1. I assume all the very public complaints against "political correctness" raised in Chait's wake were smuggled out of liberal gulags on toilet paper as samizdat, right? No? Then what's the fucking problem?
2. Every single conservative response to Chait I have seen has been too incredibly stupid to take seriously -- and since many of them call Chait a p.c. hypocrite because he said bad things about conservatives (which is the same thing as a fatwa, apparently), I guess that makes me p.c. too. Hmmph! My many services to freedom of speech count for nothing, I see.
3. OK, one example: Here's a key section from Ace of Spades' offering on the subject:
Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case.
They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other.
Thus, in a very real sense, to insist on the standards of rational discourse with such people does in fact predjudice them; it is the same as insisting a horse walk on two legs to enter a race. It is the same as disqualifying them outright.Behold the enlightened discourse of which we would be deprived by some leftists on Twitter! I wonder if the editors of Der Stürmer ever thought of complaining that protests against their caricatures (carried out in the early-20th-Century version of social media, which I guess would be graffiti in cabaret bathrooms) were in fact assaults on their free speech. If not, we should congratulate the brethren for advancing the form.
Projection at its' finest. Also:
ReplyDeleteBest friend gay — okay, I can see that one going either way; one of my best buds is a homo. Turned off by cunninglingus? Eh, a lot of guys don’t dig that. Who the hell knows what’s going on down there. It’s like H.R. Geiger giving up ink and canvas to work in the avant-garde medium of Play-Doh and bacon.
This is what he thinks is "rational discourse".
ace of spades: chatroulette's finest blogger
ReplyDeleteI think some talcum powder might provide relief for that.
ReplyDeleteAs near as I can tell, the Right's big problem with political correctness is that it leads to them getting disapproving looks for calling women "gash" or "cock-warmer," and that they can't seem to get anyone to seriously engage the argument "Why can't White men say nigger in public?"
ReplyDeleteNow, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case.
ReplyDeleteHe's got us there. Like Foucault wrote, "be brief, asshole."
je suis chait
ReplyDeleteNothing is italicized in that, how can I know how to feel about it?
ReplyDelete/Seriously, what's with all the italics from Ace, did he just find that button?
I'd like to swing with this comment.
ReplyDeleteNow there's a true High Thinker! If only he had deigned to enlightened the P.C. Mobs by making an academic or at least essay-like case on that subject.
ReplyDeleteEdit: The Play-dough and Bacon thing also made me remember this:
"Michelle Obama is not a good-looking woman, unless you like them “fierce” in the literal, rather than gay-fashion-lingo, sense."
If I were Chait's editor, I'd have proposed "In Defense of Butt-hurt" as the title.
ReplyDeleteFor SEO reasons mainly, also to celebrate my right to use "butt" in a headline.
Welp, I see someone already got to "play-doh and bacon." It's all you ever need to know about Ace of Spades, the world's oldest 11-year-old boy.
ReplyDeleteWhy does he get upset when the same people that liberals argue should be listened to, and should get to participate in the political process, start talking and participating in the political process?
ReplyDeleteHe used the fancy talk like cunninglingus and avant-garde. That's a sign of a jen-you-wine thinking brain!
ReplyDeleteFrom Ace:
ReplyDelete"But we have many people who now believe that they are Privileged to
belong to a Higher Speaker Caste and may employ any number of
emotionally-angry and abusive tactics in what should be rather light
conversation (all academic conversation is "light;" compare it to
talking to you doctor about a surgery) that are forbidden to everyone
else, and in fact have been forbidden for 3000 years of intellectual
history."
I'd take Ace more seriously if I didn't get the distinct feeling that before he goes to sleep at night, he asks The Lord William F. Buckley:
"How am I doing, Mr. Buckley? Am I good enough to write for the National Review yet?"
And when he types:
"Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case."
I get the even more distinct feeling that he doesn't read his own comments section.
I always thought being P.C. meant simply "Don't go out of your way to be an asshole", and to that end, I avoid using the "N word" to refer to the President OR to Ben Carson, and also to avoid calling Jonah Goldberg "Loadpants" or fat. I don't always succeed on that second one, but I DO try... God knows his pieces are easy enough to shred without referring to his girth or bowel habits.
ReplyDeleteIt is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the
ReplyDeleteanimal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing.
Your projection is in my racism! Your racism is in my projection! Wow, tastes great! Feces pea-brain butthead cups!
Isn't the ability to make an academic case a sign of creeping elitism?
ReplyDeleteI think too many conservatives feel they're being FORCED out of their way to NOT be assholes. If they can't use racial epithets or make remarks about how a woman looks or make unsolicited sexual advances, then the "forces of PC" are oppressing them.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to open with an example that doesn't involve politics because I'm hoping it won't generate as much anger.
ReplyDeleteI used to spend a lot of time in adoption forums. Those places were what these days you'd call "safe spaces," and I very quickly discovered how seriously they took that. In my introduction post, I made reference to my "birth mother" and was quickly reprimanded by one of the regulars. I was informed that this term was considered offensive because it reduces this woman to the physical act of childbirth. I was informed that "biological mother" was unacceptible for similar reasons. So I tried to go with "natural mother," only to be informed that this was considered offensive as it suggested that my adoptive parents were not true parents. Someone else came in after that and they all started to argue over terminology, and as a result I still don't know what the "proper" term is supposed to be. Compounding that is that I've never personally encountered anyone who's actually offended by these terms - we didn't use them in those forums because the people who ran those forums decided that they could be offensive and then set about trying to convince everyone that they should be offended by them.
Everything about those sites was about maintaining propriety. In theory this was because we were all talking about deeply personal issues and we needed to respect each other, but in practice it was this weird feedback loop where no one had discussions about anything but lingo and internal rules. These were the first places I ever heard the term "privelege" used, in the context of long threads about which parts of the "triad" had it. At least one place decided that adoptive parents had so much privilege that they were not to post unless they followed a very specific set of guidelines. These places would still allow Pound Puppies and other anti-adoption types to speak freely, so you'd get threads where there were assholes going on about how adoptive parents were kidnappers who were brainwashing their children, and the parents weren't supposed to respond. Meanwhile, you'd have these 13-year olds showing up who wanted to talk about this strange new thing they just discovered about themselves, and their first post would be their last because they didn't intuitively know how to deal with the rules. The whole process was completely counterproductive. The people who wrote and re-wrote those rules probably got a cheap sense of righteousness out of it, but no one else got any help - I sure as hell didn't.
That's the feeling I get looking at a lot of these modern "liberal" groups and their fixation on this legalistic inoffensiveness. It's not a threat to the republic as Chait seems to think, but it is absurd. This ritual of writing and re-writing long lists of rules for discourse (and then inserting exceptions so that they only apply to people we don't like) accomplishes nothing except making the whole left side of the spectrum look like idiots. And if it does actually hurt someone, people should speak out about it. Pareene dismisses the Omar Mahmood case - in which a student was harassed, threatened, and eventually fired for expressing an unpopular opinion - as though it were just one of those things that happens. A decade and change ago, if that had happened to a student who was against the Iraq war, we'd be screaming bloody murder about it. We can't suddenly dismiss the chilling effect of the mob on free speech just because we don't like the content of that speech.
All right, that's my text dump. Come and tell me why I'm wrong.
I tried making an academic case with emotion, but they wanted something more essay-like.
ReplyDeletePareene dismisses the Omar Mahmood case - in which a student was harassed, threatened, and eventually fired for expressing an unpopular opinion - as though it were just one of those things that happens.
ReplyDeleteI must have missed Chait on the firing of Ward Churchill.
Regarding the adoption forum you were taking part in. Sorry about that, but if you're leaping from that to arguing against trigger warnings, then we have a problem. I have had to deal with patients of mine who have been unable to leave the house for a day or two because their PTSD was set off by some stuff found on a forum, There's a reason that some of those rules exist, and it's because some people actually do need safe spaces.
My audience wanted something more, ese.
ReplyDeleteDon't forget the Random capital Letters.
ReplyDeleteIf I could walk that way I wouldn't need the corn starch.
ReplyDeleteThe Pareene post has a link to Andrew Sullivan in the comments and Sullivan could not agree more with Chait. Even gays are too p.c. because they won't leave the poor churches alone.
ReplyDeleteAnd so the struggle must not ease up with success after success, but must instead be ever-more vigiliant against hetero-hegemony. So small businesses who aren’t down with gay marriages have to be sued, rather than let be; religious liberty must be scoffed at or constrained, rather than embraced; individual homophobic sinners must be forced to resign or repent or both, and there is no mercy for those who once might have opposed, say, marriage equality but now don’t. The only “dialogue” much of the p.c. gay left wants with its sinners is a groveling apology for having a different point of view. There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that.
