But Wait…There’s More!

“What he wants is the right to both say things which are offensive to some people and remain a liberal in good standing once he has said them.”

What they used to call “manly warmth.”

against a man who was most prominently known among the students themselves for a physically brutal crackdown on Occupy protestors at UCBerkeley

Off-topic, but:

It never really made the press coverage of the situation, but Birgeneau was responsible for escalating the situation, not the “PC patrol.” The students asked for an apology for his actions at Berkeley and an opportunity for a dialogue with students, and he responded with a caustic How dare you whippersnappers criticize me? email.

Coming to a Quaker school having ordered protestors beaten, and vocally defending those actions? You’re damn right that you’re going to be invited to apologize and dialogue about that.

Fun fact: he never declined his invitation! Simply didn’t show up. Class act all the way.

When I used to teach civil rights and civil liberties, I taught a lot of her stuff. Lots of interesting things there on when speech is a form of action and so on. And a writer who knows how to seize a reader, who knows what a sentence is supposed to do. Definitely worth engaging with.

I saw this beautiful example of the horrors of Political Correctness from David Frum pointed out on twitter,

“But the Obama administration’s unwillingness to stand alongside the people of France at a march to condemn the Charlie Hebdo massacre does matter. The refusal to pronounce the phrase “Islamist terrorism” matters.”

You hear that you censoring leftists? You better use the termonology I deem to be appropriate to describe world events or you are taking away my freedom!

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/liberals-and-the-illiberal-left/384988/

Thanks so much for taking the time and effort to do this Belle. I was getting a bit discouraged down there.

I’m interested in all this fundamentally because I’m interested in how do we move on from the old patriarchal world that you’ve identified so well here – the world where white men like Chait got to decide who could speak – to the newer, potentially more egalitarian and diverse world that we can perhaps see forming. But the discussion seems to get bogged down by people like Chait and some commenters here, who really I think, as you suggest, just want the old world where they were in charge, but can’t actually say so – so they have to make up all this stuff about how all the new people – the feminists and the people of colour and their lefty supporters – just can’t do anything right and just want to suppress people and trample on free speech and blah blah blah.

What can be done about it though? Can we just say, look folks things are going to change around here, so stop all the bullshit and let’s talk properly about this? Or am I kidding myself? Because I’m actually quite interested in their feelings and wouldn’t mind discussing them, but I just get fed up with all the bs and the name calling and misinterpretations and mansplaining and making things up and getting all offended and all the rest of it. (And in my experience, white men who feel they’re being criticized do get incredibly offended, though yeah, feminists can be pretty touchy at times. POC do sometimes seem to get angry, but in my limited experience, don’t seem to go in for the whole “how dare you say those awful things about me” stuff so much, maybe because that is the reaction of privilege?)

Anyway, I’m interested in what you think on how we go forward on this change, if you have time/inclination to answer.

“On the contrary, they publicly lament the days when the lack of the internet meant that white men writing for The “E.T.L.” New Republic were gatekeepers who could shut out any troublesome voices bubbling up from the bottom of society”

I feel like someone should introduce Chait to our Liberal Prime Minister, who upon getting basically the entire country annoyed/feeling-like-mocking-him on Australia Day for choosing to Knight and Dame for the year just two Knights and no Dames with one Knight being the Queen’s husband – then in the afternoon twice asserted internet comments/twitter etc are merely “electronic graffiti” which no dignified newspaper should report – of course this led only to yet more annoyance and worse

I’ve a quarter-finished post on the Frum piece in the pipeline; would happily abandon it though if Belle were to decide to take him on (although how much unhappiness can a single family heap onto the head of a single longsuffering conservative pundit?)

@15 Chait is a solid liberal writer on economic policy; on taxes, in particular. I also think he can be a fun writer, especially when he’s snarky, though I’m sure that’s a matter of taste.

But yes, he has always liked to punch the hippies and monitor the halls of what’s permissible liberal discourse. I’ve linked, in the other thread, to Henry’s comparatively gentle takedown of Chait’s handwringing over the fact that “the Netroots” didn’t respect Lieberman enough–no reason not to link to it again here; it’s really a nice piece if you’re interested in Chait as a writer: https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/04/chait-on-the-netroots/ (you can find Chait’s original piece online easily. The link from CT is dead).

ah, will be interesting to see how TNR alums receive the huge slap in the face delivered by Jeter Heer in the current TNR – which, I think, is a pretty brilliant move, since the whole mooing and crying squadron last month were on about the brilliance and wonderfulness of the mag. Now, the people who own its archive come out to rub their faces in it.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120884/new-republics-legacy-race
I love this. And I love how it gives us a meaty context for what Chait’s TNR was doing in the 90s, while supposedly PC ruled.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is not just somebody whom some rich idiots think as anti-muslim. She is someone who was horribly mutilated by people who think they are and present themselves as muslims and whom the rich idiots think of as muslims and defend their right to mutilate women. As for what McKinnon think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali mutilation, I haven’t heard nothing.

Michael I would like to ask you two questions. Can you think about them and respond please?

Do you think that the problem in our public discourse is that oppressed and disadvantaged voices are heard from too often?

Do you think that when marginalized people hear something that they find offensive, inaccurate or demeaning they should just shut up and be quiet?

Thank you.

Thank you Michael.

So what do you think marginalized people should do?

Use judgement and treat people with respect.

No such thing should be apparent to you about me. It’s entirely acceptable very often, but I may wish it happened a bit more civilly a bit more of the time, and that a bit more often people would choose to make the point they need to make in a way consciously crafted to draw offenders in and further dialogue rather than consciously crafted to single out, shame, and embarrass them.

But maybe people can’t do that. And that, too, is acceptable.

So do you feel it is the responsibility of the oppressed to be polite?

Belle Waring,
A phrase you might find helpful is “call-out culture,” and I think the piece you asked for is somewhere in the links of these two posts: privilege-checking and call-out culture and Justice does not take the shape of punishment eagerly dispensed

Yes, it’s everyone’s, up until a certain point that I can’t name. Obviously I don’t expect the oppressed to be unfailingly polite at all times. Hell, I only expect them to barely avoid using violence with great effort at times of extreme stress.

The onus should be on the powerful moreso than on the oppressed, yes. So where someone is being belligerently offensive, I don’t expect anyone to be polite to them. But where someone is offensive out of ignorance or an honest inability to initially understand the perspective they need to take in a given situation, I would like people to be polite about it, yes.

Which do you think was the case in the case of the examples Freddie cites or the examples of things people like Michelle Goldberg or Samhita Mukhopadhyay have seen?

“Which do you think was the case in the case of the examples Freddie cites or the examples of things people like Michelle Goldberg or Samhita Mukhopadhyay have seen?”

I would say that these are BY far the minority of cases and that by attacking the idea of “political correctness” people like Freddy and Chait look hypocritical and self serving. The idea that you should be careful what you say because it might hurt or discriminate against someone is a good thing.

What do you think?

“Your past failure of judgment in this precise area means there is no point in listening to you confidently pontificate about it further, especially given that you have never been willing to interrogate the source or nature of your failings.”

I don’t recognize that as debate, no. I’m surprised you are surprised.

I think the problem identified by Chait is less important than the fact that marginalized voices go unheard in our society. But I also think that the problem identified by Chait contributes to the fact that marginalized voices go unheard in our society.

I don’t think Chait’s article is well-written enough think to lead to more participation of marginalized voices in our society. I also don’t think it will lead to much less of it. But I do think that effectively addressing the problem identified by Chait, something I don’t think Chait’s article will help do, would lead to more participation of marginalized voices in our society.

“…would lead to more and more effective participation of marginalized voices in our society, that is.”
so you believe that being told by a white male writer how they should best engage will lead to more participation? Do you think that is likely?

“I think the problem identified by Chait is less important than the fact that marginalized voices go unheard in our society. ”
Thank you. I agree. In fact, I think it is so much less important that I have to wonder why Chait even raised it.

Ah. So I misread you. My apologies.

So we agree that marginalized voices are more important than Chait’s or Freddie’s feelings. We agree that “political correctness” has been a social good. Fantastic! I feel we are close to a break though here Michael.

So do you wonder why Chait has to go back to 1991 for examples of political correctness gone too far? And that many of his “examples”, such as the photo montage and trigger warnings, are things that most people would argue are positive not negative examples of cultural change and expression? I mean his list of actual problems seem pretty small when you compare it to the list of positives.

So why write the article? I think he was mad. Mad about other people, people he didn’t think we’re worthy, judging him. Do you think that could be a possibility?

Digby pointed out that he said many of the same things about the “netroots” back in 2007. Maybe Chait just doesn’t like to be questioned by those he considers social inferiors. Are you open to that as a possibility?

Thanks.

@40

have you not looked particularly carefully at the list of people on whom those tactics were applied?

Silencing tactics, especially when applied by relatively small and unpopular groups, are fairly weak things. So they are unlikely to do much to the powerful, or their pet columnists.

So, naturally, when something like come to wider attention, it is likely because some white wealthy male guy had sufficient social prestige to ignore them.

But then you take a minute go back and find out who they did work on, then more or less by definition it will be a list of people who didn’t, in fact, have sufficient social power to shrug them off. Which means in general they will be disprortionately non-rich, non-male, non-white.

For example, these guys:

http://laurajmixon.com/2014/11/a-report-on-damage-done-by-one-individual-under-several-names/

‘I appreciate your 3:12 admission that basically what he says is going on in online feminist circles is going on.’ (Michael Drew, 17)
You mean there are manipulative/sectarian/mendacious/etc. people on ‘your side’? Feminists are people too? The bastards.

Soru at 49.

Belle at 52 pretty much says what I wish I was eloquent enough to say.

So read her and pretend it was me and then reflect on the error of your ways.

;-)

Belle,

One small point of disagreement. You keep saying re the Coates/Chait argument that Chait lost. That’s not right. What happened was that Chait got his ass handed to him. On a plate. With his own selected words as garnish.

Otherwise, tho, yes! A thousand times!

Re Harry/Belle/Corey, etc.:

Laura Kipnis had a great piece about Dworkin a few years back. I think it was in the Nation and I imagine you all know it, but I’ll maybe try to look it up and post a link tomorrow. It was great, in a very Kipnis-ish sort of way.

I’m open to pretty much whatever as a possibility. But all that about whom he’s mad at really isn;t necessary to assess his arguments, nor is there evidence to support the assertions made in the OP, which contrast strikingly with your modest queries about what is merely possible.

I don’t wonder why Chait has to go back to 1991 for examples, because he doesn’t have to. He revisits some history to set the context for this discussion as he sees it. As is standard practice in an article like this.

Belle,

I don’t dig all of his examples. I don’t see any reason for him to have a problem with requesting, even demanding trigger warnings. There is absolutely no problem at all that I can see with a theater department simply deciding against staging The Vagina Monologues. (I see more of a problem with protesting a decision to stage a play with the aim of and succeeding in preventing it from happening after the decision to (try to) do it has been made. That is indeed silencing.)

But Chait gets to have an opinion. I don’t hate the term mansplainy, I just don’t think it always matters all that much. He has a view of trigger warnings that rankles you for good reason, and that reason is a clear lack of sensitivity to the reason for them on his part. That’s… a disagreement. That’s what that is.

Nobody has mentioned this blog reply to Chait: http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/01/29/i-dont-know-what-to-do-you-guys/

” preventing your school from paying money to rich, powerful people is not a form of stifling political correctness”

I wasn’t actually aware of this as the crux of the argument. For Lagarde (about the only one of the protests I followed) the question was one of representation – the students understood that a commencement speaker was representing them in some way, and they didn’t want to be represented by her.

