Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Cancel Culture is the NAME OF MY DOG

Yooooooo, who’s going to get their philosophy degree from Bari Weiss/Joe Rogan university?

Was sure it would be about the framing of this shit.

pic.twitter.com/GJb8kCc7oj

— Sally Hines (@sally_hines) November 8, 2021

Kathleen Stock is on faculty at the new university, so it all connects: https://www.uaustin.org/

Trying to imagine what these courses will be like. How many different ways can you be daringly racist?

You have to get niche and use ethnic slurs not seen since the 18th century.

What's Latin for "No Refunds"?

Caveat emptor

That time a libertarian I met in China used that as the basis to argue against any regulation or certification of dentists, lmao. (He was ‘Murican of course.)

Isn't that why Rand Paul made up his own medical org for accreditation?

the only thing that could make dentists worse is doing away with licensing. can you imagine. i always think of this https://abc13.com/thom-tillis-hand-washing-restaurants-comments/503061/

“I said I don't have a problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy as long as they post a sign that says we don't require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom," Tillis said to audience laughter. "The market will take care of that."

I remember those comments, I call him Poop Hand Thom now

it IS kind of interesting how willing conservatives are to embrace reactive policies like "wait for restaurants to get customers sick/killed, then the market will take care of it", whereas in terms of national security, they are ok with pre-emptively deporting people who just look the wrong way color.

It’s a one-fork flowchart - “is this a benefit to capital? Y/N”

Ah, I wondered if there was talk of the Forbidden Courses University anywhere. Insane grifting from the purportedly cancelled.

If they had the courage of their convictions — or if they had convictions — they'd locate in some libertarian paradise like rural South Dakota. Instead they get to make noise about moving to freedom-loving Texas, while settling in a liberal metropolis full of coffee shops and bike lanes.

Who will be the Aaron Rodgers Chair of Doing Your Own Research?

Second major resignation from a key post at Bari Weiss' unaccredited grifter university since it went public this monthhttps://t.co/QT4gJxYDAj

— Andrés Pertierra (@ASPertierra) November 15, 2021

Will he have to return his gold-plated skull calipers?

Andrew Sullivan was on 60 Minutes this weekend - anybody know if it was a plug for Grifter U., or for Substack "conservatism" more generally?

"calipers" is a fabulous word

but CALPERS is just another cryptic acronym

By mutual & amicable agreement, I'm stepping off the Board of Advisors of U of Austin #UATX, wishing them well. I'm concentrating on Rationality (the book) and Think With Pinker (the BBC radio & podcast series) & won't be speaking on this further. https://t.co/xgo7exT61C

— Steven Pinker (@sapinker) November 15, 2021

Stinker out

he was revealing himself a bit too openly with that one

what is cryptic about CALifornia Public Employees Retirement System? It's not a particularly imaginative acronym

Thanks, sarahell. I never realized it before this moment, but now I see that if you expand CALPERS to show all the words it has abbreviated, suddenly it isn't even remotely cryptic! Anyone can figure it out! I'll try this with other acronyms and see if that trick works with them, too!

Sometimes I get it confused with CLASPERS, because I'm a shark pervert.

I put calpers on my pizza

Skull CALPERS

all I'm saying is that California is a very populous state with a lot of government employees and one of the main reasons people choose to work for the state government is benefits such as a pension, administered by CALPERS, from which they receive immense volumes of correspondence throughout their careers and retirement. This is not to be confused with CALSTERS -- the California State Teachers Employee Retirement System, which is separate.

oh, so that's what you were saying. sorry, that went right over my head. I'll try to pay better attention in the future.

Or CALPIRG, those bright-eyed kids with the card tables.

aiui many exhibits in the Ghislaine trial are shown only to the jury and a lot of stuff is heavily redacted, but I’m just going to wildly speculate that Pinker showed up in one too many photos from Epstein’s private collection

xp - idk to me, a cryptic acronym, is either one where you have no idea how the acronym was derived from the name of the thing, or one where even if you know what the full name is, it is still unclear what the thing actually is or does.

