Response to Freddie deBoer, Just Like I Done Promised, Ye of Little Faith

“It’s in the first post linked. Re-read. ”

Oops, yes, sorry. I looked through the piece linked to in that paragraph rather than the first one.

I frequent blogs that are objectively anti-Freddie. Maybe that’s how I heard of him, I forget. I also read his blog. He often complains that people react to his arguments by putting words in his mouth, guilting him by association, and changing the subject. I have begun to sympathize.

To say that the PC villains of his piece are women with $300 shoes is objectively false and not at all cricket. The *victim* of his first anecdote was a young woman. She may have fled the classroom in $300 shoes, who knows, who cares, certainly FDB doesn’t seem to. The villains of the first and second anecdotes are unidentified. In the third anecdote — “I saw that. Myself.” — there was a glaring and significant social-class distinction that FDB conveyed with a telling visual detail, moreover creating a nice echo with the combat boots we may imagine the victim of that particular dressing-down having worn in Iraq. FDB can’t help it that the impolite person he actually saw being impolite on that particular occasion was an expensively dressed woman.* Elsewhere he might be accused of “class warfare” for noticing that fact. Here he is accused (“amirite”) of something distastefully close to that for simply reporting someone’s gender along with their social class.

I wear $300 mens shoes. Feel free to call me on that if I’m wearing them while being sexist or classist.

* Yes, of course, woe betide FDB and me if he made this up.

Two oblique points about political correctness: when I was in graduate school we white folks spent some perplexity over what to call people of color descended from African aboriginals, since many of the traditional terms seemed to have become taboo. Then one day I heard Nelson Mandela talking about how when young he and his friends loved to see Tarzan movies because at least there were some “black guys in them.” I thought that might be a good argument for the acceptability of “black” as designation, not factoring for the fact that as a member of the group Mandela can designate himself and his fellows with more freedom than non-members. Also I thought, how strange that such a politically incorrect representation as the “natives” in Tarzan movies could still be somehow validating, a blow against complete invisibility, for some.

My second point: it often strikes me now that Political Correctness has evolved into one of those Orwellian bizarro-words used by today’s fascists (Clear Skies Act, True the Vote, Citizens United, etc) to designate the opposite of what the moniker implies. Those who insist on “Political Correctness” are now basically hippies who should be punched whenever possible. Meanwhile it’s completely taboo in the commercial media to apply straightforward , unambiguous terminology to the bullies, bigots, grifters, paranoids, punishment freaks, chicken-hawks, pathological liars, suckers, boobs, and rubes who now comprise the Republican party. The New York Times and the networks find such language unacceptable for “family fare.” The real Political Correctness then, enforced everywhere but the blogosphere (and in comedy), is the default assumption that Right-Wingers are honorable folks, well-intentioned and at worst misguided or overzealous. Thus they loot, terrorize, vandalize with impunity, not judged bluntly as they plainly are.

Freddie’s posts on this topic could be described as very kind (even bending over backwards to do so) to very young, white, not rich people who live in the South and are not sophisticated and are trying very, very hard to be good.

How’s that? The three examples he gives are:

1.) “a 19 year old white woman — smart, well-meaning, passionate — literally run crying from a classroom because she was so ruthlessly brow-beaten for using the word “disabled.” ”

2.) “a 20 year old black man, a track athlete who tried to fit organizing meetings around classes and his ridiculous practice schedule (for which he received a scholarship worth a quarter of tuition), be told not to return to those meetings because he said he thought there were such a thing as innate gender differences.”

3.) “a 33 year old Hispanic man, an Iraq war veteran who had served three tours and had become an outspoken critic of our presence there, be lectured about patriarchy by an affluent 22 year old white liberal arts college student, because he had said that other vets have to “man up” and speak out about the war.”

“The real Political Correctness then, enforced everywhere but the blogosphere (and in comedy), is the default assumption that Right-Wingers are honorable folks, well-intentioned and at worst misguided or overzealous. ”

I mostly agree with that–it was always obvious that “political correctness” is a problem you also find in the mainstream and on the political right, yet somehow the term is limited to the antics of people on the far left. I once tried to explain this to a friend back in the early 90’s when the anti-PC hysteria first kicked in–he was a liberal reader of the NYT –and he wouldn’t have it. No, PC thinking was a plague foisted on us by the far left, a mode of thinking exclusive to them, and that’s where the focus should be. Now that’s a sign of a really effective political correctness campaign by the mainstream, one that is so effective people don’t even realize it’s there.

That said, I sympathized with what Freddie wrote, though I don’t know how common the problem is.

novakant,

You’re right. Thanks for pointing that out.

In that post, he has three examples. Two are of men who were unfairly lectured to by women. One was a man who disagreed with most varieties of feminism but whose heart was in the right place and who served his country and who shouldn’t have been pushed out of a feminist group by women. One was a man who disagreed with a woman but whose heart was in the right place and who served his country and who shouldn’t have been lectured to by a woman ten years younger than himself who “incidentally” was clearly rich.

One was a woman who broke down in tears and ran away from discussion because she was criticized for unthinkingly using language considered hurtful (even by De Boer), but whose heart was probably in the right place and . . . shouldn’t have been excluded by them? But she wasn’t, she excluded herself. The point of this anecdote is unclear.

But then he goes on and says he is upset by the way his students, who come from poor rural areas, are lectured to by more privileged students. On rereading, I agree, it’s not obvious what color the students he’s defending are. (Nor does he know what color they are in different parts of the country than his, obviously, much less on the Internet.)

I’m not going to research how often De Boer berates other people, commenters and other bloggers, in the same language he complains about in that post. Look at how much of the post is devoted to ridiculing bloggers on other sites. But he says he defends kids and attacks grown-ups who have important jobs and so it’s okay that he talks that way sometimes, it’s perfectly okay that he writes jeremiads about the bad behavior he engages in himself, because if you think hard about it, it’s totally different (and he’s off the hook).

FDB writes: “I don’t know what to do.”

Then he’s lousy at his job. He should spend more time working on creating an effective learning environment than bitching about his own failures. He’s an academic. He’s supposed to be able to research and learn. (For gods’ sake, he’s at a university. He’s surrounded by people who have devoted their careers to teaching.) He’s also supposed to be able to mentor and teach. Sure, young adults can be mean. So can 5th graders.

