Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

So. You're discussing online pornography somewhere - perhaps irl, but more likely online. You mention a concern about coercion - effect of pornography on the brain - etc. Someone disagrees with you; they wave away your concern, and roll out an eloquent, slightly hackneyed panegyric to Freedom of Expression. Censorship would be worse, they say, although you hadn't suggested censorship.

Scenario two. You're discussing the middle east, and perhaps sharia law. Someone comes along with a praise of 'life's wholesome, natural pleasures', 'wine, women'; they become misty-eyed as they say how sad it is that some people, blinded by fanaticism, would seek to restrict these things. Their descriptions of worldly pleasures seem - slightly stiff? Slightly rote?

Scenario three. Subject is racial abuse. The by now familiar figure I've been portraying rolls up to tell you that 'However unfortunate it may be that some people feel offended by another individual's choice of words', censorship would still be worse, stifling the natural flow of free conversations. Again, you hadn't suggested censorship.

Does this type of person actually exist? I am describing three different people, who I have actually encountered over the last five years or so; but I mean, have I encountered a style, or set of ideas, that is bigger than these three people? If it does exist, is it fair to call it 'Creepy Liberalism'? Is there already a name for it?

I am unsure whether this thread is worth doing, because it being of interest to anyone apart from me depends on the type of person I'm thinking of actually existing. But still.

http://terryweaver.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/choir.jpg

seems like the common thread for this fellow is a conflation of legal permissiveness (along the axis of "freed of expression" vs "censorship") and moral/ethical endorsement of that thing? as in, they dont seem to understand that you can offer full throated opposition to something without at the same time calling for governmental/legal recourse in order to rectify it.

i'm w/ u man. fuck free speech. xxp

But yes, those people/person do exist. Why call it "creepy liberalism"? I haven't encountered any true liberals that have been this way, it has usually always been conservatives/libertarians or just plain ignorants.

Yes, there's a definite misunderstanding of what 'freedom of speech'/First Amendment refers to in the general public, and I even last week had to explain to someone how Kickstarter pulling a fundraiser for its content was not a violation of said amendment, but at this point I think the only way to solve that problem is to follow the example of the ending of Return of the Living Dead

really the best way to reply to these clowns is just to quote the First Amendment, given how short it is.

I think a better description of this attitude is "ignorant and/or uneducated"... obv. tho I don't think its cool to curtail free speech just because its not the government doing it. "Free Speech" has larger connotations than merely the purview of the first amendment.

viceroy otm

but free speech isn't being curtailed if the government isn't preventing it. There's a reason why I can't just walk into my business and shout "EY, SUCK MY OLIVE-OIL SCENTED DICK K THX" and expect to still have my job the next day.

like if your business removes your posts from the company e-bulletin board, it's lame, but while it's corporate censorship, really isn't a violation of free speech.

most of these sound like early-20s white libertarian-leaning dude opinions

N.B.

Am aware that my OP there may look as if I'm trying to ridicule people I've disagreed with/make out that people who happened to disagree with me on said issues = weirdo.

I'm not - I do think the idea of free speech is a very important one.

Also: this was in a UK context, which may or may not be important.

Ryan:

seems like the common thread for this fellow is a conflation of legal permissiveness (along the axis of "freed of expression" vs "censorship") and moral/ethical endorsement of that thing? as in, they dont seem to understand that you can offer full throated opposition to something without at the same time calling for governmental/legal recourse in order to rectify it.

Yeah, that conflation of the legal and the ethical is definitely part of this style. I've wondered if there's a persecution complex at work here - person always seeing state oppression everywhere, but not in a clear-sighted way. That hunted, haunted psyche might be where the 'creepy' is coming from.

It may also be, as neanderthal says

I haven't encountered any true liberals that have been this way, it has usually always been conservatives/libertarians or just plain ignorants.

i.e. the hijacking of 'free speech' as an idea by people who are not really in full sympathy with it, or only want to instrumentalise it. Disjunction between the demeanour and the actual politics thus being the source of creepy.

you're harping on the lib vs conservative angle but Caring Way Too Much About False Instances of Censorship is a pleasure enjoyed equally by assholes of both orientations

Am aware that my OP there may look as if I'm trying to ridicule people I've disagreed with/make out that people who happened to disagree with me on said issues = weirdo.

Wellll, maybe just a little

I feel that this group maybe intersects with the people who call anyone who criticizes any particular group "racist". Like, recently there was incident here in Finland where a local conservative politician posted some blatantly racist, eugenics-influenced comments on his Facebook profile, which unsurprisingly lead to people calling him a Nazi... And then a totally clueless celebrity radio host decided to chide in, saying that it was wrong to criticize the politician, because that's "racist against the Nazis", and he should be free to post whatever he wants.

But yeah, I think these kind of people generally fall into two groups, neither of which I'd call "liberal" in the political sense of the word:

1) Libertarians, who think that having political/civil rights equals being free to say whatever you want about any person or group with no consequences.

2) Conservatives, who twist liberal concepts to benefit their own goals. Racism debates such as the above, where anti-racism is condemned as a "form of racism too", are a particularly good example of this.

i suspect that an unquestioning defence of free speech without recognizing the complexities of edge cases is something that can only come from a position of privilege, ultimately

hang on i think i mean that "free speech" only really exists as a legal concept and that's okay and an important concept but it has never really been a trump card in any legal system, it feels simple-minded to adhere to it as such

Scenario two. You're discussing the middle east, and perhaps sharia law. Someone comes along with a praise of 'life's wholesome, natural pleasures', 'wine, women'; they become misty-eyed as they say how sad it is that some people, blinded by fanaticism, would seek to restrict these things. Their descriptions of worldly pleasures seem - slightly stiff? Slightly rote?

Certainly though cardamom, even if you don't care about the consumption of alcohol or equal rights for women, you surely must be appalled by sharia's strictures against music, right?

I mean, this board is called I Love Music.

fp

This board is called "I Love Everything", though. So I assume we love the pleasures of flesh just as much as music.

Surely the free speech argument works in both directions here? If you have a problem with p0rn or sharia you're covered by the 1st amendment just as much as the other guy, no? I'm not saying you should have to have a debate about free speech in order to raise your concerns, but it might be a way to shut down arguments with idiots.

Rly we need the details and positions held during these arguments if this thread is to be any more than 'i talked to a bad man and another bad man' response 'oh no u talked to a bad man oh no'

most of these sound like early-20s white libertarian-leaning dude opinions

Mostly this, although I've also heard some of them from ppl who were not young or white or dudes.

most of these sound like early-20s white libertarian-leaning dude opinions

― mh, Monday, July 1, 2013 10:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yah, not sure what exactly is novel about "creepy liberals"

xp

@ darraghmac - I know, and my inability to supply more details kind of undercuts my question. I mean I can't even be sure I'm not remembering a strawman.

@ how's life - I wasn't in favour of sharia law at the time. It was more that of all the ways one might criticise it, this person's seemed to have something a bit odd about it.

but now you are in favor of sharia law, right?

