situation where individual private platforms (and governments) are absolutely terrified of being socially sanctioned for making an incorrect decision about who should be allowed to use them (making them inaccessible in practice to people with opposing views).
Nobody cares about seeing both sides of an argument anymore. They want the other side to go away, and if they don't get what they want they'll make unending fuss. The result is that platforms now have to cater to specific political niches, because exposing their audience to opposition would garner outrage from either polarized end. Are there any major news networks that still have politically diverse viewer bases?
It has a very chilling effect on democratic health. Instead of finding a coherent middle, the chasm between the left and the right just keeps growing...
I don't know what else Scruton has said or, of course, thought about Jews, but his comments above are an undeniable antisemitic canard, as I've pointed out. I would assume a public intellectual would be familiar with such tropes. Scruton is, it should be noted, friendly with Viktor Orbán, who is an antisemite, despite having said accusations against Orbán as an antisemite were "nonsense", so I can't imagine he has a rosy view of Jews. Wouldn't surprise me coming from a man who said Islamophobia isn't real.
Having an antisemitic friend doesn't make you an antisemite, though I do agree that it is weak evidence (not in a derogatory sense, it is still evidence) in favour of Scruton having little sympathy for Jews, which is in turn weak evidence for him having little sympathy for Muslims.
Though I don't buy the inference, I can understand why someone would be suspicious, and such suspicion probably warrants his sacking.
Sure, but I didn't say that, I said that he described accusations of antisemitism against Orbán as "nonsense". I would also add that suggesting Islamophobia isn't real is more than having "little sympathy" for Muslims, especially when you add other comments of his, such as, "sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East," when describing refugees and immigrants.
The connotations of those things aren't particularly good, I agree. And yes, I also agree that it is quite unfortunate that he said those things and also that those things could be dogwhistles. I just think this is more of a case of an educated bloke being an unwitting vehicle for prejudice he would sincerely condemn if asked about it.
I think one could reasonably go so far as to say they are very bad actually!
I mean, I don't want to downplay how inauspicious the remarks are, but I don't think Scruton is actually as prejudiced as the connotations suggest. A vehicle for systemic injustice, which could be used to normalise such prejudice through a bait and switch, and close to dogwhistles for their vulgarisations, but I'm going to stop at attributing personal prejudice to Scruton for the role Scruton's remarks might play in discourse. Without that distinction you end up treating garden variety liberals and conservatives as far right.
The TPF owner is on a lithium drip, so he's very balanced.
:smile:
You know him well then ?
Here are some critics of his bias. Perhaps nearer the scene of relevance as to his suitability for the job in question.
From:
http://www.globalconstructionreview.com/news/uk-architects-celebrate-sacking-roger-scruton-hous/
'At RIBA we also argue for better building quality but our doubts about the impartiality of this commission were clearly justified. Time and effort has been wasted and we should now move on from stylistic obsessions to the issues that lie at the heart of solving the housing crisis.”
Tamsie Thomson, director of the London Festival of Architecture, called Scruton’s appointment “ludicrous” in the first place.
“Time-wasting and division seems to be the Government’s stock in trade, and it was entirely foreseeable that the ludicrous appointment of Roger Scruton would end badly,” she said, according to AJ.
“Our housing crisis is very real and very pressing, and the Building Better Building Beautiful agenda was flawed from the outset thanks to its narrow focus on subjective notions of beauty.”
Former RIBA president Angela Brady told AJ: “May Scruton’s replacement be a knowledgeable competent architect with housing expertise, who champions new ways of providing a rich and diverse choice of housing options and who encourages innovation and creativity in great design and place making".
[quote=Ambrose Bierce]UNDERSTANDING, n. A cerebral secretion that enables one having it to know a house from a horse by the roof on the house. Its nature and laws have been exhaustively expounded by Locke, who rode a house, and Kant, who lived in a horse.[/quote]
Have you even enquired what the Jockey Club position is?
You might also use it too for a while. I really enjoy your thoughtful and insightful leftist responses in the forum, which aren't the typical kind of kneejerk learnt responses people in the left typically have.
Quoting Maw
And of course as you have made your opinion about him, you don't see any reason to dwelve further, but to go along the sentence of him being anti-semite. One could easily look at from WHERE this quote is from and at the sentences BEFORE and AFTER the quote about the Jewish intelligentsia and Soros:
Of course, those parts of the talk highlighted are not quoted, which clearly show the tendentious bashing and mudslinging the whole thing is about. You see, at least I think that usually anti-semites DO NOT talk about the persecution of the Jews and anti-semitism being 'an obstacle to the emergence of a shared national loyalty'.
But of course what actually Roger Scruton said isn't at all important, it doesn't matter for those who want to bash him and go on their attack against the 'evil right'.
Hey ssu, I would strongly recommend actually reading what I wrote prior to posting. As I explained here, I didn't explicitly say that Scruton is an antisemite (I'm hesitant to do so), but that his commentary was loaded with antisemitic canards, etc., which you conveniently haven't acknowledged, much less disputed.
Quoting ssu
Yes, I'm familiar with Scruton's quotes here, having actually read his full commentary before posting, but as I pointed out, this doesn't excuse what he said (which you are disinclined to acknowledge, much less defend). But sure, pay no attention to one of the few people of actual Jewish decent here, and please, let's have all the non-Jews who clearly know jackshit about antisemitism explain to me what it entails...
I did read your posting.
Quoting Maw
Oh yes, you just said that his comments are an undeniable antisemitic canard and you can't imagine he has a rosy view of Jews. Again, that he in his talk referred to Jews being prosecuted in Hungary and anti-semitism being a problem there doesn't naturally matter to you. Nope, you have found your trope!
Quoting Maw
Of course not, why should he? Scruton is nearly this caricature of an old conservative British academician, whose whole demeanor can feel to many to be condescending. But that doesn't make him a spokesperson/ a front for anti-semites (or malevolent, as unenlightened defined him). As fdrake noted well, you "end up treating garden variety liberals and conservatives as far right".
And it's not about his dishonor here, it's about the ease how loosely defined accusations are enthusiastically hurled and accepted without critical thinking. I've learned that today when someone is called either a 'fascist', 'socialist', 'anti-semite' or an 'islamophobe', you really have to be critical about the accusations and really have to find out to yourself if the person truly is like that. Some might be, but typically you find out that the person is either right or left-leaning, has criticized Israeli policy or has worries about terrorism, yet aren't at all the ideological firebrands or bigots they are portrayed to be.
But the political tribalism of the present doesn't accept this view.
You're preaching, not philosophizing. It's not just obvious, it's overt. I see people doing this regularly with impunity from behind the veil of some religions but not others.
I'm differentiating between obvious and overt because one has intent and one doesn't. Honestly I don't know how to highlight quotes yet, I'm fairly new to the site. I've read some of your entries and have noticed patterns, but I would need some time and knowledge of the functionality of the site in order to quote them.
You do philosophize, and don't get me wrong, I have no complaints about your character, and some of your comments are entertaining, but there is a definitive bias toward a religion of choice that is often voiced unprompted amid comments. There is a belonging to a collective that you express that implies you perceive not yourself but a group you belong to as an intellectual authority.
Yes, he mentioned the historical fact that Jews were prosecuted under Eastern European Communists, and that indigenous antisemitism continues to be an obstacle for the emergence of a nationally shared Hungarian identity between Jews and non-Jews, which of course seems odd to me given his friendship with Orban who has leveraged antisemitism for political purposes, while Scruton has said such accusations were "nonsense". So when the only "problem" of antisemitism is because it's a barrier to shared nationalism, rather than a problem in itself, I'm somewhat skeptical for his sincerity here.
Regardless, you continue to dodge the issue I brought up, which is that Scruton made antisemitic comments, which of course hasn't been disputed.
Quoting ssu
I'm frankly less interested in what epithets we apply to people, as oppose to what they actually say, and in this particular case, if it's acceptable for someone in a government position to say them. Personally, I don't think it's acceptable for someone in a public position to say that Islamophobia isn't a valid term, or to refer to immigrants and refugees as "Muslim tribes" who are "invading".
I know the essay on nationalism, per se, isn't the focus of this thread, and I don't really have an opinion on whether Scruton should be tarred and feathered, but I think it's interesting how he proceeds in his essay, because it's wildly incoherent.
The whole first part is about how the EU is bound to fail because it's artificially imposing economic and political homogeneity on a deeply heterogeneous group of cultures. This can only be disastrous. What must be attended to are particular cultures, what makes them distinct. This must be the basis for unified, organic goverment
So, what makes Hungary distinct?
[quote=Scruton]All that is distinctive of the Hungarian experience – the shock of the Treaty of Trianon, which divided the Hungarian people from each other, the distinctive culture of a land-locked country in which a large population of Roma has never properly settled, the still present record of the country's struggle against Islamic domination – all this too has been ignored.[/quote]
Disunity and political shock, apparently.
Later, Scruton makes a distinction between nationalism and national loyalty.
The undercurrent here is Burke. Customs, culture etc are built up over time, organically - Centuries of trial and error streamline them in a sort of evolutionary process. Those customs which work survive; those which don't, die out. This makes them much more resilient and successful than any kind of organization imposed top-down.
This is what Scruton wants, not 'nationalism.' That's great, but, by Scruton's own conception, it can't simply be implemented. It can only come about as a by-product of something else.
So what does Scruton really mean when he says the following?
-----
Recap:
The EU is traumatic for Hungary because it doesn't govern according to the particular, settled culture of Hungary, which is characterized by unsettled Roma and historical trauma. Hungary should instead be governed according to its shared culture of not having a shared culture. This shared culture can only develop very slowly over time, and we need it right now.
Seems reasonable.
Oh I'm dodging now comments?
How about first saying that you aren't explicitly saying that he is an anti-semite and then saying he is making antisemitic comments?
That (dodging) must be that he talk about Soros Empire and jewish intelligentsia? Well, I did quote the line. Now I do agree that anything Soros has done or presumably done makes the the far-right bat-shit crazy conspiracy theorists in the way as the Koch Brothers do to the left in the US, yet that Scruton is really saying here similar comments as anti-semites is doubtful. You simply have to give the example, not just say the interpretation of what he had in mind is obvious.
What I gather is that Scruton has known personally the intelligentsia in Hungary, where he has been visiting since 1985. So is the issue that Scruton is a friend of of Victor Orban? Oh yes, a friend that Scruton describes as following to Hungarian media:
Now I don't make Hungarian politics so well to think if Scruton is correct or false, but at first glance the above doesn't seem as an appraisal for Orban, really. A politician that doesn't have the American approach to the division of powers, isn't a liberal-democrat and throws his weight around more than most Western politicians sounds to me somewhat critical.
Anyway, yet let's look at just what this was: This was just a typical leftist character assassination campaign, which was successful. They got their scruffy old conservative philosopher. It was indeed so successful job that Scruton's interviewer (of the interview that lead to this scandal) George Eaton, posted afterwards jubilant photo of himself on Instagram drinking champagne from a bottle with the caption: "“The feeling when you get right-wing racist and homophobe Roger Scruton sacked as a Tory government adviser.” Great example of objective investigative journalism.
You'll probably drink to that too.
God damn, can you please read what I actually write? I said you dodged the "issue" i.e. the content of the antisemitic comments, not that you dodged the comments themselves. Congrats, ssu, you "quoted" them, but you didn't actually directly explain why his comments weren't actually antisemitic canards, you had merely tried to highlight the quotes around them in order to excuse them. As I pointed out, they don't.
Quoting ssu
I literally posted a very good article in the previous page explaining how Soros has come to embody the centuries old archetype of the "manipulative Jew". Here is a salient point:
Here is another good article on how Soros has become a boogeyman for right-wing conspiracies, and which discusses Hungary at length. Here is another salient point:
Further, it is important that this is taken against the backdrop that, as of 2015, 59% of Hungarians think it's "probably true" that Jews have too much power in the business world; 57% that they have too much power in financial markets; and 49% that they have too much control over global affairs.
So when someone says, "Many of the Budapestintelligentsia are Jewish, andform part of the extensive networks around the Soros Empire" do you still sincerely think this has nothing to do with antisemitic tropes?
Quoting ssu
These are very much two separate things. Soros made an antisemitic trope. Do I think everyone who has made a racially stereotypical comment or trope racist? No, not necessarily. Just as I think it would be absurd to call someone a liar because they've lied once. It would be a whole other matter if he repeated it multiple times, or had made additional antisemitic comments, or stated it more explicit terms, such as "Jews manipulate the world" or something to that effect. But he didn't, and as I explained earlier, I wasn't going to call him an outright antisemite because I'm not aware of any other comments he's made towards Jews.
Quoting ssu
LOL he said that "tribes" of Muslim refugees were "invading" Hungary for fuck's sake! It's not "character assassination", he merely quoted him! I do love when right-wingers do this, they accuse others of "character assassination" when their own fucking words are thrown right back at them.
God damn yourself. I have read your post and answered to it.
Quoting Maw
Well, I assume that the whole response that people give to something should be considered. You don't think so: uttering the J-Word means you are a bigot. As I've already said, the alt-right does indeed talk of a Soros empire. Just how you talk about it is important. But if Scruton mentions Soros, is obviously he is part of the alt-right, not the traditional right.
Quoting Maw
When the interviewer literally celebrates with drinking champagne that the "right-wing racist homophobe" he interviewed is fired from a position thanks to his interview, I think the objectives for the interview are quite evident.
I don't know who George Eaton is; never heard of him prior to this, but damn he must be an extremely talented interviewer to get Scruton, a public servant in a country with nearly three million Muslims to say things like, "The Hungarians were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of huge tribes of Muslims from the Middle East," or that Islamophobia was “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue” or that many Jewish-Hungarian intellectuals form networks around a "Soros Empire". Crazy!
Quoting ssu
Insofar as you're, once again, unwilling to directly confront Scruton's remarks that I've highlighted and the loaded antisemitism that they contain, I consider this conversation over.
Eaton made the article that got Scruton scrutiny so much that he was fired from a committee.
Quoting Maw
So your argument why Scruton is islamophobic is the wording "huge tribes" basically.
Right.
I wouldn't use myself a word tribe, but does that make Scruton such a malevolent Islamophobe, really? Would it have been outrageous if you would have simply used "a lot of"? Like if I would use the term that "Finns were extremely alarmed by the sudden invasion of a lot of Muslims from the Middle East", am I an Islamophobe if I would say so? Because that is what did happen. A lot of Finns were alarmed. Others weren't and I do assume that some Hungarians weren't either. Personally my first thoughts in the time period was that relations between the native Finns and the new immigrants will sour in the country as many of my fellow countrymen have xenophobic tendencies.
Quoting Maw
I already earlier did note this that we can argue if this is really so. Yet I think that Scruton referred more to one way that the word Islamophobia is used, not that there hasn't been fear of Muslims earlier than the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood. And he does have a point, at least partially: Pascal Bruckner has argued that the term emerged "At the end of the 1970s, Iranian fundamentalists invented the term ‘Islamophobia’ formed in analogy to ‘xenophobia’. The aim of this word was to declare Islam inviolate. Whoever crosses this border is deemed a racist." Yet it was Claire Berlinski in 2010 that argued of the use of the term by the Muslim Brotherhood:
So used the term Islamophobia was before the 1970's or the 1990's can be debated.
Quoting Maw
Insofar I've noticed, you are unwilling to approach my point that Scruton isn't spreading anti-semitism, but is simply a scruffy old conservative. And I agree 100% with what fdrake:
Quoting fdrake
This is my view also. But no, you are willing to go with sentence that Scruton is a right-wing racist anti-semite islamophobe, which is so obvious to you that you want to stop the conversation now.
I am not persuaded that there was any anti-Semitism in what Scruton wrote, but I find that 'invasion' sentence deplorable. The 'huge tribes' bit is secondary, but makes it worse. He could have said 'sudden flood of desperate Syrian refugees' and still conveyed the stress the Hungarians felt, without the associated dog-whistling.
Yet you shouldn't forget that the media at the time tried to make it as intense as possible. So when (here in Finland) conscripts were used to basically assist the movement of the immigrants to refugee centers, the local media screamed about this with media tabloids like "ARMY DEPLOYED TO THE BORDER". This is a fact. And the photo used was of soldiers in full combat gear with assault rifles. Not a small contingent of unarmed soldiers helping the asylum seekers to carry their bags, which was the reality. And btw, we got the stream of immigrants in 2015-2016 only because Sweden had vowed to close it's borders.
So, when you were fed with the following kind of news reporting, it isn't so far fetched to talk about an invasion. Which btw did stop after 2015-2016. Notice that the reporter uses the word "war" to describe the events:
And basically, what does this map look like with the pointers?
I should add that the American media has been more critical of going into this kind of alarmist narrative with questions about the Trump's caravan.
So he's a right wing conservative nationalist who refers to refugees and migrants as an invading tribe, a Jewish capitalist (but no others) as having an empire, islamophobia as a myth while also talking about real muslim atrocities, and has a thing about the Roma, and another slight thing about homosexuals.
But apart from that, What's he ever done for fascism? Does he hate jazz and degenerate black music? I couldn't bothered to find out, though he does go on about music.
But thus Wiki:
So not much scruple about spreading damaging propaganda for money, under the guise of political philosophy, which to my mind is a step or two beyond selective quoting to embarrass a political opponent.
I wonder how far he followed Burke?
"common people had dangerous and angry passions that could be aroused easily by demagogues;"
Undoubtedly there is a deal of arousing of angry passions going on, on all sides. Eaton seems to be guilty of this, perhaps I am guilty of it, but we are common people, and ignorant. Scruton is exactly that kind of demagogue that Burke warns of, helping to create a tyranny over unpopular minorities.
To be honest @unenlightened, @Maw and @andrewk have made me a lot more suspicious of his behaviour. I had him pegged as a benign, educated version of a racist grandpa. He still might be, but I think he's sufficiently rhetorically aware to know how to avoid the problem statements if he wanted to. I'm left with the opinion that he knew precisely what crowd he was playing to.
Quoting unenlightened
Moral high ground rug pulled from beneath cloven hooves then.
Strikes me (and still haven't had time to look into it in detail, so just an impression), he's a kind of British Jordan Peterson. Capable of making sensible criticisms of the worst of the left but incapable of not playing footsie with the worst of the right.
Interesting how much mental gymnastics @ssu is willing to do to deny that Scruton's comments are problematic, yet he'll repeatedly accuse me of painting Scruton as an outright anti-semite, which, as I've argued, is demonstrably untrue.
Is that brewing in the UK? I'm asking.
Yes. Especially since Brexit negotiations started.
Edit: usual disclaimers about causation, correlation, post hoc, observational data and so on.
Eh, people voted for the dogwhistle parties, Brexit leave campaign was full of racist dogwhistles, not so surprising really. There's a coalition between the populist right and the (possibly latent) racists which is rather unpleasant and certainly bodes ill. Half of the reason Brexit legislation keeps failing to go through parliament is a bunch of Tory assholes who don't want the bloody rag-heads coming in from Europe.
Nothing formal yet, but still pretty bad.
"The ragheads and Pakis are worrying yer dad but yer dad's favourite food is curry and kebab...'
There is always certain opportunists pushing this or that agenda though when it comes to playing on people’s often irrational fears. A great number voted simply because they wanted complete sovereignty ... whether or not the fears are legit is another matter.
I know that. UKIP voters and the worst parts of the Tories didn't.
Not entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Office_hostile_environment_policy
Quoting I like sushi
And what a sick joke that turns out to be. The sovereignty of a parliament that is the least democratic of the EU countries, and about as functional as a thing that has no function and is broken. As if making deals with other countries can ever be done without making concessions - unless you 'send a gunboat'. But we stray from the topic.
I reiterate; Scruton is smart. He knows how things resonate; he knows exactly what associations he is leading people to make, and he has no scruple about doing it. He is malevolent.
Is a desire to limit illegal immigration necessarily a manifestation of racism? I realize the two become entangled, but there are practical reasons for wanting to control immigration, aren't there?
We live in a thick cloud of exaggeration and bullshit in my part of the world. You get so you don't believe anybody about anything.
The usual function of dogwhistles is to go largely unnoticed and tacitly accepted, they're supposed to create a consensus or work through the myth that the 'average person' agrees with the connotations of the whistling. Scruton's remarks contain dogwhistles that are already known, so regardless of personal belief in what he said (some politicians are like that, others probably aren't), the party has to distance themselves from the person who made the problematic remarks for PR reasons; to present a veneer of respectability.
Edit: they also work to normalise the connotations. People sometimes resist this fact, but it's the same kind of thing that happens when people think quantum observers are humans from pop-sci articles or that eggs both cure and cause cancer at the same time from the vulgarisation of scientific studies.
So even though firing Scruton might be motivated by the need to protect the veneer, he was still fired. The veneer is intact. The US is going down a more virulent path where the veneer is getting scuffed up, but not quite ready to crack. It's now that people like Hanover should stop fooling around and face the truth. I kind of doubt his type will, though. Weird times.
:up:
Trump removed the need for a lot of euphemisms, you're right.
Wouldn’t a thing with no function that is broken therefore have a function? Accidentally functional then? Haha!
All governing systems are partially functional and I’m neither inclined towards complete democracy nor a non-existent one. Due to increasing global pressures - from numerous areas - I think the scales are tipping everywhere and we’ve been caught unawares by some extreme social shifts as the world becomes ‘smaller’ compared to what it was merely a half century ago.
As for Scruton, he sounds and looks like your typical bond villain and this may make what he says seem much harsher than it would coming from a more doe eyed person. I just remain on guard with what people say in public because the media sphere is not necessarily reflective of an individuals cares and concerns and in an age where vilification is more easily applied than ever I prefer not to jump on the bandwagon finding it more useful to listen to what people from all sides have to say regardless of how abhorrent I may takes their words to be.
The main concern being voiced here is nothing new:
I don't know.I came across the idea somewhere that we just naturally swing back and forth. Maybe Trump marks the point where we swing back.
Quoting Maw
Interesting to end the conversation and then continue. Well, I've tried to make my point that Scruton is a scruffy old conservative and tried to explain why and you stick to your line that I'm evading the issue.
I think that you have already played the Worlds smallest violin already for a very long time...
Yeah super interesting
https://azvsas.blogspot.com/2019/04/easter-celebrations-in-poland.html?fbclid=IwAR11wcXqAR_-8PLqeZu9yShOphkb80soagSGh5g7pr9H9euXX_9mZ0ZkchY
damn this guy's a loser
Is it founded in some larger psycho-sexual framework of his or was he using this to substantiate another point?
Edit: I guess he was trying to justify masturbation as harmful?
No it's just an exceptionally stupid sexist statement he made.
Far worse than that: it's a deeply sexist expectation that woman must have no interest in her own pleasure when engaged in sex with a man.
His views are fairly reactionary on this subject. He regrets the sexual revolution, which was a movement that I think was largely a good thing, especially in the way it expanded sexual freedom for women. So in the end his views do probably imply a more traditional role for women, that is, a restricted one. But this is a legitimate political position--traditional conservatism--rather than simple sexism or misogyny.
There's no gotcha here, no case for calling out. It's time to grow up and exit the vampire's castle.
What makes a political position illegitimate? Is it legitimate to propose 'a restricted role' for any group - blacks, Jews, women, homosexuals, whatever? It's all traditional.
In case anyone wasn't aware of the reference, it's an excellent article. Though it's definitely pitched at people who are already very leftist.
Yes, in fact I would want to extend Fisher's criticism to cover all political interventions, not only the intraleft disputes that he addresses in the article. It's possible he wouldn't agree with me on that, I'm not sure.
The only comment I have on the article is that despite its great content it actually gets used as a device to bash 'witch hunt' leftists on the head with. Not really the author's fault most of what it did was fan the fire though.
Isn't that to be expected of an article that explicitly bashes witch hunt leftists?
Of course. I meant to convey that it, predictably, lead to a schism among witch hunt leftists and another witch hunt.
Edit: though, you don't actually 'see' the effects on those who were successfully persuaded by it and do not go on the witch hunts.
Make a thread of it if you can be bothered. I fondly remember when North Star dropped it.
A: "He's right, we need to show solidarity regardless of petty disagreements, we care too much about dismantling the worldviews of allies and too little about defending and publicising our basic principles!"
B: "What a crypto-liberal this one is, you think that political results flow from reasoned disagreement? Can you just talk to the fascists and ask them not to kill you?"
A: "We're not talking about talking to fascists, we're talking about talking to leftists"
C: "Can't you see this is just another piece of divisive rhetoric from a bourgeoise ideologue? The old subordination of gender and race differences to 'the' class difference was debunked years ago'
D: "You vulgar intersectional fuckwads are the reason we're in this mess anyway"
E: "Well you're fucking racist for lumping post colonial critical theory in with the vulgarisation of standpoint epistemology and privilege theory that shows up on fucking Twitter"
Edit I forgot F, directed at people who had the same response as me: "You people who find all this funny with your apolitical ironic detachment are the fucking worst"
It's got nothing to do with a general postion against masturbation nor the sexual revolution. The sexism of the statement is in the expectation the man will be the only one who takes action within a relationship.
He didn't attack any old masturbation in that context, he specifically spoke of the women touching herself during coitus, only account it was meant to be the sole provision of the man to deliver her pleasure within their sanctified relationship-- that the man would (and should) be disgusted she took some action, felt something, unless he was the one doing it.
It's a toxic and possessive masculinity which doesn't recognise the woman as a person within the relationship.
No, the passage demonstrates a profound ignorance of female sexuality, given the importance of clitoral stimulation for most women during sex. Not sure how familiar people generally were with this in 1986, but it also substitutes communication between partners (e.g. "how do I make sex great for you") with unilateral disgust.
While I largely agree with you, I'm amused that critiquing someone's morality can now mean telling them how to fuck better.
Yes. Though, I'd love to see a conservative response longing for a return to the conditions soon after the sexual revolution, rather than what can seem as the sanitised discourse we can have about it now; I'm tempted to say the idea of being surprised by your desires and how you relate to someone is a bit at odds with the 'establish verbal consent before doing anything' memes you see about it.
Incredibly tiring and thorough research, I imagine.
For this previously mentioned issue though:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1382831/Writer-fired-over-tobacco-links.html
"In a leaked e-mail, he was shown to have suggested that the cigarette company extend his two-year-old contract by a further £12,000 a year in return for his placing of articles in the media defending smokers' rights.
In the e-mail, Prof Scruton advised the company that it could avoid giving the health department details of its cigarettes' ingredients by claiming that to do so would give away "trade secrets"."
He deserves to be called a few names. Which I will leave to the reader's imagination.
I won't. 'Malevolent' springs to mind.
Quoting jamalrob
My views imply a more restricted role for Roger Scruton. He affronts me with an obscene display of sexism, racism and the willingness to covertly propagandise on behalf of tobacco companies for money. A legitimate political position, and a malevolent one.
I don't know what to say about this. This is wrong on a few levels and unbecoming of you considering your regular quality of posts.
The problem with that sort of nonsense--and there are tons of examples of this sort of thing, including things that are very noncontroversial that many people readily agree with, is that the person is assuming that their interpretation, their biases, their hang-ups, are in any sense universal.
This tells us a lot about Scruton's beliefs, and his personal hang-ups, including his self-centeredness and/or arrogance in assuming that his pitiful dispositions suggest any broader truth.
:up:
I find it too eager to abandon the question of what one is doing to others. The distinction between "sexist" and "a person who does something sexist" is not one I'm down with.
People are always rasing the distinction to contrast their moral worth against those who are "the actual sexists." Supposedly, they get to hold they are really just fine in their actions, for it is someone else who is the real monstrous sexist. It's a comparison which doesn't take the effect of their action seriously.
In this social context, people are described as sexist for a good reason: to indicate what they've done is not some trival act, but one of morally seriousness (just like the stuff monstrous sexists do).
The guilt analysis doesn't fit with my experiences, even amongst "Tumblr" style communities people are always complaining about. I've have seen "wokeness" turned into a social credit and used in popularity contexts, but this is distinct from guilt.
In my experience of these sort of communities, let's call them intersectional, guilt doesn't factor into much. Coming from a position of knowing structural power relations, there's not really space for this kind of guilt.
If one has done something sexist in past, for example, it's a descriptive fact one has done something sexist/was sexist. One can regret or be ashamed of what they did, but agonising gulit isn't part of equation. You know you were sexist. You can't do anything about it or change it. You know you can only to better in the future.
Gulit, it seems to me, is a response or implication taken by those who do not understand this social context. Those who are unwilling to accept they have done wring. People who cannot stand the thought of being sexist because it would mean they've done something wrong.
I don't doubt guilt is choking people, but it's not found from people identifying sexists, even in Tumblr popularity hunts. It in our unwillingness to accept we have done wrong. We are guilty because we insist we could never be the type of person who is a sexist.
But it does, because that's the context in which he made the statement. As I guessed, he is broadly against masturbation in general for ultimately sexually conservative reasons which most of us disagree with, but it's not sexist if he is applying his judgments to both men and women equally (the quote we read was him addressing female masturbation during coitus, but there's additional context surrounding it that doesn't make it seem like he is singling women for special mistreatment.
If you don't care about context, then you don't care about what he actually meant, and if you cal him sexist on the grounds of "how you feel about what he said" instead of "what he actually said and meant", then you're just helping to make the charge of sexism incoherent.
There's a new interpretation of how hate crimes can occur that has recently come onto the books of a few nations (U.K to name one). Instead of having to prove the guilty mind of the offender, what instead must be established is the wounded mind of the victim. Under the new line of thinking, if someone says something which could possibly be interpreted as racist or sexist or targeting any specific protected group, and someone is emotionally upset by it, then by definition they have committed a sort of hate crime.
"Count Dankula" was convicted of a hate crime because he taught his girlfriend's pug to sieg-heil on command, and uploaded a video of it to Youtube. He thought it was a hilarious prank that could not possibly hurt anyone, but eventually the right people complained to the right people, and he was convicted by a hair on the basis that he was being intentionally "grossly offensive", where the comedy defense was outright rejected.
Why do I see a sexual conservative where you see a sexist? What does howling at him as sexist actually achieve? Might it get him further "de-platformed"? Are you hoping to sway hearts and minds?
If I were to criticize him on the basis of being foolishly sexually repressive, especially as it concerns masturbation (for all genders), and make practical arguments as to why his advice is to restrictive for contemporary society, do you think I would persuade more people (or even him) than if I just started calling him sexist and focused only on the ways in which his beliefs are detrimental to women?
Sure, you get to add the #Feminism to go viral on social media, but my way actually seems to yield moral and intellectual progress (as opposed to righteous feudalism).
My point was the comment had more in that just a case against general masturbation. He specifically referred to how a woman touching her clitoris was terribly because then the man wouldn't be in his rightful postion as sole actor/pleasure giver.
I care entirely about the context he's speaking in here: that the act is so terrible because it means the woman is more than a man's object.
At the moment, I'm not interested about how sexually repressive it is or not (though there are those arguments to be made). I'm concerned about the sexist notion of a relationship he is advocating, for the damage it will do. Primary to women, for how presents a woman with her own action and volition as disgusting.
But it's also terrible for men, what is the man who cannot satisfy his wife with his penis to do? He is doomed to an abject failure, who cannot request the help of his wife. It's a shit understanding that a relationship is made by possessing. (in this case, to be the man who is the sole actor bringing his wife sexual pleasure, as if it were just a game he was playing).
I'll have to get to the other stuff later. I've got to get ready to go out.
I understand what you're trying to say, but it doesn't actually apply to him because he has said similar things about male masturbation. If I find a likewise quote of him putting down male masturbation (say, masturbating in front of a woman), will you get upset because he is implying that men are no more than a woman's object, not deserving of their own pleasure?
I didn't at all agree with what he said, but did he actually say anything like "man in his rightful position . . . "?
It does apply because the in question is defined not on a comparison between intentions of men and women, but by the effect on a woman. The effect of denying women volition and action is given not by whether or not the same is done to man, but on the impact it has on women.
Yes, I would. My response would not be exactly the same, since there isn't the same expectation men should be passive things, with no act or personal involvement. While Scruton wouldn't be latching on to the same social expectation of passivity in the case of men, it would still define a relationship by objectification and possession. In that respect, it has all the same pitfalls. No-one should be approaching their relationship like it was just them achieving something.
This is exactly what I described. You've pre-judged what you think his statements mean bereft of real context, and based on how those make you feel, you're labeling him as sexist.
The "effect on women" that you're referencing requires your own subjective and unreasonable interpretation to have a real impact. Essentially you're saying that his words do harm to women, and the emotional upset that perceiving him as sexist causes is what actually incites emotional suffering and initiates the crusade against him. Are you objecting on behalf of all women? What would you say to women who outright agree with him under a sexually conservative/repressive framework?
You've been trained to over-react to the point that you need to justify your over-reactions by conflating your over-reactions themselves with proof of the harm you allege the original offense actually causes.
Just because one repressed idiot writes that people shouldn't masturbate doesn't make it a law for all women, and telling him that he should not have the right to express his views would have a more chilling effect than does risking exposing his views to women.
Education is weaponizing oversensitivity.
I'm talking about the context of the statement, about what they hold women to be in society and to others. It's not a question of emotional harm (there would no doubt be some women who like the idea of being their husbands possession and have a positive emotional response to Scruton's connect). The concern is about the idea of who women are and who they ought to be.
Offence laws are miswritten in stating emotional harm. Emotional harm is a common response to being subjected to the actions which come under those laws, but is it not how they are hateful or discriminatory. The reason is the status or expectations about the group in question. In this case, the idea women are just objects for men .
The issue isn't women being emotionally upest. It's Scruton's understanding of who women are and ought to be. His statement would still be sexist if no women was upset by it and every women agreed with it.
I'm not describing him as a sexist because of some kind that of emotional feeling, I'm doing so because it is a fact of his understanding of women, that he holds they are just objects. No prejudging, I'm just describing what his understanding of women holds.
You're doubling down on your misinterpretation. If Scruton was giving a list of all the reasons why he thinks masturbation is harmful, and someone just happened to choose the one that involved a woman, then none of your object-possession rhetoric coherently applies because he believes the same thing applies equally to both sexes.
But if the problem is the very existence of his thoughts. What's your solution? Call the thought police?
This is why addressing the actual positions of your political opponents in a free and open forum is a better system than constant outrage based censure.
This is the perfect "Ouroboros". The serpent that consumes itself. You want to bring about fairness and equality but you try to do so by handicapping or socially eviscerating anyone whose shadow you fear. Ultimately this approach engenders resentment and resistance, and turns people into useful idiots for movements like the alt-right, while turning the left into a self-eating snake-pit of status and outrage, where everyone is really just vying for their spot on the sunniest rock.
Wait, but everyone is just an object.
I think his payment by cig companies should cast some suspicion on his motives, esp given the level of research on the topic and the undeniable harm that comes from smoking, but I don't think being paid by a particular company, cause, etc. necessarily precludes one from being a sincere supporter of said things. One may despise cigarettes (or porn, or guns, etc.) while also supporting another's right to smoke as a matter of personal freedom against government encroachment, or something along those lines.
Seems a slippery slope to dismiss arguments of those who receive personal compensation for taking a stance on a matter that aligns with the interests of powerful entities that may have, let's say, different motives than one's own. Suspicion is warranted once the financial relationship is disclosed, IMO, but not outright dismissal.
All that said, I do think the cynical appeal to protecting "trade secrets" as a means of refusing to disclose harmful information diminishes the position in this particular case. Don't know enough about Scruton to say one way or another so I'm just speaking in generalities here.
If you're writing paid advertisements / lobbying for a company or industry, you shouldn't be passing that off as authoritative content. He abused his position as an academic for money. And his actively seeking ways to help tobacco companies harm people even more because he wanted even more money place his motives well past the suspicious and into the blindingly obvious as far as I'm concerned.
But this character dissection of Roger's rotten insides is a tangent of questionable relevance to be fair.
To be fair, I think I would not sack a distinguished professor from a post as advisor over one controversial remark. But when you add the many questionable remarks on various topics to the questionable ethical behaviour, a picture emerges of a rather nasty piece of work, bringing the government into disrepute (if only it had any repute to dis).
But no one's telling him that. They're telling the government not to listen to his idiotic views. and in my case I'm also telling the universities and media not to listen to his views and to stop paying him for them. Let him express his views as widely and forthrightly as me. If he has the right to tell women how to have sex, I think I have the right to call him a sexist.
Yeah, I think you're probably right in this case. But would we take the same approach if he was being paid by an anti-tobacco group to push its agenda? Or by an anti-gun group? Or an organization dedicated to preserving the environment? Or pushing forward legislation favorable to unions? I feel like conservative groups try to dismiss the legitimacy of scientists, academics, etc. along those lines all the time (e.g., "They're being funded by George Soros!"). It's not the pay he received that's troubling but his apparent willingness to twist the facts in an attempt to advance his interests, and to do so at the expense of others.
I love to see others take principled stances on matters even if (especially if!) it hurts them financially (or otherwise). It's a way of asserting one's freedom & dignity in a world where a good deal of cynicism is warranted, if we can speak of these things as being more than mere platitudes these days. But again, I'm more concerned with this issue in general (getting paid de-legitimizes one's advocacy) than with the specific facts of this case.
Anyhow, if that's an unintentional misrepresentation of the position you're taking then my apologies.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/21/david-lammy-roger-scruton-rush-damn-our-opponents
I think this is about right. Having read a few of Scruton's books, I would defend him as a subtle and humane thinker. However, I wouldn't defend his long-standing anti-immigrant views or his anti-anti-smoking writings, and I often disagree with him, e.g., on sex, politics, and music. But mostly I'd want to see these things addressed in debate, certainly not with offence-finding witch-hunts, misrepresentation and banishment beyond the pale.
It's a fair point to bring up. I suppose if an unscrupulous person lied to help people for money, I wouldn't criticize them. Nor would they deserve any plaudits in my book. But Scruton was not delegitimized in this instance just because he was paid or because he was a conservative, he was delegitimized and fired primarily because emails were leaked that suggested he was actively seeking financial reward to help a tobacco company harm the public. In other cases, yes, you'd need to look at the history of the individual's views and whether they were consistent with what he or she was being paid to promote. As long as everything is absolutely out in the open, there shouldn't be an issue.
His delegitimization with regard to accusations of anti-semitism and Islamaphobia is more questionable. It's much harder to untangle his motives there.
I agree.
On becoming a Sir.
https://www.conservativehome.com/thetorydiary/2016/06/a-knighthood-for-the-movement-congratulations-sir-roger-scruton.html
'.....the debt that conservatism in Britain owes to Roger Scruton – philosopher, moralist, novelist, barrister, composer, conservationist, conservative and campaigner.
Scruton’s conservatism is very much of the English Tory flavour, and he is uncommon among modern philosophers in the breadth of his interests, rarer still in having the ability to project and popularise them, and even more unusual in his interest in conservative political organisation.'
Quoting jamalrob
Really ? Like this ? On Foxhunting:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/countryside/9765963/Tally-ho-Let-the-hunt-remind-us-who-we-are.html
'This morning hundreds of hunts across the Kingdom will be assembling for the Boxing Day meet. My family and I will appear in our polished uniforms on polished horses to stand ceremonially among our neighbours in Cirencester Park. With us will be a crowd of thousands who have come to enjoy the spectacle. For an hour, three species – hound, horse and human; carnivore, herbivore and omnivore – will stand peacefully side by side in a little patch of meadowland, radiating tranquillity. One of the local bands will be playing...
...Hunting with hounds is ostensibly a crime. It continues, not because hunting people wish to defy the law, but because an activity so central to their lives can no more be stopped than their heartbeats.
...In a sense we know much about the experience of the hunter-gatherer, since it is the experience that shaped us, and which lies interred like an archaeological stratum beneath the polished consciousness of civilised man. At its greatest, the art and literature of hunting aims to retrieve that experience, to re-acquaint us with mysterious and sacred things which are the true balm to our suburban anxieties, but which can be recuperated now only by returning, in imagination, to a world that we have lost.'
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No mention of the fox.
And to return to the topic.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/26/roger-scruton-not-victim-leftwing-witch-hunt
'...Scruton, transfixed by the context and reception of his own remarks, fails to consider the broader political context: refugees, Muslims in particular, are demonised, their numbers magnified and their hardships minimised for a purpose. Jews are demonised for the same purpose – the sowing of social division to serve an authoritarian agenda. It’s really nothing personal when we challenge these narratives of otherness; no malice is intended towards the bullied conservative. It’s just that the principles of universal human rights – more than that, love, fellowship, solidarity – are more important than whether or not a reactionary dude gets to keep on chairing a commission.'
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I would call Scruton more than a 'reactionary dude'. I am with unenlightened on this. And others who see the bigger picture. Like Erik and Baden.
Quoting Erik
But enough about the Scruton. Already taken up too much time and space.
He is loving it.
Also, what about me stimulating a clit during coitus (I'm a guy btw)?
And what about that girl that fingered herself while looking at me because she thought I was hot? How the fuck does that make me irrelevant? That made me super relevant at the time and I thought it was super hot too. There's a level of trust, openness and vulnerability involved that is far beyond banging away in a missionary position under the sheets with the lights out.
My psycho-analytical guess is that Scruton is disgusted with himself either for being excited about something he thinks is morally wrong or the insecurity it causes in him to make himself that vulnerable to the other. Since that uneasiness is caused by something the woman does, it obviously must be her fault.
Here's my prescriptive take on sex: "Have fun and don't kill each other".
Yeah, I didn't intend my statement to actually be supporting Scruton's moralism about sex. What I actually wanted to convey was...
Quoting fdrake
The image of Scruton's research being watching a fuckload of porn and proceeding to have a furious guilt wank. Which was supposed to convey something like you did explicitly with:
Quoting Benkei
I've got a caveat though, but I'm sure you'll actually agree with what I say. When you say:
There are clearly times when a stranger can surprise you during the act and you can enjoy it, and vice versa. This clearly requires some trust, as that tantalising hinterland of ambiguity can rapidly turn unpleasant. One of the benefits of having a long term sexual partner is that you can visit amazingly good sex land from this position of radical safety, which allows deeper emotional responses than surface level pleasure to obtain or even motivate the act (say, anger and frustration, longing and extreme love). And also to ignore or challenge the usual (but necessary) rituals we establish consent through (as if feeling out a stranger's sexual boundaries).
I like to imagine Scruton first discovered erogenous ambiguity after a life time of 'thinking of England' when 'researching' sex through the medium of porn, and he jacked off so amazingly hard he had to spill a lot of ink to wipe up the stains.
Edit: but I don't think leftists should treat Scruton's ideas, despite how problematic they are, in exactly the same manner they'd treat someone much further right (IE instead of the usual habit of addressing the person's ideas, addressing the role their ideas play in discourse). Luckily how Scruton expresses himself is pretty easy to provide genuine critique of, and I think (at least I would like to imagine) that supporters of Scruton really could have their minds changed through reasonable discussion. Even if you (not you specifically, talking about fellow leftists) wish to treat his statements as a problematic symptoms of discourse (which they are, consistent with the reactionary heart of conservatism), you're just going to alienate people who would otherwise be receptive to your views. Though I doubt Scruton himself would be persuaded by such arguments.
Scruton is a traditional conservative thinker and his hounding just shows that traditional English conservatism isn't so hip (never has been). What a surprise that leftists find him annoying.
Quoting Amity
Ah! And we hit the jackpot: Scruton is for Fox hunting! He obviously likes the sport.
Oh God, he is the incarnation of evil.
Maybe this is because I'm reading your comment out of context, but I don't know what the heck you could be doing when it comes to sex that's not represented in porn. I've definitely never done anything sexually that's not well-represented in porn. It's difficult to imagine anything that could be done that's not well-represented in porn, really.
But the majority of porn doesn't have uncomfortable positions. Maybe you're watching a pretty limited selection of stereotypical porn?
There's a ton of porn showing anything you can imagine, any way you can imagine it, including a lot of porn that's literally just everday people filming themselves having "garden variety" sex.
That won't be necessary because he can't find it.
And yet a fox in the woods is no bother to him. Priorities...
My porn appetite isn't very limited. ;-)
What does it mean to tell a private institution like a university to stop paying for whatever floats their academic boats? (And what is the manner of such a directive?).
In the digital age, a single act, person, or institution, can gain near global visibility, and the collective response to them can become utterly disproportionate as a result.
Let's say Scruton is at home in whichever conservative leaning university department values his ideas enough to hire him. Once his particularly outrageous passages give rise to disproportionate negative online feedback, their only recourse might be to jettison him without delay to weather the PR shit-storm. Even though they support his ideas, enough people with enough outrage can basically force them to fire him for strictly pragmatic reasons. And then the institution can go on teaching his ideas, so really nothing changes but the guard.
The boycott tactic presupposes that the very existence of something is harmful or a threat. It has its time and place, but when we treat the existence of ideas and viewpoints as themselves harmful and a threat, and therefore seek to prevent others from hearing or expressing them via applied social pressure, then we're drawing a rather aggressive line in the sand (the kinds of ideas we don't currently tolerate are generally threats and calls to violence, but if we expand our intolerance to include legitimately held political beliefs (such as Scruton's) then we will do more harm than good). People have a right to hold and to express view-points that we disagree with, and others have the right to pay to hear them; there's almost no point in trying to win a political debate against our interlocutors by having their careers come to an end or by getting their events/platforms shut down. Using our own free speech to ostensibly restrict the speech of others, including the right to listen, (instead of confronting their ideas, and winning through political suasion) is not conducive to a healthy democracy.