Francis: “Then he’s lousy at his job. He should spend more time working on creating an effective learning environment than bitching about his own failures. He’s an academic. He’s supposed to be able to research and learn.”

He’s written specifically about this. While he’s involved in campus activism, it doesn’t take place during one of his classes, and he’s not responsible for “creating an effective learning environment” outside of them.

Bianca @6

I think the issue with using shame as the method of persuasion to self-educate is that a typical reaction to shaming is to ask yourself “How do I most quickly and easily remove myself from this shame?” And when the choices are “Read an indeterminate number of books, many of which may be very dense, in order to become fluent in a new cultural area” and “Stop interacting with these people”, “quickly and easily” almost always points in one direction.

As an aside, I find it strangely self-effacing when people act as if they knowledge they’ve gained from years of immersion in a topic is second-nature and should be for everyone else, too. Give yourself a little credit for having read all of those books.

CaptFamous @ 22

I don’t know whether this is the reason I’m having difficulty understanding your post, but I’ll throw this out there: Some subcultures use shaming for education and some don’t. Some regularly shame some members of their own group and some only shame members of out-groups and some do neither. And similarly, some subcultures assume everyone has the goal of being part of the same group, where some subcultures assume everyone knows there are people who are outside the pale. In other words, it sounds strange to me to blame people for recognizing they belong to an out-group, as if it were up to them to work harder to join “the community” (what is that? a classroom, university, the whole world, the whole educated world, the world where rich white people are in charge and you’d better get used to it?). Though at the same time, encouraging people to see others as wanting to shame and exclude them doesn’t seem productive either.

#16

Sorry Bianca, I have no idea what you are talking about.

Well, novakant, that’s too bad. But this is the Internet, after all. If we all had to tag “I don’t understand you” comments after everybody we didn’t understand, comments sections would be full of almost nothing else.

Lynne, from occasional reading of De Boer’s blog, it seems to me he considers himself a feminist or defender of feminism. He just had an issue with Sady Doyle at some time in the past, I seem to remember she and her co-bloggers used bad language and weren’t nice to some important bloggers.

deBoer apologized for what happened with Doyle. I recall he says that he was very much in the wrong

There was a bit of a piling-on-Sady-Doyle craze there for a while, I’m not sure I remember clearly who-all was involved or what the timeline was.

Freddie’s “apologies” have a bit too much of a love-bombing feel to them for my taste, but I suppose mileages vary and that’s hardly important to this issue.

I hope we can agree on three things:

1) A lot of “PC culture” is being driven by people who are socioeconomically privileged rather than from those that are actually disadvantaged in society. This, I hope, is obvious.

2) There is absolutely a trend, particularly on the far left, of playing intersectionality trump cards before even making arguments. Quite literally, characteristics of the speaker are introduced before an argument is even made, and often these characteristics dive straight into parody. It is not even that the speaker is black, or gay, or female, but they they have dealt with psychological problems, or are fat, or suffer a minor disability, or whatever. It is one thing to say, “this argument is important and you may not have heard it because Group X is underrepresented in public discourse”, and a completely different thing to say, “this argument is better *because* it comes from a member of some, maybe, underrepresented group”. No liberal of any stripe disagrees with the first.

3) Other folks who support broad liberal goals are, and the Chait essay itself is evidence of this, turned off by what looks to them like a bunch of educated folks from wealthy backgrounds lecturing them about word choice and claiming to represent good arguments that find it difficult to make themselves heard. Especially this is true when the folks doing the lecturing are objectively uninformed 20 year olds. Shifting the liberal brand from promotion of equality of opportunity to what, fair or not, is seen as a neverending series of minor grievances can make it more difficult for broader liberal goals to be advanced in a practical manner. So conservatives do the same thing? Who cares? Chait and Freddie are concerned with a problem within liberalism, that makes liberal goals more difficult to advance.

Other folks who support broad liberal goals are, and the Chait essay itself is evidence of this, turned off by what looks to them like a bunch of educated folks from wealthy backgrounds lecturing them about word choice and claiming to represent good arguments that find it difficult to make themselves heard. Especially this is true when the folks doing the lecturing are objectively uninformed 20 year olds. Shifting the liberal brand from promotion of equality of opportunity to what, fair or not, is seen as a neverending series of minor grievances can make it more difficult for broader liberal goals to be advanced in a practical manner.

Except that at my workplace the manager can’t call you a fag or a whore any more – even if you call yourself one! – without getting into trouble, a real, practical achievement of a liberal goal. Of course THAT is seen as a neverending series of minor grievances by people who are assholes. Sucks to be them.

Chait wouldn’t have written his piece without the constant right-wing complaints about PC, which are complaints about people rising above their station.

Chait and Freddie are concerned with a problem within liberalism, that makes liberal goals more difficult to advance.

Which goal has been stymied?

All that said, yeah, people who are policing boundaries can be jerks about it, as people who like rules over openness can be. Chait wondering about the impact of PC feminists on the H. Clinton campaign were absurd. DeBoer worrying about jerks is interesting, given, you know.

Rich writes: “he’s not responsible for creating an effective learning environment outside of them”. It seems to me that this is a classic Freddie move: Some liberals suck and I’m both disappointed in them and helpless to do anything.

Why is he so helpless? Why can’t he participate in those conversations? Why can’t at least try to have a dialogue with the person who is being abusive / chilling the speech rights of others? Since he, apparently, has no clue, could he possibly do some research or talk to another professor about how to help create an on-campus environment that is more conducive to learning?

Francis: “Why is he so helpless? Why can’t he participate in those conversations? Why can’t at least try to have a dialogue with the person who is being abusive / chilling the speech rights of others?”

I don’t really know, but here’s what he wrote about it.

Speaking out of my own experience, in Occupy, it’s difficult to dive into a conflict between adults in which one of them has accused the other of something, and simultaneously try to tell the accused that the accuser has a point and tell the accuser to chill out a bit. I don’t really believe that there are people who are super good at this, and that when deBoer writes that he doesn’t know how to handle it he’s just throwing up his hands. At least, in my experience there were no people within a group of 100-200 people who were good at it.