It’s not even the fucking theater department! So the fuck what! Everything you say about that example I agree with!

Except one thing. Chait doesn’t say it’s an example of political correctness run amok. As with many of the examples people are saying he says that about, it’s just part of his sketch of growing political correctness, a trend we all seem to concede is happening, just disagree about the balance of gains and harms it represents, and which examples of it are troubling. He views that as on balance not a good thing, which people are entirely welcome to disagree with. But not every one of his examples is meant as an individual example of the trend gone amok. The eggs; the littering; the jobs targeted; I’d argue the protesting of plays that have been elected to be performed with the intent to get them canceled, and speakers heckled away from campus; various feminists saying they aren’t just more careful about what they tweet, but that they are afraid to speak at all in certain forums – those in my view are. YMMV. So what if our mileage on these vary?

“he is, in fact, crying like a little girl”

Nit: Boys and girls cry the same way. “Little child” would have less unconscious bias.

$55.000/year – bloody hell!

It’s more like some rich people are telling other rich people that they don’t like them.

And that’s cool, I would rather have liberal rich people than right-wing rich people, but it still seems to me the whole system is pretty rotten to the core, especially since we are talking about being inclusive of minorities / oppressed / alienated people.

A feminist pop culture commentator (Lauren Rosewarne) wrote an article on the website of our public broadcaster expressing concern that the female actresses in the all female remake of Ghostbusters are being set up to fail, because remakes of very popular films always disappoint.

This is what one guy wrote in the comments:
“mike j:
29 Jan 2015 1:56:08pm
In reality, the likelihood of women monopolising a hazardous profession like busting ghosts is vanishingly small. Over 95% of workplace fatalities are male, and closer to 98% in the military. Women are too sensible to risk life and limb to get ahead or support their families when they could simply marry well, pop out a couple of welfare babies, or get an easy, low-skilled job as a child carer and then complain about gender wage discrimination.”

I swear to you, he is writing that seriously, not as a joke. I mean it’s hilariously funny, (in a way, although in another way it fills me with hatred and rage) but he wasn’t writing it to be funny.

There was another article on the same site about the gender pay gap. It was an analysis using figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and one commenter said that he or she (it could in fact have been a woman in this case) would like to see a non feminist analysis of the statistics, because it would be different.

They were probably the most ridiculously egregious of the comments, but there were hundreds more that were nearly as stupid. I may be showing up my compatriots as idiots, but I’m pretty certain it’s the same in the UK or USA. If anyone wonders why feminists get enraged, you have to realise that there are these huge steaming piles of stupid everywhere. It’s just too much, sometimes.

I’ve been reading these threads and so far haven’t commented, though I intended to comment on the first one after I’d read the links. Then I made the mistake I often make and read the comments…and had no idea what to say. Everyone was galloping in a direction I hadn’t foreseen.

I still feel a little lost but I will venture this: I first encountered the term “politically correct” in the 1980s while I was in an activist group, and right from the get-go it struck me as chilling, even though my friends used it lightly. But it was like cleaver, it could divide, without nuance, any statements into two groups, the correct or the incorrect. It ended discussions rather than opening them up.

After being an active feminist for a number of years I turned my attention elsewhere and didn’t read about feminism on the internet (when I finally got there) until a few years ago when a younger friend in her 30s was talking to me about feminism and how distressing and off-putting all her encounters on feminist sites had been. I didn’t go to the sites right away, I just talked to her about feminism as I understood it which came as a surprise to her after her online experiences. But when I did go, I discovered that there have been a lot of changes in feminist discussion in the decades I wasn’t paying attention, including some that I really disagree with. And those I disagree with I have never yet dared to discuss online. I really think the left would howl at me, including the leftists and feminists here. I don’t want to get too much into that in this thread, but the divisiveness of discussions I saw was really, really depressing. No mention of sisterhood, no supportive listening to someone’s personal experience to understand it, together, politically. I really couldn’t bear it and haven’t been back.

So one thing I took from the Chait piece was that yes, people can be silenced by the PC forces, and online I am one of them, so far.

#52 Belle Waring

PC is, as I said, a rare source of power for liberal causes in society. Slowly, ever so slowly, it is becoming unacceptable to call things that are unsatisfactory “gay.”

I doubt it will matter much about reforming the word “gay”. “Gay” used to mean joyous. Then it got appropriated to mean homosexual. Then it got appropriated again to mean inferior. By the time we can intimidate people into not using it to mean both homosexual and inferior, the slang will have changed out of all recognition, likely as not to something else we don’t like.

There is a huge world of human interaction in which people say varying terrible things to one another all the time. I got called a cunt about three hours ago by an MRA who disliked my views on whether women owed men attention in clubs if the men bought them unsolicited drinks. I get called that on a pretty frequent basis if I comment with a female handle and argue about feminism. I think that concerted efforts to enforce minimal standards of politeness are much more likely to help than to hurt, and seeing powerful white men struggle to find victims makes me suspicious of their motives.

Yes, people say terrible things to each other sometimes. They hurt each other’s feelings, because as human beings or members of status-oriented cultures or whatever we are, we have this sense that we should not be treated below our station.

It’s perfectly obvious to me that you don’t owe a man anything for buying you a drink you didn’t ask for. He has no business calling you a cunt for disagreeing with him even while you drink it, except that people who disagree about things sometimes call each other names and free speech and all that. It’s crass of him even if he technically has the right.

On the other hand it’s perfectly fine for you to ridicule men who disagree with you. You can call them mansplainers or whatever the word of the day is, and it isn’t really demeaning because … because first off, it’s true. you wouldn’t call them those names unless they really were mansplainers or whatever. And second, it’s OK for you to despise and ridicule people who disagree with you because you’re right and they’re wrong. If they were right then it would be fine for them to do it, but ….

So we ought to enforce minimal standards of politeness, and our methods of enforcing minimal standards of politeness is by being as rude as possible to people who violate them. If we’re mean enough to them then other people will see what happens to people who violate the new social norms and they will be careful. “Kill the sheep so the monkey will learn.”

I’m not sure I agree with all this, but my qualms about it come from moral relativism. When people who think they are right treat people terribly because they think the others are wrong, what if they are in fact not as right as they think they are? I mean sure, you have the moral right to do anything you feel like to people who are objectively wrong, but what if you make a mistake? What if to some extent you are the one who is doing terrible things when you shouldn’t?

But of course there can be no doubt that feminism is 100% right and anybody who disagrees with anything that gets called feminism is 100% wrong, so have at it! Well wait, maybe there are some things that can legitimately be called feminism that are not 100% right. But we have to stand with them against the common enemy until the enemy is defeated. Anyway, even if we do a few little bad things the enemy does much much worse. It’s OK to do anything you want to people who are morally worse than you are, right?

And feminists still don’t have much power, while the patriarchy has lots and lots of power. So if we occasionally do some minor injustice to men who don’t have enough power to protect themselves, it serves them right for not being 100% on our side! Not like we can do anything to the really powerful ones like Chait.

And if they are 100% on our side and we hurt them a little, no big deal. They’ll agree that they deserve it.

And if it’s fellow feminists who have the wrong ideas and we shame them for it? They deserve it for being wrong. As soon as they confess and accept the truth, then all is forgiven.

So I can mostly see it. After all, the enemy is crafty and ultimately cruel. You have to fight fire with fire, you can’t run a revolution like a dinner party. If there are isolated examples of feminists who treat other people as inferiors who have no rights, it doesn’t mean anything is wrong. Their inferiors probably deserve it. And anyway that whole status thing is embedded so deeply in the culture we’ll probably never get it out.

“By the time we can intimidate people into not using it to mean both homosexual and inferior, the slang will have changed out of all recognition, likely as not to something else we don’t like.”

Yup, Iron Law of Euphemism. If a word has bad connotations, and you replace it with another word, but don’t change people’s opinions, the new word will come to have the same connotations. You just end up burning through the dictionary, rendering one word after another useless for it’s original purpose. Make it awkward to talk about sticks, or people who are cheerful and light hearted, and so on. Substituting words doesn’t change opinions.

At least the lesbians only piss off the people living on Lesbos, who have had a long time to get used to it.

So here’s my take on this, as offensive and mysogynistic as it might be.
1) Chait’s piece was just stupid for all the reasons that Belle said, and more. If you agree with him, you need to reexamine your life because you have made some bad life decisions. All of his examples are bad. Can we just move on… Please for the love of a non-patriarchal god.
2) I think we should all agree that oblivious white males casually using sexist language, or expressing racist thoughts, because they’re incurious should have their butts handed to them. Screw those guys. Basic civility says you don’t get to piss on the sidewalk – same rules apply to discourse. If you want to be part of normal society there are some rules you should damn well be following.
3) Good God, the internet makes it easy for stupid people with sexist views to express them as offensively as possible.

But… I think there’s a difference between that and the kind of stuff that Freddie was talking about. I think it’s a much newer phenomenon, and if you’re 40+ possibly not one you’ve come into contact (unless you’ve done the whole sectarian left thing in the past). And that’s largely about better educated/experienced ‘leftists’ shaming other ‘leftists’ for being insufficiently pure/educated/whatever. It’s almost always directed at people on the left, and it seems to be more about establishing in-groups and hierarchies, rather than achieving any real change.

And good god, the whole ‘check your privilege’ thing just needs to stop. Whatever utility that may once have had, it’s long since deteriated into annoying one upmanship.

No. Would have like people like her to tell the rich idiots they are rich idiots.

Wow Lynne. I find it tragic that you felt silenced as you always have intelligent and humane things to say.

:-(

Speaking as one of the younger set here, I find it kind of remarkable how few of Chait’s sympathizers are willing to consider the possibility that maybe it’s just the Internet? In my own experience, people of my age group tend to be rather ambivalent about the Internet in general; it’s simply taken for granted by the young that the web is largely a cesspool, and that anything that rises above a pathetically low level of discourse is the exception. “YouTube comments” have been a running joke for years, long before we started hand-wringing about Tumblr feminism.

To the extent that the conversation really has gotten rougher, well, that’s what happens when a black man goes to the White House and tries to pass health-care reform. You can hardly expect the violence of the right-wing backlash not to prompt greater stridency from the left. We are human. We react to what we see going on around us. The Obama presidency has pushed so-called “identity politics” out of the intellectual ghetto and into the forefront of mass discourse. It is to be expected that things will get messy. There is very little to see here, people. Move on.

Aw, MPAV, thanks. Really.

“If you don’t think that matters to a gay 13-year-old you are being obtuse.”

It will matter a lot to some and not at all to others. I have tested this by asking the son of a friend who is just starting university how he found getting through school as an out gay man (I was curious because we are thinking about the same school for our boy). he told me (us) that there was still plenty of casual homophobia but he was OK with it because there was no actual physical abuse, bullying or shunning so calling something ‘gay’ for bad seemed to him obtuse and ‘redneck’ (US slang is encroaching fast), but nothing to get upset about. It is just one example but it supports the view, to my mind, that words don’t matter very much, it is attitudes that have to change. Once the attitudes do, the words quickly lose their power and, often, just slip out of use naturally.

#84 Cian

1) Chait’s piece was just stupid for all the reasons that Belle said, and more. If you agree with him, you need to reexamine your life because you have made some bad life decisions. All of his examples are bad. Can we just move on… Please for the love of a non-patriarchal god.

Agreed.

2) I think we should all agree that oblivious white males casually using sexist language, or expressing racist thoughts, because they’re incurious should have their butts handed to them. Screw those guys.

Agreed. Those guys don’t deserve to live. They are reactionary pieces of shit who have no right to an opinion. Keep a database of them, and whenever you see one of their names pop up anywhere quote them. “On July 12, 2014 you said “X”. You are a piece of shit who does not deserve to have an opinion about anything. Just go away and die, you miserable mansplaining imitation of a human being.”