Yeah, I knew what you were saying. I was just fucking around. xp

xp Well, the mu'atizil school of ethics is interesting, but I can only access their ideas in translation

Screw my spelling today. It's Mu'tazilah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu%27tazila

gbx otm. liberals are often creepy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThrZ9-sS6aM

Conservatives, who twist liberal concepts to benefit their own goals.

this sort of bad faith argument is so common on the right i wish it had a name. the general strategy is almost a reductio ad absurdum in which, say, some concept of fairness that leads the left to things like affirmative action is then the same idea that leads conservatives to decry affirmative action as "discriminatory." ("Blacks are the real racists because they talk about race so much," is another favorite one.)

the irony to all this is that it's an absolutely self-defeating gesture because while it's intended to push back against some imagined liberal hegemony, it's instead parasitic on it--there's really no such thing as contemporary conservatism beyond this automatic adolescent rebellion against the left and liberalism. you could almost say it takes place within the assumptions of liberalism in that notions of "social justice" and fairness are equally central but "twisted" into a parody version of themselves. i guess this is what happens when conservatism is unmoored from anything like tradition and replaces it with radical individualism/autonomy (ie, freedom from society).

there's really no such thing as contemporary conservatism beyond this automatic adolescent rebellion against the left and liberalism

This is v. interesting

it's an overstatement, but i think it applies at least in part to the "media" version of conservatism (talk radio, NRO, etc...)

this is what i'd describe as football fan politics, more akin to cheering for a nebulous team, right or wrong, and it definitely has a leftist equivalent

Definitely. The bad faith characterisation aspect too.

just came across an interesting passage from Aldous Huxley who defines being a partisan as "egotism at one remove"--a mechanism which allows you to indulge in just about any vice and call it virtue.

there's also a strong element of the coopting of weighted language -- there are phrases that are commonly used, such as "gun control," which are relatively useless when used as intended because they bring up the baggage attached by groups against the concept

or, god help us, what people think "feminism" means

when the right invokes 'free speech' or 'racism' to undermine a common leftist position/belief, is that analogous in any way to the left evoking 'security' as a reason why eg the united states shouldn't use drone strikes. (bc they're undermining their own security by radicalizing more terrorists.) in both cases these aren't ideals that are generally associated w/ the political side and you suspect that maybe they're only being brought up as ideological concern trolling.

i think it's fair game to address an opposition position and try to show that it fails on its own terms as long as you're honest in what you're doing

Mordy, doesn't it depend on whether the ideal is inherent in the original critique or just bolted on?

Why call it "creepy liberalism"? I haven't encountered any true liberals that have been this way, it has usually always been conservatives/libertarians or just plain ignorants.

― Neanderthal, Tuesday, July 2, 2013 5:11 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Really? I see liberals (you know people who read the Guardian or the NYT) making comments like the ones mentioned in the OP very often, especially the third type. like if you followed the recent discussions around the EDL in the UK you'd see self identified "lefties" (ugh @ that term, but I use it specifically to differentiate from leftists) saying "well yeah the EDL are bigots but hey - free speech" or condemning antifash groups for confronting fascists instead of "engaging in reasoned debate" or some bullshit (also see the Tea Defence League thing or a typical Guardian CiF thread). Usually the people invoking free speech in this context aren't the ones who are affected by the bigotry in question, makes it easy.

how do lefties vs leftists pls

i mean i suppose people on all sides do it, I did when I was 19, but just didn't get why he picked that side in his description

i assume "leftie" = kneejerk football fan leftists and "leftist" = anybody who holds left-leaning political views

lol fuckin splitters

nah cos the former is a subsection of the latter? i mean, i am avowedly a leftist but i try hard not to be a leftie on the whole

More on that kerfuffle— artworks have been returned and artists told to “stay in line.”

https://theintercept.com/2023/10/26/artforum-artists-gaza-ceasefire-martin-eisenberg/

"In the future we'll launder money and dodge taxes with only ethnic cleansing-supportive art."

A paragraph from that Intercept link that jumped out

The authors of the response letter — the joint directors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan, which has gallery spaces and offices in New York, London, Paris, and Hong Kong — curate shows with some of the most prolific and highest grossing artists in the world, both living and dead. Their website lists Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Joel Mesler, and Adrian Piper as representative artists and collaborators. Dayan is the granddaughter of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli politician and military commander who is alleged to have ordered the country’s military to attack the American naval ship the USS Liberty during the Six-Day War of 1967

IDK if this is exactly the right thread for this. I don't really listen to Huberman, but I find this style of "investigative" smear piece to be gross and a trend I really don't like. AFAICT, the allegations are that Huberman is flaky and a shitty boyfriend? Like if he yelled and acted jealous of a woman's past I can see that that's "toxic" but it hardly seems worthy of reporting on, esp when the woman is a full-fledged adult with education and resources and there doesn't appear to have been any coercion, threats, assault, etc. Like why is "moderately famous person isn't a great guy" worthy of reporting?

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/andrew-huberman-podcast-stanford-joe-rogan.html?fbclid=IwAR3RqYspsmm0DL0VodXpthlf6DC3p-vziR-enLDDmbc9wFRHTnLpakC2P30

man alive - probably the right thread for it, i don't have much to say about it myself... the problem with a lot of this stuff is that it's so marginal that, like, the people it affects it _really_ affects, but the people it doesn't affect...

i'm particularly starting to find myself less and less online... twitter becoming overtly institutionally evil has kind of reduced my contact with it. people i know are less likely to use twitter, less likely to be engaged with the Discourse. and some of those folks are on bluesky or mastodon and some of those people are too busy getting evicted to do much on social media. i mean honestly the one upside of having a group of friends who are constantly in crisis is that it really cuts down on my exposure to twitter drama.

but i did happen to run across this:

This will be the average congressional hearing in 2055 pic.twitter.com/jbN8kV9ikZ

— Jen Deere 1986 (@oxyjene1986) April 1, 2024

and i can tell i'm getting old because i only really know like half of these. i have no idea what "the captive prince" even is. "hazbin hotel" i haven't really seen but i have a group of friends who are really into it, and i don't really know what's supposed to be "problematic" about it.

but what bothers me is kind of the flattening of "problematic", the way it gets used as code for "untouchable". i've seen this a lot with my BPD - like, i have serious problems and they affect me and the people around me and, like. if people cut ties with me as a result of my behavior i _actively support_ that, i mean it hurts like hell and it's not what i _wanted_ but it's absolutely fair. but that's not how people use "problematic", it's used like it is here, where it's like oh you have friends who have friends with this person who did this bad thing, why are you doing that?

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ok i'm gonna get deep into early christian history here, fgti if you're reading this maybe you'll appreciate my nerding out here, but what it reminds me of is this early christian heresy called donatism. it's a really interesting heresy to me and one i find really relevant to online culture.

so the big thing to know about christian persecution is that there was really only one big, major, pan-roman persecution, and that was the diocletianic persecution. after the "crisis of the third century" - basically the collapse of the First Roman Empire - after about 50 years or so rome kind of got itself together in a form that was still an "empire" but was different in a lot of ways from what came before, like more of an overt military dictatorship rather than just kind of implicitly a military dictatorship like it was before. one of the more important emperors was diocletian, who did a bunch of things and one of them was saying "ok we need to get serious about the Christian Problem", christians were, like, getting more and more prevalent. like maybe up to 10% of people in the empire were christians at this point.

so diocletian was like, goddamn, these guys are a threat to traditional roman civic religion and was all "repent or die". kind of like the spanish inquisition honestly haha. anyway a lot of christians weren't actually down with the "martyrdom" thing, including some bishops. which was important because bishops, at that time, were basically how you made new priests, you had kind of a lineage, like this person was ordained by this person who was ordained by this person, there wasn't like a Central Bishop Authority or nothing

anyway constantine, in hoc signo vinces, christianity is no longer an anti-imperialist resistance movement but a tool of imperialism, yada yada yada, but christians are mostly like, hey, cool, rome has stopped trying to kill us, that's nice.

the thing is that a lot of christians who renounced christ so as not to get killed, they were all "well, i only did that so i wouldn't get killed, i actually really believe in christ". and some of them were bishops, and since they were bishops, they started ordaining people.

and the donatists were like, hey, wait, that's bullshit, people were out there dying for what they believed in and you actively renounced your faith and now you're saying basically "psych!" and going on ordaining priests like nothing happened here? like you kinda gave up your moral authority to ordain priests when you renounced christ to save your own skin.

i mean honestly i can't say they didn't have a point, but the thing was it didn't, like, really work out in practice. because there's this lineage, and there's no central authority, and it devolves into well, was the bishop who ordained you actually ordained by a fake bishop, so for all you know you're a "real priest" but the donatists are like no you're not, and ultimately i guess like the woke donatists wound up eating themselves. or something.