RP @42,

Indeed, as FDB wrote: “You can imagine [what would happen] if I said, in the middle of an activist meeting, that a particular charge of racism or ableism or sexism was unwarranted or being expressed too harshly. The whole point is that there is currently no theoretical or practical shared understanding on the left about when and how to intervene in a situation where you believe that the intensity of political criticism is unfair and not constructive. That’s the whole point …. I see a lot of sneering; I see very little in terms of principles and guidelines.” He’s not helpless, he’s asking for a meta-dialogue about this very, actual issue, yet Because Freddie Sucks we must mock him for it.

Pencil reviews. Good god, Belle, could you just be a little less perfect?

On second thought: no, wait, don’t.

Bianca @24

In the interest of being increasingly tangential:

I tend to view it in terms of goal-oriented behavior. Shame can be useful in a number of scenarios, but providing the shamee with a feeling of inclusion is not one of them. The anti-PC complaints often seem to come in the form of “You claim you’re inclusive but you yelled at me!” (a la the Chait article). The reality is that inclusiveness is one of a number of goals of “the left”, and these many goals eventually come into conflict.

When a writer with a national platform undermines claims a position of “left” authority and undermines widely held “left” positions, shame can be an effective tool of bringing falsehoods to light, questioning assumptions on a wide scale, etc.

But shaming someone in a university classroom, or during meetings about cross-coalition efforts, is a lot more gray. It’s important as an individual to ask what the particular execution of shame is accomplishing, and whether it’s worth the cost of inclusiveness.

(To speak to your last point: Obviously, you don’t want people assuming everyone is out to get them, but we all need to recognize that no volume of credentials or “years of service” will grant us immunity from shame, and hopefully we’ll all be honest with ourselves in accepting responsibility for earning it.)

I think Belle hits it pretty well – Freddie is mostly on target with his criticism (assuming that his examples are mostly true), but there is something that feels a bit – off.

One of the issues with all the critiques that rest on “this group is alienating its potential allies who it should be trying to court” is whom they mean by potential allies. In Chait’s case the “allies” are established, slightly liberal elite dudes who are already have great power in our society. In DeBoer’s case the “allies” are mostly working-class men who (supposedly) have their hearts in the right place, but haven’t learned the right lingo. And his is an important point around class, but one gets the feeling that, like Chait, his real criteria is “people like me.”

Lost in some of this discussion is the fact that activists are human beings who are all by nature imperfect. Activist people don’t always hold up to a perfect, rational, even-minded strategic-thinking ideal. Activists sometimes have bad days. They have bad years. (I did some really destructive stuff as a student activist when I was dealing with a deep depression in my senior year). Sometimes the reason some well-meaning dude gets chewed out by a ranting feminist is because she just had a really shitty week, and has had to tolerate daily put-downs from the demeaning, sexist professor for a class that is required for her major, and one more “well-intentioned” dude saying the same clueless comments she hears all the time was just one clueless comment too many.

Marshal @ 47

Last month somebody dissed me on grounds I haven’t read enough books. I could have been William Timberman, for better or worse. Oh well.

Not to start anything, you understand, but ????

Me too. I dunno why the pile-on on FDB. It reminds me of too many other net pile-ons I’ve seen. Even joined. Groupthink in action, not limted to the net. I’ve seen it in real life: my Zen group; the Greens, when I was heavily involved, years ago.

Groupthink … that’s it, really. Not just limited to the left. Establishing your bonafides with other group members by displaying animus against enemies. Feels good to do so, doesn’t it? (Ask me how I feel about Tea Party, Republicans, Tories, BJP, etc.)

It’s not just Judean People’s Front vs. People’s Front of Judea. I recall a book re early Christianity (Elaine Pagels, I think it was) talking about the controversies that would bubble up re doctrine. It wasn’t OK to disagree, no … you had to fight it out, establish dogma, and throw the other guys out. Dogma as a ratchet, ever tightening.

Heck, I recall Garrison Keillor writing about his Sundays, spent with the splinter sect of a splinter sect, meeting in someone’s living room, and how yet another schism was narrowly avoided when two of the members were persuaded to back away from a heated argument during bible study.

We humans enjoy fighting, don’t we?

Z, you’re right. We don’t know what the content of the exchange was, beyond the expression “man up” (which I kind of like. Wish there were an equivalent for women). It just brought back memories, is all.

Bianca, why is novakant confused? In #12, he posited that the composition of FdB’s examples weren’t all from southern states, or something like that. It wasn’t clear to me. No, sorry, it was that the three were trying to be good, and he said he didn’t understand. You responded to him, directly and at length, in #16, an hour and 15 minutes later. Then an hour and 15 minutes after that, in #26, he says he doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. What? I understand!

Moving on, I don’t understand this, from the original post:

…Americans would rather elect a gay Muslim philanderer President than an atheist.

Why would the MRA guy say “gay Muslim philanderer”?

@BiancaSteele, I hadn’t read FredBo that way, so I guess we just have different sensitivities. Still, it strikes me that in the situations he describes, an anti-oppressive stack (which prioritizes those with “skin in the game,” as FredBo puts it) would have been useful.

ragweed: “Lost in some of this discussion is the fact that activists are human beings who are all by nature imperfect. Activist people don’t always hold up to a perfect, rational, even-minded strategic-thinking ideal. ”

I agree, but I don’t think that this goes far enough. Who are left activists, generally? Certainly not every woman, every person of color, every worker, every LGBTQI person or the left would win every election.

Left activists are (to generalize, of course) anti-authoritarian, power-seeking (however you want to put that: if you don’t seek power, you don’t become an activist), and generally not happy with how society is. These are general traits that don’t lead to lots of easy interactions in which people don’t get mad at each other. Every if people aren’t having a bad day, month, or year, they’ve self-selected themselves as a group of people who naturally have more trouble getting along than a randomly selected group of people do.

The problem that I have with call-out culture (to use deBoer’s phrase) is that it’s low on tolerance. People need a structure that allows them to be angry and to forgive other people for being angry. A whole lot of the answers to deBoer that I’ve seen lean heavily on “these are students, why can’t you overawe them with your adult, academic status?” But in a context where this source of social power doesn’t exist, that answer isn’t available.

“if you don’t seek power, you don’t become an activist”

Couldn’t disagree more.

“She excluded herself.”