I must be free to persecute you or you will be persecuting me.
It seems to me they are being intimidated by an ideology that utterly rejects the notion that free speech – including views with which one strongly disagrees – can actually advance social justice, and by a view of the world that sees liberal society entirely in terms of “power” rather than freedom.
Do not look at the power I want to have over you. Look at the power you have to let me do whatever I want.
I don't see Pareene "dismiss[ing] the Omar Mahmood case ... as though it were just one of those things that happens." He's simply saying that there's not some epidemic of such things happening, as Chait seems to think there is. And furthermore, he's saying it's disingenuous for Chait to use that as an example of how liberalism has gone wrong, when Chait himself has called for the firing of a sports reporter for alleged over-opinionatedness.
ReplyDeleteAs for the extreme language-parsing you encountered in that online group: I doubt anyone here is going to argue that that kind of thing is helpful. But if you're going to make a case that it is (a) specific to the left and (b) a major trend that needs to be denounced— rather than the kind of thing that tends to happen in some online communities with a few very vocal control freaks, regardless of their politics— then it's not enough to pick a particularly absurd example and say "See, that's absurd! You don't disagree, do you?" Because that has fuck-all to do with all the other stuff Chait is lumping together, like people making fun of Hannah Rosin on Twitter, which in turn has fuck-all to do with whether it's acceptable to vandalize someone's dorm, etc. He's nutpicking some stuff that's obviously hard to defend, and then claiming that you have to either defend that stuff or else accept his overall view of why angry lefties are bad.
Go on any conservative comment section and say something nice about Michele Obama and watch the venom and harassment fly. Would that be politically correct or politically incorrect? I always get those two confused. Is there a difference between those two terms or does it depend on who you voted for in the last election?
ReplyDelete...
ReplyDeleteSaint Andy has STOPPED blogging. I hope you HEATHENS are happy!
ReplyDeletehttps://twitter.com/IFThunder/status/560499619323731968
~
He's just showing off his education in philosophy by name-checking Plato and Bacon.
ReplyDeleteIt's like, if a random wingnut writes "Black people don't have family values, so they become criminals, like the guys who broke into my car, therefore welfare is bad"... it wouldn't really make sense to respond "I had my car broken into once; burglary sucks and people shouldn't do it. So that guy's got a point!"
ReplyDeleteChait is denouncing some behavior that is harmful (harassment of Omar Mahmood), and also some behavior that may be annoying but inconsequential (putatively excessive zeal in use of trigger warnings), and also some behavior that is entirely appropriate (college students expressing their negative opinion of a proposed commencement speaker, or describing their own experiences of prejudice)... and his thesis is that they are all basically the same thing, caused by the same scourge of PC which has "deep roots in the political left." That is an incoherent bad argument, and an anti-liberal one. It doesn't become a good argument just because you can agree with him on one of his complaints.
Eh, plenty of lefties also have the same problem; the difference is in degree rather than kind.
ReplyDeleteI was going to write a cogent and thoughtful critique of Ace of Spades but when I researched it, I realized that I was confusing him with Vox Day. Which leads to the worse realization that they are two separate people, and there's one more prominent loon out there than I thought.
ReplyDeleteThere is no emoticon for the academic case I am trying to make.
ReplyDelete~
If I owned a newspaper and was called by conservatives to "Have some balls and print those offensive cartoons of Mohammed", I would have printed one of the anti-Christian cartoons by "mistake" just to hear them cry "How dare you print those offensive cartoons."
ReplyDeleteI guess the subscriptions weren't cutting it.
ReplyDeleteA decade and change ago, if that had happened to a student who was
ReplyDeleteagainst the Iraq war, we'd be screaming bloody murder about it.
I'm interested to know what Chait said when pretty much that exact thing happened to Phil Donahue (or Bill Maher, for that matter, which I note Chait left out of Maher's history). Only they got fired from real jobs, at which they were doing quite well by all measures, rather than from a student newspaper.
Which, from what the editor-in-chief said, had more to do with Mahmood's actions while they were trying to resolve the conflict of interest he'd created by publishing the column in a different campus newspaper; he'd been asked to choose between the Daily and the Review and picked the Daily, but then ran to Fox and The Fix in violation of the Daily's bylaws.
As for the vandalism, that's separate from his firing, and it's of course a shitty thing to do. I presume the university will be looking into this, since it's a crime done to their property and one of their students has been targeted.
"So small businesses who aren’t down with gay marriages have to be sued, rather than let be"
ReplyDeleteOh no, businesses small and large have to follow the laws of the land. Unconscionable.
Which problem? The "I wanna use racist epithets" problem, or the "I wanna treat women like dirt" problem? Or just the "I equate people not liking what I say with oppressive state censorship" problem?
ReplyDeleteI guess there is a finite (or is it minute?) number of people willing to pay to read Sully's dancing on his own pinhead.
ReplyDeleteHe thought of those because his favorite toy is Play-Doh and his favorite food is bacon.
ReplyDeleteOr is it that his favorite food is Play-Doh and his favorite toy is bacon?
ReplyDeleteGeez-o-Pete, Palinism (the belief that disagreeing with one is an attack on one's right to speech) is running rampant these days.
ReplyDeleteAnd, lard knows, Chait deserves no small amount of disagreement. Especially because it makes him whine so. That's amusing.
I don'tthink that any kind of eu-googly or panegyric is Roy's style. Stick around if he does do one. It should be a doozy.
ReplyDeleteIf it consists of more than "Don't let the screen door hit ya where
ReplyDeletethe Good Lard split ya," I'm not interested. For the couple of times he was right in a small way, he was wrong in large ways many times. We are not losing much.
Hasn't stopped me. And I'm pretty old.
ReplyDeleteIn the oldest eleven-year-old competition, I would say he's running neck and neck with Ted Nugent.
ReplyDeleteI do hope Roy will do a blogger's lament, I mean farewell, to Andrew Sullivan who is leaving blogging to spend more time with his family.
ReplyDeleteHeh, heh. He said "packs in."
ReplyDeleteBut seriously: If only we could convince Sully to stop breathing as well.
Really, is there anything more juvenile than dismissing your political opponents as stupid, shit-flinging apes?
ReplyDeleteI'm not against trigger warnings or the construction of safe spaces but not every space can be/will be safe for everyone. They just won't. Its like peanut friendly zones. Every online fora can't be structured so no one ever gets triggered by someone else's innocent or ignorant comment.
ReplyDeleteWill there be an essay-like question on the final? I hate those.
ReplyDeleteThe same kind of small business owner who prays for success but doesn't keep the books very well and goes under after a year or two always wondering and wailing "why me, lord?" Lots of small businesses are really very short lived.
ReplyDeleteand I must scream.
ReplyDeleteChait has once again done a fine job of trolling the internets.
ReplyDeleteNever understood his or Sully's prominance.
...
The over-under on Andy's return is 40 days, like Jesus in the wilderness.
ReplyDeleteA lot of businesses of all sizes. The chances of a business reaching its 5th birthday are REALLY tiny. But the reason is the scenario you outline.
ReplyDeleteYes, this. There are so many reasons to make fun of these dumbhats that going for things like appearance, or the classic "UR a kweer" isn't just unnecessary and mean (in that it hurts other people) it's lazy.
ReplyDeleteOne thing I will say in favor of Sullivan, who I read for many years (say 2004-2011?) is that you couldn't always sit down and write his column for him. He was never as moronically predictable as Krauthammer or one of those True Assholes. He lost me at points (sure) but his takes were not a cynical attempt to carry water for the very worst. I think when he was wrong, he was honestly wrong.
ReplyDeleteOn the side of people who actually need trigger warnings I think we can argue that no book needs a trigger warning but as a teacher, teaching a particular book, I might want to remind the class that if they do have a trigger they need to be mindful that the discussion may be difficult for them. I am opposed to trigger warnings that are supposed to put some discussions/art/literature out of bounds for college discussion, or out of bounds for adult discussion, or the use of "trigger! trigger!" in online discussions as a way of shutting people up.
ReplyDeleteIf people are saying horrible things to troll or hurt then tell them to leave the conversation/get off line/ban them. If they are accidentally triggering someone then just explain that some members may need to leave the discussion and then let them leave.
Well, but adding to a conversastion isn't always "diminishing." In fact its incredibly common to show your approval of/interest in another person by saying "Oh, how interesting, the same thing happend to me once..." And it is in fact the case that in some parts of the country "where is (your family) from" is not considered an insult at all. It just isn't. The person she is talking about may have been insulting her--we don't know. But they probably weren't.