Quoting unenlightened
I never said you never had no right to call him sexist, but I am suggesting that you're making an inaccurate and hyperbolic emotional appeal by doing so. He tries to tell everyone how/how not to have sex, not just women. If you want to call him sexist merely because he has opinions that involve women (opposed to opinions that he applies only to women due to prejudice), you're free to do so, but you're contributing to the devaluation of the term, and the continued inflation of outrage.
If it turns our Scruton isn't actually overtly sexist, then like the boy who cried wolf, next time around fewer people will take the charge seriously when it is applied to someone new.
I'm immensely grateful for your liberality. But as has been pointed out his opinions do only apply to women because they cannot be performed by men as a matter of biology. Thing is, I am more moderate in my condemnation of him than he is of me and my wife, so whatever criticism you level at me you are applying to him more strongly than I am. Unless of course you are not being even handed in your criticism.
Is it possible to be equally sexist against both or all genders?
Is it prejudice against women or more broadly sexual repression/conservatism in general?
But it sure works, because the institutions fear those PR shit-storms so much!
Indeed, the effect objectification is not determined by a comparative measure of whether both men and women are objectfied, but by its impact on an individual.
The harm done by understanding one's partner is an object is not undone by them also consider you an object. It's just a doubling of the harm. Now, they just suffer like you.
In terms of preventing harm done to the women or the man, nothing is achieved.
Addressing this harm, this sexism, requires an effect on how an individual is treated/harmed, not a measure of whether the same is happening to someone else.
But if he treats men and women equally, is it sexist objectification?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
You're changing the meaning of "sexism" to mean something like "sexually harmful". I just cant assent to that use of language. It's too polemic or misleadingly provocative.
They sure do!
And what does it mean when negative PR can so easily overcome the positive?
They all become terrified of offending anyone, they take less risks, and only feel safe while pandering to a common denominator. It's a chilling effect in my view, and is not a good thing for democracy.
And this is the most crucial thing to understand here.
This has NOTHING to do with Post-modernists and Cultural Marxists and especially with snowflake SJWs in Ivy League universities. The absurd discourse is just a symptom. The real issue is just why these issues become so huge? Why do people get fired for absurd reasons? Why do these issues make it to mainstream media?
The problem is the totally illogical fear that comes close to a mass psychosis that institutions have towards their so fragile outward appearance. And the reason of course is that their PR appearance is usually totally made up as the institutions are inherently weak structures. So one employee/ person related somehow to the institution says something in an email and the PR shit-storm explodes. As somehow the person would portray the whole institution to be sexist/racist/misogynist/anti-semitic/whatever. Why? Because if the institution doesn't react, does nothing or the answer is seen as to be too little, it will somehow be interpreted as that what the odd person has said reflects the values and the norms of the whole institution! There's a whole army of PR consultants and professionals ready to jump to 'contain' the crisis, as if something like a serious nuclear accident has happened.
So the simple response (especially in a corporation) that is 'the best thing' to do, is to fire the person. By doing this the event creates this illusion of an environment among employees that they are walking on eggshells and a simple comment in an email can devastate their whole career and life. But who cares about that.
So yeah, it is a problem for democracy.
And the problem started with institutions like corporation etc. creating PR departments. Political parties are naturally even more prone to this. And if someone thinks that this is only right-wing biased view (because the thread is about Roger Scruton), just think about the typical event where a muslim liberal or leftist politician criticizes Israel and get the wrath of being an anti-semite.
[quote=Scrotum]Consider the woman who plays with her clitoris during the act of coition. Such a person affronts her lover with the obscene display of her body, and, in perceiving her thus, the lover perceives his own irrelevance. She becomes disgusting to him, and his desire may be extinguished. The woman’s desire is satisfied at the expense of her lover’s, and no real union can be achieved between them[/quote]
What does it mean to tell a couple that their lovemaking is an obscene affront and not a real union?
Honestly, it just makes no sense for you to be attacking me for my authoritarian emotive dictatorial views about this guy, and defending his views as somehow liberal legitimate and reasonable. It makes no sense even if you agree with him.
I would like to clarify and say that it is not my intention to attack you or your views about Scruton. What I do mean to criticize is your choice of words ("sexist"), especially in the context that it tends to drive band-wagons (Scruton may yet be shown sexist, but as it is a charge with gravity it should be delivered with solid evidence, lest we salt and scorch the earth prematurely).
Scruton's views are anything but liberal, and while the specific quotations we've read from him lack reason almost entirely, they're reasonable to him, and they're his legitimate moral/political beliefs (which regrettably aren't themselves uncommon). As the saying goes, I disagree with what he has to say but I defend his right to say it. I realize that gainful employment and a governmental advisory position are not protected speech rights (and I also realize that you do not seek to dictate these away from him), but consider how your own reaction can be amplified and echoed across social media networks to the point that it can completely bury a single individual or institution.
"Distributive justice" is a social system where informal sanctions keep transgressors in line (it's a primitive and instinct based system that is typically found in nomadic groups numbering around 15-30). For instance, if a hunter doesn't share their meat, or is an insufferable boaster, then everyone may shun them or dishonor them (in whichever socially relevant way) until their behavior corrects. But in the globalized digital era something unexpected happens: hundreds of thousands of individuals can all take instinctive action and issue a social sanction against a single person or institution, but their individual instincts don't realize that 100,000 other people might be doing the same thing, so the cumulative ramifications become entirely disproportionate. It's death by a million views. (Posting your views on a philosophy forum doesn't meaningfully contribute to the phenomenon I'm describing. Philosophy forums are not the fast and loose media that twitter, reddit, youtube, and the like have turned out to be, and by definition you're actually explaining and defending your views (I see such discourse/dialogue as critical to democratic progress). The real problem is when uncharitable or inaccurate reactions go viral, because when we react in anger we generally don't stop to fact check (and the ensuing pile-on can amount to crucifixion)).
I'm less trying to actually defend Scruton (I'm just working with what evidence has so far been quoted) and more trying to delineate the dangers of polemics in contemporary (digital) political discourse. We now have a much stronger capacity to socially sanction the other side: on one hand this makes us all want to be less controversial homunculi to avoid the others' stake, and on the other it causes pundits and politicians who embrace, exploit, and thrive in controversy to rise to the top (because they get the most attention, and they're the only characters who can take the heat long-term).
The many-to-many format of social media is quite novel and interesting, but it's not without faults (and to some extent it's already been hijacked by many forces that are depending on our penchant to be motivated by outrage).
I would be quite happy to agree with you about that and plead guilty to participation, if only you were as resolute in your criticism of Scrotum's language as you are of mine. His, after all is demonstrably more extreme, and hugely more influential. I say 'sexist', he says 'obscene' and 'disgusting', and you do not seem to think his language needs criticism.
But in large part, my interpretation is based on the sympathetic understanding expressed here. Quoting jamalrob
I am open to correction, but on the face of it, I would say that a view that wishes to restrict the role of women is a sexist view in any normal understanding.
:up:
Maybe, but then it's just another sexist opinion to be countered with argument. Compare: at least a couple of liberal-leftish members here are in favour of existing, or even more extensive, obstacles to getting an abortion. Me, I happen to think those obstacles profoundly restrict the freedom of women. But this is an issue for debate, not for shutting people down.
Are you suggesting - you seem to be suggesting - that I have made any kind of argument that any such issue should not be debated, or that anyone should be shut down? If you show me, I will retract and apologise. I have intimated that a person who espouses such views with such intemperate language should not be in a position of academic authority over young people, given also various other questionable views and activities already mentioned. But that is not shutting down the debate, merely refusing to recognise the authority of such expressions as if they had the institutional weight of established consensus when they are asserted without argument or support.
Existing, in my case. Anyhow, it's a false equivalency. In the case of abortion, there's a balance of rights to be considered between the unborn child (of whatever sex) and the pregnant woman. There's another life at stake. There's no such obvious conflict of rights in implying a restricted or traditional role for women as opposed to men. That's purely a matter of allowing men more freedom in a comparable domain. And consider that you could use the equivalency to accuse someone of sexism for disagreeing with infanticide. Anyway, I agree we should keep things in perspective with regards to Scruton's comments (on all issues). It's a pity it tends to become polarising as it seems to me he's a borderline case where you could be on either side without having massively conflicting views.
But then, you would say that. I'm not going to get into abortion, but my point is that in both your case and in Scruton's, there are other things you think need to be balanced against the individual rights of the woman. And I think you both believe that your positions seek a better result for society.
EDIT: But I said I wasn't going to get into that. Sorry.
Believing a position seeks a better result for society has no bearing on whether someone is sexist or not or whether their position is morally supportable or not. If I'm sexist for supporting existing abortion laws then I'm sexist regardless of my motives. Same for Scruton. But I haven't called him sexist. I would characterise his comment as prudish and silly. There are bigger fish to fry in my view.
Quoting jamalrob
But your reply to un above was:
Quoting jamalrob
So, I would agree it's another opinion (sexist or not) to be countered with argument, but not that it's 'bonkers' to think it's sexist especially considering your own interpretation of it. Again, actual differences are probably being exaggerated here by the use of derogatory terms.
Edit: On the comparison to reproductive freedom, which I missed in my reply above. Depends what you mean. I've tried to give a reductio but you said you didn't want to debate it again, so...
Edit of edit: Cross-posted edit.
So maybe the bonkers remark was intemperate too.
There is some justification in the comparison, I suppose. So, I don't want to argue the toss especially as, as I've said, there's a danger of those who mostly agree ending up thinking they're on completely opposite sides of an artificially created divide. So, I agree with the general sentiment of at least being very qualified if an -ism term has to be used. But by the same token being somewhat qualified in criticism of its use. We end up in a kind of negative discursive feedback loop otherwise.
Again, I see you condemning my language as trying to put something beyond reasonable debate as if calling something an obscene disgusting practice is the language that keeps things within reasonable debate. Most of my complaint about Scrotum is exactly your complaint about me, that his language itself prevents a reasoned discussion and certainly doesn't amount to one. And he's the philosophy professor, who ought to know better.
This doesn't work. You're condemning a man for his views or his words, but if Scruton is condemning anything at all, it's not a person for their views or words, but a general sexual practice. Only the former condemnation has anything to do with putting things beyond reasonable debate.
Anyway, I reckon obscenity and disgust are crucial in any comprehensive discussion of sexuality, so I don't see any problem with that language.
I have to agree with that. I'm all about permissibility and at the same time am disgusted with the idea of caviar, which incidentally put me off of actual caviar. Saves me money I suppose.
I had to use google for this, which for some reason makes me feel superior.
I still like actual caviar.
It's my fucking practice, so he's condemning me. Really that is a completely pathetic dodge on your part.
So your point is that you're offended because a philosopher has negatively judged your sexual practice? And I'm pathetic?
I thought being uninformed and disconnected from meme-rable pseudo-artistic works like two girls, one cup just makes you old (don't look that one up, trust me) but I'm happy to grant you this one.
Not you, your [s]practice[/s] dodge.
See?
No, that's not my point. My point is that my language is proportional to Scrotum's language, and it makes no sense, to condemn mine and excuse his, on some notion that behaviour, views, and people are separable.
It is rather like his defence of a remark that I can't be bothered to reference again, that "homosexuality is abnormal" as 'factual'. He knows that 'abnormal has a dual sense of 'uncommon' and 'deviant'( in the condemnatory sense). And I know because my special subject at ninnyversity was "Abnormal Psychology" that the common meaning in academia (and the rest of the world) is not the neutral factual one; I wasn't studying unusually smart people or unusually empathic people, but various kinds of insanity. He pretends to a neutrality but in fact he condemns homosexuality, and depends on the equivocal language to avoid the condemnation he deserves in return.
And again it is not one solitary phrase, or one solitary dubious association, but there are many just on this thread that add up to an intemperate and frankly arrogant and hate-filled attitude to otherness of every kind.
Per New Testament scholar Dale Martin, the traditional preference for missionary style sex and the condemnation of homosexuality is directly related to a sexist outlook. The penetrator is supposed to be superior to the submissive and passive penetrated. Thus the male should do all the penetrating and the woman should lay quietly still.
How are you judging a conservative perspective without knowing anything about its background?
Indeed. We might, for example, want to distinguish one's partner's clitoris from one's mother's, in terms of disgust and/or obscenity. That is to say as a relational matter not an absolute one. This this the discussion that is pre-empted by Scrotum, because his personal feelings are presented as the absolute arbiter of some universal property of things that applies to every right-thinking Englishman.
The attack is against his views precisely because that's where the sexism is located. It's his view which is the problem.
He's put out the call to society about how disgusting the clitoris rubbing women is, not because of the act itself is disgusting, but because, supposedly, it violates some right of the husband to be the only immediate control of her body. He is projecting this is who people are and how relationships are meant to be.
There are countless reason to be disgusted with a sexual practice. The barrier for this is very low. To merely find an act was disgusting in itself, would be enough for someone to remove themselves/be justified in objecting someone doing it infront of you-- that's a large part why it's not okay just to go around masturbating in front of people-- but this isn't the problem for Scroton.
Sex is not what's cited as disgusting here. It's women. Women, if they are people who take action or have immediate control over their bodies. The disgust is a power play. She is disgusting not for the act of rubbing here clitoris, but for being a person who has certain control of her body.
Scruton is advocating we should find women disgusting if they aren't just objects for men to please. He's drumming up hate against women for not just being a button for a husband to press. He's suggesting it's disgusting to think relationships are about a connection between two people/free agents, that it is not a true connection unless we hold our wives to be an arcade machine by which we attain a pleasure high score with specifically our penis or hands.
I'm strictly talking about the quote women rubbing the clitoris and his account of how it is disgusting. My point here has to do with no other statement or belief.
I don't have any doubt he'll have beliefs women are not just objects. Most sexists do. They love their mothers, daughters, sisters, friends. Many even care about the personhood and control of women, many a sexist will find a back alley rapist monstrous for treating women like an object.
But that doesn't make their sexism not sexism. Nor does it change what they are advocating about women in a social context. The position Scruton argues for in the quote, and which I described in my previous post, isn't any less sexist or different based on his treatment or beliefs about women in other contexts. Sexism isn't a sum total of one's lack of sexism and sexism, it a feature of specific actions and positions.
Scruton wasn't attacking any specific individuals (he wasn't really attacking people, as far as I know, he was attacking masturbation and specifically masturbation during sex, not women per se). If his views are legitimately sexist then you've got every onus and right to decry them, and him, as such, but you've got to get it right (otherwise you're personally attacking him for no justifiable reason).
When Scruton states his views about how masturbation is disgusting or harmful, you should be trying to combat those ideas, not his personage. By seeking to impose social sanctions against him for holding political beliefs we disagree with, we become authoritarian bullies who seek to shut down the discourse of our opposition.
So what if Scruton is disgusted by masturbation? Prudish conservatism is nothing new, and just because he has some malformed views tucked away in esoteric books exploring sexual desire, it doesn't mean we should lift a finger against him in any way other than debate and dialogue. (by lift a finger I don't mean engage in violence, but more broadly the kinds of informal social sanctions that pretty much ruin lives (letter campaigns to employers from the professionally aggrieved, misleading smear articles in the media, and a torrent of online harassment, for example)).
These kinds of sanctions are technically within our rights to employ, and maybe in some situations we really ought to, but Scruton represents a sizeable chunk of our diverse political beliefs, and while he does express some backward views, he is not belligerent, he is not (as far as I know) proselytizing anyone with said backward views, I do not see any possible violence emerging from his beliefs, and he delivers his rhetoric to private audiences who pay for the "privilege". He's not an enemy to be vanquished, he's a person to be persuaded or dissuaded. If we start trying to win The Game of Democracy by attacking people instead of ideas, then eventually we'll all be given the business end.
Yes, for the sexist impact here is upon the the individual.
The problem isn't a comparison of men and women, it's the devaluing of the personhood of an individual. If one is finding a women (or man) disgusting for not being an an object within one's control, since that is the social relation thewomen (or man) ought to be in, one is engaged in a sexist objectification. The disgust is present at the woman (or man) being a person who is more than one's object.
I've not changed the meaning of anything. All along the problem has been that Scruton is advocating a position we ought be disgusted by women (or men, if applied to them) if they dare be more than an object under our direct control. It's precisely this viewpoint which is the problem.
Disgust with sex isn't the issue here, it's the disgust with women who are more than a body for a husband's dick or hands. The issue I'm talking about here isn't a sexual disfunction. It's one of who people are to each other, relationships and power.
It's definitely a problem endemic throughout most political camps, but different camps tend to wield their own flavor. From the left it's typically inter-sectional grievance politics, and from the right it's typically fear driven nationalism and isolationism. We've reached a situation where defensive (substantive) politics is no longer relevant, and all that matters is your ability to attack and destroy the other side.
What remains odd is jamalrob's dismissive attitude.
Negative impact on the individual is just called "harm" sexism is when it happens on the basis of sex.
Sexism does not mean "harm to an individual". It just doesn't.
If you change the definition of sexism to "harm" and go around using it in that way, you're just going to confuse and infuriate a bunch of people who will have no clue what you're talking about.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
There's a difference between "sexual objectification" and "sexism".
Get it right!
That people can change and reform is a pretty compelling reason to resist attacking anything but their ideas...
But that's precisely the issue: harm on the basis of sex or to someone of a sex, it is not a comparative measure.
When sexism occurs, it affects a sexed individual. Acts or situations of sexism aren't a reason or intention something happens, they are a action, relation or postion with a harmful effects upon an individual. Sexism is not a reason, it is a material condition upon an individual.
No doubt it infurates people who think it's something else, but the point is they have an inadequate view. They are too busy worrying over whether someone said to be sexist, whether they wanted to intentionally use sex to make some kind of exclusion, to recoginse sexism is a social relation which affects individuals.
That's exactly why we attack their ideas.
If we just stood by, for example, congratulating Scroton on his perfectly acceptable opinion women were disgusting for being more than a button for their husbands to push, we would have a culture which accepted the position. We would be teaching it was a fine way to think about women.
Instead, we do not. We say that it's a serious problem, and sexism, if one suggests a husband should consider his wife a disgusting bitch if she dare to be more than his object. Anyone, including Scroton, has not just a reason, but an obligation to change his position. A failure to change means telling a falsehood about women and holding an immoral, sexist position on what constitutes a relationship.
It is how view points change . We describe the new correct/moral postion and the failings of the mistaken/immoral one. If Scruton has changed his position, it's is on account of his idea being attacked, either from by others and then himself (e.g. others describe the error of his position and he agrees) or from himself (e.g. he describes the issues with his position).
Harm to someone of a sex?
So if I harm another male, for whatever reason, I'm being sexist against men, even if their being male had nothing to do with my reasons for harming them?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This is just too fast and loose.
The charge of sexist action without a sexist mind is not fully coherent. You're just borrowing the term in order to be provocative, which then devalues it when we need to apply it to actual sexists... This is the Ouroboros I keep warning you about. You could make all of your points be 100% coherent and agreeable if you didn't insist on redefining terms like racism and sexism. Your heart is in the right place, but you've chosen the wrong strategy/tactic.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Insisting on the label of sexism is a far cry from attacking ideas (it's semantics at best). You've laid out your position on sexual objectification, and for what it's worth I think there is some merit to that framework, but this has failed to address the crux of the passage you're objecting to (it's anti-masturbation roots).
You've established that his views are bad because they repress sexed individuals (sex is irrelevant), but you've not established that the source of those particular views are his hatred of women, or his desire to treat women differently because they are women (misogyny and sexist discrimination against women).
When you export this particular attack (under the broadened and weakened definition of sexism) into average political discourse you actually wind up confusing people, entrenching their disagreements in emotion, and doing an overall disservice to your primary goal (to address outcomes). To fix outcomes, especially under your view, we need to change systems. And as you will surely agree, such systems are buried deep in the minds of every individual, where interaction allows our conscious and unconscious biases to impact or determine the unequal distribution of boons and burdens or outcomes between visible social demographics (deep breath). But here's the problem: you can't change that system without changing minds, and you can't change the minds by merely addressing the system or its outcomes. You need to address the minds; not groups, not institutions, not demographics, not outcomes, but minds and their ideas.
If you persuade nobody, you achieve nothing, so why do you insist on the polemic language for such a weak address of Scruton's weak position? You should strongly and directly address Scruton's strong position (steel-man his arguments if you need to). If you can dismantle those, you dissuade his followers and maybe even the man himself. By using your own confrontational and charged language, you're just making yourself incomprehensible to them. The only people who can navigate the nuance of your position are already in the choir, so you're basically persuading no one.
I think you have a big heart Willow, and I really wish that you would be more careful and persuasive in your writing. Just remember that a J'accuse! attitude is a great way to escalate a conflict, and you should understand that it's almost never going to work except through sheer social force. The more rigidly we stick to criticism of a person's ideas, and the less we involve criticism of the person, the easier we make it for people to dissociate away from them. I think you are trying to criticize the ideas, but the language of "sexism" overshadows your actual critique and makes it about Scruton the man.
Absolutely. But we shouldn't be apathetic about their words and the effect of their words.
I agree, but quote mining 30 year old literature isn't exactly the front-line of social justice.
When it comes to countering the effect of Scruton's words, if they are sufficiently harmful then at some point sanctions of arbitrary force are justifiable, but if they are rooted in a larger framework of ideas (that many of his followers share), then ostensibly silencing through de-platforming wont actually work (other than to create a poster-(man)-child). So long as he has the right to hold and express his views, we need to primarily attack his ideas and their foundations rather than his platform, else were undermining our own right to hold and express our own views. In so far as he occupies any governmental advisory position, elected or otherwise, and in so far as we disagree with his beliefs and political views, it is also perfectly fine to lobby our representatives to ignore and replace him, but we should not take away his very right to be a lobbyist through social and emotional persecution.
What benefit would it serve to have him fired from a private conservative institution which follows his ideas? They'll just replace the man with an updated model and carry on with more of the same, so the underlying ideas, and their effects, remain undamaged.
True. But it doesn't make sense to respond to the quote-mining with 'That's a legitimate political stance, not sexism.' That's what I understood to be jamalrob's view. It was sexism and therefore it doesn't qualify as a legitimate stance worthy of engagement.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
True. If it was possible to eliminate sexism, homophobia, and the scapegoating of Muslims by firing a few people, it would already be gone. In fact, I don't think intolerance and general assholedness is ever going to go away. But I do think we should pay attention to the message we broadcast.
What's the effect of doing nothing when a person makes inappropriate remarks? Doesn't that send the message: 'Yes, that's ok. We're fine with that.' Doesn't that have to potential to create complacency?
As far as I can tell what has been quoted so far isn't clearly sexist. It's crass, puritan, and insensitive (or over-sensitive?) but it's not sexist. The fact remains that a huge chunk of American's hold these kinds of sexually conservative views. Characterizing them as mainly sexist might to some degree be true, but it's not going to get us anywhere, and it's not productive to persecute Scruton as an effigy of sexism in general.
Quoting frank
I think we've been learning a lot lately about the problems of excessive division (especially as a result of social media), so we might be able to tone it down significantly. As Dr. King would have said, it is far better to be strong enough to return intolerance with love, because hate only begets more hate. Perhaps that's an impossible standard for many reasons, but it's the cure to our intolerance.
Quoting frank
We should respond, but we should respond proportionately, and in pursuit of truth, not heads. The deplatform movement is a great example of how we can respond inappropriately; it's might makes right.
Probably not, but I wasn't looking to crucify anyone. We know Scruton is conservative and we know he's made comments about what women should and shouldn't do in bed. Suppose you tell me that you think it's sexist. Instead of telling you that I understand why you would think that, I tell you it's not sexism. There are two reasons I might do that:
1. I'm just really ignorant of the sexism attached to traditional attitudes about the sex act.
2. I am very worried about people over-reacting to every little sign of sexism, racism, religious intolerance, homophobia, etc. so that innocent people are being attacked. IOW, I'm over-reacting to the over-reacting.
I don't know what jamalrob's excuse was. I'm happy to drop it. It's not important.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As long as we remain dedicated to condemning intolerance, I don't have any problem with loving the crowd who engages in it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Who was inappropriately deplatformed?
I agree. The issue you raised is an alarming one, in more ways than one.
It is another sign of power. And I think that power struggles are fundamental to both.
To return to the issue of Sir Scruton and his privileged, powerful position as outlined in the article on his Knighthood:
Not just a philosopher but a...moralist, novelist, barrister, composer, conservationist, conservative and campaigner.
The 'job' was as Commissioner for beautiful buildings. This was controversial and divisive from the start. Although the aims sound pretty good, the battle seems to lie in a narrow definition of 'beauty'.
'The three main objectives laid out by the commission are to promote more beautiful buildings and places, facilitate consent from communities with new developments, and improve the planning system to work with "better design and style, not against it".
From:
https://www.dezeen.com/2018/11/06/building-better-building-beautiful-commission-uk-architects-react-news/
'Architect and writer Douglas Murphy described Scruton as a "ludicrous curmudgeon".
"Roger Scruton has spent decades decrying modern culture of all types," Murphy said, adding that he had recently "become a darling of an alt-right aesthetic movement". The alt-right is a neo-fascist movement operating primarily online and centred around an ideology of white nationalism.
"The fact is that architecture has left the culture wars of the 1980s far behind, and the best contemporary work gets closer to a synthesis between timeless pattern and contemporary technique than ever before," said Murphy.
"Our housing crisis has almost nothing to do with aesthetics, modern or traditional, but rather is to do with land, wealth and exploitation. This commission is just an easy distraction from far bigger problems that the government have no intention of doing anything about."
'Holland said he supported the commission's drive for local communities to be more involved in decisions, but that the commission's focus on beauty is a "vehicle for a patently ideological programme to attack contemporary housing and undermine the architecture of social democracy".
...Hatherley accused the think tank of campaigning to "make thousands of council tenants homeless for the sake of aesthetics". He also drew links between the commission and the rising popularity of an "alt-right fringe" of Twitter accounts celebrating traditional architecture.'
[ emphases added ]
--------------
Returning to the power struggle and the vicious.
Perhaps not quite as 'sexy' as previous discussion on clitoral stimulation but hey, it all matters.
George Monbiot writes in the Guardian:
'After an organisation he [ Chris Packham ] helped to found – Wild Justice – successfully challenged the unlawful killing of several bird species, two dead crows were left hanging from his gate, whose lock had been glued shut.
Harassment of this kind is familiar to rural people who challenge shooting or foxhunting interests.
Bullying and intimidation associated with foxhunts that run riot in the north of England while the police look the other way have been reported,, one in the Independent, the other in the online magazine The Overtake. There’s an almost Sicilian culture of fear: people are frightened into silence or forced to move house. Locals complain of mob rule as hounds and horses rampage through their gardens and trash their businesses. Hunt monitors, documenting blatant lawbreaking, are beaten up with impunity while their vehicles are scratched and smashed. Everyone knows it’s happening. No one seems able or willing to stop it.'
[emphasis added ]
From:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/01/britain-countryside-bullies-chris-packham
Who are the bullied again ?
Should we find him guilty of being conservative or wanton opinion-having? Being sexually conservative isn't the same as being sexist, though there is often overlap.
It's not just that the quotes provided don't actually establish him as sexist, it's that we all seem to be on-board with head-hunting once we've agreed about his sexist nature. Not only can we easily get it wrong, but en masse we can't help but leave scorched earth in our wake.
Quoting frank
Here's one short list from 2016.
Let's say a conservative student group rents out a university auditorium and invites Ben Shapiro to speak, but the event is shut down due to security concerns caused by protestors intending to disrupt the event.
On the one hand, Ben Shapiro is an annoying jackanape and I could care less about his success, but on the other hand, people have a right to to hear what he has to say without interference if that's their paying wish. In the same thread, putting PR pressure on the university to disallow such controversial speaking events is a dangerous game, because we're trying to achieve political gains by forcefully shutting down the speech of our opposition. It tends to backfire in numerous ways, and it's unjust to begin with.
While we're completely changing the subject, I would strongly suggest that these are not separate species, the bully and the victim, more of a circle of life. I should say that I cannot vouchsafe that subtitles in the following bear any relation to the words spoken, which could be cake recipes for all I know. I wonder, these days, if there is any depth at all at which one stops saying 'legitimate' 'out of context' and has to admit that something rather nasty is going on.
It isn't a complete change of subject. But perhaps a broadening or deepening into another topic.
Power play and manipulation is integral to humanity and its progress or regress.
Yes. In a sense, there is a circle of vice ( the vicious) where the bullied (victims) can become the bullies.
However, there is also the circle of virtue ( the virtuous ) and probably a whole lot of other moral hoops we can jump through personally, socially, politically, whateverly.
The fact that any social progress concerning human rights has been made is in no small part due to those virtuous putting a spoke in the wheel of the vicious and divisive.
And yes, it is too easy to use these moralistic terms, especially of good and evil. Them and us.
That doesn't help.
As jamalrob suggests:
Quoting jamalrob
What we don't want is a regress.
But then again, I hear the hula hoop is making a comeback. The joys of the 50's :starstruck:
You know me, I'm all about scorched earth. It occurs to me that we're locked in a vicious cycle. I'm concerned about a Trump-era relaxation of sanctions against intolerance, and you're worried about a leftist lynch-mob. We're both seeing the signs that it's already gone too far.
If unity is what you're after, you should at least throw the lynch mob a bone. Tell them you understand why they're concerned. Acknowledge their fears. Acknowledge the tragic events that are generating their angst. Maybe then point out to them that there are victims they're overlooking, one of them being the first amendment.
I know you're a very reasonable guy, and I'm not trying to accuse anyone here as a culprit (though all of us have contributed to these problems in part); I'm really trying to get at the the effects of our mass movements, for which as individuals we're only marginally responsible.
It happens within all groups, and it used to go something like this:
Person A does or says something offensive, and as a response Persons B through Z spit at Person A to let them know how they feel and to correct the statement or behavior.
That's informal distributive justice. But in the digital era, it instead goes like this:
Person 1 does or says something offensive, and as a response, Persons 2 through 200,000 issue negative and direct digital response while Persons 200,001 through 400,000 harass Person 1's family and employer.
Each individual is just doing what comes naturally, but they don't realize that together they form a Mega-Zord of disproportionate guilt and retribution...
Scruton is only my concern in so far as his sacking represents a greater trend (first they came for Scruton and I said nothing...). We need to loosen up, the lot of us, and somehow get over our differences, because we're far too trigger happy and our guns have far too much range.
The MAGA kid (the one who was grinning at the Native American) is an example that comes to mind. The MAGA kids were there to protest abortion (stupid I know, but within their rights), and had been harassed for about an hour by a gaggle of racist "Black Israelites". Then a native activist marched right up to him and started pounding a drum in his face, and the kid handled it the best way he knew how. Meanwhile, as the video of his colonial grin and apparently thug like behavior was making its rounds, it infuriated so many people that it instantly birthed a vengeful movement against him. Celebrities like Kathy Griffin were demanding his identity and address on twitter (so that thousands could harass him at once), all because of a video devoid of context. He was a minor, and what the public and news media did to him was beyond irresponsible (it was gross and wanton negligence), but we just couldn't help ourselves. When I first saw the video, I was absolutely furious. I have Native American heritage, and what that kid appeared to do was beyond the pale. I wanted to lash out at him by whatever means that I could, but thankfully I'm either too lazy or too highfalutin to wax vulgar against a child (as far as I recall).
But now imagine if the MAGA kid was in fact an incorrigible racist who harassed peaceful protestors, which would have made the mob-style reaction to him somewhat justifiable. What would it have achieved? The kid himself would probably have to double down on his ideology (else he would be admitting wrongdoing) and every other vocal racist would sally from under their rocks to comfort and defend him. It would just lead to more conflict, and the politically diametrically opposed would just wind up hardening their beliefs. In response they would emotionally entrench themselves further, and the traumatic experience of being harassed and cajoled by society at large would surely either break or radicalize him.
It's experiences like this that make me reluctant to allow these kinds of vengeful emotions to cloud my opinions, especially as they apply to individuals. In the digital age we have new powers, and with new powers come new responsibilities that we don't yet fully understand. The need for civility on the individual level is paramount, evidenced by the circus we now call daily life. Since the weapons have become more deadly, we need a new code of honor that protects our vital organs, else open political discourse becomes too dangerous. This is why even if Scruton turns out to be thoroughly sexist, I would still try to dissuade others from crusading against the man himself. Let his ideas fail on the open market rather than by taking action to restrict access to his ideological products, lest we fuck the entire economy down the road.
Quoting frank
I try. I really do. I try every vector of persuasion that I can muster, but I'm starting to get tired of repeating the same songs and dances over and over. Our attitudes are driving each other more and more crazy, and instead of taking a step back we just take two blind steps forward (and firmly into the haze of our own bullshit). I'm not perfect either. I allow outrage to flavor my reactions far too often; we all need to mature and be better.
In the spirit of embracing our apparent opposition in good faith, let's take advice from the absolute sage, Melania Trump: "Be best".
You forget to mention that she has had success in her lawsuit (or the pressure group Council on American-Islamic Relations, which filed the lawsuit on her behalf), so maybe the legal system is still working in Texas. See Texas speech pathologist celebrates temporary free-speech win, hopes it inspires. Amawi, an US citizen and a person of Palestinian origin, has stated in her lawsuit that she has “seen and experienced the brutality of the Israeli government against Palestinians.” So obviously she takes it seriously.
If one is indeed vexed over the issue of free speech, one can debate the actions of the Texas legislator with having laws that state that certain state agencies shouldn't contract with and invest public funds in companies that boycott Israel.
Just as I said myself earlier, this is an example of how free speech is curtailed, just in this occasion on the opposite side of the political spectrum. It's quite common that some Muslim criticizing Israeli policy is labeled as an anti-semite. But of course for the political tribalist, only their own one side matters, they are the one's unjustly and viciously attacked while as any complaints from the other side are totally fictional, delusional and simply wrong (as the accusations are totally justified). Or they couldn't care less.
I'd say those that portray themselves as defending the victims are the one's that really are the bullies.
Appealing to people to stop that and grow a soul is admirable. I wouldn't worry if they don't seem to hear you. Life is the best teacher.
This is 110% correct.
Not only do we have evolutionary endowed cognitive biases to contend with (e.g: our penchant to only care about apparently immediate threats, such as our neglect of climate change and our focus on transsexual MTFs in women's bathrooms), we've got new social systems ('networks') that have an ass-backwards reward system (being outraged gets you insidious emotional attention).
And on top of that, we've got psychotic Zuckerberg types who are dumb enough to let learning algorithms maximize clicks, which amounts to finding out what has the largest psychological impact on a given individual, and then dumping upon them a never ending torrent of bespoke click-bait.
And what tends to get the most clicks? Anything that incites rage...
It seems like we're already up shit creek without a paddle...Or more fittingly, the creek has dried up entirely, and we're all just paddling each-other's bare asses in the mud, muck, and shit of our own making...
Quoting frank
But death is the great equalizer. The best of us (the most wise, patient, knowledgeable, soulful) are generally our elders, so if we don't take advantage of them before they're gone, the average intellect may actually decline. As I grow older, I'm noticing how hordes and hordes of ignorant youth are seemingly springing out of holes in the ground, and bringing with them new or magnified ignorance which present a few problems (the way they use social media without self-control or moderation, for example).
Basically we need to acquire the right wisdom faster than we forget it, and it's going to take concerted additional effort to actually build up the awareness.
P.S Sorry to blather so lengthily at you (and thanks for reading). I'm just passionate about the subject and you're the nearest open ear :)
Well this is certainly good news, I was not aware of this recent update. Unfortunately, this legislation has been introduced in multiple states.
I want all your names and will promptly post a letter of disapproval to your employers about all of your disgusting attitudes - I’ll also start a petition online for you all to be sacked.
Point being there are some deplorable things being said, relative to what Scruton said which led to his sacking.
So names and employer contacts please? ;)
All of what you've said so well is true. And yes, it's a problem. I just want to point out that while making this point, you have turned a blind eye to sexism and racism because it wasnt quite explicit enough to trip your alarms.
I don't accept the persecution of the people you've mentioned. I'm asking you to do what you advised: get it right. This is for both of us:
Art students are trying to get the social critic fired from a job she has held for three decades
Yes. Let's definitely discuss that stupidity.
Paglia stated that if a woman comes forward with accusations of rape six months or a year after the event, she should be ignored. Students were upset about that. This is from the article you posted.
There's nothing to discuss there. It's just ridiculous bullshit that the university ought to condemn.
From that article:
This is how I feel. Activating fire alarms when there is no fire is especially indefensible. Requesting that tenured professors be de-platformed is within their rights but also an attack on the essence of the university. It reminds me of book burning. Note that other professors at Paglia's institution were mostly afraid to speak on the record. Generally attacks on the individual as opposed to attacks on ideas drives dissent to an anonymous underground. And then the voting booth is a private place.
I didn't vote for you-know-who (his name is too much with us), but I understand his appeal on the PC issue. In our new world where an offhand comment or a moment of hyperbole can summon the digital mob, a person like you-know-how who refuses to apologize for linguistic sins starts to look heroic. Lately Bill Mahr used the terms 'SJW' and 'crybully,' and his liberal guests laughed. Are other people on the left getting fed up? Maybe the left can focus on the central-for-me issue that almost everyone can get behind: money.
I'm open to that point, but are we talking condemnation or censorship? Free speech only matters when it offends someone, when someone thinks it's ridiculous bullshit.
Personally I'm not sure that the university should deal with accusations of rape. Why don't we just use the criminal justice system? And is not plausibly a goal of feminism that victims of crime like rape report such crimes immediately when they are easier to prosecute? To be sure, Paglia is tactless on this issue during the interview, but I think her insights have value. Even if I didn't, I'd still defend her right to think against the grain of her peers. The alternative seems to be the reduction of the university to a joke or a seminary for PC theology (inasmuch as it bothers with these kinds of issues.)
But what sexism or racism have I turned my blind eye to?
Do you really think that Scruton is the crocodile in this situation? That I'm just defending him because I think he can destroy me?
My point is that he wasn't being sexist. He was being puritanical with respect to masturbation. Saying that I'm turning a blind eye to sexism just begs the question of whether or not he is actually sexist.
Earlier you accepted RationalWiki's assessment that he used to be sexist and homophobic. Have you changed your mind about that? Just give that a big juicy acknowledgement and we're done. I don't think either of us gives a rat's who advises the British government.
If I was looking for a speech writer who could help me eloquently and passionately express the fears of all the Americans who believe that Trump's dog whistles to racists, whether it's "Law and Order" or the dangerous immigrants, are pulling at a scab over a wound that could easily erupt again into full blown social sepsis, it would be you. I'm not asking you to be paranoid. I'm not asking you to crucify people on the internet. I'm asking you to recognize that our society contains racist and sexist elements. All it takes is a lost war or an economic downturn to have them coming out into the open.
Maintaining an environment of hostility to racist and sexist views is not some leftist over-reaction. It's very much an expression of who we are. Sure, let them say what they want, but be clear and loud when they're wrong.
I think we should set up an Outrage Bingo - the right-wing targeted version.
Other ones just waiting their turn to be 'Scrutonized' would have to be Christina Hoff Summers and professors Amy Wax and Janice Fiamengo. And all the horrible people in the Intellectual Dark Web.
I should have been a bit more clear: the statements that were presented as evidence of sexism were not fundamentally sexist in nature. He may indeed be sexist or have been sexist, but if his statements don't reflect that (the statements being examined) then the charge falls flat.
It's a matter of due diligence.
And if indeed we can find blatantly sexist statements of his, we still may want to stay the wagons. Allegedly the man is no longer sexist and homophobic? If that's the case, why bring up faults that he has since corrected?
Quoting frank
There's certainly racism and sexism in our society, but where and to what extent are hard questions to answer. I'm under no illusion that they're completely marginalized forces, but I also do not believe that they remain dominant forces in contemporary society.
Quoting frank
I do think hostility (verbal, emotional, or otherwise) is really the least productive course of action if it's someone's beliefs you're trying to change. Civil opposition is the thing.
There are Scruton's ideas about sex being an interpersonal relationship between two people. For each, it is a relationship between self and other. He interprets masturbation during sex being a momentary cessation of that relationship, and sees (or saw) homosexuality as exploring someone who isn't other enough. That these are false I take as obvious, there are sexual contexts in which masturbation is still interpersonal. It is argued like a man who's never sucked a dick. Nevertheless, it is not necessarily sexist, insofar as it applies to men as well as women.
But really, what's at stake here is the social context of Scruton's ideas. Or the social context of Paglia's ideas. Or whatever martyred heretic we'd like to talk about. To the extent that shallow responses in our reactionary social media do not address themselves to the ideas in their philosophical context, we should be careful to interpret the responses not as off topic or as reductive (which they are, from the perspective of criticising the philosophy of the martyrs), but as focussed upon the norms of thought implicated and instigated by the expression of those ideas. It is in this regard that a government can be justified in revoking someone's position, or a newspaper justified in refusing someone a column. But it is also on this level, the level of the norms of discourse, that Twitter frenzies and other reactionary content act.
When people discuss Scruton's ideas, now for better or worse, they have been pulled into a social context away from the flowers in his country estate, his house with its stable, and the lairds gallavanting in the dale. Scruton's ideas become their echoes in discourse, a shallow projection onto a battleground of spittle and memes. One can distance oneself from this perspective, and wish for the days of yore when apparently discourse was not so reactionary, when simplifications did not propagate into received wisdom. But simplifications do propagate into received wisdom, internet debate is a market for attention, and the valued commodities are wit and pith.
Insofar as this medium is reactionary, it is grounded in its specular reflexivity; an alienated series of images signifying other images, simplifications upon simplifications, a world view condensed to 33 characters. Here in Dys among the other heretics, screams call for more screams. In the marketplace of ideas, attention buys more attention, magnifying outrage and outrage about outrage. In this medium, a call for sanity is still assigned a side, a call for sanity from both sides at best upends the table or leaves the game. At worst, the laments of the sane are a performative contradiction, pieces in a game they do not understand, or think in vain that their lamentation allows them to escape their place in Hell. They speak in others' voices in foreign words, like the simplified language of a migrant worker on another nation's soil. They cannot integrate without losing themselves in the throes of this unholy river, among the other corpulent bodies covered with the bloody detritus of the Styx.
In this medium, restraint casts only a shadow of madness, the bastard smile of a mutinous super ego conjured from the space between othering and the other. It plays the same part as the other it loathes, whether it likes it or not.
This is terrifying.
You're suggesting that by trying to stand firm against the constant septic flow, I'm creating as much foam and turbulence as anyone...
I confess that rings true, but it's not for lack of trying. How can I dispassionately play a game that demands passion as the ante?
Must we really join them?
We all float down here, already.
:rofl:
Bravo!
Do you think democracy will be able to overcome this trauma with some kind of coming-of-age trial and triumph?
I don't think it's a threat to democracy, it rarely leads to disruptions in anything, or political movements. What is a continuing threat to democracy, a threat through omitted necessary action, is the reduction of politics to the perturbation or stabilisation of the norms of discourse (in social media). Our government institutions are now more than ever the HR department of international corporate power, and Twitter would need to be repurposed or 'reclaimed' by a real, global, social-democratic movement for it to in any way contribute to frustrating the desires of that power.
It's not even a 'distraction' or a 'waste of resources' if this becomes discourse, which is the way I think it's going. It's already political discourse, the powerful meet behind closed doors, they don't have to post on social media to have an impact. Even when that impact, the impact of all our thinking and desires, is only ever a caricature of the image of the world it wishes to create.
A caricature that makes lots of ad revenue, by the way.
But that's the rub isn't it? We're divided and conquered into these groups which are emotionally focused on the most trivial aspects of ourselves and the other, to the point that it crowds out any room for movements that don't match their attention-getting-power.
Quoting fdrake
They just need to post on social media to have a following. The specific details of what they then do or don't do in office are largely beyond our average concerns.
Isn't there a tragic irony somewhere in this?
Social media = social life and discourse = politics make sense in a political system where individuals cannot influence all, or at least the most important, institutional influences on their lives. Twitter is far less the downfall of civilisation than a concentrated expression of the alienation of people from politics and their governments from power. It reflects the state of the world more than it creates it.
The subjectivities which make good use of Twitter are those who already resemble brands, the Ben Shapiros, the Sargons, the Stephen Frys. Our use of it is a tragic imitation of its optimality condition, trying to ram the square peg of our souls through the round hole of commodified personhood. No wonder we come out bloody.
All that deep learning stuff on your posting habits is to map you onto a consumer identity (commodified personhood), this is why social media synergises so well with advertising. You first have that advertising allows the commodification of potential; your potential attention increases the expected revenue through exposure to goods you may purchase, making the codification of your personality valuable intellectual property (yes, you don't own your cyberspace image, that is terrifying).
You then have the site explicitly tailoring the goods it shows you to maximise the purchase chance. This has the effect of associating a revenue stream, literally, with your eye movements and left mouse button clicks.
Who knows such things?
*Quickly retreats to the shoutbox*
I agree that it's the way we use the tool of social media that is the problem (because of what we are), and not the existence of social media itself, but I think it has made the symptom of political marginalization (of the middle and lower class to be specific) much more severe. Maybe I'm being naive, but it feels like the public was more in the loop before we exchanged specifics for pomp and optics. What meaningful discourse we did have has devolved into simplistic diatribe.