Welp, leftism is over. Time for everyone to go home. Please pick up your immediate area as we pack this thing in, and we can make cleanup a lot easier on the roadies.

This focus on Freddie’s three anecdotes is a little strange to me. I think the more important underlying point, which he has been making repeatedly for a while now, is that the left is substituting the bon mot and the callout for tangible action. The reality that the left occasionally drives away potential allies with language policing, when the left needs all the friends it can get, seems to me a secondary point, but maybe he’ll drop by and straighten this all out himself.

The “more general point” link mentioned in the OP seems to me to be Freddie deBoer calling out Freddie deBoer, particularly the last three paragraphs. And fine.

afinetheorem @36 – A lot of “PC culture” is being driven by people who are socioeconomically privileged rather than from those that are actually disadvantaged in society. This, I hope, is obvious.

The “socioeconomically privileged” set the agenda & drive all kinds of conversations, probably the vast majority of them, irrespective of where the subject falls on the ideological spectrum. Why is it important here ? If you want to call them limousine liberals then you should do so openly.

“I personally liked the story of your libertarian friend.”

I liked the story but nothing annoys me more than a person who wants to deny other people the benefits that they themselves enjoyed. But I am sure he had his reasons.

Belle: You’re right, it was, rather, the word “affluent” that came before the identification of gender, not “$300 shoes”, and the announcement of the offender’s gender at the end struck me because I originally assumed it was a he, & the price of the shoes told me nothing I didn’t already know given the person was already identified as “affluent” which must be why I confused the two–and of course I completely agree that putting “$300 shoes” together with “this woman” is evoking a sexist stereotype. And, yes you are being uncharitable in envisioning this whole scenario of how I don’t want to acknowledge that that particular slant is there. Though I do feel like I should have caught that “woman”+”shoes” thing the first time I read it.

To defend FDB, I would be willing to consider the possibility that “this woman . . . etc.” is style indirect libre, and that he holds to the belief that every literary depiction of a character is intended (in the absence of authorial or narratorial commentary) to be taken as sympathetic. So, “this woman” is the veteran’s language. And it’s not meant as a dig at the veteran that he uses this language, because it’s appropriate to the character’s history that he uses such language. It’s a way for FDB to indicate sympathy with a character in his anecdote. (I am not entirely persuaded this works when there’s too much distance between author and character, but it’s a theory.)

The Tarot deck sounds cool. My grandmother always insisted she made up the whole thing and always gave me the same reading (with regular playing cards), but she would read cards for herself, so who knows.

“plus there is a smidgen too much ‘tumbler feminists are evil'”

Yea, I mean, I know we want the good guys to be better than that, but are people really shocked that people on the internet can be a bit harsh, and some of them may even be feminists? Compared to the average yahoo news comments section, the call-out culture is positively warm and fuzzy.

Oh, right! We’d be pre-ordering the custom deck. I was imagining some… I don’t even know, some CT-involved reading? Look, it wasn’t well thought out. Actually, scratch the “well”. Anyway, JanieM, those look great. And yes, for Belle’s deck, just tell me where to sign up.

And… just vaguely back on topic (kinda): I mentioned the Michelle Goldberg article above because if we’re going to have an intra-left cage fight flame war discussion about PC/call-out culture (are these even the same? I’m not entirely sure I even know anymore), that seems more promising—as in, more useful things might come out of it—than Freddie deBoer or Julian Sanchez or certainly Jonathan Chait. But I don’t think anyone’s really engaged with it in these threads—at least directly. Tho possibly I missed it.

My guess the folks putting people down at Purdue were not multiple Harvard legacies like they were at Berkeley.

http://opa.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/Fall2013Snapshot_Dec2013_0.pdf

What’s that T? I can’t hear you over the

My guess the folks putting people down at Purdue were not multiple Harvard legacies like they were at Berkeley.

“If racism/sexism/homophobia is something you’re sick of hearing about, imagine how exhausting it is living it?” -Jon Stewart

@js. I complete agree that for having a debate about this, the Goldberg article is not just better, but in an entirely different league of better. I’m still tending towards “she’s wrong” wrt the larger question, but at least it’s an honest and interesting piece, both with a more nuanced and more interesting argument and with actual evidence. Brittney Cooper’s response (Cooper is cited at length by Goldberg and approvingly to a large extent), quoted by Chait as a sign of PC gone crazy, is at least as interesting by the way: http://www.salon.com/2014/04/08/its_not_about_you_white_liberals_why_attacks_on_radical_people_of_color_are_so_misguided/

But that said, as I’m not the first one to say here, the use of the term “politically correct” as a derogatory term to discredit various left-wing causes would seem to be a much bigger issue, so the ridicule of liberals & progressives who adopt that terminology (the spread of which as a negative label I still think is best explained as a deliberate right-wing strategy–for context see LFC’s link in #7) seems to me a rather worthwhile endeavor in its own right. Plus, it’s certainly been fun to read.

Hello novakant! Now I understand ;) Thank you.

a) I actually don’t believe that Fred De Boer can price up a pair of shoes just by looking at them.

b) This isn’t about politics, at all. There are people in the world who are bullies, and who work out their unpleasant personalities in political contexts. Because some movements of the left have 1) weak organisational structures to control behaviour 2) a disposition to make allowances and excuses for bad behaviour and 3) some theories which are easy for bad actors to exploit, there are corners of the world which have developed norms and practices which are a really congenial environment for assholes

c) But there’s nothing specific to “The Left, Such As It Is”, there. A few years ago, we noted that professional philosophers also have some ass-o-genic customs and practices, which are abused by some of them more than others. You get these things everywhere.

d) It’s probably true that, because how many things outside an economics textbook are evenly distributed on a continuum, some corners of the world have this problem worse than others. I happen to know that English trans rights activism (which AFAICT has an alliance with sex worker groups, which is how I know about it because one of my friends is a prominent supporter of the Nordic Model) happens to have quite a number of really absurdly badly-behaved people in it. (Or more realistically, a small core of nasty people and a penumbra of casual hangers-on who will jump in where there looks like a chance of an unequal fight. The sociology and organisation is very similar to that of football hooliganism).

e) But this is nothing intrinsic to anything, not new and not A Very Real Problem For The Left. Christ knows, as Belle originally pointed out, someone who worked for The New Republic FFS has something of a Matthew 7:3 problem if their complaint is that some other corners of the political world harbour a few flaming assholes who are in the habit of monstering other people for minor ideological deviations.

f) And Belle also had Chait perfectly pegged – his real complaint is that nobody listens to him these days. The fact that middle aged white men can’t get a fair deal in minority rights campaigns is only A Very Real Problem For The Left if you believe that it is vitally vitally important for all these campaigns to have a load of old buggers like me hanging around telling people how it was in their day and so on. And I doubt that it is, not really, although it kind of kills me to admit it.

g) So De Boer is right; there is a real problem and people should cut it out and stop it. It troubles me more than somewhat when terms like “tone policing”, “calling out”, “privilege” etc are misused as euphemisms for “you’re not allowed to tell me to stop acting like a dick”, but I don’t know what to do about that either. But it really has much less to do with Chait’s article than meets the eye.