There’s no reason we should have to put up with people like that. They shouldn’t have any rights.

But… I think there’s a difference between that and the kind of stuff that Freddie was talking about. I think it’s a much newer phenomenon, and if you’re 40+ possibly not one you’ve come into contact (unless you’ve done the whole sectarian left thing in the past). And that’s largely about better educated/experienced ‘leftists’ shaming other ‘leftists’ for being insufficiently pure/educated/whatever. It’s almost always directed at people on the left, and it seems to be more about establishing in-groups and hierarchies, rather than achieving any real change.

Well, but that’s pretty much inevitable isn’t it? You can’t have a picnic without a few ants. Real change is a long-term project, it won’t be completed in our lifetimes. So in the meantime it’s only natural that the best people will look down on the second-best people. Just live with it.

And good god, the whole ‘check your privilege’ thing just needs to stop. Whatever utility that may once have had, it’s long since deteriated into annoying one upmanship.

That makes some sense. But on the other hand, who are you to tell your betters what to do? If they tell you to check your privileges, maybe you’d better check your privileges. If they have less privilege than you, doesn’t that give them the right to decide whether you’re being blinded by your own status? You’re accusing them of one upsmanship, but if their thinking really is purer than yours, you need to humbly listen instead.

It will take a whole lot of effort over a long time to give up your existing doctrinaire ideas. In the meantime it’s probably better that you don’t try to guide the Movement. Let the Movement guide you.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali was not protested against because she was against genital mutilation. It was because she thinks Islam is “the new fascism” and that she wants a “war on Islam”.

My muslim family and my muslims colleagues think that the people the rich idiots are helping and admiring are new fascists and need to be warred against so that they can practice their religion in peace.

J is your position that we should just politely listen while people say anything? That there should be no consequences for speech ever?

Deja vu all over again for us on the left. You want to see real diatribe (although generally without obscenities) try the annals of the CPUSA from the Nazi-Soviet Pact through, say, 1950. They were much better at it, from all their fractured perspectives, than anyone today. And it meant about as little. For all us white guys, the job is not to bitch but to change: what did you do the last time you saw a smaller kid being bullied? What did you do the last time you overheard the boys telling women and gay bashing jokes? What did you do the last time your kid said something was “gay” meaning no good? If you don’t intervene, each and every time, whatever your stated beliefs you are a piece of shit.

Chait wants to say offensive things and not be criticized.

I just don’t know where you’re getting this from. Are you assuming this must be his motivation? I think he’s pretty clear that he’s not against criticism of any argument or idea based on moral, philosophical, logical, or factual arguments. I mean, isn’t he just saying “don’t try to end arguments based on anything other than counter-arguments” and “don’t exclude anyone from the conversation”? Those may be good or bad ideas, but they dont’ strike me as self-pity or a rejection of any criticism. (I don’t Chait particularly needs defending; I’m trying to understand what you’re saying and why.)

MPAV@99: Do you really think that the only lesson to be drawn from the career of the SF troll is “Oh well, nothing’s perfect!”. One person was able to destroy multiple online spaces primarily be exploiting the right language and political positions. Trolls are everywhere, but if you community can be steamrolled that easily, then maybe there’s a problem.

Or how about the implosion of the major feminist group blogs*, which seems to have happened pretty much entirely because their comment sections became so pervasively toxic. You don’t think that indicates something suboptimal about the discourse in those communities? Nothing that could be improved?

Chait’s article sucked, for the reasons that have already been given, but these here comment sections seem a bit too resistant to the possibility that there are actual problems with left/progressive discourse.

There’s a pretty big excluded middle between “Anyone who checks the right boxes on the un-privileged list gets a free pass to behave like a sociopath” on the one hand and “Let’s go back to being totally cool with racists, sexist and homophobic slurs! That would be great!” on the other.

*Yes they’re still around, but they’ve been shadows of their former selves since around 2008 or so.

Belle, I just want to say that I appreciate the impulse to respond to whiny bullshit with dismissal, humour, mockery, scorn, sarcasm, and crocodile tears, too much crap gets by in the world because too many people think the only proper refutation is a polite little thesis. I am working on something like this in my own area, it’s far more pleasurable than full engagement.

As for the idea that this is a replay of the situation in the left, over and over again, I don’t buy it. Not all feminists are on the left. Not all these groups have significant representation from the traditionally Marxist groups where those problems occurred. I’m pretty sure I was an undergraduate (on a pretty lefty campus) at the time the left was getting annoyed about “identity politics,” and the feminist, black, etc., groups were getting annoyed about being expected to include “allies” in all discussions. What I’ve seen since then just doesn’t have a lot to do with that kind of dynamic.

Thanks for the kind words, bianca.

Lizardbreath @106 is right; J Thomas has no idea about the reality of contemporary youth slang usages. “Gay” and “faggot” were common slurs when I was a grade-school lad in the 90s; by the time I graduated high school in the late 2000s I seldom heard them anymore. Not just the slang usages but the actual ideology has changed. Nowadays actual support for the LGBT cause is all but universal among the young. Gay marriage wins something like 80% support from people under 30 nationally. It’s winning conclusively even in deep red states.

“That’s an interesting question in light of Belle’s observation that 98% of what people angrily claim is “Political Correctness” is just manners. Politeness.”

Would still love to see your response to the question parse. :-)

#87 Belle Waring

I am, in the current debate, saying that Political Correctness, both as broadly conceived and as for the very greatest part actually practiced, amounts to trying to educate myself and others on how to speak and act in a way that respects others who have historically been marginalized in our society. I think that’s a good thing.

Let me suggest another possible way to view it. Perhaps it amounts to an attempt to develop a new culture, one that is visibly different from the old bad patriarchal culture. The PC language is a signifier that tells people you are with the new group and not the old one. (It might also be good to have special jewelry to show that. Christians picked up crosses and fishes and such for that purpose a very long time ago. Perhaps special clothing and hairstyles would help too.)

I have seen similar things in a variety of contexts. Like, I met a Christian woman who asked somebody whether they wanted to be Christ-like, and when they said yes she yelled at them because sinners can’t be like Christ, it’s unhumble to try, the best we can do is to try to be good sinners and ask forgiveness. Her cult had a bunch of verbal traps like that, and if you didn’t know them it proved you weren’t a member in good standing.

I don’t think that knowing the shibboleths for some group makes you a better person. It just means you care about the group’s approval enough to learn the shibboleths.

I think it’s good to actually listen to people. Not so good to assume you know what they’ll say, whether you approve or disapprove. And people can mostly tell the difference. If you offer marginalized people a lot of approval to say what you expect to hear, it isn’t all that unlikely they will say what you expect to hear. Listening to that is a lot different from actually respecting them. But it’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, which is what they’d get from their usual oppressors, so that’s something, anyway. That’s something.

I believe my own beliefs are true just to the extent most people do, which is globally admitting doubt while in individual cases crediting my beliefs entirely, since that’s what they are there for.

I certainly don’t want to single you out about this. I’ve seen nothing to say that you’re worse than average, and I’ve seen you do things I like a whole lot.

You’re just the one who started the topic, and I have some hope you might be willing to look at another point of view. I’ve certainly nothing against you personally. With that in mind, I’m seeing a lot of justification for bad behavior. The behavior is quantitatively not that bad yet. But it’s the same old kinds of bad behavior and the same old justifications.

In one sense, feminism is about equal rights. I absolutely agree with that! I’m solid on equal rights for everybody. But then I look around and I don’t see people offering equal rights for everybody, they want equal rights for the good people who agree with them. If people who do that were to get all the power, would they be so much better than the patriarchs with the power now?

You want to decide what’s polite and enforce it stringently.

I’ve spoken here before about how white people in the South will sometimes bust out with some stuff you really didn’t expect when there’s only white people in the room. It’s startling. Part of the surprise is just…you think that’s not only an OK sentiment, but something you’d say in front of a relative stranger? WTF is wrong with you? I thought we didn’t talk quite like that anymore?

There are a lot of people who simply disagree with you. And being Southern they are mostly polite to you about it. They don’t want to make a scene. Then sometime they forget you’re there and you’re all WTF because you assumed they are your kind of people, when they aren’t.

I’m not one of them. I mostly agree with you and not with them. But there they are. Hey, didn’t you grow up in South Carolina? Are you actually so completely out of touch with them? I wanted to say that you might learn about them, and how to persuade them and like that, but likely you’ve seen it all already and you just reject it. How come you’re WTF around them, did you expect they would have changed? Of course they haven’t changed their own shibboleths. Why would they?

So anyway we have these prominent white guys who want to control the discourse. They want to decide what can be said politely. And hey, you want the same thing! Maybe you have more in common with them than you think.

But of course, you don’t get that control because you are not powerful enough. They used to have it and now they’re upset that they don’t have it any more. The most you can do when they say something you think is rude is to rudely punch up at them, below the belt because they tower so high above you. They get a few hundred or a few thousand people doing that and they get all upset about it. They think they’re liberals and then you tell them they aren’t.

Well, but why not go after the real patriarchal assholes on the right? Because they don’t care. Get a thousand women who go onto their blogs and tell them the truth, and they’ll just block a thousand accounts and laugh at you.

I have a bad feeling about all this. Not like you’re as bad as the real bad guys. For one thing I like what you have to say a whole lot better. Not just a whole lot better. You’re a qualitatively better person. But when I listen to the stuff about who to shout down, and who to ridicule, and who to decide has said something rude enough it’s worth being as rude as it takes to enforce community standards — for that stuff you’re only quantitatively better. And maybe the quantitative stuff is because you just aren’t as strong yet.

If I put a whole lot more time into it maybe I could pare this down into something short and clear. I feel like I’m floundering around, it’s hard to say what I want to.

Here’s one piece of it. If I got to vote on who was going to enforce community standards, you or Chait, I’d pick you instantly. But if it was MPAV or Chait it would be a tossup. And I don’t see you disagree with MPAV, I just trust your instincts. The three of you seem to mostly agree on what’s right, you each say it’s right to shut people up for getting out of line, you just disagree with him about who to shut up.

adam.smith: “But yes, he has always liked to punch the hippies and monitor the halls of what’s permissible liberal discourse. I’ve linked, in the other thread, to Henry’s comparatively gentle takedown of Chait’s handwringing over the fact that “the Netroots” didn’t respect Lieberman enough–no reason not to link to it again here; it’s really a nice piece if you’re interested in Chait as a writer: https://crookedtimber.org/2007/05/04/chait-on-the-netroots/ (you can find Chait’s original piece online easily. The link from CT is dead).”

Basically, Chait frequently falls back into TNR roots. One of its many evils was that it acted as a rightward limit on ‘decent liberalism’.

I remember a heated debate in 1970 or so with a radical feminist sociology grad student who thereafter became a very prominent feminist academic, with books and TV appearances and such. (I won’t name her, ’cause she isn’t here to give her side of the story, and in fact might not even remember the incident if she were.)

Anyway, I was on about how she shouldn’t confuse all males with our troglodyte brothers, while conceding under her skeptical counter-thrusts that we less testosterone-soaked males did indeed shelter under, and in our own small way benefit from, their patriarchal snorting and hoof-pawing. At one point she said, very much without qualification All men rape their daughters. She probably meant this metaphorically, as a way of characterizing the hegemonic micro-aggressions that present-day activists are said to complain about, but I was too incensed to consider the possibility.

Not me, I yelped. Not ME!

