Open letter denouncing the "restriction of debate".

[George J]

I have read the greater part of this thread as free speech is in my view important.

What strikes me is how wretched a phenomenon social media often seems to be. I have zero interest in Twitter and Facebook, or anything else of the sort.

I look in here, but mostly have very little to add. I am not interested in pushing my own views or philosophical outlook. I suppose that I am too stoical to think I could change anything for the better, outside my own attitudes to people and life. On the whole, I have concluded that the human race is not all that nice, and the stars are people personally known to me rather than famous or powerful people.

On the issue of being offended, and giving offence, intentional or not, I have worked out that if I give unintentional offence, it works well to apologise, and alter my way of speaking or writing in future. But the better thing is that taking offence is voluntary. Nobody has to take offence if they specifically choose not to. If someone says something unintentionally offensive, only if they are a good friend would I point out that some people might be offended by it. If they are being deliberately offensive, or in other words "are" an offensive person, the best way to steal their thunder is by ignoring their offensiveness. They have no way to go once you blunt their weapon.

I am sure that I have no idea of the branches of feminism, or the subtleties of gender politics. It brings wonderment to me how hot under the collar some people get about it.

"Live and let live," is the way I deal with it.

Best wishes from George

 

[SteveT]

To AndyU.

"Right enough, it’s ugly whoever does it." So you have seen a photo of her have you......

 

[DimitryZ]

What's your opinion on the Facebook/free speech debate?

In the current legal framework, they are a private platform, like this forum.

As such, they have no obligation to police the platform, but may choose to do it for various reasons, including business pressure.

I am with Tony on this one - government policing of private speech platforms is worse than the not very good state of affairs we have now.

 

[Joe Hutch]

I have read the greater part of this thread as free speech is in my view important.

What strikes me is how wretched a phenomenon social media often seems to be. I have zero interest in Twitter and Facebook, or anything else of the sort.

Indeed. The way to avoid 'Twitterstorms' is not to be on Twitter; ie don't post anything on it, don't read what anyone else posts on it, just leave it alone. As I've said before, the warning sign is that it's Trump's platform of choice.

And (though Twitter is by no means alone in this respect), Twitter is the ideal echo chamber: look, this person is saying stuff that I agree with/makes me feel good! But wait, this other person is saying stuff I disagree with/makes me feel bad! There's no incentive to seek out a middle ground, to sort out the 'I'd like to believe this, but it's probably not true' from the 'I'm not entirely happy about what this person is saying, but they might well be right'. I see this quite often on pfm threads, especially those involving Donald Trump; a long Twitter thread that 'proves' beyond doubt that he'll be thrown out of office, but then ... he isn't.

 

[vuk]

matt taibbi (#2 best american journalist) weighs in:

If it’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture is it?

excerpt:
....

Contrast that with today. If sixties liberals were able to sell their message to the rest of the country by making music even squares and reactionaries couldn’t resist, the woke revolution does the opposite. It spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it.

Its other chief characteristics seem to be a total lack of humor, an endless, crotch-sniffing enthusiasm for hunting skeletons in closets, a love of snitching and decency committees, a fear of metaphor (woke culture is 100% literal), a mania for collectivist scolding (“Read the room” is this week’s “Destroy the four olds!”), and a puritanical mistrust of humping in the apolitical context. The woke version of erotica is writing an article for the Guardian about how “ejaculating” skyscrapers are symbols of cisnormative dominance. They make the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin.

The question isn’t whether or not “cancel culture” exists. The question is, without canceling, what would this culture be?

LINK:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a

 

[Wilson]

Awesome!

 

[Joe Hutch]

And, as Charles Coburn sang 120 or so years ago:

Strolling so happy down Bethnal Green
This gay youth you might have seen,
Tompkins and I, with his girl between,
Oh! what a surprise!
I prais'd the Conservatives frank and free,
Tompkins got angry so speedilee,
All in a moment he handed to me,
Two lovely black eyes!

Next time, I argued I thought it best,
To give the conservative side a rest.
The merits of Glad-stone I freely pressed, When
Oh! what a surprise!
The chap I had met was a Tory true,
Nothing the Liberals right could do,
This was my share of that argument too,
Two lovely black eyes!

The moral you've caught I can hardly doubt
Never on politics rave and shout,
Leave it to others to fight it out, if
You would be wise
Better, far better, it is to let,
Lib'rals and Tories alone, you bet,
Unless you're willing and anxious to get,
Two lovely black eyes!

CHORUS:
Two lovely black eyes!
Oh! what a surprise!
Only for telling a man he was wrong,
Two lovely black eyes!

 

[DimitryZ]

matt taibbi (#2 best american journalist) weighs in:

If it’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture is it?

excerpt:
....

Contrast that with today. If sixties liberals were able to sell their message to the rest of the country by making music even squares and reactionaries couldn’t resist, the woke revolution does the opposite. It spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it.