Quoting fdrake
I think one half-solution to this will be anti-trust legislation that break up data monopolies, and also additional legislation to enforce stronger privacy rights, but the overall perverse incentives that have commoditized our identities are likely here to stay (so long as the digital spice road stays what it is).
This contrasts with contemporary discourse like an opera contrasts with a pair of mewling asses.
Here are some interesting timestamps:
Border wall: 15:00
Caravans and refugee boats: 29:31
Immigration in general: 40:00
Am I wrong to think that this is the kind of discourse that improves our democratic health?
I wasn't expecting to be the Spanish Inquisition. I know you academics are sensitive little souls and all that, but out here in the rough tough world, customers make complaints and nobody has a job for life.
Under capitalism, education is a commodity, and is democratised by consumerism - the customer is always right. So professors have to win popularity contests just like the rest of us. And in particular, academics that deliberately put themselves in the public eye by publishing controversial political pieces in the mainstream media need to toughen up and stop whining about witch hunts when they meet some opposition and become somewhat unpopular. Folks that want unquestioned tenure should stay in their ivory towers and and only talk to other tenured academics. i never complain about the ones I never hear about. Government advisers deserve the blame for everything, don't they?
I think ivory towers are great adjuncts to any monastery. But if you use them as grandiose soapboxes, you deserve all the rotten tomatoes you get. Scruton and Paglia are not academics, they're wannabe celebrities. Nobody dragged them into the limelight, and if they weren't there, we wouldn't be discussing them.
:up:
Twitter didn't create Scruton's views, or their social context. The method here is more like discovering a septic spot then squeezing it than giving yourself a midge bite. Scruton was already conservative wallpaper.
Both are professors, one graduate of Yale, another graduate and PhD from Cambridge and both have long extensive academic careers.
But if they have been active in social media, unenlightened here thinks somehow they are not academics.
But it feels like we've just discovered a new kind of siege technology, and it's changing the landscape:
We can form such large groups that we're able to put immense pressure on institutional facades, and they often have no choice but to cave, whether or not they should be allowed to stand or fall on its own merit (as opposed to our ire).
Once we can no longer safely exhibit our ideas above ground, what happens to democratic dialogue and debate? Instead of Ivory towers that are visible to all, architecture will move underground, like bunkers, and we'll have nothing left but our conflicts.
You disagree?
What's interesting about Buckley is that he's illustrative of how normal conservatism and the alt-right cannot be so neatly separated. Mainstream conservatism has routinely platformed and turned a blind eye towards white supremacy until it is no longer because tenable to do so (e.g. when the language because too explicit). Buckley spent his life attempting to demarcate his mainstream conservatism with what we would call the alt-right today, including, but not limited to, antisemitism, white ethno-nationalism, Islamophobia, etc. (can't include anti-Black racism since it was a major talking point within the National Review) Yet he frequently hired and platformed radical right-wingers only to fire them when they said the quiet parts out-loud. Of course, this continues to this day.
This reason this is garbage is being discussed at all reveals itself clearly at the bottom of the article, namely: This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute.
lol "incorrect" view. That's certainly a way to put it. Can't talk about victim blaming women after they've been raped and are hesitant to come forward? A true disaster for the marketplace of ideas.
I don't usually watch videos posted online, but that is inspiring. The guest, Leon Castillo, was absolutely brilliant - so gentle, thoughtful and respectful. I wish he were the US president. The conservatives: Buckley and Meyer, were also civilised, polite and deferential. The mood was one of trying to jointly work towards a solution, rather than trying to score points off one another, which is what modern political discourse in the media so commonly is.
If reported to the police quickly something can be done. 6+ months later there is hardly going to be evidence to prove anything. I doubt she would contest hard evidence coming to light that proved rape (video evidence or such).
Also, universities shouldn’t have to worry about these issues. If criminal activity takes place then students should report them to the police.
I think you get Paglia's attitude right. I understand both where Paglia is coming from and why some find her tactless presentation offensive (she's crankier these days in videos.) Is this not to goal, to understand the complexity of the issue and what each perspective gets right? What's disturbing to me is the attitude that those who hurt our feelings with their perspective forfeit their right to share that perspective. Some gang of college kids decides to become the thought police and purge their institution of anyone who questions their recently acquired final vocabulary.
My concern, to the degree that I've not just accepted it as the way of the world, is not that would-be censors will succeed in their attempted censorship but that the culture war will continue to clog our minds and keep working people from voting in unison on issues that they actually agree on. I like Andrew Yang's persona. My current perspective is that there tends to be insight on both sides of a division, along with a monstrousness that both sides accurately diagnose only in the other.
No doubt some will become persecuted for speaking plainly and without fear where others will be too frightened to speak out. It is on the edges of popular discourse where the so-called ‘controversial’ types wander that the most potential lies.
The lazy and inhibiting weight of personal subjectivity overriding basic reasoning has always been a hobbling factor for human societal progression. Allow the children their victimhood, let the naive tricksters cry wolf, time is a mighty leveler and we’ve all been foolish in our regard to the world with our self-proclaimed scrying abilities about the ‘proper’ and ‘just’ course for human life.
When I see so-called ‘controversy’ and ‘upset’ it pleases me. The more the better! When there is none humanity is dead and buried, anti-intellectualism having won out leaving us to gnaw on our own rotting flesh and cracked bone.
This is a great question. My answer is yes and no.
Is the platform government funded? If so, then it has no business wasting time on outlandish conspiracy theories, and we're democratically duty bound to demand satisfaction from our representatives.
Is the platform privately owned? If so, then it's something I would usually rather be solved through debate. De-platforming doesn't defeat ideas, it just sweeps them under the rug where they fester in the dark. By policing ideas on the platforms we do follow, we're just increasing demand for niche platforms that will cater directly to whatever it is we're censoring (and also inflating it (especially to rebellious youth) by making it seem forbidden).
"Platform" can mean many things in this context. If someone like Alex Jones publishes this kind of material on his own website, should we lobby his ISP or domain provider to cut him off? Should we lobby google to remove his material from search engine results or disallow his use of google ads? Should we criminalise spreading unreasonable conspiracy theories about atrocities? How far we are willing to go do "de-platform" someone, and what that actually means, can only really be answered by looking at specific cases.
Alex Jones might be the perfect case study. Not quite David Ike level crazy, but pretty close, Alex Jones was pushed out of the mainstream ("de-platformed") over a decade ago, so he turned to the newest and as yet unregulated forms of media to reach and build his audience. Now that new media is becoming the mainstream, his shitty views have caught up with him and once again he is de-platformed from places like faceboook, twitter, and youtube (which combined represent a very impressive market share of online dialogue). As before, he is just going to move into newer formats, and he will likely bring much of his existing audience with him. The main difference is that there will be few to challenge him in these new platforms. I'm definitely not saying that mainstream news outlets should have wasted any time trying to hear Alex out, but I am definitely saying that de-platforming alone might not make a lick of difference (it might even be counter-productive to our goals).
Online conspiracy theories are actually a billion dollar industry based on click value alone (ad-revenue), and since the 00's and early 10's there has been this endless rabbit hole of interlinked podunk websites (hundreds of thousands of them; think flashing gifs and a 5 mile long front-page) that profit from it. The sheer volume and density of bullshit they contain is enough to delude the best of us, and it's all so cloistered that there's no room for criticism (which is essential for them to grow in popularity). This is how and why the flat-earth community has been revived in the 21st century; cloistered and divided communities bereft of intellectual diversity, and marked by the inability to tolerate the presence of opposing views.
I don't think we should be platforming obviously ridiculous views, but if we make it a point to push them off their extant rocks and into the sea, they're out of sight and out mind, but not for very long (there's always more rocks). It's better to let Alex live or die on his Youtube or Facebook hill.
When it comes to making libellous or harassing accusations against grieving parents, I think that should be a matter for the courts (I don't think he should have the right to publish baseless claims in a way that directly harasses and invades the privacy of innocent individuals).
I was pretty much blown away by the overall quality of it all, especially Castillo. While I am not a fan of Buckley's political views, I'm a big fan of his style and effort. What I found most surprising was that we have basically made zero progress since the filming of that episode in terms of the specific political debate, and that we seem to have actually regressed in terms of our general civility and willingness to engage openly and in earnest.
I have a lot of sympathy for your position, but I think this point you make perhaps covers much of what has happened to Jones, Scruton and Paglia etc. We "de-platform" people all the time for all sorts of reasons. I'm currently de-platformed from speaking on political matters at universities across the country. This is because I have no qualifications in politics, nor am I famous and universities only give platforms to speakers who are either qualified or famous. As far as politics is concerned, neither qualification nor fame are more likely to make what I have to say more interesting or right, but qualification or fame just happen to be the university's criteria for offering a platform. If they extend that criteria to include, for want of a better word, 'political correctness', how is that any different?
The same goes for YouTube, Facebook etc. We don't all have an equal platform in these places either. Those with more money, fame, charm or even just dumb luck have a platform that others don't. Again, how is adding 'political correctness' to that list any more arbitrary?
I'm with you on the principle that ideas should be freely discussed, I strongly believe this is the best way for society to progress. But ideas are definitely not freely discussed. Ideas are shut down and de-platformed for all sorts of more or less arbitrary reasons. If we don't allow 'political correctness' to be one of those reasons, we are affording non-politically correct ideas a special status other ideas do not benefit from.
One of the things that gives one a platform is being controversial, aka political incorrectness. My feeling is that academic platforms should be reserved for academic type talk. By which I mean measured, careful, dispassionate, balanced, tight, and that means not talking loosely about a Soros Empire, or bandying 'vile' and 'disgusting' about without a very careful supporting argument. Journalism in newspapers, political rhetoric on soapboxes, complete bollocks on facebook, and in universities -smart people talking carefully and clearly.
Yes, I think, in theory, having the right talk in the right place is the key to not incidentally lending legitimacy to some ideas that don't deserve it (the avoidance of which is the point I was trying to make). The risk here though, is that we continue to lend ideas undeserved legitimacy by presuming these circumscribed places are anything but arbitrary. It's about expectation, not objective criteria. I expect someone speaking as a university professor to be educated and factually accurate, so if they are allowed not to be, there is the risk of deception. I expect Facebook to be full of utter bollocks, so when it is, I'm not deceived.
What I dislike about what's happened to someone like Paglia, is that there is no body of fact to justify her position in the first place. Most 'smart' people think that steel is better than jelly for making bridges, and most 'smart' people see that people should not be segregated because of the colour of their skin, but the two are obviously very different kinds of 'right'. Paglia is not an expert in anything other than in what other people in her field thought (people who, themselves are not experts in anything other than the same). There is no body of fact for her to be factually accurate about. So 'smart' (by which I'm assuming you mean factually accurate), carefulness and clarity, whilst noble aims, can all too readily become completely subjective synonyms for "stuff I agree with".
And again, what in the quote is about white supremacy?
Xenophobia doesn't imply white supremacist thought. You might argue it the other way around, but again, not everybody is a white nationalist on the right. It would be similar to calling every social democrat a marxist and arguing that the two ideologies are inherently the same ideology.
I've come to the simple conclusion that people tolerate foreigners and ethnic minorities when these people provide money and hence are beneficial to the society as a whole. Contribution gives the acceptance. Period. It's universal and has a long historical background.
You see, nobody hates tourists. Yet if the tourists wouldn't spend their money, wouldn't contribute to the society by creating jobs etc, but would be begging in the streets and sleeping in the parks, they would be hated everywhere and wouldn't be welcome at all. Hence if it seems that a minority isn't giving it's share to the society, but seems to be free riding the system, immediately the xenophobic views emerge. How real this is actually, is often a good topic for debate, but once it's truly obvious for everybody, the notion is totally different: if the foreigners are literally taking wealth away from the society, then you have the younger generations up in arms against the foreigners are then simply called a foreign occupiers. You call it an occupation and the foreigners the enemy. And when a country is really occupied by another one and this creates a conflict, nobody in their right mind is calling the insurgents xenophobes.
Do ethnic minorities and foreigners make easy scapegoats? Of course. But this unfortunate thing is not at all confined to one single race. The above has absolutely nothing to do with white supremacy as the fact is totally applicable to other societies than white European or North American. The feeling and behavior is quite universal even for those who are non-whites. And the above is very important to understand because otherwise one can make the error of thinking that one set of people are 'open to foreigners and multicultural' while then another society is a bunch of bigoted xenophobes.
But is there suddenly a dearth of whacky, objectionable, and generally fucked-up ideas out there? Has the volume on reactionary voices been turned so far down that we can no longer hear the anti-immigrant, homophobic, Islamophobic, sexist trumpets blowing? Or is the fear for a dystopic future where public figures are not allowed to be assholes and therefore we all forget how to think?
I don't see it. From the evidence of the thread I see:
1) The curmudgeonly unfortunately-not-yet-mummified Scruton losing one of his sidelines as a government advisor for some ill-judged use of language with the accusations against him appearing to be at least partly trumped up.
2) Camille Paglia being unsuccessfully assailed by some students exercising their free speech rights to try to punish her use of her ivory tower to fire thoughtless missives against sexual assault victims.
3) Major talking turd Alex Jones falling foul of social media company guidelines that, like our guidelines, result in the banning of minor talking turds on a regular basis.
The ideological warfare seems to be getting along fine and fears of peace seem greatly exaggerated.
:up:
I would add the 'ideological war' isn't truly detrimental or dangerous either as neither side is really thinking of implementing a Final Solution to get rid of the other side. We're still talking.
Did you watch the youtube interview?
Likewise, I'd never heard of Scruton before seeing this thread. The British government didn't eliminate his audience, it only removed itself from his company, making its sentiments clear. How is that a bad thing?
I'm not on facebook or twitter. I'm really only interested in the principles involved. I think we tried the completely uncensored internet. That resulted in the landscape being flooded with misinformation. If the goal is to protect democracy, we should at least make an effort to reduce misinformation, even if there is always more on the horizon.
I don't propose being ruthless about it. We don't have to turn into China over it. BTW, have you heard about China's Muslim concentration camps?
This is not an idea worthy of taking a place in the 'marketplace of ideas.' It's just stupidity. Do you agree or disagree?
Give me a reason to take what you’re saying seriously because I’ve heard enough of Paglia to deem her a no nonsense kinda person, but certainly not a monster by any stretch of the imagination.
Nothing was said about a lack of hard evidence. That said, I don't think you and I agree on basic principles. Therefore, there's no point in discussing the details of an actual event.
Come on! This is exactly the kind of polemic that encourages this personality politics.
Unless we're watching different videos, what Paglia actually said was
That sounds to me like a call to take rape more seriously, not less. She's saying that rape is not a matter to be kept to oneself, undecided about reporting it, and then brought up with a private business. It's a criminal offence and a very serious one. It needs reporting right away to the correct authorities for everyone's good.
Your paraphrasing is utterly disingenuous.
I wasn't paraphrasing anything. I was discussing a principle. If a man or woman is raped and delays in coming forward, whether it's to a university, a church, a psychologist, a doctor, or what have you, those accusations should not be ignored simply because there was a delay.
That's it.
So the issue you're discussing has nothing to do with Paglia then? OK, but why bring it up then? I'm not sure I get the relevance to the topic here.
@frank's interpretation is consistent with what Paglia said as in the university not tolerating a late complaint is consistent with them ignoring it, and the video makes clear Paglia's lack of sympathy for, not to mention mockery of, assault victims who don't immediately report. Should she be fired for that? No, in my view. And she hasn't been. She's suffered nothing more than some angry blowback from liberal activists.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/04/17/university-arts-rejects-calls-fire-camille-paglia
Let's start with determining whether we agree on basic principles.
Something astonishing happened to me this weekend. A woman came to my door and asked me my name. She asked if I was once friends with a guy named X. She was crying.
A few years back a detective asked me to come downtown and answer questions about X. She didn't tell me the background of it. She just said it was a cold case. I told her I knew that X had molested a 13 year old girl because he told me about it. She wrote down what I said, but didn't tell me anything about what they were investigating. I left wondering what it had been all about, but forgot about it.
The girl had brought charges against X after going into therapy to try to come to terms with it. She had told her mother and father when she was 13, but they didn't believe her. She didn't think anything would come of it, she just needed to try. As it turns out, my statement to the deputy was the only validation they could find. They never asked me to testify because they settled with a plea bargain, but the woman told me they spelled out my last name in sentencing hearing. My statement provided enough gravity to get him sent to jail. She just came to my house to thank me for being honest. She told me it had started when she was 11, which I didn't know.
All of this happened much more than 1 year after the event. In this case, the private parties she confided to ignored her. One detective did not ignore it.
As I said to the woman, just a little bit of justice makes a big difference.
Quoting Baden
The article said that a minority of the students wanted her de-platformed. The article was just whining about that minority.
No. Frank said that Paglia's claim was akin to saying that a rape victim should be ignored. Her actual comment was that the university should not tolerate such a complaint. There is a substantial difference between suggesting a rape victim should be ignored sensu lato, and suggesting they should be ignored by a specific institution.
Quoting Baden
I don't really get that from the video, but let's say that's her view, given her other writings on rape, is it likely that she's suggesting people should just be allowed to get away with rape, or is it more likely that she considers focusing on getting victims to report more quickly, and to the correct authority, is most important. As with most of this polemicism, its not about whether you agree or not with her strategy, its about not impugning her motives in order to lend illegitimate weight to your preferred approach.
Reporting rape late and to the wrong authority makes it far less likely that the perpetrator will be caught, which is a neglect of one's duty to others. Being a victim oneself does not absolve one of one's moral duty to others. You may not agree with that position, and therefore disagree with the strategy of displaying a lack of sympathy for those who neglect this perceived duty, but it is disingenuous to add weight to your argument by trying to demonise those who think differently.
Well then you need to ask about some basic principles, not provide an extremely emotional story about one specific case.
This is how people are judged today. No need to check the context or find out what the speakers views are. Simply pick out a few lines and clips and base everything about said person on nothing but those selected segments.
It is deeply disingenuous. The reason I commented was because I’m well aware of her views on the matter and agree almost completely with her and what she said in that section of the interview (note: someone clearly edited out the build it to make it look bad).
That story wasn't an attempt to confer with you on basic principles. I think you and I actually do agree there. The story is just a bizarre event I'm still trying to digest. I took the opportunity to talk about it. Ignore it if you like.
It's unclear what exactly she means with "a university tolerating a complaint" though. It sounds harsh. A good faith interpretation could be exasperation at what victims expect from the complaint. A university isn't as well equipped to research a possible rape that happened 6 months ago as a police department. At the same time there's a lot of behaviour that's strictly not criminal but should still get a person expelled. So there's situations where a complaint is actually better but that concerns situations that don't qualify as rape.
So basically to me the sentence becomes meaningless without more context.
She does come off better in a fuller context.
Quoting Isaac
You're both suggesting I misinterpreted Paglia and that I disagree with the interpretation I didn't make, which is a rather confused argumentative strategy. And the charge that I demonised her is trumped up. I demand that you be fired. Or I be fired. Or, well, someone better suffer anyway...
(Kicks off at 48:00)
This makes perfect sense in theory, but things tend to play out a bit differently on campus. It's not so much qualifications that are being debated, it's disqualifications. Deplatforming isn't the mere denial of a platform to anyone without credentials, it's actually revoking the use of a platform by someone who ostensibly already has access to it (a subtle but important distinction)
In this sense, you aren't "de-platformed" at American universities because you were never platformed to begin with...
Taking Ben Shapiro as an example, he was "platformed" at various universities by conservative student unions who were interested in his ideas, but he was subsequently "de-platformed" by progressive student groups (and non-student protestors) who used force to shut down the conservative event.
The conservative union rented out an auditorium from the University to have a private event, and it was interrupted and shut down by people who were upset by its existence on campus. The real problem with this isn't that Shapiro suffers (in fact it was the best publicity he ever received), it's that some people are claiming the right to forcefully shut down the political organizing of others, and it's nothing but emotion and popular demand that allows them to pull it off. The damage there is that a bunch of students really wanted to hear Shapiros ideas, and so by shutting down the event, they interfered with the free speech of their fellow students who have every right to decide who they want to invite as a speaker at their private events.
Quoting Isaac
Because so many people hold ideas that others find to be politically incorrect, in practice we would just be appealing to 51% of the population to silence the other 49% (or worse, appealing to the vocal 1% to silence the bottom 50%.). "Political correctness" can more or less amount to a certain emotional frame of mind (the will to be sensitive to certain identity groups), and unfortunately different people have different levels of such emotion (one white man's dreadlocks are another mans microaggressions are another man's cultural appropriations are another man's systems of racist oppression). If you think about it, trying to institute a political correctness rule would just send us down the road of always kowtowing to the loudest source of outrage. What is and is not politically correct is contested, and constantly changes. Do you really want to put corporations and professional victims in that driver seat?
And suppose that Youtube and Twitter have become somewhat crucial tools for staying politically informed and engaged. Ought we think about some kind of fairness regulation to negate their ability to influence democratic outcomes (the influence of the corporations themselves, by virtue of deciding what is and is not politically correct). Before the era of Fox news, major news outlets were required by law to show both sides of a story. I don't think we need to erect such laws against major social media networks, but if we allow them to straight up delete opposing perspectives, then we might be royally fucking our ability to achieve political progress through dialogue and debate.
In a university setting, almost by definition, competing and critical views are absolutely required for students to actually improve their juvenile and often naive political frameworks. We don't mind exposing students to ideas that make them uncomfortable because they need to get used to the idea that they don't know everything, and that the best way to improve their knowledge is to actually challenge them. Universities cannot be helicopter parents to our mollycoddled guilt-spawn, and any attempt to do so will only lead to their intellectual ruination.
A safe space...
That's what the kids wanted...
A space free from ideas that challenge their own, and free of the people that hold them.
This is the very antithesis of learning and higher education.
-----
All that said, I want to clarify and restate that I'm not suggesting that universities should be inviting people just because they're controversial, or that we need to inflict emotional suffering in order to stimulate intellectual growth; what I'm suggesting is that we should not trod on the rights of one group in order to protect the emotional security of another group. Given that Shapiro was willingly invited by a group of students looking to exercise their civil rights of democratic engagement, the context is that of dis-invitation and sanction. By de-platforming Shapiro they're not just sanctioning Shapiro, they're sanctioning every student who paid for or wanted to attend the event for the crime of political wrong-think.
Boycotting is one thing, and forceful intervention is another. If you boycott something, people who still support it are free to do so. If you forcefully intervene, it's no longer political speech (it's merely an authoritarian shut-down of speech). It's easy to be unspecific about these things and to end up going wildly overboard (especially thanks to the emotion involved), which is why I think discussing things case by case is the only sensical way to proceed.
If we did decide to implement political correctness as globally enforced standard, who would we let decide what is and is not politically correct?
Of course, in the red and brown misty heat of cultural warfare, the tits and the tats all seem above board, but in the long run our unwritten rules of engagement are changing from something like fight fair so the truth may out to we're right, therefore: go for the throat.
The latitude that we (used to?) give to our political opposition to freely showcase their ideas helps greatly (I think) to expedite our ability to come to mutual compromise across our various political aisles. Public figures don't dictate the beliefs of their followers by virtue of speaking them (hopefully), they ostensibly represent swaths of the general public whom they appeal to, so if our moods and methods force them all back into their own segregated nooks, the people they influence and represent are therefore unable to benefit from serious political dialogue and debate between them. In other words, Scruton goes back to writing obscure literature which may go unchallenged, Paglia schisms off with her own crowd, and Alex Jones, like a cockroach, not only survives, but thrives, and it becomes even more difficult for reasonable elements within mainstream to interact with or rebuke any of them.
The taboo zones we create are like no-mans lands that result from trench warfare. Our weapons are too deadly, and only the slipperiest kinds of a-holes remain free to tread there (example: Shapiro can deflect outrage with his gotchya gish gallop alone, Jones Overwhelms with volume and distraction, Paglia wields postmodern technicality like the shining shield of Hercules, and Scruton, with decreasing effectiveness, seems to build his nest as far away as possible from his opposition (deep within conservative thickets), but thanks to the increased range and accuracy of our weapons, that's no longer a viable strategy of political survival.).
Looking at these few anecdotes isn't all that convincing, and I'll admit I've been paying attention to this phenomenon for so long that I might be afflicted by confirmation bias, but there's definitely been a rise in political animosity and unproductive division. 28 Out of 30 canaries might still be chirping happily, but I can't stop worrying about the two that croaked.
Dammit, I'll need a bit of time to come up with something as poetically engaging as this. I've given up on winning the argument. But I may at least be able to blind you with colourful rhetoric.
It's not really a bad thing so far as I can tell, but we're approaching the line. Who gets to be in government ought to be democratically influenced. (The line we might mistakenly cross is holding someone's views against them when we ought not do so (if the views are irrelevant to the job, for example, then it might not make sense to defenestrate them, and if the views themselves are representative of their constituents, then the few might be going overboard by harassing them into resignation)).
I don't have any problems with the Sacking of Scruton, but I don't like the air of righteousness that seemed to surround it (although perhaps it is poetic, given that Scruton himself uses his own version of puritanical righteousness to substantiate his beliefs).
Quoting frank
I agree totally with this (I also don't use twitter or facebook myself), but in taking up the objective to reduce misinformation, we should be careful not to liberally decide that certain political views amount to misinformation (disentangling the two is often difficult).
Quoting frank
I have indeed. China isn't a democracy though (though it may claim to moonlight as such). China is a great example of why we can't have our emotionally progressive cake and eat it too. We need to deal with the unrest driving bits of political conflicts (and their ensuing resolutions) that China opts to black-out entirely for reasons of pragmatic efficiency.
I'm trying my best to not become the thing that I am criticizing, so please don't interpret anything I've written as a criticism of yourself. I too fancy myself a man of ideas, and really that's the inherent value I'm trying to promote.
I do apologize for the excesses of my rhetoric, but without color this subject is a real downer.
If I'm gonna be a broken record, I might as well make sweet sounds :grin:
Well, at least we can laugh about it. Out there in the real world there is somewhat of a loss of a sense of the absurd, and of humour, and an embrace of a feeling of threat on both sides. So we wear the ritual masks lest we be turned to stone by the sight of our own shadows posing as ophidian foes. Whereas what's underneath is likely a wormery of confused righteousness rather than a snarling serpent aimed at our souls.
In future try being completely clear and straightforward like me. :halo:
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I know. I come to the issue having once been fiercely anti-censorship, and now I feel depressed about the information age, about the long-term functionality of democracy, and about the possibility that there is some underlying fault in the social design that centers around money. Time and again I come back to the conclusion that the only way out is dictatorship or oligarchy. I think Obama's success in diverting global economic crunch just burned up an opportunity to actually correct some things. If a liberal is frustrated, I don't think we can really say it's for nothing.
Then I forget about the whole thing and go have a mint chocolate chip milk shake.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I value your perspective, and I appreciate the need for caution.
Can I take credit for this? Pretty please.
I've found that a direct approach is often not feasible when it comes to very controversial subjects, although I do put in a lot of effort into doing so and with ample clarity (because yes, that's where it is most sorely needed).
Aside from the relative experimental freedom I enjoy in this place, in this case I could also blame my own desire to be shielded from personal exposure. My self-amputating tail, my thickened mane, and my bedazzling tail feathers help to protect my vital organs. I'm a peacock like any other, but I do repent.
Quoting fdrake
Half credit for tardiness! :naughty:
Quoting frank
:up:
I value your desire to see meaningful change (and I share it).
And by George, we've got our work cut out for us.
That worm deep inside of us is in desperate need of catharsis, as its enduring frustration turns it into the self-consuming Ouroboros that I fear.
This is a part of what drives me to such colorful descriptions. I want to satirize and make light of our own foolishness, though I'm running at high risk in terms of how my musings are actually received.
I want to reframe this discussion somewhat because you a missing a key element: its the values and ideas which are the problem. They are the threat and opposition.
Scruton trying to teach us woman are just objects for their husband, Pagila suggesting someone could only have been raped if it was reported within a certain time period, Jones, well, being Jones. In any of these cases, the problem is how they understand the world and others, such that it is devaluing them and producing a culture which will harm them.
We cannot approach or rebuke them without going for the throat. In any case, Nothing of these positions can be taken. There is nothing to agree or comprise on. These values and ideas constitute an immoral understanding of others. They tell falsehoods about people, they form to abusive cultures about people. To be sexist, etc. occurs within our ideas themselves, not just in our other actions or intentions towards others.
When we talk about oppression, devaluing, dismissal, etc. we are speaking about an objective social relation. A whole set of relations of how people understand each other and are affected within a social context. In exactly the same way that, for example, believing the Earth is flat is both a factual and ethical problem for those trying to describe the Earth, these ideas are a problem for the formation of diverse (i.e. a society in which people of different racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, etc. groups are respected as equal) and ethical society.
Everyone is in the same position as any scientist when it comes to talking about this need. We can’t avoid telling of the particular truth in question and how positions which reject it are gravely mistaken. No-one cannot get up and say: “Well, Pagilia didn’t really do anything wrong. What she did is not really a problem because X,Y, Z…” It’s an objective fact her comments, regardless of anything else she might have said or intended, devalue rape victims and suggest the falsehood that elapsed time/not reporting to the police is a good reasons to dismiss an account of rape.
Many people trying to take a “centre” position don’t seem to understand this about the political discourses in question. They keep supposing agreement between political sides is the goal. But it was never the goal.
Indeed, the exact opposite is true: the whole problem is ideas integral to these politics violate ethics and objective description of society. We need to abandon them.
Now don’t get me wrong, none of the above means there are no issues with responses. Someone having unethical ideas or even being some kind of political threat doesn’t mean we get kill them, lock them up or even get to deny them a platform in certain ways. If we were, for example, deplatforming anyone with those ideas, there is no way the Republicatian Party in the US could put on a proper campaign. There are many ways we might take issue with our response to unethical ideas.
In a capitalist society, for example, having a job is critical to people’s lives. Should we fire someone just for having an unethical idea or falsehood? Maybe in certain contexts, such as leader, teachers of ethics, representatives of ethical organisations, when people continue to be disrespectful or abusive towards staff, customers, etc., but it’s extremely dubious just in terms of an idea.
Trouble is that opponents hardly talk ever in these terms. They don’t go, “Yes, they were sexist then, but our response shouldn’t be this because XYZ.” In almost every case, the opposition move is to deny the objective social and ethical observation made about the position— just as you did in our discussion about Scruton— rather than take issue with how people respond to it.
The form of media is almost largely responsible for that. The pool of people we can commute with is far larger because we can just shoot messages over the net, rather than talking to people who live near us and having to make do. Echo chambers are an inevitable result of a diverse media landscape, combined with our ability to self select our community. Most of us aren't going to want to spend time talking with the we find politically unpleasant, when we could just select a group of people who share our interests (including politics).
Modern broadcast media also enables this because it splits up into ideological entertainment. Not only can well select our own groups, but the media does for us too. It specifically puts us in the mode of thinking in terms of a constant beat down of political teams (see all the guff of "balanced" punditry) often a far cry from genuine engagement with political or social issues. People will move to media which argues for their views, if it is available, especially if the supposedly serious media is treating everything like a game of "debate" and "balanced" opinions.
In terms of political opposition, our ideas are no less opposed than sixties or seventies, for example. The feminists, civil rights activists, LGBT+ activists, etc., were no less definite in calling out the ideas and politics of that time as something that needed to be abandoned.The all-compassing opposition ( "going for the throat" in terms of ideas and values) of politics isn't new. People just mistake it for a new phenomena because they haven't been paying attention what the politics concerned about.
I'm not sure if what followed was the explication, but I don't feel like you've made the case for it being 'important'. I agree it's a difference, but I'm not so sure how important a one it is.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But free-speech (in terms of having a platform like the one Ben Shapiro had) is interfered with in this way all the time. I don't have enough money to do what Shapiro does, is the economy interfering with my free speech? The trouble is we're not starting from a blank slate, so to give people an equal right to speak from where they are now, is not equality of opportunity, it's re-inforcement of the status quo. How is the effect on freedom to speak of the protesting students materially any different to the effect on the freedom to speak of the revenue-based format of the global media? How is it materially any different to the qualifications/fame barrier of columnists for major newspapers?
I think with cases like these, people seem to mix two ideas. The first is the principle that human society works best with a free exchange of ideas. This is something I'm entirely supportive of. But this has nothing to do with the Shapiro affair. The reason why people wanted to hear him speak is because they'd already heard his ideas and wanted to rally behind him. They didn't randomly invite the guy in the spirit of widening their concepts. The reason why the protesters wanted to prevent his speech is because they too had already heard his ideas and didn't want their university to be associated with them (among a host of other incentives no doubt). None of the conflict was to do with hearing his ideas for the first time, that has already happened,and was fully facilitated (in fact encouraged) by the way our idea-discussing platforms are already arranged to favour people like Shapiro (wealthy, charismatic, controversial) and disfavour many whose ideas might be just as useful.
The media makes it difficult for those who are not wealthy, charismatic and controversial to have their ideas heard. Academic institutions make it difficult for those who are not wealthy (again!) and well-read to have their ideas heard. The liberal protest movement might make it difficult for those who are not 'politically correct' to have their ideas heard. I'm still not seeing the 'important' difference.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But some group already is in the 'driver seat'. There already is a rule for having a platform. You have to be wealthy enough to finance it, charismatic enough to carry it off, well-read enough to be accepted (even when there is no body of fact to be knowledgeable on), and controversial enough to get enough 'hits' (even the academic publishers are just as guiltily here). Are those factors ones you want in the driver's seat?
To me, it's a bit like the adversarial system in law. No one really likes it as it feels wrong to be trying as hard as one can to let a potential criminal go free, rather than just find out the 'truth'. But the other side are trying as hard as they can to put them away. So the adversarial system is the best we have. Similarly each pressure group is going to be trying as hard as they can to allow/promote only the ideas they see as 'worthy' of discussion. If we single out one group and ask them not to try as hard as they can, to refrain from some action they think might work, we're tipping the balance in favour of the other pressures whom we have not similarly bound.
Well, if its all just a series of undeniable objective facts then we all might as well just go home, job done. I can't think what we've all been wasting our time on.
I don’t see this as a problem really? We’re all different with different opportunities taken and missed, so it ends up with some people more able - and willing - to get their ideas out there into the public domain.
The ‘status quo’ is a realm of open exchange. As long as people are not inhibited by the law to express different ideas we shouldn’t be overly worried. I don’t think it makes sense to protest speakers and stop others hearing what they have to say simply because they are deemed as x or y. If people strongly oppose these people then they should go and listen to them and challenge them instead of expecting them to simply disappear because they have opinions and views that clash.
I simply think this is all a matter of youthful exuberance and part of establishing a sense of political positioning in an ever complex and dynamic sociopolitical life - universities have been full for protesters and hipsters since they were established.
No. The status quo is absolutely not a realm of open exchange. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of hurdles one has to overcome in order to get one's idea into the public realm for discussion, many of them relate directly to the idea itself. If we say that one pressure group should reign in their attempts to control the public debating space, we are, by default, lending weight to those other pressure groups who tactics we are not likewise seeking to shackle.
What I am saying is people voice their opinions and undermine others all the time. They are nasty and backstabbing, and something encouraging and open. Overall the noise heard is a general expression of people on the fringes hollering (with varying degrees of justification) and this leads, and has led, to some people being shut down on various public platforms.
So, as to the above quote, saying that everyone has the right to listen to who they want to listen to is nothing like playing an “us” versus “them” game.
The worry is that small minorities of people effect the larger sphere to push their views for their own personal benefit at the expense of the vast majority who either don’ t care, or who are cajoled into believing something is being said by someone when it is not - hence the kind of mess we see in this thread about the call for people to be “sacked” for expressing views on difficult topics (which is actually part and parcel of their job being professors and intellectuals).
Note: Anyone saying “absolutely not” rings alarms bells for me. I generally take “absolutely” to mean “absolutely” in intellectual discussion rather than a use of rhetoric to enhance a point - for now I’ll generously assume the later. That is to say I am NOT saying it is completely free nor that it has problems; I think a constant rebalancing IS what the status quo is today more than at any other time in human history as we’re not (at least in western society) massively inhibited by Law and Order as to what we can and cannot say.
I didn't say you said that. You misread the word 'both' as referring to you and Isaac rather than two things Isaac did and thus misinterpreted me as saying I said you said I misinterpreted Paglia. Funny that.
Nope. “You’re both,” consider both myself and Isaac were tagged in that post can only mean BOTH of us NOT both of the things he said.
I didn’t misread. You miswrote and then misread our own writing. I guess you meant to write “You both” and either the autocorrect kicked in or your brain decided to tell your fingers to do something else. It happens :) As I’ve stated elsewhere I’m not a massive fan of proofreading because I’m trying to train my brain to be more precise first time around.
I’ve made a couple of posts recently where I missed the “not” which I hope people managed to read around given the larger context of what I was saying.
AMENDED: Haha! Okay! Gotcha! XD just realised! Someone invent a better system of communicating please! My mistake. It is kind of funny that I still didn’t notice ... sorry I didn’t spot the double meaning behind the ‘You’re’. Is there a way to avoid that confusion without adding an explanation in parenthesis? Mmm ...?
A bit like the difference between “I helped my uncle jack off a donkey” and “I helped my uncle Jack off a donkey.” Haha!
:lol:
I should have written to avoid ambiguity: "You're suggesting that I both... "
Quoting I like sushi
Neither am I, but it's another hat I wear (though apparently the fit is a bit loose). :)
I agree, with one important caveat. Where there is a widely accepted body of knowledge which relates to a position, I don't think a person unaware of that lore need necessarily be given an equal platform.
Quoting I like sushi
Yes, but opposition to de-platforming is not saying that everyone has the right to listen. It's saying that one, and only one, method of restricting what people listen to should be stopped. That obviously gives greater weight to all the dozens of other methods for controlling what people can listen to which we have left unfettered.
Those wishing to listen to 'politically incorrect' views are now unhindered. Those who wish to listen to moderate, uncontroversial views are still just as hindered (uncontroversial views cannot get a platform because of the commercialisation of ideas). Those wishing to listen to the views of the poor or marginalised are just as hindered (poor people cannot afford the kind of promotion needed to get a platform). Those wishing to hear from average 'ordinary folk' are just as hindered (ordinary people are not normally charismatic enough to carve out a space in today's media). I could go on...
Quoting I like sushi
But this happens in most fields all the time. How many people are actually involved in awarding a Nobel prize? And what disproportionate effect does being a 'Nobel-prize-winning' whatever have on one's ability to be heard. Have not a very small minority just effected the larger sphere? What is the total size of the group who collectively edit all the academic journals (clue - it's way smaller than you think) yet how much of an effect does being a 'published academic' have on one's ability to get a platform, or indeed even a job?
Hundreds of small minority groups are using whatever tactics they can to push their own agendas. Either close them all down, or let them fight it out adversarially, but don't shut one down and leave the others in an attempt at equality.
This is probably one of the few sensible things said in this thread so far. The middling liberal approach taken by many in this thread looks at issues of ‘deplatforming’ and so on as though politics and power only ever intervene after the fact, as though the ground of speech were a priori neutral and only then ‘interfered’ with from the outside, per accidens. But this is naïvety at best, utter stupidity at worst - anyone who isn’t a complete idiot knows that only some are ever given a platform to begin with - are ‘platformed’. The rest - the majority - simply shout into the void.
It is simply political infantilism to believe that everyone has a platform - is born with one, as it were - and that harm only comes from 'taking it away’. As if some stupid toy. Platforms are rare, hard-fought over, and mercilessly defended and attacked. Those who complain about ‘deplatforming’ usually have nothing to say about platforming to begin with, because they are so utterly insensible to the play of power everywhere at work long before some wanker has their stupid ‘say’ on a lectern somewhere. Their defence of ‘free speech’ is nothing but a defence of the arrangement of power just as it is - the status quo, all the while denying that power has any role to play expect on the side of those who argue for ‘deplatforming’. It’s hypocrisy unnamed.
Liberal shills have nothing to say about the structural, socio-economic conditions that precipitated the situations they are decrying. They'll bark your ear off about 'deplatforming' and remain deafeningly, fatally silent about the far more significant, far more pervasive issue of platforming. Their politics is reactive, as reactive as any they blab about with their reams of words.
Sorry Isaac, I meant:
“I believe that literally everyone who wishes to be heard shouldn’t be heard simply because they believe what they have to say matters.”
There is an obvious problem there. You assume everyone agrees on what is or isn’t PC. You seem to be appealing to a democratic choice yet against a democratic choice at the same time? How should people decide who they want to listen to? Should we avoid talks by people because a minority of people get annoyed or cater to the general consensus (which is generally that most university students aren’t political activists looking to undermine anyone and everyone who comes to speak at their university).
I’ve no issue with groups of people protesting. I get worried when such protests effect the attitudes on the people running the university due to legal machinations and fear fo possible lawsuits. That is part and parcel of what Paglia was saying (in that and other articles/talks). That is universities shouldn’t be expected to police students. It is a facility to facilitate not an institution for telling people how to behave and abide by the law and order of the state.
Why shut them down? Are they taking part in illegal activities? If not leave them be. More often than not it is just a simple case of a few individuals making a lot of noise about nothing and effectively (more often than not) actually undermining the very cause they insist they are fighting for - this, as I said, is something as old as universities themselves. Most people venture out into the world and have their views shattered by the reality of societal forces to some degree or another. Those that never admit they were previously naive to some extend are just demagogues in the making (in the modern sense of ‘demagogue’)
I'm not seeing the link there. All I'm saying is that if de-platforming attempts like those in response to Shapiro were somehow stopped, then such people (I'm just calling them 'politically incorrect' for shorthand) would now be able to speak, the people who want to listen to him can do so unhindered. But many, many other voices remain unheard because of the socio-economic system we currently have. There is no default position we can return to if only those nasty protesters are dissuaded from their tactics. To oppose the tactics of the protestors is to implicitly support the tactics of the establishment that exists without them, they're both trying to control the debating space.
Quoting I like sushi
The attitudes of the people running the university are already affected by a hundred interest groups exerting their influence in whatever way they can. Why shouldn't the protestors be one of them?
Universities absolutely tell people how to behave, that is the net effect of the entire humanities and arts departments and a huge part of the hard sciences. Every institution, every pressure group, even the structure of society itself is telling people how to behave. There is no default position. So why pick one group trying to do it and say they shouldn't?
If people want to stop others from speaking they can do so. There will be a lash back and things will push in the other direction. Rinse and repeat. The danger is one position pushing too far - I don’t see that happening much just yet. The telling sign is when the average student starts caring about the issues a small group are pushing for or against.
There does seem to be a growing impression of hypersensitivity. I think this is okay too because if we’re to become more sensitive then we’ll become sensitive to being overly sensitive. Social media is just a magnifying lens of what has always existed in educational institutions and I would argue that today there is more freedom of speech within universities than there was 50 or more years ago even if we are (and I’m not saying we are!) experiencing a little dip.
The gist of this entire thread is about the vacuous assessment of academics whose job it is to cover fringe topics and deal with uncomfortable issues. Shapiro isn’t a professor, so it is a side issue to the wants and needs and of the students - the ‘protests’ for and against will level out and no doubt some professors will stick their oar in and voice their views on matters of who should and shouldn’t speak on university campuses. My view is that if they are stopped from speaking on campus that by no means leaves them open to criticism so I’d rather they spoke on campuses so students (who are there because they’re smart) can question them directly in an environment of intellectual discourse. The alternative is they take their talk elsewhere under what I imagine would be a less intellectually demanding environment.
I very much doubt I have anything more to say on this topic.
Apologies for not responding this earlier. My intention was not to confuse matters thus, but only to re-emphasise the significant difference between what Paglia actually said (the university should not tolerate them) and what frank paraphrased (they should be ignored - without any qualifier as to who is doing the ignoring). I thought your statement that Frank's interpretation was accurate covered up this important distinction.
The 'demonising' comment was not aimed at you, but at her detractors. Apologies if that was not clear. Rest assured my script writers have been fired, as have those responsible for hiring them.
My comments will now be continued at great expense in a completely different style... cue llamas.
(sorry, probably very niche monty python joke)
But how do we convince our political opposition to abandon their unethical beliefs? Half the time they too feel that the other side holds unethical and inaccurate beliefs. Assuming the conflict will tend to be symmetrical, if I endorse the use of force against the other side then I'm also endorsing the use of it against my own side.
Only "their" defence of free speech? I guess you mean either the defence of free speech for the views you don't like; or, which for you comes to the same thing, the defence of free speech for all views. I guess you mean that, say, my defence of free speech is also a "defence of the arrangement of power just as it is", only maybe I don't know it.
But there is disagreement over what that arrangement of power is, and disagreement over what is a defence of the status quo and what is not. For example, I'm a quasi- or ex- or crypto-leftist, and I believe that neoliberal capitalism and the present cultural orthodoxy that passes for leftism are more than merely compatible: they are two sides of the same coin. And that's despite the existence of bogeymen like the Kochs. The point is not to argue here for that thesis, but to try and show that your moral and intellectual high ground isn't necessarily so high, i.e., that there's a debate to be had, one that you assume has been had already.