ReplyDeleteThis comes up all the time in the field of babies and adoption, or babies and race. New Parents of adopted babies (sometimes) freak out at the attention new babies get--at the number of people who will come up and compliment them on how cute the baby is. Speaking as an old parent I well remember how many people tumbled over themselves to admire my babies. But I've overheard new adoptive parents freak out at it and assume that people are judging them for having adopted, are remarking on the race or the cuteness of the baby because they are secretely racist or disapproving of the adoption. Sometimes its useful to hear that what seemed to you to be an interaction which was entirely governed by your race/sex/age was actually something that is quite common and generic and bypasses race/sex/age.
You shold have tried interpretive dance, Coozledad. That's how I'm planning on asking for my next raise.
ReplyDeleteI just loved his sideswipe at tone policing. As I see it "tone policing" is a useful term that reminds us that people often tell obstreperous outsiders that what they say might be correct but they are saying it wrong. Tone policing is what the upper class does to the lower class, higher ranking people to lower ranking people.
ReplyDeleteAlas, you are wrong. I said she may have misinterpreted. That is crucially different. I will confess, it is annoying that you have chosen to ignore that fact!
ReplyDeleteAs I see it, I offered my own experience to supplement hers, giving her more evidence to consider -- which should only broaden an experience, not shrink it. In my understanding, that's how dialog works. It can't be taken as ".... really pretty diminishing" to listen to what someone else says, wonder about it, and offer them your own experience. And I had hoped she would reply in kind.
I made my comment under the impression I was entering a dialog about how we talk about race. But it was made clear to me instead that I had stumbled into a closed circuit of back-patting. Any commenter could have answered me with an actual thought -- but the replies were all attacks, in effect "diminishing" me, I suppose, and that was the end of any chance at thought, or different experiences meeting -- or of me or any participant gaining productive insight on the topic. The vocabulary and rules this PC crowd lives by support grievance and anger but do not allow for dialog.
I don't think you're wrong, I think you're explaining a particular behavior that has been used by assholes throughout the ages to bully people, and they're everywhere.
ReplyDeleteSay what you like about the Internet, but it has made this sort of thing a lot easier. Now these idiots don't even have to leave their houses to get their jollies and there are so many groups out there, very few of which require the kind of credentials that would exclude people who really don't belong.
Don't tease me like that...
ReplyDeleteUuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
ReplyDeleteAn article about political correctness.
Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh.
Good sweet christ, I would absolutely love to see a discussion about this stuff that didn't boil down to "My group is so oppressed!" "Nuh-uh, MY group is so oppressed!" "Well, your group needs to stop being so sensitive and whiny!" "Nuh-uh, YOUR group needs to stop being so sensitive and whiny!"
Like, okay, on the one hand, Chait has managed to jam every possible response to speech, from polite but strong disagreement to harassment to actual murder into one box.
On the other, I notice that he's very careful to point out how people who are, you know, not Jonathan Chait have been intimidated or even literally attacked because of fairly mild expression of opinions, and yet, of course, his thesis is boiled down to "Jonathan Chait got his feelings hurt"
And, honestly, the "This is what speech policing in America actually looks like" part of Pareene's article drives me nuts. Notice that speech policing actually looks like is... well, exactly what Chait says it looks like; Cowardly school administrators shutting down potentially controversial political events.
I guess the difference is that Chait's favored events deserve to be policed, or something. There's also Pareene's implied power differential, where on the one hand we have the oppressed, powerless college professors living lives of dickensian squalor while the Jonathan Chaits of the world dine on fine caviar and decide the fate of nations.
Yeah, that's right, I can use dismissive sarcasm too.
As you can tell, I'm not sure I agree with this assessment of who has power and who doesn't. I suspect mid-level opinion columnists and socially conscious college professors are not that different in terms of their power and influence.
Chait's article is also dumb and boring too, by the way. He might want to at least check what concepts like "trigger warnings" or "microagressions" were invented to do. I mean, he does seem to know what "mansplaining" is, so I guess he's got that going for him.
I think that there is an illustration of what Chait was talking about when he said:
ReplyDeleteUnder p.c. culture, the same idea can be expressed identically by two
people but received differently depending on the race and sex of the
individuals doing the expressing.
Though, as Pareene pointed out, it's not just p.c. culture where this happens because it's a completely obvious thing if you are aware that other people perceive things through the filters of their own contexts and experience.
The blowback you got was because you were responding to someone's statement of her own experience and her own context and telling her she must have misinterpreted the intent of the question. That.... is really pretty diminishing, and people on the receiving end of it are really not obligated to be nice to you when they're pointing out that you just diminished them.
I'm down with trigger warnings for big and obvious things -- violence, sexual violence, racism, misogyny, etc. -- but some of the demands I've seen are bizarrely esoteric.
ReplyDeleteFor old time's sake, Jon Chait's essay "Don't Let the Left Defeat Lieberman," from back when Ned Lamont was the specter of communism:
ReplyDeleteIn the end, though, I can't quite root for Lieberman to lose his
primary. What's holding me back is that the anti-Lieberman campaign has
come to stand for much more than Lieberman's sins. It's a test of
strength for the new breed of left-wing activists who are flexing their
muscles within the party. These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who
tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in
simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent. Moreover, since their anti-Lieberman jihad is seen as stemming from his pro-war stance, the practical effect of toppling Lieberman would be to
intimidate other hawkish Democrats and encourage more primary
challengers against them.
If you read the whole thing, Chait goes through the bill of particulars against Lieberman and agrees with them—and, further, acknowledges that, being a terrible hack who rolled over at the promise of a belly-rub from Bush, he didn't even set a good example for hawkish Democrats who were at least trying to clean up the giant dump they took all over the country.
So his argument is: yes, Joe Lieberman is terrible, for America, for Democrats, and even for Democrats like Jon Chait. But we must support Lieberman because the perception of people like Jon Chait is dependent on it!
Also: "anti-Lieberman jihad." Is it "tone policing" to tell him to shut the fuck up? I consider it just dipshit policing.
I am against trigger warnings. Look -- you just listed four "obvious" things that qualify for one and ended with "etc" -- so where does that end? Should The Great Gatsby have one slapped on the cover because Tom gets drunk and breaks his mistress's nose? Yes? No? Who decides?
ReplyDeleteMr. Bacon & Playdough is a champion of rational discourse.
ReplyDeleteOn edit - aw.
I think it's possible to go way too far on insisting on particular language, especially since, as you mention, it comes at the cost of alienating well-meaning people.
ReplyDeleteI just don't think it "accomplishes nothing except making the whole left side of the spectrum look like idiots," because the only people I see who apply the goings-on of an obscure internet forum or some idiot college students to the whole left side of the spectrum are people like Chait, who have been grinding that ax for years because their TNR paycheck is dependent on it.
As soon as Chait's piece was published, the liberal feminists I follow on Twitter immediately had examples of very left-wing, very-"social justice warrior" sites hashing through the same issues Chait claims are chilling dialogue on the left. When the whole "cancel Colbert" thing happened, they went through the same issues.
I dunno, Chait's piece seemed like the xkcd "someone is WRONG on the internet" cartoon. Well, sure, I just don't see it as some existential crisis on the left.
I tried making an academic case with emotion
ReplyDeleteSo like a Lisa Frank Trapper-Keeper?
These are exactly the sorts of fanatics who tore the party apart in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.
ReplyDeleteGod, I forgot just how stupid this argument was. This little pull quote is chock full of staggering hypocrisy (is he tolerating ideological dissent by opposing the anti-Lieberman forces for choosing to oppose a warmongering, sanctimonious, prick they hated? Someone should try and tease that paradox out a bit.) and ahistorical hysterics (The tearing apart of the Democratic Party came from simple slogans? Oh really? Maybe it was the Southern Strategy, RFK's assassination, Vietnam and the unions playing footsie with Nixon. BUT NAH, PROLLY SLOGANS). Christ, what an asshole.
Yes, but since he's only asking for something "essay-like" and not, you know, an actual essay, uh, Something, something, Random, Capital letters.
ReplyDeleteAll they have is slogans, man, and I've got this sophisticated eleventy-dimensional strategery. [Builds Wile E. Coyote machine, shoots self in foot.]
ReplyDeleteAgreed. I recall one really painful flamewar over at Sadly, ignited when I mentioned that I didn't really care for Shakesville because of the rigidity, which offended someone who DID like Shakesville, to which I very reasonably, I thought, responded that I wasn't arguing against the existence of Shakesville, it just wasn't my bag so I didn't go there, and it was foolish to expect the gang at Sadly to conform to the same guidelines as those at Shakesville. It flamed on and on for hours. But I still think I was right about that.