like sometimes yeah it sucks that people who actually denounced christ are out there saying "oh yeah i'm super duper christian" like fuck you where were you in chicago?, but man you just gotta let that shit go

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anyway tho i wanna get back to "problematic" as a euphemism for "untouchable" because of the two of the media properties in that tweet i _do_ know, they're like very different. i mean i haven't seen "attack on titan", it's not really the kind of animne i go for, but my understanding is that there's some questionable fascist subtext in there somewhere, the kind of stuff that makes you go "hmmm i wonder if there's something deeper going on here". like "problematic" in the same way that... like another deep cut, there was this debate for a while over whether "the celestial toymaker" was racist against asians. because it turns out "celestial" was an old obscure derogatory term for chinese folks and if you look at it michael gough's getup in the episode has kind of a chinoiserie thing going on. and i think eventually they figured out that it's not racist against asians and apparently RTD brought back the character in a special last year which i didn't watch because clinical depression, but without the "celestial" part because that bit was maybe a little bit problematic. like the bigger problem with that story is the gratuitous use of the n word for no goddamn reason in the story's second episode, that's not really _problematic_ that's just goddamn racist is what that is.

now i could be wrong here but i feel like attack on titan is "problematic" in the same sense that, like, the celestial toymaker was arguably a racist caricature of a chinese person. (which contrast with "talons of weng-chiang" which _does_ contain severe racist caricatures of chinese folks, again, not "problematic" just racist.)

anyway contrast that with harry potter which, again, i haven't really read... i've heard that there are some problematic depictions in there and i honestly can't speak on that one way or another. of course that's not the problem with harry potter. the problem with harry potter is that its author is, like, probably the most influential person in the british anti-trans movement, which has been _very_ effective and which has been _very bad_ for anybody in the uk who happens to be trans. and it's still very effective, and things keep getting worse for trans people, and rowling is still working really hard to keep making things worse for trans people over there.

like to me that goes a little beyond just "problematic". and if someone says that none of that has anything to do with harry potter, respectfully, i call bullshit on that. i only speak for myself, other trans people can and occasionally do differ from me on that. speaking as a trans person, though, i do think supporting harry potter serves to make rowling powerful and influential, and the effects of that power and influence are directly harmful to trans people in the uk. to me that goes beyond "problematic".

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see when you flatten out all this stuff it becomes this moral equivalency thing. i mean shit i got _problems_, i got shit-tons of problems. i've done some fucked up shit, i've had some supremely bad takes, past and very probably present. i have _problems_ and i deal with them the best i can. i mean my whole BPD thing, i act in certain ways and sometimes people are like "yeah i can't deal with that". fair! more than fair! but then some people are like "oh don't talk to kate she's _problematic_". like i do my best to take responsibility for my problems and deal with them. "ok nobody talk to kate" doesn't, like. doesn't help.

the thing i keep coming back to is when kendrick put out "mr morale" or whatever and the only thing anybody wanted to talk about was "auntie diaries". and within 24 hours of that song coming out some person, who was trans, was tweeting that anybody who had a problem with kendrick saying "faggot" in that song was a "secretly racist tenderqueer".

and i mean i like that song, even though it's probably not the best song on that album, which i admit i've only really listened to once. i agree with that song. i self-identify as a "faggot", though i'm careful about how or when i do because some trans people are uncomfortable with that and i wanna be respectful.

and i keep coming back to it because it says something important about how, like, purity culture or cancel culture or whatever works. like the people who they go after the hardest, it always seems to be marginalized people. i mean i don't believe in all that "punching up/punching down" stuff, like the idea of privilege hierarchies, i don't think that works out too well in practice, but like the person who made hazbin hotel isn't a white man, this is a show that speaks deeply to queer experience, and, like, what... one of the characters is homophobic? like you can't really give an authentic representation without representing homophobia, without representing sexuality sometimes in some pretty blunt terms. and if that's "problematic", it's not the problem of the people depicting them.

none of this is remotely _new_, people were saying shit like this about gangsta rap when i was an ignorant teenager in the early '90s, and it was just as fucking stupid then. it just irritates me that you try to talk about genuinely hateful and bigoted people like rowling and suddenly it turns into dunking on, like, kendrick lamar or w/e. come the fuck on.

I feel like many young progressives have unwittingly adopted the strategies of Fundamentalist Christians. my youth group leader back in the day used to warn us our brains were little computers and even exposure to questionable ideas could warp our mind, so we should abstain from anything that contradicted or criticized our beliefs.

like the whole "six degrees of complicity" thing that is Twitter's steez has become exhausting and seems less focused on actually righting any wrongs and more about competing for social manna.

and if you dig deep into the people doing a lot of the finger-wagging, especially on Twitter, often times they aren't who they portray themselves as. such as the person who was publicly and dramatically berating my friend a year ago for being a 'COVID minimizer', and turned out to be someone who was actually an abusive person themselves and had an entire Twitter thread started by someone detailing their abusive behavior.

I often have distrust of anybody who I've known for years and never seen publicly apologize about anything, because everyone has stepped in it before and needed to be humbled, but those that repeatedly seem to avoid said humbling are often taking extra measures behind the scenes to stage-manage how they are perceived, so that they 'wriggle' out of it.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal)

right the isabel fall thing fucked me up for a long time, like she wrote this amazing story and twitter went after her so fucking hard she apparently wound up detransitioning and i'm like shit, well, i better not let anybody read any of _my_ stuff then

yeah, i _am_ in a crouched position ready to pounce at all times. i'm hypervigilant. it's a trauma response. it's not healthy. but trauma responses aren't, like. there for nothing. i'm hypervigilant because i _need_ to be, because there are _legitimate threats_ that marginalized people need to watch out for. and sometimes i do see things as threatening when they're not, really. because they remind me of past things that _were_ threatening. people tell me "assume good intent" sometimes and honestly i don't necessarily have that luxury sometimes. some spaces are, "safe space" for me isn't absolute but relative. twitter was never a particularly "safe space" for me, someone with rejection sensitive dysphoria and a tendency to take things that don't really have anything to do with me very personally, and it's _really_ not safe now. for me it's almost better because being what gets called a "highly sensitive person" things are problems for me that aren't problems for most people, and twitter is now a problem for, like. pretty much everyone? so in an odd way it helps me.

anyway dembo apologized but also as soon as people found out dembo was wrong everybody turned around and dogpiled on _them_ (not sure their pronouns), like, hello, cycle of abuse much? there's this tendency to attribute _malice_ or _ill intent_ in cases where none exists. and you can apologize, but you make a mistake and ever after you're "problematic". it's not like... nobody has to _accept_ dembo's apology, people can be like well that's all well and good but isabel fall's life was kind of ruined by what you did so i'm not sure i wanna like hang out with you, but _they're_ not problematic. the _behavior_ was, i'm not even gonna say "problematic", they did something that seriously negatively affected somebody else's life, they weren't fair to fall, and to me, you know, someone knows that and accepts the consequences, that's the _opposite_ of threatening to me, the opposite of "problematic", because the standard of "don't ever make mistakes" is a shitty standard. my standard is "if you make mistakes can you accept the consequences of those mistakes". which is a pretty fucking high standard on its own, it's asking a lot of people, but at least it's, like, _attainable_.