Quoting StreetlightX
Is anyone who defends free speech without compromise, or who complains about deplatforming, a "liberal shill"? What about the people who do so while also having things to say about the "structural, socio-economic conditions that precipitated that the situations they are decrying"?
Like most of your stuff about actually existing politics, your post is impatient, polemical, authoritarian, and--in common with most philosophers when they talk about the real world--disappointingly second-hand and mainstream-ideological. But if you're taking sides in a battle, on behalf of a party, then I guess that's appropriate. I mean, even accepting your stuff about power, from that point if you don't accept that there is a debate to be had about who holds the power in the first place, then it just comes down to who can shout the loudest, who can use the power of the state for their own ends (and who can lament the deplorableness of the common people in the class war of the Left against the working class).
Your post is really just an argument in favour of ad hominem. Do not look to the argument, you say, look to the person--and their power, identity, etc. As such it is close to being fallacious if interpreted as rational, though perhaps useful or understandable if interpreted as bloodthirsty polemic or Leninist revolutionary propaganda. It doesn't come close to being thoughtful or philosophical.
While it's true that we don't all have the means to platform ourselves, and it's also true in a capitalist system those with more wealth will always be able to purchase more influence or exposure (a tangential issue), democracy was never intended to give every individual equal speaking time at a podium (though whomsoever wants to step on a soap-box is free to do so, for all the good it might do). Representative democracy requires that we choose representatives, both formally and informally. Ben Shapiro happens to have made a career out of being an informal representative (a well followed pundit), and though at this point he has more privilege and opportunity than most anyone else, it is a privilege freely given to him by his supporters.
Regarding the question of protesting a Shapiro speaking event, I'm all for it, but where's the sense in shutting it down with force and disruption? It's true that the wealthy and privileged have a pre-existing advantage, but does that mean we should resort to force?
I just want to clarify that "platforms" and "de-platforming" are so poorly defined that we can easily over-generalize. We're all platformed or not platformed in dozens of relevant ways, and my objections to "de-platforming" run along very particular lines (e.g: de-platforming through harassment or force and de-platforming based on misleading emotional appeals (it's not so much the emotional appeal as it is the misleading part, and the fact that these are what tend to lead to unjust harassment and force)).
Quoting Isaac
Ultimately it's not for me (or any individual, save our elected officials, for better or for worse) to decide whose ideas (policies) are useful for the lot of us. I take as much issue with Shapiro as you do, and as much of a sycophantic echo-chamber as I'm sure the event would have been, there's no good reason they should not be allowed to hold it (and where opposing it by force just backfires spectacularly). Isn't any partisan political event by definition a re-hashing of ideas that most everyone there has already heard? Is there a useful point to them beyond promoting intra-party cohesion? If not, why shouldn't the economically disadvantaged among Trumps constituents disrupt left wing events? If they're just ideas everyone has already heard then why not? I'm being facetious, but from the other side (Shapiro fans), condoning forceful disruption against him would be taken as firm evidence of Shapiro's already privileged narrative. Why take the bait?
Quoting Isaac
It's the long-term chilling effect of how we motivate and sanction individuals and our institutions. Positive reinforcement is like inviting/paying Shapiro to speak at an event, and withholding positive reinforcement would be akin to a boycott or a dis-invitation (a de-platforming). Negative reinforcement then amounts to the use of force (force as in taking disruptive action beyond traditional protest and boycott, which can include dis-invitation by extortion (e.g: a group of unruly protestors issue threats to have an event canceled)).
So what do we get when we normalize that kind of negative reinforcement as a standard sanction against political opponents? We drive pundits like Shapiro onto fringe media platforms (much like Alex Jones, where they may all yet live), or worse we give them the attention the thrive on; but we might also create a similar predicament for our own beloved radicals. Regular individuals with no substantial platform gain nothing, and if they've got radical ideas of their own, they would have a large incentive to remain politically silent (because applying negative sanctions en masse against an average individual (someone who doesn't have Shapiro's resources) can be life ruining). The crucial difference is when our opposition goes from civil to less than civil.
Quoting Isaac
I'm actually a fan of the adversarial system, not for its short term precision, but for its long term accuracy (its ability to derive and establish superior precedent in case law over time. Some might say legislative superiority just waxes and wanes according to the values of the time, but I personally believe in legal ethical progress). For that system to work, both sides need a somewhat even playing field, but both sides must also agree to abide by a certain code of conduct and procedural standards that are designed to protect fairness. And compared to those standards, the landscape of political discourse is an unregulated free-for-all, where the conflicts spill violently out of court-room and into the streets. Letting Shapiro confer with his clients, so to speak, is an essential part of a functional version of an adversarial political system.
But I don't mean this: I meant the defence of free speech on the grounds of protecting it from machinations of power as though access to the 'marketplace of ideas' were not already gate-kept to the nth degree. It's that specific argument for the defence of free speech that I was attacking as being naive and hypocritical. The point is simply that it is prejudicial, that it sees power only where it wants to, and not where it largely lies. Mistaking trees for forests and all that. If an attack on an argument is an ad hominem then I suppose I've been using that word wrong for a long time.
And I'm not sure what to make of your complaint that I don't believe there is a debate to be had over 'who holds power': my whole point is that this debate is explicitly not being had, and that it should be. Have I read you wrong, or you me?
Not sure. Let me think about that.
I really don't think that is the way things work, but it would take quite some investment in the social psychology literature to even review the arguments, let alone convince you. Suffice to say my faith in the independent decision-making ability of most people has been significantly eroded.
I'm of the opinion that people like Shapiro are enabled by institutions and his widespread acceptance is nothing more than an entirely predicable consequence of that enabling. The idea that he has somehow 'emerged' as the representative of a group of people who have long harboured his views but until now had no voice is just not swinging it for me.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Sometimes, yes. I'm not really sure why you are drawing such a line at physical force, perhaps you could expand on that? Why is it OK, for example, for media companies to use their wealth to distribute platforms to those controversial enough to make revenue (denying platforms to the mundane), but its not OK for students to use their physical mass to deny platforms to the likes of the Shapiro? What is it about physical mass as a tool that singles it out as reprehensible?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. It has virtually nothing to do with free-speech in the sense most people seem to use the term (we must listen to and rationally argue against ideas for the sake of our collective intellect). There's no debating going on here. No one is listening to the arguments with a rational mind, neither for nor against. It's language being used entirely as rhetoric just to stir up a movement in a particular political direction. To say we should use language to oppose it is to give the 'discussion' a legitimacy it does not deserve.
These events are no more than rallies, a show of force.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Agreed, but this seems another regularly implied state of affairs which I just don't recognise. "If we use physical force to de-platform, then they will too". Where is this idea coming from that they're waiting to see what we do to decide what tactics are acceptable? They (by whom I mean whomever one considers opposed to them) are going to use whatever tactics they can to shut down ideas that don't meet their requirements. Not necessarily even ideologically, I don't think the media, for example, are motivated by anything but the fact that controversy sells. But the point is, they won't hold back.
I guess to some extent the issues are different for different sides in a debate. If you're arguing against someone who has money, they're not going to use physical force against you (why would they) but you might need to against them. Your resources are obviously not going to be the same as theirs.
So yes, an even playing field and fair rules of engagement are very important to any adversarial system, but I think what we too often take for granted the playing field and rules we currently have which are neither even nor fair. They are stacked massively in favour of the institutions of the status quo.
I appreciate that. The issue I brought forward was the basis of some of the protest against her, and it wasn't a free speech issue because if taken seriously, it would endanger the community. I understand that you disagree, but there's no fruitful discussion down that trail as far as I can see.
I think a better tactic for you would have been to drop the rape reporting issue and bring up an idea of hers that, though controversial, is an idea that warrants discussion, research, policy alteration, etc.
You misrepresented what she said based on a clip under 2 mins long from an interview that was 30+ mins long. I pointed that out, you evaded and switched tack quickly rather than hold your hands up and say “Oops! My bad.”
It is not an issue of me “disagreeing” you simply conveyed what she said very poorly. You were duped by the aim of the protestors and added to it. Isaac spotted this too.
This isn’t a debate. It is me telling you that you’re wrong and you apparently failing to see that. So I’ll just stop there unless you plan on posting other crass misrepresentations of someone else.
Point is that if a person takes a platform, he or she has a responsibility to choose words carefully. If a person cannot take that responsibility seriously and avoid saying things that could potentially put people in danger, there is a problem.
I agree that conflict is crucial. We read to expose ourselves to other perspectives. The point is to be surprised, challenged, offended, and thereby illuminated. We enjoy becoming something that is less like the typical flipper-clapper, the default position of a human brought up this way as opposed to that way.
This illustrates a subtle strategy for some right wingers who have counted on being protested and/or uninvited at college campus and leveraging that by writing articles (or being the subject of them) about how the Left is silencing them, and the articles of course receive many more clicks and public discussion than some measly campus speech. Milo Yiannopoulos did this frequently.
Koch Brothers paying for articles about Camille Paglia?
An article mentioning among other things Paglia and you are saying the Koch Brothers are vouching for Paglia??? This is as silly as the Soros hysteria on the right.
Quoting Maw
Oh brother, this is starting to sound as delusional as some Alex Jones following Trump supporter.
Yeah, obviously it has been the white supremacist alt-right that has lured the innocent students to protest/deplatform people at campuses in order to get more clicks. :joke:
Um, the article literally says this at the bottom of it:
"This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."
Which was also appended to the original article posted, it should be noted.
Are the Koch Brothers vouching for Camille Paglia? Are they funding her?
Or would it be Tom Nichols, the writer of the article?
Or the actually, the Atlantic???
If you want your 'alt-right' culprit, it would be the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:
See The Atlantic Begins “The Speech Wars” Reporting Project
"This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."
Is reality bullshit? Why are you dancing around this?
First, the article takes Paglia as an example, but it also takes professor Samuel Abrams. To infer then that Paglia is vouched by Koch Brothers is a long shot. So long, that it goes to the Alex Jones -type of conspiracy. That is my point.
If you want to describe the 'evil workings' of the Koch brothers, then far better to talk about the actual project they are funding, which I referred above.
Did anyone say that 'Paglia is vouched by Koch Brothers'? [sic]
Here's what Maw said:
"The Atlantic published another article on Camille Paglia paid for by the Koch Brothers."
Here's what I said, paraphrasing Maw:
"They're paying for - or at least funding - an article on Camille Paglia".
Because of a byline that reads:
""This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."
Maybe should you reassess the relevance - or complete lack-thereof - of 'your point'?
I don't really want to get on the wrong side of this, because I'd happily see the Koch brothers pistol-whipped, but this hysteria (of maw's, not you) does not help and I think ssu is (sort of) right to call it out. What was actually said was...
Quoting Maw
...if the claim really was just that the Koch brothers paid for a series of articles to be produced about a topic they are politically in favour of, then why "Just incredible"? What on earth is incredible about a company funding a series of articles?
To then say...
Quoting Maw
...is the conspiratorial part which seems to me to qualifiy the use of "incredible".
I may be completely misjudging maw's comment, but it did sound to me like an accusation that the Koch brothers incited the whole incident - controversial comment>kick back from liberal students>complaints about 'suppression'>article in the press.
I think that is a bit far-fetched, but, as I said, maybe I've read too much into the unusual appearance of the the term "just incredible"?
Isn't that a bit overreaching conclusions? It is really similar like the conspiraty-theorists in the right.
I'll take an example: George Soros has given money to associations that some are close to Black Live Matters. And OMG! All the hubbub around that in the right. It is similar to think that the Koch brothers are funding articles about Camille Paglia.
This conspiracy bullshit of billionaires meddling through journal articles (because they have given money to the institutions) is simply silly.
At the risk of just pissing everyone off by disagreeing with all sides, do you really think it's "silly" to think that billionaires don't just donate their money and then walk away?
I'm with you as far as it being rather ludicrous that the Koch brothers somehow cooked up the whole Paglia incident as part of a right-wing conspiricy to generate stories about the erosion of 'free-speech', but to think they'd have no influence at all on the contents of the articles they find might be going too far the other way, no?
Is it cynical or paranoid to say that maybe the whole point of an article about Paglia with a Koch thing at the bottom is for a [maw] to post it, disgusted, and an [ssu] to counter it and a whole bunch of others who want to chime in (me included), reading it, click, click, click.
The article seems designed to be culture war fodder.
[incendiary paragraph]
[controversial paragraph ]
'introducing the 2019 chevy blazer.'
[ a paragraph that's just outrageous]
[Charles Koch, can you believe it?? link to show you're justifiably mad!]
'Sofi: no hidden fees on your student loan refi'
Maw, here, is standard issue Internet Leftist rage, tapped into a flagrant sense of intellectual and moral superiority. SSU, here, is standard issue erstwhile-centrist-liberal-now-battling-left-excesses-thereby-inexorably-becoming-right-as-leftists-just-get-more-and-more-ridiculous. i'm standard issue 'this is all just spectacle' buttressing my 'above it allness' at the expense of engagement.
But isn't it nauseating to be playing out types so exactly?? Don't you guys feel as gross as I do here??
To win the culture war is not to be on a particular 'side'; it's to shape what counts as a side to begin with. And that's the function of articles like that - to define the debate, as much as come down on a side of it.
Yeah, that I can definitely see being the case, so perhaps I did read maw's comment wrong afterall, if that was the limit of the implication.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is very true. So much of this is rallying cry dressed up as discussion. I imagine it like Wittgenstein's amorphous patches of colour grading into one another, with similar political groupings being the coloured shapes. Sometimes although the edge is hazy, it's clear enough to draw a rough line around and not be completely wrong, but most of the time it's more like the colours grade smoothly into one another and we couldn't really draw a line around any homogeneous group to distinguish it from another. Articles, speeches and the like are all about drawing the line anyway and hopefully making it so bold as to detract everyone's attention from the fact that they've just located it arbitrarily.
All well defined, have to say.
(Of course I've never seen myself as a centrist liberal at all, but as coming from a socialist nanny-state that Bernie Sanders praises sometimes and not from North America, that definition can be understood)
I tried to make a similar point here.
Only time will tell.
Quoting Isaac
Which specific institutions enabled Shapiro?
Shapiro basically clawed his way to notoriety over the last decade through mostly his own effort. I'm not aware of any major reason for his success other than his hard work and his ideas. (Before he became famous, he was making rounds on obscure media sites like "Blog-Talk-Radio", and slowly building his audience and body of rhetoric).
The thing about Shapiro is that he is actually persuasive to a huge number of people. You might feel like he is just singing the same old conservative song, but the way he sings it allows him to go viral; he seems to be mostly self-made...
Quoting Isaac
Let's assume for a moment that physical force is a normal tool of political speech: so we go and shut down Shapiro's event by force, and any other event that espouses ideas we don't like.
But what will we say when a large group of Trump supporters shows up to shut down one of our progressive events? Throughout American history, liberal and progressive movements have often had to deal with violent push back from supporters of the status quo who also believed that might makes political right, and this is one of things we've been rebuking since the French and American revolutions (which though themselves used force, were also direct responses to force).
What you're suggesting will inexorably lead to increasingly violent conflicts as both sides convince themselves that they're ethically justified to use force. Your justification seems to be that wealthy individuals and corporations are able to purchase political influence, and therefore wealth inequality warrants the use of force as an equalizer. The problem with this is that there is wealth being spent on both ends of the political spectrum (often by the same groups), so the use of violence on one side also justifies the use of violence by the other side.
Quoting Isaac
Is it really fair to assume that Shapiro has nothing rational or original to say, and that since he is only rabble-rousing to gather physical force, we ought to use physical force against him/them?
I find most of Shairo's rhetoric to be polemic, misleading, and insidious (though there are some basic things we agree on), but he does actually make arguments and engage in political suasion. If we ignore what he has to say and insist he is just a bogeyman to be de-platformed, we're actually living up to his caricature of the left. Shapiro uses ideas to appeal to emotions, and if we respond to his followers with threats, we're just going to entrench and validate their emotions.
Quoting Isaac
I disagree.
The alt-right exists as a mostly reactionary movement (and to be fair, Shapiro tries to distance himself from it) that started as a rejection of identity politics, but eventually began reciprocating the tactics of the left, which now happily appeals to race and gender as a means to credibility (instead of claiming to champion non-white and marginalized identity groups, the alt-right claims to be the champion of straight white men). Once "Antifa" caught a whiff of their rhetoric, they decided that violent opposition was the way to go, which ironically caused the alt right to galvanize into the "culture war fighting" white supremacist cluster of fear driven lunatics and opportunistic con-men that it now is.
If we start attacking Shapiro events as a matter of course, don't you think that's going to cause some kind of response?
This is how we get violent clashes between opposing mobs, which is decidedly unproductive. The radical left created the alt-right.
Quoting Isaac
This is such a strange perspective. Leftists have money too, so does that mean the poor Trump supporters of Appalachia should take up the use of force to prevent their region from being associated with political enemies?
We fund leftist representatives, and given they have more money and platforms than the whining right wing masses, the same argument can easily apply from their perspective.
It sounds like your position derives from a deeply seated dissatisfaction with the "status quo", which makes you willing to forego democracy and the rule of law in order to bring about change, but if Shapiro is high on your list of enemies regarding "the status quo", then I think you're sorely mistaken (and as I have been saying since the beginning, responding to the likes of Shapiro with force almost always backfires by giving them attention and by apparently fulfilling his self-trolling prophecies of "cultural marxism" and the like).
Quoting Isaac
Which status quo?
In my view, Shapiro does not represent the status quo (evidenced by the fact that corporate PR departments wont touch him with a 39 & 1/2 foot pole). The status quo is more money for more money, and unless we have some kind of massive economic reform there's going to be no change to the economic plights of the middle and lower classes of all colors and creeds. The Besos and the Zucherbergs of the world claim to be progressive, but they act like psychopaths in the way they manage their ultra-powerful corporations. The Koch brothers are one thing, with their spider-web like funding of propaganda, but a corporation that can fundamentally control the landscape of our collective psychology, or extort entire nations for exorbitant profits by threatening to withhold their crucial business, are problems of an entirely different magnitude.
Shapiro, to me, is like one of those annoying midges whose high-pitched buzz is too close to our ears, but Facebook et al. is the swamp in our front yard that generates them in the first place (and worse). We need reform of such magnitude that fighting these polemic and niche battles with the likes of Shapiro or Paglia would be a waste of time even if the left knew how fight them successfully. But by constantly defining other political groups as the enemy, and giving up all hope of cooperation or compromise, we're simply dividing and conquering ourselves.
I say this as a person who spends far too much of their time on the internet, but I say it with conviction.
The commodification of discourse comes along with the equation of discourse with politics. When one establishes a marketplace of ideas, attention is the currency, and attention generates revenue; it also generates more of itself. Along with content curation, this encourages clickbait both algorithmically through internet architectures of persuasion and emotionally by appealing to one's position in discourse and thereby retroactively identifying it (see previous post).
The overall social architecture that leads to commodified discourse is one where the items in it are marketable content, and labour is done to catch the eyes of your (largely involuntarily assigned) consumer base. That is to say, we're all working for Facebook and Twitter now.
This requires a coupling of ad-broker information gatekeepers with the conditions of possibility for expression; if Heidegger were still alive today, he might've said 'Twitter speaks man!' or 'Facebook is the House of Being'. This is true insofar as the conditions for expressing an opinion or otherwise reacting/contributing to public discourse must be done through an interface which can only exist so long as your opinions and potential expressions are bought and sold. Of course, this comes along with the alienated series of images we all know and love, for discretisation allows information to be sold by the unit.
What facilitates this, and accelerates the process of turning humans into retrojected consumer identities, are the algorithms which curate content exposure based on advertising/consumer profiles. That these consumer profiles can be of (or correlate with) political identity manifests in the troubling pigeonholing of expressions during the discourse which concerns itself with the norms of expression and social conduct.
Most of this is severed from institutional levers, and it is in the interest of those who enjoy meetings behind closed doors for there to be channels for expression of political foment alienated from actual political mobilisation and logistics. In terms of emergent strategy and management of political activity, social media functions like a heat sink for political zeal, trapping people into political consumer identities which are alienated from their own political interests, and alienated from other consumer identities in a way which generates more attention (and thus more revenue). Conflict is lucrative, so make speech a battlefield.
The Vampire Castle is more than the reduction of productive thought to reactionary clickbait, it's a festering wound in the prospect of political organisation along shared interest. It substitutes a representation for what it represents; the representation of the political is equated with the politics of representation.
That is to say, politics tout court.
So how do we leave the vampire castle and move away from this virtual-real-politik?
How can we mature while trapped in the fun-house?
It seems like a catch-22: We need self-control to be able to coherently organize and institute reform and accountability measures, but reform and accountability measures are about the only thing that could help us regain our self-control and democratic composure in the first place.
Second, encapsulated by @StreetlightX's point, is that the Koch Foundation is funding projects that magnify issues that are ultimately exaggerated in order to shape what is debated in the public sphere. Issues that are discussed on a national, well-respected publication is necessarily a zero-sum game. One conversation regarding a societal problem is platformed at the expense of another. It is given prerogative over other issues that plague society. This is even more true when issue is serialized. And the debate over campus speech is typically positioned as a problem generated by "regressive" Leftist students. Despite @ssu 's continued spurning of the Koch Brother's extremely well-documented influence in politics via "covert operations" the objective of which is to "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action". Often known as the "Kochtopus", the ultimate end goal has been to deregulate their industry and maximize their profits by promoting libertarian talking points. There's no conspiracy, it's merely capitalists using their capital to ensure they can continue to generate more capital by shifting what the public is discussing (viz. that it is not focused on progressive taxation, universal healthcare, regulation, worker rights, etc.), funding think tanks to promote libertarian political philosophy, donating money, dark or overt, to Republican politicians and their campaigns, while also, as @csalisbury noted here, hoping that continuously promoting conversation around campus protest moves centrists closer to the right.
As per my further comment on how campus speech issues have become a way to enhance one's public profile, this is true for both individuals ( and even Universities). The steps are fairly simple. Call yourself a provocateur and tour college campuses with lectures titled "Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes", or "The Dangerous Faggot". Then, when you inevitably face backlash because students aren't thrilled their college has decided to waste money on you visiting to discuss things like why "Muslims shouldn't be allowed in the USA" or that "feminism is worse than cancer", you can write about your traumatic experience, or have others write about you, on how the Left is so deeply intolerant and totalitarian.
Mmm, the best part! Watching cherub-faced liberal dupes then vomit out defenses of free-speech in response (oh so enlightened, oh so sophisticated), while playing right into the hands of those happy to watch them safeguard their dirty work. And you don't even have to pay them. They'll do it out of the sanctity their own rightous good-guy soooo-not-mainstream convictions. An unpaid force of mercenary enablers. It's a maddeningly effective cycle.
If you mean like this, sure. Cold war people may have gone beyond that, but the poor have demonstrated a strong willingness to vote against their own interests in our time. And a couple of billionaires have come forward, exposing and complaining about the way the system is supporting them at the expense of others. This isn't Cold War in other words.
I hope you are feeling better now.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Publishers, corporations supporting advert-funded media like Breibart and YouTube, and funding foundations like the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Really? So, the publishers published his books purely out of recognition of his hard work and ideas, and not becausethey thought the books would earn them a pack of money? Breibart made him editor purely because of his hard work, and would have done so even if their corporate advertisers were opposed to it?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is what you're not seeing. The first part of this coupling is not some naturally occurring state of affairs. It is a deliberate structure. There is a reason why Shapiro 'singing' the way he does goes viral, and some dry climate scientist talking about ocean heat-stores doesn't. Its not random, it's designed that way (largely but not exclusively, to generate income for the platforms concerned).
This means that it is simply impossible to promote some messages (mostly moderate, or anti-commercial ones) in the way Shapiro can promote his. It's not a level playing field.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I'm not really talking about the sort of progressive event that Trump supporters might turn up to shut down. I'm talking about the dull, but factual communication of things like economic policy, climate science.... Trump supporters don't have to turn up to shut these messages down. They they're already shut down. Who wants to publish a news story about the fact that the poor are still just as poor as they always were? Who wants to tweet about a rally to encourage the same economic policy we've all know is probably best in the long term but still haven't done yet? Who's going to advertise and provide commercial support for the message that we should all just buy less, including from our kind sponsor?
These messages already have their means of being shut down - lack of funding, lack of interest, lack of media support.
Shapiro can't be combated by these means, he has the funding, has the media support, has the interest. So do we just allow the unlevelled field?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
To an extent, yes. Though I wouldn't advocate extreme violence, but that's not because I think the other side will follow suit, it's because avoidance of extreme violence is one of the things I'd be standing for in the first place. It'd be like using racism to combat a racist.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Your making a presumption about whose 'side' I'm arguing in favour of. I disagree with a substantial proportion of the student protestors, as is clear if you've read my comments about Paglia. I'm arguing in favour of the principle that unless we level the playing field, then it is unreasonable to expect one side to limit its tactics and allow the other to keep all its weapons unfettered. If both sides have equal access to all the same weapons, then great, but that is simply not the case. The generic 'left' might have some money behind them. The generic 'right' undoubtedly has more, but the specific "this is my campus and I don't want you rabble-rousing on it" are not funded by anyone.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, basically. I'm of the view that rational argument proceeds from shared premises, and that the conclusions can only be rationally countered on the basis of the inferences drawn between premises. One cannot rationally discuss the premises themselves unless they are rational conclusions drawn fro higher order shared premises, and were merely being assumed for the sake of argument.
Shapiro has been demonstrated on dozens of occasions to work from premises which are factually incorrect. He makes frequent assertions about moral rights and wrongs (which cannot be rationally countered) and the vast majority of what I've heard has been statements about states of affairs, not rational inferences. I may be exposed to an unfortunate selection of his work, but thus far I've encountered very little to argue against other than to say "no".
Quoting VagabondSpectre
That may or may not be the case, but I'm not talking about either group.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not a million miles off. I don't vote and I don't obey the law, so I suppose you're right in those respects, but I think your and my deninitions of what constitutes the 'status quo' may differ radically. Ben Shapiro is just as much a part of the 'status quo' I'm referring to as Facebook, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders are.
Csalisbury's totally accurate description of you above (and me) are so spot on that it's now just entertainment for others for us to continue this extremely stereotypical debate.
Quoting Maw
Your utter inability to see how exactly similar your argumentation is to the right-wing hysterical outrage against Soros, even with similar figures of speech like reference to an octopus with it's tentacles everywhere and 'covert operations', is so telling that it's funny. Just change the names and change it from libertarian talking points to liberal/leftist talking points and it's exactly what you find among Breitbart following Trump fans.
Like to berries... or more correctly two strangling octopuses:
Quoting Maw
Don't forget sending emails like 'urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween'. Oh those devious ways the evil alt-right gets innocent students to play along and get that angry response they have planned for!
Of course the campus nonsense hasn't been picked up in mainstream news as it hasn't become Trump's trump card like the kneeling NFL players or flag burning at the time of Bush senior (if I remember correctly), but that doesn't apparently matter.
Honestly? You don't. Social media has great potential to allow international organisation.
You also have to recognise that people who are actually on the far right don't give much of a shit whether their ideas are right or wrong, they care a lot more about whether people are broadcasting their message for recruitment purposes, and care a lot about marketing. This is part of why you find so many liberals defending the far right, or assholes like Shapiro and Milleanopolusapalalalais or whatever the fuck that guy's name is, not because they're defending the content of the ideas - but because they care that they are possible to express.
All you need to do is pay lip service to individual freedoms, and it is only lip service - remember these people actually want most of us not to exist -, being curtailed by 'hordes of irrational leftists'... then you get liberals defending the right from a left wing conspiracy.
A liberal won't even realise they're doing this, most of the time. This focus on optics and the understanding of viral marketing, as well as playing on structural weaknesses in liberal discourse (even liberal politics), is why the right is disproportionately influential on the internet.
Even if it's not a far right ideologue, the liberal sympathy for freedom of speech is being leveraged by these goons to get lots of money and idea exposure.
Remember, protests, deplatforming, critique are just as much a part of free speech as anti-protests, platforming and political program advancement. What matters is who, why and how much power they can mobilise.
I should probably say though, the suspicions I raised in the previous post aren't always appropriate. The forum here, for example, is exactly the kind of space where nuance thrives. What I really wanted to emphasise is that instead of lamenting the lack of nuance in reactionary media, we instead treat it as a medium that nuance suffers in and go from there.
I think Shapiro was the youngest ever syndicated columnist, and he's been a political pundit for over a decade (he's written 10 books since age 17). Strictly speaking, publishers will only publish if they think they stand to make money, and Brietbart hired him because of his notoriety (where political alignment is a pre-requisite)
Quoting Isaac
Climate science and economic policy are hot topics of late, even in some right wing circles. "The New Green Deal" might interest you. Bernie is running on a campaign of corporate accountability and economic reform, which I don't take as insignificant.
You're making it seem like Breitbart, Monsanto, et al.represent the average political agenda, when in reality they're political pariahs (In different ways). They certainly do represent the agenda of profit, but that agenda is somewhat a-political in that they don't care which politician gets elected (or which editors they hire), so long as they support beneficial policies for corporations (or in the case of Breitbart and its editors, so long as they bring notoriety and clicks, which is the product they sell to advertisers). Broadly speaking, there's a new corporate sustainability movement that is driving just about every major corporation to develop sustainability/green initiatives, but this is largely just a PR measure in response to rising public concern. Corporations don't actually want to spend money on minimizing pollution or giving back to the community because it affects their bottom line, but they're learning that we'll damage their bottom line even more through social sanctions if they do not. In reality, if they are able to do so, corporations will claim to spearhead and represent sustainability initiatives while actually subverting them (they derail our reform movements with superficial bull-shit). I just find it strange that you view Shapiro as a hero of corporate interest when most of what he says has very little to do with policies affecting corporate profits (he deals in petty moralizing mostly). I'm much more worried about the Zuckerbergs, the Musks, the Besos, the Dorseys, the Cooks, and the rest, who have the gall to pretend that we can trust them or that they're looking out for our interests; that if given the choice between profits and the right thing, they'll do the right thing. That's not how they got where they are, and it's not where they're going, even if they're self-deluded enough to believe it.
The real difference between our views regarding Shapiro is that I don't see Shapiro as having wide-spread "media support" beyond the fact that algorithms favor his polemics. In the realm of mainstream news, Shapiro and his ideas are somewhat ignored and avoided, where his best exposure (that I know of) comes from videos uploaded to Youtube ("take-down" or "destroy-the-libs" videos) which are vastly persuasive to the philosophically and politically uninitiated. Whether I like to admit it or not, Shapiro is an amazingly persuasive and attention-getting speaker (that's his value), and while he may be yet another in a long line of talking-shit-heads, somehow we've got to confront the persuasive elements of his rhetoric directly. Force and censorship simply won't work against him (it energizes his existing base), so really the only option is to beat him at his own game. It's a lame and difficult task, but it is an absolutely necessary one.
Quoting Isaac
I think civil protest and disobedience is almost always more effective (even when you're fighting an enemy that has all the power (perhaps especially then)). But the other issue with the force approach (I'm starting to sound like a broken record) is that it will just engender the use of force by the other side. In other words, it escalates our conflict beyond what words, ideas, and reason can overcome, and more and more force becomes strategically necessary. As with the adversarial system we use in courts, if one litigant crosses the isle to assault the other side, there's a significantly reduced chance of the proceedings leading to a useful outcome. Maybe it's fair to say that the other side as already crossed the isle and uses unjust force against us, but even if that is the case, I still think it would be more effective not to reciprocate that force. Taking the higher moral ground against force and violence through a civil disobedience approach requires real sacrifice, but it actually works.
Quoting Isaac
Where he selects faulty premises, challenge them (in the most persuasive manner you can). Shapiro is highly practiced, and countering his gish gallop ain't easy, but it's doable. Many people here think that if you're engaging Shapiro in the first place then you've already lost, but if countering his actual rhetoric is of value, then someone has inevitably got to do it. The corporate status quo that I'm more concerned with is somewhat removed from Shapiro's sphere of influence (I'm open to corrections on this point) which is why I don't view him to be quite as pernicious as some suggest, but if I'm wrong, then directly addressing and overcoming his rhetoric is of even higher importance.
Quoting Isaac
I think is shows the most contrast between our positions. I'm still willing to gamble on politicians that I have more trust in (Bernie being infinitely more trustworthy than Hillary). In a sense, Shapiro is like Facebook's useful idiot in the way he polarizes us all (nudging us into disparate political boxes that represent powerfully accurate market segments) in a way that makes it easier to exploit our political angst with learning algorithms. I still hold out hope that governments will be able to control these wildly powerful corporations (and mitigate their recklessness), or else we're in for a very dystopian future indeed.
I would describe myself as yet reformist rather than revolutionary.
I think this holds true for hardened figures within the alt right who care more about growing their following than they do about being right (Richard Spencer is a primary example of this; I don't think he believes a word of what he says, it's just his meal/fame ticket), but the people that they recruit are persuaded by the specific rhetoric. If we can't sway alt-right leaders, at least we can sway their followers (and we really ought to try).
Quoting fdrake
I view the alt-right-at-large as less of a marketing mastermind, and more as a lucky opportunist. Elements within the broad Left do have some significant ideological issues, and they make for more fodder and fuel than Shapiro and his ilk could ever exhaust. Figures in the left are generally too vulnerable to controversy, so when it comes to the alt-right in particular there's almost never any direct exchange. People like Shapiro who are considered alt-right-adjacent are indeed getting exorbitant exposure, but I don't think they could sustain it unless they were somehow appealing to a large number of people (especially the digitized youth). Given the current strength of appealing to identity (and given the current demographics of America), it's not at all surprising to me that the left is losing its broad appeal compared to Shapiro the rebel.
Quoting fdrake
Quoting fdrake
I'm very reluctant to embrace the death of nuance in any political arena. I just can't accept that we've come back to Jacksonian rabble-rousing, and that it's either rabble or get rabbled. In mediums like Twitter it inherently can't be otherwise, but I think embracing that approach will blur and bleed into settings where nuance should be the focus. For example, our forum has probably seen a rise in ideological grand-standing in place of dialogue, and on university campuses (where nuance is what they're there to learn) I think it's equally important that ideas be met with ideas rather than a mobilization of force. We're better off abandoning media like Facebook and Twitter entirely as meaningful political arenas.
I wholeheartedly support protests, but not when they use force to interfere with the rights of others.
If you took five seconds to Google it, you would see that articles about the Yale Halloween costume controversy were published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Time Magazine, Slate, etc.. That a minor concern affecting no more than 6,000 students was discussed numerous times in a variety of well-respected publications demonstrates how absurdly perverted The Discourse is.
Quoting ssu
ssu, you demonstrably have severe reading difficulties and prefer to resort to crass 'both siderism' in lieu of anything beyond a nine-year-old level of intelligence. Thanks to this enlightened centrism ideology your brain keeps churning out, like a rusting meat grinder, you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between the network operations as exposed by a "Breitbart following Trump fan" and by an actual investigative journalist who has worked at the New Yorker for over 20 years and who has received a wide array of awards for her work, including the George Polk Prize, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, and the Frances Perkins Prize for Courage, and whose critically acclaimed 500+ page book, Dark Money, which was a finalist for numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize, reveals how the Koch Brothers have spent 40+ years pouring money into organizations, think tanks, universities, politicians, and now serialized articles on The Atlantic covering topics that have profound and immediate effect on the average American...Camille Paglia getting fired because she said a University shouldn't tolerate a rape accusation from a women if occurred over six months ago, in order to, in David Koch's own words, "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action".
No, instead your extremely broken brain has decided that these two are actually equivocal, because apparently any issue the Left brings up automatically requires an ersatz right-wing counterpart in a shit-brained attempt to negate it.
Absolutely! As demonstrated by David Frum and Hilary Clinton. If we liberals don't do the fascism then the fascists will do the fascism!
Roger Scruton is not a racist, this is a return of the negative left as described in Terry Eagleton about the topic he really got the sack for.... the C word.... Culture in doing so he destroys the pet project of nobody academics to try and make 2019 like something nostalgic from the 60's only it won't be the Californian Summer of 1969 but the revolutionary France in May 1968.
Roger Scruton was a reasonable proponent of a traditional conservatism that is the very antithesis of this project and one that is appealing to many in a project of humanism, aesthetics, uplifting history a Transcendence in principle. I am not a Roger Scruton fan, per say but I do admit his ideas have some kind of appeal. How would the self described wokeful, but truly woeful for their entire game is to see whom can cry more over human suffering to derive a sense of authenticity. How could they the woeful allow Roger Scruton to lecture proverbially or literally right next door.
It is more surprising that this kind of shit is still a surprise as Roger Scruton is just another great man taken for a ride by Orwellian Speech Codes and Academic Tribunal... Roger Scruton is the 2019 winner of the Tim Hunt award.
???And the Washington Post, NPR, CBS... what on Earth is your point?
Quoting Maw
Well, absurd events simply do make it to the papers. Just as the Evergreen nonsense did. People do think that universities are important. Hence something happening at like Ivy League Yale does break the news barrier unlike some Mid-Western community college might not. And these kind of incidents people do find absurd. It's not the most important issue of course, but we're at page 14 in a thread about Sir Roger getting sacked from some committee.
And any sane person would understand that the issue doesn't affect the 6,000 of who the vast majority don't care much about these kinds of nonsensical issues, but focus on their studies that will be a big help in their promising future careers. The issue would effect more the professors involved.
Quoting Maw
seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between ...billionaires that give money to libertarian and conservative political causes and the ones that give their money to liberal and leftist political causes.
Yes, how dare I even mention in my naivety this kind of 'both siderism'.
Yes. So none of this relates to his "hard work" at all. It's an aside, but it riles me this reference to "hard work" to imply some virtue to the top of any heirachy. I don't doubt for a minute that Shapiro works hard. It's a prerequisite for what he does. Putting your running shoes on is a prerequisite for running the hundred metres, that doesn't mean that the winner won because they put their running shoes on, they all did that. Loads of wannabe pundits work hard. The question is why, out of the pool of pundits all working hard, did Shapiro rise to fame. The answer to that, I'm claiming, is that his ideas were controversial enough to commodities, and supportive enough of industry to attract funding. Not because lots of people were persuaded by he logic of his arguments.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes OK, it's not obvious and would take a significant amount of explaining, some of which fdrake has already done. I'll give you the very potted version. Corporations rely for their profits on selling us 'stuff'; but we don't need any more 'stuff', no one in their right mind actually wants a plastic watering can that plays God Save the Queen every time your plants need watering (or whatever other throw-away crap they're selling). So what's to be done? You have to turn the consumer base into exactly the kind of un-thinking moron who would. Shapiro, Facebook, the 'green movement'...are all just part of that scheme.
Its not tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theory though. I don't think anyone is pulling the strings, it's just the natural consequence of everyone doing their jobs.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I actually think this is where we differ (as I agree Shapiro's influence is minor). I don't think there are any persuasive element to his rhetoric. His "game" is to act as a rallying post for the sorts of vaguely right-wing positions he espouses and he does this exactly by lending them faux-intellectual rigour. It's this method that I feel so strongly about preventing. Neither you nor I will ever be invited to speak at Berkeley, yet I've no doubt either of us would be able to dismantle Shapiro's reasoning relatively easily.
It's this tendency for fame to justify a platform to speak that I'm opposed to, and debating with him doesn't solve that problem because the moment you debate, you've accepted his right to a place at the table. A right denied to you and I. The implication then, is that he has something more worthy of listening to than you or I do. Now, no matter what happens at the debate, the damage has been done. His ideas have been lent at least the legitimacy to be allowed a place at the table.
If we really did have an open platform where everyone had an equal opportunity to be heard, then I would not be in favour of denying access to that platform in any way, but we don't. We have platforms like universities and newspapers where barriers are purportedly in place to prevent certain people from speaking (namely those without any reason to think their contribution might be useful, usually academic qualification). So allowing someone in to these places already says something about their ideas, before the debate is even had.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I think I understand what you're saying here up to the point of escalation. If the "other side" really are just waiting for "our side" to set the rules of the game (still not sure why they would be, but going with it for now), then surely barricading a lecture theatre would only lead to barricading lecture theatres. Escalation requires that the "other side" respond, not in kind, but over and above, which implies they're not really watching us to establish the "rules of the game" at all.
You're still drawing an arbitrary line at physical force that I don't see your reasoning for. Let's say all responses can be given a number from one to ten representing the 'intensity' and the aim is not to get to 10. Say, for the sake of argument, physically blocking a lecture theatre is a 6. Staging a sit-in, or being verbally disruptive a 4, and just disputing his arguments rationally a 2. I can only see two possible scenarios...
1. The other side only ever responds exactly in kind - in this case, as long as your physical response stays below 10, so will theirs.
2. The other side have a tendency to respond higher than your last action - in this case they're going to move to a 6 (first physical response) in response to your 5. So 5's must be avoided. And we end up with a hangman's paradox.
I definitely agree with this. If someone actually demonstrates good faith, they deserve responses in good faith. This is a benefit of a long form discussion forum like this one, we can weed out crap and get better at slinging crap laced with pearls.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Absolutely, inconsistencies and holes in the left are there. Whining hypocrites and wounded masculinity make a nice little niche for public figures to exploit. Specifically talking about the radical left (conscript reporting), an absence of a popular emancipatory left project in politics; buttressed by our narrow minded focus on systemic critique; is definitely fuel for this, even after all the stupid simplifications and reactionary noise have been filtered out. We generally focus on broad things without the rhetorical flourish to make sweeping statements catch on - though there are some ok examples here. The Jacobin magazine definitely tries for style points, even though it's addressed to 'the crowd' which find the Communist Manifesto an inspiring document already... Chapo Trap House and Left youtube (Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube, Hbomberguy, Shaun and InnuendoStudios to name the major figures) are addressing this hole and, by the looks of it, actually having a positive effect through their excellent mockery and long form, funny, video essays respectively.
Identity's a hot topic, really the beating heart of our political discourse, and how we think of ideological allegiance along identity lines has to change when we're talking about contemporary discourse. From the algorithms and faultlines of power, we end up in a position where correlated clusters of ideas matter more than robust inferential systems of coherent beliefs. These correlated clusters do not necessarily reflect real world political projects that would be beneficial to the identity groups and help them stymie the unjust power differentials they inhabit. Consider, a rapper like Lowkey or Immortal Technique is more likely to inspire political conscience in someone than the plans of a seasoned economic tactician like Varifoukas.
But that systems of ideas become correlative rather than inferential is actually a response to the globalisation of political discourse, and its centralising focus on American and European power. Our local politics come to have the same limitations every other local suffers from, and the ambiguity inherent in whether isolated responses can address any large scale political problem renders the specifics uncertain, but the broad themes and broad issues are readily apparent. In this condition, organising in terms of form rather than content is required; political schemas for global issues are approximately independent of any local action but are completely determined by the joint aggregate. So we're in a position that requires the analysis of global issues with global responses; climate change, the decline of the sovereign power of the nation state in response to the growth of influence of international industry and finance. Talk, here, aggregates and stereotypes, it reduces discussion of the specifics to the discussion of the specifics of dominant powers (a point that @ssu's expressed frustration with several times). We need to accept this as the political reality of discourse insofar as it is global, but nevertheless try to organise locally in ways that contribute to addressing the global problems we all face.
For me, the important question is not really how to rehabilitate discourse, but how to use its shifted form to correlate action internationally so we can address the global problems we face. This requires broad correspondence between communities irrespective of national lines; the brutality the global south faces when it tries to organise should be resisted in the home of the companies that brutality benefits as well as at the scene of our daily humanitarian disasters. Social media could let us do that.
We might look to thinkers like Garvey or Bordiga for inspiration.
I don't deny that he believes in what he says. What I'm trying to say is that how his message propagates isn't really to do with its truth, it's to do with aesthetic appeal and a comforting narrative. If someone's going to deny the Holocaust, for example, you can't do much to shift their denial through reasoned argument most of the time; and how people come to believe it is not through reasoned argument using reliable sources.
You-tube seems like the perfect microcosm of the broader political scene. Those obscure Youtube pundits actually seem to get more play than almost anything else, and a lot of times they do a very good job of it. Youtube is home to pundits of all persuasions, and following clashes and interactions between them can actually be quite revealing about the broader real-time political spectrum. Given that Youtube is 99% grass-roots, issues tend to appear there before they get picked up or mowed down by the mainstream. In that sense, social media like Youtube does seem to have some merit, but at the same time unless you know how to cross the boundaries of Youtube's sub-networks it can be just as much of an echo chamber as anywhere else.
Quoting fdrake
I think I get what you mean. You would have us use the cognitive exploits that social media makes available to overcome our creeping existential threats. But how can we wield the dark magic of social media without being influenced and manipulated by corporate psychopathy?
This is, I think, a necessary part of a winning strategy, but it's missing something. The left and the right are already in maximum pander mode, and there's not much more either side could do to improve their optics (except maybe learning how to persuade the other side instead of offending them). At this point, the more we pander to one side, the more we offend the other. I would say the solution is to pander to both sides, but that inherently doesn't work (hence, sides). The only things that can really bridge this kind of divide are facts and reason which can't be easily ignored or misunderstood. I realize how naive that sounds, as if "facts" have hold any sway these days, but if you present the right facts in the right way they are still effective tools. As idiotic as we tend to behave in groups, individuals are almost always smarter than we give them credit for, which is where cold hard facts and well supported arguments are absolutely vital.