How about good old Jurgen Habermas, and the three rules of discourse:

1. Every subject with the competence to speak and act is allowed to take part in a discourse. 2a. Everyone is allowed to question any assertion whatever.
2b. Everyone is allowed to introduce any assertion whatever into the discourse.
2c. Everyone is allowed to express his attitudes, desires, and needs.
3. No speaker may be prevented, by internal or external coercion, from exercising his rights as laid down in (1) and (2). (86)

So people could criticize use of the word “tranny” if they had a strong basis, and debate/discuss it with others. But they shouldn’t banish people from discourse. Yeah, Habermas isn’t perfect (who is?) but these seem pretty good.

It has pretty much nothing to do with Chait’s article which, to a great degree, consisted of him policing the discourse in the hopes that no one could blacken the escutcheon of The New Republic by accurately referring to articles it had published in the past!

I feel like there’s a great Onion article to be written about TNR defending its championing of The Bell Curve from ‘the PC police’, possibly involving references to Illinois Nazis.

This isn’t about politics, at all… It troubles me more than somewhat when terms like “tone policing”, “calling out”, “privilege” etc are misused as euphemisms for “you’re not allowed to tell me to stop acting like a dick”, but I don’t know what to do about that either.

But that’s why this is about politics. Specifically, the people who have adopted the (political) discourse of privilege have by and large put no limits on it. So they have lost the ability to distinguish in any formal sense between appropriate and inappropriate uses. It’s not that privilege is being “misused” in this way, but that who are you to say it’s a misuse? I don’t get to condemn “tone policing” and then tell people to act civil, unless there are clear, objective rules about what is (bad) “tone policing” and what is (good) “keeping things civil.” And the people pushing the privilege discourse are extremely hostile to any such set of rules, because they think that such rules will only benefit the privileged. But that leaves us right back in the muck.

Personally, I think the privilege discourse is really always a misuse when applied to other people. It’s good if I check my own privilege, but it’s the height of arrogance (privilege, even) to presume that other people haven’t checked theirs and need it checking. I should make sure that my objections to others aren’t using unwarranted objections to tone as an excue, but I shouldn’t accuse others of “tone policing” because I don’t know that’s what they’re up to. And so on. Someguy88, above, well describes the very negative dynamic when you apply this thinking to others.

“Precious response. I guess you’re here as a shill to prove Freddie right. Well done.”

Don’t be a poor sport T.

js @ 73. Wow. Depressing.

@106 Yep. Because the community isn’t small enough already. Maybe Freddie could be on the something?

“I happen to know that English trans rights activism (which AFAICT has an alliance with sex worker groups, which is how I know about it because one of my friends is a prominent supporter of the Nordic Model) happens to have quite a number of really absurdly badly-behaved people in it”

No offence to your friend but sex workers and trans people are some of the most absurdly oppressed people in modern society. Can anyone blame them for responding forcefully to people who (from their perspective. Lets not get into an argument about the Nordic Model) want to make their lives worse?

This is my big problem with all the complaints about PC language. Basically we want to tell people who are mistreated and oppressed by society the appropriate way for them to react.

Witty writing obscures the fact that Belle Waring’s post helps make Freddie deBoer’s point. DeBoer wants us to go easy on people who say things we disagree with, particularly if they are college students. Waring prefers stylish clever ridicule.

I also missed most of the CancelColbert stuff, but at least the people offended weren’t libertarians, right?

Witty writing obscures the fact that Belle Waring’s post helps make Freddie deBoer’s point.

Freddie deBoer helps make his own point. What is that piece but (his usual, as far as I have experience reading him) rant about how other people are doing it wrong?

“And I think that’s what Freddie was talking about.”

But who is Freddie to tell these people what to do?

@116
Freddie seems to think that a calling a potentially sympathetic 19 years old an asshole because she isn’t fluent in the language of anti-postcolonial hegemony isn’t a good idea. Guess that’s controversial.

MPAVictoria, you can say that complaints about PC language equate to “Basically we want to tell people who are mistreated and oppressed by society the appropriate way for them to act.” That’s fine: no tone policing. But in that case one has to give up the bit about how PC is just about politeness. Politeness is always, in theory, two-way, and a large part of it is expressly about how you handle violations of politeness in a constrained way. PC is about mockery and expressions of anger.

“This is my big problem with all the complaints about PC language. Basically we want to tell people who are mistreated and oppressed by society the appropriate way for them to react.”

My big problem is that there is not just one “society” (site, location, position, contestation, hegemonic discourse) and people seem to move around and between various levels too easily and for convenience and advantage.

So at the board meeting of Goldman-Sachs, the Saudi prince and the Chinese heiress tell the British Banker ‘stop oppressing us with your racist colonial attitude’

@Rich

Do you think that people with power in society have more or less of a responsibility to be polite then people without power? Personally I give a LGTBQ person of colour a bit more leeway on how they respond to the oppression they experience every, single day.

Thoughts?

“Do you think that people with power in society have more or less of a responsibility to be polite then people without power? Personally I give a LGTBQ person of colour a bit more leeway on how they respond to the oppression they experience every, single day.”

I generally think that “civility” is merely a method of social control, aimed by those with relative power against those with less power. Politeness, also, has become a term of art meaning “You are not allowed to express something I don’t like”, instead of something like an actual system of politeness.