Its other chief characteristics seem to be a total lack of humor, an endless, crotch-sniffing enthusiasm for hunting skeletons in closets, a love of snitching and decency committees, a fear of metaphor (woke culture is 100% literal), a mania for collectivist scolding (“Read the room” is this week’s “Destroy the four olds!”), and a puritanical mistrust of humping in the apolitical context. The woke version of erotica is writing an article for the Guardian about how “ejaculating” skyscrapers are symbols of cisnormative dominance. They make the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin.

The question isn’t whether or not “cancel culture” exists. The question is, without canceling, what would this culture be?

LINK:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a

In turn, I find him boring and predictable as well.

This article, NOT by a celebrity journalist, calls BS on the Harper's letter the best:

Don’t Fall For The 'Cancel Culture' Scam
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cancel-culture-harpers-jk-rowling-scam_n_5f0887b4c5b67a80bc06c95e

 

[vuk]

In turn, I find him boring and predictable as well.

multiple choice:

a) you are so special.

b) that's kinda funny coming from a status-quo, centrist, vanilla capitalist

This article, NOT by a celebrity journalist, calls BS on the Harper's letter the best:

just one little tip that may help in trying to critique what you are reading there: if a mob breaks into the white house and murders the president, that is also an anecdote.

 

[DimitryZ]

multiple choice:

a) you are so special.

b) that's kinda funny coming from a status-quo, centrist, vanilla capitalist




just one little tip that may help in trying to critique what you are reading there: if a mob breaks into the white house and murders the president, that is also an anecdote.

You know you are really strange, right?

I am not in the vanilla business. I am in the radar business.

 

[Brian]

Indeed. The way to avoid 'Twitterstorms' is not to be on Twitter; ie don't post anything on it, don't read what anyone else posts on it, just leave it alone. As I've said before, the warning sign is that it's Trump's platform of choice.

And (though Twitter is by no means alone in this respect), Twitter is the ideal echo chamber: look, this person is saying stuff that I agree with/makes me feel good! But wait, this other person is saying stuff I disagree with/makes me feel bad! There's no incentive to seek out a middle ground, to sort out the 'I'd like to believe this, but it's probably not true' from the 'I'm not entirely happy about what this person is saying, but they might well be right'. I see this quite often on pfm threads, especially those involving Donald Trump; a long Twitter thread that 'proves' beyond doubt that he'll be thrown out of office, but then ... he isn't.

Spot on. Links to tw*tter, especially those with no other text in the post, are best avoided, imo.

 

[matthewr]

I have a couple of general points.

1) A plain restatement of what free speech is is somewhat missing the point as a lot of this is about protecting minority classes who have had to struggle to get their speech heard and protected. Which is why it so often seems to come from a position of wealth, power and white privilege. It's similar to the people who respond to Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.

2) My generation was either lamabasted or misunderstood by the boomers for talking about feminism, gay rights and class struggle (Thatcher, miner's strike). I would be disappointed with millennials and zoomers if they didn't have causes that at least slightly baffled me and required me to rethink my priors and listen. It's the nature of progress.

 

[droodzilla]

matt taibbi (#2 best american journalist) weighs in:

If it’s Not “Cancel Culture,” What Kind of Culture is it?

excerpt:
....

Contrast that with today. If sixties liberals were able to sell their message to the rest of the country by making music even squares and reactionaries couldn’t resist, the woke revolution does the opposite. It spends most of its time constructing an impenetrable vocabulary of oppression and seething at the lumpen proles who either don’t get it or don’t like it.

Its other chief characteristics seem to be a total lack of humor, an endless, crotch-sniffing enthusiasm for hunting skeletons in closets, a love of snitching and decency committees, a fear of metaphor (woke culture is 100% literal), a mania for collectivist scolding (“Read the room” is this week’s “Destroy the four olds!”), and a puritanical mistrust of humping in the apolitical context. The woke version of erotica is writing an article for the Guardian about how “ejaculating” skyscrapers are symbols of cisnormative dominance. They make the Junior Anti-Sex League seem like Led Zeppelin.

The question isn’t whether or not “cancel culture” exists. The question is, without canceling, what would this culture be?

LINK:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/if-its-not-cancel-culture-what-kind-46a

Vuk, most of the time I agree with you, but that's a straw-man attack that reinforces alt-right stereotypes about progressive politics. As such it's positively harmful.

This author gets it more nearly right (which is not to say I agree with everything she says):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/03/the-myth-of-the-free-speech-crisis

The article was published last year, before George Floyd and the Harper's letter, but it's highly relevant. In the UK we've had weeks of culture war bullshit because some people pulled down a statue of a slave trader. The vast majority of this (which includes fears about a statue of Churchill, and "banning" popular 70s sitcoms) has been exaggerated and driven by our far-right press.

 

[droodzilla]

I have a couple of general points.

1) A plain restatement of what free speech is is somewhat missing the point as a lot of this is about protecting minority classes who have had to struggle to get their speech heard and protected. Which is why it so often seems to come from a position of wealth, power and white privilege. It's similar to the people who respond to Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.

2) My generation was either lamabasted or misunderstood by the boomers for talking about feminism, gay rights and class struggle (Thatcher, miner's strike). I would be disappointed with millennials and zoomers if they didn't have causes that at least slightly baffled me and required me to rethink my priors and listen. It's the nature of progress.