Do you HAVE a daughter? she asked. No, I replied, maybe a little sheepishly. (I’d recently gotten married, but there were no kids yet.) She leaned back in her chair, arms folded, and gave me a bit of a smirk. Well, she said. we’ll just have to wait and see then, won’t we?

Well, we’ve waited, and we’ve seen, or at least my daughter and I have. She’s now nearing 40, married with kids of her own, and therefore presumably safe at last from any evil intentions I was apparently expected to have toward her, but I still remember that conversation, what I learned from it, and also what I learned much later from my daughter’s eloquent descriptions of just what her own struggle with male hegemony had cost her, at least from that moment in pre-adolescence when she first realized the profound subjugation it demanded of her.

The lesson? Listen to people. Don’t dismiss them out of embarrassment, or pride, or shock, or whatever. Go away red-faced and pissed, if necessary, but think about what they’ve said. Ask others wrestling with the same conflicts, who don’t necessarily see things your way, and listen to their answers. With any luck, you may eventually come to understand that you aren’t the center of the universe. Do this often enough, and you might even wind up being a reasonable person. Sainthood isn’t what’s required of us, after all.

Could you try writing with a more grown-up tone? This drivel is unreadable. There are people trying to find out what legitimate points might be made about this issue from the left perspective, yet we find ourselves having to wade through a juvenile affectation and manner of speaking that doesn’t do you any favours in getting your point across except perhaps to people who speak and think exactly like you do.

#111 dn

Lizardbreath @106 is right; J Thomas has no idea about the reality of contemporary youth slang usages. “Gay” and “faggot” were common slurs when I was a grade-school lad in the 90s; by the time I graduated high school in the late 2000s I seldom heard them anymore.

Lizardbreath agrees with me. Slang changes pretty fast whether you try to change it top-down or not.

Not just the slang usages but the actual ideology has changed.

Yes, and I think that’s a good thing, and I strongly doubt it had much to do with teachers etc trying to enforce their own language standards. This is word magic. You can’t control people’s thoughts by controlling the literal words they use, because they will change the meanings out from under you.

Kiwanda I am just curious what you would like to see?

“No, I don’t think it’s the responsibility of oppressed people to be polite, but I do think in most cases it’s a good idea, and I don’t think that membership in an oppressed group excuses all instances of rude behavior.

I agree with Belle’s assessment that Political Correctness most often is just manners and believe that, because of this, Political Correctness is typically a good thing. So I believe it would be a better world if oppressors and the oppressed alike were Politically Correct, especially given the fact that most individuals are members of both oppressed and oppressive groups.”

Thank you. I can sign on to most of this. Though I think it is a bit rich when privileged people piss all over the place and then take umbrage when people call them on it.

#127 MPAV

“And what more is Chait doing?”

He is objecting to people he considers his inferiors calling him out.

And you have objected to me calling you out. Same thing.

“but part of what changed it was people talking about what language hurts people.”

Yes, yes, yes a million times yes.

The point being that narrowing your vision to just talking about “language policing” in isolation is to miss the big picture. “Language policing” doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s part of a larger trend. The difference is between teaching kids “be nice to gays” versus teaching them that “gays are A-OK”. Mere tolerance vs. full embrace. This is a subtle difference, but it’s important. And an important difference between the LGBT case and racism/sexism; in the latter cases, the full embrace has been much slower in coming, for whatever reasons.

If a Neo-Nazi like Shanley Kane can troll a large number of feminist and anti-racist activists into accepting her just by using the right code-words, then it’s a sign that language is being overemphasized.

@William Timberman?

Well then, what did you learn from that conversation? ’cause her statement seams either crazy nonsense if taken literally, or douchebaggy behaviour if metaphorical; as well as an unhelpful muddying-up of anything bad that may happen to a woman as “rape”.

P.C. goes beyond politeness. It’s the left-wing version of going coo-coo when someone burns a flag.

I think I agree with what Douthat wrote today, namely, that going coo-coo may sometimes be rather effective way to enforce taboos. Taboos, of course, are much stronger motivators than reasoned argumentation. Since people are going to employ strategies that work, even when high-status people deem them ignoble, Chait is probably fighting for a lost cause.

Maybe Chait should have argued that it is the radicals themselves who are bad, since radicals are the ones generating the p.c. discourse. Why not try to make them an even more hated outgroup than they already are? This is what the right does. Feminazis, etc.

Chait would probably say that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since radicals and liberals can work together for shared goals.

How much p.c. discourse would radicals be willing to sacrifice to meet Chait halfway to work on a shared goal? My guess is if there was a concrete goal that radicals believed in they would be willing to police their tone a bit, but since there is nothing at stake radicals aren’t willing to surrender anything unilaterally. That makes sense to me.

It’s the left-wing version of going coo-coo when someone burns a flag.

You can’t prove flags don’t have feelings. /J Thomas

#132 dm

“Language policing” doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it’s part of a larger trend. The difference is between teaching kids “be nice to gays” versus teaching them that “gays are A-OK”. Mere tolerance vs. full embrace. This is a subtle difference, but it’s important.

That sounds potentially important to me. Perhaps we should have had some sort of public discussion before implementing that in the schools. I can see advantages and disadvantages if it succeeds. Like, cutting down on teen pregnancy would be a plus.

Homosexuality is a lifestyle choice, or maybe it’s something that happens to people. Why should society take a positive or negative stand about it? Should we extend that? Teach kids that nerds are A-OK? Are jocks A-OK? People with autism spectrum disorder? (I think that’s a choice, all it takes is the choice by age 10 to avoid hypocrisy and society will give you all the cues to fit into the autism spectrum disorder role.) Should we teach kids that virginity until marriage is A-OK? Prostitution is A-OK? Islam is A-OK? No, strike that last, we don’t want to promote religion or atheism in the schools.

Somehow I much prefer the idea that we all find ways to get along with each other, more than that we should heavily promote particular lifestyles. That was a minority position when I took it up and for awhile it seemed to be increasing, and now it’s declining and it looks increasingly controversial.

Not that I agree with J Thomas’s idea that adults cannot influence the values of teenagers (especially young teenagers) and how they’re reflected in their language, but even if that were the case: a huge chunk of the work of making schools better places for LGBT folks has been done by the kids themselves. The fact that a large number of middle schools (!) now have gay-straight alliances is a game changer. And especially for the younger kids, calling out homophobic language like “that’s so gay” is often the first step.

#134 TM

JT 128, you are not getting your own joke are you? The circularity you are pointing out just shows that what is going on IS nothing but debate. There is nothing sinister, no police, no suppression, just people disagreeing with each other and saying so.

You say there is nothing sinister going on. It looks sinister to me.

I guess maybe we can discuss it when it’s your turn in the barrel.

“If a man can resist the influences of his townsfollk, if he can cut free from the tyranny of neighbourhood gossip, the world has no terrors for him; there is no second inquisition.”

“Why should society take a positive or negative stand about it?”

Oh you pompous jackass.

“I doubt many radicals share Chait’s goal of furthering Chait’s career.”

I assume the implication here is that Chait is a member of an outgroup, thus cannot have good or even mixed intentions. I get that. I think the line is “morality binds and blinds.” You feel moral superior to chait, hence it is really hard to credit him with good intentions. I do the same thing sometimes.

Robespierre @ 135, Cian @ 144

She — the feminist I was debating — was really pissed off. In reflecting on the conversation as a whole, I would say that what was pissing her off was what she perceived to be my attempt to wriggle out from under her indictment of patriarchal presumption by disingenuously claiming not to be one of those bad men.

In her view, all men were bad — in the sense of demanding what they don’t deserve — even those who present as mild-mannered and inoffensive. By that yardstick, I was a collaborator at best, and at worst, an outright liar. Frustration at my obtuseness, I would say, made her reach instinctively for the rhetorical H-bomb. I was too bewildered at the time to see clearly what the problem was, but later on, it came clear enough. No harm, no foul, I would say. She did me a favor, even if she was a bit bloody-minded about administering it.

I like Chait’s column, but I remember when he defended Joe Lieberman I stopped reading him for a long time. Maybe a lot of Chaitgate has to with the fact that people haven’t forgiven him for past transgressions. A. Sullivan also comes to mind in this regard. I don’t think you can ever demand people forgive another person, because you can’t make yourself forgive someone. I guess I’m saying I do recognize that other people may be emotionally invested in Chaitgate in a way that I am not. There can be no blame in that.

dn @ 153

Very well said.

Back in law school, my crim law professor taught rape law. There were some detailed questions that arose when it came to rape via intoxication. The laws in many states are very conservative on this issue, but my professor advocated a more liberal approach that didn’t require that the perpetrator have intoxicated the victim by force, or that the victim be literally unconscious, or any of those things. So the obvious question was, if simple intoxication was sufficient, how much intoxication was necessary? This was a question relevant to the students lives for two reasons: first, many of us anticipated having to make professional decisions on prosecution in the near future, and second, because a substantial minority of us spent every weekend getting hammered and sleeping around. (Not me, I was the loser virgin who didn’t drink or even go to parties.) so the questions were both personal and professional.

Anyway- we never got an answer. Not even a general set of guidelines that might help. But we did learn that a substantial cohort of students were willing to do everything they could to vilify you for asking the question. I remember being eye locked with an enraged female student who genuinely believed that asking how to tell the difference between valid consent and mere apparent consent obviated by intoxication meant that I didn’t even understand that having sex with unconscious people was wrong. I obviously hadn’t said that, and her position explicitly encompassed more than that. I had no idea how to even respond.

I gave up pretty quick. I certainly felt like I was being intimidated into shutting up. I never got an answer, but did later learn that the question is a lot less meaningful than I thought because my professors description if rape law was a lot more… Aspirational,.. Than accurate. Real criminal codes tend to answer this for you.

How does one contact the moderator of these discussions?

Conventional wisdom is PC, especially when it’s some cracked reactionary twaddle about how capitalism is the final form of society or Russia is threatening all Europe or Syriza is radical leftist. The assumption that the police are good guys is PC. These are conservative times. Therefore the line that it is politically correct to enunciate is conservative.

As for conservatives’ charge of “PC,” where the left gets symbolic concessions to manners so that polite company will not agree that it’s right to call people names? The problem there is that symbols are not enough. I think it would be better to trade some n-words for conviction for police murder.

Belle @ 87
I’m also very interested in the idea of the safe thread to discuss concerns in feminist and left sites and discussions, and I’d be very interested to hear the things Lynne felt she couldn’t talk about.

“I’m also very interested in the idea of the safe thread to discuss concerns in feminist and left sites and discussions, and I’d be very interested to hear the things Lynne felt she couldn’t talk about.”

I would be interested in both these things as well.

AB @158:

I take it that the “moderator” is in this case Belle. You could do the sort of thing Val did @162. I’m not sure what else would work.

$161 MPAV

“Why should society take a positive or negative stand about it?”

Perhaps because LGBTQ teens commit suicide at a rate much higher than average?

You have a whole host of unstated assumptions there. You probably haven’t even noticed them.

So is it that depressed teens are more likely to become LGBTQ? If that happens enough, we should try to make sure that LGBTQs have access to therapy (and particularly to the less-addictive antidepressants since talk therapy is often ineffectual). But if it’s an increased rate but not enough to be predictive, then maybe that wouldn’t help.

On the other hand if being LGBTQ is likely to result in suicide, then it would be good to nonjudgementally steer people away from that to the extent it works to, and provide therapy to the ones who go those routes anyway.

That they are more likely to be homeless?

That makes perfect sense. Homeless kids will get shelter where they can, which is likely to involve prostitution and gay prostitution. Better if we can get them shelter that doesn’t involve any implicit coercion along those lines. But it’s only natural to prefer to shelter with people who have an emotional connection versus people who’re just doing a job. And there’s a feeling of security in providing an important service, versus just being a victim who gets charity. I dunno, it’s a hard question.