Like compare these in terms of "cryptic-ness"

BUTT - Bouncing Undulating Twerking Tool

vs

BUTT - Bettering Understanding Transitional Talismans

can a mod add a new ILX autoreplace?

Michael Eisen has been canned from eLife. He’s tenured at Berkley so it’s a stretch to describe it as “being canceled.” Twitter is filled with posts about free speech in defense of Eisen and, in a variety of ways, Eisen is representative of creepy liberalism.

I usually don’t have feelings or opinions about these culture or political issues but I, for whatever reason, can’t stop thinking about this today. Eisen is a great scientist but Eisen was a terrible editor.

There’s also a personal component for me. Because of his following and position he’s the major example of being a bipolar academic on social media. I genuinely feel like I’m a moment from posting something really dumb.

he can be a terrible editor and suck in a variety of ways but if he was removed from a post due to retweeting an onion article that's still worthy of condemnation.

I agree. Nevertheless, the eLife letter claims it’s because of multiple (unnamed) incidents. I believe this wasn’t entirely about posting The Onion article. Especially when that’s, compared to some of his other posts, relatively innocuous.

My first thought when I see stories like that--and I freely admit I know nothing more about this case than what you have posted here--is that there was probably sexual misconduct at the back of it.

I agree. Nevertheless, the eLife letter claims it’s because of multiple (unnamed) incidents. I believe this wasn’t entirely about posting The Onion article. Especially when that’s, compared to some of his other posts, relatively innocuous.

― Allen (etaeoe), Tuesday, October 24, 2023 5:10 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

could you just…say what’s on your mind here? his canning is facially, incontrovertibly preposterous. what other beef do you have exactly?

Posted about this case because it just seemed the weirdest one. But I see tweets like "an academic has been suspended" or "I lost a freelance gig" etc.

Utterly vile. "Free speech" as conducted in liberal democracies is an utter sham.

Unsurprisingly, the craven art world seems to be operating similarly as many universities— Artforum Fires Top Editor After Open Letter on Israel-Hamas War

More on that kerfuffle— artworks have been returned and artists told to “stay in line.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/26/artforum-artists-gaza-ceasefire-martin-eisenberg/

"In the future we'll launder money and dodge taxes with only ethnic cleansing-supportive art."

A paragraph from that Intercept link that jumped out

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967

IDK if this is exactly the right thread for this. I don't really listen to Huberman, but I find this style of "investigative" smear piece to be gross and a trend I really don't like. AFAICT, the allegations are that Huberman is flaky and a shitty boyfriend? Like if he yelled and acted jealous of a woman's past I can see that that's "toxic" but it hardly seems worthy of reporting on, esp when the woman is a full-fledged adult with education and resources and there doesn't appear to have been any coercion, threats, assault, etc. Like why is "moderately famous person isn't a great guy" worthy of reporting?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html?fbclid=IwAR3RqYspsmm0DL0VodXpthlf6DC3p-vziR-enLDDmbc9wFRHTnLpakC2P30

man alive - probably the right thread for it, i don't have much to say about it myself... the problem with a lot of this stuff is that it's so marginal that, like, the people it affects it _really_ affects, but the people it doesn't affect...

i'm particularly starting to find myself less and less online... twitter becoming overtly institutionally evil has kind of reduced my contact with it. people i know are less likely to use twitter, less likely to be engaged with the Discourse. and some of those folks are on bluesky or mastodon and some of those people are too busy getting evicted to do much on social media. i mean honestly the one upside of having a group of friends who are constantly in crisis is that it really cuts down on my exposure to twitter drama.

but i did happen to run across this:

This will be the average congressional hearing in 2055 pic.twitter.com/jbN8kV9ikZ

— Jen Deere 1986 (@oxyjene1986) April 1, 2024

and i can tell i'm getting old because i only really know like half of these. i have no idea what "the captive prince" even is. "hazbin hotel" i haven't really seen but i have a group of friends who are really into it, and i don't really know what's supposed to be "problematic" about it.

but what bothers me is kind of the flattening of "problematic", the way it gets used as code for "untouchable". i've seen this a lot with my BPD - like, i have serious problems and they affect me and the people around me and, like. if people cut ties with me as a result of my behavior i _actively support_ that, i mean it hurts like hell and it's not what i _wanted_ but it's absolutely fair. but that's not how people use "problematic", it's used like it is here, where it's like oh you have friends who have friends with this person who did this bad thing, why are you doing that?