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also i do wanna clarify with the harry potter thing, even then i'm personally not gonna be like "well you can't be my friend if you like harry potter", particularly because, like, the reality is that most harry potter fans have no fucking clue. they don't. so personally - and this is personal, not everybody is going to do this or has to do this - what i do in those situations is _talk_ about jk rowling, what she's doing, how it's affecting trans people. like again, some of this shit _i_ don't even know why it's "problematic" and i'm more online than i'd like to be.

great post Kate....thank you as always for your insight and thanks for redirecting as needed. always learn a lot from your posts.

fair play for pulling genuinely damning quotes rather than ones that suggest the the woke dweeb reviewer is appalled

If you're not taking flak you're not over the target. pic.twitter.com/gnsJ1RmvJ8

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) May 16, 2024

Was very disappointed to see a musician whose work I like, and with whom I've had some really enjoyable interview/conversations, praising this book on Twitter. He's revealed himself as a small-c conservative many times, but since he's a white dude from the Midwest I kinda figured that much was to be expected, but lately he's been loudly praising Freddie DeBoer, and now this...

the new yorker review is a great review btw

"you're either hated or irrelevant"

https://blog.beeminder.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/why-not-both.png

a genuinely weird story, but i have to say that this seems absolutely targeted. (i don’t agree with much in the Uhuru movement and certainly not the Black Hammer movement, the latter of which relies on reactionary politics)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/activists-russian-propaganda-florida-trial.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.tTBa.7YvxMQ3oBtem&smid=url-share

a genuinely weird story, but i have to say that this seems absolutely targeted. (i don’t agree with much in the Uhuru movement and certainly not the Black Hammer movement, the latter of which relies on reactionary politics)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/us/activists-russian-propaganda-florida-trial.html?unlocked_article_code=1.H04.tTBa.7YvxMQ3oBtem&smid=url-share🕸

The Nazis tried to radicalize Native Americans--the "Nazis declared the Sioux Aryans because a journalist was part Sioux" story was disinformation related to that.

I hear that when Hitler gave a speech he'd point to a guy in the crowd and say, "There's my Native American."

Good Nicole Hemmer essay:
https://www.bostonreview.net/forum/the-right-to-be-hostile/the-actual-politics-of-free-speech-is-fueled-by-a-right-wing-political-strategy/

Nothing new for those who've been paying attention, but I appreciate how clearly she lays it all out.

folks, you need to be aware of this.

https://action.aclu.org/petition/mastercard-sex-work-work-end-your-unjust-policy

one of the things that is scariest about being an out trans person is that it significantly limits our sources of income. historically, sex work has been one of the only sources of income available to trans people.

targeting work which monetizing explicit content exhibits the same pattern of behavior as those who seek to punish and repress sex work, and has the same effect. it is an act of systemic violence against queer and trans people. it is important that we and our allies understand it as such.

please understand what is at stake here. this is not a niche issue. this is directly economically devastating to many of my personal friends and many, many people in the trans community i belong to.

otm

I just edited a friend's academic article about this exact thing (she's a porn studies scholar). What's appalling about the moral panic behind this is the incidences of CSAM on Meta absolutely massively outweigh those found on adult sites, but they will never be subject to these kinds of policies.

right! it's not like queer people don't know that CSA takes place and it's a serious problem because A LOT OF US ARE VICTIMS. not that we can say that without some assholes pulling some gaslighty "well maybe you're just queer because you're abused, DID YOU EVER THINK ABOUT THAT?", shut the fuck up already and let me enjoy my furry vore porn in peace

(note, my fetishes have been anonymized because i'm super fucking insecure about my sexuality, GEE WONDER HOW THAT HAPPENED. probably NOTHING TO DO with only being able to find trans representation on porn sites fetishizing my gender identity for the benefit of cisgender men. NOPE.)

i was watching a documentary from the late '00s about this adult content website from the early '00s, which i'm not gonna name but which was fairly well-known as an extreme kink site. i personally am not into the kind of stuff that was on this website, not to that extent at least, but i was aware of it at the time it was operating. and it was interesting because i didn't know the story of how it was shut down, and i found it really enlightening.

see, what happened is that what the american government did, some clever lawyer in the GWB administration said "you know what, we can't go after the site directly", which they couldn't because in the '90s there was this unanimous, far-reaching supreme court decision striking down the Communications Decency Act. all of the edgelord bullshit around at the time, it was and presumably still is protected by that supreme court decision. i'm not aware of that decision having been overturned, though i have no doubt that the american supreme court of today _would_ overturn it in a heartbeat.

but this was the first time the government decided to go after the payment processors, sent out some memo saying something about the war on terror and making some threats against the payment processors. and the payment processors caved. this site, which did absolutely feature some pretty extreme and horrifying content, was shut down, because they couldn't process credit card payments.

the funny thing is that this site... this guy was a fucked up person who did some shitty, manipulative, abusive things. but none of those things had _anything to do_ with how extreme the content is. people look at the content of it and think it looks like, you know, a snuff film or something. nobody's actually ever _seen_ a snuff film, is the thing, all we have is these ideas of what we think a snuff film _would_ look like. i mean, you know, maybe something like the infamous NIN "broken" video, which i haven't seen.

but i do know that guy featured in the "broken" video. he was a guy named bob flanagan. he was really well-known in the kink community, i think there was a documentary about him too, which i haven't seen. the thing is that he _enthusiastically_ consented, as we say in the kink scene nowadays, to all that stuff. you look at some of this stuff and you think that there's no way someone could possibly consent to that, but people not only consent to it, some of us actively desire things like that, and experience great joy when we get the opportunity to experience those things. and you can say oh that's fucked up, people shouldn't be _allowed_ to consent to that, like the british government said with the spanner case in the '90s. it's considered horrific, extreme, like, i don't know, having your dick cut off or something.

am i making a direct comparison between my GRS and extreme consensual torture? no, actually, no i'm not. what i am arguing is that to me, freedom is the freedom to _enthusiastically consent_ to things that might shock or appall the "community standards" of, let's say, the George W. Bush administration. i'm saying that i have actually seen, in person, acts which i would, in the abstract, consider incredibly shocking and terrible. and that it was a really interesting experience seeing them in person, because being there, it wasn't about the acts themselves, it was about people being kind and loving towards each other. like... and i've never seen this, i've never done this, like people talk about fist-fucking as if it was this brutal, violent act, and having heard other people talk about fisting, it does occur to me what a completely silly and wrong-headed take that is. like what you punch someone in the butt so hard that your fist goes entirely up their asshole? i _have_ done anal and, uh, no, that's not how anal works. fisting, as i've heard it described, is a slow, meditative, gentle act, and this makes a lot more sense to me than thinking of it as violent. anyway i'd apply that mindset to any number of consensual "extreme" acts.

so when the movie talks about the fucked up shit this guy did, the fucked up shit is, like... negotiating a boundary ahead of time with a performer, and violating that boundary, and then not only _not_ recognizing that boundary but being controlling and manipulative with the performer when she tried to bring the boundary violation to his attention. what the boundary was doesn't particularly matter, but i will say it didn't involve doing anything physically dangerous. it was a psychological boundary. and she did wind up going along with him, because of the way he determined remuneration. he had a _great deal_ of personal discretion on how much to remunerate a performer, and if a performer kept him happy, they got more money. and if a performer made him unhappy, by, say, _safewording_, they got much less money, and he wouldn't hire that performer again.

i do not think this is a healthy approach to consent, and unfortunately, i have seen a number of cases where... within a system, there are larger dynamics, and sometimes one party has disproportionately more systemic power than another. and the people who hold disproportionately greater systemic power are, very often, COMPLETELY UNAWARE of this systemic imbalance. they also often tend to get defensive and hostile when there systemic imbalances are brought to their attention. "what do you want me to do about it?" like, don't set up a payment structure that disincentivizes the people you're paying from advocating for their own safety? recognize that you do have disproportionate power and take responsibility for it? don't be a mealy-mouthed little shit about it? don't justify your bad behavior as "art"? i don't know, lots of things.

and the most galling thing is that the site in question being shut down had nothing at all to do with any of the wack bullshit he was pulling, and more to do with the bush administration disapproving of the stuff he was selling, which is ironic because some of what that site was doing bore a lot of resemblance to that administration's "enhanced interrogation techniques", with the difference that, and again this is very fucking important, _the performers having these techniques practiced on them enthusiastically consented_. instead, they went after the payment processors, and already in the late 2000s people like this guy were calling it out explicitly and directly - the bush administration is using payment processors as a means of censoring content they didn't like. i really would consider this site being shut down for that reason as what, in my line of work, would be called a "sentinel event".