More likely to suffer from depression?

Again, if depressed people are more likely to become LGBTQ then it makes sense to offer them therapy. But if LGBTQ are more likely to get depressed then it also makes sense to offer them therapy.

Could these possibly be reasons?

Reasons for what? If LGBTQ tend toward bad outcomes then it might make sense to nonjudgementally warn kids about those likely bad outcomes, so they have more chances to make better choices. On the other hand it’s possible that none of them have any choice about it, and then there’s no point telling them about the odds, it would just be depressing. Maybe it would be good to do research and find out how much choice they have before we do things that might affect choices.

But anyway we don’t know yet whether LBGTQ gives people psychological problems or whether instead people with psychological problems tend to go LBGTQ. There’s a whole lot we don’t know.

No, I wouldn’t suggest taking a positive or negative stand on any large scale until we have some idea about the likely results.

But society’s judgemental coercive punitive highly negative stand was clearly unhelpful. In the short run let’s try to get along, and help each other as we can.

What do you think? Do you think we should act based on your feelings?

That comment is very low down J Thomas – it is deliberately insulting and provocative and probably doesn’t meet the comments policy. If it does just manage to scrape in – then I hope maybe you and MPAVictoria can be banned from responding to each other.

Belle has–as usual–stated a position I largely agree with.

However as someone who spends a lot–professional and off the clock–in academic feminist circles and has every possible privilege, I have to respond to Chait and people who think that pc language/attitude policing is a serious problem, I’m especially grateful to her for this formulation, “wow, that hasn’t been my experience at all and I really couldn’t possibly disagree with you more.” I see some bad behavior, sure, but nothing on the scale alleged.

One possible thing to remind ourselves about is that a lot of this is the internet, which, as has been said, tends to cesspool.

But another thing is that it’s academia, which is rife with point-scoring, vituperation, scorn, status anxiety, point scoring and all the pathologies attributed to feminist and identity activism in these kinds of screeds.

Professors were pissy, self-regarding assholes long before women and people of color got to be professors. But, of course, when women and POC got to be professors, the rules changed, and being a pissy self-regarding asshole (even a little) is no longer “does not suffer fools gladly,” but now it’s “oh my god, you violated the canons of civility that I’m going to pretend used to exist.”

Oh, please.

“MPAVictoria can be banned from responding to each other.”

No need. I am done with Mr. Thomas. His comment @168 is so far beyond the pale I cannot imagine every conversing with him again.

OK I wasn’t going to do this publicly, since it seems rude as new-comer to the comments section (long-time lurker), but after 168 I’ve had it. As politely as I can:
I find that J Thomas’ comments add nothing of value, and seriously disrupt what might otherwise be an intelligent, sensitive discussion. I think he should be asked to leave.

#176 AB

I have to admit that I have found these discussions frustrating also. A whole lot of really crass illogic. It bothers me a lot to see people who have been agile thinkers on other topics shut down here.

I think I will leave for awhile and come back sometime later to see whether I’ve been banned. My work is heating up anyway, it’s a good time to leave.

I haven’t read a comment by J Thomas since shortly after the first one appeared with that handle.

That option is open to everyone, and it would make a noticeable improvement in a lot of CT threads if everyone would consider it.

Or as my old guru Danaan Parry used to say, “Don’t bite hooks.”

Several years ago, I was thinking that “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” which we’d done in high school, was probably unstageable nowadays. Maybe as with an all-female cast. I thought that would be interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahqu1nd3Zu8

Then the revival opened on Broadway with Whoopi Goldberg as Pseudolus. I’m not sure how she handled the number. The only cast album I’ve heard has Nathan Lane.

I haven’t read a comment by J Thomas since shortly after the first one appeared with that handle.

That option is open to everyone, and it would make a noticeable improvement in a lot of CT threads if everyone would consider it.

Indeed. The point could in fact be generalized.

(AB: I called out a couple of people in the recent Charli Hebdo thread for making blatantly racist comments—called out as in, appealed to the mods. Nothing came of it, but I don’t see any problem with ‘publicly’ calling out beyond the pale comments. I don’t think how long you’ve been commenting should matter, tho I do get the point about etiquette. In any case, re the commenter in question, you’re hardly alone.)

Appropriate it? As stephenjohnson noted upthread, reactionaries pretty much invented it. In a religious context, another term for it is “heresy hunting”. The Roman Curia has an entire congregation devoted to it (the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly known as the Inquisition).

Or put another way, I’m not sure whether or not communitarian was essentially majoritarian at its inception, or whether it was drawing on feminism and what’s now African-Studies.

Last was a response to dn @189.

bianca steele,

So, the idea is that the historical-causal progression goes from (a) the New Left taking a (majoritarian) communitarian turn to on the one hand (b) these communitarian ideas being adopted by feminism and ethnic minority theorizing, and on the other hand (c) these same ideas being used by conservatives? That may be right, I don’t know. It seems to me tho that the rhetoric of victimization, as deployed by conservatives, has to be appropriated from the discourse of feminism and minority theorizing (for lack of a better term). I don’t see how _that_ could be coming out of a majoritarian communitarianism.

js. @ 195

I don’t think it lasted long, but IIRC in the 1990s a later communitarianism was contrasted to liberalism–I don’t know whether it specifically set itself up as an opposition to liberalism, as a critique, or something like that, or whether the opposition was observed by other people (and again, I don’t know how much it was a critique of liberal universalism on behalf of the “ordinary majority person” and how much it was a critique of liberal universalism on behalf of the minority)–and that could easily have contributed to later movement conservatism picking up on its ideas.

As a follow-up to 194 – Corey Robin has actually touched on this a little in The Reactionary Mind – in one of the chapters he points out that of all the ways reactionaries have sought to resist liberation movements, they’ve often reserved their greatest vehemence for the sheer possibility that those they are oppressing might have the chance to speak. Slaveholders in the antebellum period tried to prevent testimony from former slaves being heard in Congress, for example. Because of course, this was “politically incorrect” from a slaveholding perspective; chattel don’t get to talk.

When I first read that piece in the Michigan Review (“Do the Left Thing”), which Belle links to in the first paragraph way back up there, my reaction was (a) it’s really badly written; (b) if he’s making a point, I can’t tell what it is; and (c) as political satire–assuming that’s what it is–this is not funny. Were I the editor of The Michigan Review, I would have declined to print it. Were this typical of this guy’s writing, I would have suggested he try a different extra-curricular activity, because what he’s writing isn’t worthy.

Oddly, I felt the same way about Chait’s piece.

What Belle says. Yet another way to state the great irony here is this – concern troll Chait is very, very worried about the idea that liberal “PC” discourse is a threat to our open “marketplace of ideas”. But “PC” ideas are just that: ideas, which are bandied about on this marketplace like any other ideas. And if we do indeed have faith in said marketplace, can we not have faith that in the long run, reasonable people will understand when “safe space” rhetoric is legitimate and when it is not? That they will recognize bogus reactionary hijacking when they see it, and rightly reject it?

How is the concern-troll position not self-refuting, in other words? Either the open marketplace of ideas functions properly to rule out bad examples of “PC” reasoning while endorsing good ones, or else the intellectual free market, just like the economic one, doesn’t actually work very well in the first place. In which case it might benefit from a little “PC” regulation.

I submit that the resort to “marketplace” rhetoric, indeed, betrays something of the neoliberal mindset. One must have faith in this abstract “market” with its invisible hand, because one cannot trust actual human beings. Real people are too complicated, too irrational, to be trusted to regulate their own discourse. For all Chait’s claims of Enlightenment optimism, this seems rather gloomy, doesn’t it?

Happy you enjoyed it Belle!

Ben I see her writing some sort of awesome mystery novel with a killer lead detective lady and loads of interesting supporting characters….

Hell, DeBoer thinks Erik Loomis is a sell-out. Erik Loomis! He thinks anyone who voted for Obama is a sell-out, because drones and Chelsea Manning, right? That’s what I seem to recall.

” On a hot summer’s day in 1838, when the Reverend S. Baring-Gould was four years of age, he was seated on the box of a carriage as it passed through a bleak and arid plain in the south of France. Suddenly he was surprised to see a host of dwarfs scampering alongside the equipage, scrambling not to the horses’ backs, and sitting laughing on the pole. When he remarked on this to his father, the child was promptly put inside the coach, and the merry little fellows gradually disappeared from his sight. Years later his own son, then about twelve, was in the garden picking peas for the cook, when he was terrified to com upon a little man standing between the rows, in a red cap, green jacket and brown breeches, ‘whose face was old and wan, and who had a grey beard and eyes as black as sloes’. Baring-Gould’s wife, too, when a girl of fifteen, was startled by the sight of a little green man, a foot or so high, staring at her with beady black eyes from a privet hedge.” Bolton, J.D.P (1973) Glory Jest & Riddle

Zora, I’ve been thinking about the Requires Only That You Hate situation. (For those who missed it earlier, a magisterial review by Laura J. Mixon. Summary: one very dedicated person working under several aliases did immense damage to a small and vulnerable part of the sf/fantasy scene for much of a decade.) Personal disclosure time: I was active on Dreamwidth at the time 50books_poc was founded, and remember the Winterfox persona unpleasantly. I have acquaintances with some of the participants running back to the late ’80s or so.

This may come across as making excuses. It might be making excuses. I’m not altogether sure.

First, I have a thought about scale. Benjanun Sriduangkaew has done harm to the careers and well-being of targets whose numbers total up to the low dozens. Chait, the one warning about this kind of thing, was a vigorous cheerleader for a venture that killed hundreds of thousands and turned millions into refugees, shattered an entire secular society and handed it over to warring religious factions, and wasted trillions of dollars. But Chait’s warnings are not framed with anything to the effect of “See, a hundred thousand instances of this might do as much harm as that one that I boosted”.

Second, looking at her targets and at those who’ve done (and are doing) the work of building some safe places within which to work on recovery, I find few of Chait’s idea of good liberals as opposed to those evil threatening PC types. Some of them were on different sides of internal controversies like Racefail, but (unless I’ve missed some) this is a crowd that starts well to the left of Chait and goes to for-true Communist. It’s not people saying “the cure for bad speech must always be more speech” and tut-tut-ing over rich prominent speakers for the war machine losing gigs who did the detective work to put this together and get it out, nor to help with repairing aching souls in the wake of that.

This isn’t to say that folks Chait would approve of wouldn’t do the same if it happened in their scene. Most would be supportive, I’m sure. But just as the harm came about by too many people in a scene letting themselves be used by one determined manipulator, so the good is coming about by people in that same scene working on their collective problem.

Third, I’m not sure how much Benjanun Sriduangkaew says about that literary and social scene in general. Her kind of multiple-identity long-term pursuit is really rare in the left-wing world where that old devil political correctness might be found. There are weaknesses in pseudonymous communication formats she was able to exploit. But it doesn’t appear that many others are busily doing the same thing. Leftie sf/f is not 4chan, essentially; her style of trouble-making flourishes more among people more inclined to be moral sinkholes already.

It’s not that I think what she did should be excused. I really strongly support the effort going on to bring it all to light and help those who got trampled. But I don’t think that she actually illustrates anything particularly wrong with that scene, so much as with human nature in general: people fall for plausible lies and let themselves be led into doing bad things, and must take heed to learn when they’ve been used, stop going along with it, and help those who were wronged, and try to avoid doing it again.

Going for an analogy: she’s like a very successful bank robber in the era of MERS and subprime mortgages tranched and passed off as top-drawer material. People like her aren’t super common in the first place, and turn up in all kinds of contexts. Their specific tactics may show specific points of vulnerability in a given scene, but mostly – I think – they just show that we’re an exploitable species.