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ok i'm gonna get deep into early christian history here, fgti if you're reading this maybe you'll appreciate my nerding out here, but what it reminds me of is this early christian heresy called donatism. it's a really interesting heresy to me and one i find really relevant to online culture.

so the big thing to know about christian persecution is that there was really only one big, major, pan-roman persecution, and that was the diocletianic persecution. after the "crisis of the third century" - basically the collapse of the First Roman Empire - after about 50 years or so rome kind of got itself together in a form that was still an "empire" but was different in a lot of ways from what came before, like more of an overt military dictatorship rather than just kind of implicitly a military dictatorship like it was before. one of the more important emperors was diocletian, who did a bunch of things and one of them was saying "ok we need to get serious about the Christian Problem", christians were, like, getting more and more prevalent. like maybe up to 10% of people in the empire were christians at this point.

so diocletian was like, goddamn, these guys are a threat to traditional roman civic religion and was all "repent or die". kind of like the spanish inquisition honestly haha. anyway a lot of christians weren't actually down with the "martyrdom" thing, including some bishops. which was important because bishops, at that time, were basically how you made new priests, you had kind of a lineage, like this person was ordained by this person who was ordained by this person, there wasn't like a Central Bishop Authority or nothing

anyway constantine, in hoc signo vinces, christianity is no longer an anti-imperialist resistance movement but a tool of imperialism, yada yada yada, but christians are mostly like, hey, cool, rome has stopped trying to kill us, that's nice.

the thing is that a lot of christians who renounced christ so as not to get killed, they were all "well, i only did that so i wouldn't get killed, i actually really believe in christ". and some of them were bishops, and since they were bishops, they started ordaining people.

and the donatists were like, hey, wait, that's bullshit, people were out there dying for what they believed in and you actively renounced your faith and now you're saying basically "psych!" and going on ordaining priests like nothing happened here? like you kinda gave up your moral authority to ordain priests when you renounced christ to save your own skin.

i mean honestly i can't say they didn't have a point, but the thing was it didn't, like, really work out in practice. because there's this lineage, and there's no central authority, and it devolves into well, was the bishop who ordained you actually ordained by a fake bishop, so for all you know you're a "real priest" but the donatists are like no you're not, and ultimately i guess like the woke donatists wound up eating themselves. or something.

like sometimes yeah it sucks that people who actually denounced christ are out there saying "oh yeah i'm super duper christian" like fuck you where were you in chicago?, but man you just gotta let that shit go

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anyway tho i wanna get back to "problematic" as a euphemism for "untouchable" because of the two of the media properties in that tweet i _do_ know, they're like very different. i mean i haven't seen "attack on titan", it's not really the kind of animne i go for, but my understanding is that there's some questionable fascist subtext in there somewhere, the kind of stuff that makes you go "hmmm i wonder if there's something deeper going on here". like "problematic" in the same way that... like another deep cut, there was this debate for a while over whether "the celestial toymaker" was racist against asians. because it turns out "celestial" was an old obscure derogatory term for chinese folks and if you look at it michael gough's getup in the episode has kind of a chinoiserie thing going on. and i think eventually they figured out that it's not racist against asians and apparently RTD brought back the character in a special last year which i didn't watch because clinical depression, but without the "celestial" part because that bit was maybe a little bit problematic. like the bigger problem with that story is the gratuitous use of the n word for no goddamn reason in the story's second episode, that's not really _problematic_ that's just goddamn racist is what that is.

