I honestly had no idea the Amazon union drive was going to fail. Were there any reports at all that attempted to assign a probability of success to it before the vote?
I have many connections in organized labor and union activism, in part because of my current status as a housing activist myself, and I heard relentless negative predictions for weeks. It was not at all an uncommon opinion within people who watch labor that the effort had been badly mishandled and was going to lose. But nobody was reporting on it, because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If organizers were getting their operational analysis from published articles, they would be singularly poor organizers- which is a real possibility. It's also very difficult to make things happen in the Taft-Hartley structure.
When I saw the interviews of Bessemer employees posted by @MikeElk on Twitter, I could tell it was doomed. The point being, it was really hard to come by that sort of stuff.
This makes me wonder how many other ideologically-mandated blind spots we're enduring, lest some assistant editor be suspected of secret heresy and purged.
I generally agree with Freddie on the merits, but I do think there is a tension with this: "Here on planet Earth, the actual, obvious financial advantage (for writers or anyone else) lies in being the loudest Good White/Male/Straight/Cis Ally you possibly can be." He has written elsewhere, convincingly, that the finances and job prospects of the media/culture industry is bad and getting worse. It's not crazy for someone in that ecosystem to think there is a comparative advantage to develop an anti-cancel culture, anti-woke shtick. Is the audience smaller? Yes. Are there less people vying for that piece of pie? Also yes. Your Bari Weiss's and Jesse Singal's of the world seem to have found sustainable work. If you look at lots of popular comedians, they are ALL beating the anti-cancel culture drum, undoubtedly not solely out of virtuous commitment to free expression.
Look, when I read Bari Weiss write a story about some elite private school doing absolutely insane stuff, I go "yeah, that seems insane." The problem is that there is no rigorous attempt at trying to understand the scope of this. If you ask Bari, she says "this is all over pubic schools." To which I respond: LOL. Are most education non-profits doing diversity training and workshops on systemic racism, sure. Is the average poorly funded, crumbling urban school with teachers who have been there forever and are constantly annoyed the copier doesn't work enthusiastically teaching with Pedagogy of the Oppressed in mind? No, not at all.
the point I took from it was more that there are grifters on both sides, which I think is probably true.
Also Bari's audience is entirely wealthy people, which is why she can get away with insane generalizations like that. If your entire world is private schools in the Northeast corridor, then it really may seem as if wokeness is a monolith that has taken over education. If you go to a public school in 80% of America and ask them about it, they will say who the fuck is Bari Weiss.
I noticed the same tension between this post and the previous 'writer/journalist advice' post.
But I think the resolution/dissolution of the tension is, in part, noticing that being anti-woke is costlier _up front_, i.e. you have to survive being 'canceled', at least once first. It also (mostly) just _seems_ that the best way to avoid being canceled is being loudly woke. And it's still not sufficient; just required. (You could think of woke and anti-woke as being mostly stable 'niches' in the media ecosystem. And moving/adapting from one to the other as evolutionarily expensive.)
> Is the average poorly funded, crumbling urban school with teachers who have been there forever and are constantly annoyed the copier doesn't work enthusiastically teaching with Pedagogy of the Oppressed in mind?
I think many – maybe most – are performing "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" in the same way writers/journalists are. If anything, it's more terrifying that so many people are going along with it _without_ enthusiasm. (I've always hated this kind of 'officially mandated' bullshit in school and at various jobs.)
oh, I was going to comment on this, too. I suspect that most mainstream journalists (and people generally) aren't performing wokeness (if they are) for monetary gain, but for social gain, or at any rate not to feel like social outcasts.
but I think the whole question of monetary gain is a bit of a red herring here. people don't get into journalism for the money, do they? surely not? they get into it because of its social prestige and/or because they enjoy writing and communicating and/or because they want to have an impact on the world.
mainstream media is where most of the prestige is, and therefore also where most of the outside pressure is applied. that a bunch of anti-woke types (but far from only these, as freddie has pointed out) end up on substack is, I think, because they feel they aren't welcome or anyway don't fit in in mainstream media, not because they are hungry for loot.
"You think, what? That the army of white guys who are suddenly so deeply motivated against cancel culture critics aren’t doing it for clout and pussy?"
I cracked up at this. It reminded me of the South Park episode back in 2015 when they first introduced PC Principal. "PC= Pussy Crushing."
That show called this crap out early on, and of course Woke Twitter hates it. I think it's because the show strikes a nerve, and that's always uncomfortable.
What I love most about your writing, Freddie, is how often your throwaway comments crystallize important truths that need to be reckoned with, but that hardly anyone is talking about. In this piece, it's "Silencing dissenting opinion without actually changing minds is dangerous because it lulls you into a false sense of strength." Movements have to persuade in order to accomplish anything of substance. Too many activists right now view persuasion with disdain, as if trying to see an issue from the perspective of someone who doesn't already agree with you- and then finding ways to appeal to that person from inside their experience,
rather than expecting them to "do the work" - is somehow contemptible. Most people aren't going to do the work. They just fucking aren't. And anyone who won't see this and adapt and take on the necessary hard work of persuasion isn't an activist or an ally.
I think part of the problem is that there are super fringe views where silencing is absolutely the right approach - like Holocaust denial. The problem is when you try to use the silencing approach for views that are much less fringe. Take the view “I don’t want to see adult male genitalia in a female locker room” - I bet that view is way more prevalent than Holocaust denial but there are folks who are trying to use the same silencing tactic for it and I doubt it will be successful.
Maybe silencing isn't the right approach, even for Holocaust denial. I don't think it is.
In general, if 'we' allow silencing as a tactic – at all – then people will fight to push their enemies's positions and ideas across 'the line' into 'okay to silence' territory. And that's exactly what people are doing now!
If it's okay to silence Holocaust denial and Nazism, it should be perfectly fine to silence communism and all kinds of other ideologies and ideas.
But silencing just doesn't seem to work. It's also true that nothing else DOES seem to work – perfectly. Apparently some people really do think the Earth is flat, or that the moon landings were faked, and there doesn't seem to be even any reliable way to 'convince' people of the truth.
I consider Daryl Davis to be the gold standard for really truly doing the best to 'fight' the worst ideas – he's got the best track record AFAIK. And, if anything, his main tactic or strategy seems to be sincerely _listening_ to people defend these terrible ideas; not silencing them from voicing them at all.
Well we silenced/de-platformed Milo and I think the net effect of that was positive, so maybe it works in some cases? Or maybe that’s just a case of someone who was just being a provocateur and (probably) wasn’t expressing deeply held beliefs?
How did silencing Milo create any material change in the world whatsoever? Literally, what is different in a world where Milo was not silenced? And "we" didn't silence Milo, conservatives did.
That’s a fair point, and I deeply appreciate your materialist take on these issues (it’s why I subscribed). I guess I would say it lowered he temperature a bit which seems positive to me. My hope would be that people not feeling like they have to react to Milo would have more time to actually effect material change, but I could understand if you are skeptical if that actually happened.
I don't think the material benefits were great, but Milo would sometimes use his platform to foment harassment against individuals. The fact that he can no longer do that is at least a small benefit. Also, his talks often invited campus protests that devolved into violence and property damage.
Of course you could also argue (and I would agree) that deplatforming people like Milo and Alex Jones created a precedent that has been invoked with increasing frequency and also served as the basis for a new set of norms in progressive circles, and that these are drawbacks... but now we're weighing relative pros and cons, not claiming that there was no material impact at all.
And the guys in red suspenders who work in towers on Wall Street wreak absolute economic havoc on people, creating widespread poverty and misery, and we don't even know or care who they are.
"Also, his talks often invited campus protests that devolved into violence and property damage."
That's just the heckler's veto, right? Some people riot when Milo speaks in public, so we should keep him from speaking? Is this a general principle you'd like to uphold? Because it seems like it just incentivizes everyone to organize riots when their enemies speak.
How about we try a different strategy: when some people riot in response to speech, we arrest the rioters and let the speaker continue.
That's a terrible justification for anything – 'it works sometimes!'.
Is the tactic/principle net good or bad? I am very much in the camp that freedom of speech is net good and silencing/de-platforming is net bad. Bad ideas should be countered with good ideas (or ignored) – not met with coercion.
“It works sometimes” is not a good justification for a blanket policy, but it is a justification for trying to determine when it’s likely to work and applying it on a case by case basis.