Being able to successfully organize and take action against our globalized disasters is made more and more difficult by petty polarization that distracts and entrenches us, so we should be putting some limits in how much we're willing to favor form over content if too much direct emphasis on form leads to greater polarization. The alt-right is primarily a symptom of our susceptibility to form over rational function, so in the sense that such aesthetic appeals have become normalized as rational merit, I do think our discourse needs rehabilitation.
Quoting fdrake
You're absolutely right, but they do come to believe it through a series of cognitive steps which if, are well understood, can be effectively challenged and undermined. It's true that to actually dissuade a holocaust denier, a "white ethno-nationalist", or someone who propagates a conspiracy theory alleging global "Jewish control of all media, militaries, and finances", that we're going to have to pull the right emotional strings (where solid evidence alone won't do much), but form and emotion alone almost never get the job done (and can be reversed with a change of mood). Actually dissuading these types in practice is nearly impossible without a thorough grasp of their platform, its supporting beliefs, and their underlying emotions (along with a wide range of material that is included among their many and often fallacious appeals). It simply can't be done without meeting them on a level they can actually understand and relate to, and it often can only happen between individuals (there are very few open debates about such topics because they are so uncouth, but they do happen). It's a very messy affair, and other than maybe wising up as they age, it's the only way to actually dispossess them of their delusions. Shapiro's ideas, which are less dangerous, better formed, but just as polarizing and irritating, require the same robust and personal redress if we're to pull his followers closer to the middle.
The three specific delusional positions I mentioned share many common roots, the deepest of which are fear and paranoia. The alt-right-at-large is a mostly flat, unsophisticated, and horizontal political structure comprised of a mix of specific and often unrelated ideas and beliefs, but all of them incite fear. If our focus on form is constantly spun as anti-white rhetoric which feeds their fear and paranoia then we should adapt our approach accordingly. If we refuse to address their positions and pursue censorship, they see it as yet more validation for their delusions. We can't sweep them under the rug, because that's where they matured in the first place, so the only solution that I see is pulling them out into the open and dealing with them directly. Their views are alien to our own, and utterly reprehensible, but they're also a part of us (many of them yet children), so we really ought to try. Even if having such debates publicly would offend the majority of us, it's the only way to truly sanitize the problematic political minority.
P.S, sorry if my response misses the mark slightly. Our discussion is so broad and similar to my parallel discussion with @Isaac that I'm starting to misplace some details with reference to previously made points.
Quoting Maw
I've listened to everything Spencer has to say, and it turned out that he just reads crowds (live-stream chat-rooms mostly) in order to maximize his number of cheers and subsequent donations. I've heard him say, and then have to recant, the most absolutely ridiculous shit because he was just reflecting the mass lunacy of the live-chat attached to the event. He may hold run-of-the-mill conservative views or typical far-right views, but his current career and business model is entirely based around maximizing the donations he gets through inlets like Youtube "super-chats" (a built in donation function), PayPal, cryptocurrency, Patreon, Hate-reon (now defunct), StreamLabs, merchandise sales, sales for his white-nationalist publishing house, and any other source of monetization that he still has access to. In short, he is a human crowdfunding algorithm catering to a niche and gullible market segment for the sake of maximizing his personal wealth.
Demonstrating his own intellectual dishonesty is actually a great way to undermine the influence he has over his followers, and even if he doesn't believe many of the things he says, the things he says still need to be debunked and rebuked (because his followers DO believe it). What makes it a mistake?
I italicized "hard work" in to imply ambiguity. I'm not trying to rally behind him, I'm just describing the fact that he is skilled (and dedicated) at what he does, which is why I think he rose through the ranks compared to others (and of course, there are niche institutions that have supported him along the way, but they don't endow him with his persuasive power).
Quoting Isaac
Look at the Youtube videos featuring his "take-downs" of "the libtards". Look at the view numbers, the ratings, and the comments. It's not just his corporate-given ubiquity that makes him successful...
Quoting Isaac
I believe that Shapiro and "god-save-the-Queen" paraphernalia are symptoms of a broader trend, not the disease itself. They may do something to reinforce the trend, but ultimately us plebeians are still to blame. Our nature makes us vulnerable to fear-based group think (and gives us an emotional need for a protector), and our technological dice-rolling has given us more powerful group-think-tools than we've ever had to contend with in the history of our species. We knew there would be unknown risks, and our apparent inability to use social media responsibly and rationally is evidently one of them. Corporations are trying to adapt to change and scale just like the rest of us, we just need to make sure they don't take the whole store in the contemporary shake-up (because given their inexorable motives, we should trust them less than anyone).
But I still-hold out a lot of hope that grass-roots initiatives still mean something (even if that is very little compared to corporate will), and I think the interests of the people can still recapture influence. Present times might be a bit of a hiccup, but the grass is also more fertile than ever as a result.
Quoting Isaac
Generally we hope that what's persuasive to us is also truthful, and much of what Shapiro says is a good example of how things can be persuasive but ultimately untruthful or inaccurate. It begs direct redress.
Quoting Isaac
Specifically (if memory serves), and I think this might be a very important point, Shapiro was invited by a conservative student union, not the University itself. He wasn't arbitrarily given platform by a respected institution, paying members of that institution rented a physical platform within it and offered it to him. If Berkeley was playing political favorites, they might simply be boycotted as a thoroughly partisan University (and students who are politically opposed to it would know not to apply and pay to attend).
Quoting Isaac
The way we respond isn't exactly linear in this respect. Certain kinds of perceived threats can invoke different flight or fight responses in different situations, but when flight is not an apparent option, the greater the perceived threat, the more likely people are to escalate a conflict to a higher level. There's seemingly no escape from the woes of modern political controversy in the contemporary world, and dissatisfaction with political outcomes on both sides are driving everyone to extremes. We can try to game-theory out the appropriate amount of force to use, but ultimately, since the less force, the more room there is for reason and reasonable persuasion, I think the ideal approach is to ourselves minimize our use of force, and to minimize the ways in which the other side can declare us a threat to themselves, which is (same as us) what drives their own use of force.
But the seductiveness of white supremacy is precisely through its "aesthetic appeal" or a "comforting narrative", i.e., there is a racial hierarchy and whites are at the top, and if a (typically young) white person is struggling economically (which of course many are), it is arguably more comforting to blame that downward social mobility towards Blacks, or Jews, or Immigrants, etc. than on yourself, or on this abstract notion of Capitalism that many people are frankly unfamiliar with, so it's unsurprising that that's the lens through which Spencer articulates the veracity of white supremacy while at the clear expense of actual reliable science or reasoned arguments, or what have you.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
But this is no different than saying that demonstrating over and over how Trump is a liar, a shit business man, or a hypocrite etc. is a great way to undermine the influence he has over his followers. It's demonstrably untrue. I also don't see why being a white supremacist means you can't simultaneous grift. I mean people like Richard Spencer still want to make a living and if you can squeeze money out of people who would gladly give it to you, you probably would. And it goes without saying that Hitler was masterful at reading and then manipulating crowds while also believing in what he was saying.
Trump is a bit of a unique case because he is impossibly low brow, and outright name-calling is the game he excels at. And to be sure, Spencer does have racist and supremacist beliefs, but he is willing to say anything that will help him get attention.
All of which suggests a direct correlation to the sort of politics involved. What's inviting is a take down of these (supposedly) wrong and inaccurate ideas of the left/liberals. This would not seem to be merely "aesthetic" bringing in viewers, but be drawing on a present desire amongst viewers to see the left/liberal understanding of society and its problems taken down.-- i.e. it's part of the white supremacist positions or sympathies already present in our culture.
This is where marketing comes in, have a look at Ben Shapiro's Channel... "Ben Shapiro Destroy" these kinds of "ask him a question..." so that he can take it down BS are the videos that get millions of views, he is more famous for telling Pierce Morgan that he stood on the graves of the children of Sandyhook than he is affirming anything specific and concrete.
As sad as it is you would probably get more inroads into writing a little peanut gallery "top ten reasons why ben Shapiro is wrong" about everything or going along to one of his live events and accusing him of being the Right's pet Jew...
Then take him to task about Israel and Palestine, get him to define how voting for Trump is voting for a free-market with tariffs, increased subsidies, etc
It isn't about being right or having a substantive point it is a marketing ploy and a niche. I do think some of his arguments though are more polished than given credit for, his movement particularly in abortion politics where he literally gave a live podcast on typical arguments and refutation... He is, in essence, sharpening the claws of his side of the debates reasoning.
In particular, his framing of the biological aspect of it outside of religious premises has been something alot of people have found compelling.
It's definitely a feature of his worldview, not a bug. If the reasons for people turning right were evidence based we'd be in a lot more trouble. You are right that responding to the extreme right is a lot more about minimising their message through actions other than argument; at least in public spaces where argument does not transmit well.
What's missing from your argument here is the mechanism by which this happens. Are you suggesting that there's some system in place which ensures everyone skilled at what they do rises through the ranks? If so, I'd be interested in what this is, if not, then we can agree that some people skilled at what they do rise through the ranks, whilst others equally skilled do not. If this is the case, then the reason Shapiro rose (as opposed to others skilled at what they do) needs to be something else.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yeah, I'm not necessarily talking about corporate-given fame. I'm talking about the very general notion of taking the arguments of pundits seriously (debating them, allowing them platforms in academic institutions), purely because they are famous. Whether that fame is corporate sponsored, or by plebiscite, is irrelevant. The point is we do not simply debate ideas on merit. If you were to counter Shapiro's arguments right now, no matter how good your argument is, it will only ever be heard by the four people who might read it here. If one of those people (by some bizzare means) happened to be Shapiro, his counter would be heard by millions. And none of this disparity is because he is more knowledgable, well-educated, better informed than you. It's because his ideas are more popular than yours.
So, it goes back to my "seat at the table" metaphor. Not everyone is going to get one. It would be a good thing for society if seats at the table were distributed on merit, but one cannot 'argue' that merit with them, it's not amenable to debate, so groups have to be able to say "no" to potential participants on the basis of the person, not the ideas.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, that's my memory too, but it doesn't change the public image, and it's the public image that matters in legitimising his ideas. It's still written up as Shapiro's "talk at Berkeley" and not Shapiro's "talk at a conservatives union (which happened to be in Berkeley)". But really, that's not the only issue. The issue is also one of who 'owns' the table. Remember, if the liberal students had just turned up to the event and rebuffed his ideas, they've already lost the battle they really wanted to fight. The battle they're fighting is "you are not one of the people who deserve a place at the table". To win their battle over who gets a place, they need to prevent him from speaking, just like you and I are already prevented from speaking.
Of course, you can argue over whose 'table' it really was, and so who had a right to be part of that battle, but that's a different argument to the one supporting someone's right to try and prevent someone from speaking on a platform they feel some ownership of.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This, I would agree with to a point. I just think things like barricading lecture theatres is sometimes the minimum amount of force required to prevent someone from abusing a platform you feel some ownership of or connection to.
I think that political ideologies aren't based in the end on evidence. They surely want portray themselves as evidence based, that is for sure.
All successful political movements rely on a "comforting narrative". I'd say the movements are especially successful when they twist something that was considered a sin by the Christian Church into a rightful virtue, something good. Hence with capitalism greed comes to a good thing as you aren't greedy but simply hard working, which then produces the income for the work been done. In a similar way, in socialism envy isn't bad as the whole issue isn't envy, you are just wanting equality and fairness.
What better way for an ideology to get support than turn sin into a virtue.
Evidence for that?
Look at any political campaign and the rhetoric used. Sure, the politician states facts, usually try to portray the positive events and trends that have happened as having been the outcome of their policies (if they have been in power). The politicians do in general give a historical viewpoint on just why they and their party should be voted in the next elections. Hence the use of facts, data and historical evidence.
But that's not all. There is also the part of simply making people feel that this is the correct party to support, that the ordinary reasonable people should vote for this party. And this is part of what Maw referred to a "comforting narrative" (if I understood Maw's point correctly that is). And naturally the other parties are vilified for being against the ordinary people and only working for special interest groups that are far from the 'ordinary people'.
That's exactly what I meant.
I think you're missing lots of nuance here, actually. There can be really big differences in severity and relevance of the narrative, especially the scapegoating parts, even if the structural logic is the same. Jeremy Corybn in the UK demonises Trump for being a racist corporate shill, Richard Spencer literally wants all the Jews and degenerates (including progressives and liberals) to die. If Corbyn got his way, Trump would have less power. If Spencer got his way, the biggest genocide in human history would start.
You can do the same thing for reactionary moralism; apply the same 'all wishes come true' to the worst excesses of 'Me too!', say; the world would hardly change other than people getting more awkward around consent (which might actually have its positives). If the Koch brothers' political machine gets its way, there will be no action towards climate change, reduced power for unions, more inequality, 'incidentally' racist policies that lead to lots of non-white kids in cages...
Perhaps I'm exaggerating a bit about the Koch brothers, but they really do invest a lot of money to get their dirty propaganda laundered through sponsored academic precision.
Yet Richard Spencer isn't mainstream and he does not portray the conservatives in the US. It's as stupid as saying that the marxist economist Richard Wolff portrays every left leaning liberal in the US. A Jeremy Corbyn (or Bernie Sanders) aren't the extreme of the left wing. Just listen to them what they actually say. Sure, you can find something if go through all of their quotes that can be portrayed as them to be extreme, but in reality either Corbyn or Sanders aren't at all extremists. (Just as one Roger Scruton isn't a dedicated Islamophobist Anti-Semite)
Quoting fdrake
Perhaps. I will repeat that they (the Koch Brothers) are exactly a similar trope for the left as Soros is for the right. Everybody hates billionaires that give money to political movements (that the people themselves oppose). It's simply a fact.
But try to understand just why the whole discourse has become in the US so vitriolic. The first reason is the political duopoly of a centrist and a right-wing party that totally dominate the whole political spectrum. It is essential for these two parties in order to dominate the whole spectrum of politics in the US to portray themselves in a bitter crucial struggle between each other. This creates a fundamentally different political environment than anywhere else.
This also makes very unique political strategies to be prevalent. One typical right wing strategy, most well seen in the strategy of the NRA, is simply to fight every inch of the way without any effort to seek a compromise. Yet this is logical in the current American political environment. It starts from the thought that there will be no compromise in the gun issue: the opposing side, the left, will not in under any circumstances be happy with any kind of consensus. Hence there will be no middle ground to be achieved in the gun control issue to be reached. The anti-gun lobby will not be pleased at some point and let it be. It is a total ban on privately owned firearms and nothing else. Hence the only logical strategy for the pro-gun lobby is fight all the way at anything all the time. So the thinking goes.
And in the end you end up with the vitriolic political environment you have today.
Dude. I know that the popular right in the US aren't Nazis. What did I say that gave you the impression that I thought they were?
Like um.... this is a thread about Roger Scruton? Why then bring up Richard Spencer?
Oh I know the answer, it's a topic you discussed with someone else that I didn't read more carefully. My bad. :yikes:
This is precisely why political discourse is so impossible nowadays, all these bloody centrists exaggerating and underplaying the potential of every side! :P
Eh, sort of. I enjoy playing the ironic distancing game about political discourse too. Though I do it while pretending to be a leftist. Sometimes I hope if I say enough left things I'll actually have a political identity.
Hannover will be disappointed. At least Maw and Bitter Crank among others are genuine leftists...hopefully!
I mean Jesus, what will be a Philosophy Forum without genuine differences in the political ideology of the active members?
Hell with those algorithm driven echo-chambers we have now!
Can't our society be even a teensy bit merit based? What if there is more than one reason for the rise of Shapiro, and among are his quick thinking and rhetorical skills?
This is an aside that doesn't count for a whole lot in our discussion, but it's not a black and white situation; it's complicated.
Quoting Isaac
But which came first, the famous chicken or the famous egg?
Quoting Isaac
If I attended a Shapiro event and get in line to ask him a question, my question would be heard by his millions of followers, as would his response. If my question challenges the merit of his political views, then he's going to have to debate their merit.
Even though I'm not entitled to Shapiro's followers, I'm still able to support pundits of my own, including a few that are willing to debate him (such as Sam Harris).
Yes, democracy is mostly a popularity contest, but should we lose, we ought not up-end the entire system; we should try to be more popular.
Quoting Isaac
You're not entitled to any seats at any tables, neither am I, and neither is Shapiro. We're all entitled to scream loudly in the wilderness, passionately on a soap box, financially through political donation, and discretely through our votes. Shapiro happens to have many seats at many tables, and we can ask ourselves why we don't have those same seats, or we could choose our own informal representative, and through mutual support, put them in a seat at one of those tables (that's what Shapiro's followers did).
Quoting Isaac
How can we justify the ethical right to decide for other citizens which political ideas are O.K or not O.K to legitimize?
Democracy is supposed to be about everyone being entitled to their opinions and their input (through the aforementioned rights, not privileges such as an invitation to speak on a campus), so aren't you kind of throwing democracy out the window by assuming that your own ideas and beliefs are the final and correct politics (or that Shapiro's conservatism should be verboten)?
Quoting Isaac
So the issue isn't just that we need to seize the property of our political enemies (because they use it to spread propaganda), it's also that we need to have them banished from the political arena and revoke their right to a political opinion?
This is how they would respond, and allowing that rebuke to go unaddressed helps to validate their caricatures of the left. If the liberal students turned up to rebuff his ideas (rather than disrupt, shut-down, silence, intimidate, and ignore) then they would not have given him the attention that has propelled him to his current level of fame, and they might have even dissuaded a few of his followers....
And of course, entering into a debate with him also means hearing his ideas, which apparently are too harmful to be heard (we run the risk of being persuaded by him!). But if his ideas aren't actually good ideas, or if our ideas are better, what the heck are we afraid of?
Quoting Isaac
"The right to try and prevent someone from speaking". I missed that one in civics class...
Quoting Isaac
There's really no feelings involved in property ownership, except maybe in some edge dispute cases (like squatters rights and such). Berkeley owned the venue (IIRC) and they legally rented it to the conservative student union. Trespassing without permission with the intention of disrupting a private event may result in both criminal and civil suits (criminal for the crimes, civil to sue for damages resulting from torts).
Do the students own Berkeley?
Quoting Isaac
I can't express just how complacent I find this position to be. From feelings to force is the story of all mankind; it encapsulates all human behavior. But in the modern world, we've created relatively sophisticated systems (moral, ethical, political, legal, rational, scientific, empirical, metaphysical, theological, secular, etc, etc, etc...) that help us navigate safely and consistently from feelings to force. We have laws protecting individual rights (such as property rights) because if we allow ourselves to act fast and loosely according to our felt connections, we're not guaranteed to behave any better than an angry mob, and we just wind up creating more problems for ourselves and everyone else. If student groups really did start to claim ownership of their universities, then many of them would promptly go out of business and liquidate their assets, because if they aren't allowed to control their own property, then they have no way of controlling their own financial and physical security.
For some reason many people here seem to think that a bit of force against right wing pundits is a callback to the American civil-rights movements of the 60's (it's not; the 60's civil rights movements were marked by dignity, not rebellious violence). In my view, it's a callback to Russia, circa 1905. Dissatisfaction with the capital-having bourgeois elites was Lenin et al.'s call to arms, and as much as I want to see economic reform and wealth redistribution, Shapiro and Berkeley have little and nothing to do with it.
As I said before, I urge you to seek reform before revolution, if only because we might not survive the latter.
Maybe, but I contend it's also an unfortunate ramification of progressive excess.
For example, when you make the argument that all white people/men are by definition "racist/sexist" because statistically they tend to benefit from a system that disproportionately distributes benefits and burdens in their favor, there's this large swath of the population (mostly young white men) who feel unfairly generalized by it, and as a result they tend to want to see such an argument rebuked (and if that rebuke can be severe, then they get emotional catharsis to boot).
Alleging that wanting to see your argument "destroyed" is evidence of supremacist tendencies only makes sense because your argument hinges on the premise of a supremacist system operating as the dominant causal factor determining all social outcomes in the first place.
It's a Kafka trap, where my denial will be evidence of my guilt. You've got to do better than that.
Opposing the left is not tantamount to white supremacy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg
Whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breath!
And where exactly does such an idea lead to in practice? The articulate members of the PC Left will surely make excuses for these excessive statements. Conservative thinkers are in the same situation. Some of their fans surely say things that are just as brutal and irrational. It's also not surprising that white men often resent anti-white talk and favor 'representatives' who object to this talk.
Another theme: some posters implied above that they could easily OWN or DESTROY Shapiro. That may be correct. But here we all are in the dark like anonymous rats. I'm not a big fan of Shapiro (or of Peterson), but it occurs to me how much more difficult it must be to actually wear one's ideas in public. It's a big deal these days. It almost has to be a career. Any sufficiently exciting opinions are going to offend or scare employers.
This reminds me of my last theme.
[quote=Marx]
The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.
[/quote]
The PC Left seems to envision a new, global human being that is beyond race, gender, and sexuality. To do this, however, it needs to obsess over race, gender, and sexuality...until utopia arrives.
How? What would the mechanism be by which this would be brought about? Is there some gatekeeper somewhere that I'm unaware of ensuring that YouTube videos, Facebook news, campus tours and online opinion columns are all written only by those with some actual intellectual merit? As far as I know, all these platforms (including academic publishing) are run by companies whose objective is to maximise profits for their shareholders. It's not some crazy conspiracy, it's written in black and white on their aims and objectives statement. It's actually a legal obligation. So how would merit become a factor? Nowhere is it written that all publications must also be somehow meritous. It is only necessary that they increase profits.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't think I understand what you mean by this I'm afraid.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Not at all. First there's the 'if' at the beginning, but let's say you jump whatever hurdles are required to get that lucky break. Your question would be heard by hundreds of followers. Whether it is heard by millions of followers is determined entirely by whoever has access to the largest publishing platform. It can be edited out of any video, or transcript. Described in unfavourable terms in any commentary or write-up. It's not difficult to make an insightful and penetrating question sound dumb and easily answered when you control the medium through which that question is going to be reported.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Why?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
You see, when I talk about entitlement to be heard, you play the nihilist and say "no one has a right to anything", when I use the argument that we're entitled to use whatever tactics we see fit, you play the noble and say "there is a moral right as to what tactics one should avoid". Which is it? Are we arguing about what should be (in which case your counter with regards to a 'place at the table' should be a normative one, not a descriptive one), or are we arguing about what actually is (in which case we actually can use whatever tactics are legal)?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, we couldn't. Not if the representative in question represents an unpopular or non-commercialisable view, because the mechanisms by which Shapiro became popular require those two things. What we're talking about about here is the situation where a person (or small group of people) believe a view to be right, in a moral sense, but neither popular, nor commercial. Should they then just give up, or what other means do you think they have to bring about what they think is right?
Is trying to bring about what you think is right an entitlement only of those whose views are popular or commercial enough to have a public figure they can put their support behind? If not, what recourse do these people have?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Everyone is deciding "for other citizens" here. If the university allows the lecture to go ahead, they are deciding for the other members of that community that his ideas are OK to legitimise by association with their university. If protesters were to have successfully blocked him from speaking, they would have decided for the other members of that community that his ideas were not OK to legitimise by association with their university. Either way someone is deciding what ideas get legitimised or not, and it's not on the basis of merit. It's whoever has the most power.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I think it's a big push to say that 'democracy' is somehow about the rights people currently have to speak. Those rights are an entirely pragmatic matter, and not part of a broad concept like democracy. Recently, in Ireland, the issues were discussed using citizen's assemblies, a system instigated by the government containing randomly selected members of the community who were then entitled to a 'place at the table'. Other democratic governments have chosen not to do this. So one's right to be heard does not seem to be linked to democracy as a concept. The means one has at one's disposal will vary.
If some democratic government believes that a random selection of community representatives have a 'right' to be heard, but people who just happen to be famous did not get an invite, then it seems a perfectly legitimate aspect of democracy to give certain people platforms to speak and deny platforms to others.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I'm not really interested in how 'they' would respond. I don't think it is right to constrain one's tactics by trying to second-guess what one's opponents will make of it. They will spin absolutely anything we do into a negative. It's pointless trying to limit their ability to do that, especially if doing so limits our own methods.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I thought you said it was his hard work and popularity?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I said, I don't really care much for law in this respect. I don't agree with property ownership on the basis of land purchase and I don't believe that ownership of land confers any rights over the community who occupy it. So...
Quoting VagabondSpectre
...yes.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
This is too much to get into here. Suffice to say I disagree that the institutions you list are a means to safely and consistently navigate from feelings to force. The history of modern civilisation has been an almost unbroken fight for power on the basis of force.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Look to your history books. If you can detail me a single instance of a law protecting property coming about after a community-wide discussion about the anarchistic ramifications if we don't, I'd be fascinated to see it. All I've found so far is laws put in place by wealthy landowners in order to apply the force of the army to back up their claim to land.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Have you any evidence to back this up. I could point to the many successful community run enterprises and worker-owned companies in opposition.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Well, the latter is coming. To quote one of my favourite passages from Stephen Emmott when asked what he would do in response to the current global situation he replied "teach my son how to use a gun".
You're equivocating "the right to be heard" with "the privilege to speak at Berkely", and you're also equivocating "not having the right to speak at Berkeley" with "not having any rights at all". You're trying to justify the use of force as political speech, but you're consistently equivocating in your attempt to do so. You complained that you have never been invited to Berkeley and used that as evidence showing you have no right to be heard.. I have tried to be very specific, and I certainly didn't state "no one has a right to anything"... "We don't have a right to any seats to any tables" means just what it says. Private tables are private platforms, and access to governmental seats are decided through votes, not passion.
Specifically, you're using your undefined notion of what should be to justify your argument that the use of whatever tactics are justifiable, and I'm saying that legally, democratically, pragmatically, and morally, your tactics are wrong.
Quoting Isaac
You are saying that in order to be popular, first, you need to be popular, which makes no sense.
Why is your view non-commercializable or unpopular?
Quoting Isaac
If the alt-right is commercial enough to have public figures, then you can have figures too. The argument that your views aren't commercial enough to get their own pundit is not at all realistic (in fact, corporations platform progressive views more than any other). Ironically, the only hard barrier to any political persuasion finding representatives is the very censorship which some have advocated for in this thread.
Quoting Isaac
We're not supposed to be unthinking lemmings who look to an intellectual authority to decide whether or not a private group of students should be permitted to discuss their beliefs. By telling conservative students their beliefs aren't "legitimate" and that they have no right to express them, we're legitimizing worse.
Quoting Isaac
Shapiro had been growing his popularity for around ten years, but it wasn't until antifa started barricading his events that the mainstream media finally started giving him undue attention. The story became how there's this "culture war" with racists on one side and PC babies on the other (depending on who you ask). The rise to his current level of fame is thanks to the negative attention given to him by the left, and his ability to spin discussions in his own favor.
Quoting Isaac
Actually, The Berkeley Group Holdings plc owns UoBerkeley. The students are just paying customers (the conservative and the liberal students alike).
Quoting Isaac
It's been an almost unbroken fight in terms of military vs military and nation v nation, but the deaths resulting from war have continuously plummeted, and while they are still too numerous, are proportionally smaller than perhaps ever before. I think that at this point in history we're more free (in the west) than ever before from abusive government, but we also happen to be more beholden than ever before to corporations, which are forces unto themselves.
In the senses that corporations use undue force in politics, I do want to see change (which may inexorably require force) but I don;t want to see it achieved through the whimsical arbitrariness of mob impulse.
Quoting Isaac
When police arrest thieves and return the stolen property to the victim...
It happens every day. But my point isn't that laws protect everyone equally, my point is that if we don't have laws then the alternative would be worse. For example, a few hundred years ago, if I wrongfully accused you of horse or cattle theft in a frontier town where there were no marshals/police, all it would take to have you unjustly killed would be to get enough people angry about it. This point is deeper than the value of democracy, it's one of the pillars of civilization itself.
We don't need to consider the anarchistic ramifications every-time we uphold the law, and every-time an innocent person is declared not guilty, and a guilty person is found guilty, in a fair court of law, it's a victory for civilization itself (our ability to live together and successfully in large groups).
Quoting Isaac
Let the inmates run the asylum? :chin:
Quoting Isaac
That's just not the right attitude...
First you teach him what guns are, and what they are for, and why they are dangerous. Then you teach him about gun safety. Start him off with a pellet gun, and teach him how to load and shoot targets safely. Once he is old enough, and under direct and expert guidance, then he can learn how to shoot a gun.
So I take it you're a supporter of the second amendment (gun rights)?
I wonder...
If you were attending a gun safety seminar, and a group of anti-gun rights activists showed up to disrupt and vandalize the event, how would you respond?
yes, yeah. A lot to chew on there
Ok, first thing - Scruton's 'context' - the estate, the horses (there were horses, right?). My first thought is, if you lose that, 'good!'
The calming luxury of an estate points toward the calming, sober, power of the master. The meaning of a speech delivered in a warm drawing-room after a tour around the property bristles with everything you've just seen. and the plight of placeless gypsies in Hungary very easily, naturally, rolls into a momentary distaste for [those who would want to disrupt this eminently Placeful Harmony]
from Henry James The Bostonians : a fervent 19th century feminist spending an evening at a wealthy nonfeminist's place:
[quote=James]I must add, however that there was a moment when she came near being happy - or, at any rate, reflected that it was a pity she could not be so[...]His guests sat scattered in the red firelight, listening, silent, in comfortable attitudes; there was faint fragrance from the burning logs, which mingled with the perfume of Schubert and Mendelssohn; the covered lamps made a glow here and there,, and the cabinets and brackets produced brown shadows, out of which some precious object gleamed[...]Her nerves were calmed, her problems - for the time - subsided. Civilization, under such an influence, in such a setting, appeared to have done its work; harmony ruled the scene; human life ceased to be a battle. She went so far as to ask herself why one should have a quarrel with it; the relations of men and women, in that picturesque grouping, had not the air of being internecine. [/quote]
But I understand your broader point to be that internet discourse is a kind of flattening all around. Where everything is yanked from its context, and you reach a sort of critical mass of 'yanking' where the flat space of the internet doesn't reflect a given world anymore, but, instead, everything in the world is already measuring itself against how it would seem in the flat space. Gradually quotes aren't cited in a neutral medium; the medium itself dictates how people speak, all speakers now anticipating how their quotes will be reworked.
In that regard, I agree with you. The tweeted protestations or lamentations of the 'sane' are a performative contradiction It's like Comey doing his sober perspective in biblical tweets (waters of righteousness or something). He's immediately infected, and made memeable. Everyone gets sucked in.
But do you think - My feeling is that a return to context *is* good, even if the Scruton context is abhorrent. Where the speaker draws from a local situation and works with it. I know that's a little luddite, because it means logging off - but I don't see how you can counteract the sheer dissolving momentum of internet discourse - for the reasons you mention - through anything short of dropping out of it. Any attempts to intervene in the medium itself will get sucked into it.
No, it's about the fact that when it comes to the right to speak at Berkeley, you play the nihilistic and say hat Berkeley is a private institution and has the right to allow or disallow whomever it wants. If we're basing rights here solely on law, then the protesters have the 'right' to block entry, in fact do absolutely anything that it is not actually illegal. But when we talk about the protesters, you switch terms. No longer are we talking about what they have a right to do by law, we start talking about what they should do, in terms of not escalating violence, not fanning the flames etc. So why is it legitimate to talk of what the protestors should do morally in their actions, but not about what Berkeley should do morally in controlling the speaking platforms they own?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, I'm saying in order to be popular you must be popular in principle. What will be popular is not a mystery, advertising companies predict it all the time. In order to popular you must be one of the things which it is known is going to be popular.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
So your counter argument is to just ignore everything I've said with a blanket denial. Haven't we just been discussing the barriers to some viewpoints getting a platform? Only controversial views sell advertising space, if your views are not controversial you will not have the same platforms available to you as controversial views.
Only popular views are worth promoting. What is going to be popular is fairly well predictable and if your views don't fit into these categories you will not have the same platforms available. It is pretty unequivocal (and to be honest a fairly uncontroversial view) that certain ideas are more 'sellable' than others for reasons other than their actual merit. So no, censorship of the kind I'm advocating is not the only barrier to political persuasion, its not even close.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What we are 'supposed' to be and what we absolutely evidently are, are two different things. Your faith in humanity is misplaced. Between 18 and 31% of Americans don't even believe in evolution. Is that the crowd you're expecting to critically appraise what the association with Berkeley 'really' means?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
As I said. I don't accept the legitimacy of legal ownership of property in this respect.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
And the law by which that prosecution is made came about as a considered means of avoiding anarchy? That was my question. I was asking for the evidence of the avoidance of anarchy being the motivating factor in creating a law, not the protection of the property of those responsible for creating it.
Some of the law protects the citizens of the country from unjust harm. Some of it doesn't. Some of it actually perpetuates unjust harm. So 'the law' doesn't mean anything in moral terms. One still has to make an independent decision about whether one's actions are moral, and whether they are against the law or not need not enter into that.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
They're not inmates. They're students and workers. And yes, let them run the companies.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No. I'm a strong opponent of the second ammendment. Why would I want everyone else to be armed too? Just my family, armed illegally, would be the most secure insurance.
There's no such "right to block entry" in this context, except to one's own property. By barricading doors to interfere with others, we're approaching dangerously close to intimidation, and we're likely trespassing. I'm no lawyer, but this isn't rocket-law.
I think that students absolutely have the right to protest and lobby their university, but I don't think they should be able to use physical force against the university or any other law abiding citizen in order to achieve their political ends. I'm saying don't use physical force or violence to achieve political goals (especially in as round-a-bout a way as shutting down the events of the opposition, which merely energizes them).
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Isaac
I said that the only hard barrier to platforms is censorship. My claim is more specific than the one you've addressed, and my criticism is that your own position is both controversial and popular, and is already highly platformed in new media.
If your political ideologies already have ample platforms, why barricade Shapiro's?
Quoting Isaac
I'm an atheist, but I don't see why people's belief in angels and demons is a problem that can't be mitigated. After all, America remains the leader of the free world despite all that (and so far, despite Trump), so the long term trajectory is against you.
Quoting Isaac
Whether the original intention of a law is to preserve order or not, they tend to only stick around if they do. Ostensibly the modern world upholds laws in order to maintain civil order (both to protect individuals from each-other, and to protect individuals from the government itself). Lots of times we have retarded reasons written down in old dusty books and documents (such as "Under the divine auspices of Her Majesty's authority blah blah blah"), but by now everyone knows why we still need them.
Quoting Isaac
Sometimes the law corresponds to what is moral, but you also have the democratic right to try and have the law changed. If changing the laws you disagree with is completely impossible, then maybe insurrection is the right rub, but maybe the harm you would or could cause in doing so would outweigh your initial justification. In more common terms, do your ends justify your means?
Quoting Isaac
How should they decide who gets to be CEO of their shiny new companies? Should they take it in turns in some sort of semi-autonomous anarcho-syndicist commune, with ratification of major decisions by simple majority?
This is where "merit" really has a lot of merit...
Quoting Isaac
I'm willing to bet that, statistically, owning a gun decreases one's life expectancy...
As far as I'm aware, 9 people were arrested, so, pending further evidence we can only presume the actions of the remainder were considered by police to be either legal, or non-prosecutable at least. Notwithstanding that, my comment was only intended to try and draw the discussion away from what's legally allowed to what's morally acceptable. The two are not the same.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Maybe, but it took a place in the argument which carried a greater weight. If censorship is the only 'hard' barrier (whatever that means) then the other factors I mentioned remain as barriers.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't think I've yet mentioned my position. Its certainly not popular as I've barely heard it repeated in the media. The point I'm making here is about the right of communities to determine (forcefully if necessary) who they want as contributing members.
Put simply, my view is that the people of Berkeley University form a community (from CEOs to cleaners), that community collectively are responsible for Berkeley (regardless of legal property rights, with which I do not morally agree here), a community demonstrates its moral code by ostracising those who do not adhere to it. Where there is disagreement, there will be clashes as one group tries to ostracise the other.
If I were one of those groups I would certainly be looking to ostracise the other with as little violence as possible because I believe causing unnecessary harm is generally bad, but I wouldn't rule it out. It depends on the threat.
I have no wish to prevent someone like Shapiro from speaking anywhere in the world (unless no community supports him). I'm defending the right of one given community to demonstrate (by whatevermmeans prove necessary yet remain moral) that he is not welcome to contribute.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Again, I'd need to know the mechanism by which this is ensured in order to consider it. Unless you're saying the good ones remain entirely by chance. The only mechanism I'm aware of that can remove a law in most Western countries is the democratically elected government. Is there some force I'm unaware of which prevents people from electing governments for reasons other than the prevention of anarchy? If not, I'm struggling to see what would force a government to remove laws not designed only to maintain civil order.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I really don't think explaining how worker owned coops function would be on topic here. Suffice to say many do, and the manner in which they do varies.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Statistically it probably does. But as my statistician colleague is fond of reminding me, there is a difference between incidence and probability, and the one thing you can almost guarantee your own probability is not going to be is the incidence. No one is average.
As far as I can gather, you're a socialist leaning anti-fascist.
In any case, the views of the Berkeley students who use force to shut down conservative events seem to have ample platforms of their own.
And there's an irony afoot. The "Antifa" movement of today mirrors some of the tactics and attitudes of the original fascists. Purging our communities of undesirables might not turn out like you'd hoped...'
Quoting Isaac
I understand what you're saying in principle, it's called "distributive justice", but in the broader "community" of which Berkeley is just one part, there is disagreement about what is moral, and who we should therefore ostracize as a result. A huge swath of the American people hold conservative views, so if Berkeley and every progressive institution closes their doors to conservative leaning students, we'll just be creating division which will lead to more conflict instead of cooperation or mutual compromise.
Quoting Isaac
It's that "by whatever means necessary, yet remain moral" line that gives me pause.
Are you defining what is moral by appealing to what you think is necessary?
The ends always justify the means?
Quoting Isaac
Courts often strike down laws in practice because they violate more fundamentally important and well established laws (namely, individual rights). Politicians and bureaucrats draft bills, parliamentary/senatorial representatives ratify them, police enforce them, and then the courts interpret them. If a certain law cannot be justly enforced, or if a given interpretation makes no sense, then individual judges can essentially overturn or reject said law (and in doing so they can set an influential precedent, which we all learn from). Case law works because it's constantly being put to the test; it can evolve according to whether or not it's actually working, or as the values of the people change. If the enforcement of a particular law causes too many problems or upsets for too many people, judges might strike them down and politicians/bureaucrats will have them addressed.
Quoting Isaac
Students attend university to learn, not to occupy or control it.
That's a very broad brush. Even Shapiro does not support zero welfare and he certainly claims to oppose fascism, so I think socialist leaning anti-fascist describes almost the entire political landscape. No one is suggesting that the ecomony should be entirely unregulated with regards to progressive redistribution (welfare/minimum wage/stock option/government funded services) and no one is suggesting that Americans are the master race and non-Americans should be purged because they are lesser beings.
The arguments are about exactly how much wealth redistribution there should be and to exactly what extent ethnic/national groupings should be allowed to migrate.
The detail of my own political opinion is way off topic, but the point is that some positions on this scale (wealth redistribution, ethnic/national migration) are unpopular and unrepresented.
The point about some views not having platforms is not that it justifies action for those groups, it's to re-affirm that we live in a society where denial of platforms is a perfectly normal commonplace event. If I went to Berkeley conservative Union and asked to speak, they would say no. They would deny me a platform, it's normal practice. We're arguing about how and why, not whether.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
It may not, but there's nothing I can do about that. Purging our community of undesirables is happening all the time. What we're arguing over is the method, not the activity. Look at a community in rural Afghanistan, a community of Australian Aborigines, a community of middle class New Yorkers. Are you supposing that the almost complete homogeneity you see within those communities (when compared to between them) is random? No, it's the result of purging undesirables, and it's usually done by ostracisation.
There's a reason why there aren't any mainstream fascists here in Europe, and it's not because we debated their ideas. It's because we shot them.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't see any reason to think that would be the case. You're talking about this as if it were a question of learning about other cultures by intermixing, like we should avoid ending up with a 'conservative' university and a 'liberal' one, so that people mix and understand where each other are coming from. But this is not about where people are coming from. It's about greed and xenophobia. These are moral issues. No one would say we should have a few child-killers in the community so we can mix and understand where different people are coming from.
It's really as simple as saying that some attitudes are simply not tolerated within a community. Again, this is perfectly normal practice, the debate is (or should be) about what attitudes are disallowed and what means a community can engage in to make that position clear. That some attitudes are disallowed, and that some methods are employed to make that clear is unquestionable.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No. What is moral is what is moral. It's that the morality of behaviour is contextual. It's not immoral to kill (it's immoral to kill someone who isn't an immediate threat, or in need of mercy killing, or...). So no, the ends do not always justify the means, but of course they sometimes do. I think that's the case for everyone?
Personally, when anti-immigrant and anti-welfare sentiment is at risk of being escalated thousands of people's lives and livelihoods are at risk. I think a little scuffle is a more than justified way of demonstrating how unwelcome that sentiment is.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
True, but that just acts as a means to ensure the laws are enforceable. It still doesn't seem to be a mechanism whereby laws are filtered to ensure they focus on maintaining a healthy degree of order.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Can't they do both?
When it comes to billionaires giving money to political movements, parties and outright individual politicians, one naturally has to make the difference between propagation of political and economic ideology and what is simply lobbying for personal gain. For some like the Koch brothers to hold power in the GOP it's more about the latter. Yet typically things are promoted as ideological choices.
Then my argument is that one political faction of Berkeley U's students should not be able to control the platforms of an opposing faction through force. The opposing faction may have rented a venue from Berkeley U, and you can say that conservative views are immoral, therefore students ought to censor it, but the opposition could make the same blanket statement as justification for shutting down an event that you or I might support. I'm saying that just because some students feel like they have the right to occupy Berkeley doesn't make it so. It's not fair to Berkeley and it's not fair to the opposition which would be censored.
If you want to actually establish that the opposition is immoral, delivering an argument or a rebuke at the event in question would be your primary means to actually persuade them.
Quoting Isaac
You're advocating for using the tactics of the racists and the fascists in order to get rid of them, and because of that you run the risk of merely replacing them.
Quoting Isaac
If you want to censor Shapiro's ideas, then I'm worried that you would wind up censoring basically everything else that you don't agree with.
One of the few kinds of speech I'm in favor of censoring is speech that calls for violence against a specified group or individual. Why, again, must Shapiro be purged?
Quoting Isaac
How do you regulate the scuffling mob?
Once you've framed the issue as one of preserving life and livelihood, where force in general is sanctioned, how will you stop the mob from going too far?
Quoting Isaac
Student's can't run the university because they don't know how. They're teenagers who lack knowledge and experience; most of their time needs to be dedicated to learning their course material and attending lectures, and the rest of it needs to be spent goofing off to diffuse stress. They're customers, not faculty/staff; they pay for a service, they didn't buy the business.
This really is a case of suggesting that the inmates should run the asylum. We don't let the most inexperienced among us make the most critical decisions for the rest of us, because people with no experience at a thing generally suck at that thing.
Except if you had actually read anything I recommended, you'd know that the Koch Brothers don't exclusively lobby or donate money to politicians and campaigns, but also set up and direct multiple think tanks and university departments to propagate libertarian ideology, as I've already stated multiple times now. Not going to further waste my time with a tried and true know-nothing like yourself who constantly pedals in vapid speculation.
Look at you go!
Your arrogance and ideological tribal fervor is so over the top that it's hilarious, yet so telling. Where did I say that the Koch's exclusively donate to politicians and campaigns? Donating to think tanks etc. can be a way to effect party policy and this can be done, in the end, for personal gains. Yet with the so popular tradition, just give an answer to things that have nothing to do with what I actually say. How this conversation reminds me of the debates with the old venerable LandruGuideUs chap.
The total inability to see that populists (by the traditional definition of populism, actually) both on the left and the right don't really like billionaires funding politics is obvious. At least those that fund the other sides favorite issues. Oh but this is what? Toxic centrism? That would be a new one. Even to refer that both sides would engage in basically similar demagoguery (even in their alternate universes, of course) is heresy for you as obviously one side is justifiably right, errr the left that is, and the other side just resorts to absurd lies that have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
But now we're back to 'fairness' again. Why do you think it would not be 'fair'?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
One cannot argue morality, there are no moral facts, only opinions. Even if we could agree on some basic moral and argue the facts of how it is achieved, what evidence do you have to justify your belief that evidence-based persuasion is the best way to change someone's opinion?
I've just read this morning that Alabama have just banned abortion even for victims of rape and incest. How did the logical persuasion of liberals go there?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
That's a ludicrous argument. If racists and fascists started debating their ideas in open forums would you then advise we switch to violent insurrection lest we become fascists by copying their tactics?