that site's stuff, it still circulates, frequently in questionable-looking "upscales", and i don't think it's just that the guy behind the site had a unique creative vision or whatever. it's that there _hasn't_ been anything that extreme on the internet since. i've been aware of this fact since the site shut down - even if i didn't know the details, it was clear to me that the site was shut down for being "too extreme", and that since then the stuff people have been doing on the internet has gotten less and less and less extreme. a couple of years ago i realized, with horror, that, functionally, _you can't say fuck on the internet anymore_.

because theoretically you can say what you want on the internet, except that the internet now consists of a series of walled gardens. if you want to make money doing creative work on the internet, you have to do it through one or more of these gardens, which means you have to play by their rules. no, we don't have "free speech" on the internet. it's a myth, and it's been a myth since the day that site was shut down. do i think it's a loss that this extreme fetish site was shut down? yes. yes, i think it is a loss that nobody is doing stuff like that anymore. because, like i said, the problem wasn't that the stuff was _extreme_. the problem was the same problem we see with every other fucking cis white man in a position of systemic power. they have the power, and the rest of us are expected to bear the responsibility. this is about the only place on the public internet i'm still visible, and it's specifically because this space isn't one of those walled gardens. i don't think we're the future of the internet or anything, but those walled gardens, my god, those places are _cooked_.

i happened to run across some ai slop on the net today. someone depicting a fantasy of young women wearing "free palestine" t-shirts being kidnapped and tortured. honestly, this didn't bother me. seeing as how i fantasize about being kidnapped and tortured, i figure it's only fair enough if someone wants to fantasize about kidnapping and torturing me. yes, it's clearly politically revanchist, but frankly, i think most kidnapping and torture fantasies are at least implicitly political - if he's gonna make it explicit, well, at least i know where i stand with him. in other words, i consider him patently unqualified to consensually kidnap and torture me.

no, what bothered me was that he titled it something like "liberal girls get what they deserve", or some such thing. well this was a bridge too far. i had to speak up. if someone is demonstrating for palestinian liberation, we're not liberals, we're _leftists_. i don't see how this fucked up country is ever going to get better if our enemies don't start at least recognizing us for who we are.

i do, incidentally, wonder how that person would react if they knew i was a trans woman. would they say "oh, forget it", and stop sexually fantasizing about my being kidnapped and tortured? or would the fantasy just make them _harder_?

the answer doesn't really matter. i just figure asking the question would make them really, really uncomfortable. worth it.

I don't know where to put this, but I'm struggling with what I see as the extinction of discourse due to the enshittification of social media communities.

10-15 years ago, I regularly witnessed productive, open-ended discussions where people worked through their feelings in tandem. Less rushing to a canon take and more assumption of good faith.

Nowadays, I only really experience that here. Scold culture really took off during the pandemic and now what I see in these spaces are people who are hesitant to express any view until a respected 'authority' comfirms the proper take everyone should adopt.

Ignoring the issue that this leads to inadvertent monolithic thinking, with the implication that authorities on a subject can't possibly have degrees of reactions, I also think people are afraid of public shaming and humiliation. Or being labeled with a Scarlet letter.

Which, despite being pooh-poohed aa nbd, for some folks (like myself), social ostracization is extremely anxiety-inducing. I'm not talking about being called out or criticized - I've akways said my best shrinks were the ones unafraid to call me on my bullshit, and I fired those that didn't.

But online mobs of familiars and strangers widely sharing wrong takes and heaping on abuse or encouraging exclusion of this person. I get it for some things - obv if I had a mutual friend expressing open, hostile transphobia, I'd want to know so they would no longer be in my life.

But it is usually not just that, it's often "this person does not think like us, ergo the entirety of this person is garbage and any verbal abuse to any degree is warranted". Like, ok, I don't like centrists much myself and will argue harshly with them, but I am not going to rush to dismissing the entirety of their worth and being.

Also, though, targeted ostracization and abuse of those with the 'wrong' thoughts is fairly similar to tools fascists use.

Again, there's degrees to these things. But "lol you're a shitlib therefore I can unleash unfiltered misogyny on you because you're not on the right side" is a growing trend.

Also, though, I feel like this creates a lot of people pretending to house beliefs in order to avoid ostracization, who do not actually live the values beyond talking about them. Or in public , admit more openly that they're not as convinced of the views they espoused electronically as they pretended to be. Is that useful?

Disagreement is now seen as hostile. "You didn't adopt my 100% canon take without reservation, which is an act of aggression", basically.

This is one reason I've been working on reducing screen time. I don't see this happen as much in public. I still have great conversations with colleagues.

I've not been the target of anybody's wrath, but I have witnessed plenty in my own community. One particularly toxic example involved a local theater attendee who died suddenly in 2024, I'll call D. While her family, in shock, was posting news of D's passing and funeral arrangements on FB, one friend of mine. I'll call B, tagged the D, so that her friends and family could read it, and wrote an unhinged rant about her.

The offense? D had once taken umbrage at the price B bad set for one of his shows and complained about it on FB once. Rude behavior? Sure, more rooted in ignorance and incuriosity about what goes into setting prices. This wasn't just one example of a pattern of behavior. He made clear this was *the* incident that made her stop being friends with her, that there was no discord prior, and no contact after. Which, fine! I've stopped being friends with people for less.

But the rant written was vitriolic, written as if he was speaking of Ike Turner, saying that now he was glad that all the people she hurt could get closure and that he was glad she couldn't hurt anybody else.

It was bizarre not because we can never speak ill of the dead, but because he had clearly seen other examples of an abusive figure having their legacy rightfully ripped apart upon their passing, and somehow felt that the minor rudeness he experienced rose to the level of systemic abuse and that this warranted a public evisceration in front of friends and family.

More accurately, he saw an opening to tee off on the legacy someone who upset them once because he felt he had the appropriate prerequisite - and he appeared stunned when both my ex and I publicly called him out for what he said (in much calmer language).

I have fairly bad OCD. Because of the nature of online discourse now, that OCD has manifested itself in being unable to write any opening message without pre-addressing the vicious objections i think may come in response. Everything is 5 paragraphs lol

One thing I've noticed is that things on social media become so politically charged that if someone makes a factual correction to someone's righteous rant it is taken as a defense or an apology for nefarious forces.

I have fairly bad OCD. Because of the nature of online discourse now, that OCD has manifested itself in being unable to write any opening message without pre-addressing the vicious objections i think may come in response. Everything is 5 paragraphs lol

You're not the only person I know who suffers from this (and I really do think of it as suffering). I am "fortunate" (in the sense of "suited to online discourse") in that I'm somewhat sociopathic — I'll tell you exactly what I think, because who gives a fuck what you think? If you disagree with me, I might fight you about it, but more likely I'll just ignore you. (I don't killfile anybody because I'm low-tech and lazy, but there are multiple ILXors I don't respond to anymore, because there's no exchange to be had.)

That said, I find your posts in particular not just welcome but consistently interesting.

Neando, I have found that opting out of online discourse entirely, outside of this place and a few no drama discords, has made me a happier person.

Of course walking away isn't a societal solution - the problems you describe will continue - and perhaps on some level it's a cop out but fuck it, on a level of individual mental health it's the way to go. And just anecdotally I see a lot of ppl my age do the same.

It has also helped me to realise that deeds (as in mutual aid, volunteering, etc. not trying revolutionary chic here) matter so much more than whatever words I might summon to try to convince anyone of anything (double that if we're talking online).

<3 Neando

Yeah Daniel I'm seeing more and more walking away is important.

I'd managed to significantly reduce my screen time outside here and it was great.

But I got sucked back in hardcore!

Thanks all

I think there are actually quite a lot of canon takes here. I mean, this entire board is firmly far left as far as I can fathom. And my deepest convictions are all far left as well but I have a number of loosely-held feelings and suppositions that I would never in a million years share here unless I was itching to get shouted down and accused of perpetrating grievous injury.

is your opinion about Bad Bunny?