This is where the question of what “silenced” means becomes important. I don’t believe in laws against Holocaust denial, but neither do I think that universities should give platforms to Holocaust deniers (I guess Ahmadinejad was an exception since he was a globally important figure). Please note that I’m not a “free speech only means the government can’t censor you” guy—I believe in free speech as an ideal, not just legalism. But I do think there are ideas that don’t deserve a hearing.
Hell, *most* ideas don't deserve a hearing. Young-Earth creationism, UFOs built the pyramids, Holocaust denial, vaccines-cause-autism, Qanon--the world is full of people with silly ideas. But that means you shouldn't pay them any attention, not that you should punish anyone who expresses those dumb ideas, or anyone who allows them to be expressed.
Sure, of course. But this discussion started with Milo, who wasn't punished (or at least I wouldn't say he was), but was deplatformed. So that's where the rubber hits the road.
I hate to be so blunt but you're just wrong here Tom. You seem to be an honest broker. But look how you just rationalized Ahmadinejad. With that logic why wasn't Tom Cotton, a sitting US senator (who I loathe) allowed to write his op-ed in the Times about sending troops to stop the riots in the northeast? But an insane (yes, insane) article about "Abolishing The Police" was allowed a week later?
How can you not see the danger of selective "free speech" rights?
Sorry, I might have given the wrong impression—I don't think that Cotton's op-ed (which, just as a factual matter, *was* published, to huge backlash) was out of bounds for the Times. I share a lot of your concern over progressive repression of speech. What I'm saying is that while it makes sense to have Ahmadinejad on stage because his beliefs, like it or not, had influence on the world (and yes, the same thing justifies Cotton), a university is certainly within its rights to dismiss certain beliefs as excessively fringe to be worth giving university resources (a stage, AV equipment) to. The problem isn't with excluding some beliefs from consideration (though not censoring them), it's with expanding that exclusion to cover beliefs that aren't actually fringe or even unreasonable.
I'm definitely biased – I'm _fascinated_ by flat-Earthers and consider it to be a wonderful puzzle how one could convince them that the Earth is (approximately) a sphere!
But I also hate the 'platforming' frame – I deny that mentioning, referencing, arguing against, or providing someone with means to express their ideas to others is wrong or immoral. It definitely doesn't seem terrible (to me) to expose college students to Holocaust denial. We all have to learn to live with 'crazy' people (and we're all probably 'crazy' at least in some ways or with respect to some intellectual disputes).
I agree that there are ideas that don't _deserve_ a hearing. But I'm basically fine with others granting them a hearing anyways.
This is a good take Kenny. I think exposing college kids to bad and even "hateful" ideas is analogous to how vaccines work. If you don't expose them to crazy ideas then, when they get out of the college bubble, they overreact to even slightly divergent concepts.
Being exposed to any idea all alone, good or bad, is indoctrination.
Being expose to different ideas, good or bad, is inoculation.
Because in the long run, in a healthy ecosystem of good and bad ideas the good idea will always win.
(Well, in the SUPER long run the second law of thermodynamics sends us all into entropy, but of course I'm talking about the closed system of human existence.)
This sounds neat but I don’t think I believe it. I don’t think people who are never exposed to Holocaust denial are more vulnerable to it or other bad ideas in the future. Flat earth was not at all a thing when I was in school or college, but when it came along I was obviously able to see the problems in it (impressive, aren’t I?)—I guess having been exposed to the evolution-creation debates in the 2000s didn’t hurt, but the main resource was the *true* things I had learned about cosmology, the scientific method, etc. And of course we don’t necessarily practice this principle in other fields—literature classes don’t expose their students to trashy books so that they’ll be able to appreciate quality better. If someone wanted to do that it wouldn’t be pedagogically invalid, but I think most professors find there’s too much good stuff out there to waste time on the bad.
Well, I didn’t say wrong or immoral! The main problem with giving university resources (time, space, AV setup) to crankish ideas is that those resources are limited and shouldn’t be given out without a clear benefit. It’s the same reason why it’s not censorship for the newspaper not to print flat earth op-eds: there are only so many column inches so why use some for false ideas? (That said, another commenter points out that campus groups frequently try to bring controversial speakers and those events get shut down. That I disapprove of, as it is a case where an organization makes a decision on how to use its resources and that decision gets countermanded.)
As an aside, I found myself sitting next to a flat earthier at the poker table the other night, and I thought I’d ask him a polite probing question because I was intrigued by the prospect of a discussion just as you are. Let me tell you, in his case anyway the challenge was not “how can I convince him of this true fact?” but “how can I get a word in edgewise?” The torrent that came from him (frequently off the topic of flat earth—adrenochrome was mentioned) was so overwhelming that after about three minutes I was asking him as politely as I could to drop it so we could just play cards.
To you maybe. No censorship at all. Ever. Not for Holocaust denial, not for anything. Why? Because any censorship is suppression, and regardless of topic, is a metastasizing cancer. It spreads because your own not-fringe views are always on some else’s shit list. Hope you’re good at catching that razor sharp boomerang. (Feral Kid reference from Road Warrior)
Sorry, you're in a capitalist system. Views are suppressed anyway as a matter of course, unless, of course, you have a narrow view of what suppression involves. You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news. Free speech does not exist, it is always curated, censored by someone, unless it's screaming into the void, which cannot be regulated no matter what one feels about free speech. If free speech is a right to be heard, then it never existed.
Liberals have the dumbest possible view of speech.
> You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news.
Are there any Maoists on "cable news" in China? Why does that not count?
And I don't even think it's true that it's not possible. There are lots of ideologies for which there are no representatives with a "cable news" show. I don't think that's particularly strong evidence for anything other than those ideologies not being popular enough for anyone to want to give someone that believes them their own show.
I would hardly call CTV state media a bastion of any notion of free speech. It, like any other, chooses content based on the ideology of its runners. Free speech in this case is an impossibility, the only real choices are in who picks the content- Rupert Murdoch, the Politburo, whoever. It's a place to control and deny one's enemy to help gain popularity and power.
And, to be specific, Chinese state TV likely does not have many Maoists on board as things have changed in that country since the days of his rule.
If ideologies get put on cable news or media because of their popularity, then they're about as democratic(not the party) as one could expect, and thusly America is incredibly woke. If they are put in based on the ideologies of corporate board members and management, then the selection is arbitrary, so the question as to why an Austin Red Guard or a Proud Boy isn't running a cable TV show stands. In reality, there's only so much airtime and airspace, or people's attention, so somehow, we accept curation because it's the only possibility.
Curation by 'markets', or 'popularity', still seems strictly better than 'enforced by state sanctioned violence or violent coercion'.
But currently, cable TV seems like a nearly-irrelevant ideological battleground. The Internet seems more like 'curation-via-anarchy', which I think is perfectly fine, assuming people can continue to route around censorship.
"Sorry, you're in a capitalist system. Views are suppressed anyway as a matter of course, unless, of course, you have a narrow view of what suppression involves. You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news."
Actually (and ironically) you're wrong here and this very substack is the perfect example where capitalism promotes free speech, rather than suppressing it. I'm one of the people that Freddie talks about in "It's all Just about Displacement." I became disillusioned and frustrated with the single, narrow views in mainstream media, heard about Matthew Iglesias's substack in an Atlantic article and subscribed. Someone linked to one of Freddie's articles. I read it and immediately subscribed. Substack is capitalism at work. As Freddie has laid bare many times, mainstream media has become ridiculously partisan and obviously there is a market for that. (I guess becoming hard-core social just warriors has worked for the NYT much to my disappointment and sadness.) But this leaves open a large market for people like me who want truth, balanced ideas and can't stand silencing and censorship in any form. Enter Substack. And now Freddie, who was one of those silenced and shut out for daring to speak against the appropriate narrative, has an appreciative PAYING audience for his work. You may not see a Maoist get a show on cable news, but you clearly can have a successful communist have a thriving business on substack. :)
In practice, the way that goes down is: a student club invites a speaker (as student clubs often do), people complain to the university because the speaker is controversial, and the university administrators intervene to prevent the speaker from coming.
Are you under the impression that adult trans women are fighting for the right to proudly get naked in women's locker rooms? have you ever spoken to a trans person in your life? No trans person wants to do that. The whole point is that trans people are unhappy with their bodies, not trying to parade their biological differences around in public. Trans people just want to fucking blend in and go to the gym or use the bathroom like anyone else.