now i could be wrong here but i feel like attack on titan is "problematic" in the same sense that, like, the celestial toymaker was arguably a racist caricature of a chinese person. (which contrast with "talons of weng-chiang" which _does_ contain severe racist caricatures of chinese folks, again, not "problematic" just racist.)

anyway contrast that with harry potter which, again, i haven't really read... i've heard that there are some problematic depictions in there and i honestly can't speak on that one way or another. of course that's not the problem with harry potter. the problem with harry potter is that its author is, like, probably the most influential person in the british anti-trans movement, which has been _very_ effective and which has been _very bad_ for anybody in the uk who happens to be trans. and it's still very effective, and things keep getting worse for trans people, and rowling is still working really hard to keep making things worse for trans people over there.

like to me that goes a little beyond just "problematic". and if someone says that none of that has anything to do with harry potter, respectfully, i call bullshit on that. i only speak for myself, other trans people can and occasionally do differ from me on that. speaking as a trans person, though, i do think supporting harry potter serves to make rowling powerful and influential, and the effects of that power and influence are directly harmful to trans people in the uk. to me that goes beyond "problematic".

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see when you flatten out all this stuff it becomes this moral equivalency thing. i mean shit i got _problems_, i got shit-tons of problems. i've done some fucked up shit, i've had some supremely bad takes, past and very probably present. i have _problems_ and i deal with them the best i can. i mean my whole BPD thing, i act in certain ways and sometimes people are like "yeah i can't deal with that". fair! more than fair! but then some people are like "oh don't talk to kate she's _problematic_". like i do my best to take responsibility for my problems and deal with them. "ok nobody talk to kate" doesn't, like. doesn't help.

the thing i keep coming back to is when kendrick put out "mr morale" or whatever and the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was "auntie diaries". and within 24 hours of that song coming out some person, who was trans, was tweeting that anybody who had a problem with kendrick saying "faggot" in that song was a "secretly racist tenderqueer".

and i mean i like that song, even though it's probably not the best song on that album, which i admit i've only really listened to once. i agree with that song. i self-identify as a "faggot", though i'm careful about how or when i do because some trans people are uncomfortable with that and i wanna be respectful.

and i keep coming back to it because it says something important about how, like, purity culture or cancel culture or whatever works. like the people who they go after the hardest, it always seems to be marginalized people. i mean i don't believe in all that "punching up/punching down" stuff, like the idea of privilege hierarchies, i don't think that works out too well in practice, but like the person who made hazbin hotel isn't a white man, this is a show that speaks deeply to queer experience, and, like, what... one of the characters is homophobic? like you can't really give an authentic representation without representing homophobia, without representing sexuality sometimes in some pretty blunt terms. and if that's "problematic", it's not the problem of the people depicting them.

none of this is remotely _new_, people were saying shit like this about gangsta rap when i was an ignorant teenager in the early '90s, and it was just as fucking stupid then. it just irritates me that you try to talk about genuinely hateful and bigoted people like rowling and suddenly it turns into dunking on, like, kendrick lamar or w/e. come the fuck on.

I feel like many young progressives have unwittingly adopted the strategies of Fundamentalist Christians. my youth group leader back in the day used to warn us our brains were little computers and even exposure to questionable ideas could warp our mind, so we should abstain from anything that contradicted or criticized our beliefs.

like the whole "six degrees of complicity" thing that is Twitter's steez has become exhausting and seems less focused on actually righting any wrongs and more about competing for social manna.

and if you dig deep into the people doing a lot of the finger-wagging, especially on Twitter, often times they aren't who they portray themselves as. such as the person who was publicly and dramatically berating my friend a year ago for being a 'COVID minimizer', and turned out to be someone who was actually an abusive person themselves and had an entire Twitter thread started by someone detailing their abusive behavior.

I often have distrust of anybody who I've known for years and never seen publicly apologize about anything, because everyone has stepped in it before and needed to be humbled, but those that repeatedly seem to avoid said humbling are often taking extra measures behind the scenes to stage-manage how they are perceived, so that they 'wriggle' out of it.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.