Social media & the internet have really changed people’s instincts imo … imo as a 50+ year old. It’s weird thinking about 90s internet message boards vs what exists now. …the other day I worried that someone in a Signal group might misinterpret an emoji … and today I explained the Zizians to my 80 year old mother. … I said at one point in my explanation, “when you were 20, people had to run away to join Maoist communes, now they can join them from home!”

I really like Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. Seeing him in decline and then dying onscreen is extremely sad, but the whole thing's fascinating IMO. I couldn't get it out of my head that he did all this stuff to cope with having cystic fibrosis, but as things got bad he just couldn't do it anymore, and at the end was completely stunned by the realization that he was really about to die.

I've seen the documentary that Kate is being careful not to name, but don't remember it very well, so I think I'm going to rewatch it at some point.

I have fairly bad OCD. Because of the nature of online discourse now, that OCD has manifested itself in being unable to write any opening message without pre-addressing the vicious objections i think may come in response. Everything is 5 paragraphs lol

I get this, and I don't think there's a right answer is such but I think you have to look at it like if you get what you consider to the a vicious or vitriolic response to something you just have to let it slide. There could be all kinds of reasons for the response that most likely aren't even anything to do with you (even something as innocuous as toothache). But on the other hand a strong response isn't necessarily a vicious response though can be perceived as such, and arguing can be productive!

And my deepest convictions are all far left as well but I have a number of loosely-held feelings and suppositions that I would never in a million years share here unless I was itching to get shouted down and accused of perpetrating grievous injury.

Coming back to this, the thing is, I want more disagreement. Disagreement is one of the things I use the internet for. I'm thinking of buying a particular thing, or using a particular tool. Am I making a mistake? Maybe. Whose opinions do I actually value at this moment? People who have negative things to say about it, and people who have positive things to say about alternative choices

But we often ended up with an environment full of people who either a) backslap and cosign for the wonderful choice we've made and just say the same thing we just did, b) call us a bellend and full of shit for the choice, or c) don't say their actual opinion because they think we might call them a bellend and full of shit for saying it

I mean pushback is a good thing. I don't mind that. I was a privileged, sheltered kid coming out of high school with naive beliefs and most of my leftward drift came from people challenging me my first few years in college.

But it did require incredible patience on their side.

As a non North American it looks to me like (a) the polarisation of online interaction has been deliberately engineered by social media platforms to drive engagement (duh) and (b) as a society, folks (particularly those of left leaning views) are under unbelievable stress at the moment and this is unlikely to foster broadminded consideration of differing views.

(also duh)

also marginalised people beyond the left have come to recognise certain kinds of "just innocently asking questions" or "you must debate me rationally and calmly even when i question your entire identity" discourse for what it is and recognise that some of the foundational myths of liberal thought are, at bottom, ideological weapons - pretty much the premise this thread was started on! in those circumstances then ignoring or vociferously challenging micro-aggressions, conscious or not, is an entirely understandable thing to do. imo one of the things that keeps the best online communities valuable is when they don't allow themselves to be overwhelmed by Debate Me bros.

obv there is a lot of nuance and other interactions to consider in terms of how people within a community support each other, but this sign has to be tapped on every few weeks apparently

I get this, and I don't think there's a right answer is such but I think you have to look at it like if you get what you consider to the a vicious or vitriolic response to something you just have to let it slide. There could be all kinds of reasons for the response that most likely aren't even anything to do with you (even something as innocuous as toothache). But on the other hand a strong response isn't necessarily a vicious response though can be perceived as such, and arguing can be productive!

So on one level this is good advice, but on another it is severely underestimating the emotional charge of these situations: the poster's irrational anger rubbing up against the reader's irrational fears and anxieties. In such a situation rational arguments are basically besides the point, you can tell yourself about the other person's toothache a million times and it won't change anything. So I say again: extricating yourself from situations that cause this is also an option! It doesn't mean you are "giving up" or failing to fulfill your role as a citizen in the Modern Acropolis.

The internet is particularly likely to lead to such emotionally charged situations as well, due to structural factors - not even talking about all the sinister shit social media throws at us, but more basic points like...if you're arguing with a friend irl their tone and smile will communicate much more than a :) online, their replies to you will be immediate (as opposed to posting something online and then having the opportunity to have a dozen angry discussions about it in your head before anyone's even replied), outside of DMs online is "public" so you are debating with and to an audience, etc.

I agree with the above entirely, especially opting out

What I really meant was in the case of if or where barbs have already arrived, not a suggestion to go wading in and accept the barbs that may come from it.

But reading my post back, your interpretation of it is entirely valid. I could have re-read that 10 times and not seen your interpretation, but reading it back now, that interpretation is really quite obvious

We opt out of things all the time, even for just no particular reason. And we should. But I felt in the original posts there was a subtext of wanting to say something but feeling uncomfortable about it, which suggests not necessarily wanting to opt out. Or feeling conflicted about it, at least

Scold culture really took off during the pandemic and now what I see in these spaces are people who are hesitant to express any view until a respected 'authority' comfirms the proper take everyone should adopt.

Some of it is no doubt due to pandemic, but I also think its politics taking an increasingly bad turn for everybody in the last ten years. Not even personally but seeing atrocities in Gaza from afar, which means trying to reason this out in public - which in one sense is real time political education for all and a net positive in the long run - but it also means the process is fraught, messy and will leave people with scars.

We opt out of things all the time, even for just no particular reason. And we should. But I felt in the original posts there was a subtext of wanting to say something but feeling uncomfortable about it, which suggests not necessarily wanting to opt out. Or feeling conflicted about it, at least

Yeah I get that, posted mostly because I myself didn't want to opt out for the longest time, held unrealistic beliefs about the power of debate, etc. I'm being vocal about it because I feel like many might be in the situation I was in.

I go back and forth on this, because I find a lot of value in disagreement, at least in theory. Especially when I'm not settled on something myself. Lots of times things aren't actually all that clear, but the (growing?) absolutism of things isn't a good test of anything at all

As I said, I have come to the conclusion that I learn more from deeds - which also includes disagreements! - than I do from debate. Debate's mostly just a fun passtime at this point in my life - I learn much more from confronting my beliefs with the reality on the ground. But I'm not claiming that is universal.

assert (matttkkkk) at 9:37 5 Feb 26

As a non North American it looks to me like (a) the polarisation of online interaction has been deliberately engineered by social media platforms to drive engagement (duh) and (b) as a society, folks (particularly those of left leaning views) are under unbelievable stress at the moment and this is unlikely to foster broadminded consideration of differing views

4 am thoughts

Coming back to this, the thing is, I want more disagreement. Disagreement is one of the things I use the internet for. I'm thinking of buying a particular thing, or using a particular tool. Am I making a mistake? Maybe. Whose opinions do I actually value at this moment? People who have negative things to say about it, and people who have positive things to say about alternative choices

But we often ended up with an environment full of people who either a) backslap and cosign for the wonderful choice we've made and just say the same thing we just did, b) call us a bellend and full of shit for the choice, or c) don't say their actual opinion because they think we might call them a bellend and full of shit for saying it

― anvil, Wednesday, February 4, 2026 11:47 PM (yesterday)

i think disagreement is valuable under a lot of circumstances, and those aren't the circumstances i personally am under... what i want most is validation, emotional validation, other human beings confirming that the things i believe aren't crazy or stupid. because the systems of power in america and on the internet are extremely invalidating. it is weird because i do think the internet, which i believed so strongly in the potential of when i was younger, is now the absolute center of power of the forces of oppression. it's been "nerfed" by corporate fascist oligarchs so heavily that i find it all but useless in this day and age, and my frustration is mostly that i'm functionally forced to use it at all.

it's not that i don't have confidence in myself, mind you. one of the things that drives me away from the internet is that i am increasingly confident in myself. when i talk, i give speeches, i talk in ways that don't necessarily open the door to discussion. partly this is hypervigilance, but mostly it's that, well...