I don’t disagree! I was just pointing out that this view is much more widespread than Holocaust denial and is going to need information and persuasion to change it, not shaming of it.
fair enough. I guess my point is that it's a straw man that doesn't actually need to be challenged directly, more like pointed out for the ridiculous moral panic that it is (like basically every conversation about trans people).
To be fair, moral panics are _extremely_ common, and about all kinds of other (ridiculous) fears.
And, from some perspective, even ridiculous fears aren't ridiculous. Generally, phobias really are or can be debilitating, and I certainly sympathize with people that suffer from them, even if, rationally, their specific fears are 'ridiculous'.
There is a very sizable difference of kind between a phobia and a moral panic whipped up through tendentious political rhetoric. To treat them as comparable makes no sense.
I *knew* the Craigslist angry personal attack people were going to show up. Foolish me expected it to take longer. This labeling is an attempt to silence discussion.
No trans women want to "get naked in women's locker rooms"? Or just not do it "proudly"?
They do want to be able to use locker rooms tho, right? And that would entail them 'having the right' to "get naked", right?
Rick's hypothetical "I don’t want to see adult male genitalia in a female locker room" seems like a charitable paraphrase of views that people might actually hold and doesn't seem to imply anything about, e.g. trans women being 'political exhibitionists', or whatever it is you seem to be angrily conflating it with.
yes. The point is that if there is a trans woman that has not had gender confirmation surgery using a women's locker room, you can bet your life that you will never "see male genitalia". Again, this is obvious to anyone that has any experience with trans people in real life. Some people don't have that experience, I understand. But those people also shouldn't use straw men that propagate bathroom bill scare stories from Fox News.
Wait – are you claiming that this is true for all trans people?
If anything, my real life experience with trans/non-binary/gender-fluid people is that there are no (or extremely) few generalities that apply to all of them.
I don't think Rick was using "straw men that propagate bathroom bill scare stories from Fox News" but I can understand why you might have perceived that to be the case.
I think this turned out to be a good example by Rick – this isn't something people should be silenced for discussing or voicing disagreement with 'progressive orthodoxy'.
of course there are exceptions. There is always extreme outliers, some trans people will be murderers too. The point is not presenting outliers as the norm.
And I personally know at least half a dozen cis men who would happily declare themselves trans for a day if they could then wander freely in womens' locker rooms, without fear of legal consequence. (Note that the Equity Act allows unlimited and arbitrarily fast changes of gender declaration.)
lmao this says so much more about the people you associate with than it does about anything else.
and yeah I'm familiar with jessica yaniv. she's an awful person and outlier. there's outliers of every identity. when a jewish guy commits a murder do you share the article in support of laws making sure that jewish men are kept out all of places where they could possibly commit murder, or do you acknowledge that we live in a society of mostly good people with some exceptions?
And good to know that, since your original post, you've discovered the existence of "outliners".
"Outliers" and creeps are people who behave badly. Society needs laws that constrain them. If you are in favor of the Equity Act, then you are in favor of laws that do not.
I appreciate the conversation about rights, but I'm talking about something different. Movement building in the interest of social change requires hard work. Much of that work involves talking to people who don't already agree with you, some of whom don't have a lot of knowledge or an already-formed opinion about the problem that your movement wants to address. Or maybe they're a little knowledgeable and even sympathetic, but they don't use the "right" language. Or maybe they don't agree with every part of your analysis, but they agree that "something's" gotta change and that "something" overlaps with some of the changes you want to effect. If you're not willing to work with these people, to try to move them in the direction you want them to go without insulting them or guilt tripping them, or telling them to decenter their own needs and interests, then you're not serious about wanting social change. (And really, who the fuck among most ordinary people can afford to decenter their own needs and interests? Most people are just trying to get by or make a life that works for them. And even if they're doing okay, human nature doesn't work that way. You gotta tell me why your issue should matter to me. That's YOUR responsibility if you're the one who wants change. Otherwise, buzz off.) I can't count how many activists I've seen complaining about people who are put off by "defund the police." I've heard many of them say, "What don't they get? It makes perfect sense to me." Well, guess what, you are not your audience. If a slogan makes sense to you, that doesn't mean it will (or can, or should) make sense to people who aren't you. If making sense to you and everyone who already agrees with you were enough to change the world, things would be a lot different. Preaching to the choir all day every day may feel good, but it doesn't move the ball forward.
What you’re describing sounds a lot like evangelical Christianity: asking questions or raising issues means you’re off the team. That happened to me in evangelical Christianity, and by then I was like, ok bye. Echoes your book title: this whole setup is cultish, and I’m not getting why so many people are either playing along or buying it whole cloth. (Well, I get the playing along part. Protecting the cashola, however meager it may be.)
Exactly this. I've wondered for years if many who advocate for these strategies understand how evangelical their rhetoric is. Sometimes it feels like I got out of the frying pan only to get into the fire.
Absolutely true. I also grew up Evangelical and around the time I saw this similar approach on "the left" (whatever that means anymore) I quickly bailed. Been there, done that.
For me the 'tell' was the suddenness of it all. Everyone from Roger Goodell to Nathan Robinson radically shifted their politics in the same direction over a couple of weeks or so? The only explanations for something like that are that they only had skin-deep beliefs to begin with (surely true for many people) or that the whole thing was propelled by fear and cynicism.
I think you can observe the (rapid) 'diffusion' of this kind of thing by noticing how individual words, e.g. 'grift', appear and then spread thru the members of 'the hive mind'.
'Garner' is one that I have been nauseatingly following for some time now.
The beauty of preference falsification is that it allows for remarkable ideological flexibility. To misquote the Onion Knight: A month ago they were Robert's men. A week ago they were your brother's. Today they are yours. Whose shall they be on the morrow?
Just wanted to agree that I fucking loath NJR; he is a completely spineless, convictionless weather vane that has never gone against a trend in his life.
I think if you break down the metaphor, a windsock always points with the wind but a weather vane points into the wind, which kind of breaks the point I was going for, so I cede to your superior analogy.
Grift now seems to mean "Someone who disagrees with me is making money".
A bit simplistic, and of course there ARE grifters, of all political bents. But like all terms these days, it doesn't matter where it starts. These weapons are spit out onto the floor of social media like the Cornucopia in The Hunger Games. Who ever grabs the weapon first can use it to bludgeon whoever they want.
We're at a point where any politics committed to helping people who are lower-income, or who are slipping from middle-income to lower-income, needs to stop grasping after "the left" for ideological or organizational support. This is quixotic. This is Charlie Brown still trying to kick that football in Lucy's hands. There's a lot of excellent analysis now of why the 21st century left isn't going to provide that support: Catherine Liu, Angela Nagle, Geoff Schullenberger, Wesley Yang, Curtis Yarvin, and many others, have all provided theoretical assessment of what kinds of class interests the left is fighting for. Something new is needed composed of perspectives which are currently misassigned to "radical left" or "radical right."
And yes I mentioned Yarvin! Why not. Freddie, the social-political entity whose hypocrisies you've committed a decade of writing to grappling with is Yarvin's "Cathedral." Other terms (like "PMC") may be preferable for analysis. But it would be fruitful to get people who are, increasingly, seeing the same thing and whose patterns of analysis and thought are swirling around the same vortex to actually mention each other by name, talk to each other, blend terminologies to some extent.
I think I agree generally with what you're saying about getting past left-right reductionism, but my problem is, in terms of actual electoral politics, where on the right do I even go? As I see it:
The small number of Actually Left elected officials: Espouse populism, try (and fail) to pass bills that do populist things
Rank and file Democrats: Pay lip service to populism, uphold corporatism
Manchin Centrists: Totally unclear to me what belief system they're even espousing, uphold corporatism
Republicans: Openly love corporatism, uphold corporatism
"Populist" Republicans: Pay lip service to populism, uphold corporatism in everything they pass except some isolated anti-silicon valley crusades
I've read Nagle, Schullenberger, and Yarvin. Where are their beliefs represented on the actually existant right? Who am I meant to get excited about? People like Cruz or Trump who know if they stoke the culture war stuff, they never have to betray their big business alliances, or blatantly self-interested opportunists like Hawley, or somebody like Rand Paul whose "libertarianism" is about protecting "individual freedom" from government, but not the private powers that are gradually taking its place? (If I'm genuinely missing some real populists I haven't heard of, or at a more local level, please tell me!)