ReplyDeletePeople have the right to create zones with whatever rules they like; they don't have the right to insist that everyone, in every zone, conforms to those rules. If someone is that sensitive that seeing a comment using words that bother them is going to be a problem, then they probably should stick to those safe zones.
I didn't ignore the "may." I just don't think it's magic.
ReplyDeleteThere's a good analogy that many people use: If you step on my foot, you should get off my foot. You may not have meant to step on my foot, you may have ignorantly stepped on my foot, you may have felt really bad about stepping on my foot, but you're hurting me and you need to get off my foot.
What that person said was, in essence, "When people ask me this, I feel hurt in this way." Your response was, "Have you considered that maybe you shouldn't feel that way because I have had different experiences than you so I feel that the intent behind those questions is different?" What you did, essentially, was argue with that person about whether she really should feel pain because the person stepping on her foot might not have meant it.
And believe me, you weren't "broadening" anyone's experience. What makes you think that the people you were talking to haven't yet considered that there might be a more charitable reason for why people keep stepping on their feet?
I mean, if I said to you that you shouldn't have felt attacked by their responses because they may not have meant it to be an attack, and that you should consider broadening your experience, wouldn't you be annoyed? And if that happened every time you brought up the issue, even when you're trying to have a conversation about it that's more advanced than the 101-level stuff the "just asking questions" folks keep talking about?
Well, yes, but this seems to be a novel concept for Chait. Which is one reason he's getting shit, because it's completely fucking obvious and nobody really needs him to explain it.
ReplyDeleteIn every culture throughout human history, the same idea can be expressed identically by two people but received differently depending on the status of the individuals doing the expressing.
ReplyDeleteHe's nutpicking some stuff that's obviously hard to defend, and then claiming that you have to either defend that stuff or else accept his overall view of why angry lefties are bad.
ReplyDeleteBingo. Nutpicking was the vibe I got from Chait's essay as well. Hannah Rosin complaining that people on Twitter mocking her thesis was especially precious.
The point of a trigger warning is to give people who might have flashbacks fair warning that there is content they may find triggering or upsetting therein. Then it's their choice to read further or not, because it's the responsibility of the triggered person to manage their own triggers; the warnings are supposed to be just a courtesy heads-up so people can care for themselves.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, many of the people demanding them don't really understand that and instead use them as a way to shut down conversation.
Trigger warnings were not a concept when I was in college, so my understanding is rudimentary. I probably should learn more before I declare "to hell with them!"
ReplyDeleteI did write a thing once that a professor assigned to a class and she placed a trigger warning before it. It was fiction including a paragraph of sexual assault. As a writer, it is strange to pause and wonder if the sentence you're crafting about an assault, or a car accident, or what-have-you, is going to give someone flashbacks they literally cannot deal with. Is that what a trigger warning is for?
I have been made uncomfortable by books and movies, at times lingeringly. I have rarely wished I'd been warned ahead. I have sometimes wondered what the fuck the author was thinking because now there is something awful in my imagination I'd like to get rid of and can't.
(To give one concrete example -- I can't take beheadings. The removal of the head from the body, or its destruction, fills me with a dread I can't account for. Just writing this parenthetical is unnerving to me; but anyway there was a certain graphic death in Season 3 of Game of Thrones that left me physically wrong and existentially a mess for a solid two days. And still a bit now. I probably would have watched even if someone had said "don't look," because I need to see everything. But -- is that the kind of reaction a trigger warning exists to prevent?)
Oh, god, Shakesville. I am so glad I left there.
ReplyDeleteSo translating into more plain language Ace of Spades is saying, sentence by sentence:
ReplyDeleteLiberals don't like free speech because they're dumb. They're dumb. They're dumb. They argue bad. They argue bad because they're dumb. They don't like free speech because they are dumb; free speech means they'll lose, because they're dumb.
Behold the Rational Discourse!
ReplyDeleteOk, you get a pass. Wingnuts actually are stupid, shit-flinging apes, and I guess therein lies the problem. How do we call them exactly what they are without them feeling free to project their own imbecility onto us?
ReplyDeleteActually I'm not sure nutpicking is the right word, because it's not just about whether these things are rare or not. I mean, my own feeling about, say, super-extreme language-policing in online communities, is that it's not that common a problem on the left— it's something everyone has seen to some degree, just like everyone's met a 9/11 Truther, or nothing-matters-but-my-one-issue person, or an intelligent and well-meaning activist who nevertheless can't help alienating everyone around them, etc... but it's rare for it to take over the whole forum like it did in D Johnston's case. But supposing for the sake of argument that every lefty activist group in existence behaved like that... it would still not be a good reason to say that students shouldn't complain about an awful commencement speaker, or that making fun of someone on Twitter is a form of oppression.
ReplyDeleteA pure nutpicking argument would be like "Someone on Democratic Underground used violent rhetoric, therefore leftists are violent"; Chait is adding an extra layer of non sequitur, like "Someone on Democratic Underground used violent rhetoric, therefore solar power is violent."
Well, and helpfully, said.
ReplyDeleteOnce he heard someone in another room make the "playdough & bacon" comparison, and the people in the room laughed. He thought "that's so profound! and funny!" So he stole the quip.
ReplyDeleteHard to listen closely to the written word!
ReplyDeleteI didn't ignore the "may." I just don't think it's magic.
ReplyDeleteI didn't claim it was magic. My claim is that it is a word with a distinctly different definition than "must," which is the word you decided to substitute in its place when paraphrasing me in order to build your case. I chose "may" because of its definition, not because of magic.
There's a good analogy that many people use: If you step on my foot, you should get off my foot.
That is a terrible analogy. No one was crushing any foot. No one got hurt, nor could anyone be hurt by my comment. There is, however, in deep PCville as in rightwingnutville, an inability to discern the difference between expressing an opinion that is not the locally accepted one and causing real pain to the community. Both ends of the spectrum have devised vocabulary to dispense with pain-causers; I've been dismissed both as "unAmerican" and as a "typical White Male." In both cases, the vocabulary is 100% intended to diminish the intruder, prevent further discussion of whatever he or she said, and keep the community safe. It does not exist for dialog or critical thought.
"Your response was, "...I feel that the intent behind those questions is different..."
Once again, please don't substitute "is" when paraphrasing the "essence" of what I wrote, as clearly my "essence" was very much "might be," not "is." If you find yourself changing my words to make me look wrong, it's a good bet that on some level you know your case is shaky.
What makes you think that the people you were talking to haven't yet considered that there might be a more charitable reason for why people keep stepping on their feet?
I don't know what they considered, only that they decided not to discuss it with me. I don't even know why, exactly, they decided that. Your premise (expressed via foot analogy) is that they refused to engage because I was "hurting" them.
if I said to you that you shouldn't have felt attacked by their responses because they may not have meant it to be an attack,...
This is a pointless hypothetical. Their responses were clearly and without exception attacks. It is a waste of time to pretend otherwise.
...and that you should consider broadening your experience, wouldn't you be annoyed?
Sigh. As I said, I entered the thread to join a dialog. A dialog by definition stands a good chance of broadening my experience. So I would not have been annoyed. But I did not get a dialog, because the PC community there was only interested in reinforcing their preconceived ideas; they have built a vocabulary, rules, and reflexes to guarantee they do so.
I have found the PC gang to be consistent in this; and, as you've changed my words before arguing against them, confused metaphors about being hurt with actually being hurt, and floated detached-from-reality hypotheticals to support your case that... what, exactly? I was an asshole because I told this chick maaaybe her opinion was incomplete and gave her a chance to write back?... I am beginning to conclude that you can't see the terrible flaws in PCville because you are too uncritically a citizen of PCville.
[EDIT: Jesus this looks too long onscreen. GREAT now I look like a lunatic.]
Neither of them ever wipe their butt.
ReplyDeletePuritans, extremists, and authoritarians are pretty much all assholes irregardless of their specific political beliefs. In fact, the assholishness often seems to be even more important than the politics, like with all the washed up Marxists who became Neocons. Give me a good communist, and I'll give you a good Nazi and all that.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I just don't find this definition helpful (thanks for posting it, though! I do appreciate that.). I mean, what is meant by "upsetting"? And for that matter what exactly is the definition of "flashbacks"? It all feels too vague to me, like a pretext for censorship or for permitting people to excuse themselves from difficult material. Are we talking about soldiers with PTSD avoiding accounts of war? Are we talking about alcoholics avoiding books that romanticize a good drunken spree? Quite possibly everything worth anything is going to upset someone.