Meanwhile, Sriduangkaew’s pawns and people who might have succumbed are working together to do more for each other and the ones who got hurt than, say, Chait is doing for Riverbend.

My view if that this stuff is a tactic or a tool, it is one that has the nature of saturation bombing. An effective tactic if you are already overwhelmingly powerful, and have goals that are the consequences of such bombing.

But not at all effective if you are either less than overwhelmingly powerful, or have a goal other than burning down cities.

Forget Foucalt, this stuff all comes down to Trotsky’s critique of terrorism. The fact that a tactic is used by the powerful does not mean that it is a plausible path of history that the weak can simply use that tactic and become powerful. It is not a matter of choosing to punch up or down; it is the fact that stamping on the face with steel-toed boots is a tactic that inherently only works on those already down.

In any case, only the use of different tactics of power can ever lead to an elite that is different in nature, as opposed to mere composition.

Well said, Soru. It is often not easy to tell whether a punch is “up” or “down” in any case.

” It is not a matter of choosing to punch up or down; it is the fact that stamping on the face with steel-toed boots is a tactic that inherently only works on those already down.”

The basic problem with this analysis is treating “up” or “down” as though it were some unidimensional value, when “up” and “down” are entirely situational and fluid. The powerless are seldom everywhere and always powerless, ditto for the powerful. You’ll always have in society domains where the nominally “down” are “up”, and the nominally “up” are “down”.

Indeed, these assignments are largely nominal, not real, for this very reason.

bob: ahhh that’s the stuff

I would have thought you’d be more amenable to Foucault’s approach though; I thought neoliberalism’s top-down influence on subjectivity is a theme of yours (might have you confused with another regular).

But I’m more shocked about the expressed preference for hope from bob mcmanus. Glory be.

Belle: oh mercy that sounds like I don’t even know . . . Pynchon doing the South instead of California. Yeah that might make for a good read.

Mental problems restrict my creative output too . . . it’s frustrating having ideas backed up and not being able to express them. Creative constipation is no more fun than the physical kind.

(I feel like kind of a jackass for braying for more of your writing and making you spell out why there’s not more of it; should have pieced it together from the descrpition of your condition in the other thread; apologies)

One problem, as nicely illustrated by the wrangling over whether or not one ought to être charlie, is that mighty institutions wrap themselves in symbols that are sacred to vulnerable people.
The sanctity of the Koran and the prophet is violently enforced by petro-dictatorships and ayatollahs and crooked ulema and marauding millenarian madmen – but they are also sacred to minority facing the worst wave of race-hate Europe has experienced since the twenties .
The Star of David is the symbol of a nuclear-armed colonial state, and the most persecuted people in history.

Up and down is a matter of context, but context is always itself an interpretive judgement. (What was the context of Charlie Hebdo? Its bougie bolshie readership (not so much punching up or down as waving a fag in the air and scratching its arse)? post-colonial racially-segregated France? are ISIS and Al-qaeda part of the context? It ain’t easy.

Bruce @219 makes the most important point though.
The problem, if it does exist, of PC scolds exercising a little too much influence on twitter, rather pales in comparison to the problem of bloodthirsty imperialists occupying all the prestigious podiums of the liberal establishment. What can’t we do about that?

And one more thing…Foucault’s observations — and Marcuse’s as well — benefit from the clarity of a pessimist, bob’s from the passion of an optimist. I fall somewhere in between. I’m up for the fight, even though I know that if you’re born into the wrong time, that fight can consume pretty much your entire life without any observable results on the grand scale you envision. I also know, although I wish I didn’t, that just about any time is the wrong time to be born if you’re expecting justice with a capital J at the end of the trail. Like the sage said, it’s the journey that matters.

The Conservatives are never the only Party of the Stupid.

In reply to Zora, and not to take away from Bruce B.’s helpful analysis: I really do think it’s not difficult to tell the difference between a psychopath and someone who’s simply passionate. I also think it’s generally obvious when someone isn’t interested in discussing politics but basically wants to whinge about people who annoy them. Similarly, someone who just wants to rap about, say, J.S. Mill and Wittgenstein is fairly easy to distinguish from someone who’s pretending–they will sooner or later give themselves away.

And the seriously forum-destroying, apparently psychopathic trolls, in my experience, look different from language policing. But they take advantage of the prejudices of the normal people in the group, and they do cause damage.

I’m inclined to agree, Bianca. Good stuff.

I hope that I didn’t come across sounding like I’m underplaying the harm done during the Requires Only That You Hate rampage. It’s hideous stuff – I had no idea until recently how much worse it got beyond the fringes I happened to see. I’m concerned only to work out, if I can, what sort of awfulness it is, and how communities can better defend themselves and their vulnerable members against it in the future.

whoops, one sentence was messed up, should read: “Sometimes the sense of liberation that comes from facing truths, often chaotic and ugly ones, can be empowering.”

novakant @220: See, and that’s just the point of the linked Loomis piece, with which I largely agree: Who “speaks for the left”? Who cares? Why do people waste so much time trying to police the boundaries of ideological identity at the expense of addressing other, far more concrete identities, such as skin color or gender, which are the root of far more suffering in the world? Why so determined to impose yet another unnecessary tribal division on the discourse, rather than work to break down those unnecessary tribal identities which already exist? Why not let one’s views speak for themselves?

@231

This is indeed the enormous elephant in the room that the bien pensants are loath to mention — afraid for their jobs, or worse, I imagine. Stephen F. Cohen, incidentally, has won an award from Project Censored.

See “Media malpractice is now the norm” http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia#

A very unsavory development in this regard is the new version of holocaust denial – or obfuscation, the so-called Double Holocaust theory (it should be called the “Doubletalk Holocaust”), endorsed by our government in a Nov. 22 UN vote ( in a move to appease Baltic and Ukrainian right wingers), which has the effect of blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves who were, it is held, overrepresented in the Stalinist regime, or who benefitted in other ways. In this version, put forth explicitly by German historian Ernst Nolte in 1980s, and implicitly by Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore, the Holocaust was an merely an understandable reaction to the previous Ukraine famine, in which many Jews were implicated, not least because of their mercantile activities as storekeepers and traders (according to Marci Shore “even during the height of the [1032] famine, special ‘Torgsin stores’ remained—almost obscenely—stocked with cornmeal and other foodstuffs. The Torgsin stores sold food for hard currency. Often it was dollars sent by American relatives that saved the lives of Jews while their Ukrainian neighbors starved to death.” See Marci Shore, “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine”, NYRB, April 3, 2014)

The NYRB’s editors fell down on the job, here!

In Central European countries such as Hungary denying the double Holocaust is now a crime punishable by jail.

bianca @232: someone who just wants to rap about, say, J.S. Mill and Wittgenstein

“Just”? JSM and LW are rad to the extreme, gnarly, tubular, totally awesome! We should all (or at least, many of us) rap about them all the time (or at least, a significant proportion of the time)!

Responding to Bianca, it is not so easy for someone inexperienced to “tell the difference between a psychopath and someone who’s simply passionate”. I had some interaction with RH and sincerely thought her to be an exemplar of social justice. Other people I respected deferred to her as an authority in the area. Who was I to contradict them, or her, about a movement that I was not familiar with?

Roger @ 231, I came here to link something along the same lines.

‘Group-Thinking’ the World into a New War

By Robert Parry

If you wonder how the lethal “group think” on Iraq took shape in 2002, you might want to study what’s happening today with Ukraine. A misguided consensus has grabbed hold of Official Washington and has pulled in everyone who “matters” and tossed out almost anyone who disagrees.
…
In other words, as the United States rushes into a new Cold War with Russia, we are seeing the makings of a new McCarthyism, challenging the patriotism of anyone who doesn’t get into line. But this conformity of thought presents a serious threat to U.S. national security and even the future of the planet.

It may seem clever for some New Republic blogger or a Washington Post writer to insult anyone who doesn’t accept the over-the-top propaganda on Russia and Ukraine – much as they did to people who objected to the rush to war in Iraq – but a military clash with nuclear-armed Russia is a crisis of a much greater magnitude.
=======
~

@245, Well, Robert Kagan, and his wife have a long track record you might want to look into. His wife is in charge of Central European policy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/06/opinion/sunday/are-neocons-getting-ready-to-ally-with-hillary-clinton.html

A long track record, not to put too fine a point on it, of being wrong about just about everything.

Ms. Waring, I have read “But Wait…There’s More” and dutifully read (most) of these posts, and although I am sure you wish everyone would relax and find something else to do I just wanted to say:

Everything you said about Mr. Chait was very, very funny, everything;

It wasn’t mean-spirited (that I could tell) but if some part of it was, that is OK, we are adults;

I understood that your piece(s) were not meant to be point-by-point rebuttals, with footnotes, annotated footnotes, of every point Mr. Chait made, or ever made, but a mocking of a certain tone in his article and a noting of his blindness on certain issues; and (finally)

Your pieces are really funny…it took me a bit to get them, but I do now. Please keep writing.

I must say, observing this ‘love for Ukraine’ phenomenon in the western governments and mass-media made me question the common wisdom of ‘Zionist lobby’ as some outside force bullying the western governments and mass-media. Is there, all of a sudden, the all-powerful Ukrainian lobby, bribing and intimidating journos and politicians? I don’t think so. Something sure orchestrates it, on the scale of all of Oceania (US, Canada, western Europe, Australia), but it can’t be a bunch of well-financed zealots. Plain and simple, it’s a system of totalitarian thought-control. How did Orwell know all this? Or did life imitate art? “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.”

@Brett
No, if I mean bigotry I would have said bigotry. The point isn’t that Muslims are in any coherent biological sense a race. But the discrimination they are now facing in Europe takes a clearly racialising form, and it is not a coincidence that the parties promoting it mostly have their roots in old-school racism and antisemitism. It is obsessed with birth rates and breeding, with supposedly innate characteristics which render muslims intrinsically unable to integrate, heritable deformities of the Muslim brain. Atheist brown-skinned people of Muslim ‘descent’ are not spared. It is part of the resurgence of a blood-and-soil definition of citizenship by which those of non-European descent are, however many generations in, considered foreigners. “anti-muslim” attacks and taunts are in practise simply directed at people who look like they come from the middle east and north africa.

Ummmm…

This actually needs a call-out:

Harold 01.31.15 at 7:15 pm @231: “A very unsavory development in this regard is the new version of holocaust denial – or obfuscation, the so-called Double Holocaust theory… blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves who were, it is held, overrepresented in the Stalinist regime, or who benefitted in other ways. In this version, put forth explicitly by German historian Ernst Nolte in 1980s, and implicitly by Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore, the Holocaust was an merely an understandable reaction to the previous Ukraine famine, in which many Jews were implicated, not least because of their mercantile activities…”

Even as applied to Nolte, this is wrong: Nolte attributes *some* responsibility for the Holocaust to the Bolsheviks, not to “the Jews”. In Nolte’s (wrong and contemptible) mind, its Lenin and Stalin, not Motel Kanzoil, who are to be blamed instead of “Germany”.

And as applied to Snyder… “implicitly” is a giveaway that this is not what Snyder’s “Bloodlands” says.

Harold shouldn’t have written what he did. And people shouldn’t pay any attention to him. And I think it would be a better world if he didn’t come back here again…

Brett Bellmore @ 257

But, of course, the vast majority of the population have neither Predators nor Secret Service, and are far, far more subject to contextually swapping places. And so, for most people, the nominal character of assigned power relations is more significant.