Oh, that's such nonsense. Good grief. Do you really want me to engage with you, or did you just feel an impulsive need to string words together and hit "post"?
Re: Biased reporting on Amazon, something similar is happening with the Derek Chauvin trial. Reporters know they can't say things like "this one prosecution witness fell apart on cross" because Twitter would melt down and accuse them of siding with the defense.
So if you follow the coverage, it sounds like the prosecution has been perfect while the defense lawyer is an incompetent buffoon. MSNBC has been playing long, moving, effective clips of the prosecution while barely showing anything from the defense. If the verdict isn't murder, people are going to lose it.
I don't have time to watch the trial, so maybe the coverage reflects reality. But there's no way to know how it's really going besides watching every day -- because I know reporters will only say what their audience wants to hear.
I think it is not a good sign that the head of Planned Parenthood apparently feels morally superior to Margaret Sanger and is comfortable using sexist stereotypes to get her point across. I was raised Catholic and while I am not a believer, the keen sense of being always a sinner striving to be better is deep in me. I am incredibly taken aback by how comfortable conscious self-righteousness is for so many on my side of the ideological aisle. Clearly Margaret Sanger had views that I would critique as being unsound and unkind, but I don't feel ashamed to say that she has done a lot more to advance liberation than I ever will. I don't know if it's all cynical, but it is clearly counter productive, and it is pretty infuriating that the people imposing the purity tests are not the ones who stand to lose if it results in a backlash and another resurgence of the right wing. If one side tells you that you that there is "white culture" and it is really terrible and you need to accept that and feel deeply ashamed about it and stop talking and the other side says that there is white culture and it should be the source of deep patriotic pride who is going to win the most white votes? Seems like an insane strategy to build a multiracial coalition to me, especially when lots of white people actual do support racial equity even as they behave in ways that are impacted by racist stereotypes that are deep in American culture.
I agree and it doesn’t seem to be working with non-white people either, if you believe the polling data that showed Latino vote shifts towards Trump in the 2020 election.
Your style continues to be my favorite style. Thank you. This is great. I'm going to use some quotable quotes for my Media Lit course, if that's cool. We are spending a day on "cancel culture" and just the mention of it to my h.s. seniors had them chatting at me via Zoom that there "is no such thing."
Other people have commented on this, but I think you attribute to crass cynicism ("money and pussy") what is more likely (or at least not less likely) due to a subtler, more genteel cynicism: basically, social pressure, the desire to get along with one's peer group, not make waves, not seem to be swimming against the current. Of course, as you point out, we've lined up lots of incentives in favor of wokeness and so it's hard to tease out when someone's hypocrisy is motivated by X rather than Y, and of course it can be both. But the tell for me is that I've seen this same sudden switch even among my peer group on social media, almost none of whom have any plans of monetizing this change in attitude. I myself, in 2017 or so, started coming up with all these rationalizations for why it was *now* okay to use political violence (or at least, wrong to criticize it), why Jesse Singal should probably just hush up about trans issues, etc., before the contradictions with my previous commitments became too glaring and I finally got some sense. I had been deploying my education and powers of reasoning to justify positions I knew deep down weren't justifiable. But I wasn't motivated by a desire to make it in media; I felt scared by the Trump presidency and so I wanted to get along well with people I saw as being on "my side," so I figured, go along to get along.
All good points. But now that Trump is gone (thank God!) what's the current rationalization? I don't doubt Freddie's claim that some people do it to get laid. (People younger than my plus 50 fat butt). But some do it like you say. Just to not make waves. I posted against Trump endlessly. Because I did and still do think he was the worst president ever. And like you he scared me. But he's gone. The election worked like the vaccine. But this curse of "wokism" or "social justice ideology" or the "elect" as John McWhorter calls them, is like the ultimate variant to the virus of Trump.
Or maybe bacteria is a better analogy. All the anti-Trump response, (including mine) was like those anti-bacterial soaps that scientists say might give rise to super bacteria if over used.
This wave of censorious orthodoxy is the flesh-eating bacteria the doctor's warned us about. (Hyperbolic? Shrug.)
I do think that it's hard to cast aside an absolutist ideology once you've adopted one, which is a good reason not to adopt one. I also think that people can be forgiven for not having a "phew, glad THAT'S over with" attitude—between the Trumplike true believers in Congress (Greene, Gosar, Boebert, et al) and the Capitol riot, not to mention events like George Floyd and anti-Asian violence, it certainly doesn't feel like liberalism has won some kind of final victory. Which is not to say that wokeism is therefore vindicated or prudent, just that it's understandable why people aren't coming out of a combat stance.
Insofar as this exists at the rational decision level, I think many people see the wagon circling as a good way to achieve their goals and worth what is (in their mind) a small cost. Perhaps you have to support some nonsense unquestioningly, perhaps you have to join an internet mob once in a while, but the (cultural...only cultural) left presents a cohesive front.
"Did it cross no one’s mind that establishing immense punishments for anyone who steps out of line with social justice orthodoxy ensures that we’ll have a lot of people who dishonestly embrace that orthodoxy in public to protect their selfish interests, in a way that obscures the actual political conditions of our country, leading to dynamics like Trump dramatically outperforming expectations in 2020? "
I wish I had the balls to post this on my Facebook page. I don't. I can't afford to lose my job. It's that simple. I'm still a progressive liberal, but you point out how poisoned the well is better than anyone. I thought this would change with Trump gone.
(SIDE NOTE: I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Think about he irony of that for a second. Because I attacked the worst president ever with a word that the woke has decided is verboten now. It was a Q-Anon nut who reported me to the Moaists. The woke are literally handing weapons to their enemies. Retards on every fucking side.)
But no. Trump is gone and they're doubling down. Depressing. But you're a ray of light Freddie. Keep doing what you do. (All of it. The personal piece was great too.)
I still remember the time back in middle school when a teacher scolded some kids for saying "that's so gay", so they apologized and said "that's so homosexual" instead, and she walked away pleased with herself.
Oh I know. When I was appealing to Twitter for reinstatement I told them "I wasn't using the word 'retard' as a pejorative. I think the President is literally a retarded person." Needless to say they refused to reinstate me.
In hindsight it's one of the best thing's that's ever happened to me.. Twitter is clearly a modern dayJean Paul Satre's version of hell on earth. Good riddance.
Indeed the left has been brainwashed. But I think we're all brainwashed. I'll admit to still being a "Russia did it" guy. I might be wrong, but if you read the Mueller report, it's not about Trump partying with Putin. That may or may not be true. But Russia does seem to have engaged with a misinformation campaign that effects *everyone*. AntiFa, ProudBoys, BLM, NRA. On and on. Left & right. Divide and conquer. I *do* believe Russia has had a big hand in the very arguments on threads like this.
Now that may all be misinformation and I'm as confused as the Q crowd. But then who's doing this? Who's feeding this Russian mis-info? The CIA?
I honestly had no idea the Amazon union drive was going to fail. Were there any reports at all that attempted to assign a probability of success to it before the vote?
I have many connections in organized labor and union activism, in part because of my current status as a housing activist myself, and I heard relentless negative predictions for weeks. It was not at all an uncommon opinion within people who watch labor that the effort had been badly mishandled and was going to lose. But nobody was reporting on it, because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It would have been helpful if this had been more publicized before the election - perhaps the organizers could have changed tactics?
If organizers were getting their operational analysis from published articles, they would be singularly poor organizers- which is a real possibility. It's also very difficult to make things happen in the Taft-Hartley structure.
When I saw the interviews of Bessemer employees posted by @MikeElk on Twitter, I could tell it was doomed. The point being, it was really hard to come by that sort of stuff.
At least maybe we could learn from it. Does anyone know of a good post-mortem about how they screwed up, what they were thinking, etc?
There was the New York Times article [1], but I'd like to see more depth.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/16/technology/amazon-workers-against-union.html
I found this useful: https://paydayreport.com/flawed-approach-sunk-amazon-union-drive-but-birthed-national-movement/
This makes me wonder how many other ideologically-mandated blind spots we're enduring, lest some assistant editor be suspected of secret heresy and purged.