But watch out for your own language, MPAVictoria — it’s not up to you to give an LGTBQ person of color leeway on how they respond. You’re not the judger of them, giving or withholding leeway: you’ve expressly said that you shouldn’t be.

So, given that. Just out of curiosity’s sake, have you worked politically alongside LGTBQ people of color?

“Privilege” or “oppression” are not attributes or valuable possessions carried everywhere and always by anyone. They are descriptions of social interactions in particular concrete instances and events. “Intersectionality” came about in the 70s because UMC white feminists were ignoring queer women and women of color in real-life meetings.

The Scalzi scale is pernicious pandering bullshit. Nobody has privilege on a desert island. Nobody is born with it.

FdB nails it. You need to look at the room to see where the power lies.

@William Timberman – No offense intended. I’ll buy beverage of choice any time you’re in Oregon …

That is a difficult question Z. I don’t have a good answer. :-(

Sure bob. Thanks.

JanieM: “We (“we” = everyone) don’t seem to have learned that when we decide to come together to change the world, we’ve already skipped a couple of crucial steps: processing out loud what it actually is that we think we’re going together, and learning (or, if we were luckier or collectively smarter, having already learned) how to be a group effectively.”

But there are reasons we haven’t learned — problems that keep us from learning. It’s not in my opinion that there are solutions out there and all we have to do is learn them, and the reason why we haven’t is that we’ve thrown up our hands. When something like, say, the protests at Ferguson happen, the people involved don’t really have time to process or learn how to be a group. And the groups on the left who were supposed to do this organizational processing and learning ahead of time have been discredited for various reasons. I don’t think that there really has a successful movement that has been successful because it has learned these lessons: I think it’s possible to do this through the old means of charismatic leadership and hierarchy, but that these themselves have been discredited (generally for good reasons).

I try not to use the phrase “white privilege.” It often comes with the connotation that an individual possess something that she or he does not deserve.

Who is most often accused of “white privilege”? College educated white males.

Is being college educated a privilege? The stats suggest that it is.

But the more crucial question, in my view, is whether a college education should be framed as a privilege?

No. A college education should be available to everyone. We shouldn’t shame individuals for taking advantage of what many of us consider a social right. We should scorn the fact that these educational opportunities are not granted to everyone. We need to bring the bottom up, not bring the top down. The former approach encourages inclusiveness, the latter approach causes alienation.

Ronan(rf): “Rich all the way back at 1. I’d genuinely be interested to hear about this dynamic at play at Occupy.”

I’ve written about this a bit tangentially here, which was largely about “Whose fault was it that Occupy General Assembles always seemed to turn into such train wrecks?”. But from my personal experience, three exemplary conflicts that I first remember, off the top of my head, had little to do with PC as such:

a) Someone presented a letter to local politicians that he said was from us, when it really was pretty much written by him. He felt that he’d been given implicit permission to do this, when according to a large majority of everyone else, he hadn’t.

b) Police came to the encampment late at night, while it was raining, and told everyone that they had to clear away the encampment by later that night or they were going to get arrested. Matters were complicated even further by a medical emergency at the same time. Everyone yelled at everyone else.

c) Encampment #2 failed when people heard rumors that had a homeless person had nearly OD’d, and found needles in a tent. It was quickly agreed to pack everything up and clear everything away before we got blamed for something.

PC concerns were tangentially involved in all three of these. In case a), many people objected to the relationship that the letter writer had with a significant other. In b), at least one of the people yelled at felt that she was yelled at because she was a woman, and this may well have been a factor. In c), I was pretty much the complainant — the mayor had given us resources to contact for people who needed help with drug abuse, and I felt like we’d been a little too shocked because of our class position and overreacted.

But it’s quite true that PC concerns were in no way the driving force of conflicts that contributed greatly to ending the organization. In that sense, one could say that this was no big problem. People acting horribly to each other was, in general, a huge problem. And I’m skeptical about the advice about conflict resolution techniques and so on. We tried all of that: stacks, consensus-building, intervention by trained mediators, and so on. When the crises actually happened, that didn’t help. One can say that maybe we needed more long-time patience, but how long-term?

My apologies the T.

I also apologize for my inability to type “then”. Not, though, for leaving the period outside the quotes.

I think where Freddie DeBoer is most on target is where he talks about how the loudest voices in the call-out culture on white privilege are white. While it is important for white people to stand up and speak out about white-privilege (though I prefer talking about racism than white privilege, but that is another conversation), the issue is when white people trash other white people about being clueless about white privilege. It is one thing to say that an oppressed person has every right to respond with outrage and anger at oppressive actions, even if it is not polite. That seems to me completely valid, and I have seen the way that tone policing is used to silence justifiable anger about oppression.

But it is another thing when white people or men appropriate the outrage of people of color or women, and act otherwise aggressivly, using the experience of an oppressed group they are NOT part of as an excuse. It isn’t our outrage or our place. In the worst case you see very privileged white men verbally abusing people and then justifying it because tone policing is oppressive of People of Color. Maybe so, but not of them.

“Can anyone blame them for responding forcefully”

Another concept which is unobjectionable and even admirable in itself, but obviously capable of being abused by turning it into a blanket all-in-come-free. Particularly as (I don’t need to name names), plenty of the worst actors in the subculture I was talking about are neither trans nor sex-workers themselves, but self-appointed allies. (No need to name names, but there is one individual who is a stickler for trigger warnings on things like “discussion of misogyny” but chucks around the phrase “Go and die in a fire” the way some people say “good morning”).

The big unspoken here, of course (and AIUI this was a big issue at Occupy too) is mental health. Because of their welcoming and tolerant nature, a lot of anarchist groups attract people with mental health problems. This is good in ever so many ways. But I’ve seen a cycle in more than a few individuals of 1) extremely aggressive behaviour, 2) blaming, probably-but-not-necessarily correctly and p-b-n-n sincerely, 1) on their health problems then 3) completely refusing to take any responsibility for 1), because of 2) and to complete the circle, 4) reacting with p-b-n-n sincere outrage and hurt at the ableist suggestion that the fact that they do 1) means that other people are going to treat them differently from other people who don’t do that. That’s another hard problem for which I’ve no solutions for, by the way, and it’s clearly just a specific case of a very general problem for which the mental health professions don’t seem to have a solution for either.