Tactics and the arguments they promote are two different things. As I said, I'm not an advocate of serious violence unless it is strictly necessary (responding to serious violence). I'm just not arbitrarily drawing a line at any physical force whatsoever. I'm still not seeing any argument for drawing the line there apart from this 'escalation' idea, but then I'm not seeing the mechanism by which violence breeds more violence, but spoken word is immune from such escalation.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes, that's the point. Within one's community, why would we not be allowed to proscribed certain speech acts? We proscribe all sorts of other behaviour, even very trivial stuff of virtually insignificant harm. What is it about speech that you're so opposed to circumscribing?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
The same way you regulate the non-scuffing mob. Why has the fact that it is scuffling suddenly rendered it difficult to regulate?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Inexperienced at what? We're not talking about how to balance the cash flow, we're talking about desicions about who to allow to speak on campus. What level of experience is the CEO guaranteed to have here that helps them make the 'right' decision?
http://time.com/5589439/china-wikipedia-online-censorship/
I really want to see how long they can keep pretending that SJW fanatics are not a problem and people don't want to learn from or with such morons.
I wonder if they will pretend to the end.
I like to imagine Scruton having his ideas about sex and gender identity while watching carp in a stately pond. But yes, less carp, more empathy, more reality.
Quoting csalisbury
I think that's about right. At least, close to my perspective on it.
Quoting csalisbury
I guess it's about a different kind of contextualising. You can embed nuance in the Endless Stream of the Styx through tinyurl; so lectures, 'thinkpieces', books, good blog posts; can propagate. The problem there is that reason is unlikely to function as a bridge or a perturbation, as its distribution is partitioned into channels created by other means. The synoptic vision and measuredness that can come from good research and journalism is a synoptic vision for the marketing demographic that is most likely to click on it.
As much as people like to paint reason as a great connector - it's now less a universal transit system of the space of ideas and more like a bridge between near islands in the grand archipelago of internet discourse.
Edit: I guess the contrast is between 'dropping out' = cutting out your tongue and 'staying in' = speaking post-Babel in the Bible.
Edit2: Though there are some promising prospects for grass-roots viral marketing, like the case of the Scottish Independence referendum a few years ago.
Why aren't they sitting on those nice looking mahogany chairs instead of those plastic things? Is it a fake backdrop or something?
It's not "fair" because banning conservative views on campus would be gross political favoritism. Conservative students are paying customers, and as long as they're behaving peacefully, banning them would be unjust.
It's also not fair to Berkeley to use force to compel them to play political favoritism.
If alt-rioters shut down an event you that happened to be attending and support, I'm guessing you would object to their use of force against you and yours, right?
Quoting Isaac
Often times people hold particular political views because they believe that they represent the best way to achieve fundamentally important moral goals (like a secure, stable, and prosperous society).
As it turns out, conservatism and progressivism are often after the same ends, people just disagree about how best to achieve them (both sides are interested in "fairness" for example, but they disagree about the facts of the playing field).
So, with the right evidence, it is actually possible to show people that their views are not practical or are not likely to achieve the desired results.
We didn't get where we are today by randomly succumbing to our moral whims, we actually held debates as best we could, and were able to find mutually beneficial compromises.
Quoting Isaac
What logical persuasion?
Merely condemning abortion without appealing to facts isn't evidence based persuasion, it's based on an emotional appeal. Alabamians are well insulated from reasonable pro-choice speakers, so it's unlikely that many of them have ever seriously considered the issue. The problem is that many of them have pre-decided, on emotional grounds, that they're correct, and that listening to the opposition is nothing but harmful; and because they're surrounded only by people who reinforce that view, how can they get away from it?
When the left comes in and calls them monsters as a rebuke, they're only strengthening their resolve.
This is the politics of feelings over facts, and it stinks...
Quoting Isaac
I think your analogy is a bit lopsided. Racists and fascists are debating their ideas in open forums, and you're advising violent insurrection to be used against them. I'm not saying copying the fascists and racists is necessarily bad, I'm saying that violent insurrection is bad. Racists and Fascists have historically used violent insurrection to achieve their ends. I'm trying to draw an ironic ideological connection between your advocacy of the use of force as political speech with the self-same directive of the original fascists (see: brownshirts & blackshirts).
Quoting Isaac
Tell me again why barricading the doors of Shapiro's events is necessary force?
You said because the lives of marginalized folk are on the line. You might interpret that as only condoning barricades, but why can't someone else say that it condones the use of artillery?
If lives are on the line when Shapiro speaks, can't your argument also justify his assassination?
Quoting Isaac
Because lots of people disagree, so what you're asking for leads inexorably to conflict and political segregation.
The whole point of democracy is to work through our disagreements about what policies and moral aims we should enshrine into culture and law. We don't police the thoughts of other citizens because we've collectively decided to protect the right of individuals to think and speak freely, so that through a marketplace of our ideas, we may identify the best and most appealing principles by which to govern.
Quoting Isaac
How can you even ask this?
Are you really wondering what could make a scuffling mob harder to control than an organized crowd (i.e: not a mob)?
Here's how: emotionally riled up individuals within the scuffling mob take aggressive action, which engenders an aggressive response from opposing individuals, and then when the rest of the mob sees this, they tend to escalate their degree of scuffling.
Quoting Isaac
Exactly. They don't even yet know what they don't yet know, and if they skip their business classes then they may never know.
Quoting Isaac
If you think it would stop at deciding who gets to speak on campus, then you're kidding yourself beyond measure, but let's assume that's all they're after:
An edict is issued banning any and every conservative speaker, which causes the conservative student union to start protesting, and to lose faith in the institution's ability to impartially educate them.
Next year enrollment figures are way down as a result, and the university needs to think about what it's going to cut, or sell, or who it will layoff to balance the budget. Because "progressive" students are the ones using forceful extortion, they might have no choice but to down-size and start openly pandering to assuage the students' ire.
And what would all this do to the academic integrity of the institution in the long run? How could Berkeley field a political science major and at the same time shield them all from even entertaining mainstream conservative political beliefs? It's farcical.
You have some stupid antifa. Then you have the ones, the majority, that counter protest violent nationalists. They are called antifa because they try to impede far right movements. I'll be more sympathetic to this comparison when you can give me news articles of antifa killing people. or acting to seriously harm people, for their political beliefs and not out of self defence.
Even violence at protests; most of which is done by antifa in self defense; all political ideologies have violence somewhere - faultlines of power are semipermeable membranes for our conduct -, the presumption that antifa violence is just as unjust and indifferent to life as memeing your car into a group of left protestors, killing an island conference of schoolchildren, or beating the shit out of unarmed black teenagers is quite reductive.
Where's the nuanced treatment of the antifa? Why is the presumption there that the antifa are aggressive in the same way as the people they counterprotest? Surely there should be more nuance here.
Edit: also, left liberals attempting to deplatform on college campuses are generally not antifa - antifa are usually anarchist, anticapitalist leftist, rather than capitalist-humanists that lean left.
I'm reluctant to go into specifics because I'm not looking to tit-for-tat justify violent actions from either side, I'm saying that embracing violence in arenas which are meant to be democratic is antithetical to democracy. I'm rebuking left wing actions here in this thread (given its context, and especially given they're the democratic party), but it doesn't mean I don't rebuke the other side (my main point has become that rebuking the other side on moral, ideological, and factual levels in spite of its violence is the only apparent solution, where meeting force with force just compounds the root cause of the problem).
Quoting fdrake
Shapiro is a lot of irritating things, but I don't believe him to be white nationalist, and he doesn't condone violence so far as I know. Nuance for Scruton (and by tangential extension, Shapiro) is my objective here.
The fast and loose way in which we associate Shapiro with these heinous acts provides great emotional fodder to motivate a basic protest even though it might not be accurate, but it also causes some individuals to become emotionally enraged and to resort to violence. The idiotic minority of antifa who go overboard and undermine the movement are magnified by the opposition and used to paint a caricature, which then becomes the fast and loose rhetoric that motivates and radicalizes individuals on the other side.
It's almost never productive to protest for emotional reasons alone, because without a coherent ask it's just a rowdy waste of time. If the people who are protesting Shapiro are asking him to go away, then they're also asking the conservative students who invited him to go away, which is an unreasonable request if Berkley wishes to show some semblance of political impartiality
Pathetic.
I'm willing to accept (culture) war in principle, but I think you might be escalating things rather quickly, especially you think if Shapiro's followers are beyond persuasion.
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't get what you mean, who is suggesting money buys civil rights?
Or are you just broadly equating the political sphere with force?
I'm not 'equating' the political sphere with anything. What counts, and does not count, as political, is the political act par excellence and the liberal con is to imagine that one can set out, in advance, what ought to, and ought not, count as political. The neutralization and sterilization of politics passed off as sensible political theory. Trash.
You're right that what counts most is determined in the field (voting booths mostly), but we embrace the use of force at the expense of the use of sensible political theory, where instead of the merit of a representative's ideas lending them success, it will be the amount of force employed by their supporters.
I'm not saying violence can't be political, or that there's not a time and a place for it, but I am saying it's undemocratic. Hooliganism from either side convinces no one, and seems to only serve the opposition by energizing them and fueling their rhetoric, so why bother?
Why do you want a no-holds barred political sphere?
No, I want a non-hypocritical political sphere. One in which the politics at work in platforming some dickhead like Shapiro is acknowledged as political, and not the outcome of some 'natural', merit-based, extra-poltical process. Where money is similarly acknowledged as a political tool that anyone who holds it knows it to be. What is 'undemocratic' is the (pseudo-)depoliticization of what is obviously political: of putting these things out of democratic play. I want more democracy not less. But this requires a less shallow, less emaciated understanding of democracy than just what happens in 'voting booths'.
The older you get the more conservative your values become. Does this mean experience is wisdom or that experience dims wisdom? Listen to your elders.
Political discourse requires opposition, conflict and the exposure of necessarily difficult and threatening questions.
Generally speaking I believe it best to act collectively with a right-leaning attitude and individually with left-leaning attitude - not that this dictates any personal starting position. To me this has become a common practice now that I try to instill habitually.
As for Murray’s comment about Foucault that is irrelevant. “Power” isn’t a dirty word and not something we should attach to ‘shame’ and/or ‘decadence’. Foucault’s work is primarily political and historical; his style of writing is that of someone who couldn’t decide whether to write fiction or be a scholar.
I do like this line from Murray:
“If you hear the dog whistle then you are the dog.” Haha!
Contrast Shapiro's shrill delivery with Hitchens here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY
Now that's charisma, whatever you think of his points. If he was still around, some 20-year-olds would probably be trying to silence him.
Paglia is a far more interesting individual than Shapiro and an even less plausible cartoon villain. My sense is that those who think Shapiro and Paglia are beyond the pale are themselves in a pretty small group, which is to say beyond the pale for yet another and perhaps larger group. And it's not the cartoon fascists. It's people largely in the middle and who haven't thought about the issues as much as intellectuals who really don't like being told what they can say and hear. Sorry, geniuses, you'll have to win those hearts and minds despite your obvious superiority.
Consider also that those who bother to watch Shapiro are still at least identified with 'REASON' and 'FACTS.' They are willing to talk. Shutting them down just puts the censors in question. If I'm young and my mind isn't made up yet, I'll probably go with the group that isn't directly interfering with my most taken-for-granted freedom. Isn't socialism scary to many people precisely in terms of its threat to freedom? And if those who would censor others really have reason on their side, then what do they have to hide? I identify with the left, but personally I'd like to trade the PC-left (the 'safe space' left) for some of the people in the center. And I think it would have to be a trade. Our crazies make the family look bad.
That's just a slightly longer restatement of your position. I asked why. What is it about political favouritism that is unfair? What is it about banning them that would be unjust? We do favour people and ban people for various reasons, so it's not that favouring and banning themselves are unfair acts, so how are you justifying your judgement about who it is fair to favour/ban and who it is not?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes. That's the point of having a feeling about how our society should be. I would object to the alt-right using any means at all to shut down an event I approved of because I'd believe them to be wrong. You can't remove the judgement of what's right and what's wrong from this. The debating arena itself is constructed and maintained by people. People who all have a view of what's right and what's wrong. It infuses every action they take. Denying a platform, allowing a platform, ignoring a platform...everything is infused with our moral sensibilities, we cannot 'step outside of them' to create a fair debating space.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What political rhetoric claims to be in pursuit of and what those following it are actually in pursuit of are not the same thing. Are you suggesting that it is a coincidence that most wealthy people are right-wing? That in order to get votes among the poor right wing parties appeal to anti-immigration? That despite any extraneous policies, the voting of the subsequent party/president depends almost exclusively on the strength of the economy?
The vast majority of people don't give a shit about 'fairness', or the playing field, or anyone else not directly related to them. If they did, then how would there be any homeless? How would a pair of trainers made by 11 year old sweatshop workers ever be anything other than a morbid museum exhibit?
This is not, nor ever has been, about rational persuasion on the basis of evidence. It's about what is and is not acceptable behaviour in a community, and people judge that by the actions of others. People think its OK to just walk past a homeless person because others do so too. They think it's OK to buy sweatshop-produced trainers because others do too. Rational argument never entered into it.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Are you suggesting that Alabama has some kind of censorship law? I'm not particularly expert on local law in the US, but it's hard to imagine that evidence-based pro-choice arguments were somehow banned. If you're trying to make the argument that these people would have behaved any differently simply as a result of being presented with the evidence then I'm afraid you have a mountain of psychological research saying the exact opposite to counter along the way.
People do not change their political opinions on the basis of evidence. That's about as close to a concrete fact as we get in psychology.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, they're not. No one is 'debating' anything. They're rabble-rousing and it needs to be stopped before a rabble gets roused. Their words have real impact on the lives of actual people. Ethnic minorities, the poor, immigrants... These people are actually harmed by the rhetoric of fascists, racists and the alt-right.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Because Shapiro's speaking at a university legitimises his ideas by association. Those who feel they do not want their community associated with such ideas often lack the power to ostracise him by financial or media control, so they use physical force to do so. The physical force carries a minor risk of harm to some, but Shapiro's ideas carry a more significant risk to a larger number, so the risk is broadly justified.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, because artillery and assassination are bad. As I said above, what we consider right and wrong infuses everything we do, you cannot remove it to make an argument. No one who wishes to ostracise Shapiro would also want to use live artillery on other people. If they were that inconsiderate about the lives of others, then why would they want Shapiro shut down in the first place?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No, that consensus politics. Something I'm greatly in favour of, but not democracy. Democracy is about doing what the largest block of voters want. Screw the rest.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Hasn't really answered my question. Why is 'scuffling' particularly responsible for creating these "emotionally riled up individuals" yet words are completely immune from having such an effect?
Thanks for posting those links. The Aleksandar Hemon was a really good read. I've read few such close-up stories about watching a descent into fascism, it really highlights how dehumanising the process is.
Scruton and Murray do get to the point just why conservatism seems so feeble compared to the left (and I would also add compared to the extreme-right). Cherishing how things are, love of your country and your people is especially in a democratic justice state is quite lame and uninteresting. Conservatism is for those who at least are doing OK. Those that look for scapegoats in minorities and have more hate in their hearts than actual love for their people are made of a different mold and will look for radical changes. In political discourse and in the university traditional conservatism sounds extremely boring. However when it comes to real life and the choices people make in their own lives, conservative values are quite popular. In a leftist welfare state like mine I would say that many of those that vote for social democrats are otherwise quite conservative: they like how things are and don't object at all to what the free market can offer them, with the supervision of the government of course.
Conservatism a political movement for a silent majority which doesn't make a huge fuss about itself. Radical leftism is on the other hand quite hip for a loud extrovert minority who want to shake things up, especially when nobody here in the West has experienced the true nature of totalitarian Marxism-Leninism. It's very apt for Scruton to depict Murray as being 'harmless'. Of course the left wouldn't see Douglas Murray at all like that, yet there is a point about it when you talk about upholding free speach. You then have to respect that other people have different views about everything than you.
Worse still, having plucked her own eyes out, the liberal then denies that anyone else ought to have recourse to action beyond speech either (despite such actions saturating the ground aroud her). Anything else is apparently 'violence', 'unfair', 'undemocratic', or whatever empty pejorative might fit the current flow of conversation. And this sort of bullshit renders fascism utterly unintelligible to the liberal, who can only treat of it as a set of ideas while actual fascists get on with the job of grabbing the levers of power where they can. People don't get hurt in the liberal imagination because there are no people in it: only 'debatable ideas' - words. And while everything burns, the liberal can only stammer on about m-m-muh free speech... Good-intentioned pavers of the road to hell, all of them.
Step foward: we hear
That you are a good man.
You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?
You are a good friend
Are you also a good friend of the good people?
Hear us then: we know
You are our enemy. This is why we shall
Now put you in front of a wall.
But in consideration of
your merits and good qualities
We shall put you in front of a good wall and shoot you
With a good bullet from from a good gun and bury you
With a good shovel in the good earth.
So you're arguing that because moneyed interests are supporting Shapiro, and because ideological merit has nothing to do with politics or democracy these days, the use of intimidation, force, and violence to silence him is well justified?
Why do we even have voting booths if the real politics are decided through money and might? Merely tradition?
And if Ideas mean for so very little, what's the harm in not using force against Shapiro?
I want a non-hypocritical political sphere too, but vague and violent grand-standing against the likes of Shapiro by alleging that he is somehow vaguely violent is itself hypocritical (he has access to those [s]rings[/s] levers of power I guess?).
He's just a pundit, and the attitude of forceful mobilization against him does nothing but feed the troll.
Quoting StreetlightX
And Shapiro himself is The Joker? Holy bubbeleh!
Shouldn't you be posting all of this in underground revolutionary networks committed to toppling the current status quo of exploitation, slavery, and death? After all, it's not like our tiny digital pulpit serves any pursuit other than the hubris of an ego massage...
I wish you would be more specific than "the world around the lectern is literally on fire", because I'm not sure what you mean; it reads like a traumatized war-veteran trying to describe what it's like out in the shit (and I'm the [s]innocent green boy[/s] [s]ignorant[/s] useful idiot who is incapable of fathoming a hard world outside his toy chest). In what way has my advocacy for non-violent methods of protest against Shapiro triggered your world weary stress syndrome? How does bringing down Shapiro put out any of the fires you have yet to name?
Because of the existing "social contract" between Berkeley and its students. What I mean by this is that it's an unwritten agreement which, when broken, leads to problems for both sides. I've explained this every which way, and in the end you can just say "That's just like, your opinion, man", but I think you understand the idea that people should be free to explore political ideas. Do you think that your own correct beliefs should be the only permissible beliefs hold?
Quoting Isaac
But sometimes the homeless person is grouchy or drunk...
Quoting Isaac
Why do you make me defend Shapiro? He's not a fascist, he's not racist, and he's not alt right. (He's the son of Jewish immigrants if that helps persuade you).
Quoting Isaac
Are you asking why violent combat tends to invoke emotion more so than words?
I'm arguing that people like Shapiro got to where he is by means far beyond that of his power of speech alone, and to restrict responses to those means to speech alone is asymmetrical and democratically fatal. It is to enter the fray with one's hand deliberately tied behind one's back while giving the other a full range of movement and then having the gall to call this 'fair' and 'democratic'. It's yielding to a profoundly uneven playing field that, in all naivety or idiocy, is subsequently earmarked as the only one that's 'fair'. Meanwhile, anyone who knows anything about anything is laughing all the way to white house while liberals congratulate themselves on how they are apparently not the idiots (and oh-so-democratic).
And this is all to say nothing about the reductive and myopic tertium nom datur that is speech or violence that you keep pushing. As if this silly little duo exhausted the means and range of political action. Most of those having their au courant whine about deplatforming or whatever are responding less to incidences of violence - rare and sporadic as they are - than to the sense of damage done to their bourgeois sense of dinner table manners ('let the man speak, chérie'). Violence is rarely at issue*, and to pretend that it is is misdiagnosis, either deliberate, ignorant, or both at the same time. In any case the right - who have been pushing just this line, to their infinite benefit - couldn't be happier with this utter failure of political imagination.
*On the left in any case. Let's not talk about how nearly every single ideologically related murder in the US was commited by right wing terrorists in 2018. Let's keep pushing the bullshit line that it's the PC snowflake left that's after violence. Speech or violence? Fuck that entire framing of the issue, and anyone who peddles it. 'World weary stress syndrome'. Yeah, you fucking bet.
I don't see the asymmetry of means between political camps that you do. Corporations invest in both sides to subvert them as best they can, old and new media certainly aren't dominated by the right, and anecdotally it seems like there's a well funded pundit for every political niche. As the absolute majority, a full embrace of force might be in our short or long term interests, but not if we abolish democratic safeguards in the process. I would much rather discuss erecting new safeguards to defend against those as yet unnamed "means" which you say are democratically fatal (corporate influence perhaps? Individual wealth?).
Speech is not the only useful form of political action, but in the past, violence as political action has caused unpredictable and oftentimes undesirable results.
How does Shapiro fit into all of this. Is it that he supported Trump?
Quoting StreetlightX
I say: "we shouldn't use violence or physical force against Shapiro", and then you say: "stop restricting my political freedom, and fuck your myopic excluded middle!".
Let's clarify. Are you arguing for the use of force or violence against Shapiro? (For example, by using intimidation and force to block, shut-down, or disrupt his events?) Or are you in support of something less drastic? (Like, for example, a peaceful protest).
Quoting StreetlightX
What is the issue?
That Trump got elected, therefore the left should have used greater forced against the likes of Shapiro?
I'm genuinely trying to connect the dots between saving our souls and barricading a Berkeley auditorium against Shapiro. Is it the harmful nature of his policies or the way he manipulates young minds in support of them? Or both? If so, can't you see that your attitude and approach toward Shapiro et al. only empowers them? If not, why should we cross any moral lines to take down Shapiro when he's neither the source nor the sustaining force of our problems?
I'm telling you to let the man speak because throwing him out of the saloon makes us look weak and stupid, and is exactly the sort of attitude that propelled the bad orange orangutan himself all the way to the white house. It wasn't the fascists and the racists that got him elected, they're a clear minority; it was that too many on the left got fed up with their own dogmatic bullshit. The alt-right grew for a reason, and it certainly wasn't because the left wasn't radical enough.
Yes, you would care about looks, wouldn't you? Words and looks, the substance of the liberal political imagination.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Then there's nothing to discuss. Fascists and racists are always a 'minority' in the liberal imagination. Right up until the point they're not. Because there are no racists and fascists, only ever racist and fascist ideas, ripe for the acedeme debate. What a joke.
The joke is that Shapiro is a meme of your own making, just like Trump.
Who needs debates or voting booths when you have undying righteous indignation?
Liberalism is cancer.
That Shapiro is able to win informal popularity contests upsets the left, and then many individual overreactions only serve to make him even more popular by comparison. It's the same bottom up force that helped put Trump in the white house (which hasn't been a very good thing for many of the problems you've mentioned). By condoning the forceful censoring of Shapiro you're giving him more attention and losing the petty popularity contest/grudge match that politics has apparently become.
Which you'd know if you'd read.... Where's the extra-word center of gravity here?
As a blusterer, I know the litmus test of bluster is how cartoonish the insults get. If you're leaning into calling things 'trash', you're probably covering over the fact you're guilty of exactly what you're accusing others of.
Do politics, not words, c.f. a very lovely piece by...
Quoting csalisbury
You don't know?
Let's say I don't & want to learn - guide me toward it. You do the words on here, what does your worldly practice look like?
It's not mine.
I don't know what that means, so I think you got me.
"A categorical error is made in any media narrative resting on the idea that protests “turn” violent, or counterprotesters instigate violence in these circumstances. The error exists in the tacit suggestion that there was a situation of nonviolence, or peace, from which to turn. Any circumstance in which cops take black life with impunity, any context in which it is still necessary to state that Black Lives Matter, any situation where neo-Nazis march and murder, is a background state of constant violence. Yet the media consistently attributes the act of turning to violence to people who literally cannot turn from it, whose lives and deaths are organized by it. In the book, I cite the late philosopher Bernard Williams who wrote, “To say peace where there is no peace is to say nothing.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/natasha-lennard-fascism-book/
When everything around you is ugly, the concern for 'looks' is just another scar.
*When everything around you is ugly, the concern for 'looks' is very far.
The only problem is that literally every post on tpf is 'looks.' We're all doing looks! This is looks, that is looks. It's all looks. you do understand that, right? Like - these ideas aren't politics, or anything even close to it. Do you see that?
You should be the one answering this question.
No, it's not trivial.
--
Also strikes me, incidentally, that the concern for appearances from those who avowedly like the arguments to 'speak for themselves' in the 'marketplace of ideas' is irony made thick.
[quote=sx]Words simply float free of any gravity of worldly consequence[/quote]
It sounds good. What's your worldly consequence? Is this really an unfair question?
:rofl: :vomit:
If you can make that attack, if their ideas have no worldly consequence, it must be the case that your ideas do have some worldly consequence. Right? What are those consequences?
I've offered no 'ideas', made no claims to political action. I'm attacking an argument. It's informed by a certain understanding (duh), but that's not really relevant. Or at least, it's not this conversation. Perhaps you want a different conversation. Not my problem.
Streetlight, c. 2019.
Otherwise, @StreetlightX, you seem to want to have your cake and eat it, to talk politics in order to scorn talking politics. You presume a position of political certainty where the battle lines are drawn--e.g., the Left vs white supremacist murderers--from which you can make an intervention to tell us all that we're wasting our time at best, paving the road to hell at worst.
But the political situation to me and others is different from that, hence the discussion. Hence the need for discussion.
The consequence is giving free reign to abhorrent politics. It's a society which is unable to take falsehood and immorality of certain politics and values as a problem.
A world in which no idea or value can be catergorised as one we ought to avoid. Where every pointed remark about how a politics, value or idea devalues someone is deflected under the guise of an alternative option worth respecting as a possible way of running society.
A world in which, for example, the liberal proclaims we force them to defend Ben Shapiro, in our suggestion Shapiro proposes false and abhorrent accounts of various people, which ought not be respected as a description of people or how we ought to run society.
:blush:
There's no shift of register. It's all fucking bullshit.
If you wish to silence someone because YOU don’t like what they are saying go ahead. If you are telling me I CANNOT listen to them then be sure to violently opposed (physically if need be).
That is all there is to say. If we’re talking about ‘protecting the youth’ or such then WHO is worthy of deciding the line between locking someone in isolation (for their own protection) and giving them absolute freedom (naked and running in the streets with a machete screaming and shouting)? I think we’re all pretty much in agreement that there is a rough area - not a definitive LINE - in which we should likely allow danger to manifest for the long term benefit of others. Risk is necessary for learning and the perceived negatives are simply the price paid for any kind of freedom.
Stupidity is the majority of human activity. Intelligence is a accident of stupid actions we attempt to cultivate by way of something vaguely referred to as ‘wisdom’ - an attribute we knowingly stumble toward possessing even though we know that we essentially cannot ‘possess’ it; we only place ourselves as close as possible to its burning and undeniable force upon a landscape that shifts every time we move.
Do I? In arguing that the liberal appeal to the neutral ground of 'the free and open marketplace of ideas' is bullshit (I'm certain about that), is it battle lines that I'm casting? Is there a discussion, here, that I'm asking be shut down? Hell, I'm not even asking - desiring? - that Shapiro be 'shut down'. I want to talk politics in order to scorn a certain take on politics - one I think disingenuous and potentially harmful.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't have to supply shit. There's no 'ploy' here, if you think I'm wrong, say so, and why. The rest is noise.
Ah, finally, an emotional response.
In the context of the rest of your posts, yes, obviously.
Exactly, which is just your view of the moral framework. If my moral framework justifies the use of force in situations like this, that is wrong, but if your moral framework justifies the use of force (by the police, say) to prevent me, then that's right. Wars, riot management, police attendance...all uses or threats of force to maintain a political state. Do you think the families of immigrants spilt up in detention centres acquiesced to such treatment by persuasion? Force, or the threat of force, is what maintains the state, its the playing field on which the circus of politics takes place.
The 'social contract' has been abandoned long ago. It was abandoned the moment it became OK to buy footwear made by children on little more then stipend wages. It's a mockery to look at Western society in all its destructive gory and then focus in on one university to see if they're upholding a minor legal contract. It's like talking about Ghengis Kahn's table manners.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
What, the man who said "Arabs like to bomb crap and live in open sewage. This is not a difficult issue.", or the later classic "Arabs just want to murder", not a racist?
The man who, on a Columbus Day posting listed Native American achievements as "dreamcatchers, tomahawks and cannibalism" compared to a list of noble European achievements. That's the non-racist you're referring to?
Do I seriously need to find all his quotes about how blacks are disproportionately represented in prisons because "blacks commit more crime", his tweets supporting vigilantes who kill black children, his denial of institutional racism in the police, his support for immigration policies based on race...
Then there's the homophobia...
Are we talking about the same Ben Shapiro?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Yes. Hitler's rallies created a state complicit in the genocide of 6 million Jews. I grew up in a town where a fight on Saturday night was a fairly regular event for at least the decade of my early adulthood, and yet we never instigated a policy of ethnic cleansing on the boys from the neighbouring estate.
So yes, I am asking you why you think violent combat tends to invoke more emotion than words.
I've learnt here that this is toxic centrism.
Quoting jamalrob
Hear, hear
Yet too many actors gain from the vitriolic nature of modern (non)debate. Heated debate creates more posts, more activity (clicks) and makes you embrace your side more. Add the anonymity to the debate and that there is nothing that we have to do otherwise together, hence there is no need to be cordial and respectful. The opposing side isn't simply wrong, it's a sinister evil. Hence respecting opposing thoughts to your own is a sign of weakness or worse. Seeking a consensus is simply wrong.
Just from a Left-strategic point of view, I think liberalism is precisely now necessary. The Left antipathy to free speech only makes sense from a position of dominance, as in, it's generally not ok to be openly racist and sexist, and we need to protect those progressive gains. That is, it only makes sense for a Leftist focus on culture at the expense of economics and class, because a concern for the latter, as expressed in your post, is what we need free speech for, given that the societal ills you mention are real (and I agree they are). Pretty much any fundamental social gain either depends on free speech or is intimately associated with a fight against restrictions on speech.
Thus the Left is suicidal in abandoning the defence of free speech to the Right. Liberalism still has the potential to undermine its own social conditions, which is part of its enduring value.
But I guess that's an old and obvious argument, and I think things are a bit more interesting than that. Culture war and identitarian Leftists have not merely forgotten about economics and class. Their position is predicated on an outright rejection of the working class as a progressive political force, and on a concomitant fear and suspicion, namely that the average white Joe is always one Shapiro video away from signing up as a white supremacist. So this Left antipathy to free speech is not merely suicidal or naive, but is an expression of a class hostility.
@csalisbury: The danger for me here is that if I start banging on about "liberal elites", as befits my nauseating role right now, I might look like a kind of proto-fascist. Instead, in my attacks I feel the need to use other terms of abuse such as "petit-bourgeois" so I can remind everyone I'm even more woke than woke. But still, I want to say that in saying so I need not be disavowing my position, exactly. It's more that I'm struggling to find or create the language to use, most often failing and falling back.
Wow, that's quite a substantial claim, given the overthrow of basically any authoritarian political regime I can think of has happened by at least physical protest if not outright war.
Yeah I'm not denying that.
Then I'm not quite seeing the exhaustive link you're making. It seems like 'free-speech' is being presented as some kind of unique pre-requisite to social reform, such that reform is frustrated by any restriction thereof. But I'm not seeing the way in which 'free-speech' might be singled out among the many other issues which might frustrate social reform, including such media dominance and intellectual legitimising which the de-platforming is attempting to diminish.
We're a bunch of leftists and a couple of centrists disagreeing about what politics is, and what actions are relevant to it. There are a few sub conversations; Maw, Street, Csal, Jamalrob and I are being annoyed with liberals. Csal, Jamalrob and I are also being annoyed with the left. Vagabond and SSU are against Maw, Street, Jamalrob and I in the usual 'what is politics' and 'how does free speech relate to it' debates between leftists and more centre left liberals. Vagabond, Csal and I were talking about social media and the role of reason in internet discourse. Isaac and Vagabond are having a discussion on framing issues about politics. Now there's a new one where Jamarob (who started it on the first page and then left it, and is now picking it up again) and Csal (who is suspicious of internet political discourse for similar reasons to me, I think) are suspicious of Street's portrayal of left politics for different reasons.
And I'm just shouting into the void...?
Is this a kind of leftism prevalent where you are? I'm asking. My perception is that racial tension has increased in my country since the election of Trump. I don't think Trump recruited anyone, it's just that when David Duke has endorsed the elected president, it gives a bit of hope to the down-trodden white supremacist, which leads to increased police brutality and violence around protest marches.
It has a tit or tat feel to it and it's in that context that Shapiro is demonized. I understand the need to restrain ourselves in the name of free speech. What's riled me from the beginning of this thread is your casual dismissal of the sources of liberal angst. Maybe there is no legit source where you live. If so, let's limit your comments to the world you're witnessing. Be open to the possibility that others see a different world.
I forgot you because I've not read your exchanges with Vagabond. I'll put it in my post. :)
I was only joking. It amused me that you'd managed to summarise everyone else's position, as if you'd read mine and just shook your head slowly. There's nothing needs doing about it, I didn't mean for you to take that impression.
Reviews should summarise everything relevant that goes on. I don't care if it was a joke.
I'd say it's an inherent part of a functioning democracy and basically acts as a safety valve. People are very adaptable and do quite easily adapt to censorship and self-censorship. And it shows, really. Without freedom of speach, people are different and behave really differently.
You might avoid talking about politics with a total stranger (if he or she happens to be totally opposed to your ideas), yet there is no true fear about talking publicly your mind.
I remember how dramatically Russians changed once when Soviet Union collapsed. Politics and traumatic experiences of the past (and present) were something they didn't simply talk about. It didn't exist. The way to speak was called the lithurgy. Endless official jargon without any meaning, very hilarious when you actually think about it. Now they (the Russians) may be vary of publicly criticizing Putin, but are quite open to talk privately or with Russians about politics. Before not so.
Stop burning effigies like you're not made of fire.
Yes well, "framing issues about politics", should cover everything I've said... and everything I'm likely to say in this and any similar debate, so I'd say you've done a very prudential job.
:up:
This presumes there is a binomial {with freedom of speech/without freedom of speech}. It's that framing which I dispute. The 'freedom' to speak one's mind in a meaningful way must itself be meaningful, as in apposite to the cause about which one is speaking, otherwise how is it any different to the 'freedom' a political prisoner has. Afterall, they can always try to escape, no one's stopping them doing that.
The speech has to have function, to play a part in the process, and that function is interfered with by the means of presentation. Some groups have more control over the means of presentation than others, this control is physical (financial usually) and must be combated physically at times.
It worse that that: every single victory was won by attacking what seems to be counted as "free speech."
Each time we make a change of policy or culture, the very idea of the former is discarded. Not in the "Let's respect each other's differing opinion" either, but in the substantial "Our society ought not do this. This idea is not respectable or worth considering", such that the latter then holds dominance in culture.
The centerist assumption of the neutral postion which is settled by an exchange of respectful veiws is a myth. It gets nothing of the politcal picture correct.
In a society without free speach, which typically is a totalitarian society, this is a fact. People do behave differently. There is a genuine collective fear which stifles even ordinary debate.
In the US (or the West) this whole debate isn't about existence of free speech, but it is about the Overton window in public discourse. And that is totally different.
Hence the debate starting from Roger Scruton, but easily going to all the usual right-wing suspects, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson etc. An many go with the leftist line that anything beyond this or that and the people have to be white supremacist nazi bigots.
I don't know where you got that conclusion from in thread. The topic's slid from left propagandising liberals *cough* I mean reasoned debate with them to countering the influence of the far right on discourse.
I don't think it's fair to attribute blurring the lines between the two to the posters here. Especially when many of the comments have been about the weaknesses of the liberal interpretation of freedom of speech to cooption by the far right. Garden variety conservatives (though maybe not the US conservative party, they play real rough internal politics) and liberals both have this marketplace of ideas = the court of reason perspective on the issue.
I don't doubt it. I also don't doubt in a society authoritarian enough to totally suppress free-speech, the inability to tour a lecture series is probably the very least of their worries.
Quoting ssu
Yes, I'd agree with this, that's why I think claims of being "anti-free-speech" are weaponised. Everyone is anti free speech. Everyone has their line, and sometimes that line is enforced by law (which ultimately is backed by serious force).
So the discussion, with regards to Shapiro, is not about whether it is reasonable to restrict free speech with force, virtually everyone agrees with that already. It is about whether small sub-communities should be autonomous enough to make those decisions for themselves, and on what grounds (or whether they should always defer to the law of whatever country they're in).
All I'm arguing is that continually deferring to the democratic decisions that have already been established, with regards to where these lines are, is pointlessly circular. Either Shapiro and the like do not influence the voting public (in which case shutting them down is of no consequence), or they do. If they do, then one cannot expect the democratic system to deal with the effect they have by restricting speech appropriately.
From the comments after the OP, I guess.
Quoting fdrake
What is the far right here? Is Scruton really a spokesperson for the far right? It is about the Overton window in public discourse.
Sorry if I'm confusing people here, but I do make the difference between conservatism and the far right just as I do with social democracy and communism.
I don't think everyone is. And besides, anyone saying that people should have the right of free speech obviously do then logically give the opening for different viewpoints.
Quoting Isaac
I don't actually get your point here or perhaps I haven't read this part of the conversation. What's the fuss with this quick-speaking Jewish right-wing political commentator that resigned from Breitbart?
Ringleaders feel themselves as leaders of a mob of the similarly virtuous. They see individual rights as giving comfort to enemy. Since they see themselves as intellectual leaders of the good guys, they don't worry about their speech being curtailed. If/when their side wins, they expect to do just fine. They don't want to say anything that they don't want anybody to say.
Outsiders, though, see fanatics on both sides of them. The alt-right and the PC-left are perhaps equally eager to reduce their freedom. At the moment, the alt right and the center makes use of the rhetoric of free speech. The center is sincere (as I intend the 'center'), but surely their are crazies in the red states who would vote for laws against blasphemy, etc.
It's in the outsiders interest to keep the fight between the maniacs close. (Of course it's also in the interest of the very rich to keep the culture war close, so that the working people don't get together and tax the rich.) As an outsider, I voted against Trump as the greater threat but consoled myself with his victory by interpreting it as a check on the PC-left and its digital mobs. I'm down with democracy, but more important than democracy are the rule of law and individual rights, with free speech as perhaps the essential right (as Spinoza saw.)
It's that supposed difference which is the problem. By the measure of the content of their postion, that conservativism is a problem. They, in many respects, reject the valuing of particular groups. One doesn't need to be a nazi, alt right or an intentionally bigoted monster to devalue and hold oneself superior monster.
To be an ordinary conservative, for example, who thinks having a penis means your a man and a vagina means your a women, constitutes a devaluing and oppression of trans people.
In a critical way, these positions are not different to the nazis, alt right or the intentional monsters people like to imagine. Like them, this value and politics form a culture we have an ethical obligation to avoid. By moral terms (that is, whether our society ought to hold them), these are equal to the monsterous forms of oppression people like to imagine.
One doesn't need to demanding slavery for or attempting to genocide a group to have a culture which devalues or oppresses them. Plenty of that happens in the values and expectations a lot of people consider "ordinary." These don't make one or their values better than the alley stalking, nazi monsters people like to imagine.
Ah, like the class enemy is to the communist? Sounds like authoritarianism.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Oppression, really?
Without going into the sex and gender issue, I'll take another example. So if I think that humans are omnivores because humans can eat meat, do I then oppress vegans? Am I really oppressing, devaluing or ridiculing them? You see you are making a similar kind of interpretation here.
This is the problem in thinking that having different thoughts means naturally that you then automatically oppress, hate, vilify, are against and surely will attack others that have different thoughts, ideas and feelings. Is it so hard to really respect others that have different thoughts and likes? Or different philosophy?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yep, there's the smoking gun. In the critical way. But what are the nazi like positions, really?
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Yes, one can be a leftist SJW to do that too, to have that emotional hatred towards others.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
Or those with the values of being "progressive", "open to new ideas", "tolerant" and "woke".
Well, both like authoritarianism and actually aren't so excited about liberal tolerance. Radicals always hate the present that we have and want real change, something totally else.
Quoting pomophobe
Naturally. But for those it's quite easy to notice that the belief on liberties aren't actually so important.
The standard marketplace of ideas line is an oldie, and it's still in many ways a goodie, but my practical argument has yet to be addressed: censorship per se isn't the only issue, it's also the method of censorship that causes problems. I condemn the forceful censorship of Shapiro not only because I want to preserve my own right to be free from forceful censorship, but also because when applied to someone like Shapiro, it only elevates their celebrity.
I could better understand your position if I was defending someone like Spencer, whose views arguably amount to hate speech (the Canadian version), but I don't see how Shapiro warrants the same sort of response. If the orthodox conservatism Shapiro spews really does exacerbate the sources of harm you listed earlier, isn't it imperative that we successfully counter him and their effects? Banning books and speakers alike just makes them more popular.
And if Shapiro's views are really a major threat, isn't the current white house the final boss? If there ever was a looks based popularity contest, the U.S presidential election cycle is it. Screaming in anger just won't achieve anything.
It's exasperating to have this bromide blindly repeated unceasingly. Outside of anecdotal examples (primarily at elite schools which make up a fraction of the total student population) in which left-wing students protest, or are able to shut down highly controversial speakers, which the right-wing students also do, there is no quantitative proof showing Leftists are "abandoning free speech", across campus or beyond. If free speech is having a speaking opportunity at a University then it goes without saying that all of us are without such freedom.
Curiously, accusations around abandoning free speech are never thrown at the right, despite anti-BDS legislation that's been adopted by over a dozen states, Trump and his administrations's condemnation of news media, or when right-wing figures such as Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulos, or Jordan Peterson hypocritically threaten to sue people.
Unfortunately liberals and self-described centrists often internalize the bad faith arguments put forward by right wingers, because the latter have, to @StreetlightX's point, amplified and propounded this narrative in the 'marketplace of ideas' despite how groundless and false it is.
And I don't see how anyone can be faulted in protesting Shapiro who has said that a majority of Muslims are extremists, or that Jews who vote democrat are "bad Jews who undermine Judaism", and more, among a number of things that any level-headed person would find deplorable and outright pseudo-intellectual.
EDIT: and regarding Ben Shapiro and violence, it's important to note that the Quebec mosque shooter, who murdered six Muslims, viewed Ben Shapiro's twitter 93 times in the month leading up to the killing. Even more than he viewed Alex Jones, David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Tucker Carlson.
While there are undeniably ideological overlaps between Shapiro and Spencer, the latter is an outright ethno-nationalist fascist, while the former isn't. To combat Shapiro, he should not be invited to cable news to speak, he should be protested when giving lectures at college campuses, and he shouldn't be coddled in major publications because he says nothing of value and has no journalistic merit. He shouldn't be violently confronted because I'm not convinced he's anything other than two five-year-olds stacked on top of each other in a suit.
But this is not a 'defence of free speech' issue: it's a defence of consequences issue. Or at least, its matter of taking speech seriously, of actually giving it the weight it can and does have, and not treating it like some intellectual parlour game to be played out in salons where people can unironically talk about 'the marketplace of ideas' - a wretched idea indulged in by wretches. Let's be clear about what this means: the response to speech cannot simply be limited to 'more speech'. Politics is not a dinner party, and words can and are, to use a useful word in one of @Maws articles, actualized. In some cases that actualization means fucking genocide, as the Bosnian case makes clear, and the liberal disconnection of speech from its actualisation is doubly a denial of reality on one hand, and an insistence that reality go unaffected by words on the other.
The liberal hypostatization of speech has the effect of draining it of whatever power it can and does have. It sucks the life out of what it claims to be so vital to it. I'm mincing words - lets be sparkling clear: the liberal doesn't give a fuck about speech, dispute her pseudo-veneration of it.
I said above that the response to speech cannot simply be limited to more speech. Which is not to say that speech should always be responded with means other than speech; only that it cannot be turned into a political principle without at the same time destroying the power of speech. Were we to be so lucky, in a good society, speech should be adequate most of the time. Except we don't live, not by any means, in such a society. Things are shit, and liberal with his head simulatiously up his ass and in the clouds misrecognises this to sometimes literally fatal effect.
Another way to put this is that even 'initial speech' (lets call it), speech 'before' response is never 'just' speech: to have a platform is already to have been implicated in whole webs of extra-vocal institutional power: education, money, social and media networks and so on. Speech is never 'just' speech - it is that and a boatload more. To insist that the only politically appropriate response to this is just more words (throw words at fascists! That'll stop 'em!) is fucking idiotic, to put it mildly.
You're grossly mischaracterizing my position, yet again. I condemned violence as a means to censorship, and apparently that makes me a howler worthy only of passive aggressive pejoratives. You're either not bothering to read my posts, or you're too incensed even for less than serious engagement.
Whatever political action it is you think will save us all, please tell us (or share a video of it, because speech is for liberal [s]daydreamers[/s] fascist enablers).
The rest of us aren't privy to your advanced solutions.
Indeed. I'm suspicious of this 'totally else.' What I see is various groups dreaming up a future that...ignores the problem of the existence of other groups. Of course it sucks when people won't behave how I'd like them to. It sucks even more when they try to control me. The boring old compromise is of course individual freedom. But I'm no libertarian on property rights. That might work on an infinite frontier, but we are stuck together on a crowded boat, and it's not ultra cool that the boat is largely owned by a tiny minority.
What we probably don't want is hysteria on a crowded boat. Unfortunately folks tend to glob up and demonize and I'm not above that myself. There's an ecstasy in dissolving into the angry mob. And yet it's also the slime of hell itself for the individual as individual.