I generally agree with Freddie on the merits, but I do think there is a tension with this: "Here on planet Earth, the actual, obvious financial advantage (for writers or anyone else) lies in being the loudest Good White/Male/Straight/Cis Ally you possibly can be." He has written elsewhere, convincingly, that the finances and job prospects of the media/culture industry is bad and getting worse. It's not crazy for someone in that ecosystem to think there is a comparative advantage to develop an anti-cancel culture, anti-woke shtick. Is the audience smaller? Yes. Are there less people vying for that piece of pie? Also yes. Your Bari Weiss's and Jesse Singal's of the world seem to have found sustainable work. If you look at lots of popular comedians, they are ALL beating the anti-cancel culture drum, undoubtedly not solely out of virtuous commitment to free expression.
Look, when I read Bari Weiss write a story about some elite private school doing absolutely insane stuff, I go "yeah, that seems insane." The problem is that there is no rigorous attempt at trying to understand the scope of this. If you ask Bari, she says "this is all over pubic schools." To which I respond: LOL. Are most education non-profits doing diversity training and workshops on systemic racism, sure. Is the average poorly funded, crumbling urban school with teachers who have been there forever and are constantly annoyed the copier doesn't work enthusiastically teaching with Pedagogy of the Oppressed in mind? No, not at all.
the point I took from it was more that there are grifters on both sides, which I think is probably true.
Also Bari's audience is entirely wealthy people, which is why she can get away with insane generalizations like that. If your entire world is private schools in the Northeast corridor, then it really may seem as if wokeness is a monolith that has taken over education. If you go to a public school in 80% of America and ask them about it, they will say who the fuck is Bari Weiss.
I noticed the same tension between this post and the previous 'writer/journalist advice' post.
But I think the resolution/dissolution of the tension is, in part, noticing that being anti-woke is costlier _up front_, i.e. you have to survive being 'canceled', at least once first. It also (mostly) just _seems_ that the best way to avoid being canceled is being loudly woke. And it's still not sufficient; just required. (You could think of woke and anti-woke as being mostly stable 'niches' in the media ecosystem. And moving/adapting from one to the other as evolutionarily expensive.)
> Is the average poorly funded, crumbling urban school with teachers who have been there forever and are constantly annoyed the copier doesn't work enthusiastically teaching with Pedagogy of the Oppressed in mind?
I think many – maybe most – are performing "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" in the same way writers/journalists are. If anything, it's more terrifying that so many people are going along with it _without_ enthusiasm. (I've always hated this kind of 'officially mandated' bullshit in school and at various jobs.)
oh, I was going to comment on this, too. I suspect that most mainstream journalists (and people generally) aren't performing wokeness (if they are) for monetary gain, but for social gain, or at any rate not to feel like social outcasts.
but I think the whole question of monetary gain is a bit of a red herring here. people don't get into journalism for the money, do they? surely not? they get into it because of its social prestige and/or because they enjoy writing and communicating and/or because they want to have an impact on the world.
mainstream media is where most of the prestige is, and therefore also where most of the outside pressure is applied. that a bunch of anti-woke types (but far from only these, as freddie has pointed out) end up on substack is, I think, because they feel they aren't welcome or anyway don't fit in in mainstream media, not because they are hungry for loot.
"You think, what? That the army of white guys who are suddenly so deeply motivated against cancel culture critics aren’t doing it for clout and pussy?"
I cracked up at this. It reminded me of the South Park episode back in 2015 when they first introduced PC Principal. "PC= Pussy Crushing."
That show called this crap out early on, and of course Woke Twitter hates it. I think it's because the show strikes a nerve, and that's always uncomfortable.
What I love most about your writing, Freddie, is how often your throwaway comments crystallize important truths that need to be reckoned with, but that hardly anyone is talking about. In this piece, it's "Silencing dissenting opinion without actually changing minds is dangerous because it lulls you into a false sense of strength." Movements have to persuade in order to accomplish anything of substance. Too many activists right now view persuasion with disdain, as if trying to see an issue from the perspective of someone who doesn't already agree with you- and then finding ways to appeal to that person from inside their experience,
rather than expecting them to "do the work" - is somehow contemptible. Most people aren't going to do the work. They just fucking aren't. And anyone who won't see this and adapt and take on the necessary hard work of persuasion isn't an activist or an ally.
I think part of the problem is that there are super fringe views where silencing is absolutely the right approach - like Holocaust denial. The problem is when you try to use the silencing approach for views that are much less fringe. Take the view “I don’t want to see adult male genitalia in a female locker room” - I bet that view is way more prevalent than Holocaust denial but there are folks who are trying to use the same silencing tactic for it and I doubt it will be successful.
Maybe silencing isn't the right approach, even for Holocaust denial. I don't think it is.
In general, if 'we' allow silencing as a tactic – at all – then people will fight to push their enemies's positions and ideas across 'the line' into 'okay to silence' territory. And that's exactly what people are doing now!
If it's okay to silence Holocaust denial and Nazism, it should be perfectly fine to silence communism and all kinds of other ideologies and ideas.
But silencing just doesn't seem to work. It's also true that nothing else DOES seem to work – perfectly. Apparently some people really do think the Earth is flat, or that the moon landings were faked, and there doesn't seem to be even any reliable way to 'convince' people of the truth.
I consider Daryl Davis to be the gold standard for really truly doing the best to 'fight' the worst ideas – he's got the best track record AFAIK. And, if anything, his main tactic or strategy seems to be sincerely _listening_ to people defend these terrible ideas; not silencing them from voicing them at all.
Well we silenced/de-platformed Milo and I think the net effect of that was positive, so maybe it works in some cases? Or maybe that’s just a case of someone who was just being a provocateur and (probably) wasn’t expressing deeply held beliefs?
How did silencing Milo create any material change in the world whatsoever? Literally, what is different in a world where Milo was not silenced? And "we" didn't silence Milo, conservatives did.
How does protecting the free speech of conservatives create any positive material change in the world whatsoever?
rights, how do they work
Because you can't protect rights selectively. Either everyone has the same rights or they're not rights. They're privileges. (Classic definition.)
That’s a fair point, and I deeply appreciate your materialist take on these issues (it’s why I subscribed). I guess I would say it lowered he temperature a bit which seems positive to me. My hope would be that people not feeling like they have to react to Milo would have more time to actually effect material change, but I could understand if you are skeptical if that actually happened.
I don't think the material benefits were great, but Milo would sometimes use his platform to foment harassment against individuals. The fact that he can no longer do that is at least a small benefit. Also, his talks often invited campus protests that devolved into violence and property damage.
Of course you could also argue (and I would agree) that deplatforming people like Milo and Alex Jones created a precedent that has been invoked with increasing frequency and also served as the basis for a new set of norms in progressive circles, and that these are drawbacks... but now we're weighing relative pros and cons, not claiming that there was no material impact at all.
And the guys in red suspenders who work in towers on Wall Street wreak absolute economic havoc on people, creating widespread poverty and misery, and we don't even know or care who they are.
"Also, his talks often invited campus protests that devolved into violence and property damage."
That's just the heckler's veto, right? Some people riot when Milo speaks in public, so we should keep him from speaking? Is this a general principle you'd like to uphold? Because it seems like it just incentivizes everyone to organize riots when their enemies speak.
How about we try a different strategy: when some people riot in response to speech, we arrest the rioters and let the speaker continue.
That's a terrible justification for anything – 'it works sometimes!'.
Is the tactic/principle net good or bad? I am very much in the camp that freedom of speech is net good and silencing/de-platforming is net bad. Bad ideas should be countered with good ideas (or ignored) – not met with coercion.
“It works sometimes” is not a good justification for a blanket policy, but it is a justification for trying to determine when it’s likely to work and applying it on a case by case basis.
Sure – as long as you're properly accounting for the costs/damages done every time the policy is tried, case by case or otherwise.
This is where the question of what “silenced” means becomes important. I don’t believe in laws against Holocaust denial, but neither do I think that universities should give platforms to Holocaust deniers (I guess Ahmadinejad was an exception since he was a globally important figure). Please note that I’m not a “free speech only means the government can’t censor you” guy—I believe in free speech as an ideal, not just legalism. But I do think there are ideas that don’t deserve a hearing.
Hell, *most* ideas don't deserve a hearing. Young-Earth creationism, UFOs built the pyramids, Holocaust denial, vaccines-cause-autism, Qanon--the world is full of people with silly ideas. But that means you shouldn't pay them any attention, not that you should punish anyone who expresses those dumb ideas, or anyone who allows them to be expressed.