What you’re missing here is the extent to which the assignation of these power relations is a considerably less than accidental process. To give just a couple of obscure examples from long-ag0-or-far-away-and-therefore-harmless stories told to me: the old busybody on a street in Teheran who gestures toward a stray wisp of hair and informs a visiting Iranian/American woman, “sister, you’re having bad hijab”: the teenage SA members in ragtag uniforms putting little cards under the windshield wipers of seemingly random cars on a Berlin street in 1935, on which is spelled out in very proper Fraktur, “Jew, we know where you live.”

What you miss about engineered social conformity is that it is engineered. The penalty for disobedience is no less real for being implied; there’s nothing merely nominal about it. So tell me, how do you contextually swap places with an informant for the morals police, or a thug from the Sturmabteilung, without becoming one of them yourself. How does Steven Salaita swap places with Alan Dershowitz?

Thanks Belle @ 261. I thought about acknowledging that people do, as you say, sometimes do bad things in political communities (I’ve experienced the quite punitive nature of some of this) and that story about the woman with multiple trolling identities was pretty awful. However I just thought I’d already written a long comment so I’d better not say more.

As per your previous suggestion, it would be good to have a thread to reflect on some of the problematic judging and policing that does happen in the left and feminist groups sometimes.

A black teenager stalked by an armed racist, in the falsified version of events designed to make the assigned roles look reasonable. Not in real life, though, where the black legal adult was a thug who finally chose the wrong victim.

And, yes, the black power structure, of, say, Detroit, where they had enough power and autonomy to run the city into the ground. Having power doesn’t mean you know what to do with it.

It is actually kind of hilarious that the sort of people who are so determined to assign power relations this way, like using the term “racist”. What, after all, is more “racist” than the determination to think that somebody’s race tells you more about them, than the particulars of their life? Than the determination to think in groups, rather than individuals?

“The injunction to the “left” to stop fighting each other never seems to apply to those issuing the “concerned” criticisms. “We should unite….behind me!””

Definitely. I see far more ostracism of leftists from liberals for refusing to vote for Obama than of liberals from leftists for choosing to vote for him. And I say this as someone who chose to vote for him.

There is an explanation, of course. It only makes sense to denounce someone with similar beliefs but a different voting strategy as a traitor if you think that elections are the only political work that matters. So if you’re looking to find tribalism in left-of-center American politics, it’s more about party unity than ideological purity. It’s coming more from the people demanding loyalty than those demanding accountability.

DeBoer isn’t always fair to his interlocutors, but to hold up Loomis as a better example is nuts.

I don’t know about that, there are almost no Sikhs where I live. All I can say is that most vocal islam-critics that I personally meet, will also make negative generalisations about ethnic groups or nationalities. Not limited to majority-muslim groups.

Though I say ‘most’, I cannot think of a single exception. At least in my personal experience, people who object to the presence of Islam in Europe also object to the presence of specific ethnic groups in Europe. I am sure there are people whose strong objections are purely aimed at the religion, but they seem to be a small minority.

Brett: these questions probably feel clever if you have no first hand expereince . If you do, they are just stupid. In Britain, the people who hated “pakis” in the 70s and the 80s switched to hating “Muslims” in the 90s. In France the people who used to rant about “Arabs” and “Africans” now rant about “Muslims”. It’s a new stick to beat the same people.

Abbe: feel free to consult the French, Dutch, German, Norwegian, Swedish or Danish press, all of which have reported dozens of such incidents in the last months alone. Smashing of shops, firebombing of mosques, heckling and bottling on the street etc etc. All of these countries have major political parties for whom anti-Islam-ism [I won’t use “islamophobia” seeing as you don’t like the word, many of the Scandi parties use “Islamokritisk”] is the central policy plank. Anti-Islam street marches are now a common fixture in Germany and (on a smaller scale) in the UK, Denmark and Norway. By sheer coincidence, most of these political parties and protest groups are led by ex white-power types whose fight for the preservation of the European genetic stock used to be focussed on blacks and jews. They focus on Muslims now, because that has much more traction.
The national secretary of the Sweden Democrats got into a bit of trouble for saying that Kurds and Jews can’t be Swedes. Do you think such a man’s dislike of Muslims is really based on a close reading of the Koran?

Muslim anti-semitism is awful. The behaviour of the Islamists in Turkey is awful. The NUS vote was a good example of PC used as a stick in lefty infighting – (it was all actually a pissing match between two tiny impotent far-left parties, the SWP and AWL who are divided over whether hating America or Isis is more important.) But what has this got to do with anything? If anything you seem to agree with my own complaint about the unhelpfulness of “punching up vs down”.

I am very sorry that what I wrote roused the ire of Brad de Long, whose writings I read regularly and whom I greatly respect. I am surprised that he goes so far as to say my opinions should be banned. Professor de Long should take it up not with me, however, but with with the distinguished historian of the Holocaust and World War 2 Omer Bartov, whose views I summarized (along with those of Dovid Katz), and whom I find very convincing:

A point of departure for this discussion can be the Historikerstreit, the German historians’ controversy of the mid-1980s. The debate was set off by German political scientist Ernst Nolte’s assertion that, apart from the gas chambers, Nazi policies and practices of mass killing were merely a copy of Soviet ones. German genocide, argued Nolte, was a fearful response to the perceived threat of communist violence. The Historikerstreit introduced no new documents; it merely rearranged existing knowledge to reproduce an old argument. The Nazis had already presented themselves as a bulwark against Judeo-Bolshevism; early postwar Germans depicted the Wehrmacht’s war in the east as a struggle to save civilization. Antisemitism was said to have been provoked by Jewish overrepresentation in communism and the professions and by western Jewish leaders’ threats of war against Nazism. And in any case, the argument went, with so many other cases of genocide and atrocity, it was time to stop obsessing about the Final Solution.

A quarter of a century later, Bloodlands seeks to fit the Holocaust into an appropriate historical context by examining the struggle between the Third Reich and the USSR from the perspective of the civilian populations caught in between. The book presents no new evidence and makes no new arguments. Facts and interpretations are culled from established authorities: Christian Streit on the Soviet prisoners of war (POWs); Christian Gerlach on “hunger politics”; Nicolas Werth and Lynne Viola on the Ukrainian famine; Dieter Pohl and Karel Berkhoff on German-occupied Ukraine; Peter Longerich, Christopher Browning, and Andrej Angrick on the Holocaust. Admirably synthesizing this voluminous scholarship, Snyder stresses that most civilians (and POWs) died in the east. While not a revelation for scholars of the period, this argument may appear startlingly new and shocking to nonexperts. Snyder’s designation of this site of mass killing as “bloodlands,” though evocative, lacks any historical existence: none of the protagonists would have recognized it, and it excludes large numbers of victims on both sides. And his penchant for citing vast figures to the last digit cannot be reconciled with the notorious unreliability and contentiousness of such figures. —

The book’s claim to novelty relies on its juxtaposition of systems and events. By describing the sequential or simultaneous actions of the Soviets and Nazis in the “bloodlands,” Snyder suggests the impact they had on each other. The book begins in 1933, thereby implying a link between Adolf Hitler’s “seizure of power” and the mass famine in Ukraine. Yet this single largest mass crime by Stalinist Russia, chillingly described in the book, along with the Great Terror on the eve of World War II, had little to do with German policies. Bloodlands then examines the genocide of the Jews within the context of Nazi crimes against other populations, continued maltreatment of civilians in the Soviet Union, and partisan warfare. Reiterating Götz Aly’s 1995 thesis, Snyder argues that the single-minded focus on the genocide of the Jews came only after Nazi plans for resettling eastern Europe collapsed in the face of Soviet resistance (251–52). But whether one accepts this argument or not, surely a defeat of the USSR would not have prevented the Holocaust. –Omer Bartov, “Review of Timothy Snyder’s Bloodland”, Slavic Review, Summer 2011

See also: Jan Gross, “A Colonial History of the Bloodlands”, Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 15: 3 (Summer 2014)

Abbe – I’m sure the relatives of Mohammed Saleem, the elderly Muslim man murdered in the UK by Pavlo Lapshyn (who also bombed several mosques) will be pleased to hear that Islamophobia isn’t a problem in Europe.

On Islam as a race: races aren’t real. That is, nothing in nature actually corresponds to what people almost always mean by “race”. Given this, it is unsurprising that among the real things stuck with this invalid label are identities and presentations that combine religion, ethnicity, language, culture, and a bother stuff. Islam isn’t a race, but neither are “white” or “black”, and yet racists have no problem treating them as if they were, too.

The form and content of how Islamophobes talk about Muslims, attempt to litigate against them, etc., is the form and content of how racists of any stripe deal with their designated targets.

Belle, I am a nobody, and you are right to respect Professor de Long more than me. But with all his admirable erudition, he is not a historian but an economist. Omer Bartov, on the other hand is a very respected historian with a specialty in this very field, as is Jan Gross, and they are highly qualified to pass judgment on Snyder.

I will say that I was completely taken in by Timothy Snyder and Marci Shore at first and have been very disillusioned to gradually discover the slanted nature of their joint narrative (basically, they over identify with some of the groups they study).

@280
What “a wave a shootings of Jews”?
Also, regarding those people who chose to join the ISIS: how did you learn that their motivations are “to enslave and murder Kurds”? Did you interview any of them?

The “property crimes”, which include beatings and stabbings, take place alongside a wider political movement, which I discussed in the paragraph following the one you quoted, one which is already strongly influencing policy on immigration, policing and welfare in a number of countries.
If I said that this was “very bad”, rather than “the worst”, would we have anything left to disagree about?
(Might I add, your comment seems to me a prime example of rightwing poltical correctness, HOW DARE YOU TALK ABOUT X WHEN YOU SHOULD BE CONDEMING MUSLIM TERRORISTS, which I had just done at some length,)

Excerpts from Amir Weiner review referenced above: … “the argument for the two systems and leaders teaching and enabling each other is not exactly novel and to put it mildly, has not taken root since Ernst Nolte’s debunked argument of Nazism as a copycat of Bolshevism. Repetitive assumptions do not constitute evidence no matter how eloquent and playful the language employed.
*** Creating and celebrating a false equilibrium is the last thing that Poles or any other European society emerging from the disastrous communist experience needs.
***
Falling back on Vasilii Grossman’s oft-quoted insights into the similarities between the Soviets and the Nazis does not absolve the historian from probing the fundamental differences between the two regimes, especially those that accounted for the one being nihilistic and genocidal, and the other not. Long on promises and short on delivery, replete with equations that are often baseless and at times tasteless, Bloodlands ends up as a bloody nose to history.

‘Going back to Freddie. Someone in the comments at Delong’s blog made the great point that he is hardly one to talk when it comes to driving away potential allies.’ (MPAVictoria, 214)
Freddie’s examples were total newbies who were driven away by the reception they got. Disagreeing, however violently, with someone who knows what they are doing is something else.

My comment on Mr. de Long’s blog to the effect that I was merely the messenger of the bad tidings of devastating reviews of Bloodlands from the author’s specialist colleagues in the field of history was speedily deleted. It is they who bring up the comparison to Ernst Nolte and they also state that Snyder’s method is that of implication. I have never accused him of anti-Semitism, by the way.

Such attempts at censorship speak for themselves.

@294 Ronan, Dovid Katz has written extensively about the double Holocaust theory. Holocaust obfuscation is a phrase used by Jan Gross.

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-bonanza-for-upgraded-holocaust-denial/

Harold @ 292

For what it’s worth, Brad DeLong does seem to me have an unusually idiosyncratic view of what’s acceptable and what isn’t, at least when it comes to addressing him — less so when it comes to his addressing others. For example, he once tried to explain to me in the comments section of CT why he’d banned me from the comments section of his own blog. Because of some syntactical confusion, other commenters got the impression that he was trying to ban me from CT, a blog which he seems to like, but as far as they or I knew he doesn’t own. First confusion, then nervous laughter.