I mostly agree, but I think the left can actually gain from earnestly engaging with him (although not many let wing pundits are well prepared to do so). Shapiro's gaff on the BBC is a great example of how a calm approach can be effective. Too many people think his ideas do have merit (of whatever kind), which makes them disagree with your assessment that he should not be platformed, hence the protests and counter-protests, and the general escalation of conflict.
Don't think there is much point in an earnest debate with a guy who sells "Leftist Tears" branded tumblers.
When I think of moral progress, I think of an expansion of rights. Free speech was used to criticize slavery and argue for female suffrage. It was used to argue for gay marriage. Maybe it'll be used to remove 'male' and 'female' from government documents. Fine with me. The point is to protect the individual from the mob --including the mob acting through the government.
Now we have something like equality before the law in terms of race, gender, and sexual orientation.Still some would like to push further in the direction of 'progress.' This article links to some examples of what many of us otherwise 'left wing' people find troubling.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2017/04/04/its-time-us-left-wingers-stood-up-to-pc/
And some of us are keeping an eye on this.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714
This is one of the reasons talking about 'free speech' as a general concept is so meaningless. Free speech where? In what context? With respect to which audience? In what medium? Among which institutional arrangements? Liberals would flatten these questions out, and bray out the tautology and speech is speech is speech. But it's not, not to anyone for whom politics is anything more than a mild-mannered salon conversation - which is to say, not to most people, everywhere.
And this what we should really notice and stop here. There's no need for hysteria.
Students being hysterical asses in Ivy League universities is rather unimportant in the end. They are enjoying their time being woke and being so hip 'university students' and simply having fun before they start their top notch careers. And isn't it awesome for them if they get some professor fired? So they don't care about the wars the US, but do care if some provocative right-wing commentator is invited to their university campus to give a speech or are concerned of 'microagressions'. That's their thing to be so woke about. Let them have their egotrips I say.
Yet it really isn't that important. Just look at how radical university students, or the loudest leftist part of them, were in the 1960's and just how traditional that generation came out to be. The media has picked up these incidents mainly because of the absurdity factor, like the Yale Hollywood suit incident or the Evergreen incident and so on.
Right wing commentators like Scruton will be attacked. That's just the nature of the game.
No need to challenge his views directly if he's not invited or discussed on a public, wide-reaching platform further amplifying his voice. No one owes Ben a conversation, any more than they owe me a conversation. He has his own website (funded by billionaire brothers, of course) so he's free to publish his views there (insofar as he is profitable).
Quoting pomophobe
lol the whole sokal squared thing was a dud.
That's a good point. Personally I'm not that worried about it. I was already dying before I started paying attention to politics, in the usual sense of just being mortal. 'War is god.' I relate to John Gray's dark view. Maybe history is a merry-go-round. I don't see why something like WWII won't happen again, including another genocide. We're the same old monkey after all. And it'll happen because part of us wants it too. It's fun watching Drogon annihilate King's Landing.
There are two errors in this formulation:
The first is that Shapiro's views are already out in the wild, and regardless of our whack-a-wing-nut high-score, Shapiro or whoever else will manage to find or build a platform of their own. We need not invite him to platforms of our own, but his views must still be challenged.
The second error is that nobody is suggesting we're obligated to invite Shapiro to any of our platforms: the specific issue is that one group of students is claiming the right to dis-invite Shapiro from the platform of another group of students who do want him invited. While it is true that platforming pundits for the purpose of rebuke is sometimes worthwhile (albeit risky), specifically what I'm condemning is forced de-platforming by third party groups. If Berkeley wants to succumb to social pressure and disallow Shapiro, I can respect that, but protestors should not use extortionate physical force and disruption to make it happen, nor should they use force to disrupt the event should they not get their way.
It is for this reason I hold to radical inner change and destruction over such destruction manifested in society. As an individual I try to be an anarchist - questioning my own authority - and as a member of a community I try to be conservative; with my inner rebel shining forth rather than causing outward destruction. Non-destructive radical change only seems possible to me if the radical change is taken on in numerous individuals and spread as a paradigm change. To put such change into outward action directly seems foolhardy to me where a passive outward attitude holds dear what is existent whilst the active inner rebellion drip-feeds society and ushers in long lasting progressive change - be it at dire personal cost rather than some naive policy thrown out experimentally into the political sphere where the cost becomes the burden of the innocent bystander.
Some of it is a contempt for the college kids for being such pussies. But I think Shapiro is a joke too. Zizek I like, since he knows he's never quite telling the truth about himself, and he knows I know.
Paglia is whiny these days, but Sexual Personae was good stuff. When the PC kids interrupted her talk, it was like a team of cliches interrupting someone who might be saying something interesting with predictable noise. Sexist. Racist. Fascist. Something-phobe. These words have been milked dry. They were used like wide-spectrum antibiotics. Yet just about everyone roots for the blue people when they watch Avatar. Few people embrace racism consciously, though maybe everyone (like it or not) is racist on some level --even the white people who like to shame other white people on this issue. After all, bringing it up and crying 'racist' constantly keeps us all well aware of what team we're on.
I like this.
Quoting I like sushi
Indeed. Holding dear what is existent especially stands out for me. One of the things that keeps people from violence is the sense that all the nice things in life (like the daily routine of a mostly happy marriage) can be washed away beyond recall. And let's see: I buy lots of healthy food from the grocery store. I ride my bike not expecting to be murdered. Above someone stressed the shittiness of the world, but I don't think it's all that shitty. Now I know a homeless addict who's not enjoying the ride, but it's anything but clear what to do with/for him. So it goes.
Quoting Maw
It may have been silly, but they scored a hit with the dog park rape culture paper. The journal didn't just publish it. They celebrated it. They lapped it up. And this is how your debunking link responds to that:
[quote=link]
How absurd was it for such work to get an airing? It may sound silly to investigate the rates at which dog owners intervene in public humping incidents, but that doesn’t mean it’s a total waste of time (as psychologist Daniel Lakens pointed out on Twitter). If the findings had been real, they would have some value irrespective of the pablum that surrounds them in the paper’s introduction and discussion sections.
[/quote]
That's pretty weak. And the issue is bigger than that paper in any case. It doesn't keep me up night, but it moves the needle a little bit at the voting booth --not that that matters much either, but talking about politics is a nice way for us all to twist up our intellectual panties. At the moment I'm remembering to laugh at all of this again, all the drama that serious people are supposed to take seriously. So 'lol' indeed.
So do you distance yourself at all from any PC stuff? I ask sincerely.
We can commentate without participating and still know what we're talking about. Just look at football. So I'm not sure about the necessity of things having wordly consequences outside of this thread.
I find the comment that there is an inherent asymmetry between an platformed speaker and regular Joes persuasive. I doubt this is fixed through deplatforming or disrupting speakers. First, half of the time the whole invite is troll baiting. I sincerely doubt serious Conservative students care about Milo's brainfarts. It's just to set up the situation so they can then claim neo-Marxists and SJWs are against free speech. And that is all about appearances which basically is what politics has devolved into.
That's the second point there, that it is indeed all about appearances. The insistence that it shouldn't is just a wish. Without a plan to enrich the debate it will not change.
The devolvement means clickbait, memes and one liners have become more effective as political tools to get the necessary votes to give a thin veneer of democratic legitimacy. But nuance is lost because it cannot be captured in three words, it needs to be teased out through debate. What if left is two sides who just repeat their positions ad infinitum without actually engaging the other side that we still need for meaningful political action.
Just look at Brexit and how this was initially attempted as something to be imposed on the "losers". How a certain segment of Brexiteers insisted on going at it alone and a parliament voting down every option without the ability to develop real alternatives.
We're creating schisms in societies by setting up every difference as irreconcilable, with us vs them, winner-takes-all, while we still need to live together. It's all pretty toxic.
And it gets worse because freedom of speech isn't meaningful without freedom to information and we don't get the information we need to make informed decisions because we're inundated with clickbait, memes and one liners.
Why?
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I don't know about physical confrontation, but they have every right to protest the event, in particular against someone who thinks women shouldn't have reproductive rights, that Muslims are mostly religious extremists, etc. If Ben Shapiro, who claimed that Left Jews are bad and undermine Judaism, came to my university, then why should I, a Left/Secular Jew, standby as a person who dehumanizes and delegitimizes me is offered a platform? You cannot expect that when a person's views are essentially a protest against others, they are not challenged and confronted in turn by it. That's a consequence of free speech.
Can you actually explain why it's weak? The paper is interesting and "celebratory" because of the number of hours purportedly observed. 1,000 hours of observation, as the article and linked tweets within explain, is a huge outlier in research, and would be an enormously valuable data set for other scientists, even if the actual study itself was silly.
Quoting pomophobe
Good to know that a poorly executed sociological hoax makes you slightly more likely to vote for what's becoming a white nationalist party.
Quoting pomophobe
I don't know what Political Correctness means, a priori. Most people agree that white people shouldn't be slinging the N-word around. But is that political correctness? Most people agree that women should't be sexually harassed in the workplace? Is that political correctness? Some people think that we should acknowledged a person's preferred gender and refer to them as such. Is that political correctness or just common decency?
I don't think you can see it, but you are misreading me. It's not just the quasi-religious pseudo-scientific nonsense going on in gender studies. It's stuff like this too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO1agIlLlhg
Chants of 'black power' and the demonization of whiteness are racist, at least in the view of many people whose votes the DNC should seek. Is Bret Weinstein the devil? If even he is the enemy, then the PC left is doomed. If that guy is your boogeyman, you're an extremest, a New Age religious fanatic --or so it seems to me.
That's what I mean by the PC-left, a cult of race, gender, and sexual orientation that pretty much inverts a more familiar cult of race, gender, and sexual orientation --as if repeating a mistake in the opposite direction is progress rather than excess.
Well said.
How much context do you need for a gang of students chanting 'black power'? Or a mob of students gathered threateningly around a small female professor? Or 'whiteness is the most violent fucking system to ever breathe' being yelled out for a mob's applause? Would you need the same context for chants of 'white power' ? It just seems reasonable to me for us all to encourage a society where race and gender aren't such a big deal. If blacks are justified in chanting 'black power' because they are viewed as currently less powerful, then at some point 'white power' politics will be justified. Some obviously already think so. But if whites become a smaller part of the population and lose political power, they'll have a precedent for thinking racially. Perhaps they already do, but it doesn't seem like something we'd want to encourage by tolerating divisive rhetoric.
That said, I also see something like the futility of this reasonable talk. It's more exciting to be unreasonable. The reasonable people end up depending on the extremists to cancel one another out. In the meantime the rich can get richer and the oceans can get warmer. The world was always on fire and always will be. I'd hate to live without any distance from all this political hysteria. It's serious and yet it's not, not while most people just go the grocery store without shooting one another.
Because either:
Shapiro's rhetoric is meaningless, persuades nobody, and need not be protested whatsoever, let alone censored.
OR
Shapiro's rhetoric does persuade people, in which case we must try to counter his persuasive power with persuasion of our own, a large part of which entails addressing the underlying substance of his claims and beliefs. (Given he is persuading people, censorship or no, clearly de-platforming alone isn't the answer for the left)
Quoting Maw
Yes they do have the right to protest.
Quoting Maw
We should not encode what we can and cannot protest beforehand (for good reasons). People are free to protest against water, air, earth, and fire if that's what tickles their political fancy.
Quoting Maw
If it's not your platform that he is being invited to, how much authority should you have to veto his invitation?
Quoting Maw
This is all well and good, but I draw the line at responding to speech with physical force, intimidation, or violence. Violence is not speech, and using force to silence the speech of other groups likewise is not speech.
As long as the bullhorns and barricades of the former don't crowd-out the benefits of the latter, then absolutely. And this is how we've always done it, so what's changed in recent years?
Quoting StreetlightX
Rather than flatten the conversation out, it's only practical to examine the issue on a case by case basis, which is what I've tried to do. In the case of Shapiro (which I realize is not that relevant to your position), it's not a plain matter of to invite or not to invite, it's whether or not to disrupt the private political event of another group with force. As nebulous as the free speech discussion has become, you can at least agree to a distinction between speech and violence, and that when it comes to achieving political goals, the means should not undermine the ends.
Quoting pomophobe
This is really the thrust of your argument, isn't it, and the genesis of white nationalism. White people fear losing power and will take extreme efforts to hold on to that power. The key difference between black power movements and white power movements is that latter tends towards overt violence and systemic oppression of non-whites. 'Black Power' is the call for Black Americans to defend on another against oppressive forces, and confronting those forces in non-violence ways. 'White Power' is to call for lynches and remove non-whites from their communities. Black Americans simply don't want to be unjustly targeted by police in their own communities and desire safety like their white peers. American demographics are changing, and non-whites are simply demanding the same opportunities, freedoms, and equality before the law that's currently afforded towards whites. Thinking that a white racial backlash is a justifiably precedent to these demographic shifts and demands is to justify white nationalism.
Ironically, you seem triggered by the use of 'Black Power', but my main concern is that this issue, which occurred two years ago at a college campus and really only affected a few people is a more compelling influence on how you will vote, than say, the draconian legislation to destroy women's reproductive rights, or the zero-tolerance border policy separating children from families, villianizing news media, cozying up to right nationalists around the world, as well as domestic white nationalists, shifting wealth to the ultra-wealthy through tax cuts, etc. somehow these play second fiddle to black students protesting unsafe and unfair conditions in their colleges.
This is nonsense. Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, and Milo were deplatformed and have all but been removed from public conversation, save for Bannon when he's occasionally invited to speaking engagements. Deplatforming works, and just because Shapiro may be persuadable, doesn't mean he deserves to be heard. And it's not as if someone who says Muslims are bad, or doesn't understand transgenderism deserve to be heard.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
No but speech can undoubtedly lead to violence. Shapiro is emblematic of that.
I think we may be running aground on our final vocabularies, and I'm not sure you have the story straight, especially since you didn't mention Weinstein.
That you ultimately don't object to the chant of 'black power' seems to confirm you as a defender of 'virtuous' racism. I'm not so sure about your psychoanalysis of my motives. To be sure, I'm no saint. Drogon wants out. Are you a saint?
Anyway, what I'm hearing is that it's cool if biologists are chased out of their institutions as long as they are white men who question an arguably racist policy. I though we on the left were down with science? Oh well. Here's his testimony before congress. I'd say decide whether even this guy is one of the baddies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRIKJCKWla4
You're missing the point: it's not about who deserves to be heard, it's about who is influential, what they are saying, and responding to it directly. Milo, Bannon, and Spencer don't get much play on CableTV, but they still have large online followings, and their influence is still able to spread through the unregulated new media. Whether or not Bannon is verboten, if he is still gaining followers in whatever platform, then the answer is to address his rhetoric directly rather than just pushing him onto the next platform.
We could ban them from every existing platform, but as long as they have an extant following, they could simply create platforms of their own (we would also have to ban all of their followers from very platform). I'm saying it's not practical to disallow their speech on whatever platforms they manage to get invited to, instead it is far more practical to counter their rhetoric directly when and where arises.
Shapiro is a bit more tame than the three other provocateurs you've named, so I'm not sure lumping him in with the rest is entirely warranted. Shapiro does represent a very large ideological demographic in America, so unless you want to get rid of political-pluralism altogether, it might not be the best move.
Quoting Maw
Speech that leads to violence is the kind of speech that we want to censor, but where do we draw the line? In my opinion, if someone calls for, condones, or advocates for violence against a specific individual or group, then we should be able to prosecute them for hate speech, but legislating that in practice is a tricky affair.
I want to differentiate myself from what I take to be vagabond's stance in that I don't think the right tack is to argue with Shapiro or whoever on their own ground (which is so deeply disingenuous that I think even Shapiro doesn't realize how disingenuous he is.)
But the point is that shaming w/ fiery rhetoric, even if you're right, has no positive effect. It worsens things. It's a show of weakness. That's why the most 'clap' worthy medium piece is going to get parsed as 'liberal tears' by the right. 'clap' worthy pieces are only going to land for those who agree with you already , so it amounts to circling the wagons, a defensive maneuver.
That doesn't work, but arguing seriously with e.g. anti-blm is no good either because [anti-blm] stuff is always, always motte and bailey, even tho half the time people are tricked by their own rationalizations and don't even realize the difference between their motte and bailey.
But what is there that isn't performative? I don't know, but I think it's not taking a heroic trash-talking stand against the enemy. As if the mccoys would listen to the hatfields if only the hatfields really gave it to them.
There's a new-left thing of flirting with the vibe of violence and revolution while certainly not advocating it because real violence isnt real violence, its symbolic violence etc. Here's a poem by Brecht only of course I don't mean it like that. But for anyone not already sympathetic, this looks deeply silly and structurally symmetrical (not equivalent- value-symmetrical) to what the rights doing. This is at least one major part of the engine that keeps the whole thing churning. This is ultra-performative.
Whatever's outside is probably something like: a real alternative. Which the left has become expert at not-offering. The first thing is probably to let go of 'theory' which is fine as an exciting private pursuit, one which I also enjoy, but from the perspective of political efficacy is nothing but series of very clever footnotes to Marx which alternate between cerebral self-satisfaction and a community founded on mutual recognition of well-struck poses. It doesn't work. Empire & Zucotti should have been the last hurrah.
I don't mention Bret Weinstein because he was not, in actuality, a major component to the story. He inserted himself as a major figure during on-going protests for personal exposure. The actual story is that for decades, Evergreen engaged in a 'Day of Absence' event in which students of color would leave the school to highlight their importance within the college and overall community. This practice, which was optional, was praised by Weinstein. However, in Trump's first year in office after threatening mass deportation for people of color, the school had decided to invert the original project so that white people were asked to leave the campus while people of color stayed, in order to highlight their belonging to the community. This was encouraged, but not mandated, and Evergreen's white students made up over 66% of the overall population, so it was never expected that a majority of white students would participate. Bret complained about this change on false premises, arguing via email that this was a "show of force", which it wasn't, since it was always optional. This email was sent and leaked in April. No protests took place because of this because who cares about Bret Weinstein. It wasn't until May that the incidents I mentioned regarding black students occurred and protests appeared throughout the campus. Weinstein confronted the protesters who shouted him down, in part because of his emails. Whether or not they were right to do so is frankly neither here nor there, as Weinstein later appeared on white nationalist Tucker Carlson's show on Fox and knowingly gave a false version of the events, which lead to alt-right targeting and harassment towards the school.
Well no they don't, because they were banned from most forms of popular media. Can't have a large online following if you are banned from most popular platforms.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Is it? I thought Fascism, Nazism, White Supremacy, or whatever Spencer, Milo, Bannon, et. al. are selling were thoroughly defeated by the end of WW2, and yet somehow you feel that we still need to confront these ideas via debate and counterargument? That these ideas can still take hold over segmented populations (despite the last 70+ years) shows that far-right ideology actually thrives when placed in the light and publicly confronted. That's precisely why Bannon, Milo etc. want confrontation. That's why they want to be platformed and publicly exposed. That's why the alt-right celebrated when Hilary Clinton gave speech in 2016 condemning them. They can't lose. Far-right ideology is inherently irrational. It cannot be defeated by debate and countering rhetoric. In that regard, it's actually very practical to disallow their speech on platforms, whether on popular publications, or social media, or college campuses.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Does he? Seems like a majority of Americans, regardless of political affiliations, prefer left-leaning policies.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Sure, but my point is that it's not unreasonable to protest Shapiro for lecturing on college campuses.
I don't think I addressed this properly so let me try this on: free speech is a class issue, and until it is understood in those terms, liberals will continue to find themselves arrayed with the fascists whose rights their tender little hearts break for. 'Cause liberals don't - in fact are constitutionally incapable, given the poverty of terms in which they approach politics - have any way to address the material and historical differentials that have made reactionary views so attractive to the uptake now, in this time, in this particular political situation.
I mean, reactionary fucks like Shapiro have been around since the dawn of time, all with more or less varying degrees of success; so the question is: why now? Why this prevalence, this attractiveness, now? The only piddling, bootlicking answer the liberal can give is something like 'because the Left have gone too far with PC culture and I'm not allowed to make tasteless jokes anymore' (note again the foregrounding of speech). Aside from the fact that anyone who doesn't do politics-by-meme can at a glance note the disproportion between supposed cause and contemptible effect, this simply cannot account for why-now. Can you imagine a Bannon, a Trump, a Shapiro running around in the 90s? They would have been fringe, and would have remained fringe, and not beacuse they weren't engaged with by the left. Platforming - or not - wasn't even at issue.
I'm not saying society was much, if at all, better 'back then' (that time had its own, insane, problems), but - I can't believe I have to spell this out - if you want to know where Sapiro et. al. emerged, perhaps, just fucking perhaps, one ought to look at the material conditions of the poor white working class, rather than 'Muh Free Speech Under AtTaCK fROM ThE LeFt'. Long story short, to put the etiology of the emergence of Shapiros down to 'the left' is such, such, such a stupid and historically myopic idea that it simply cannot be taken seriously. But the liberal simply has no fucking language or vocabulary other than 'free speech' by which to track these issues, so of course for him it's all about 'speech'.
Given all this, the point is not to give up or cede the argument for free speech to the right, but to insist upon creating the conditions under which speech is genuinely constitutive of freedom, and not just a sop to some abstract freedom felt by no one, no where, and has liberals walking in goosestep with the wankers whose speech they cry over. That's the sense in which I think the argument that 'we have to engage them' misses the mark to a fatal degree. Leaving aside the sheer fact the deplatforming works, despite the unemprical meme that it doesn't, the point is to get us to a point at which the 'platforming' - or not - of Shapiros shouldn't even be an issue. I want to live in a society where Shapiros don't matter - not because he's 'deplatformed', but because even if he had all the platforming in the world, no one would care.
Well, clearly deplatforming works against individuals, but not against the ideas they're vessels for... otherwise this conversation wouldn't be happening, and otherwise it wouldn't be barreling inexorably toward what you've said, which reads, quite literally as, " It was because of NAFTA, not the left, I want things to be different." Yes, so....
I feel like the relevant thing here would be whining about whining about free speech.
In any case not whining about whining about whining about free speech. Want to keep going?
e.g.
I guess you have to read between the lines
I don't know what you mean by dreck. I don't even know what 'dreck' means. It sounds like an insult from a 19th century novel. I feel like you're going to call me a 'sniveling blackguard' next.
I mean, I've been pretty upfront with what I'm saying and I stand by it. What's the alternative? I invite a response, as always. I'm asking what you would do to make a world where no one would listen to Shapiros. If you say that's what you want - and I agree - I'm open to suggestions. A better reproach would be that I haven't offered anything either, and I haven't. But I'm sincerely interested in ideas in that vein.
[edit] the above is a response to the pre-edited post ["Do you have anything else other than this dreck? Or is this all you know how to do?"]
Yes, but I always argue with people who are closest to my view. It's negative, and the negativity sustains itself on the 'positivity' it grapples with, so it diffuses into nothingness without it. That's exactly why it's words in a vacuum. My post sustains itself off that sustaining, so I'm trying to drag us both down to the fiery pit where it doesn't matter at all what we think about Shapiro. I could clap you and it would be meaningless.
I appreciate your detailed response. You have made me more skeptical about Weinstein's version of the events. Where I can't agree is that whether they were wrong or right is neither here nor there because Weinstein appeared on some show. I will say that Weistein's testimony in that video was a little offputting to me when he offered something like a conspiracy theory --as if the kids were the unwitting pawns of far more cynical agents.
But I find a different conspiracy theory here: https://www.thenation.com/article/white-men-have-good-reason-to-be-scared/
[quote=The Nation]
From the left to the right, we have for decades masked our disagreements with the paralyzing euphemisms of partisanship. We’ve told ourselves that our most bitter conflict is “conservative” versus “liberal,” “free enterprise” versus “big government.” Maybe now we are finally ready to be honest about the real point of contention: We are, as we have always been, a nation divided on the topic of white-male power. It’s easy to get confused by the crosscurrents of misogyny and racism and xenophobia, to think they’re discrete issues rather than the interlocking tools of white men’s minority rule.
[/quote]
What do you make of this article?
I do get it. White men have largely been running things. But this seems like a crude simplification to me. And most white men aren't rich and aren't connected to power. Lemme guess, if we get rid of the white men in power, then the rich POC and women in power will sprinkle the poor with cash and reduce carbon emissions, since blackness and femaleness are magically good, just as whiteness + maleness is magically bad. I don't think so. We're all greedy monsters. Maybe we're all racists and sexists too. This article may want to demonize a small subset of rich white men. But only someone in the bubble will ignore the direction of this magical thinking. At the moment white men have enough power so that such articles are acceptable. But this anti-white and anti-male sentiment is only going to encourage white men to start thinking (even more) about which party has more to offer them. I mean those who might otherwise vote DNC but aren't sure if they can trust the kind of people that tolerate this attitude toward people with their combination of race and gender. Ain't it gonna be the po' white boy that gets it first? Or the dummy tryin' to pay off school debt? 'White men have reason to be scared.' Mitch McConnell approves this message. It's great way to cut down on violence too, literally telling the wingnuts with a basement full of ammo that yeah dude you should be scared, we're coming for you. (The NRA also approves this message.)
The choice that either one 'responds' to Shapiro's words or does not; It's as if the world does not exist; as if one could not aim to change the conditions in which Shapiro's words have any hold at all, make them ring false on their own terms, from the moment they leave his mouth. Words, words, words, the thin, impotent reed of liberal dinner party politics.
Simple - the right has coopted liberals into mass hysteria over anything that isn't 'speech'.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
'Private political event' is an oxymoron. Politics is disruption, and the liberal 'stay in your lane' take on politics is not politics at all, but its destruction. If it were up to liberals Rosa Parks would have been chastized for inconveniencing poor bus riders who just wanted to get where they were going. She should have just made a really good fucking argument, maybe written a really eloquent letter instead.
This is liberal 'politics': you ought to have your opinion, so long as it changes nothing, has no effect, amounts to people nodding along in contemplative agreement, looking good while they do so.
I would hardly describe my objections as hysterical (certainly no more so than what I'm criticizing). And to thrice clarify, I'm not condemning anything that isn't speech, I'm condemning anything that is violence (at least in the context of a Shapiro event). There's an obvious difference you're expected to grasp.
Should you respond with some allegory about how Shapiro's events amount to force in the first place, please tell me how much force we ought to use in response (a practical example would be dandy).
Quoting StreetlightX
Rosa Parks refusing to yield a seat on the bus (an act of civil disobedience) is not quite the same as physically disrupting and shutting down an event via force.
There's a stark difference. If you think the harm caused by Shapiro's words or the policies they inexorably support warrant more than civil disobedience in active response, I would be glad to hear your position (as opposed to the peanut shells you've given me so far).
Quoting StreetlightX
Bandying words at dinner parties is more productive than vaguely preaching fool-hearty revolution from an armchair. You've given up on words as a means to progress or resistance, but it's Shapiro's words (the persuasive power they hold) that helps prevent the world you desire from actually existing.
The disunity Shapiro causes in the body politic is a great way to divide and conquer that mythical vox populi, but instead of trying to win his followers to gain the base you would need to institute change (unity is roundly required for any revolution), you would instead have them tarred, feathered, and dunce-capped, which then makes my job at the dinner party unnecessarily difficult and awkward.
'Your' objections belong to a multiplex industry of complaining about 'de-platforming' that just is the standard line churned out by any institution or person which fancies themselves 'thoughtful' about the day's events. An industry moreover that thrives off a tiny proportion of blown-up events all the better to secure the massive, crushing weight of the status quo. That critical mass - that disproportionate swarm, to which your objections belong - qualifies as hysteria by any measure.
And again the the apparently exhaustive duopoly: speech or violence. Nauseating.
So Weinstein inserted himself to this (with apparently an outrageous and provocating email???) and then knowingly gave a false version of the events? So just what was he lying about?
See the Olympian article Here’s how many students were sanctioned for breaking Evergreen’s conduct code last spring, summer
I wouldn't say that 80 students being sanctioned and suspended (after over 100 incident reports) is just a few people. And Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying receiving a $450,000 settlement and $50,000 in legal fees from the college tells something. Of course with your logic, this perhaps was Weinstein's plan all along to provoke the students and start a new career or something.
As I've said, this odd incident was picked up by the media basically for it's oddity and naturally was cherished and upheld by conservative media. The rarity of the incident and others like it is quite telling and actually show how the thousands of campuses and universities in the US aren't affected with similar issues. Simply put it, today's students aren't on a verge of starting a revolution. However your spin on the events is simply a bit biased.
Oh yes you can. Anything indexed by the google search engine counts as a platform, and as click-baity provocateurs, there are an unfathomably large number of news outlets willing to air their ideas, whether to profit from the stink, or that good old time smell.
Quoting Maw
The trouble is that Spencer, Milo, and Bannon (and Shapiro) are great at positioning classically far right and Fascist ideas something else. To an average white seventeen year old, all they will see is someone claiming to represent their interests with some fancy sounding ideas about religion and government. The deeper they get into alt-right circles the more they're being exposed to mountains of misleading bull-shit that individually they have little hope of refuting (shit about "white genocide/death", shit about anti-semetic conspiracy theories, shit about "the muslim invasion", shit about "the evils of diversity", shit about "race and IQ" and more). Once the damage is done and they've accepted the basic alt-right program of bat-shit ideas, dissuading them is like talking to a flat-earther who cites nothing but obscure, convoluted, and misleading arguments to make their case.
And what happens when you tell a "flat-earther" that their ideas are too stupid to even be considered or debated, let alone refuted? They say "Aha! You're so brainwashed that you're unable to give me an answer! I must be right!". This is why Shapiro DESTROYS... are so popular. It's not that his ideas are really being challenged and showing their merit in any meaningful way, what pleases them is that where leftists and liberals are unable to respond, they claim the chemical rewards of victory without ever needing to leave their comfort zone. Granted, many of their ideas aren't fit for daytime T.V, and willingly getting into a serious debate with them is downright masochistic, but short of a firing squad it's dirty work that inevitably needs doing.
These 17 year olds that Bannon et al. are recruiting will soon be voting age, and they're already on platforms you and I haven't yet heard of.
Quoting Maw
Online social media has been segmented for years (which is a part of the problem). People like Spencer were never out in the light. Almost nobody had ever heard of him until a video of him being sucker-punched went viral and we all asked the question "Is it O.K to punch a Nazi?". Maybe it's O.K to punch a Nazi, but it falls short of a rebuke, and it's not a good look (and regrettably, looks matter; by going overboard we undermine our own political goals).
Quoting Maw
I would like to point again to how a conservative British interviewer was able to "destroy" Shapiro simply by keeping his composure and asking straight-forward questions. By refusing to respond with emotion, Shapiro was disarmed of his "Aha!, Triggered leftist!" shtick, and being completely unprepared to defend the actual ideas in that moment, he fell flat on his face. I'm positive that that event had a negative influence on his popularity (maybe the only blow to his popularity in recent memory).
Quoting Maw
I never said that it is unreasonable to protest Shapiro, I am saying that it's unreasonable to use force against him, and that both protesting him and using force against him are less effective than beating him at his own game.
I'm not condemning anything that isn't speech, I'm condemning violence and intimidation through force (at least in the context of a Shapiro event). There's an obvious difference you're expected to grasp.
Quote one line where I advocated 'violence and intimidation through force'.
Quote one line where I alleged or stated that 'anything other than speech amounts to violence'.
Yet one shouldn't go too far with this theory of a political gateway drug to nazism. Because it sounds like an argument like "if smoke marijuana, you'll end up as a heroin addict". Because there is the lure just to enlarge every conservative pundit having this kind of veiled agenda, which simply is false. Just to remind people that this thread was about Roger Scruton.
It is as condescending as thinking that every social democrat is actually for Marxism-Leninism and authoritarian communism. That they 'just disguise' themselves as believing in things like democracy.
I'm not interested to listen to Spencer, but I think I agree with this. And Shapiro as political commentator and a talk show host indeed wants people on the left to get provoked.
The simple problem here is to see nazis everywhere, just as for the right it is this quite odd fixation about there being these postmodernist cultural marxists undermining the society in the academia.
Social Democrats are just badly informed Marxists. :razz:
It's less about calling everyone you disagree with a Nazi, and more about seeing threats to democracy and social justice. Let's indulge a far right, but quite insightful, understanding of politics for a second and reference Schmitt; there are political friends and enemies on any issue. Friends are those who act, consciously or unconsciously, to bring about your political desires. Enemies are those who act, consciously or unconsciously, to frustrate your political desires.
When people see good intentioned 'free speech absolutists' making the same arguments as clever transphobes about that Canadian hate speech law, we can see sides drawn. When people defend homophobia through the guise of 'states rights' on gay marriage, you can see sides drawn. When people lambast the antifa for the free speech rights of white nationalists, you can see sides drawn.
The question you have to ask yourself is; why do the far right see centrists like this. People that have not inoculated themselves against fascist rhetoric are willing vectors for political disease; normalising what should never be normal. In most circumstances, the toxic propaganda is elevated by giving it any public platform; you end up with people who wouldn't believe it not believing it, and people who have far right sympathies see their beliefs (in the ethnostate, in the invasion of whatever brown country...) as a subject for reasoned debate. The engineers of discourse see you lot as easy dupes and design their arguments, propaganda and behaviour along easily accepted tropes (like freedom of speech in deplatforming, or 'Zionism for whites') for you. It isn't just the far right that get in on the act, it's organisations like Soros, Murdoch and the Kochs and every government. And why do so many centrists fall for it?
It's all a sham, really. Antifa super soldiers care a lot more about democracy and free speech than the lipservice most people pay to it. When Antifa counter protest and frustrate threats and horrible organisations, they're being an immune response to fascism, racism, transphobia, nationalism - people who would rather see Mexican children in cages than playing happily with their kids. They care so much about democracy and social justice they organise to stop threats to both.
They're never going to be seen as the heroic, sound-minded people they are as long as political action is sanitised speech 'respecting everyones rights'. This right there, that belief in sanitised politics and its reduction to inferential chatter, is the biggest namby pamby PC scam there is. Anyone who thinks PC is killing political freedom needs to take a good look in the mirror, their smiling reflection knows what side the sophisticated marionette of their body is on.
We have to be ultra careful not to address ourselves to the academy in our hearts; so what we do isn't to confuse the actionable insights of critique for the actions they embody. I'm a hypocrite in this regard, perhaps a necessary one due to political alienation. So I imagine that the only role I can play is an academic one; writing about this kind of stuff. What we definitely shouldn't do is to turn academic critique into a placebo politics; in essence on this site leftists posting are doing what TED talks do, making a complicated issue an advert for further talk.
It's probably true that people everywhere are turning left in response to the increasingly evident impossibility of nationstates acting in the interests of their people everywhere. That this is essentially a symptom of the alienation of workers from politics, and the PR role nation states play for global capital, isn't a coincidence; the rise of the populist right (and Blair and Obama rhetorically) in Europe and America which addressed the concerns of the working class with racist just so stories was also an opportunity the left squandered. Sanders, Corbyn and before them Syriza and Las Podemos have seized the opportunity to articulate the alienation of the working class, let's hope we make use of the shift in the Overton window and the at least in principle sympathetic ears to overcome our tendencies to self purge with academic precision.
Edit: Trump too, we have a role to play in doing what we can to resist the shift in the Overton window to the right.
Seems evident to me that you aren't attempting to thoughtfully listen and engage with what people of color and women are arguing for when they criticize and attempt dismantle the hegemony of white (male) power. And when this hegemony holds onto its power through voter suppression and gerrymandering, denying access to capital, or dissolving reproductive rights along with punitive consequences, you think that the only valid response is to play nice and be civil?
I strongly suggest reexamining your ideological commitments and political prioritization, because saying that students chanting "black power" is leftism gone haywire and will only alienate white people and cause severe backlash, while shrugging off voter suppression or police brutality is an outright backwards ideology. In a previous post, I said it was strange that political correctness in this country might "move the needle" on your voting decision, but caging children at the border is of tertiary concern, and I think that's something you need to recognize and internalize.
Consider carefully rereading my original post.
Quoting ssu
ssu, why did you remove my following sentence asking pomophobe why the actions of these 80 students "is a more compelling influence on how you will vote" particularly because the consequences of their actions resulted in nothingburgers such as "formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension". Do you think it's normal to make voting decisions because some college students received formal warnings??
Quoting ssu
Yeah it tells us that the Evergreen College, which formally admitted no wrong-doing in how it handled the affair, didn't want to go through years of litigation which would have been time-consuming and arguably would more expensive in the long run.
Ok, so there (assuming I have the right one), you say:
Quoting Maw
And Bret Weinstein has explained this. He thought that it is quite different for a 'Day of Absence' being celebrated by African-Americans being absent (as a boycott mimicking past passive resistance) and to ask white people to stay away. I think that there is an obvious difference in the nuance. And I guess that in any way such a day would and should be optional anyway in either way 'celebrated', hopefully, so that this is a non-issue here. What is the false premiss or lying that refer to I don't know.
Quoting Maw
Because I just wanted to note that what you described as only a few persons involved was obviously far more, simple as that.
I wanted to go back on this.
It seems like this type of vitriolic politics is being copied from the US to Europe (among other things). I think it's a warning sign when political parties start simply rejecting any kind of cooperation with another parties and when consensus seeking is loathed so much. It's not the parties themselves who are an issue here (as it is partly a show), it's the gap that is built between the supporters of the parties.
Not sure how you aren't picking this up. In an email Bret (mis)characterized the inversed Day of Absence as "a show of force, and an act of oppression in itself", when the event was completely optional, required pre-enrollment to participate, and it was never expected that a majority of the white students, who comprised 70% of the total student body would participate. Not only did Bret mischaracterize the event via email, but, far worse, he went on Tucker Carlson's show and in front of an audience of millions did not correct Tucker Carlson when the latter framed the event as "student activists demanding that all white people leave campus, or else" and asking if they protested Bret directly because "he did not leave campus because he's white".
Quoting ssu
Dude. I said that a few people were "affected". Not that there were few people "involved". Honestly, please do a better job of reading what I write because it's a waste of my time responding to this illiteracy.
Fdrake, enemies are people you look at through the sights of your assault rifle hoping to incapacitate them, even kill them, before they kill you. Those are enemies. Your fellow citizen who has a totally different political world-view, ideology and political agenda about everything is not at all your enemy, but an opponent with whom you make the best democracy you can.
Quoting fdrake
Lol! :lol:
Oh that's like an ardent breeze from the 1930's quite in tone with those delirious überlosers hallucinating in their dreams that they are now living in similar time as Weimar Germany and resisting rising Hitlerism and hence picking fights with similar losers with grandiose out of this World pipe dreams. I simply don't get those crowds who want to pick a fight with each other. It's like this perverse love relationship the antifa and the neonazis have: they desperately need each other.
Of course in the end it's pretty pathetic especially in the US which not only is very prosperous, but has a most effective huge security control system that has totally infiltrated all these radical groups.
OK, you don't get my point in this issue. Fine, on forwards.
[quote="Maw",290807"]but, far worse, he went on Tucker Carlson's show and in front of an audience of millions did not correct Tucker Carlson when the latter framed the event as "student activists demanding that all white people leave campus, or else" and asking if they protested Bret directly because "he did not leave campus because he's white".[/quote]
It's America. That he later goes to talk to the media and goes on talk shows can be seen as a quite logical. After all, he hasn't his earlier job anymore. And there aren't so many professor level people interviewed in the US media. Hence among the filmstars, comedians and other celebrities your run-of-the-mill college professor here isn't so bad. And Weinstein isn't a provocateur like Milo or Ben Shapiro. It's simply delirious to think that this professor designed this when sending an email, just as in the case of the Yale Hollywood costume email. As I've said all along, the whole oddity of the event made it a media issue.
Actually Bret Weinstein, who is leftist, just shows the tribalism of US politics. So he goes to talk his leftist views to conservative crowds and gets applause. What's the problem?
Your point? You asked me to explain what Bret was lying about and I explained. What do you mean your point?
Quoting ssu
What the hell are you talking about? I don't give a shit about this. I give a shit about him giving a false narrative on a major news network.
I don't know...
Richard Spencer still seems to get a lot of attention on social media like Youtube, and he was never really that popular (but he's become infamous as the nazi).
Milo actually caused his own decline when it came out that he condoned pederasty.
So I disagree. Spencer is alive and kicking and it wasn't de-platforming that ended Milo, it was actually his access to enough rope.
Your babbling over a false narrative, which you haven't explained. Weinstein has gone over these issues in other far lengthier discussions, which there is no reason to say would be false.
It's simply one thing to have this kind of 'Day of Absence' of African Americans to mimick passive resistance and then to say that white people shouldn't come, and this was the whole point of Weinstein. I have no idea why you don't get this point, you just repeat your nonsensical reasoning that the event was optional or something and thus Weinstein was false. Well, I guess anything that the student body decides to do would be optional.
I love the antifa super soldiers meme, and will use it whenever I can.
You're making the antifa out of straw here. What they actually do is counterprotest far right groups and dangerous ideologues, disrupt their organisations however possible (usually without violence). I'm kind of baffled that you don't see how fragile democracy is and how persistently it is subverted. I'm most familiar with the UK, so let's go with that. The left more broadly protests for climate change action, they protest the humanitarian crisis in Palestine, they protest the terrible atrocities that come from the alliance between BAE systems, the British government and the Saudi government. They protest the privitisation of our health care system (and have been doing so for a long time), they're protesting for the survivors of Grenfell tower and the austerity politics that allowed the disaster in the first place and the corrupt legal system that continues to allow the owners to walk free. They're doing what they can to support (like through parda schemes and Patreon) education initiatives in poor areas like E15 in London and Drumchapel and Parkhead in Glasgow.
The antifa specifically organise direct action in communities in a rather non-hierarchical way (which often gets called 'sleeper cells' through this stupid narrative that they're the same as far right or Middle-Eastern terrorists) to undermine the influence of racist political groups like the EDL and BNP (remember, the leaders of the BNP have been playing footsies with the literal KKK for years). They counter-demonstrate when people who support these ideologies or want to destroy the fundaments of progressive ideals are stupidly given invited talks at universities and public halls.
They're fully aware that most of the time, they're actually fighting the results of government policy, not the Nazis from the Wiemar republic. If you want to engage in reductive analogies, perhaps if the Wiemar republic had more violent and better organised anti-fascists, there would not have been a need to fight WW2. If half the city shows up to counter protest, handcuffs themselves to government buildings, occupies the homes of political decision maybe the government would actually fucking listen. It's a damn sight more likely to have any effect than civil conversation with your friends; actually engaging the relevant political groups that is, engaging the driving forces of the political machines they, rightly, dislike.
We too often forget that liberals and conservatives, genuine liberals and conservatives, actually agree in spirit with what the radical left activists are doing. They just stopped spitballing and got out their damn chairs.
I still have a response to your earlier in the works, but I should leave a comment on this one.
In terms of a response to the colonisation of many parts of the world, it's hardly an absurd analysis to suggest they should not of come. At least with respect to how they arrived and treated indigenous populations.
Anyone from the many destroyed groups and cultures would have good reason to suggest colonisers ought to have stayed away. In our analysis of past events, we should be able to see this too. Are we to make a habit walking into the homes of others, taking there stuff, enslaving them, etc.?
In these circumstances, it's not absurd to think someone ought to of come. We would say that of anyone who was to do these things or make an attempt in our home.
Should have touched on this. Why aren't things like deplatforming, institutional subterfuge, and counter protest legitimate moves again? If you and your opponent both have the gloves on, the discussion usually does not matter, direct action about it is elsewhere.
It simply isn't subverted as it was in the 20th Century. Especially when focusing on the West, the idea that democracy is in peril is simply an overblown idea typically used to agitate your own side. One really has to have the perspective here: totalitarian ideologies as Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism aren't coming back after the catastrophic 20th Century.
Quoting fdrake
From the UK I'm not so well informed. But I would assume you have a similar phenomenon as we have here in our idyllic Nordic wellfare state. It starts with neonazi-or-similar movement (usually founded somewhere else) goes on a march with their own silly flags and then there is the counter-protest and in between the police that keep the two separated. Nothing typically happens, but the only thing what is created is a huge media frenzy about the issue.
Quoting fdrake
But they don't reject violence. As I've said, both neonazis and the antifa need each other.
Having gloves on is basically what a representational democracy and justice state is about. Discussion does matter. Belief in elections does matter.
Without better context, this is like saying penicillin needs the existence of bacteria to work as an antibiotic. Which is true, but also really misses the point.
Quoting ssu
And if your opponent takes their gloves off?
Sorry for two double posts. I'm kind of frothing at my keyboard here.
I don't buy that antifa like strategies are only justified when we already have a fascist state. Their entire schtick is preventative. If you think they 'need' fascists with real power to justify their actions, you're completely missing why they do what they do.
They never had any gloves to begin with. Makes handling the levers of power a bit fiddly.
Not really. If you think that to be a vigilante is totally OK or that the police cannot handle some small fringe cabal of neonazis, then I have to disagree. Sorry, but the violence part I simply disagree with.
Quoting fdrake
Does he really? Typically terrorism isn't tolerated.
Quoting fdrake
But do we have really a fascist state? Is there truly a threat of it? You see the RAF (Rote Armee Fraktion) believed that they indeed lived in a nazi-Germany (in West-Germany) and then retorted to violence. Yet that idea of a fraction then igniting the revolution simply didn't happen.