i've changed in the past 10 years, i'd like to think for the better. when i was younger, i believed strongly in "discourse", by which i meant abuse. i was genuinely well-intentioned, i think, if ignorant... the internet was a natural fit for me because i'd grown up being emotionally abused by an incredibly brilliant person. it was a great opportunity for me to interact with people in the ways i'd thought of as "normal". i had principles, and they were good ones... it wasn't about _what_ i said, but _how_ i said it, falling into "flamer" internet culture. undifferentiated "extreme" culture, part of which was people saying shitty awful bigoted things, and part of which was just genuinely weird stuff outside the realm of what i'd been taught was "normal". in the past 15 or so years, those two impulses have grown increasingly categorically distinct, and, well, people saying shitty awful bigoted things is apparently more profitable for giant corporations, as well as, this interests me, easier to manipulate and control.

i remember in the first half of the 2010s the outrage when facebook was doing research into how they could use their platform for emotional manipulation. well i can only conclude that their research yielded useful results, because corporate social media is absolutely built on social manipulation. and at first i was just mad at facebook, but more recently i've come to understand that they're simply amplifying a quality that was always present on the internet. and that quality is taking highly activated emotional language and framing it as "logic". honestly, this is a quality that has a long, _long_ tradition in Western (white) culture... I look at the Roman orators the founders of America esteemed so highly, at the legal tradition that was the basis of the values my family taught me, and I find that much of it is about emotionally manipulating people while making it look like what one is saying about "facts" and "evidence". i grew up revering movies like "12 angry men", and, well... at the same time, my grandfather, the lawyer patriarch of our extended family, his favorite film was _a man for all seasons_, this fascinating intersection of Brechtian rhetoric and humanist Catholic stubbornness. my grandfather saw it as a role model for how to perform non-compliance. i don't agree with _a man for all seasons_ in a lot of ways, but it's definitely informed how i interact and talk with other people, how i exhibit my principles. and a lot of what sir thomas more does is... there are things he believes that he chooses to remain silent on. everybody knows what he believes. they're really fucking mad that he won't come out and say it. and i think the thing that impresses me is that he _shows_ instead of _telling_, that thing i was always told about fiction.

i try to show more and tell less. and i try to show empathy, compassion, kindness... to other people but first and foremost to myself. it's who i am, and at the same time, "who i am" means that i change my beliefs based on _evidence_. 30 years ago the research wasn't out there. now it is. now the research that exists suggests that arguing with people doesn't change people's minds, but causes us to harden our hearts against the people who are trying to persuade us, _particularly_ when the other people are _factually correct_. we have this whole system that's based on logic and reason, facts good, feelings bad, and i don't think feelings _can_ be good or bad, right or wrong. they're just not facts. and the research, again, suggests, that while we are very capable of reason a lot of the time, when we're highly emotionally activated, well, we're not. when i'm upset i don't think logically. i'm very good at rhetoric so i can come up with all kinds of arguments to make my emotions _seem_ factual in nature, but it doesn't actually change the facts.

so i talk in these long, long chunks of text, and, well, part of it is that i'm older, i'm slower... when someone says something interesting, i take it in, i listen, and then i take the time to sort through my _feelings_ about what they're saying. cuz that does take time, it doesn't fit in well with the "microblogging" thing where everybody needs to respond instantaneously. and i guess writing how i sort of put my feelings into words. yeah, most posts i make here are essentially "first drafts", in that i write without worrying about how to most succinctly and efficiently communicate what i'm saying to an audience. if there's anything i don't believe in, it's not myself, it's, well, the internet, and as much as i love this site, as much as this place is categorically better than corporate social media, it is technically a public internet site. :)

well, this is kind of the only place i have the opportunity to _think_ in terms of the written word, to work through my thoughts around people who can... people are willing to disagree, when they're not cowed into silence by my prolixity, but even if people aren't "engaging" directly with my posts, the reason i post here is because people here give me things to _think_ about, to consider. and that's not a model that's conducive to monetization. at least not the form of monetization the corporate internet has adopted wholesale!

---

i feel like much, if not all, of the above is me rehashing your second paragraph in longer terms... idk, it's how i internalize stuff. writing is hard for me lately. i'm very skeptical of what i've come to call the "idolatry of the word". because the thing is... i think a lot about language. george carlin, george orwell, they've shaped my thoughts a lot, for better and for worse. i think of myself as being, in many ways, a narratively constructed person - or at least someone who's shaped strongly by the stories i tell about myself. the corporate internet is very much, i think, an example of "strong sapir-whorf" thinking, the belief that it _is_ possible to control people's thoughts by regulating the language that we use. and i do think the sapir-whorf theory applies to a great extent, i think carlin is a fantastic observer of how language is perverted for ideological purposes.

at the same time... i didn't really understand _the book of the new sun_, but one section i do recall well is a section towards the end which describes a society whose speech is controlled by their rulers so that they can only utter certain stock phrases in praise of those rulers. and what wolfe does, as i recall, is demonstrate the emergent qualities of language, the way we ourselves "pervert" any language we're given to express the things that we need to express. i absolutely find this to be true in practice. i watched, a year or so ago, this very interesting video by contrapoints which was, in theory, about the _twilight_ books. well, i think this was in part because it was acceptable on youtube to discuss _twilight_, and not acceptable to discuss kink. and of course there is precedent for this in _50 shades of grey_, which is, i'm reliably informed, a fucking horrible book, and which, at the same time... i feel like it did open the door for people to talk about kink in ways that _aren't_ stupid. when i was younger, there was a series of books called the _gor_ novels, which were widely derided, but people looked at that and, well, made lemonade out of lemons. err, i'm not talking about piss play or anything. i do try to watch out for the subtext, goreans, when i was younger, were more protocol-based than anything.

i don't think it's inherently a good thing, this way of using language, but i do think it's interesting, and i do think it's an inherent challenge to the ultra-prescriptivists, who have set up, in the internet, this narrative which is... increasingly in conflict with reality. i see a lot of people looking at this world and concluding that if you lie enough, you can do anything. i think "if you lie enough, you can do anything" is kind of a central component of The Lie. when i told my youngest sibling, who is very involved in recovery groups, that i hadn't found "fake it till you make it" to be true in practice, they said that a better way of putting it is "you can't think your way into a new way of acting, but you can act your way into a new way of thinking".

i can ta-ta-ta-ta-talk myself to death, or nearly to death i guess, but ultimately i get so desperate and frustrated that i can't help but fucking _do_ things. and mostly those things are good, i've found, better than wasting my breath. it's not that there's no point in talking, but it has a time and a place. the internet has always failed as a replacement for the corporeal. in the 90s, i didn't use the internet like that... i used the internet as a way to bridge the weird shit in my head with corporeal interactions with other people. it's a real struggle to do, because we're all really fucked up and traumatized and the things the internet tries to push us to believe are increasingly at odds with empirical reality. i keep doing it, though, as best i can, because it's what keeps me alive. that's something else i've learned. when shit gets tough, what keeps people alive isn't just about guns or food or whatever. it's about community. isolation kills. which sucks pretty badly for people who are physically isolated, like my friends in alaska, in the yukon. as a weird kid growing up in republican suburban new jersey, the internet showed me that there were people who were weird like me in the world. it's still true, but for us who belong to what was at one time termed the "long tail"... the internet has cut off its long tail, and while i think there can be times when it's... valuable... for someone to do something like that, the internet being what it is... the only thing that's ever been of value in it, i believe, is that long tail.

so increasingly, i interpret the internet as damage and try to route around it. i think you can see this... things become smaller, more local, in times like these, and i think there is value to that. the internet has always struggled with a sense of _scale_. there is no universal community, really. in some ways i do almost think of the internet as the actualization of the old myth of the tower of babel. there's this attempt to bring all of humanity together, united in one purpose, and what we find is that we're divided by a common language. i don't think there's any greater moral purpose to it, i think that's just how language _works_, how human communication _works_. it does, though, seem like someone or something has confused the language of the whole world, and as a result we are scattered into smaller groups.