Ah well, it is what it is. I read his blog every day, ’cause he’s an interesting and very smart guy, but I no longer try to trouble him on his own turf with my reactions. In fact, there’s hardly any need to — the Internet being the very large place that it is, the word will get back to him sooner or later, as it has with Chait, but in the meantime, nobody’s hair will get mussed.

N.B. to you and all others concerned: I have no opinion as to the disagreement between you and Brad in the present instance, as I’ve not read either Nolte or Bloodlands.

“My apologies for not making this clear through formatting, Ronan, the statement you quote”

Sure, I got that. I just think it supports De Long’s position(ie that Nolte puts some responsibility on the Bolsheviks), not:

“the Holocaust was an merely an understandable reaction to the previous Ukraine famine, in which many Jews were implicated, not least because of their mercantile activities”

” Please take the trouble to read Weiner’s review and also those of Gross and Bartov.”

Ive tried to but cant find them online (links would be appreciated.) Again, Im not disputing any expert criticisms of Synders thesis, just that you misrepresented it (and Id assume the pushback) above

aargh, Weiner not Wiener.

What do we have, exactly?

Well, DeLong sure hasn’t read Nolte either.

Harold at 307: “I am not arguing about Ernst Nolte.”

Harold at 240: “In this version, put forth explicitly by German historian Ernst Nolte in 1980s,…”

Harold, you have a history of arguing about texts you haven’t read — and whose arguments you represent as knowing, based on a combination of Google snippets, Wikipedia entries or, in this case, book reviews. When you’re called on it, you act like you’re the victim of academic wagon-circlers or, now it seems, the thought police. But the issue is much simpler: do the work yourself. Read Nolte, then make claims about him, preferably with textual evidence and quotes. And if you haven’t read Nolte and are called on your claims, just admit outright and upfront: okay, I haven’t read him. If you’ve read Snyder, as you claim, cite Snyder, with quotes; it’s much more persuasive. If you have the evidence.

Corey Robin, you have no idea of what I have or haven’t read. I am older than you and have read quite a bit and moreover, when I went to school we learned to read, and to enjoy reading, in languages other than English.

“Victim of academic wagon circlers” ?! It’s me who is citing academic writers here. I revere academic writers. “Public intellectuals” not so much.

Hirschmann? I think you have me confused with someone else.

Oh, I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten; that’s what happens when you get into arguments about texts you haven’t read. But it was you, on another thread, who made many claims about Hirschman and Tocqueville. In the first instance, without having read the book and in the second with no evident knowledge of anything Tocqueville had written.

And, no, I’m afraid that was not at all the only claim you made about Tocqueville. Now I know at this point in the game what you’d love more than anything else is rather than looking at what you actually wrote, to find some academic worthy whom you could cite who could tell us what you wrote. But alas there is no such worthy; all we have is your own words, and they’re plain as day. You did in fact make multiple claims — and argued with me — about what Hirschman said, without having read the book, and you did make multiple claims about Tocqueville, showing no actual acquaintance with what he wrote.

Again, here’s the bottom line. Those academic writers that you claim to revere: they actually read the texts they write about. So why don’t you do the same? Stop citing reviews, Wikipedia entries, and the like; just read the damn book — and not just Google snippets — and then show us that it says what you claim it says.

Since you care so much, I will read your book.

Harold – I don’t read BDL normally, so have only realised by going over there now that he’d ‘called you out’ (so to speak) on his blog. If I’d known the context for your responses above I wouldnt have said anything (although I do think youre wrong, and that review you link to – while interesting – doesnt say what you imply it does)

Here is the citation; Thomas Thomas Kühne, “Great Men and Large Numbers: Undertheorising a History of Mass Killing” Contemporary European History [Cambridge University Press], 21: 02 (May 2012): 133-43.

http://www.academia.edu/1492056/Thomas_K%C3%BChne_Great_Men_and_Large_Numbers._Undertheorizing_a_History_of_Mass_Killing_Contemporary_European_History_21_2_2012_133-143

Brett says, ” I guess the test would be whether the hostility goes away after a Sikh explains that he’s not a Muslim.”

Doesn’t work so well with American conservatives, Brett. This isn’t the only one: http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2013/9/23/columbia-universityprofessorattackedinallegedhatecrime.html.

I don’t think I slandered Mr. Snyder. I said he over-identified with some of the people he studied. And I believe this to be true of his wife as well (or her editors). I don’t think there is an equivalence, myself, and I think our refusal to condemn glorification of Nazis at the UN last November was despicable.

What you said was this, “In this version, put forth explicitly by German historian Ernst Nolte in 1980s, and implicitly by Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore, the Holocaust was an merely an understandable reaction to the previous Ukraine famine…”

As Corey Robin noted above, there’s no reason to suppose from your posts that you’ve actually read Snyder, because you have offered no evidence for your assertions from the book itself, instead offering links to reviews. At this point, if you want to make the case against multiple people who actually have read the book, and who say you’re wrong, you’ll have to offer some evidence from the primary source.

Or you could admit you don’t possess the evidence yourself, and then go read the book. There’s that option.

I will admit that my comment was a gross simplification. However, Snyder imply, through constant comparison, that Hitler was inspired by Stalin’s crimes. He says Hitler’s policies resembled Stalin’s (p. 62) describes Auschwitz as “a giant labor camp very much on the Soviet model” (p. 150) , and so on.

I don’t have the book in front of me because I took it out of the library some years ago when it first came out. When I first read it I thought it very illuminating. (In fact, my whole family read and discussed it, and then we went on to read other books, such as Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors and Larry Wolff’s The Idea of Galicia, as well as Michael Stanislawski’s very interesting A Murder in Lemberg.) It is only later that I began to see the defects of Bloodlands, especially as I read Snyder’s articles in the NYRB and elsewhere and the reviews of Bloodlands by authors I respect. I certainly would not go so far as to call Snyder a liar, as is done by Daniel Lazare (or his editor) in Jacobin, the magazine of which Corey Robin is a contributing editor.

I think what turned me against Timothy Snyder were his disparagements of Rosa Luxemburg and Claude Lanzmann, not to mention his contention that there was no Red Army, and that the Ukrainians not the Soviets had liberated Auschwitz, because that division of the Red Army was called the First Ukrainian Front. Which is like saying there was no British Army because of the Welsh Guards.

@330:

Actually, Harold @283 seems to imply he has read the Snyder book and was disillusioned with it from reading critiques by other specialist historiographers. I myself have read the book, only reviews, but whatever the merits of the book on a professional level, Snyder has been quite aggressively championing what one might call the State Dept. line on the Ukraine crisis, drawing on his professorial authority, while going quite beyond its bounds. And the phenomenon of equivalence and thus “double denial” which concerns Harold is quite real, (as he has provided links for), and disturbing, whether or not Snyder has done anything to support it, (which I would guess he would strenuously deny). (“Yats” was in Germany recently, where he told an interviewer that both Germany and the Ukraine has been invaded by the Red army!) Why anyone here should be expected to read Ernst Nolte, or at all want to, is beyond me. Besides which the German historians’ dispute occurred 30 years ago, and it would be more fruitful to read a summarizing overview (which I did years ago) of that many-sided debate that Nolte only set off.

#240 Harold

A very unsavory development in this regard is the new version of holocaust denial – or obfuscation, the so-called Double Holocaust theory (it should be called the “Doubletalk Holocaust”), endorsed by our government in a Nov. 22 UN vote ( in a move to appease Baltic and Ukrainian right wingers), which has the effect of blaming the Holocaust on the Jews themselves who were, it is held, overrepresented in the Stalinist regime, or who benefitted in other ways.

So here’s a claim about the meaning of the UN vote.

In this version, put forth explicitly by German historian Ernst Nolte in 1980s, and implicitly by Timothy Snyder and his wife Marci Shore, the Holocaust was an merely an understandable reaction to the previous Ukraine famine, in which many Jews were implicated, not least because of their mercantile activities as storekeepers and traders (according to Marci Shore “even during the height of the [1032] famine, special ‘Torgsin stores’ remained—almost obscenely—stocked with cornmeal and other foodstuffs. The Torgsin stores sold food for hard currency. Often it was dollars sent by American relatives that saved the lives of Jews while their Ukrainian neighbors starved to death.” See Marci Shore, “Rescuing the Yiddish Ukraine”, NYRB, April 3, 2014)

This appears to be a claim that some ukrainians blamed jews for surviving the famine, and so wanted to help kill them to even things out so to speak.

In Central European countries such as Hungary denying the double Holocaust is now a crime punishable by jail.

No doubt inspired by legislation to make doubting the single Holocaust a crime punishable by jail. I can’t help think this sort of thing is a bad idea.

So out of all these very serious claims, that have serious implications for europe, the only part that gets discussed is whether Snyder implicitly implied the things you said he did. This controversy has hardly anything to do with the fate of europe, but it could possibly have some sort of effect on Snyder’s career if people believe you that he complicitly implied. Or possibly some people might figure that if they can show that you got that one reference wrong then they can dismiss anything you say?

One obvious conclusion from this is that maybe your actual conclusions might get more attention if you do not provide references to back you up. The references will not in general support your claims because whoever thinks they’re an expert on your references will disagree about what they mean in reality. And if you argue about that, the discussion will slide down the black whirlpool of back-and-forth about quoting the words, and the contexual words around the words, and what the meaning of “is” is, until either all but one side give up in disgust or the nonexperts are totally confused. It’s a mug’s game.

“You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backward.” Thurber and White.

Sorry sorry, the black whirlpool of back-and-forth about quoting the words.

#341 Harold

Generally, I don’t like to make statements for which I don’t have references.

It’s great to have references. But if you display your references it’s predictable people will find something to argue about them.

But the double holocaust theory and concomitant demand for reparations, does have the effect of casting doubt on the singularity of the holocaust.

Singularity of the holocaust is a silly idea. Something like 2/3 of european jews disappeared in the Holocaust, around 6 million people. The Armenian holocaust killed 3/4 of armenians but there were only 2 million of them to start with. (There are 3 million in Armenia now.) The Nazis killed a lot of gypsies but there wasn’t a great estimate of the “before” number. Sure, the Soviets killed a lot of Russians and also many Armenians. The Chinese communists killed a lot of Chinese. The Khmer Rouge killed a lot of Cambodians, and the USA did very little to offer them any better choices. The USA was poised to kill a whole lot of Japanese after the surrender, but it turned out we didn’t have to. It wasn’t all that singular, and we should work to keep it from ever happening again, starting now.

Maybe some jews have tried to minimize other people’s suffering to make their own seem singular. But that is not enough reason to try to minimize Jewish suffering from their own Holocaust. There’s plenty to go around.

The Nazi Holocaust of the European Jews and Gypsies was singular in some respects and not singular in others. It is not a good idea to make invidious comparisons about suffering. But I am not going to debate this.

Why anyone here should be expected to read Ernst Nolte, or at all want to, is beyond me. Besides which the German historians’ dispute occurred 30 years ago, and it would be more fruitful to read a summarizing overview (which I did years ago) of that many-sided debate that Nolte only set off.

I agree that nobody should be forced to read books by Nolte in order to participate in the discussion, I myself have never read a book by him and do not intend to. But a familiarity with Noltes position in and some of his contributions to the “Historikerstreit” is required if one wants to make strong claims about Nolte, as DeLong does – and he clearly is not knowledgeable enough to comment.

Wikipedia has an entry on the Historikerstreit for those who are interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historikerstreit