ReplyDeleteThe mistake you're making is that because you say you want dialog, you think other people owe you some sort of engagement, conducted according to rules you set and insist on.
ReplyDeleteBut please, declare me a citizen of PCville, too. Zuzu explained pretty clearly why a reasonable person might be bothered by word choice and you responded with an unconvincing wall of text. PCville seems like more fun.
I just don't get this at all. Are people really so sensitive that they suffer immensely because some stranger said the wrong words? If so, all I can say is they need either to (a) get the fuck over themselves, or (b) do what most of the human race does and learn to either avoid that shit, block it out, or work it out with your therapist.
ReplyDeleteDisliking cliche-mangling grifter and occasional politician Sarah Palin without gendered insults is sadly still only an aspiration for some people.
ReplyDeleteWhen people explain themselves on this point, which they do all 'cross the internet, they tend to say, well, yeah it's not that big a deal when someone calls them a racial slur gender slur whatever slur, but when it happens all the damn time, it becomes more of a thing. Or so I surmise from following a bunch of black feminist types of Twitter.
ReplyDeleteI don't know, really. I've never encountered one of these people in real life or, if I have, they haven't told me what the problem is. But as I understand it there are enough traumatic, abusive, childhoods and incidents in people's lives that students are coming into academic classrooms with real trauma that they have yet to handle.
ReplyDeleteI also think that conversations and books/topics which can be handled without trouble in same sex groups, or single ethnicity groups, can be highly problematic in mixed company. Not that a "trigger" warning is the right solution but that not every group can handle the complex emotions and histories of individual participants.
Someone we know was strangled by a returning vietnam vet--she was trying to interview him as a journalist and he strangled her until the air was so cut off from her brain that she ended up a paraplegic in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. So things can be triggering to people and bad stuff can result.
Now, the PC Mob types will reject this distinction because -- and listen closely here-- most of them are Stupid and Inarticulate; most of them are in fact incapable, on a mental or emotional level, of making an academic or at least essay-like case.
ReplyDeleteDid he give any verifiable examples of this stupidity? I can give a hundred example with links of the idiocy of conservative writers (David Brooks). I'd actually LIKE to see some good examples of inarticulate stupid liberals. It sound like it could be very amusing at the least. Or is calling someone "Arglebargle" or "Loadpants" the example of liberal stupid? Because "Doughy Loadpants" is really quite clever, and apt.
What's wrong with "Loadpants"?
ReplyDeleteIts so rude to speak the blunt truth, especially when a sly quip will work so much better!
ReplyDeleteOh, I get that lots of people are severely damaged emotionally, and if someone like that wants to alert the people around him/her that certain topics are very sensitive, that's great. In the academic setting, such students need to work with the appropriate office and their teachers need to be accommodative. That should be just a variation on what is done for students with diagnosed ADD or whatever.
ReplyDeleteBut out in the real world? Or on the internet? We're all on our own out here.
Yes, the RW started to go of CH when they saw the picture of the Holy Trinity three way.
ReplyDelete-and words like "ergo" followed by statements such as "I rest my case!". Those always confound me.
ReplyDeleteDude, you're on the internet. Perhaps you could look some of this up?
ReplyDeleteI mean, don't let me stop you from offering your opinions about trigger warnings just because you can't be bothered to find out what they are before you decide you're against them. That would be uncivil of me.
Hugely fascinating discussion online--I got to it reading Brittany Cooper who was dissed by Chait so I thought I'd look her up. I was reading this article http://www.salon.com/2015/01/07/the_rights_big_racism_lie_how_tucker_carlson_co_distort_white_privilege/ and then I jumpedto this one about Leslie Tuohy who "adopted" a black teenager who later grew up to be a start football player. That got me to another black writer who I would otherwise not have read here at bellejar.ca http://bellejar.ca/2014/12/15/leigh-anne-tuohy-racism-and-the-white-saviour-complex/
ReplyDeleteIts worth reading through both articles and down into the comment thread to see that a single incident can have more viewpoints than Rashomon, that there can be no monolithic viewpoint on a racial incident, that good intentions can have bad consequences, and that the intentions of a single white person w/r/t a what they see as a spontaneous interaction with a black person also exists, from the black person's point of view, in a stream of such incidents stretching back in time and forward into the future.
The case under discussion is a white woman's attempt to dispell the racist assumptions of one of her white friends by interrupting too young men, joining their conversation, finding out all about them, giving them money, and then having her picture taken with them to represent racial harmony and posting it to her social media. I can absolutely understand why she did what she did--it was very much a southern mom kind of thing to do. But from the point of view of the two boys she interacted with and their mothers? Holy shit does it look different.
OMG! Bacon flavored Play-Doh! That could be THE must-have item next Christmas. We'll make millions!
ReplyDeleteYou mean he believed his own crap?
ReplyDeleteI agree.
ReplyDeletecOGito ERgo suM baCoN and pLaYdOh.
ReplyDeleteHey! Unless this comment was posted by the author of Doon, you're stealing his bit!
ReplyDeleteThat is a terrible analogy. No one was crushing any foot. No one got
ReplyDeletehurt, nor could anyone be hurt by my comment.
Yet the people who responded to your comment said they *were* hurt by it. So there goes the argument that no one *could* be hurt by it. You don't get to decide what other people find offensive. That's the whole point of the foot-stepping analogy -- you may not have *meant* harm, but you still caused it, and rather than telling the people asking you to get off their feet that they shouldn't feel that way because your intentions were good, you need to just, you know, get off their feet.
If you find yourself changing my words to make me look wrong, it's a good bet that on some level you know your case is shaky.
Or I was doing other things at the time and didn't have time to do all the cutting and pasting and formatting necessary. Speaking of which:
This is a pointless hypothetical. Their responses were clearly and
without exception attacks. It is a waste of time to pretend otherwise.
How do I know you're reporting the comments accurately? After all, you're paraphrasing. Can we get a link to the original thread?
Sigh. As I said, I entered the thread to join a dialog. A dialog by
definition stands a good chance of broadening my experience. So I
would not have been annoyed. But I did not get a dialog, because the PC
community there was only interested in reinforcing their preconceived
ideas; they have built a vocabulary, rules, and reflexes to guarantee
they do so.
So you went in there, offered an opinion on an issue you hadn't bothered to learn about, then JAQ'd off when you didn't get the kind of reaction you'd hoped for when laying your opinion on those poor benighted folks who'd never ever considered what you'd said before -- even though they had undoubtedly heard it a thousand times before. I suppose you gave it just as much thought as you did to the issue of trigger warnings upthread.
I am beginning to conclude that you can't see the terrible flaws in
PCville because you are too uncritically a citizen of PCville.
Aw. You're cute when you're flailing.
and how an elephant got in my pajamas I'll never know
ReplyDeleteExcept with a copy of the Social Contract...
ReplyDeleteYou've made my day. Thx!
ReplyDeleteBut is it too much to ask that, in your day-to-day business or
ReplyDeleteincidental social dealings with gay people, you try not to act like a
bigoted asshole?Yes.
Exactly. (Leaves eyebrows unwaggled.)
ReplyDeleteThey are in fact low-thinkers.
ReplyDeleteYes, we are the Lower Orders. The Beasts of the Field. Ruminants.
"Moo".
The Transgoogleator gives me "Sie sind tat gering denker", but the word he's so fucking obviously doing his little pee-dance around has to be "Untermenschen". Ist das nicht der projektion? Jah, immer...
They are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor
ReplyDeletethe brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions"
of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is
what they are capable of, and no other.
Meanwhile, let's see what passes for "high-thinking" on Planet Ace:
I’d hit [Christina Hendricks] with the berserker fury of a
dozen Norsemen. I’d hit that so hard she’d sing the aaa-aaa chorus of
The Immigrant Song.
I’d hit that I like I turned a Bag of Holding inside-out and dropped it into a Portable Hole.
Hitting that would fill me with such transcendental bliss the final three seasons of Lost would seem like time well spent.
I’d hit that so hard Disney would make an amusement ride out of it,
and then, 20 years later, they’d make a series of four
increasingly-tedious films about it starring whoever plays Johnny Depp
in the year 2031.
I’d hit that so hard Dominique Strauss-Kahn would turn to me and say,
“That was completely out of line.” I’d hit that so hard Bernard
Henry-Levi would convince Barack Obama to launch a limited kinetic
action against my nards.