The first point is crucial. The moral panic about a "free speech crisis" is an almost perfect inversion of reality. Members of minority groups, without a public platform, have been "cancelled" for decades. Now they are findng their voice, thanks to the democratisation of communication (yes, I know that' a simplification) and a few people who are used to holding the floor don't like it.

 

[matthewr]

See also Ted Cruz and his recent troubles with Goya beans : https://popculture.com/trending/news/ted-cruz-goya-boycott-reactions/

 

[Tony L]

The first point is crucial. The moral panic about a "free speech crisis" is an almost perfect inversion of reality. Members of minority groups, without a public platform, have been "cancelled" for decades. Now they are findng thir voice, thanks to the democratisation of communication (and yes, I know that' a simplification) and a few people who are used to holding the floor don't like it.

That is exactly it IMHO. Like so many here I’m of a generation that kicked back against such things in my youth and it sickens me to see an endless stream of wealthy white straight elites attempting to move us all backwards and undo that work. That we now even have some wealthy leftist ‘academic’ booksellers and YouTube talking heads aligning with these alt-right voices only highlights how socially isolated and up their own arse certain elite sections of academia actually are. Not everything is about what rich white middle-aged men think! Student unions deciding who they platform etc is exactly how things should be. That is a solid grounding to take forward in life. Making those decisions is all part of the learning process.

 

[Joe Hutch]

2) My generation was either lamabasted or misunderstood by the boomers for talking about feminism, gay rights and class struggle (Thatcher, miner's strike). I would be disappointed with millennials and zoomers if they didn't have causes that at least slightly baffled me and required me to rethink my priors and listen. It's the nature of progress.

I'm sorry, but that's just plain bollocks. Taking the Wikipedia definition of a 'boomer' as someone born between 1946 and 1964, that covers the generation that began radical feminism as we know it, the generation that founded the Gay Liberation movement, and the generation which broadly speaking supported the miners' strike (someone born at the tail-end of the Boomer generation would have been 20 when the miners' strike started). If you're saying that some boomers lambasted or misunderstood these movements, that's fair enough. I'm sure there's plenty of millennials and zoomers who lambast and misunderstand the causes du jour. But certainly my particular age cohort, born slap-bang in the middle of the Boomer generation, were generally supportive of feminism, gay rights, and the miners' strike. An almost exact contemporary of mine, who was a radical feminist, was arrested at Greenham Common, at a airbase in Scotland where she and fellow peace activists were trying to break in, and again on a demo supporting the miners.

 

[Brian]

I'm sorry, but that's just plain bollocks. Taking the Wikipedia definition of a 'boomer' as someone born between 1946 and 1964, that covers the generation that began radical feminism as we know it, the generation that founded the Gay Liberation movement, and the generation which broadly speaking supported the miners' strike (someone born at the tail-end of the Boomer generation would have been 20 when the miners' strike started). If you're saying that some boomers lambasted or misunderstood these movements, that's fair enough. I'm sure there's plenty of millennials and boomers who lambast and misunderstand the causes du jour. But certainly my particular age cohort, born slap-bang in the middle of the Boomer generation, were generally supportive of feminism, gay rights, and the miners' strike. An almost exact contemporary of mine, who was a radical feminist, was arrested at Greenham Common, at a airbase in Scotland where she and fellow peace activists were trying to break in, and again on a demo supporting the miners.

Spot on again.

Which airbase was that, Joe?

 

[Joe Hutch]

Spot on again.

Which airbase was that, Joe?

From memory, it was Lossiemouth.

 

[matthewr]

I'm sorry, but that's just plain bollocks. Taking the Wikipedia definition of a 'boomer' as someone born between 1946 and 1964, that covers the generation that began radical feminism as we know it, the generation that founded the Gay Liberation movement, and the generation which broadly speaking supported the miners' strike (someone born at the tail-end of the Boomer generation would have been 20 when the miners' strike started). If you're saying that some boomers lambasted or misunderstood these movements, that's fair enough. I'm sure there's plenty of millennials and zoomers who lambast and misunderstand the causes du jour. But certainly my particular age cohort, born slap-bang in the middle of the Boomer generation, were generally supportive of feminism, gay rights, and the miners' strike. An almost exact contemporary of mine, who was a radical feminist, was arrested at Greenham Common, at a airbase in Scotland where she and fellow peace activists were trying to break in, and again on a demo supporting the miners.

Obviously, not all boomers no.

My point was more about the nature of progress and how views that would have marked you as a radical as a boomer were common campus issues for my generation and accepted mainstream views for younger generations. And that this cross generational tension will necessarily affect us as we get older and things change. Unless we are one of the minority who remain truly radical and progressive into our dotage.

I personally feel this tension specifically with some issues where I find people I would traditionally view as allies disagreeing with the younger generations. This is, at least for me, inherently difficult and complicated and full of nuance. And so, to get back to the original topic of the letter, why I personally wouldn't start from a position of telling people the problem is really that they just don't understand free speech.