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which brings me to the question of, you know, it used to be called "cancel culture", groupthink, people shouting each other down, whatever. and i think this is... the thing i say increasingly, when it comes to why i hate cops, is that the thing i hate most about cops is that it puts me in a position where i feel like i have to _be_ a cop. that's what happens when the law binds, but does not protect you. we all have no resources, no authority. we're all on the outside, and the people on the inside are... well, i mean, they're fucking systemic perpetrators of CSA, aren't they? like, literally? and, i mean, how do you live in community when these people are the LEADERS, these people are the ones setting the rules? you have people out there basically openly advocating for sexual assault and, like... i mean, like i said above, i got _feelings_, i got _so many feelings_, anger, grief, fear, and, increasingly, disgust. that's an interesting one. and the people in power, they're not listening. i can't shout down the israeli government, but i can send an email to a local theater who gets funding from an organization that has some sort of ties to an organization that has ties to the israeli military... i think? "in war, truth is the first casualty", i think someone said. our language is confounded. i don't follow the official sources. what i know comes from the rumor mill. and it's very easy for that to turn into a moral panic. maybe the information i have about this theater is wrong. i try to do due diligence, but i'm also, uh, well, i don't trust most of the "official" sources, and the people who do have some idea of the truth are constrained very much by the internet. we gotta keep ourselves alive by talking with idioms.

as much as we're all trying to do the right thing, we all gotta get paid, right? we all gotta make compromises, we all gotta make hard decisions. and i'm not gonna blame anyone for their decisions, but if someone decides to, say, make common causes with transphobes, that means i can't have common cause with them. so yeah. that's always been the way of it, with the left, and they call it "the left eating itself" but it's not, really. it's establishing a common framework of values. there absolutely is an orthodoxy here, and, i mean, everyone on the internet is wearing a uniform, right? supporting trans rights _isn't_ an unquestionable norm on most of the internet, and it very much is here, and that's a large part of the reason i'm here and i'm not on corporate social media. because i do believe in norms. i think it's important that people have common norms and reinforce them. i'm not... i'm not outraged at the people in power for doing the same thing. it just means that we're enemies, that we _can't_ sit down at the table and find a common good. they're not changing their values, and i'm not changing mine. that doesn't mean that we need to settle our differences through clausewitzian diplomacy by any means. they have a decided diplomatic advantage there. for me, all it means is that i have my values and i try to live them as best i can, and i guess they do the same. they live their values on the internet, where they can say whatever the fuck they want and not be bothered about whether material reality backs it up, and i live mine, well, wherever i can. on the internet no more than i have to. :)

Coming back to this, the thing is, I want more disagreement.

I want more disagreement and to have a variety of thoughts but honestly at this point I'm only interested in being challenged in my growth in the direction that I want to be growing in. There are enough spheres of life where more conservative/regressive opinions are available and people voice them very comfortably. That's not where my learning edge is and it's not interesting me to try to deprogram someone from their "we shouldn't tax rich people because they earned their billions fair and square" indoctrination.

totally agreed io. and i guess this is one of the things that, as much as i love ILX... i know y'all, and i think y'all are pretty much great (specifically calling out you, io, as well as neando, map, anvil, sarahell, sleeve, the rest of y'all on this thread as well but i did wanna name y'all specifically :) )... and at the same time, out of everybody name here i've only met sleeve, and it does limit how much i can know someone if we can't hang out. my last ex-girlfriend broke up with me because, well, we never got to see each other... she only lives two hours away, but keeping up a relationship with someone i didn't ever get to see, i couldn't really do that well.

i also, whenever i take the "big 5" test (the one personality test with some evidence of clinical significance), one of the things i rank highest on is "openness to experience". i crave new experience. i hunger and thirst for new experience. am i a lot older? sure. am i depressed and also deeply afraid of doing new things? well, yeah. do i genuinely love life, love the world, love all the amazing people in it? absolutely. i'm just bowled over, on a regular basis, by the wild, amazing, wonderful things this world has to offer, endlessly, ceaselessly. this place is chock full of creative, idiosyncratic, passionate people.

and we're not getting any younger, you know? yeah, most of the people i know these days are younger than me. there's this kind of disconnect, with y'all i can talk about the things we've went through, generationally, not as "nostalgia", as _lived experience_. and i guess it's not new, the "generation gap". the internet can be a very lonely place, can't it? a lot of us are very lonely people. being around other people means being there for each other's grief and pain, and finding ways to express our own grief and pain that don't overwhelm other people.

it's not a matter of "why can't people stop being assholes on the internet". i've said before that if the internet were a physical place, it would probably be someplace like pdx, and these conflicts, the "discourse", the things that get argued about are often stupid and the emotions are real. there are places where i'm not welcome because of my past behavior, and i've had to learn that it's not a matter of right or wrong, it's just that... the term i use is "highly sensitive person". there was, of course, discourse about it. it's pretty similar to what some people used to call "empaths", and of course those people then got made fun of by other people. nobody was _wrong_ exactly. it's just not a matter of morality for me, of good or bad.

i have Big Feels. i have them easier and they hit harder, last longer, affect me more. there are good things about that and bad things about it. it's painful, a lot of the time, because caring hurts. and, well, i'd rather care than _not_ care, cuz i see what happens to people who don't care. and i used to... a lot of gen x was this posture of apathy, "so fucking what", etc. and i guess some people, some of us actually didn't care, maybe a lot of us honestly. for me, i sought out extreme stuff, "edgelord" stuff, to kind of try to numb my emotions, to inure myself. i can't imagine really what bob flanagan must have been through, but i know what it's like to seek out extreme pain to try and inure myself from the pain i'm experiencing, pain that is, in a lot of ways, beyond my control. i used to bury my feelings, to have lots of thoughts, and god, i was miserable, miserable the way a lot of these internet edgelords are now. these days, i tend to bury my thoughts more. there's a lot i want to say and i mostly don't get to say it in paragraphs, as opposed to dribs and drabs on private discord servers. writing helps me make sense ok my feelings, always has. i wish there was a better place for me to write like this on the internet! there really isn't, though. not right now. i'm not starving for _content_, i'm starving for _knowledge_. people tell me i'm "wise", but it's kinda hard to be wise when i don't really _know_ what's going on right now.

i look at youtube - private window, as always - and the sidebar has some video from five hours ago with 1.5 million views that says "WATCH TRUMP SPIRAL ON LIVE TV", and the thumbnail says "ONE SICK F***", because, again, we've reached the point where you can't actually say "fuck" on the internet. and me, i just think about gil scott-heron. and i'm not even going to put words on what's happening now. "words are dead", i sometimes say, taking something billy name said out of context. words aren't dead, though. it's just that the thing that gil scott-heron said wouldn't be televised, that's not what's happening. the word wouldn't be the right word even if i _could_ say it without it being interpreted as sedition. i'm not interested in sedition. i'm also not interested in copping out on skag or q-anon or most of the shit we do to avoid the world outside. i don't judge anybody for doing it, but the shit they say on the internet just bears so little resemblance to reality.. i often say that i can't suspend my disbelief in reality, but it's not "reality" itself that i object to. it's this hyperreal, hypernormalized corporate hellscape that.. i accept it, but i don't understand why people would do or say the things that they do and say. i guess this circus, the american metaphysical circus, is my circus, but i don't know what the hell i'm supposed to _do_ with it. they want me to watch and talk and watch and talk and i do have feelings, but they don't _deserve_ those feelings, for the most part. except for the disgust. and what do i do when i'm disgusted? i turn off the television.

i know that's another long ramble. like i said, i don't write much, anymore. even if i don't make a whole lot of sense, i feel like i'd make less sense if i didn't write at all. it's not good for me to bury all this stuff, i know.