Note that, at no point, does he express any desire to fuck her, probably because he just doesn't find vulvae appealing:
"Best friend gay -- okay, I can see that one going either way; one of
my best buds is a homo. Turned off by c****lingus? Eh, a lot of guys
don't dig that. Who the hell knows what's going on down there. It's like
H.R. Geiger giving up ink and canvas to work in the avant-garde medium
of Play-Doh and bacon."
Now, that's some real goodthink, loony libs!
I made an academic case out of old essays, but it fell apart during the first rain in which I used said case :(
ReplyDeleteThey think in simple slogans and refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent.
ReplyDeleteNow let me explain why I refuse to tolerate any ideological dissent
'specially since he misspelled both o' them fancy words! But everyone knows that spelling it just another PC thing.
ReplyDeleteMormon Elder Dallin Oaks informed the world on Tuesday that they'll pledge to support anti-discrimination laws for gays, lesbians,
ReplyDeletebisexuals and transgender people, as long the laws also protect the
rights of religious groups. That's certainly big of them, but it's hard to see how this will work in practice, since, unfortunately for the gay community, they seem to be insisting that the freedom to practice their religion includes the right to never, ever be offended by the presence of gays or having to deal with them in any way. Jeez, Dude... if you don't believe in marriage equality, don't marry a gay person. You don't even need to let them into your treehouse...er... tabernacle. But is it too much to ask that, in your day-to-day business or incidental social dealings with gay people, you try not to act like a bigoted asshole?
"A Modest Butthurt Proposal."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Ted will blow him away in order to hold onto his title.
ReplyDeleteYes, yes, I suppose I could go read wikipedia again. But I asked here, on this part of the internet instead of that one, and you gave a definition -- which I thanked you for. Now you suggest the reason I find your definition problematic is that I'm too lazy to have asked someone else. Sure, "dude," my bad.
ReplyDeleteNo offense to your definition, though; I have found every explanation of trigger warnings that I have ever read to be problematic. I have also never found what impressed me as a definitive account of their goal and parameters. People at alicublog strike me as damn smart, so it seemed a reasonable place to ask.
And above, I now see, Aimai has an interesting reply to Krebs on the subject. A real-life example (the Vietnam vet strangling the reporter), with some thoughts on how trigger warnings help handle varied responses in a wider group that isn't geared to addressing each individual's complicated personal history. Reading this in combination with the second half of your comment (the idea that warnings shift responsibility from the professor or writer to the student or reader) is helpful to me.
The ill-defined parts continue to irritate, given the latitude I see them granting to -- well, basically to self-righteous types and the lazy. "I refuse to confront my established sensibilities." Like a get out of jail free card when Lolita or Origin of the Species or much of human history comes up.
And a rump-titty-titty-tum-tah tee to you too...
ReplyDeleteIn Ace's case this falls into the category of "small mercies."
ReplyDeleteYes, many of the people I've met IRL who adhere to extreme politics, it seems their belief is not motivated by the politics as they suppose, but by a need in their personality to be extreme. Not one of them would agree, but my sense is: If they had not first attached to a bomb-throwing left cause, they would soon enough have attached to a bomb-throwing right cause.
ReplyDeleteEcce disputatio!
ReplyDeleteIt's not that I care so much about Jonah's feelings, it's just that when it appears in, say, on of Roy's (or the many commenters here who are also capable of it) exquisite takedowns, it feels kind of cheap.
ReplyDeleteIf the forum was supposed to be about dialog, it might be better for them to extend the benefit of the doubt to people who disagree with them. That just seems like good practices.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually upset. He seems to have done less damage as a blogger than as editor of TNR. I have heard hide nor hair of him since that Palin bushwa and have managed to successfully ignore him for most of the past decade.
ReplyDeleteNow he wants to *think* about things? Oh no.
Bookmark it, libs!
ReplyDeletePreach it, Ace!
ReplyDeleteThey are in fact low-thinkers. It is no accident that they favor the brutish, the primate-like, the animal-level sorts of "persuasions" of group hooting and feces-throwing. They favor this because this is what they are capable of, and no other.
And while you're at it, please give us the lowdown on who you think is a rent-a-cooch. Show us how high-thinking reasonable adults are supposed to debate.
It's hurtful to chronic, involuntary sharters.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I'm on the Internets all the time, and had never heard of trigger warnings before. Also, a Google search wasn't entirely helpful. (Urban Dictionary has its limits.)
ReplyDeleteWhenever some old fart, be they a loading dock worker or columnist for a high profile New York magazine, says "But you can't say that, it's not [scare quotes] 'politically correct'", I feel safe in ignoring them. Why? Because either they just said what they're bitching is unsayable or admitted they're too much of a pussy to say it outright.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the previous sentence contains an arguably dismissive and potentially offensive reference to female generative organs. I'm reasonably confident I won't be arrested for hate speech. If my luck goes on the way it's been going I might be busted for vagrancy, but not the other thing.
And speaking of Jesus, I'm sure we'll all be grumbling His holy name when it happens.
ReplyDeleteYou guys are harshing my dreams. I've had a failed business and I'm now trying to start another one that hopefully won't fail. Talking about failed businesses is a trigger. You should have warned me.
ReplyDeleteAlways fun and easy to do: And so the struggle must not ease up with success after success, but must instead be ever-more vigiliant against white-hegemony. So small businesses who aren’t down with mixed marriages have to be sued, rather than let be; white liberty must be scoffed at or constrained, rather than embraced; individual racists must be forced to resign or repent or both, and there is no mercy for those who once might have opposed, say, mixed marriages but now don’t. The only “dialogue” much of the black population wants with its sinners is a groveling apology for having a different point of view. There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that.
ReplyDeleteTL;DR: Fuck off back to England you insufferable limey prick.
because you say you want dialog, you think other people owe you some sort of engagement, conducted according to rules you set and insist on.
ReplyDeleteThis is standard PC language -- describe the interloper as thinking other people "owe" him. And it is standard PC advancement of its agenda by deflection: charge the critic with insisting everyone conduct themselves according to his arbitrary rules, like some tinpot internet fascist. But obviously, to normal brains, me suggesting maybe someone misread a conversation she once had is in no way insisting she follow my rules.
And seriously, it is somewhat problematic to indicate that it is wrong to demand people follow rules and abide by certain expectations in conversation -- while declaring that anyone violating your rules and expectations is on your foot, causing you pain, and needs to step away. Here's where what we say "with the right it's all projection" becomes true of the far left too.
Zuzu explained pretty clearly why a reasonable person might be bothered by word choice
Yes, if you read my "wall of text," you would see me note that the word choice Zuzu expounded on was one he made up and attributed to me.
Dammit, I wish he wouldn't defile the delightful Joan Holloway and Led Zeppelin in the same breath.
ReplyDeleteTWIB did a pretty great discussion (beatdown) of Chait. Chait discussion starts at 6:05 and goes almost til the end of the episode.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKzBdMiIXZk
I agree it's not completely nutpicking, but he did wander into some fairly obscure corners searching for support of his weak tea thesis.
ReplyDeleteYou don't get to decide what other people find offensive.
ReplyDeleteBut let's be real. Some people are justly offended. Some people are offended because they misunderstood, and if it can be cleared up, everybody wins. Some people are just going to be offended -- it was a misunderstanding but even cleared up they are STILL offended. Why do you resist talking about that?
That's the whole point of the foot-stepping analogy -- you may not have *meant* harm, but you still caused it, and rather than telling the people asking you to get off their feet that they shouldn't feel that way because your intentions were good, you need to just, you know, get off their feet.
What you are arguing here is that if someone tells you that you are not allowed to engage with them about their impression of the world, then that's it -- their ideas are shut off from investigation. That is more or less central to PC -- the aggrieved party can demand no one can challenge their opinion; to do so is one or another brand of hurtful oppression
I was doing other things at the time and didn't have time to do all the cutting and pasting and formatting necessary.
Haha, perfect. All that "formatting" required not to misquote me three or four times. When it's so much quicker to address the misquotes!
when you didn't get the kind of reaction you'd hoped for when laying your opinion on those poor benighted folks who'd never ever considered what you'd said before
This is a very PC tactic. Basically a leftwing dogwhistle, here, implying I am racist and elitist, with some kind of Great White Savior complex. Fantastic.
even though they had undoubtedly heard it a thousand times before.
Well, at any point, someone might have said so, if that was the case, but they took a different road. I wish I did have a link for you. This stuff was all years ago, but it made quite an impression on me, and I stowed a bunch of screengrabs somewhere because it was maddening; I later spent hours studying them for clues about cult mindsets in general. In general I do have a detailed memory and very little instinct for self-preservation, so I promise it happened as I say it did.
you would see me note that the word choice Zuzu expounded on was one he made up and attributed to me.