Like the small fringe cabal of fine neo-nazis that murdered Heather Heyer in Charlottesvile? The police clearly handled that great.
ssu really needs to read the news more often
I recall correctly from a FBI document published before Charlottesville: right-wing terrorism is typical done by individuals in an act rising from opportunity. They (the FBI) knew their home-grown terrorists actually quite well. Having more than one person makes it a terrorist cell, you know. If I remember correctly, there was just one terrorist.
Quoting Baden
Seriously???? You start to remind me of the calls for arming teachers when there is a school shooting.
No, the real way is for the police simply to treat these groups seriously and separate them and preserve order.
Quoting Maw
Not my police. But the FBI typically looks at any movement left or right.
Antifa don't punish crimes, this is a false analogy. They're in the business of frustrating the political machinations of far right projects, they're usually seasoned protestors or brave members of effected communities responding to real need. They are not vigilantes, and they do not resort to violence unless provoked. They know precisely how their self defence will be sold, so they're reluctant to raise their fists most of the time.
Why they do what they do is to remove real threats to effected communities and society at large. And don't rely on the police to protest the far right or mitigate its threats, is that the police; rightly; are always working to stop illegitimate violence. So, the police themselves will never be able to defend against the tangible threats right projects like these, and themselves are slaves to the acceptable boundaries of discourse and direct action (the Overton window). Of course, their edict for violence is a bit broader than the margins of acceptable opinion, but there is a reason why alleged terrorist sympathisers can be detained (for the UK, indefinitely without a trial).
Beating the crap out of a protestor with a truncheon is fine, a friend attacking the police officer who did it is not. There are huge asymmetries in the justifications for violence, and this is based on learned trust of the police. You have to have rather a lot of faith that the police's violence is in your interest or the interest of society at large to uncritically give them this edict. What usually happens at large protests (at least in the UK) is that (1) the police creates subgroups of the mass of people that are protesting (2) the management strategies they use to keep the subgroups separate are incredibly inhumane (eg, no water for 12 hours, less than a square meter of personal space per person, this is called 'kettling') (3) eventually people in the group get pissed off and violent since they're being treated like shit even when they've not been violent. You know why it's got the nickname of kettling? Kettles fucking boil.
Counter-activism often comes into violent contact with the police, this isn't because it's atypically violent or riotous, it's because the police usually demarcate lines between the original demonstration, say a white nationalist march, and forbid counter protestors to get near the original demonstration. When those lines are drawn, the police beating the shit out of left activists in protest is a matter of geometry on the ground, and of the monopoly of force handed over to the government and its representatives. The government's agents, paradoxically, can be very violent because what constitutes violence is politically prefigured in their favour.
Say you have a far right group who wants to 'send (most brown people) back' having a march through a London community that's mostly African and Middle-Eastern. The police show up to defend these people's free speech right to shout thinly veiled hate speech, threats and dogwhistles at the crowd. Are the police serving the interests of that community? Does their violence frustrate or support the disenfranchisement of and violence towards the people in that community? I know this has happened, but I can't remember the date.
Suppose, like a good minded liberal, you do what you do best and entertain the idea that violence is part of all political action. How would you justify the police's violence towards the community defending their rights to live where they do with dignity and without prejudice? Presumably through appealing to the moral neutrality of police violence; or that it is legal.
Suppose you can suspend the equation of moral with legal for a moment, how then would you justify the police's violence against the counter protesting community? The police beat the shit out of far more non-whites in the community than fascists that day - even when the majority of scuffles were started, predictably, by violent xenophobic racists. Is the police serving your community? Consider one of the rallying cries of protest in Charlottesville in the US: "Who do you protect?". Often, people who are outright enemies of democracy and have literally genocidal intent, and this is moral. Whereas some Iranian nurse punching a goose stepping EDL member to defend his family from what normalising that group's politics would mean? Now that's where we draw the line. It's political correctness *cough left politics cough* gone mad!
My point here is that not even being able to countenance the fact that some illegal antifa actions/assaults might be ethically justified makes you the one not ethically engaged, not them. It's just too easy to outsource everything without qualification to the police. Again, that doesn't justify any particular action but the argument that "it's illegal" isn't on its own terms convincing.
Also, putting anti-fascists on a par with fascists in terms of the language used to describe them is hardly ideologically neutral.
[Edit: Cross-posted with fdrake's (much more comprehensive) take above.]
I put to par only those that engage in violence and terrorism. They are indeed equal, no matter on what side they are.
Like the French Resistance and the Nazis? Ok, odd ethical position to take...
And I wouldn't call West Germany the Third Reich.
Yeah, I wasn't talking about Syria either...
No idea what you're talking about. But putting everyone who uses violence on the same ethical terms is madness. And yes, the FR were the "terrorists".
But when we go to wield what we consider to be justified violence (in this political context), I think it's of utmost importance that we don't haphazardly choose our targets along perceived tribal lines. Attacking the wrong individuals or groups will only entrench them as as an enemy, and actually winning out against the forces that perpetuate the status quo (should we deem it intolerable) requires some degree of organization.
And they opposed an actual occupier, an enemy. But I think you can understand that I was talking about the present and the West in general. The US isn't under enemy occupation. And neither is France. Or Finland. And when we have a democracy (at least I live in one), I wouldn't call for, tolerate or accept political violence.
Now you're adding qualifications to what was a sweeping statement. Keep adding a few more and we may get to agreement. I'm saying forget the "politics" for a moment and ask yourself, could an antifa member be seriously ethically engaged? Is that possible? Notice the asymmetry in that it doesn't even make sense to ask that of the fascists who make no pretence to be.
Jesus Christ, of course they can be! And it's on the individual to look at where he or she draws the line with direct action. Yet what I do not accept is political violence in countries that are basically justice states. Here, now. Not France of 1940-1944.
What about violence by "justice" states?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preventive_war
"A preventive war is a war or military action initiated to prevent a belligerent or neutral party from acquiring a capability for attacking. The party being attacked has either a latent threat capability or has shown through its posturing that it intends to follow through with a future attack."
What's your position on that? Ok for massive military campaigns but not for neutralizing fascist bullies on the streets? Or no?
Let's not mention the systemic violence the prevailing ideologies of "justice" states inflict all over the developing world.
My claim is that you don't have a coherent ethical position on violence. Show me I'm wrong.
The main ingredient to a successful revolution is widespread discontent. When discontent, corruption, repression reach a critical mass, it causes enough of the upper-class and other opponents of radical change join the revolutionary cause, which tends to tips the scales of power. While business owners and the wealthy upper class oppose change, they forestall it, but when they switch from suppressing change to supporting it, it is often a part of the final catalyst.
There's also this curious pre-revolutionary period where those who do support change schism into a spectrum of competing ideologies ranging from completely legal and peaceful methods to full blown/prolonged/open/guerilla rebellion. As societal conditions deteriorate, advocacy for more drastic action becomes prevalent, and once there is enough desperation for change, all it might take is a single event (example: a repressive massacre) to cause an uprising to rapidly spread.
There's always disagreement about the strategy and self-imposed limitations in revolutionary movements (e.g: deciding not to engage in outright terrorism). It's definitely true that the force used by revolutionaries needs to be at least proportionate to the force that is being used against them, but when and where too much force is used, they might just be trading injustice for injustice.
Not many people are willing to use the R word, but it's only a decade or two away if the current trend holds. Political division will rise, economic inequality and the resulting dissatisfaction will continue to rise, groups will begin to unite under banners of radical change, and should the government become repressive enough, or should living conditions decline, then revolution will undeniably be the word on everyone's lips as poor conservatives and liberals alike unite.
The discussion we're having here is like a microcosm of the broader discussion society will have should political groups start taking popular revolution seriously.
One of the biggest setbacks for many revolutionary movements is that they often don't have a coherent end-game until the very end (or later). Revolutionaries know they want change, but they seldom have specific and practical plans for making it happen, and they have even fewer plans about what to do once they're successful in overthrowing the old power. The way that crowds throng emotionally against Shapiro events reminds me of revolutionaries without a coherent plan. Maybe this is the process they have to go through before they figure things out, but we need not learn the hard way if we can benefit from history.
You seem not to know the term justice state, oikeusvaltio in Finnish. The proper definition would be perhaps Rechtsstaat, where the power of the state is limited in order to protect citizens from the arbitrary exercise of authority. The citizens share legally based civil liberties and can use the courts. So hence my referral not only a state to be a democracy, but a justice state also.
Well, seldomly Democracies fight each other, but there of course are few exceptions. For example in WW2 at first the UK wanted to give military assistance to Finland to fight Russia and later declared war to Finland (because it was fighting Russia after Russians had immediately bombed the Capital when Germany attacked the Soviet Union). No actual fighting happened, but Finns living the UK were detained. Winston Churchill sent the following letter to Marshal Mannerheim, the commander of the Finnish Armed Forces:
So when two democracies (justice states) go to war, historically the correspondence is like the above. Quite cordial I would say.
Quoting Baden
I would state that a functioning democracy (and a justice state) has the acceptance of it's people to it's existence and has the monopoly on violence along the lines of Max Weber.
And actually there have been wars and military actions that have been implemented by the UN. I have no problem with those. With the Six Day war it's clear that the Arab coalition was going to attack, while I was against the Dubya Invasion of Iraq.
Quoting Baden
You're asking far too much...
I think that's an absurd reading because those opposing Shaprio know exactly what they want in the situation: a lack of platform for Shaprio/a society which doesn't treat his accounts of society and ethics as respectful.
In the wide sense, these people aren't revolutionaries either. In the sense you are using, they are trying to work with/within the current structure of power to alter one specific aspect of culture. They are, in the usual sense of the dichotomy, just reformists.
I should learn not to try to give people homework. :razz:
I had edited to 'by' rather than 'between' above btw as the original was a bit misleading wrt my intention. I'll take what you said on board anyhow and let you respond to @fdrake.
So saying that political violence isn't OK means... that I find it more objectionable than selling arms to Saudi Arabia???
Confusing.
Sorry, have to go to sleep. Working day today.
That claim was more of a general critique.
Quoting ssu
Me too. Good night!
This still isn't a coherent ask, and it's strategically self-defeating (because rallying against Shapiro with emotion and force causes others to rally behind him with emotion and force). Wanting a society that doesn't treat Shapiro's accounts of society as respectful is what you already have via protests and outrage. What you actually seem to be wanting is a society where you get to dictate the permissible topics of discussion.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
As I mentioned in the post, there is a spectrum denoting how much force individuals are willing to endorse, which is why I drew the comparison. Revolution is a strong term, but we're in the early states of getting there.
You misunderstand my use of "don't treat with respect"
I don't mean in the sense of people just being there opposing someone. I mean that society takes the values and ideas in question not to be worthy of consideration as a direction for society. Like how the liberal treats any opposition to "free speech." Or how we treat totalitarianism. Or how we might treat someone saying the Earth was flat, in the context of describing the shape of the world.
It's not a world in which everyone is supposedly given their worldview by some kind of edict, just the basic recognition some ideas are unethical and false, not even worth considering an account of society or as a possible course of action.
How is the average 17 year old supposed to learn why Fascism isn't worth considering if they're not allowed to even consider it?
Do we have to consider actually being an Islamic Extremist understand why it's unethical and we want our society to avoid it?
We don't have to consider actually following an idea or holding a value to understand its not worth considering.
All the time, we recognise these instances. We teach it to people too. How is a 17 year old supposed to learn? They recognise/we teach them about fascism and how it's not worthwhile. We don't need to respect fascism and its values as a legitimate option to so this.
But we're also talking about Shapiro. If we banned Shapiro from all platforms under the justification of anti-Fascism, the naive 17 year old won't understand why, and will actually go looking for the views we've forbidden them from exploring.
1. They can recognise why/we can teach them why. Holding there are ideas we ought not hold, or even forbidding someone from following, doesn't mean we know nothing about them. The naive 17 year old can understand why. Children learn a whole lot of stuff and why its bad before they are 17. We don't encounter and follow ideas as blank slates.
2. Most won't. People don't go following something just because it's banned or suppressed.
The same way the 17 year old learns that pedophilia and murder are 'not worth considering'. Or would you like to have a nice civil discussion about those too? I'll bring the tea. Then we can discuss, civilly, whether its nice to fuck children, live in fear, and murder minorities.
What a stupid fucking question.
Also, since you asked, here's a random sampling of the fake dichotomy between speech and violence that worms its way all through your engagements with me:
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
Quoting VagabondSpectre
One thing that's evident upon reading our exchanges is how much you talk about violence despite my initial remarks not even so much as mentioning the word. But I suppose this is to be expected when you're just another cog pushing the standard fanatical media line: who cares if anyone is actually engaging or talking about violence: let's make it seem as though that's the overwhelming, pressing issue de jour regardless.
You're juxtaposing Shapiro's conservative beliefs with murder and pedophilia?
Isn't that a bit of an overreaction?
Is considering Shapiro's beliefs is as bad as committing or planning to commit murder? Or is it akin to considering murder?
Quoting StreetlightX
The only context that I brought up Shapiro was to give an example where protestors use excessive force, and to condemn that excessive use of force (and to show why words aren't yet meaningless). The quotes you gathered are in the context of condemning force (force amounting to violence), not restricting political action to only speech.
You say that you're not advocating for violence, but when I advocate for non-violence you attack me as part of the problem (because how dare I whine about the left when lives are on the line!).
And my main criticism of your position, which you've scarcely responded to, is that it's your own kind of negligent and holier-than-thou attitude that Shapiro relies on. They're a bunch of murderous villains, the lot of them, how dare you suggest using mere words against them!
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
It definitely piques their interest.
Your question was about fascism, not Shapiro. And it remains a stupid fucking question.
Quoting VagabondSpectre
I attacked the liberal grounds that you put forward as an argument for non-violence, and not your advocacy of non-violence simpliciter.
Perhaps participants might want to consider that there are more important issues to be considered: global warming, resource depletion, environmental destruction and pollution and accelerated extinction of flora and fauna and exponentially increasing economic complexity and instability.
What a fucking wank!
Quoting Janus
This is one of the better threads in quite some time in my view. Even if it might be frustrating to see intelligent people disagreeing on some fundamental aspects of what meaningful democracy means, the role of police and other state sanctioned violence and violence (and everything less than it) as a political instrument for citizens.
I actually also see similarities between for instance racism and the insistence of race being grounded in biology and the insistence global warming is a hoax. If we're incapable of convincing people racism is bullshit on stilts, we won't fare much better with the other issues.
In general, though, why should we approve of institutions shutting people down just because they can? It's really just a matter of power, and has little to do with public approval, anyway. If a university decides to fire someone like Scruton there is little the public can do about it even if they care to. human beings are not really all that good at coordinated action. Personally I don't really care that Scruton was de-platformed, because I don't sympathize with his political conservatism, although in principle if he hasn't said anything overtly hateful, then I don't see much justice, but rather mere prejudice, at work in his being shut down.
I agree with you about the absurd attitudes that unthinking people hold: notions that some races are somehow intrinsically better than others, or that global warming is a hoax. People who believe those things are mostly thoughtless morons, and unfortunately there are plenty of them. There is a difference though, because promoting the idea that there are significant racial differences is definitely hateful, whereas denying climate change, although stupid and probably mostly unconsciously self-serving, is not hateful; it is merely stupid and delusional.
People feel threatened by climate change and economic instability, and many are incapable of facing the horrible truth, so they take refuge in denial. When they start to feel any significant negative economic effects they will look for something or somebody else to blame. It is in times like this that underlying cultural tensions, that are due to the distrust many people feel towards those whose cultures they cannot understand; may manifest as various forms of racism. Brexit and the Trump phenomenon exemplify these kinds of effects.
We were speaking in the context of Shapiro, so it was about Shapiro. Willow said that they want to live in a world where Shapiro's views aren't respected, where they're automatically known to be not worthy of consideration, and I used the term Fascism because it's their accepted short-hand to describe Shapiro's views (and it would have sounded silly if I said "How is the average 17 year old supposed to learn why Shapiro's views aren't worth considering if they're not allowed to even consider them?", because it's the ideas that matter, not the person who professes them, and because obviously Shapiro isn't a standard by which we should set our curricula).
The point i was making is that to understand why a pernicious idea is bad, we need to actually explore it. By banishing debate on our own platforms against such bad and pernicious ideas (the kind which Shapiro and Spencer both peddle), we're missing an opportunity to potentially inoculate audiences against them. Yes it's offensive and emotionally neglectful to have a public debate about things like genetic racial differences, but by refusing to have it altogether we're giving racist pundits the room they need to float their bull-shit/pseudoscience. Debunking requires exploration.
Quoting StreetlightX
I've cautioned against violence, but I've also clarified early and often that there's a time and a place for it (I've made the context of my condemnation clear), so you're not actually criticizing a position I've ever held.
On the other hand, the fact that you insist on leaving room for force in the context of discussing Scruton and Shapiro does give the appearance of lending political legitimacy to violence against them.
Maybe we're just applying the most uncharitable interpretations of one another that we can muster, which either proves you right by demonstrating that words accomplish nothing, or it proves me right by showing how bad-faith interactions (assuming meaningful communication is pointless from the get go) is a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure.
Did you really just write this? And mean it? 'By not giving them room ... we're giving them room"; How does one go about writing a sentence like this? How does this transmit from brain to fingertip to keyboard without stalling at any point from the self-imploding force of its own vacuity? And add to this a casual acknowledgement of how it happens to be 'offensive and emotionally neglectful' - an acknowledgement made to all the better dismiss these as irrelevant - and one has to wonder what the actual fuck went on during the writing of this sentence.
Incidentally, let me tell you how I, and probably millions of others, learnt how fascism was bad. We studied it, like everybody else; felt its effects as we walked through the remains of concentrations camps, like everybody else; understood its history, like everybody else. You know what we didn't have to do? At least, not until liberals lost their collective fucking mind under the sway of the conservative rewriting of history and political mores? Debate a fucking fascist. Holy hell. In what universe must this be spelt out? Unlearn these memes. They are destructive of your intellectual ability.
I've kinda enjoyed lurking on this thread. It's a thorny issue--on the one hand I quite like the idea of the 'free marketplace of ideas' and free speech and diversity of thought and public sphere and rational debate and all that stuff. But the critique that this can be easily co-opted by ethno-nationalist ideological forces who don't give two shits about any of this stuff and would destroy it given half the chance can't be ignored. So, to no-platform or not to no-platform? No-platforming appears to undermine the public sphere of rational debate, but not no-platforming also appears to undermine the public sphere of rational debate!
I think the only way to really make progress with this quandary is through large-scale data analysis. This is really a question about information spread. Assuming a fascist does get a platform, would no-platforming really stop a spread of fascist information? It might do. Not giving space for fascists to air their ideas makes sense. It might not. Fascists using 'muh free speech' memes to turn no-platforming into a platform for their ideology also seems plausible.
It's not a question that can be answered solely by following through the logic of liberal philosophy, nor can it be answered by a critique of the logic of liberal philosophy. The only way to answer it is to gather data about how information spreads (harvest all opinion pieces, youtube comments, tweets etc. about lobster daddy, Shapooro, Spencer, all comments related to them, model an 'information space' using graph theory, use computational linguistics to make distinctions between different kinds of memes, sentiments etc., track the spread of ideas between nodes). Only then can one have a clear picture of the circumstances which allow dangerous ideas to spread.
google scholar search about information spreading processes:
https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=information+spreading+process&btnG=&oq=infor
The danger of a data-driven approach is that is misses, by necessity, how changing political and material conditions themselves change the uptake and dissemination of ideas (dangerous or not). If, for the sake of argument, it were found that deplatforming - or what passes for it - doesn't work, does that mean it doesn't work flat out? Or does it mean that, under these conditions, given this particular set of political and social constraints, for where we are in history in this time and space, it doesn't? If the latter, then one response might be to attempt to change those conditions. To engage, in other words, in politics (this all assuming the data is conclusive!).
In this sense, data always comes too late: by necessity it must take certain conditions as fixed for the sake of comparison and conclusion at all. But changing conditions just is the sine qua non of political action. There's a nice passge by the political philosopher Byung Chul-Han on data and politics, where he writes that:
"Compulsive transparency stabilizes the existing system most effectively. Transparency is inherently positive. It does not harbor negativity that might radically question the political-economic system as it stands. It is blind to what lies outside the system. It confirms and optimizes only what already exists. For this reason, the society of positivity goes hand-in-hand with the postpolitical. Only depoliticized space proves wholly transparent". (The Transparency Society).
If politics is the effort to make a change in the relations of power in a society - and with it, how information is distributed across those networks of power - then data can only really capture what's already there, 'before' change - before political action. Political theory is not quite like other theory in this sense - one's object of study changes as one collects the data.
Funny how we have different interpretations of this thread. My take away is there is no consensus on what qualifies as speech. If "actions speak louder than words" and yet some here insist on a seemingly narrow definition of it involving spoken or written words, then there's a sea of meaningful difference. Not speaking in response to another is "speech" in itself in my view. And for those who don't believe it I suggest they not talk to their partner for a day.
I'm on the fence as to deplatforming but mostly because I worry about what it does to political engagement in general. If we shame people to stay quiet about beliefs they hold, there's exactly 0 chance of them changing their minds. Considering the alternative (social) media and communications channels available I suspect it inevitably leads to reinforcing existing bubbles, which just takes us farther away from constructive political debate. Plus, I think inviting certain controversial speakers usually isn't about real interest but trolling and then they can attack non-existent neo-Marxists academia and SJWs. Don't feed the trolls.
This is one reason why long form discussion forums are useful, as it's explicitly a place to 'talk' with the gloves on. The way I look at it is the right (even the regular grade conservatives, at least in UK and US) plays dirty when it counts most, so it makes sense to play dirty too. If they can do it for what you see as terrible immoral reasons, you can do it for just ones.
It doesn't prevent engagement, it enables it.
Just saying ... now delete ;)
People like Shapiro and Spencer have been able to build significant followings despite the lessons of history, and willingness to debate them hasn't contributed to their rise (we're only willing to debate the because they have significant followings). If you look at the contemporary origins of the alt-right, or Shapiro's rise, you'll see that they're reactionaries who are responding to the excesses of the left.
You might be too intellectually advanced to lower yourself enough to actually debate a fascist, but having an emotional breakdown doesn't seem to dissuade them (it encourages and energizes them), so perhaps you should try a new approach?
Called this out for the unempirical untruth it is long ago. This is just recycled memes at this point.
Also consider that perhaps debating a fascist isn't an 'intellectual' issue, but an ethical, lived one. But by all means, continue to intellectualize fascism. Consider also that I don't want to 'dissuade' them. I want them to be terrified for their bodily safety.
I'm quite pro shame here. If the worst excesses of political opinion are shameful to express in public and in private, it's a much better deterrent than reason. Even if in some cases you might get ressentiment backlash and 'X DESTROYS Y' porn on social media and Youtube as a reaction. If xenophobia and racism are shameful that's a lot stronger an imposed sanction than being merely wrong.
Edit; for distinctions between personal and systemic injustices, though, I think it's still quite helpful to be exploratory and gentle. It's hard to get your head around 'it's not about you' for systemic issues, especially when there are reactionary fuckwads everywhere claiming that it is.
I think that's a false analogy. That's fine for a website, excluding people who don't meet certain criteria or who breach the rules. I'm not convinced exclusionary politics is a good idea when the rules haven't been breached (eg. still in accordance with the law). In fact, I think it's the opposite.
I've got some pretty racist family members. Yet I can still talk to them, work together and have fun at parties. They know I disagree and we even sometimes talk about racism and politics.
If I'd verbally attack their preferred candidate "oh, Thierry Baudet is such a douche" it's just me signalling I cannot be spoken to about his ideas without his ideas actually being deconstructed. But he has a platform precisely because people already agree with his ideas, which aren't novel at all. He's symptomatic of what exists in society. Deplatforming is effective at repressing symptoms and lowering its spread but ineffective against the disease itself.
It reminds me of the kerfuffle that's happened with 'predictive policing' in statistical modelling. You make a model of where the crimes are, distribute police in accordance with crime rate weighted by a measure of police intervention effectiveness per crime type per unit area. Unfortunately, you have a finite number of police officers, and without careful control of the model's time based updates you end up with increasing concentration of police in poor black areas and less in the white areas. Why? Because crime rate is measured as observed crime rate, the more police you have in an area generating reports, the more crimes will be reported in that area.
Anyway, biased as I am, political arguments and programs are never purely conceptual, and should be evidence based where possible; a good statistical workflow can generate a lot of insights and condense information usefully; and the ideal model of 'evidence based policy' has data analysis feeding into every step and assessing the policies.
What I'd like to draw attention to here is the poverty of mathematics for extrapolation in complex systems; even if you know the weather now, if you add or subtract 10^-32 to the measurements being fed into a dynamical climate model, the simulations still produce different results after a relatively short (sub month) period of time. 10^-32 is millions of times more precise than the most precise measurements physics has ever made. If we need to 'know the future' to produce guides for action, and 'knowing the future' must be evidence based in the long sense, this is a good excuse for the indefinite suspension of any intervention.
Conceptual and historical arguments can aggregate the phenomena into readily understandable qualitative chunks with fuzzy boundaries of relevance, providing heuristics for action rather than quantified expectations of the results. Political interventions can only be imposed under the guidance of heuristics due to the social's infinite statistical complexity but relative qualitative simplicity. This isn't to say political thought is easy; it's fraught with framing issues and the difficulty of inferring causal chains from historical data (rather than confounded causal chains of disjunctive events); but it's definitely possible to do well. The role statistics should play here is in the operationalisation of conceptual-historical heuristics for assessment and study, rather than the driving conceptual machinery of justification for any intervention.
They very much rely on aesthetic appeal. In fact, over the course of hundreds of debates against them on alt-right platforms, in dozens of cases they openly admit that aesthetics alone is the only coherent basis for their political beliefs as they shift the goal posts back inside their own ass-holes in response to my attacks. It's definitely a surreal experience when you say "So you're basing your entire moral, cultural, and political platform on the emotional whim of aesthetic appeal? Like some kind of pretentious post-modern-art critic?", and then your interlocutor says "Yea, so what? Morality is subjective, man", but just getting to that point can be a major victory because the audience then gets to see alt right views distilled into the basic emotional appeals that actually drive them (which must then be worked directly).
The alt-right believes more than anything that it embraces reason and science over ever every other political group, which I see as a vulnerability of hubris. The scientifically inclined tend to give politics a wide berth, lest their work be co-opted by lay-zealots, but bringing expert knowledge to a debate with someone like Shapiro or Spencer (and an ability to withstand and rebut the memes and rhetoric) regarding those topics the alt-right claims to embrace (sociology, genetics, evolution, economics, psychology, history, statistics, etc...) actually goes a long way to countering them in the eyes of their audience. I'm no scientist, but I have a better understating of most of these topics than the average alt-right pundit/proponent, and I've used that understanding with great success in such debates, despite the unending theatrical pretense they entail.
While it's true the alt right is mostly veneer and bluster, they do have a general mix of core beliefs that they've internalized as facts, and which they substitute for arguments when required (such as, for example, the belief that because of declining birth rates and interracial marriage,the white race as a whole will cease to exist in anywhere from 100 to 1000 years, depending on who is asked).
Quoting csalisbury
While they don't exactly argue with the same good faith that we try to maintain on this forum, there still is a relationship of [s]good[/s] faith between them and their followers, and even if I could never get one of these pundits to fully recant in real-time, it's still possible to be persuasive in the long run, and to the greatest number of listeners. When directly challenged, almost nobody ever recants their views in real-time (especially obeliefs involving emotional commitment), but the challenges they're exposed to might stay with them, and overtime, presumably, cognitive dissonance allows them to organically evolve and change their fundamental beliefs. It might be a lofty and naive goal, but I don't want to give up and accept the less optimistic conclusion that political suasion is now for the birds.
Unfortunately, they've immunized themselves against particular sources of shame. Getting called a racist is a badge of honor for them because to them it means "you're too stupid to understand the science". Their platform intrinsically frames itself as struggling against the progressive embrace of diversity and equality, which they fundamentally conceptualize and perceive as the source of all their problems. Calling an alt-righter a racist is like calling Adolf Hitler a Nazi. Shame might still play a role in their pathology, but it would have to derive from other sources.
Rhetoric shouldn't be designed to capitulate to politics it despises; this literally sends mixed messages and is easy to co-opt - bad rhetoric. On the level of reactionary politics; or mobilisation by TweetStorm; memorable rhetoric is the identifiable content through the medium's constraints on the message.
EG: Even facts become rhetorically charged factoids. True or false, people remember things like "More Israeli citizens die per year from peanut allergies than from Hamas rockets' than any of the data analytic context which derives the claim. Or pick any dubious Murdoch statistic citing headline about Muslims for the 'other side'.
When you're sure you can sit down and have a discussion about it without issues, when everyone agrees the gloves are (mostly) on like here; for sure, skewer stupid ideologies with systemic reason and moral critique. Adapt the level of reliance on rhetorical (or out of the marketplace of ideas, violence and subterfuge) strategy to the amount of good faith (or violence and subterfuge) your opponent shows. Bad faith interlocutors don't care about your ideas, they care about your audience (which is why we made gurugeorge fuck off a while back). In the gloves on case, this goes both ways; @StreetlightX's approach is not likely to work for the rare intellectually honest person who sympathises sincerely with personally (rather than systemically) prejudicial or genocidal authoritarian politics; bigots through circumstance rather than studied conviction. They won't see the conceptual work done to get to that opinion, they (typically white adults eh?) can mistake the vitriol for nothing but the whining of another reactionary nincompoop; even though the union of good reason with precisely articulated contempt is a very potent perturber of belief. For the systemic case with the gloves on, intellectually honest debate about the relative importance of systemic vs personal prejudice and the propagation mechanisms for both is useful; pending good faith. Systemic critique is always a useful intellectual resource, but a poor promoter of itself by itself.
Edit: when discussing garden variety liberalism or conservatism's inherent weaknesses to fascism, the gloves will almost never be on. It's way too emotionally charged. Though, this metagame of rhetorically motivated exchange makes the marginal strategy of good faith engagement on the topic especially useful to those who are unaware of the arguments or are intellectually honest to a fault.
Yes, as I remarked earlier, some proponents of change embrace much more radical and violent methods than others, up to and including inciting terror. It's a potentially valid ethical discussion, but isn't it a bit extreme?
And while we sit here openly discussing how we're to dispose of them, they're listening in from dark corners, and reporting the worst that they hear back in their own echo-chambers (which is monetarily incentivized through clicks to boot). And so, both sides start organizing thanks to the emotionally galvanizing opposition each side provides for the other.
If someone who holds fascist views really is the imminent and existential threat you make them out to be, then why don't we arrest them?
P.S. I realize you're about to say "WELL I NEVER!", so consider the following:
Fascist 1: "Liberalism was originally a reactionary movement against fascist governments that relied on force and repression to keep power. Maybe we can persuade the liberals to accept Fascism if we don't make that mistake?"
Fascist 2: "I called this out for the unempirical untruth it is long ago. This is just recycled memes at this point.
Also consider that perhaps debating a liberal isn't an 'intellectual' issue, but an ethical, lived one. But by all means, continue to intellectualize liberalism. Consider also that I don't want to 'dissuade' them. I want them to be terrified for their bodily safety"
I know you don't support terrorist activity, but this is precisely the kind of rhetoric that radicalizes both sides because of how it sounds; how it looks.
At the point at which you're dealing with fascists, more 'radicalization' - worrying about what's North of the North pole? - is the least of your worries.
As for arresting them? The force most responsible for protecting fascists has always been the state. At any far right rally, the police are inevitably there to protect them. The state is not your friend.
By 'great success', what exactly do you mean? (& in terms of the venue - are you talking about posing as an alt-righter on a discord or something similar?)
Good rhetoric is more or less the rub in all of this. In the political climate of today, the gloves only protect the knuckles (e.g: anonymity as protection and the allusion of reason as the high ground), where good rhetoric is not only based on solid facts and sound arguments, but is also emotionally appealing and highly persuasive.
There's almost no real sitting down with the opposition these days (heck, even Shapiro could scarcely sit with a British conservative lobbing soft-balls down center-plate), where every engagement is a standing affair, usually with a lot of yelling and righteous indignation. Getting an opportunity to put forward substantive arguments needs to happen in spite of the memes and the spittle, so I do see why it looks like actually pulling this off seems like a Herculean task.
All it really takes is patience and dispassion. In a one-on-one engagement, genuine good-faith does seem to be required, because if one side gets incensed they can just end the interaction. But if there is an audience watching, rage-quitting is really bad optics, and in a one-vs-many situation (my favorite!) the same knuckle-protector-only rules apply.
Quoting fdrake
This is good advice, but it only works up to a point. When your opponent hits the rhetorical bottom of the barrel and has nothing left to offer but bad faith nonsense or ridicule, it's better to stay composed and to stick to substance. You might need to deflect verbal flak as they go down in flames, "destroyed" in the eyes of the audience, but in my experience it is worth the result.
Posing as an alt-righter, no; but debating alt-righters on alt-right Discord servers, yes.
It's a grotesque affair given the rabid nature of internet chat rooms, but it can be done.
These sometimes tight-knit communities are often run by a vocal few, but there can be hundreds or sometimes thousands of lurkers who do nothing but absorb what gets said (they're also significant entry points for new members). Deploying effective rhetoric against them in that setting can have a strong influence on individual members of its community, especially the less hardened. Specifically, by "great success", I'm essentially referring to the influence I was able to have in those mediums.
Yes, like with the intermittent Randroids here. So long as you're willing to see that this is confined to media contexts where shaping the audience's interpretation/ideological commitments is the goal we can come to some kind of consensus.
Then there'd be a different conversation about tactics 'in the wild'.
I'm worried that upon concluding it's a war against fascism, our resulting hasty generalizations of who's the fascist will lead to our self-defeat. How severely conservatism has been minced with fascism in this thread (despite our effort to be clear) is at least some evidence of how easily this can happen.
Quoting StreetlightX
Police also protect progressive rallies as well, in which case, aren't they our friends?
If the far right rallies in question were proliferating hate speech, I would like to see them prosecuted where possible.
I've checked out a couple & I think I know the dynamic you're talking about. Let me know if this is your experience as well ( since I'm generalizing from only a couple visits):
There's usually a couple guys who are charismatic in the way a fuck-the-system senior might be attractive to angst-ridden freshmen. They combine a confident seeing-through-the-bullshit ideology with a seeming easy mastery of christian theology, or history, or something scienc-y or some other Western Knowledge signifier. The appeal seems to be that they echo the same doubts you've had, and they have a bunch of extra knowledge to fill in the blanks. They hold court and the people who have just un-lurked try to get their attention and cautiously advance their own ideas and look for approval and direction. (in another lens: you feel humiliated and powerless? well here is validation that you're actually right plus very powerful [knowledge/culture signifier]
I do see the potential for arresting radicalization in these venues. I'm too old to have been a young lurker on discord - my charismatic older figure was Zizek (for the same reasons, he echoed doubts I had and helped make sense of them, and knowledge signifier (german idealism, even tho he knows it for real, it still had a signifying aspect) so I lucked out.
Two caveats:
(1) While I think this works in the pirate corners of the internet, I'm not sure the logic carries over to larger, more mainstream platforms. My guess, no offense intended, is that you've probably swayed a very small number of people. Showdowns draw blood and attention, but on the enemy's turf things scab over pretty quick.
(2) How are you measuring the influence you've had? Is it dms confirming you've had an effect?
A simple, unnuanced definition of speech would be to say that it involves words, spoken or written. But the visual arts can obviously also speak to us without requiring any actual words to do so. And then there is body language and facial expression, not so easily used online, although emojis play a part. Not speaking in response to another, per se, could mean many things, when the situation is face to face, facial expressions, body language and non-verbal vocal sounds would give clues as to the attitude behind the silence.
Quoting Benkei
I think the problem of "bubbles" may be due, at least in part, to human beings having evolved to be able to personally interact with, and thus really care about, only a relatively small number of others. Some people care only about themselves, others about family, extended family and friends, then perhaps some community that probably would not exceed 100 to 200 people. Also the number of people one interacts with and more or less cares about will likely not form a cohesive community in modern life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
People will pay lip service to caring about other communities, nations, or humanity in general, but this is arguably only on account of having introjected an ethical imperative to do so. As soon as the going gets tough, people will narrow the range of others they care about to the extent that they will be willing to inconvenience themselves in order to help them in times of need or crisis.
I agree with you that inviting controversial speakers may often be motivated by a desire to appeal to and manipulate the mob's love of sensationalism. On the other, more conventional or "mainstream" side, institutions are generally conservative and the decisions as to who to "platform" are made on the basis of who the administration thinks will say best what they want to hear and have heard by the public. If the platformed one says what the administration does not want to hear, or what it fears will cast them in a bad light in the public eye, then, if they have the power to do so, they will surely de-platform.
Should we approve or disapprove of that fact of power, or be indifferent to it? Does it depend on the circumstances? What difference would our approval or disapproval make in any case? The only real power "consumers" have is to refuse to consume. As an example if you want to do something about global warming and resource depletion, then don't own a car, have children or travel to other countries, buy only local products and so on. If you want to do something about financial instability then don't invest in the share market, or at least if you do, invest long-term in companies you believe are the most ethical and sustainable. First change yourself before worrying about changing the world, in other words. Lead by example or else keep mum, lest your voice be just another "pouring from the empty into the void".
This is definitely an apt description. To add to this, in some of the more populated rooms the chaos is extreme, where a team of party-loyal lieutenants moderate only spam (and ban people they suspect of recording or "doxing"). The text chat rooms consists of an endless and ever devolving torrent memes and group-signals which scrolls by so quickly that fast and loose rhetoric is sometimes the only means of participation. Live chat rooms for even the most positive and politically neutral venues are often described as "cancerous", so you might be able to appreciate just how bat shit insane a Discord server filled with hundreds of 15-25 year old alt-righters actually is. Words can't describe that level of unhinged verbal lunacy.
Quoting csalisbury
I don't know much about Zizek but from his "debate" with Peterson I gathered he at least knew what he was talking about. Interestingly, Peterson was adored by the proto-alt right (for them he was one of those charismatic figures, first for his perceived rejection of transgenderism, and second for his overall conservative rejection of the left). The alt-right broke away from him primarily as the result of the strangest damn thing: he was asked by an audience member what his opinion on the "Holodomor" was, and whether the "Marxist Jews" were responsible; and Peterson had no sweet clue what the audience member was talking about. Alt right memes emerged depicting Peterson as intellectually dishonest or cucked, and before long Peterson was publicly disavowing far right collectivism. That whole affair is only the tip of the ridiculous rhetorical iceberg. The stories I could tell...
Quoting csalisbury
Elevated platforms do work a bit differently, where higher standards in discourse are more important. There are, however, exceptions that depend on the expectations of the audience.
Quoting csalisbury
The amount of attention and feedback I've been able to gain at those venues was astounding. By merely asking questions and making satirical commentary (and rebuking their responses quickly and persuasively) the loudest among them quickly became obsessive, which ensured I was always the center of attention (my very own triggered town-criers). At any given community, finding success was a prolonged affair, but once I built up a reputation as the competent leftist (by, in their eyes, beating back the many headed hydra that is the alt-right ideological platform, but also by subverting their expectations by not presenting as the caricatured "deluded emotional leftist"), they then wanted to "destroy" me so badly that they had to actually answer my questions and respond coherently to my attacks (lest they lose their high ground of "reason"). The vocal minority spamming me with insults would generally then be silenced by the more highly ranked as they stepped in to "red pill" or "black pill" me.
They would demand debates in voice chat or that I debate on one of their many youtube live-streams (generally in voice chats I didn't break a sweat, but for whatever reason voice-chats seemed to accentuate their incompetence, and the pool of participants was smaller), while my dm inbox would be flooded, surprisingly, by mostly positive feedback, friendship requests, and invitations to seemingly every other Discord server even vaguely connected to the one I happened to be on at the time). I could see undecideds move in my direction in real time, and at least on some occasions I watched my views begin to defend themselves (their own ranking members were ceding critical ground) and internalize within local communities. Some or all of my successes aren't really that impressive given that what I was actually refuting was beyond reason in the first place ("We're going to create a whites only nation in Antarctica, and because whites are the best, it too will be the best! Huzzah!"), but it's honest work for honest influence. On some of the more serious and seriously pernicious subjects, I often found myself giving lengthy lectures (me? lecture!? HA!) after it had become clear to everyone that none of them bothered to do any fact checking or had a clue what they were talking about (for example, their arguments expounding "white death" based on birth rate statistics are a huge foot-in-the door sales tactic for the alt-right (one of their many fear-based appeals), but the so called statistical analysis they base it off is laughably bad, and an easy target for rebuke). Almost nobody has the patience or the will to entertain their ideas, so they've never really seen them competently rebuked, especially the younger initiates whose only political experience comes from [s]classrooms[/s] schoolyards, and especially not on their own turf; down there in the mud and the muck and the merde; and in terms they actually understand.
It's also fine for academic institutions, serious newspapers, government advice panels and so on. Even public libraries need to have some quality control.
Speakers' Corner is where batshit crazy arse-wipes can have a platform of a soapbox and free speech. And sensible folks can go elsewhere while they indulge. For god's sake, even Belgium's Got Talent needs a bit of discrimination!
In other news, and note that my stunning analysis will not be appearing on mainstream news sources, Physics departments do not discuss flat Earth theories, and political analysis does not discuss David Ike's Alien Lizard theory. And it would be a pretty good idea and long overdue to start de-platforming climate change deniers.
And in other news again, speech is nowhere free and equal, or at least platforms are not, because people can and do buy time on platforms both openly and, when advertising tobacco is banned, by secretly suborning people like Scrotum to lie on their behalf, by the endowment of academies and by charitable think tanks. Money has always talked a lot louder than hard work, and scandal much louder than virtue, that is why other forms of protest and resistance are legitimate and essential. Peasants are always revolting because nobles are always monopolising the platforms; That's capitalism. And talk that it is the other way round and nobles are being unfairly treated belongs on speaker's Corner, not a sensible debating forum.
But the protesters are anti-democratic. Whereas Farage and co. who lied their way to a narrow victory for a cause the most destructive version of which they are now pursuing with gusto against the will of the majority of both Parliament and the public are... Where was I going with this?
Embracing your tribe?
I remember earlier there was this French guy who attacked famous people by throwing cream cakes at their faces (in the old slapstic comedy way). Once he (and his accomplices) got to cake Bill Gates. When asked about it, he said that the people from the Belgian subsidiary of Microsoft contacted him and asked him to do it, told him where and when he would have the opportunity to cake Gates (which sounds quite likely). They told him, assumedly, that their CEO was starting to take himself a bit too seriously. The thought of that being the truth, that company employees making such a practical joke on their CEO, makes me smile.
Here's how American media reported the incident:
Now I don't know if people throwing milk shakes take these issues in similar way, because in the end they seem to be fighting evil.
There isn't a tribe in the world absent of members who can't fire their poison arrows straight, but when they hit the target, I'll applaud. Just highlighting some hypocrisy really.
Quoting ssu
"Hitmen" is hyperbole but that did look considerably more traumatic than a milkshake in the groin. :brow:
I’ve seen how some people have been misrepresented in the UK media and find it difficult to trust anything said in the mainstream news (more so today than ever before). I’ve always known it was mostly bullshit, but now the shit is thicker.
[tweet]https://twitter.com/iknowplacesmp6/status/1131977960444108802[/tweet]
The problem isn't free speech, it's the underlying algorithmic network and how profit is pursued where extreme and insane ideas propagate faster than truth and nuance.
What Scruton wrote about populists (in 2017):
I don't think he was a supporter of Trump ...or Duterte.
Good thing that Artificial Intelligence will eventually take over the task of guiding and governing by appeal to arguments instead of stirring the unthinking feelings of the crowd.
Also, it's just far more easier for those in power to control the debate through AI. Imagine just how many people intelligence services and various secret police have employed to listen and survey people? Now everything can be done by computer!!!
Well, not everything. As a member of the crowd, I'd rather have a populist stir my unthinking feelings, rather than have a computer flatter my mistaken beliefs.
Populist using AI rules... over the traditional populist.
I prefer the traditional populist, because then it's my natural intelligence versus the populist's natural intelligence. If the populist uses artificial intelligence and I don't, then the game of politics is rigged (even more so than it already is).
And Owen Jones is perhaps the second-worst commenter in recent memory, when it comes to British Media (there's another fellow who is worse - can't recall the name right now though). I can't see i've seen a single reasonable comment in this thread that lands on the side of Scruton having said anything wrong.
Sad that conservatives like Scruton seem to be a dying breed.
Unsure if this is simply a sarcastic remark or sincere and thus asinine, but regardless, Roger Scruton has been dead for over 5 years
"Islamophobia" - "Homophobia" - "Transphobia"
Whenever someone tries to attach a term from psychiatric diagnostics ("phobia") to the person they disagree with, you can be sure they are full of crap and have no real argument to offer.
Perhaps it's already been mentioned in this thread, but apparently he became a conservative after witnessing the student riots in Paris in May 1968 where politically left leaning students from mostly wealthy families were throwing rocks at policemen from mostly working class families. :cool: