Lili Loofbourow made a worthwhile contribution to this cursed argument

Why would you refuse to debate someone who's simply saying that All Lives Matter?" is the kind of question an Enlightenment subject longing for a robust exchange of ideas might ask. Well, the reason is that most of us know, through bitter experience, that it's a waste of time.

https://twitter.com/Millicentsomer/status/1281414278407319552

I was going to link 1 but peep has oppressed me.
I, perhaps stupidly, tweet under my own name because I mostly use it for professional purposes or occasional community engagement. The one- really just one!- time I posted something vaguely political that got any visibility someone snitch-tagged my employer within an hour to try to get me in trouble. Twitter is shit and is a net negative in the world, although nowhere near as negative as Facebook is.

Mostly a teapot tempest, but I was surprised, I suppose I shouldn't have been, that so many people's heads exploded over such an anodyne statement.

I was also surprised by a few of the names on the original letter. I don't follow Yglesias very closely, but my impression was that he was firmly in the "cancel culture doesn't exist it's just a bunch of zany college students and doesn't go beyond a few campuses" camp.

Twitter is utter shit, and it does seem to have spawned a subculture of genuine freaks whose hobby is trying to get complete strangers fired.

Why can't they put a dead mouse in their hamburger like normal people?

My problem is that I can't follow any of the dog whistles in the original letter, except maybe the dude who got fired for publishing Tom Cotton's call for fascism? And then I recognize a lot of the names, but they're in that gray area where I can't remember if we loathe them, feel mildly annoyed, feel like they've aged badly, etc. Some of them are outright idiots, identifiable even by me, but I don't know if it's a critical mass or not. And some of them I thought I liked, but I have no idea what they signal politically.

In other words, the link in 1 is correct, and I'm not really able to hang in this discourse.

Because there were no acrimonious arguments on Twitter, hast thou led us here to discuss free speech and cancel culture on Unfogged? wherefore hast thou dealt thus with us, to insist we engage in a discussion lifted from Crooked Timber? Is not this the word that we did tell thee in the archives, saying, Let us alone, that we may talk about procrastination, and the courts, and mild examples of academic silliness? For it had been better for us to procrastinate harmlessly, than that we should engage with horrific Balkanesque conflicts with angry people on social media.

I am astonished that no-longer-young Y persists in the way of the exceptionally face-punchable. Perhaps he can't help it.

There is the problem of online scrums where non-public figures get harassed, fired, etc. Or where stuff is gunned up for real but minor misconduct that has been apologized for, for the sake of harassment - that author who used the Roma slur before knowing it was a slur, and perhaps James Gunn. That all seems so distant from "JK Rowling getting cancelled" or what have you as to be barely worth describing in the same breath.

Yeah, this is an absolutely hopeless conversation to have. At least half of the signatories are the same crowd of bullshitting whiners who have been inventing disingenuous complaints about intolerant leftists for decades now. And while there are a bunch of signatories who don't fall into that category, I don't think there's any useful way to have a conversation about whether they were all haplessly duped or if they sincerely thought there was some genuine problem to be addressed -- it's all too poisoned by the existence of the first category.

I started looking into some of the responses and responses to responses, but they were all taking place on twitter and fortunately I caught myself after a few minutes and dropped the whole thing.

A few years ago I wasted a bunch of time following some dust-up in the SF community that mostly took place on twitter, and at some point I realized that I was being a rube. The whole platform is designed to get you to waste time going down bizarre rabbit holes (and clicking of course) while you try to figure out what the fuck people are talking about.

I've tried to keep that lesson in mind ever since.

In the present case, I also decided to not bother reading anything that looked like a variation on "I know you are but what am I?", and that seems to account for about 95% of it.

People are mad a Rowling because the second Fantastic Beasts was really confusing and hard to fit with the main series?

Here's a response that tries to concretize what instances the letter seems to be referencing (and what it's ignoring): https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice

I was surprised and kind of charmed to find as a signatory (affiliation given as "teacher and writer") a NYC public high school philosophy teacher my kids loved. I googled to make sure there wasn't a more prominent person of the same name, but it was definitely her.

2: Twitter is weird. It seems to be better than Facebook for niche communities, like cardiologists. I mean there are some intense debates about whether critical care fox's should practice standard medicine with COVID patients or that everything is so different that they shouldn't, but the tone is different, and I appreciate being able to read that without joining.

There are wonky policy twitter feeds about things like how Medicare Advantage plans capture risk which mostly seem fine.

Do you find that posting under your real name for professional purposes is useful for networking. I don't want to derail the thread. Yes/No answer would be fine.

And while there are a bunch of signatories who don't fall into that category, I don't think there's any useful way to have a conversation about whether they were all haplessly duped or if they sincerely thought there was some genuine problem to be addressed -- it's all too poisoned by the existence of the first category.

There is clearly a generation gap with the "freedom of speech" issue. Someone who was politically active in the 70s and 80s is accustomed to seeing a threat to free speech from the Religious Right, the Israel lobby, southerners threatening boycotts if a TV show has miscegenation, the military-industrial complex getting you painted as unserious/scary and not worthy to be interviewed in a mainstream media outlet. Nowadays left-wing people don't see speech itself as being threatened, at least in America. We can speak all we want, for whatever good it does. "Free speech" is no longer salient, not something you would go on a march for. The only people under 50 who obsess about being unable to express their beliefs are people who think traditionally subjugated people will gang up pretending to be offended by their defense of traditional status hierarchies and get them fired. Free Speech has never been so unimportant of a cause.

But if you're Noam Chomsky, of course, you're going to speak out in defense of free speech.

The worst part is the ringleaders of The Harper's Letter immediately betrayed all their signatories, waiting about 1 hour before starting a gloating tour reveling in how they had baited everyone into overreacting, and even more cleverly they made the overreacting people look extra unreasonable by overreacting to a list of people containing a bunch of unimpeachable figures in addition to the usual Professional Free Thinkers. Congratulations on bringing everyone down to your level. Now a bunch of internet obsessives have a vague hatred for Salman Rushdie and Bill T. Jones and Nell Irvin Painter because of something that itself is going to be forgotten in a month.

Part of the problem is that "free speech" and other rights in the US are narrowly focused on protections from the government, but in practice the government is far far less relevant than employers. Whereas in Western Europe there's less absolute "free speech" rights, but more freedom of speech in practice because there's no at-will employment.

I do think this is the sort of thing that will get a lot of people to stop doing guilt by association all the time. It's a way to paint your opponent in political campaigns, not a way to orient your own mind for God's sake.

Get mad at someone for saying "J.K. Rowling is my friend and whatever she says is fine by me", sure. You can see that person as having taken a side against you. Get mad at someone for putting five minutes of thought into signing something that J.K. Rowling also signed? Are you going to have anyone left who you like?

Did signers know it was intended for Harpers? I feel like that should have been a clear red flag that it wasn't in good faith.

Boy, I don't think this is going to make people do guilt by association less.

15.1: At least one exception, the attempts to legally punish BDS.

Also I think four states still have "no promo homo" laws for schools.

Here's a response that tries to concretize what instances the letter seems to be referencing (and what it's ignoring): https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice

Thanks, I was hoping to find something like that.

Yeah, this is an absolutely hopeless conversation to have.

There is a way-too-broad discussion of free speech which is mostly hopeless. But, the subsequent developments, since I sent the post to HG, have made me think there are some specific issues around the way in which the reactions to the letter have played out which are still messy, but worth digging into. I'm thinking of the harassment">https://twitter.com/emilyvdw/status/1281153701290274819">harassment Emily VanDerWerff has received in response to her tweet, which is both predictable and informative.

Working up a longer comment on that . . .

Raw milk people?

Bleh: Description by Emily of her experience.

Boy, I don't think this is going to make people do guilt by association less.

I agree completely.

Anyway, I think it is unseemly and generally unproductive to punch down over these issues. I'm fine with punching up and usually fine with lateral punching.

Up/Down is probably not simple to determine in all cases, but really if you've made billions because millions of nerds liked what you wrote, it's really petty to feel oppressed by those nerds when they don't like something else you did.

The Yglesias / Vanderwerff dispute is a perfect contrast. Vanderwerff wrote an open letter to Yglesias's bosses to say "I don't want Matt to be punished, but I want you to realize that nobody at Vox should do what he did and it made me feel unsafe". Now, that does seem like an effort to get him punished, whatever clauses are attached to it. Which is the sort of thing the Professional Free Thinkers are afraid of - having someone go through the proper channels to get you punished by your workplace. They say "Oh, it must be nice to not be worried about losing your livelihood. We're the ones taking risks here."

Then of course Vanderwerff was harassed by an internet mob of maniacs. Which is actually more frightening?

In private life "Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them."
"Men are afraid women will get them fired. Women are afraid men will kill them."

Boy, I don't think this is going to make people do guilt by association less.

Yeah. The only real outcome of this is going to be lot of people deciding that it's yet more proof that everything they already believe is correct.

Longer comment ---

My context for the whole debate is primarily recognizing a bunch of name associated with vox, who I positive associations with -- I recognize and like the writing of both Yglesias and Emily VDW. And this whole back-and-forth has definitely produced intra-Vox drama, which has gotten coverage from Fox News and the National Review (who, needless to say, are not trying to be helpful.

Seeing that happen makes me reflect on some (vague) parallels with the discussions on unfogged about trans issues.

I don't think it's a coincidence that, of the many people who have objected to the letter, the one which would blow up, and expand beyond twitter is a response posted by a trans woman. The people who have jumped on Emoly VDW argue that they are reacting to the fact that she sent something to HR at the organization, and that seemed like an escalation -- despite her repeated comments that she was not seeking to have Yglesias punished. On the other hand, I think the reaction demonstrates both a fair amount of transphobia, and something about the discourse around trans rights.

I think a lot of people both don't like trans people, and specifically don't like trans people asserting that they have a direct personal interest (and suffer harm) from the debates that happen about trans rights.

I find myself about 90% in sympathy with Emily VDW and Aja Romano. I think it is good that they have spoken up, I don't think they deserve to be harassed, and I think much of the blowback they've gotten is willful misreading of their position, and I think it is important and says positive things about diversity at Voc that there were 3 trans Vox writers who could speak up against the Harper's letter and support each other.

I also think that one dynamic which increases the amount of heat in the debate is the questions of, "how do we tell if something is addressing Trans issues or not? Aja Romano wrote, "The Harper's letter is a dehumanizing transphobic whisper network masquerading as reasoned intellectual debate. Everyone who signed it has contributed to the real harm that its legion of transphobic signatories have brought to real trans people, especially teens." and many of the responses are, "wait, what?"

Emily VDW elaborated on her reading of the letter, and started off by saying:

I absolutely see why that does not read as particularly anti-trans to a cis person! It just seems like vague support of free speech and a vigorous exchange of ideas, right?

Believe me, I get it! (continued)

I think part of the debate is that it is absolutely valuable to hear trans people saying, "this is how it sounds to me, and here's why . . . " but there's also a lot of reaction of people who do not think that reading the letter through a trans perspective is the best or primary way to understand what the subject of the letter is.

I understand the reluctance that I've described in 29.last. That's the 10% that I feel myself resisting. But, on that topic, I think John Holbo makes good comments in the thread linked in the OP.

... If you want a world in which a good faith argument is possible between Rowling and her critics (which I do!) 19/

work to bring about a world in which there is less bad-faith arguing from the right on trans rights. Let me be very specific about that. The bad faith arguments all have the same form. They are what I call 'downstream worries' arguments. If 'trans rights are human rights' 20/

we have pronoun trouble, or need new norms for bathrooms or women's sports or in womens' shelters. Or philosophical ideas about the metaphysics of gender will be problematized. All this is true and some of it may get bumpy. But there's really no point arguing about it 21/

without a high baseline of initial acceptance of trans rights. If trans rights are human rights, how are we going to run sports/use pronouns? But the bad faith arguers are not willing to debate the antecedent honestly. They have a sense they'll lose, and they are right. 22/

We've all tried to get Matt fired at one time or another, but his views on zoning and housing construction have won me over.

I'd argue that there's a lot of overlap between the John Hoblo comments quoted above and this Aja Romano thread.

There's a giant complicating factor in terms of any public conversation involving trans issues, that there's so much irrational anti-trans hostility out there, that once trans issues are salient you're going to get horrible abusive people showing up in support of whatever side they perceive as anti-trans regardless of the specific subject matter of the conversation.

That was me.

I agree with 33, and in 29, I was trying to say that anti-trans sentiment is the biggest reason why Emily VDW received so much harassment, and there are some interesting dynamics that are worth teasing out (even if, in practice, those are not determinative).

Again, I think having a productive or interesting conversation about this is hopeless. These are the sorts of issues that I enjoy picking over generally, but this specific situation is completely pre-poisoned.

On the intra-Vox angle, there's also some weird thing going on where there's a prior intra-Vox controversy (around the same time as the big NYTimes op-ed blowup, but I think unrelated) which resulted in Yglesias changing his opinion on cancel culture and resulted in him signing this statement, but which there seems to be no public information about if you're not on Vox slack. That's what's being referred to in the Yglesias/Klein exchange. I'm assuming someone tried to Yglesias fired over a bad tweet, and didn't actually get him fired but he got some kind of strong warning that he might get fired if it happens again, but it's all subtext so I'm not sure.

Sorry those should all be inter- not intra-, right?

No, maybe they're right... Interstate system. Interstate commerce.

I don't want to have this conversation (nationally) before the election because I want people thinking of Trump's record and not about things other people night be doing with their genitals.

No, intra is right. You're talking about stuff that seems to be going on entirely inside Vox, and just leaking out weirdly.

And I have a gossipy interest in the Vox situation, but there doesn't seem to be enough public to talk about.

These are the sorts of issues that I enjoy picking over generally, but this specific situation is completely pre-poisoned.

Maybe . . . .

It was important to me to think through and say the comments in 29-32, but I'm not planning on saying more unless it's something that other people find interesting and respond to.

Vox needs a more absorbent human resources department?

14.last- no, but I only rarely use it to post things, mostly I find other interesting people to read via scientists I follow. A number of people in my field do use it successfully to network or self-promote.

45: Thanks.

The Vox thing is interesting in the sense that journalism in general seems to be experiencing some sort of collective meltdown lately, and this provides at least a small glimpse into what's going on.

A former journalist noted how much of it comes down to money. With staff cuts most people apparently have so many deadlines that there's no time to go out and do traditional journalist stuff (e.g., fact check, interview multiple people & etc). The easiest way to meet the ever increasing deadlines is to do stories that don't involve leaving your desk, and "here's some stuff on the internet someone has opinions on" becomes the default. Hence, increasingly crappy journalism.

Random thought about twitter, as someone who likes long rambling conversations in blog comments. Tweeting something that sparks a lot of engagement in the form of textual responses is the definition of fucking up: more replies than likes is the "ratio". This doesn't mean anything specific other than that it's kind of why I find twitter unsympathetic.

Why did I put quotes around ratio? Working from home for four months has melted my brain.

Twitter is horrible. I still read some streams, but never log in.

The letter was entirely in bad faith, signers names were not disclosed to other signers, or worse when asked they were provided a list including LGBTQ/POC writers but not bad faith trolls like Jesse Singal.
Some good takes, context:

https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/status/1280859257970159618

https://twitter.com/djw172/status/1281256832313393152

https://twitter.com/ajaromano/status/1280860080318091264

https://twitter.com/mrdavidwhitley/status/1280798659848830976

https://twitter.com/AsteadWesley/status/1280510062751035395

There's a general phenomenon of "financialization" where most people at most jobs used to primarily be concentrating on doing a good job making a product, and only a small subset was concentrating on profit as-such, but now that it's easier to get data everyone is working on profit-as-such and all products suck.

51: Vox has three trans writers? How many people work there? I feel so old and out-of-touch.

genuine freaks whose hobby is trying to get complete strangers fired.

Maybe the real problem all along is at-will employment.

47: Much as conversations in New York City tend to blur into "Money money money money money, etc.," journalism, even in the rare print edition of a newspaper or magazine that I get my grubby hands on, increasingly tend to blur into "Twitter Facebook Instagram Netflix repeat."

At least Bret Stephens doesn't seem to have signed the original letter.

One obvious breakdown in the news industry and employment norms overall is that the more you are paid the more secure your job is when you fuck up and it should be the exact opposite. In theory you're highly paid because you take responsibility when things go wrong at the organization and it's ultimately your job to avoid problems and fix things, not to mention the fact that if you're getting paid seven figures you can handle being briefly out of work a lot better than a reporter who was making $35k. Bennet's firing was shocking because it was long overdue and no one believed it could actually happen- he was a made man at the Times and heir apparent to executive editor.
That responsibility is what the well-off letter signers fear, whether in employment or social reputation. Rowling, Sullivan, Brooks, Gladwell will still have plenty of people kissing their asses even if a million people on twitter call them bigoted fuckwads, regardless of how much they mess up the lives of the powerless.

I count 110 people on the Vox masthead, a lot of them podcast (a lot of them are video or Recode people to be fair). But Vox didn't start small, it was always a fairly big operation.

In case there were any doubt, the National Review has published a defense of the letter and Yggles which deadnames Emily VanDerWerff. Fuck these disingenuous assholes.

57 is so very right.

I'm guessing Vox make all their money from podcasts and youtube and the Netflix show, and the writing is just a source of content and views for the money making bits. I know they're more popular than sites you hear more from, but they've never had a lot of ads as far as I can remember, and doesn't seem to have any ads at all now?

One obvious breakdown in the news industry and employment norms overall is that the more you are paid the more secure your job is when you fuck up and it should be the exact opposite. In theory you're highly paid because you take responsibility when things go wrong at the organization and it's ultimately your job to avoid problems and fix things, not to mention the fact that if you're getting paid seven figures you can handle being briefly out of work a lot better than a reporter who was making $35k.

This is the source of the nervous breakdown. Some people are resigned to the idea that if they lose their job they will never get another one, and would see losing their job as a tragedy second only to death. Some people are resigned to the idea that they WILL lose their job no matter what happens, so they spend their time shitposting and starting feuds as if they were still 20 years old. A few people respond by trying to build an independent brand so they can theoretically survive if they lose their job, if they're lucky. All of this is exactly like academia.

I count 110 people on the Vox masthead, a lot of them podcast (a lot of them are video or Recode people to be fair). But Vox didn't start small, it was always a fairly big operation.

And that's just the people at Vox qua Vox. Vox employees also includes Polygon, SB Nation, Eater, etc.

Vanderwerff wrote an open letter to Yglesias's bosses to say "I don't want Matt to be punished, but I want you to realize that nobody at Vox should do what he did and it made me feel unsafe". Now, that does seem like an effort to get him punished, whatever clauses are attached to it.

I understand that reaction, but I read the letter as saying, "one element of harm that is being done is that Matt is a prominent figure and people often think that his views reflect the views of Vox as an entity." That is a harm which can be addressed without punishing Matt, simply by having public acknowledgement of Vox being supportive of people who disagree with the letter.

51: Vox has three trans writers?

I am hurt that you reference Barry; the same information (and tweet) was in 29.

I'm guessing Vox make all their money from podcasts and youtube and the Netflix show . . .

I noticed that one of the signers of the letter Minivet posted in 12 was Carlos Maza who had worked doing video for Vox but has left. I don't know if there's any significance to those tea leaves.

62: Indeed. Job wars are what most of this is about. It's no accident that so much of this stuff is concentrated among younger journalists.

Over the last 10 years or so journalists (at least in the US) have become one of the most homogeneous groups on the planet. The downwardly mobile children of the upper middle class who all went to the same 15-20 schools and could all afford to do the same unpaid internships.

These people know that their prospects of entering the UMC world they thought they belonged in by right are dwindling fast, and they're fighting like rabid weasels over the few opportunities that are left.

Ditto with a few modifications for academia.

64.2 Eh? I posted that before reading through the whole thread.

The whole letter is just an exercise in weaponizing people who are not Very Online. It's obvious that a lot of the people who signed it (Chomsky, for instance) don't understand the milieu, so they think they're supporting a sincere exchange of arguments between equal speakers. A lot of them, like Chomsky IMO, really aren't particularly caught up in current political discourse about civil rights, so their model is pretty much "we should be able to debate science and religion and US military engagement" when what this is really about is "should Jesse Singal be highly paid to publish hateful and misleading stuff about trans people".

The whole thing is rooted in contagion from the UK, in my opinion - the increasing insanity of straight, white, aflluent women who hate trans people and are secretly pretty uncomfortable with gay people. And that in itself I think flows from a media environment even smaller and more nepotistic than in the US - a few well-off, connected women were sort of the gamer-gaters of the UK.

An awful lot of the "whhhhhhyyy can't we have free speech" stuff on the internet right now can be traced to anti-trans activists. They hate Twitter in particular because Twitter has been instrumental in connecting trans people and, especially in the US, really changing norms around gender. If it's an unfair fight - ie, if you're a wealthy transphobe who gets published in the UK Guardian - you can win pretty easily because the UK Guardian isn't going to publish anything to contradict you. But if just any old trans person can be funny on Twitter and reach a huge audience and your purse-mouthed, mean-mom style doesn't win you friends, what you do is attack social media, because social media is where you lose.

In a way it's a bit like the rise of the white supremacist right - the liberal and left-liberal worlds didn't understand what was happening because they weren't familiar with the networks that were operating behind the scenes, and so they didn't believe it was happening. A lot of people don't understand how determined (though small and IMO likely to lose) anti-trans movement among affluent white people actually is, and I don't think that liberals/left-liberals understand how this movement is also an anti-gay movement that advocates for a lot of anti-woman stuff.

And many of those liberals and left-liberals just went ahead and signed the letter, just as they advocated against censoring white supremacists, etc.

64.2 Eh? I posted that before reading through the whole thread.

Not you, I was responding (in a petty manner) to 53 which referenced your comment when I had mentioned the same thing earlier.

In my partial defense, 29 was a very long comment...

To the OP I wish I could say I'm disappointed in hilzoy but we had a bit of a back and forth on twitter awhile back where she totally justified the Iraq war on grounds of procedural liberalism. My takeaway was she'd justify another Holocaust if it met the ground rules of process and procedural liberalism. I like her and her input generally but yeah, more than a bad taste in my mouth over that.

You're fine, I was being petty.

The only reason I said anything was that it is disappointing to write a long comment which feels important and have people skip over it, but that's inevitable.

Frowner's 67 is on target.

lol Nick, much love. Like your comments as always.

lol Nick, much love. Like your comments as always.

Ditto. Also, your story about Hilzoy is disappointing, but interesting. I took her thread as mostly supporting the idea that the way in which the letter was pitched to people was somewhat disingenuous (i.e, that the letter was presented to her as something anodyne and non-controversial).

70: Boy, I wouldn't say she'd "justify another Holocaust" about almost anyone, and particularly not Hilzoy. That seems like a lousy thing to say unless you are really convinced it's true.

Then we need to ask Nick why he's on good terms with someone who minimizes the Holocaust.

Then we need to ask Nick why he's on good terms with someone who minimizes the Holocaust.

It's all connections. I'm friends of a friend with her father's cousin.

This must be the twitter conversation Barry's talking about, and wow do I think he read it oddly. https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1037430754052112384?s=21

74: I don't quite get the people who are implying that they were somehow tricked into signing the letter unless the text was changed after they signed it, which no one has claimed.

Either they read the letter or they didn't. If they didn't then it's their own fault for endorsing something they didn't read. If they did read it and agreed with it then...? I haven't heard anyone say they were promised to get the names of every other person signing it before it was published.

And "I thought it would be uncontroversial" seems disingenuous. Everyone should know by now that the words "free speech" will reliably cause a certain segment of the internet to flip out. Of course it was going to be controversial.

I think to read it as specifically anti-trans, which is the issue that makes people perceive signing it as wrong rather than at worst pointless, you needed the signatories -- that wasn't an interpretation you could get to from just the text.

80: And again, this is why it's about weaponization. Just as white supremacists weaponize, eg, certain kinds of humor so that they can say they're "just kidding" and "of course an igloo doesn't mean white supremacy", the people who organize this kind of "free speech" letter weaponize the good will of others whom they know to be unfamiliar with the issue. It's like getting people to write a letter in support of apple pie without mentioning that you own an apple orchard where you abuse your workers.

78 My takeaway was she'd justify the Iraq war on those grounds. And anything else if it mets them.

Well, I think we can put this whole issue to rest now. William Shatner came out in support of the Harper's letter on twitter. When you've lost Captain Kirk...

78 I'm going to have to read (re-read) that later, when I'm tobally soter.

82: Right, and that's wrong in a thread where she's specifically (a) reiterating her actual opposition to the Iraq war and (b) talking about the kind of extreme circumstances where she would walk away from her adherence to norms of procedural liberalism. Saying someone would justify the Holocaust is a really, really intense thing to say if you're not dead certain you understood them correctly, and I'm pretty sure you misunderstood something here.

The best single line pushback on the letter that I saw was pointing out that the letter says that the actual facts of the specific cited incidents don't matter. That's ridiculous.

Getting rid of at will employment is a really good idea.

It's after the letter, but I just recently saw a criticism on FB of the firing of that 'I Feel Threatened!' guy in the viral Cosco mask video. Is a 17 second video enough to fire someone? I suppose I'd let that go to a jury. From the video, he certainly didn't seem like anyone I'd want to have around, and if the conduct was in anyway similar to anything else about the guy, well, easy to blame Twitter and just let him go.

...I read the letter as saying, "one element of harm that is being done is that Matt is a prominent figure and people often think that his views reflect the views of Vox as an entity."
Seems like she could've said that without invoking her safety or involving HR.

What a thoughtful thread, 29, 52,57,62,65,67 are all really good points.

My only insights to downward-mobility induced problems are pretty remote, don't think they'd add much.

As UPETGI and others said, there *is* a very real, legitimate issue that this touches on, but it's about the monstrosity of at-will employment, not "cancel culture" as such, and the signatories with actual power & influence have no desire to touch that.

But as Minivet said in 8, the anti-cancel-culture crowd is (sometimes intentionally) conflating two very different phenomena.

1- Online-mobs-trying-to-get-people-fired-for-online-stuff is real, mostly comes from the right, is mostly a threat to mid-level people or non-entities, but can only *actually* be defended against by robust employment protections, rather than trying to convert everyone to Millian liberalism.

2- Most of the signatories are really bothered by something entirely different, which I take Frowner, Academic Lurker, SP, and Cryptic Ned to be getting at: establishment figures terrified that they might actually be held to account for their mediocrity, if only to the extent of twitter teens laughing at them.

3- Then there are some who are just bone-deep tone-policer, who fundamentally think a senator calling for military suppression of dissent, but without using any bad words, is part of free speech in a way that calling that senator a fascist is not, with the latter completely out of bounds. This intersects with #2, but is also a sincerely held belief of people without any personal stake in it.

Here's a piece by a signatory who asked for her name to be withdrawn after she saw the full list of signatories: https://medium.com/@luciamv/trying-failing-trying-again-bb6e6a9f1f83

Her reasons for signing originally don't seem to me to fall into any of those categories.

85 Like I said, I'm going to have to review that when I'm sober but it seemed to me that she did/could/would justify the Iraq war on grounds of procedural liberalism. And once you've gone there another Holocaust is but a jump skip.

I'm going to have to take that up with Nick also.

The most surprising signatory for me was Jeet Heer because he is extremely online and has been consistently anti-anti-cancel culture.

Here's his explanation https://www.thenation.com/article/society/left-free-speech-harpers/

93: His was one of the names besides Yglesias that made me do a double take.

I think if I'd been asked about the letter I'd have assumed that it was about how you should be allowed to speculate about mildly racist stuff without getting criticized, like in the "We write with grave concerns" letter to the AMS that all the famous people signed. Trans issues never would have crossed my mind.

Obviously more people worry about the AMS than worry about Harry Potter. But you have to figure that at least sometimes it's not about the mathematicians.

I gotta say, the David Shor firing really is weird.

54 is entirely correct and that's all I have to say.

Here's his explanation https://www.thenation.com/article/society/left-free-speech-harpers/

That seems like a good statement, thanks.

I gotta say, the David Shor firing really is weird.

Agreed. The summary in the letter that Minivet linked seems accurate, but unsatisfying.

The signatories claim that a researcher was "fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study." This is likely about David Shor, who tweeted a summary of an academic paper by Professor Omar Wasow and was then fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research firm. It could very well be true that Shor was fired for posting the study. The facts of the situation are unclear and the company has said it will not comment on personnel matters. If Shor was fired simply for posting an academic article, that is indefensible, and anomalous.

And again, this is why it's about weaponization. Just as white supremacists weaponize, eg, certain kinds of humor so that they can say they're "just kidding" and "of course an igloo doesn't mean white supremacy", the people who organize this kind of "free speech" letter weaponize the good will of others whom they know to be unfamiliar with the issue.

This is smart and helpful.

Reading the thread linked in 1, it makes a similar point.

It wouldn't be a true exchange. We know by now what "All Lives Matter" signals and that what it signals is orthogonal to what it says. Your fluency in this garbage means you take shortcuts: you don't have to refute the text to leap to the subtext, which is the real issue.

To outsiders, that leap will look nuts. That's obviously what all the coded Nazi shit is for and about--the 14 words, the numbers, the OK hand sign that both is and isn't a white power sign, the Boogaloo junk. They're all ways to divorce surface meaning from intentional subtext.

Yes, this is bad for discourse! Yes, it inhibits intellectual exchange! Yes, it makes productive dissensus almost impossible. But that's not because of "cancel culture" or "illiberalism." It's because in this discourse environment, good faith engagement is actually maladaptive.

It's possible and likely that knowledge gaps between people who are online too much and folks who aren't are making things worse. If Atwood (or whoever) isn't online much, she might be shocked to see people accuse a nice-looking boy in a Hawaiian shirt of wanting a 2nd civil war.

It might indeed look like cancel culture gone mad. He's just standing there! Civilly! Offering support to Black Lives Matter protesters, of all things! Can't we all, whatever our disagreements, come together in support of a good cause?

It's *also* possible that people who've learned to read *through* stuff (to whatever bummer of a subtext we're used to finding there) sometimes overdo it. Some of us might reflexively ignore the actual text--fast-forwarding to the shitty point we "know" is coming even if it isn't

100: Multiple people have been fired for making the "OK" sign, despite the fact that most people who don't spend at least 15 hours a day on the internet have never heard of the idea that it's really a soooper sekret white power symbol.

As for the "Hawaiian shirts = Hitler" garbage, who had ever heard of this until some jackass at the New York Times decided to signal boost it? And how long before some freak tries to get someone fired based on this?

Honestly, if folks want to convince non-insane people that left cancel culture really is a threat, keep pushing this "Some right winger somewhere allegedly did some totally innocuous thing so now everyone else has to stop doing it or we'll try to get you fired" line, it's a sure winner.

90: Her reasons for signing originally don't seem to me to fall into any of those categories.

Yes, that's true, I forgot at least a few:

4- People concerned that "cancel-culture", as a discourse, a habit of responding to utterances, is an unproductive transformation of politics into performances of personal purity that are generally toxic for group dynamics and for personal mental health. Some variants of this: leftists worried about its effects on The Left; academics worried about its effect on academia; people specifically worried for The Youth. These are usually sincere, probably correct to worry, but by and large hijacked by or hitched to the agendas of #2 & #3 in ways that are unhelpful for addressing #4, because #4 is mostly about *specific* institutional or group dynamics, even if it plays out online.

5- People worried about stuff like what happened to VDW, above in 27--basically, that women with opinions online get buried in harassment, death threats, etc. This can intersect with #1 but needn't, and the "abolish at-will employment" doesn't address it, because that doesn't get at 1000 random shitposters being horrible. This is really about platforms, how they deal with (or are forced to deal with) harassment, and thinking about it in terms of "defending free speech" is not very helpful here. The Bret Bedbugs of the world try desperately to conflate this issue with their own situation, #2, but it's quite different.

6- Dedicated right-wing grievance merchants, just playing a new remix of Political Correctness Is Fascism from the 80s and 90s.

But anyway, this only strengthens my point, which is that there are a lot of very different phenomena being mixed together here, mostly intentionally and in bad faith by people in categories 2, 3, and 6.

95: The other thing is that the UK TERFS have a lot of ties to the US far right. I don't have time to look it all up now, but some of them have gotten funding from the US and there's a lot of background meetings at conferences, etc.

Anti-trans activism is a reservoir of far-right sentiment and, like a reservoir of virus, it will keep infecting the rest of society.

I think there are several reasons for this, the least important being the most theory-y.

The most important is the way internet networks have developed. There's already a lot of self-sustaining connections in place, there are a lot of affluent and connected "respectable" people who don't froth at the mouth about Blue Lives Mattering but who can back a lot of other people who are worse, etc. In this sense, it doesn't "matter" that it's trans issues; the networks of people-with-bullshit-grievances are strong enough and provide enough emotional and social engagement that the actual topic isn't what motivates people per se.

Also, anti-trans politics are a way for rich white women* to exercise their bigotry while still feeling feminine/respectable/feminist-in-a-self-serving-way. If you're a rich white woman and you start laying out serious "I hate POC and gays" bigotry, you'll lose friends - maybe not as many friends as you should, but you'll lose them. If you tremblingly allow as how you're just scared of a man in a dress attacking you in the bathroom, a lot of people will take what you have to say at face value, especially because people of good faith pay attention to women's fears of assault. Twitter is a huge problem for transphobes partly because a lot of people who don't know any trans people in real life know some on the internet and are therefore less likely to fall for the MAN in a DRESS line.

Anti-trans politics are also a way to introduce anti-gay and anti-feminist ideas, and that's happening. At first, when people said, "Transphobia really leads to anti-gay and anti-woman sentiment" I didn't believe them, because many of these mumsnet women seemed vaguely feminist in the "a woman can be PM!!!" and "I don't want my daughters to be limited by sexism" way. But I've definitely seen more and more conventional gender stuff coming from transphobes - that childbirth is a woman's most important experience, that "real" women look a certain way**, that gay people in general are "too sexual", that open sexual expression is ipso facto Bad For The Children***.

Alignments that we used to take for granted are changing and it is becoming possible to combine a right-wing view of gender expression and sexuality with feminist-esque views on cis women's place in politics and economics. We're in the midst of a huge political realignment in general and as with the rise of the nazi right, it's hard to recognize while it's happening.

A good way to keep your finger on the pulse, IMO, is to follow a lot of the anti-Nazi twitters - Left Coast Right Watch, Minnesota Antifa, Unicorn Riot, etc. They routinely report on and identify white supremacists and in general also retweet stuff about gender and sexuality, and starting with them will help build your twitter stream around these issues. The key part is that there are networks of fascists/TERFs actively organizing and largely invisible if you're mostly seeing the relatively respectable Harper's world, or even the good old "progressive" world of the Nation, Mother Jones, etc. Stuff is a lot scarier even than it seems right now.

*Normally I'm suspicious of discourse that's all "white women in particular are the villains" because where there are villainous white women there are generally also villainous white men. But if you look at the UK Guardian and Mumsnet in particular, you find that this is a white women-led project that is not obviously and immediately of the far right. Seriously, the UK Guardian is insane on this topic - a little less than in the past, but as recently as a year ago they were running obsessive coverage about a couple of trans women who had committed crimes - article after article about unpleasant but not really unusual criminality.

**And lest you think "but I usually automatically and unthinkingly assess gender by face-shape, skin texture, facial-hair-if-any, etc and so you sort of can tell at least cis people's gender this way", I am here to tell you that my gender confuses people all the time, and I am not taking testosterone. I have an oval face and no facial hair and when I look at photos of myself with cis men, to myself I do not look "like a man". I also, even in a compressive garment, have visible breasts (because TBH the really effective binders compress the lungs and you can't work out in them comfortably). And yet a lot of people don't in fact think "oval face, breasts, no beard, lady"; they think "short hair, button-front shirt, must be a man...or?"

***As a prude, I'd have a bit more sympathy with this except that I live in a fairly large city and have visited, eg, San Francisco, and you have to seek out very specific GLBTQ spaces to see all the stuff that people think of as "too sexual". Don't go to Sexy Queer Burlesque BDSM Night and it won't happen to you.

People concerned that "cancel-culture", as a discourse, a habit of responding to utterances, is an unproductive transformation of politics into performances of personal purity that are generally toxic for group dynamics and for personal mental health.
This is where I'm at. Not the most important issue, and maybe CC is the best 2nd best solution possible, but it's frustating.

103: Jezebel just had an article about that connection.

Alignments that we used to take for granted are changing and it is becoming possible to combine a right-wing view of gender expression and sexuality with feminist-esque views on cis women's place in politics and economics. We're in the midst of a huge political realignment in general and as with the rise of the nazi right, it's hard to recognize while it's happening.

A head scratcher like that for me is that the parliamentary leader of the German right-wing party AfD, is an out lesbian in a partnership with two children. I could see her being a member of a liberal party like FDP, but AfD?

an out lesbian in a partnership with two children

Fascism, bigamy, and pederasty.

106:

I think these realignments happen when people decide that certain battles aren't worth fighting anymore and that it's better to make new coalitions that will help further the goals they really care about.

60s republicans were horrified by the hippies both for their far left affinities and for their awful sex drugs and rock & roll. 80s republicans of the yuppie/corporate stripe found that sex drugs and rock & roll were actually just fine since they could be easily combined with "I don't want to pay taxes and greed is good".

I think we're seeing a similar shift with gays and lesbians and a few other issues. Except for a shrinking segment of the religious right, conservatives are deciding that that ship has sailed and remaining hung up on it is just a distraction.

Old friend of the blog and now podcasting superstar Rotten in Denmark weighs in -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/cancel-culture-harpers-jk-rowling-scam_n_5f0887b4c5b67a80bc06c95e

18 is very well observed.

I believe that I first read about Twitter in the comments of Unfogged over a decade ago. I thought it sounded like the most absurd thing ever, so imagine my surprise when a few years later it became (and has mostly remained) my main point of contact with the internet. It's not that my first reaction was wrong, I suppose, I just needed my brain to rot a bit more to get the appeal. Reading Unfogged comments steadily for the past few weeks for the first time in years, I've been disappointed by my inability to mash a little star underneath them.

My main reaction to the letter and the discussion about it, apart from a thought similar to 18, was it provided a number of names and accounts to mute and block. Useful in that way.

OT: Roger Stone is not going to prison.

I will provide yet another Twitter thread that I think provides a good framing of the discussion. It is from Regina Rini who has not someone I had ever heard of. So far it is the best thing I've read on the whole fucking thing.

My attempt to capture her thrust by a few key excerpts::
Our debate about debating - what it's good for, when to pursue it - has become painfully confused, as that Harper's letter shows.
First, distinguish two theses:
GENERAL: It's best if our social norms permit open discussion of disagreeable topics, with some exceptions.
EXCEPT: Here are the exceptions: {X, Y, ... }
Almost everyone agrees on GENERAL, including the need for exceptions. For instance, we all agree that it's good to have norms against excessive discussion of the private family lives of ordinary people. Otherwise we'd have no privacy.
The problems come in specifying the list of EXCEPT. Along with privacy-protection, we tend to agree that libelous falsehoods and direct incitements to violent harm shouldn't be welcomed. But after that, we start disagreeing about what else to add.
...
Here's the trick that some are trying to pull: they refuse to acknowledge that their dispute is a dispute about *which* version of EXCEPT we should endorse. They pretend that it's really a fight over GENERAL - the thing everyone agrees about.

I will provide yet another Twitter thread that I think provides a good framing of the discussion.

That is smart and, shockingly, the responses to her twitter thread are mostly reasonable as well -- it actually is a good faith, public discussion of a difficult and sensitive subject (and what a fragile thing that is. I suspect that if she was somebody who was already twitter-famous, there wouldn't be space for the same back-and-forth in the thread).

In fact that makes me think that there may be a natural tendency for reasonable debate to break down as it becomes visible to more people (not an original idea, but one that I hadn't been thinking about relative to this discussion) and that part of what made the golden days of blogging great was that it was a niche activity.

I was thinking of a taxonomy similar to 89, and mainly agree, but would add that

1- Online-mobs-trying-to-get-people-fired-for-online-stuff

isn't a category that can be easily put to one side but, being the point at which the often shoddy anti-cancel-culture argument is prima facie strongest, is pretty central to the underlying dispute, even if it's as much a right-wing tactic as a woke one. Basically, it's reasonable to fear losing your livelihood because of a mistake, to a degree that isn't reasonable to fear purely online denunciation. Another aspect of this is that arguing that few people actually end up getting fired (as the link at 12 did) misses the point that even if you beat the rap you didn't beat the ride (the ride being not the denunciation per se but the fear of being out of a job).

https://twitter.com/JonathanHorowi1/status/1280515383418634246?s=19. I liked that. Saw it maybe in a link in the OP? This thread (and a few drinks) has degraded my ability to use HTML tags. Sorry. I also liked 112.

Looking at the original text of the letter itself, it's hard for me to imagine a journalist, acting in good faith, could sign it. Activists can maybe be forgiven for doing something this dumb, and some folks on the left are just dumb this way. (Steinem has not always practiced sterling judgment, and Chomsky probably understands the implications of the letter and agrees.)

But I am at a loss to understand Katha Pollit being there. And Jesus, what in the world was Dahlia Lithwick thinking? Some trusted friend must have encouraged her to sign.

You expect this kind of shit from Jon Chait (who, oddly, is absent from the list). But Michelle Goldberg? Are you kidding me? She wrote a terrific, somewhat ambivalent piece that ultimately was clear on why Tom Cotton ought not be in the New York Times. Key quote:l

But as I've seen my colleagues' anguished reaction, I've started to doubt my debating-club approach to the question of when to air proto-fascist opinions.

And Goldberg clearly elucidates the same point made in 112:

So the value of airing Cotton's argument has to be weighed against the message The Times sends, in this incendiary moment, by including it within the bounds of legitimate debate. Everyone agrees that The Times draws those boundaries. The question is where.

Good journalists are extraordinarily careful about language. You just can't sign a letter that tries to suggest that the threat from the left (which, you know, barely exists) is at all meaningful during the presidency of Donald Trump. From the letter:

The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

"All sides." Are you fucking kidding me?

I will confess there was a time when I said dumb shit like this:

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

Well, no. Tolerance for indecency is what produced Trump. And "trying to silence or wish them away" are approaches that are opposites - trying to silence fascism isn't at all the same thing as pretending it doesn't exist.

Who is your most disappointing signee? Lithwick is at the top of my list. I think Yglesias may actually believe this bullshit, but Lithwick had to have been conned into signing. Right?

Another way of putting 115 is that formulations you see on the right like "And then they came for J K Rowling..." wouldn't have the perceived bite they do if not for the idea that 'they' are 'coming' to do more than give you a stern dressing-down.

78 It's this: https://twitter.com/hilzoy/status/1037448077421015040

And I remembered incorrectly, it involved nuclear war and not a genocide. If that makes it any better.

112: This movement wants to make it socially costly to debate the rights of marginalized people.
Most of the online conversations I've seen are not so much about rights as they are about language.

Online conversations about trans issues, that is.

The Rini thread linked at 112 is helpful, but again illustrates how easy it is to overlook the relevance of the distinction between being criticised and being fired. As was already excerpted by Stormcrow, Rini correctly points out that we almost all accept:

GENERAL: It's best if our social norms permit open discussion of disagreeable topics, with some exceptions.
EXCEPT: Here are the exceptions: {X, Y, ... }

She adds:

The problems come in specifying the list of EXCEPT. ...
Our current debate stems from a movement to add some new items to EXCEPT. This movement wants to make it socially costly to debate the rights of marginalized people. Call this the Movement for Marginal Protections - MMP. ...
Meanwhile there's another faction operating in this thoughtspace. They firmly object to revising EXCEPT. They are happy with the limits already in place (privacy, libel, etc) and oppose change. Call them Status Quo Warriors - SQW.

What she doesn't do is distinguish two possible versions of MMP, a stronger version where the costs imposed can include unemployment, and another version with costs stopping short of unemployment. The stronger version would probably make a lot of liberals uneasy; the weaker version, not so much.

Where 'unemployment' as a cost means 'losing a job the transgressor already has' (i.e. not 'failing to get a job the transgressor has applied for').

oh, fuck it. I have been avoiding the letter because my instinct is that it is not worth discussing in terms of ideas. The actual row is all driven by status anxiety in an industry with no employment protection and no functioning economic model. [The same is of course true of academia].

We'd think it farcical if anyone gave up vegetarianism after it was pointed out that Hitler was a vegetarian too but the US in in such a state of social and economic insecurity that no one thinks it odd that a supposed intellectual should give up an opinion because it's shared with someone else whom they completely disagree with on another matter.

Some people think that this is all about the loss of power to a better, more moral generation. They are wrong. Obviously a great deal of the rage against "gatekeepers" with secure jobs and pensions to go with their unacceptable opinions comes from people who want to have the secure jobs and pensions themselves. Good luck to them: who doesn't? But once it's established that anyone can be fired at will for the wrong opinions, no one, not even those now righteous, will be safe for very long. The only people who gain in the long run will be those who profit from a business model where all public discourse approaches the standards of twitter.

But I do know something about the sinister cabal that Frowner describes at the Guardian (for all I know I'm supposed to be part of it) and the description is just plain wrong. That's all I'm going to say. Life's too short for another thousand comment thread.

The known drafters of the letter, such as Mark Lilla and Thomas Chatterton Williams, are tedious and objectionable people, but focused on racial identity politics and other issues, not trans issues. Williams was happy to defend Rowling without defending her views and they asked her and Singal etc to sign the letter, so I wouldn't consider them allies of trans people.

But a common line is that people like Teachout and Chomsky aren't "extremely online" and therefore couldn't see the real meaning of the letter. Lilla doesn't even have a twitter account.

119: And you're outraged because she said precisely that something like averting nuclear war is the sort of situation where, strongly as she believes in procedural liberalism, she'd be able to believe that abandoning those norms was right. Reading that as "she'd use procedural liberalism to justify nuclear war/the Holocaust/the Iraq War" still seems very mistaken to me.

124: no one thinks it odd that a supposed intellectual should give up an opinion because it's shared with someone else whom they completely disagree with on another matter.

The letter was substantively wrong on merit, and nobody should have signed it. But yes, the content of the letter changes depending on who signs it. The same letter, drafted and signed by overt fascists -- who, in fact, use this sort of argument all the time -- would have a different meaning.

The Klan wants to be in the pages of the NYT, and its members will defend themselves as participants in the marketplace of ideas, but the NYT is correct to limit the exposure of that organization. The question (as 112 and Goldberg point out) is not whether to draw lines, but where to draw them.

But once it's established that anyone can be fired at will for the wrong opinions, no one, not even those now righteous, will be safe for very long.

I believe the signatories are mostly Americans, and therefore they live in such a system. They declined to oppose that system.

Oh, 112 is good, everyone should read it.

122: I think the relevance of the distinction between being criticized and being fired, while it's real, can be overstated -- there are some kinds of criticism where I think vehemence of criticism causes a chilling effect that's a problem even if no one gets fired.

For an older, kind of socially unconnected version of this (that is, it doesn't break down neatly left/right, although there is a l/r aspect to it) talking about Israel/Palestine in polite company is hard because there are a lot of people who will call you an anti-Semite if you say anything supportive of Palestinians. And the upshot of that is both that conversations about I/P tend not to happen other than among the most intensely concerned about the issue on both sides, which makes them ugly. And that specifically people who advocate for Palestinians are going to be nervous and tentative because they don't want to be called anti-Semites; incredibly brave about being called anti-Semites (it's a big accusation -- not that many people get fired for it, but people do occasionally, and it puts you outside the category of people who should be interacted with in good faith if it's believed); or actual out and proud anti-Semites. And the existence of the last category makes it even easier to use guilt by association against non-anti-Semitic advocates for Palestine, and the conversation gets impossible.

This is subjective, but it is my impression that a lot more of the conversations about issues of concern to the left feel like only Israel/Palestine conversations used to, and that's importantly enough bad to be worth talking about. And it's hard to talk about concretely in a broad way, because it's a matter of what argumentative tactics are appropriate in what specific situation -- sometimes calling someone an anti-Semite/transphobe/racist and refusing to treat them as a good faith interlocutor on the basis of plausibly deniable statements and loose affiliations is going to be justified, and you'd be a sucker to deny it. But sometimes it isn't -- I'm bringing up I/P as an issue where I think a lot of people would agree that that style of argument is brought into play too easily and has done a lot of harm, and I think the same thing may be happening on other issues now.

126 I'm outraged because she says:

Thus, suppose that the author of this piece is in national security, and that s/he successfully prevented Trump from nuking North Korea, which would (I assume) start a nuclear war fought on the Koreean peninsula, not here, and would result in truly massive casualties. In that SPECIFIC case, I would be prepared to entertain the possibility that the author had done the right thing. At least if we assume that the author had some reason to believe that s/he might be able to do something of that kind.

She would be "prepared to entertain the possibility" is very weak sauce indeed and utterly damning.

Wait. What's wrong with that?

On second thought, never mind. I'm going to make pancakes instead.

The thread JP Stormcrow linked to is v good.

Israel AND trans people? Oh, this one's going to three thousand.

I would be prepared to entertain the possibility of fighting a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula provided that the missiles are launched by Israeli trans people.

Discuss.

Uh oh. Now they've come for Tucker Carlson's writer, Blake Neff.

Please don't engage in guilt by association. Many of us have nothing to do with Carlson.

Barry- I'm sorry about this, but I'm going to keep picking on you for a while, because I think what you said about Hilzoy is wrong, and it feels to me like kind of a perfect toy example of the kind of thing I feel as if I see more often and want to complain about, in a way that's easy to talk about because it's not about any of the touchy substantive issues.

You said that she'd "justify another Holocaust" in the service of procedural liberalism. That is a very strong thing to say, and I would read it as "don't trust her, she will say things that seem harmless but will lead you down the slippery slope to evil". You sound as if you're saying that she should be excluded from the group of people you can trust to engage in good faith.

And she's not above criticism. If you really believe that's true, you should be able to say it. But if you say it without good reason to believe it's true, you are, I think, doing a bad thing. (And in this case, from reading the exchange that led you to that conclusion, I think your reasons for believing it's true are weak.)

And you're doing a bad thing that could have some real world consequences. It's not very likely at all, she has tenure, she's safe, you're some internet rando. But you're an internet rando with a whole lot of social capital (I've known you for over a decade at this point, I agree with you about most things, I generally trust you and think you're a good person, I figure commenters here roughly share my evaluation of you), and you're talking about her in an environment at least some academic philosophers read (or used to). And academia and journalism are areas where even if you're not fired, having people form a general belief about you that you're a bad person who isn't to be trusted has meaningful professional consequences.

I went all internet detective on you, searching for what you were talking about, because it surprised me as a thing to say about her. But no one checks up on everything, you couldn't, and if you said the same kind of thing about someone I didn't know much about, I would have trusted you and moved on, and accepted your evaluation as something I knew about the target. And if you were wrong then, something bad would have happened.

So, excluding people from the sphere of people who can be engaged with in good faith is something that has to happen sometimes, but I'd really like people, when they're being critical (and everyone should be subject to criticism) to be careful about the kind of criticism that tends to present the target as someone unworthy of being treated with good faith.

You're right, but still I'm glad I had pancakes instead of going deeply into the matter. Even though I forgot that we also had blueberries.

You're nitpicking LB, I misremembered and recant about the Holocaust bit but what's a few million innocent deaths between a Holocaust and a nuclear war anyway? What she said there is monstrous. Are you accusing me of bad faith? As you can see from that thread it surprised the hell out of me too. And I interrogated her statement very gently, never took it up again, continued to engage with her amicably, as I said, I've read her for a long time and have a lot of respect for her. Still do. Her major philosophical commitment much less so because I can see where that kind of adherence leads. It was enlightening.

Further, and here again I'm describing my subjective reaction, and I'm not going to successfully pull up examples, maybe there's not as much of this as I think there is. Reading Twitter, on more substantive social issues, I fairly often have the experience where someone I don't have a lot of context for is described as not worthy of engaging with in good faith, and there's either no background for it, or twitter links that don't lead me to anything that I understand as meaningfully supporting the claim.

And this is kind of rough, because I see people who I know and trust generally making what I think are bad calls about who isn't safe to listen fairly often, so it's an area where I don't want to rely on other people much. But it feels (again, subjectively, maybe I'm wrong) that to participate in lefty discourse, you're expected to be very trusting about other people's evaluations of who should be excluded from the sphere of presumed good faith.

This is all, again, subjective, and it doesn't lend itself to concrete public examples all that easily. But it feels important to me.

FWIW, I was willing to credit Barry's statement without checking it, but I also didn't read the statement as signaling that Hilzoy should be excluded from the group of people one can trust to engage in good faith.

Perhaps it's just because I have been in arguments in which I was accused of willing to accept injustice when it was being carried out lawfully (which made me think of the Heinlein quote, "Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws." -- I've always wondered why that was so explicitly gendered). So I take it as a statement about blind spots (and common blind spots), not a defamation of character.

140: Barry, you read her hyperbole -- what she said was pretty much that she takes procedural liberalism so seriously that she'd still be thinking about it even as she abandoned it to prevent something like nuclear war -- as something horrific that she didn't say and I think obviously doesn't think, that she thinks procedural liberalism is important enough to justify nuclear war.

You're clearly convinced, but looking at the exchange you were relying on doesn't convince me and I don't think it would convince many people -- the problem is that just listening to your evaluation of it, without her words to rely on, would convince a lot of people because you have a lot of well-deserved credibility.

I also didn't read the statement as signaling that Hilzoy should be excluded from the group of people one can trust to engage in good faith.

Yeah, I think you might be unusual there. I think most people would take "would justify another Holocaust" as a strong reason, if they believed it, to treat the person so described as completely unworthy of trust.

142.1 I think LB is talking about me which if true lol.

If not, read what I wrote again, I still read and value her writing, especially on twitter (as I'm not an academic philosopher) and interact with her on occasion and amicably so. My takeaway wasn't intended to exclude her from the arena of people one treats as arguing in good faith. She's the very model of good faith argumentation. But her views there are monstrous, and given the chance she didn't walk them back. I took it as a cautionary tale as to where those commitments can lead. I mean anyone can read the thread and see for themselves but I stand by my interpretation.

I would also mention that I read Hilzoy's comments as a parallel construction to an argument that was made about the legality or torture during the Iraq war -- that if people believed that torture was justified by a ticking time bomb, that didn't require formal legalization. The appropriate position was, "torture should be illegal; but if someone is really convinced that torture is necessary they should be prepared to make that argument, of necessity, as part of their legal defense. "

It's a way of heavily underlining the question, "how sure are you that this is necessary?"

143 it didn't read to me as hyperbole.

144 Point taken, and I would rephrase that now but take it as an indication of how shocked I was to read that at the time.

146 She was aces on the torture question, I was a regular and avid reader and sometime commenter at ObWi in those dark days.

147.1: Okay, but if you're reading it dead straight she still didn't say "Procedural liberalism justifies nuclear war." You made that leap from what she did say, and it's a wild leap.

149 Disagree. I think it's pretty plain from what she wrote.

144 I should be more specific about my own experience. I was having a conversation with a friend who is a person of color (and, worth noting, my social circles are heavily white) who said, essentially, "I don't trust that, if they were loading people who looked like me on boxcars that you would protect me."

It was a shocking thing to hear, but I recognized that there was an element of truth to it. Given my own personality, I probably wouldn't fight back -- unless it was a scenario that I has thought about and mentally prepared for. In an immediate stressful moment. I would default to accommodating the authorities.

I don't think that makes me a moral cripple. I think it demonstrates the importance of saying things like that well before they might come up in reality.

I still don't even see what's objectionable about the quote in 130. People who go to work for Trump on the grounds the damage done by helping Trump is going to be offset by some hypothetical tragedy they can avert by being on the inside are lying to themselves so they can advance a career or similar.

148: that's why I think the parallel may be more than a coincidence.

151 I read a good article about the many forms that resistance took under the Nazis but damned if I can remember what it was. There were many ways people resisted and not all of them or even most of them were outright acts of defiance (and also many ways of collaborating). Would you hide your friend? Would you do what you could to see him to safety? Would you lie to the authorities that you'd seen him somewhere earlier that week?

154: I think in any likely scenario I would do that, because there would be time to think during the process of building up. But I wasn't sure I would have if the choice came suddenly and without warning. That's why the interaction and challenge stayed with me.

And getting meta about this -- I think you're simply incorrect about what Hilzoy was saying. We're not disagreeing about how bad it is to use procedural liberalism to justify nuclear war, we're arguing about what she said and meant -- if you misunderstood her, or if I'm mistaken and your understanding was correct.

I'm willing to have this argument, because it's not on a particularly touchy issue. It would be really hard to have an argument of the same type if the underlying issue were racism or transphobia: your characterization of what I'm doing as 'nitpicking' would be a really effective way of getting me to back off if I was 'nitpicking' about whether something was really racist. That's the kind of thing that gets described as a bad look.

I don't know what to do about this, but it seems as if norms of argument have shifted in a way that has made it harder to address genuine errors or misunderstandings on sensitive issues. Maybe the benefits outweigh the losses, but it feels as if there's something going on there.

...because it's not on a particularly touchy issue...

Objectively pro-nuclear war.

156 I'm willing to reread that thread, yet again, and reconsider in light of your arguments. But not tonight as it's close to 8 pm and I'm pouring myself my second drink and there will be a third and more and I won't, or shouldn't, argue when drinking.

And absolutely no hard feelings, I hope. I jumped all over you because it felt like a really not-sensitive example of something that I was having a hard time talking about concretely in more sensitive areas.

Comity, at least for the night ;)

Yeah, I also think that Barry is mostly misreading Hilzoy and/or being uncharitable at the places where it's ambiguous what her position is.

Hilzoy is saying: in general, taking a job in this administration with the justification that you will attempt to undermine Trump when he does truly awful things is bad. It's bad partly because psychologically, you're likely going to increasingly have a morally distorted view of things, but she doesn't dwell on this part (which is a shame, because I think this is actually the most weighty reason).

But on her view, it's bad because it's anti-democratic: you, an unelected political appointee or civil service bureaucrat, are subverting the will of the elected president, and it doesn't seem like you have the authority to do that. Moreover, to the extent and others like you succeed, you are blurring the line of responsibility that is supposed to go: 1- parties make promises about who they are and how they're going to govern; 2- they are elected on that basis; 3- they implement what they promised and/or what they want; 4- they are judged on their performance; and this chain is often thought crucial for democratic accountability.

*However*, Hilzoy continues, there are certainly extreme, very rare cases, when the situation is so extreme, and also involves harm to people who are "innocent" of our sin of electing Trump, in which she's willing to say that it would be justifiable -- being able to somehow stop Trump from starting a nuclear war with North Korea would perhaps be one of those cases.

Barry is outraged that Hilzoy views stopping nuclear war through not following orders as only a borderline case, rather than an "OBVIOUSLY at this point we're WAY PAST the situation where subversion is justifiable" case. I think it's *generally* a bad idea to get outraged when you agree with someone about the outcome but disagree over whether it's an easy case -- find a case where you disagree on the outcome, and *then* get outraged! But also, I think this misses 2 important points:

1- Even if this is a borderline case, that doesn't mean she thinks it might be okay to turn the nuclear key or deliver the relevant memo or whatever! She doesn't actually spell out what the alternative to "continue to serve, while undermining the boss when morally necessary" is, but there's no reason to think it's "eagerly carry out deeply immoral/illegal orders" -- the obvious alternative is simply "refuse to carry them out *and resign in protest*". The context of this whole thing, after all, is anonymous Republicans claiming they're saving us from the inside, and in this general debate, everyone understands the alternative is resigning/refusing to serve.

2- IMHO, she's wrong about the proper application of procedural liberalism to the ethics of office, and specifically wrong about the office-specific duties of federal appointees/bureaucrats. Note the oath they actually take is: "I, X, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God." Moreover, not only is there no direct oath of loyalty to the department or the president, there are explicit laws requiring that you *refuse* an unlawful order.

So "no need to obey unlawful orders" and "oath to defend the *Constitution* against domestic enemies" already get you quite a ways in terms of *procedural liberal* grounds for resistance-from-within. The key question, then, is what counts as "duties of the office" -- but here, I think you have to be committed to a deep form of unitary-executive theory and/or a morally implausible general view of executive/bureaucratic authority as justified only through faithful service to a democratically authorized principal in order to think it rules out independent judgment in the service of your office's mission.

In other words, even to the extent she is more committed to procedural liberalism than is morally appropriate, it's leading her astray here *not* because of this mistaken commitment, but at least partly because she's mistaken about facts about the federal government and how they apply to this case.

That said, I haven't checked her to see whether she's written at greater detail on the ethics of office and the duties of bureaucrats & subordinates -- if this "only a faithful executor of an elected official's will has legitimate authority" view really is her considered judgment, after looking thoroughly at the details, then I'll agree that she's wrong in an important way, and that this view indeed would justify quite a lot of evil that a more sensible view would recommend resisting.

Christ, that was way too long. Now that I wasted all that time on it, I'm curious what Hilzoy's specific view is--anyone want to reach out to her?

I think that's mostly right, and right about the interesting next question.

I don't really understand the trans issue, as an issue. With black people, they want(ed) the right to vote, to be served at places of business, to be able to buy homes wherever they could afford to, etc. What is it that trans people want the right to do that someone like JK Rowling (who, I assume, isn't interested in beating them up) would deny them? This is a genuine question. I don't know what's at issue, or what the disagreements are.

There's a bunch of different stuff. A big thing is the right not to be misgendered, or at least to treat misgendering as a serious significant offense -- Rowling I believe originally became known as anti-trans for tweeting support for a woman who was (not exactly? She was a contractor or something?) fired for repeatedly misgendering trans women, sued for wrongful termination (again I think not exactly because not exactly an employee?) and lost.

Rights to be present in single-sex spaces as appropriate for a trans person's gender. In the US, this comes up as a bathroom thing almost exclusively, but in the UK there seem to be a lot more "women only" spaces that are contentious. And I get confused about the legality of this because it's UK law and I've only read the arguments about it not anything really substantive, but the UK stuff involves a lot of arguing about what sort of bureaucratic process you should need to go through to get ID reflecting your gender.

In addition to LB's, access to bathrooms in the workplace, and access to appropriate health care are some big obvious ones.

Gotcha, thanks.

And a lot of arguments about what type of medical treatment are appropriate for trans children, based on what standards and so on. Puberty blockers, what kinds of therapy, what are the rates of desistance among children presenting as plausibly trans and what are the implications and so on.

And all of this with a background of disputes over what sort of rhetoric should be understood to be offensive enough to make the speaker not someone who can be engaged with in good faith.

I mean, someone trans should step in and correct me where I've gone wrong, but that sort of thing covers a lot of it.

168: The pediatric thing is kind of interesting. It used to be that parents of intersex children ere supposed to choose surgery at birth. Now that's recommended against. At what age should minors be able to make those decisions about medical care? Not really interested in debating it now, but the answer isn't immediately obvious to me.

166: For example: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2020/06/12/868073068/transgender-health-protections-reversed-by-trump-administration

A trans acquaintance of mine had a big health care mess because he'd saved up for bottom surgery out-of-pocket, but then had complications from the surgery and the complications were then also not covered under his health insurance because the initial surgery wasn't covered. But although you can comparison shop for the original surgery and save up for it, there's no way in the US healthcare system to deal uninsured care for complications in any reasonable way.

And everything's kind of linked. There's a fair argument that the more that vaguely construed "being a jerk about trans people" like Rowling is normal and accepted, the more trans people are likely to run into people making either annoying or actually dangerous trouble for them in day-to-day life.

I read Hilzoy as not really appreciating the gravity of Barry's point -- not seeing it as presenting a contradiction to her thesis that exceptions to 'resign rather than subvert' should be rare and compelling, and thus not requiring a rethinking of her thesis.

X, I'm with you on higher obligations, but the context here is the discussion about Admin insiders bragging about their subversion. When confronted with an illegal or immoral order, there are three possible outcomes: (a) resign, (b) refuse to comply and argue your higher obligation, demanding to be fired or have the order rescinded or (c) pretend to comply but don't, hoping that the President (who is an idiot and doesn't know how things work, and is also highly unstable) won't notice. Bragging about (a) or (b) are pretty different from bragging about (c). And nothing about the existence of options (a) and (b), which are not being taken by the person engaging in (c), justifies (c). When is (c) justified? I think it is hard to say that (c) is justifiable either when the order is part of the mandate (like pursuing charges against H Clinton -- if you don't want to do that, you don't belong in a Trump administration) or part of a well considered, though monstrous, direction by the president. When it's some stupid off-hand shit -- 'dammit, let's just sell Puerto Rico' -- then I think a bureaucrat is justified in ignoring or subverting by slow-walking, rather than resigning, because its not an order meant to be taken literally.

Let's use a seriously made, thoroughly (although plainly wrongly, like the invasion Iraq) considered order to nuke North Korea as the example. Hilzoy is saying, as I read it, that you should be engaging in (a) or (b). Surely no one disagrees with that? Ignoring the order, or telling the President 'yeah I'll get right on it' and then ignoring the order -- that's not what the oath to the constitution is exactly calling for. Could an employee buy some time with subversion, time that might be used to good effect? Edge case.

I don't think it's about ignoring the order so much as justifying joining the Trump administration on the grounds that you might be in a place to ignore such an order.

I'm not going to go back and look, but I imagine what that Anonymous guy was talking about subverting was daily Sell Puerto Rico! kind of things -- titillating, sure, and maybe it lets him (it's a him, right?) feel good about his role in the Administration, but, as a zillion people pointed out at the time, obviously not mitigating the vast evils we're seeing from the rump Administration. Yeah, you're a hero for not selling Puerto Rico, asshole. But if it was something real, (hu)man up, resign, and tell your story.

Also, I bet historians are going to discover that the direct impact of Anonymous' bragging is that Trump did a lot of purging of people with the sense to be subversive.

Twitter is awful, but Jamelle Bouie retweeted a video of a kangaroo beating up a dog and then getting punched by the dog's owner.
It's pretty great.

It's even better with the right url: https://twitter.com/MeanAnimals/status/1282028142878752774

I already saw it.

I love this https://twitter.com/drtlane/status/1282055124848742400?s=21

Just a belated drive-by here, but this piece by Li/li Loof/bourow is pretty good on the dynamics of the New Suspiciousness (the lite pop current-year version of the good old hermeneutics of suspicion):

It's also true that people who've learned to read through texts (to whatever bummer of a subtext we're used to finding there) can overdo it. We sometimes skip the content of the text itself and reflexively fast-forward to the shitty point we "know" is coming even if maybe it isn't. This will frequently aggravate the other party, especially if they weren't headed in that direction; it sucks to have people assume the worst about you. That's all pretty bad for a healthy discourse, but it's a learned response to a platform that has fundamentally skewed the cost-benefit analysis of engaging. The rational move has become to presume bad faith.

The 'rational move' is inevitable when it's so standard for people to say X ("All lives matter") when they mean Y ("Black lives aren't systematically under-valued by police."). LB's nice example from 128 is the less straightforwardly right/left-inflected version of the same dynamic - sometimes criticism of Israeli policy is a proxy for anti-Semitism, which makes it easy to presume that it always is, which has a chilling effect.

In the quote Loof/bourow charitably allows that sometimes the subtext you think is there isn't really. What's makes the chilling effect particularly sharp, though, is when that possibility is taken to be unthinkable, the critic of Israeli policy is taken to be definitionally anti-Semitic, the person who is asking about how to craft fair rules for trans-women in sport is definitionally trans-phobic - i.e. 'cancelling the implicature' is ruled out of court.

Re 128.1: Sorry, LB - I was unclear in my 122. This chilling effect is definitely an issue, even when no-one is in danger of getting fired, but I was starting by assuming most Unfoggeders would be very sceptical about whether cancel culture is really even a thing, and was trying to find the most clear-cut possible genuine problem, without denying that there might be others. (I was in 122 carelessly using "not so much" in the un-ironic sense of "not as much", as opposed to the now probably universal ironic sense of "not at all".) I do, however, think that the chilling effect would be far less intense if we had stronger norms against firing people.

Bari Weiss leaving the NYT.

Ivanka Trump says #FindSomethingNew.

As I understand the intra-vox situation, Ezra Klein got everybody at vox to pledge not to subtweet each other...

...& then Ezra did a tweet that Matt interpreted as a subtweet of him...

In the meantime, I have been listening to the @apocrypals podcast, which is the Bible & Bible fanfic read as if it were a series of comic books...

...& then Ezra did a tweet that Matt interpreted as a subtweet of him...

Or, at least, that many people on twitter interpreted as a subtweet of Matt (Matt replied in a slightly passive-aggressive way, but it wasn't clear if that was, "are you criticizing me?" or "I know we have different opinions on this, but I don't feel like arguing about it right now."

Which is clearly not the only intra-vox drama . . .

182 That letter was some flounce