Sure, of course. But this discussion started with Milo, who wasn't punished (or at least I wouldn't say he was), but was deplatformed. So that's where the rubber hits the road.
I hate to be so blunt but you're just wrong here Tom. You seem to be an honest broker. But look how you just rationalized Ahmadinejad. With that logic why wasn't Tom Cotton, a sitting US senator (who I loathe) allowed to write his op-ed in the Times about sending troops to stop the riots in the northeast? But an insane (yes, insane) article about "Abolishing The Police" was allowed a week later?
How can you not see the danger of selective "free speech" rights?
Sorry, I might have given the wrong impression—I don't think that Cotton's op-ed (which, just as a factual matter, *was* published, to huge backlash) was out of bounds for the Times. I share a lot of your concern over progressive repression of speech. What I'm saying is that while it makes sense to have Ahmadinejad on stage because his beliefs, like it or not, had influence on the world (and yes, the same thing justifies Cotton), a university is certainly within its rights to dismiss certain beliefs as excessively fringe to be worth giving university resources (a stage, AV equipment) to. The problem isn't with excluding some beliefs from consideration (though not censoring them), it's with expanding that exclusion to cover beliefs that aren't actually fringe or even unreasonable.
I'm definitely biased – I'm _fascinated_ by flat-Earthers and consider it to be a wonderful puzzle how one could convince them that the Earth is (approximately) a sphere!
But I also hate the 'platforming' frame – I deny that mentioning, referencing, arguing against, or providing someone with means to express their ideas to others is wrong or immoral. It definitely doesn't seem terrible (to me) to expose college students to Holocaust denial. We all have to learn to live with 'crazy' people (and we're all probably 'crazy' at least in some ways or with respect to some intellectual disputes).
I agree that there are ideas that don't _deserve_ a hearing. But I'm basically fine with others granting them a hearing anyways.
This is a good take Kenny. I think exposing college kids to bad and even "hateful" ideas is analogous to how vaccines work. If you don't expose them to crazy ideas then, when they get out of the college bubble, they overreact to even slightly divergent concepts.
Being exposed to any idea all alone, good or bad, is indoctrination.
Being expose to different ideas, good or bad, is inoculation.
Because in the long run, in a healthy ecosystem of good and bad ideas the good idea will always win.
(Well, in the SUPER long run the second law of thermodynamics sends us all into entropy, but of course I'm talking about the closed system of human existence.)
This sounds neat but I don’t think I believe it. I don’t think people who are never exposed to Holocaust denial are more vulnerable to it or other bad ideas in the future. Flat earth was not at all a thing when I was in school or college, but when it came along I was obviously able to see the problems in it (impressive, aren’t I?)—I guess having been exposed to the evolution-creation debates in the 2000s didn’t hurt, but the main resource was the *true* things I had learned about cosmology, the scientific method, etc. And of course we don’t necessarily practice this principle in other fields—literature classes don’t expose their students to trashy books so that they’ll be able to appreciate quality better. If someone wanted to do that it wouldn’t be pedagogically invalid, but I think most professors find there’s too much good stuff out there to waste time on the bad.
Well, I didn’t say wrong or immoral! The main problem with giving university resources (time, space, AV setup) to crankish ideas is that those resources are limited and shouldn’t be given out without a clear benefit. It’s the same reason why it’s not censorship for the newspaper not to print flat earth op-eds: there are only so many column inches so why use some for false ideas? (That said, another commenter points out that campus groups frequently try to bring controversial speakers and those events get shut down. That I disapprove of, as it is a case where an organization makes a decision on how to use its resources and that decision gets countermanded.)
As an aside, I found myself sitting next to a flat earthier at the poker table the other night, and I thought I’d ask him a polite probing question because I was intrigued by the prospect of a discussion just as you are. Let me tell you, in his case anyway the challenge was not “how can I convince him of this true fact?” but “how can I get a word in edgewise?” The torrent that came from him (frequently off the topic of flat earth—adrenochrome was mentioned) was so overwhelming that after about three minutes I was asking him as politely as I could to drop it so we could just play cards.
Yeah, that's reasonable, tho, as I commented elsewhere, I don't think the best amount of 'crankish' ideas is literally zero.
And yes, some people are too crankish in too many ways for any real discussion of their crankery to be practical!
‘Much less fringe’
To you maybe. No censorship at all. Ever. Not for Holocaust denial, not for anything. Why? Because any censorship is suppression, and regardless of topic, is a metastasizing cancer. It spreads because your own not-fringe views are always on some else’s shit list. Hope you’re good at catching that razor sharp boomerang. (Feral Kid reference from Road Warrior)
Sorry, you're in a capitalist system. Views are suppressed anyway as a matter of course, unless, of course, you have a narrow view of what suppression involves. You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news. Free speech does not exist, it is always curated, censored by someone, unless it's screaming into the void, which cannot be regulated no matter what one feels about free speech. If free speech is a right to be heard, then it never existed.
Liberals have the dumbest possible view of speech.
> You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news.
Are there any Maoists on "cable news" in China? Why does that not count?
And I don't even think it's true that it's not possible. There are lots of ideologies for which there are no representatives with a "cable news" show. I don't think that's particularly strong evidence for anything other than those ideologies not being popular enough for anyone to want to give someone that believes them their own show.
I would hardly call CTV state media a bastion of any notion of free speech. It, like any other, chooses content based on the ideology of its runners. Free speech in this case is an impossibility, the only real choices are in who picks the content- Rupert Murdoch, the Politburo, whoever. It's a place to control and deny one's enemy to help gain popularity and power.
And, to be specific, Chinese state TV likely does not have many Maoists on board as things have changed in that country since the days of his rule.
If ideologies get put on cable news or media because of their popularity, then they're about as democratic(not the party) as one could expect, and thusly America is incredibly woke. If they are put in based on the ideologies of corporate board members and management, then the selection is arbitrary, so the question as to why an Austin Red Guard or a Proud Boy isn't running a cable TV show stands. In reality, there's only so much airtime and airspace, or people's attention, so somehow, we accept curation because it's the only possibility.
Curation by 'markets', or 'popularity', still seems strictly better than 'enforced by state sanctioned violence or violent coercion'.
But currently, cable TV seems like a nearly-irrelevant ideological battleground. The Internet seems more like 'curation-via-anarchy', which I think is perfectly fine, assuming people can continue to route around censorship.
"Sorry, you're in a capitalist system. Views are suppressed anyway as a matter of course, unless, of course, you have a narrow view of what suppression involves. You will not see a Maoist get a show on cable news."
Actually (and ironically) you're wrong here and this very substack is the perfect example where capitalism promotes free speech, rather than suppressing it. I'm one of the people that Freddie talks about in "It's all Just about Displacement." I became disillusioned and frustrated with the single, narrow views in mainstream media, heard about Matthew Iglesias's substack in an Atlantic article and subscribed. Someone linked to one of Freddie's articles. I read it and immediately subscribed. Substack is capitalism at work. As Freddie has laid bare many times, mainstream media has become ridiculously partisan and obviously there is a market for that. (I guess becoming hard-core social just warriors has worked for the NYT much to my disappointment and sadness.) But this leaves open a large market for people like me who want truth, balanced ideas and can't stand silencing and censorship in any form. Enter Substack. And now Freddie, who was one of those silenced and shut out for daring to speak against the appropriate narrative, has an appreciative PAYING audience for his work. You may not see a Maoist get a show on cable news, but you clearly can have a successful communist have a thriving business on substack. :)
Do you consider a university decision not to invite Holocaust deniers or flat earthers to speak, censorship? Defining that term is key here.
In practice, the way that goes down is: a student club invites a speaker (as student clubs often do), people complain to the university because the speaker is controversial, and the university administrators intervene to prevent the speaker from coming.
I *do* consider that censorship.
what an insane straw man.
Are you under the impression that adult trans women are fighting for the right to proudly get naked in women's locker rooms? have you ever spoken to a trans person in your life? No trans person wants to do that. The whole point is that trans people are unhappy with their bodies, not trying to parade their biological differences around in public. Trans people just want to fucking blend in and go to the gym or use the bathroom like anyone else.
This is Mike Huckabee level creep shit. Grow up.