I’m pretty sure that anybody (male or female) could look at my shoes and instantly determine that they cost less than $300.

People acting horribly to each other was, in general, a huge problem. And I’m skeptical about the advice about conflict resolution techniques and so on. We tried all of that: stacks, consensus-building, intervention by trained mediators, and so on. When the crises actually happened, that didn’t help. One can say that maybe we needed more long-time patience, but how long-term?

Rich, thanks for responding to what I wrote; I was thinking of you and your stories about Occupy when I wrote it. I don’t have any answers, I’m getting older and tireder and more cynical by the minute. But at the same time, I have a certain pie in the sky hope or idealism, as in: What if we (“we”) all had been trained to some degree in conflict work and awareness starting in kindergarten? People wanting to gather to protest in Ferguson (since that’s what you mentioned) might have had more options than they had as it actually played out last summer.

But then again, if our culture was such that we knew enough to teach conflict work starting in kindergarten, we might not have needed protests in Ferguson in the first place.

Then again again, if there’s any chance we’re ever going to have such a culture, we have to start somewhere.

As to “how long term,” I have no idea. I don’t expect to be alive when that question is answered, if it ever is, and if various people here are right about the cyclical nature of history, that’s one kind of answer right there. But I’m remembering a sort of parable I once heard, which I can’t seem to make Google find. It about Person A saying, “I was thinking of learning to play to piano, but I’m too old. It would take ten years, and by that time I’d be sixty.” And Person B says, “Well how old will you be in ten years if you don’t learn to play the piano?”

Another story that seems relevant: For a few years in the early nineties I went to a UU church. On one of my first visits, a woman got up at what was then called “Joys and Concerns” time and made a passionate, heartfelt speech about the news that was just then starting to come out of Bosnia. She ended by appealing to the congregation: “Please, we have to do something about Bosnia.” (“We.” I love that word.)

I couldn’t even get my kids to stop squabbling. Bosnia? Yeah, right.

People should try to be polite to one another, and kind to one another, and generous to one another, and to muddle through as best they can.

Indeed! Unless, of course, those others happen to be among one of the particular out-groups

the type of total psychopath who is a MGTOW

whom it is totally OK to revile without qualification, since we know deserve zero sympathy or respect. (Or, was “psychopath” meant in a technical way here, rather than simply as a disparaging and dismissive insult? Looking up the Hare definition, I don’t see that it fits; so I’m guessing not.)

More generally, how necessary is it for everyone to have an out-group or two that they can rank on reflexively, without guilt or hesitation? Does having these act as some sort of mental stabilizer, like a canoe outrigger? Give everyone the ability to retreat into “well, even on my worst day I’m not as bad as [X], they’re just pure evil” when needed? Can you think of examples of any figures — since Christ, perhaps — who lived successfully without having an out-group to stabilize against?

“I’m curious what you think about what MLK was doing up until the time he was assassinated?”

I think that the American Civil Rights Movement was a classic example of a social movement organized on the basis of charismatic leadership and hierarchy, and that it was successful. I also don’t think that it can be duplicated now. Reasons why are probably beyond the topic of this thread.

Is #107 an example of white, affluent, female academician privilege-rage?

No one asked me here, and I will probably be IP banned for this tirade, but as a voice from the out-group, I’ll share: Bianca Steele, Belle Waring and MPAVictoria (whenever I see “MP”, I’m reminded of “Military Police”) are intimidating and derisive. Using the Crooked Timber lexicon, that would be equivalent to “precious”. Maybe? The net effect is “hurtful”, according to the rest of the world’s lexicon. Red Magpie at World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is slightly more pleasant than those three, and she is not especially cordial.

Rich Puchalsky, William Timberman, Landru, JanieM, Z, bob mcmanus, Anderson, The Temporary Name and ragweed seem friendly and sensible. Z is a mathematics professor! William Timberman has a worthwhile economics blog. I enjoyed every one of bob’s comments and links. I’ve had plenty of confrontations with the Twitter feminists. I don’t want to argue with or enrage them, but I always do. They promptly block me. I want to be congenial but always say something wrong. It’s the lexicon thing, which grows increasingly arcane.

What is a MGTOW? It was mentioned in #158 and earlier. Would a taxonomist classify it as a PUA cline? Or perhaps a RINO? I couldn’t find MGTOW in Urban Dictionary.

#153 – Bruce, yeah I read that story too and had the same reaction. The unspoken thing in all this is class, no? Which Freddie, for all his (many) flaws does at least get.

I’ve seen people online police the boundaries on race, sexism, homophobia. But many of the same people will say the most awful things about ‘white trash’. And while there are definitely gay and feminist activists who engage seriously with class and economic issues, they do seem to operate on the margins.

Nothing sucks more than being poor in the US. Sure it’s worse to be poor and gay. But people who are gay/female/black and wealthy have it way way better than those who are poor but have all the other ‘privileges’.

I’m listed as one of the friendly and sensible people? I knew I should have been more hostile above. Got to stay in training.

Ronan(rf): “I thought you put the reason for the ‘failure’ of Occupy in the police ?”

Yes. In short, there were long-term factors that might have done Occupy in, but the police repressed it before those long-term factors really could be decisive. It turned out that Occupy couldn’t really exist without encampments, and police forces across the country destroyed the encampments. Some of the long-term factors that I talk about are structure, ideology, the strain of including homeless people with substance abuse or mental health issues, the long-term difficulties of middle-class protest movements, and the separation of Occupy from actual, majority identification in the U.S — but none of these things had time to work.

I’m still an anarchist, but the reasons why are even further out of the topic of this thread.

Interesting:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2015/02/12/how-trigger-warnings-could-really-work/

I really don’t see any of my posts on this thread as being “derisive” but I guess I wouldn’t would I?

MPAVictoria @ 172, that’s the joke of that post. You, Bianca Steele, and Belle Waring are three of the LEAST derisive posters on CT.

That epithet is particularly ridiculous when applied to Belle–the worst insult she has ever used is probably “bless your heart.”

Ellie Kessleman @ 173, I wasn’t suggesting you didn’t know the difference…

Also, if you keep getting blocked by “twitter feminists”, perhaps consider that your tweets aren’t as congenial as you make them out to be.