ReplyDeleteMisgenderer.
Who decides?
ReplyDeletePeople with PTSD who can be triggered.
Next question?
But let's be real. Some people are justly offended. Some people are
ReplyDeleteoffended because they misunderstood, and if it can be cleared up,
everybody wins. Some people are just going to be offended -- it was a
misunderstanding but even cleared up they are STILL offended. Why do
you resist talking about that?
Because I don't care whether someone is genuinely offended when I step on their foot. The decent thing to do when you step on someone's foot is to say sorry and get off.
But also, the people you were talking to were probably full to the teeth of clueless white boys dropping pearls of wisdom on them and then getting all huffy when they wouldn't "dialog" with them to clear up a "misunderstanding." While you're on Wikipedia, look up "derailing." I know you find it offensive when people use "PC tactics" such as pointing out that nobody owes you their time, energy, and attention, but nobody owes you their time, energy, and attention. Dismissing that as "lefty" or "PC" says a whole lot about you.
This is a very PC tactic. Basically a leftwing dogwhistle, here,
implying I am racist and elitist, with some kind of Great White Savior
complex. Fantastic.
I guess some people are determined to be offended. I'll just be over here, savoring the irony.
The problem is, though, that there are a lot of people who breeze into forums like that, "Just Asking Questions," and then demand that the regulars stop what they're discussing and educate them. It's a classic move on the part of people who are, yes, asserting their privilege -- what I have to say is so important that you must engage with me on it, on my terms.
ReplyDeleteIt's not about a difference of opinion or simple disagreement. It's about a refusal to engage with people who are straight-up derailing.
Point.
ReplyDeletePlease stop digging. Your hole is causing a road hazard.
ReplyDeleteWell, fair enough. I debated whether to keep posting. But two things were in effect here. 1) I really hate the tactics being deployed against me, e.g., altering my words, dogwhistling me as possibly racist -- that was hard to walk away from. And 2) I think I was having flashbacks to time spent in PC threads. So the topic of PC must now come with a trigger warning for me. There is irony for you.
ReplyDeleteI did go on too long, I'm sure, but I think tomorrow I'll stand by it all.
Oh For Fuck's Sake, you say I'm hallucinating a racial component in your comment about me AND in the same post you say I'm a "clueless white boy" -- aaAAAnnND you say I'm the one missing the irony? Ha. You go have fun in the closed circuit of that back-patting circle your whole life.
ReplyDeleteAnd so the struggle must not ease up with success after success, but
ReplyDeletemust instead be ever-more vigiliant against hetero-hegemony.
Criminy. From what mad universe or antic century cometh this prose style? I can see that he's trying to write in the manner of a Cultural Revolution poster in order to impute that mentality to the Other Side, but dude, put down the quill pen.
Fritz Leiber! I swoon!
ReplyDeleteyou couldn't always sit down and write his column for him
ReplyDeleteSometimes he was stupid and convinced himself that stupidity was a brave contrarian challenge to the established opinion; sometimes he was contrarian in the course of grovelling to power. Sometimes he'd ask for a do-over, either because he had belately realised that the stupidity was injurious to his brand, or because the people he had previously been running after were no longer in power.
True, not entirely predictable.
Hey, I do not "fling' shit, I use a trebuchet.
ReplyDeleteI’d hit that I like I turned a Bag of Holding inside-out and dropped it into a Portable Hole.
ReplyDeleteI know just enough about Dungeons 'n' Dragons to understand how very, very much this quotation tells us about Ace O'Spades.
You'll excuse me. Having summoned forth an involuntary mental image of Ace fappin' furiously away to an amateurish drawing of a bacon-and-playdoh-free, yet magically desirable elven warrior queen, I must now heat this knitting needle white-hot, then ram it far up my nose in an effort to destroy the memory centre of my brain.
I'm sure, despite that, no one else will ever make it with such care and such thoroughness. Until Jonah farts next.
ReplyDeleteMy alternative was "Two Cheers for Butthurt", but yours is closer to perfect.
ReplyDeleteI'm imagining Fred Sampson clutching his chest and staggering around the room.
ReplyDeleteThey were going to hate all of the com-symp pinko traitors to the left of them anyway. All the way up to Nixon, who took the US off the gold standard, although there's still some argument over whether that was ordered by the Kremlim or the Gnomes of Zurich. Anyone who actually voted for a democrat is a hopeless subhuman.
ReplyDeleteFuck 'em. They weren't ever going to play fair.
Lesson for future: take care not to fall into the zuzu-hole.
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of cheap but then...one has to take one's pleasures where one can.
ReplyDeleteI think the problem you are having, gromet, is kind of the same problem that Republicans have with the various "exceptions" to their would be draconian laws on rape. They know for a fact that women want abortions and they also know for a fact that women are natural liars so they put those two things together and argue that even in a lawful or righteous abortion the principle problem is going to be preventing slacker/moocher/liar women from claiming the exception in order to get that sweet sweet abortion.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly the assumption that lots of people will use the possibility of trigger warnings as an excuse to claim some kind of exception to class work, or social interaction, is based on a notion of human nature which presupposes that there are lots of people who are not more ashamed of asking for help than there are people who need help who quietly suffer. I admit that having worked, however briefly, in academia and having known lots of people there are lots of people who are manipulative, demanding, narcissistic, deceptive, and childishly spiteful. People who if given an inch will take a mile. People who will claim a disability when they don't have one just to get an inch's worth of advantage.
But my guess is that there are a lot more people who suffer silently, withdraw from classes, and avoid interactions than the ones who fuck everyone over. And/or we could just address the problem of the abusers of the system by being very upfront with people, talking to them privately, and refusing to cater to liars. Its not a magic word and it doesn't have to be treated like one. Maybe its more like a plea for help and for compassion.
Protocols Of The Elders Of Behind The Zion Curtain
ReplyDeleteThat's no bookmark.
ReplyDelete(I'm going to defer to Ta-Nehisi Coates' response when Chait tried to "tone-police" him.)
ReplyDeleteOld Curiosities Shop Class
ReplyDeleteSomeone left the case out in the rain
ReplyDeleteAnd I'll never have that typing class again. . .
I know I'm going to suffer for mixing in here but I'd like to point out that Gromet and Zuzu are well respected members of the Alicublog community, both are assumed to have the best interests of the community and (generally speaking) other people at heart. If either of them transgressed the unwritten rules of another website or made a faux pas there, or failed to understand something that happened elsewhere using the same metrics, we should hope to give them the benefit of the doubt severally and together.
ReplyDeleteWhy? Because not giving them the benefit of the doubt, not letting each of them represent their own experience in their own words, is exactly the kind of exclusionary and divisive tactic that destroys community.
Maybe Gromet made a (very typical) mistake in entering a new community and "telling" or "suggesting" to someone that they had not properly understood their own situation. ITs true that this *can* be an example of ignorance tantamount to privilige, and its also true that continuing to argue about it can be seen as a form of derailing. But sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes people think they are more a part of the community than they are. Sometimes they think they are just having a conversation. And sometimes people can learn from their mistakes and not repeat them. They often do if they are talked to like human beings and not instantiations of evil.
And communities are not always correct in their judgements. As I said before I got bounced from We Hunted the Mammoth, after being greeted with open arms and much love and affection a few years ago, because I don't post often enough and when I did post the last time I was accused of breaching their protocol on the use of certain forbidden words and became instantly a "troll" and a "provocateur" and an all around evil person. I'm exactly the same person I was when they liked me a lot. I just violated one of their shibboleths and then didn't accept really hostile correction.
See, e.g. Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians and any book ever written about Narcissistic personalities.
ReplyDeleteMy apologies. No doubt you wasted time praying to the god of yeti porn. You should have tried for a different porn god. Yetis are notoriously unbusinesslike.
ReplyDeleteYes, the addition of the reminder that LDS doctors should not have to treat Lesbian patients was particularly egregious.
ReplyDeleteBut is it too much to ask that, in your day-to-day business or
ReplyDeleteincidental social dealings with gay people, you try not to act like a
bigoted asshole?
"There are few things in a free society more illiberal than that." Except for calling someone a bigoted asshole, of course.
That Ta-Nehisi Coates piece reminds me of something I noticed while going through the White House Flickr pages looking at the photographer's favorite shots. Not only does he carefully frame them physically but he is forced by a clear awareness of the right wing hatred of the President and First Lady to "Explain" any pictures that might be subject to some unpleasant or hostile interpretation. And, horrifyingly, almost every single image of Obama interacting with young black men or boys (boys, not girls btw) is captioned "The President offers some life lessons to children from the X school" or "The President offers some life lessons to the team from X sport."
ReplyDeleteIF Bush's compassionate conservativism was represented by endless series of him hugging black people with a look of pained sympathy on his face (which it was) poor Obama's interactions with black people are apparently all to be seen by white viewers as a charitable act towards a defective, lost, community in need of "life lessons" rather than just a joyous interaction between kids and the president who looks like them. I try to imagine someone captioning any picture of white kids and a president "President offers life lessons to the kids" and I just can't.
Within a certain closed circle, Chait is actually quite good; he can argue very effectively with people who share his ground rules, so he can often demolish right- and center-right arguments from a centrist perspective; and he is occasionally funny, in a cruel kind of way. When he tries to engage outside his circle, however, he is completely incompetent and yet acts as though he is the only one with vision on the island of the blind. Which is annoying. And dumb.
ReplyDeleteSully just careens around and occasionally finds an acorn. I gave up reading him because the proportion of posts worth reading was way below par; Chait's percentage is sinking in that direction.
The Right certainly has hypersensitive language police as well.
ReplyDeleteShortly after the Benghazi attacks, it was a VERY big deal to them whether President Obama said "terrorist" or "acts of terror." The choice of words could not be between roughly synonymous words and phrases; it had to be the exact choice deemed acceptable by the conservatives.
In other words, they were insisting on politically correct speech.
The big difference between the language police forces of liberals and conservatives is this: The Right is much better organized about it, and they don't question it. When it was decided that they would always say "Democrat Party" and never "Democratic Party," there was no debate. There was no dissension among the ranks. They all marched in perfect formation, obedient to their own language police.
It's always projection with these guys.
ReplyDeleteThat's certainly in keeping with his "My Brother's Keeper" initiative that he started soon after Trayvon Martin was murdered.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/28/us/politics/obama-will-announce-initiative-to-empower-young-black-men.html?_r=0
I agree with that; it's a form of bullying. It's social dominance behavior.
ReplyDeleteYou're right when you say it's everywhere. It isn't confined to the Left. The big difference is the people on the Right tend to be authoritarians. They bow their heads before the biggest bully, the leader of the pack, and whatever he says becomes the rule.
You can hear this on the Rush Limbaugh show. He reads the headlines (often from the New York Times,) and dictates to his listening audience the proper terms to talk about it. He frames the issues, and chooses the correct words and phrases that they are expected to use.
Sometimes a listener will call in and suggest a little tweak here and there, saying for example "Shouldn't we be calling Sandra Fluke a 'whore' instead of a slut,'" and they work it out on air. That's not common though; mostly it's a very top-down, hierarchical model.
And strangely, they never seem to consider that what they are striving for is a "political correctness"
Ugh. I was working my way up to some sort of "Chait Is Usually Better Than This" semi-apologia, but "anti-Lieberman jihad" is a self-applied scarlet letter nonpareil.
ReplyDeleteThat is literally true in that I couldn't imagine any recognizable version of myself deciding that this sort of thing would be the hill that I wanted to die on.
ReplyDeleteSully has always written from a place of privilege and makes no bones about it. He interleaves shit like the above with whining about how NYC isn't personally nice to him.
ReplyDeletethe xkcd "someone is WRONG on the internet" cartoon.
ReplyDeleteThat cartoon is in its own modest way the Rosetta Stone of so many things about online discourse, up to and including Gamergate. I've gotten into Tumblr quite a bit recently, because there really is quite a bit of great stuff on it; if you're into comics at all, for example, the odds are good that your favorite artist will post stuff from their sketchbooks that you wouldn't see anywhere else. The odds are also very good that you'll start following someone who's in the same fandom as you and they'll post something that will make you go "you gotta be fucking kidding me." I've caught myself starting to compose a lengthy screed in response, decided to look at their profile instead, realized that they were some teenager or college kid, reminded myself of what I was like at that age, and unfollowed them. Boom, problem solved.
I've seen a lot of small businesses go down myself.
ReplyDeleteA lot of times the reason stems from ego-driven squabbling between business partners and arguments about money. That's been my impression.
"I always wonder what kind of shitty business mind thought it would be a good idea to pass up a vast expansion in the potential market for their product or service."
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, it's the kind of business mind, prevalent in some communities, that thinks bigotry is a great business model. If the word got out in Mountain Meadow, Utah, that you made a wedding cake for a same sex couple, you might lose a dozen potential customers from upstanding straights who fear catching gay cooties. And lunch counters in Mississippi fought desegregation not only because the owners hated black people, they knew their white customers hated them too, and wouldn't even sit on the same stools. "Community Standards" can be a bitch.
Yes, that's why it's been a comedy staple to depict a boss who steals an employees idea, saying something like "Good idea, underling... glad I thought of it."
ReplyDeleteI've actually had this happen to me in the workplace more than a few times.
As soon as I saw the words "Jonathan Chait" and "political correctness," I thought this is going to be a shitshow I will not pay any attention to. I won't read Chait's piece or any supporting or contradicting pieces. Wise move on my part, apparently.
ReplyDeleteDidn't the term "political correctness" originally come from the left anyway, to describe the less-than reasonable types within their own midst? I know it's been distorted beyond recognition ever since Daddy Bush seized on it in one of his speeches for its obvious propaganda value, but it once meant something, and it was solid proof people on our side of the ledger had no problem in criticizing their own. I've certainly never seen anything like that from the right, the far right, or even mainstream conservatives. Back when such creatures existed.
ReplyDeleteI'm not unsympathetic to Chait. His many years at TNR don't seem to have destroyed all the New Deal liberalism in him. I don't read him often, usually just on the recommendation of others, but it seems like he's good on policy—and if he's irritatingly centrist, well, I can acknowledge that it's his way of trying to advocate for policies in a real political framework.
ReplyDeleteIt seems like he has some weird PTSD about the breakup of the New Deal coalition and blames the crap out of hippies. His argument with TNC was genuinely revealing, as he got ever-larger pieces of his ass handed to him: Chait really, really wants to love midcentury liberalism, which I totally get and he's not totally wrong, but the gains came to whites to a much greater extent to blacks. Which—and I have direct experience of this—people don't realize.
The most revealing part about his PC whinging is when he says that internecine battles among the left hamper it because they reflect poorly on the left--something something the positive image you have to put forward to be successful in electoral politics. So when TNC says "not my fucking job," well, yeah.
Where I get pissed about Chait is that knowing that history is significant to policy debates. If you think that the New Deal was super-great for blacks, then one obvious conclusion is that the lack of progress made post-1960 is, well, their fault for frittering away the wonderful things the federal government did for them. On the other hand, if you acknowledge that whites benefited from that era to a much greater degree—and that they were able to build generational wealth and build on that, while generational wealth for blacks was often wiped out—you have a very, very different set of conclusions to apply towards the future.
This is standard PC language -- describe the interloper as thinking other people "owe" him.
ReplyDeleteSome language policing is okay, apparently.
She didn't actually say you were a clueless white boy, though. Between that and your various appeals to magic words like OMG PC Language/ville/whatever, you're not giving anyone a particular reason to join you outside the circle of back-patting.
ReplyDeleteSounds like he saw that scene of Joan being raped by her scumbag fiancé and got turned on.
ReplyDeleteUgh, you keep saying that! Alright, alright -- I downloaded it months ago (at your direction); I will bump it up the queue.
ReplyDeleteThis is well said, and thanks for it.
ReplyDeleteI will continue to have an issue with PCville. I was taken by surprise yesterday at what felt like its tactics directed against me personally. Maybe I could have said "you're on my foot" and zuzu would then have agreed it didn't matter whether I was right or wrong, the important thing was that I was hurt -- that might've ended the whole day respectfully! (Unless I misunderstand how her analogy works...) But temperamentally, I have a hard time walking away from what felt like attacks made in bad faith.
I don't go to PC websites anymore. They brought me no joy. I'd walk around in a foul mood for days over crap like what happened here yesterday. And -- alright, how about another memory of a conversation? Please understand, People of Alicublog, I offer it only in the hope it will help explain the source of my lunacy:
AGIRL: You're just another stupid white boy.
ME: You know what? I'm pretty upset here, but let's refrain from personal attacks. Could we agree to both do that, at least?
AGIRL: Your privilege enables you to do that. I don't have your privilege.
That nutshells PC reasonably well. And now I'm going to exit stage left.* See you all next week.
(*Not too far left.)