I don’t disagree! I was just pointing out that this view is much more widespread than Holocaust denial and is going to need information and persuasion to change it, not shaming of it.
fair enough. I guess my point is that it's a straw man that doesn't actually need to be challenged directly, more like pointed out for the ridiculous moral panic that it is (like basically every conversation about trans people).
To be fair, moral panics are _extremely_ common, and about all kinds of other (ridiculous) fears.
And, from some perspective, even ridiculous fears aren't ridiculous. Generally, phobias really are or can be debilitating, and I certainly sympathize with people that suffer from them, even if, rationally, their specific fears are 'ridiculous'.
There is a very sizable difference of kind between a phobia and a moral panic whipped up through tendentious political rhetoric. To treat them as comparable makes no sense.
I *knew* the Craigslist angry personal attack people were going to show up. Foolish me expected it to take longer. This labeling is an attempt to silence discussion.
I will remind everyone that you can be passionate but please be civil, here in my home.
...Craigslist?
No trans women want to "get naked in women's locker rooms"? Or just not do it "proudly"?
They do want to be able to use locker rooms tho, right? And that would entail them 'having the right' to "get naked", right?
Rick's hypothetical "I don’t want to see adult male genitalia in a female locker room" seems like a charitable paraphrase of views that people might actually hold and doesn't seem to imply anything about, e.g. trans women being 'political exhibitionists', or whatever it is you seem to be angrily conflating it with.
yes. The point is that if there is a trans woman that has not had gender confirmation surgery using a women's locker room, you can bet your life that you will never "see male genitalia". Again, this is obvious to anyone that has any experience with trans people in real life. Some people don't have that experience, I understand. But those people also shouldn't use straw men that propagate bathroom bill scare stories from Fox News.
Wait – are you claiming that this is true for all trans people?
If anything, my real life experience with trans/non-binary/gender-fluid people is that there are no (or extremely) few generalities that apply to all of them.
I don't think Rick was using "straw men that propagate bathroom bill scare stories from Fox News" but I can understand why you might have perceived that to be the case.
I think this turned out to be a good example by Rick – this isn't something people should be silenced for discussing or voicing disagreement with 'progressive orthodoxy'.
of course there are exceptions. There is always extreme outliers, some trans people will be murderers too. The point is not presenting outliers as the norm.
I am confident in my generalization, yes.
@Julie: I guess your survey of every trans woman on the planet somehow missed this one: https://torontosun.com/news/local-news/mandel-trans-activist-learns-testical-waxing-not-a-human-right
And I personally know at least half a dozen cis men who would happily declare themselves trans for a day if they could then wander freely in womens' locker rooms, without fear of legal consequence. (Note that the Equity Act allows unlimited and arbitrarily fast changes of gender declaration.)
And why do the woke feel that endless use of "fucking" enhances their arguments? It's just weird.
lmao this says so much more about the people you associate with than it does about anything else.
and yeah I'm familiar with jessica yaniv. she's an awful person and outlier. there's outliers of every identity. when a jewish guy commits a murder do you share the article in support of laws making sure that jewish men are kept out all of places where they could possibly commit murder, or do you acknowledge that we live in a society of mostly good people with some exceptions?
Yeah, I know some creeps. Don't you?
And good to know that, since your original post, you've discovered the existence of "outliners".
"Outliers" and creeps are people who behave badly. Society needs laws that constrain them. If you are in favor of the Equity Act, then you are in favor of laws that do not.
I appreciate the conversation about rights, but I'm talking about something different. Movement building in the interest of social change requires hard work. Much of that work involves talking to people who don't already agree with you, some of whom don't have a lot of knowledge or an already-formed opinion about the problem that your movement wants to address. Or maybe they're a little knowledgeable and even sympathetic, but they don't use the "right" language. Or maybe they don't agree with every part of your analysis, but they agree that "something's" gotta change and that "something" overlaps with some of the changes you want to effect. If you're not willing to work with these people, to try to move them in the direction you want them to go without insulting them or guilt tripping them, or telling them to decenter their own needs and interests, then you're not serious about wanting social change. (And really, who the fuck among most ordinary people can afford to decenter their own needs and interests? Most people are just trying to get by or make a life that works for them. And even if they're doing okay, human nature doesn't work that way. You gotta tell me why your issue should matter to me. That's YOUR responsibility if you're the one who wants change. Otherwise, buzz off.) I can't count how many activists I've seen complaining about people who are put off by "defund the police." I've heard many of them say, "What don't they get? It makes perfect sense to me." Well, guess what, you are not your audience. If a slogan makes sense to you, that doesn't mean it will (or can, or should) make sense to people who aren't you. If making sense to you and everyone who already agrees with you were enough to change the world, things would be a lot different. Preaching to the choir all day every day may feel good, but it doesn't move the ball forward.
"it’s not enough for a solution to have good intentions. It has to actually be a solution" is the tee-shirt i want to signal my good intentions
What you’re describing sounds a lot like evangelical Christianity: asking questions or raising issues means you’re off the team. That happened to me in evangelical Christianity, and by then I was like, ok bye. Echoes your book title: this whole setup is cultish, and I’m not getting why so many people are either playing along or buying it whole cloth. (Well, I get the playing along part. Protecting the cashola, however meager it may be.)
Exactly this. I've wondered for years if many who advocate for these strategies understand how evangelical their rhetoric is. Sometimes it feels like I got out of the frying pan only to get into the fire.
Absolutely true. I also grew up Evangelical and around the time I saw this similar approach on "the left" (whatever that means anymore) I quickly bailed. Been there, done that.
For me the 'tell' was the suddenness of it all. Everyone from Roger Goodell to Nathan Robinson radically shifted their politics in the same direction over a couple of weeks or so? The only explanations for something like that are that they only had skin-deep beliefs to begin with (surely true for many people) or that the whole thing was propelled by fear and cynicism.
I think you can observe the (rapid) 'diffusion' of this kind of thing by noticing how individual words, e.g. 'grift', appear and then spread thru the members of 'the hive mind'.
'Garner' is one that I have been nauseatingly following for some time now.
"Ghoul" has become extremely popular among the same people who say "grift" constantly
I'm glad I haven't noticed that one! I've mostly avoided 'grift' too tho.
The beauty of preference falsification is that it allows for remarkable ideological flexibility. To misquote the Onion Knight: A month ago they were Robert's men. A week ago they were your brother's. Today they are yours. Whose shall they be on the morrow?
Just wanted to agree that I fucking loath NJR; he is a completely spineless, convictionless weather vane that has never gone against a trend in his life.
I believe the technical term is ‘windsock’.
I think if you break down the metaphor, a windsock always points with the wind but a weather vane points into the wind, which kind of breaks the point I was going for, so I cede to your superior analogy.
More "fucking". Geez. Get a thesaurus.
I'm totally open to edits and ideas. What word would your thesaurus suggest I use instead?
Am I mistaken to think that the term "grift" started in the "alt right vs alt light" fights of 2017 and then spread to the rest of social media?
Dunno! I just know that it suddenly became unavoidable.
Grift now seems to mean "Someone who disagrees with me is making money".
A bit simplistic, and of course there ARE grifters, of all political bents. But like all terms these days, it doesn't matter where it starts. These weapons are spit out onto the floor of social media like the Cornucopia in The Hunger Games. Who ever grabs the weapon first can use it to bludgeon whoever they want.
I noticed it becoming become popular, somewhat ironically, after Matt Taibbi's "Griftopia" book.
This one was incredible. A family members birthday is tomorrow and a subscription will be my gift.
Keep it up. Your ideas (as to content) and your voice (as to style) are a delight.
We're at a point where any politics committed to helping people who are lower-income, or who are slipping from middle-income to lower-income, needs to stop grasping after "the left" for ideological or organizational support. This is quixotic. This is Charlie Brown still trying to kick that football in Lucy's hands. There's a lot of excellent analysis now of why the 21st century left isn't going to provide that support: Catherine Liu, Angela Nagle, Geoff Schullenberger, Wesley Yang, Curtis Yarvin, and many others, have all provided theoretical assessment of what kinds of class interests the left is fighting for. Something new is needed composed of perspectives which are currently misassigned to "radical left" or "radical right."
And yes I mentioned Yarvin! Why not. Freddie, the social-political entity whose hypocrisies you've committed a decade of writing to grappling with is Yarvin's "Cathedral." Other terms (like "PMC") may be preferable for analysis. But it would be fruitful to get people who are, increasingly, seeing the same thing and whose patterns of analysis and thought are swirling around the same vortex to actually mention each other by name, talk to each other, blend terminologies to some extent.