Doug @171: fwiw, I’ve gotten the impression that the “Victoria” in MPAVictoria is not a personal name.

On one of the listservs I was on (where the material discussed was divisive in itself) no meta-discussion was allowed*. It being a listserv everyone had everyone else’s email address so there was backstage chatter here and there, and moderation too was backstage and not public shaming, but outside of direct engagement with subject matter “so and so is not nice and said a bad thing” or “Does anybody else think this whole take on this thing is misguided?” simply did not happen. On the one hand, there were no personal spats. On the other, there was an obvious orthodoxy in content that could only change slowly.

*Not a suggestion to our indulgent hosts that they should do more unpaid work moderating.

Doug: “Interesting that the three people identified as “derisive” in 162 are all women who aren’t hesitant to give their opinions.”

Interesting that Doug, a person who from their screen name presents as male, is the first to announce that Ellie, someone presenting as female (according to my two-minute click through to her blog), is using “intimidating and derisive” as secret shorthand for “uppity women”. Looks like we’re about to get a textbook lesson in what the thread’s about!

And come on, it’s not tone policing to describe reality, is it? I won’t express an opinion on other commenters, but Belle Waring is derisive. As I write above, I don’t consider it to be a character flaw, but come on. Let’s just scroll back a bit here: “Salem, I feel you, but I don’t see that coming into this thread and saying, you know who’s been talking sense? Someguy88!” really passes the muster, argumentatively speaking. I may just be a dumb chick with a magic wand I point at stuff and then it explodes, though, so, what do I know? BOOM BOOM BOOM” That’s textbook derisive. What’s this weird, misdirected flattery and / or toadying saying oh you’re the least derisive person ever about?

Rich Puchalsky @180,

Derision in the service of mocking fools is no vice.

But seriously, considering how much crap Belle takes just for posting, I don’t consider a little light sarcasm to rise to the level of derision.

I mean, when you have people like Brett Bellmore advocating outright evil (in other threads), Belle would be well within her rights to use much harsher language and / or ban people left and right.

But then, I’m a pinko commie feminazi, so YMMV.

MPAVictoria @183, but minorities are always so angry and derisive! If they could just be more polite, then white men would be happy to listen to them!

I appreciate being called friendly and sensible, but I actually think the same could be applied to Bella – though I can understand some might not get her literary style. I will acknowledge that she does tend to diss some arguments (more than people), but she does it with style and flair.

Bob McManus is, I think, more right than not in this discussion, though I will take issue with the opposition between Marxist/post-colonial/queer theory and feminism/anti-racism. Because most of the folks I can think of who pioneered intersectionality before it was a thing considered themselves feminists. Post-colonial feminists, socialist feminists, feminists of color, queer feminists to be sure, but feminists.

Bianca Steele #181

And about having guessed wrong about whether Ms. Ellie Kettleman would prefer me to gloss over her comment…

Please don’t ridicule my name. Yes, my ancestors were peasants in Zhytomyr and some were door-to-door peddlers of cookware. Pots and pans. You know your etymology, good for you. I am a second generation American. Not everyone is named so gloriously as “Bianca Steele”.

OK, Doug. It’s going to take some time to go through all of that.

First of all, this wasn’t about whether derision was acceptable. Someone said Belle Waring was derisive, you said that she is one of the least derisive posters on CT. When challenged on that factually, you had to admit that you were obviously wrong, so now you’re saying that she is derisive but it’s OK because she’s punching up, not down.

How do you possibly think that Belle Waring is punching up when she makes fun of Someguy88 here? She has the ability to ban Someguy88, delete his comments, or whatever. She also has a demonstrated group of commenters who would cheer her on in doing so. Against this, he has what — a male screen name?

And more to the point, how do you think that you, an apparent guy — though of course I don’t know — aren’t punching down when you accuse Ellie Kesselman of whatever? Let’s review: she is apparently a woman. You are apparently a man. She is a woman whose name, when clicked on, goes to an actual blog with some kind of enduring presence that she must value. You have a meaningless first-name pseudonym that, when clicked on, leads to nothing. You have nothing at stake and nothing to lose. How do you reconcile this with your punching-up theory?

Y’all are missing an obvious thing about being dissed by Belle. It’s the quality of the diss. It’s like someone who was disses by Mark Twain – you frame that.

“Because I clearly am not wanted.”

I am sorry you feel this way Ellie.

And I do have a sense of humor:

As Shakespeare said: Which is the nice girl here, and which the shrew?

Back for a sec–Ellie Kesselman @ 193, oh for crying out loud, you can’t be for real. No one would write something so overwrought over a few comments.

I said (and maintain) that you are a troll, feigning hurt feelings to try to silence or shame some of the posters in this thread. Let me use your latest post as an example. No one has suggested that you were not a woman, and absolutely no one has demanded that you “verify your authenticity as a woman”–but by claiming that an unnamed someone has done so, you try to make yourself look persecuted, and anyone who questions you look like a misogynist. Likewise, Bianca’s mispelling of your name was a perfectly innocent mistake, not some sort of obscure Russian slur. But by suggesting that, you once again try to make her out to be the “bad person”.

You tried to position yourself as a “hapless innocent” who was offended by the “derisive comments” of certain posters in hopes of silencing those posters, and now that you have been called on it, you are doubling down.

Bah. I’m just unsettled by Belle’s other post, my tolerance for “can’t we all be nice” trolls is exhausted. If you really want to help, go tell some MRAs to stop being so “derisive” or something.

@198, it should be. I guess.

Doug is kind of a Q.E.D. to FdB’s point.

I’m beginning to suspect that Doug at 191 may be an example of the extremely artful trolling described in a recent post by Henry:

https://crookedtimber.org/2015/02/06/hr-tips-from-roman-slave-owners/

The real tip-off, for me, is the passage

[post] contained an obvious dogwhistle and was clearly not meant in good faith. If this isn’t evident to you, well, I’m not sure I can help you with that

I mean, really: is there any lower form of argument than “It’s simply self-evident that I’m right and you’re wrong, and if you can’t see it that just demonstrates how stupid you are”? Useful for all occasions, handy to have in the tool belt.

@205, MPA Victoria
I was going to post something hostile and petty here, but then I read Belle’s other post and the thread and was blown away, not to say shamed.