I think I agree generally with what you're saying about getting past left-right reductionism, but my problem is, in terms of actual electoral politics, where on the right do I even go? As I see it:
The small number of Actually Left elected officials: Espouse populism, try (and fail) to pass bills that do populist things
Rank and file Democrats: Pay lip service to populism, uphold corporatism
Manchin Centrists: Totally unclear to me what belief system they're even espousing, uphold corporatism
Republicans: Openly love corporatism, uphold corporatism
"Populist" Republicans: Pay lip service to populism, uphold corporatism in everything they pass except some isolated anti-silicon valley crusades
I've read Nagle, Schullenberger, and Yarvin. Where are their beliefs represented on the actually existant right? Who am I meant to get excited about? People like Cruz or Trump who know if they stoke the culture war stuff, they never have to betray their big business alliances, or blatantly self-interested opportunists like Hawley, or somebody like Rand Paul whose "libertarianism" is about protecting "individual freedom" from government, but not the private powers that are gradually taking its place? (If I'm genuinely missing some real populists I haven't heard of, or at a more local level, please tell me!)
There are more important things than voting. Thinking is more important than voting.
Oh, that's such nonsense. Good grief. Do you really want me to engage with you, or did you just feel an impulsive need to string words together and hit "post"?
As long as this is the answer the right and its politicians offer, you're not going to see the kind of shift or cooperation you want.
Ideally, you'd even think first and *then* vote.
Re: Biased reporting on Amazon, something similar is happening with the Derek Chauvin trial. Reporters know they can't say things like "this one prosecution witness fell apart on cross" because Twitter would melt down and accuse them of siding with the defense.
So if you follow the coverage, it sounds like the prosecution has been perfect while the defense lawyer is an incompetent buffoon. MSNBC has been playing long, moving, effective clips of the prosecution while barely showing anything from the defense. If the verdict isn't murder, people are going to lose it.
I don't have time to watch the trial, so maybe the coverage reflects reality. But there's no way to know how it's really going besides watching every day -- because I know reporters will only say what their audience wants to hear.
I think it is not a good sign that the head of Planned Parenthood apparently feels morally superior to Margaret Sanger and is comfortable using sexist stereotypes to get her point across. I was raised Catholic and while I am not a believer, the keen sense of being always a sinner striving to be better is deep in me. I am incredibly taken aback by how comfortable conscious self-righteousness is for so many on my side of the ideological aisle. Clearly Margaret Sanger had views that I would critique as being unsound and unkind, but I don't feel ashamed to say that she has done a lot more to advance liberation than I ever will. I don't know if it's all cynical, but it is clearly counter productive, and it is pretty infuriating that the people imposing the purity tests are not the ones who stand to lose if it results in a backlash and another resurgence of the right wing. If one side tells you that you that there is "white culture" and it is really terrible and you need to accept that and feel deeply ashamed about it and stop talking and the other side says that there is white culture and it should be the source of deep patriotic pride who is going to win the most white votes? Seems like an insane strategy to build a multiracial coalition to me, especially when lots of white people actual do support racial equity even as they behave in ways that are impacted by racist stereotypes that are deep in American culture.
I agree and it doesn’t seem to be working with non-white people either, if you believe the polling data that showed Latino vote shifts towards Trump in the 2020 election.
Your style continues to be my favorite style. Thank you. This is great. I'm going to use some quotable quotes for my Media Lit course, if that's cool. We are spending a day on "cancel culture" and just the mention of it to my h.s. seniors had them chatting at me via Zoom that there "is no such thing."
Best of luck with your class, hats off to you for being willing to talk about it
Other people have commented on this, but I think you attribute to crass cynicism ("money and pussy") what is more likely (or at least not less likely) due to a subtler, more genteel cynicism: basically, social pressure, the desire to get along with one's peer group, not make waves, not seem to be swimming against the current. Of course, as you point out, we've lined up lots of incentives in favor of wokeness and so it's hard to tease out when someone's hypocrisy is motivated by X rather than Y, and of course it can be both. But the tell for me is that I've seen this same sudden switch even among my peer group on social media, almost none of whom have any plans of monetizing this change in attitude. I myself, in 2017 or so, started coming up with all these rationalizations for why it was *now* okay to use political violence (or at least, wrong to criticize it), why Jesse Singal should probably just hush up about trans issues, etc., before the contradictions with my previous commitments became too glaring and I finally got some sense. I had been deploying my education and powers of reasoning to justify positions I knew deep down weren't justifiable. But I wasn't motivated by a desire to make it in media; I felt scared by the Trump presidency and so I wanted to get along well with people I saw as being on "my side," so I figured, go along to get along.
All good points. But now that Trump is gone (thank God!) what's the current rationalization? I don't doubt Freddie's claim that some people do it to get laid. (People younger than my plus 50 fat butt). But some do it like you say. Just to not make waves. I posted against Trump endlessly. Because I did and still do think he was the worst president ever. And like you he scared me. But he's gone. The election worked like the vaccine. But this curse of "wokism" or "social justice ideology" or the "elect" as John McWhorter calls them, is like the ultimate variant to the virus of Trump.
Or maybe bacteria is a better analogy. All the anti-Trump response, (including mine) was like those anti-bacterial soaps that scientists say might give rise to super bacteria if over used.
This wave of censorious orthodoxy is the flesh-eating bacteria the doctor's warned us about. (Hyperbolic? Shrug.)
I do think that it's hard to cast aside an absolutist ideology once you've adopted one, which is a good reason not to adopt one. I also think that people can be forgiven for not having a "phew, glad THAT'S over with" attitude—between the Trumplike true believers in Congress (Greene, Gosar, Boebert, et al) and the Capitol riot, not to mention events like George Floyd and anti-Asian violence, it certainly doesn't feel like liberalism has won some kind of final victory. Which is not to say that wokeism is therefore vindicated or prudent, just that it's understandable why people aren't coming out of a combat stance.
Insofar as this exists at the rational decision level, I think many people see the wagon circling as a good way to achieve their goals and worth what is (in their mind) a small cost. Perhaps you have to support some nonsense unquestioningly, perhaps you have to join an internet mob once in a while, but the (cultural...only cultural) left presents a cohesive front.
"Did it cross no one’s mind that establishing immense punishments for anyone who steps out of line with social justice orthodoxy ensures that we’ll have a lot of people who dishonestly embrace that orthodoxy in public to protect their selfish interests, in a way that obscures the actual political conditions of our country, leading to dynamics like Trump dramatically outperforming expectations in 2020? "
I wish I had the balls to post this on my Facebook page. I don't. I can't afford to lose my job. It's that simple. I'm still a progressive liberal, but you point out how poisoned the well is better than anyone. I thought this would change with Trump gone.
(SIDE NOTE: I got kicked off of Twitter for calling Trump a retard. Think about he irony of that for a second. Because I attacked the worst president ever with a word that the woke has decided is verboten now. It was a Q-Anon nut who reported me to the Moaists. The woke are literally handing weapons to their enemies. Retards on every fucking side.)
But no. Trump is gone and they're doubling down. Depressing. But you're a ray of light Freddie. Keep doing what you do. (All of it. The personal piece was great too.)
I still remember the time back in middle school when a teacher scolded some kids for saying "that's so gay", so they apologized and said "that's so homosexual" instead, and she walked away pleased with herself.
Oh I know. When I was appealing to Twitter for reinstatement I told them "I wasn't using the word 'retard' as a pejorative. I think the President is literally a retarded person." Needless to say they refused to reinstate me.
In hindsight it's one of the best thing's that's ever happened to me.. Twitter is clearly a modern dayJean Paul Satre's version of hell on earth. Good riddance.
Indeed the left has been brainwashed. But I think we're all brainwashed. I'll admit to still being a "Russia did it" guy. I might be wrong, but if you read the Mueller report, it's not about Trump partying with Putin. That may or may not be true. But Russia does seem to have engaged with a misinformation campaign that effects *everyone*. AntiFa, ProudBoys, BLM, NRA. On and on. Left & right. Divide and conquer. I *do* believe Russia has had a big hand in the very arguments on threads like this.
Now that may all be misinformation and I'm as confused as the Q crowd. But then who's doing this? Who's feeding this Russian mis-info? The CIA?
I dunno.