[Andrew Szilvasy]

This is an excellent takedown, Aaron.

[Kevin Rainbow]

Kevin, if a person supports morally abhorrent views and policies, it is not going "beyond criticism" to make a judgment as to their moral character.

Bashing the person him/herself and lying about them is not judging someone's moral position about something. Nor is merely slinging labels like "morally abhorrent".

All you have proven is that you can sling negative labels. When are you going to judge things by what they really are, instead of what you want to smear them into appearing as?

But I understand why you, who yourself support morally abhorrent views and policies, are concerned about people on the left making use of their free speech rights to criticize both such views and policies and the people morally bankrupt enough to support them.

What do you know about morals if you engage in and condone personally insulting and grossly misrepresenting people and views of people you disagree with. I'm simply condemning the behaviour, and in response you resort to more negative labels offering no substance, basis or argument to back them up whatsoever.

At the very least when you sling a label, provide an argument and evidence to try to back it up. As a critic you should know the difference between "constructive" and nonconstrucive" "Morally abhorrent" "morally bankrupt" - these are provocative and attention-catching, just as "horrible poem" "meaningless drivel" would be in the poetry section. there is a big difference between saying something and constructively making a case. Anyone can sling labels like "morally abhorent" or "morally bankrupt" at your thoughts too. What's new? It just keeps going around and preventing people from being able to disagree about things in a civilized, constructive way.

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[Quincy Lehr]

There is a difference, say, between internet pushback against Establishment figures (e.g. New York Times columnists with consistently bad takes) and trying to get Palestinian professors fired—both of which apply to Bari Weiss, who is ironically a signatory of the letter in Harper’s. Likewise, J.K. Rowling never missed an opportunity to slander opponents of Jeremy Corbyn as “anti-Semites”—and careers were ruined over that canard. But hypocrisy is, as they say, the tithe vice pays you virtue, and the NPR tote bag “We Are the Left” letter was worse than hypocritical, but rather a lib regurgitation of anti-left slanders and glib use of historical examples, wedded to an HR-department-style use of overly psychological views of bigotry of the sort Matt Taibbi rightfully eviscerates..

As for Poetry, it was grimly hilarious to see Don Share sent to get his shine box after setting himself up as a paragon of the most insufferable brand of the stuff. One imagines him arriving in the Cancellation Gulag like a recently purged ex-GPU station chief forced to bunk with the Trotskyists, Zinovievites, and Bukharinites who’ve been there for years.

[Aaron Novick]

Kevin, it's a bit rich of you to complain about me "lying" about what people said when your post contains, by my count, at least three outrageous lies about me.

My moral views are pretty simple, ultimately: life is difficult for everyone, and we should be kind to each other. I understand that you are a Trump supporter, so perhaps you subscribe to the rather different moral view that we should be as pointlessly cruel to people as possible. Different strokes, as they say.

[Mark McDonnell]

Back to the letter.

Andrew, it is just not true to say "the letter's main complaint is that other people are using speech in ways the letter-writers don't like" and you know this. Its main point is about people losing their jobs and their reputations, which is having a chilling effect on writers and the arts. Here's its key paragraph. I recognise something real in it. Aaron, the link about right wing clampdowns on campuses is disturbing. There's nothing below that wouldn't include that sort of thing too. This is why this needn't be seen as a right/left issue. The left wing critics of the letter, and those who signed it but are now distancing themselves, are making it a left/right issue by complaining that some people who they disagree with have signed it. That's the whole point! Otherwise you're just saying "I believe in open debate, but only for people who agree with me".

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

On the trans thing my instinct is to side with anyone vulnerable who is being made to feel uncomfortable (apart from clear bigots and religious crazy types obviously). And it seems that lots of people are feeling like that: trans people, of course, who are especially vulnerable, but also the parents of trans teens who worry their child may make a decision they regret, or (some) feminists and lesbians who feel the lived biological reality for which women have long been oppressed is being somehow diminished. I maintain the issue is complex

https://arcdigital.media/harry-potte...n-926ad6519451

https://www.afterellen.com/general-n...irls-and-women

I'm prepared to believe that one day I might be proved wrong to think that there are any valid feelings or points to be made here, but I'm OK with that. I think people sometimes fear being on the "wrong side of history" more than they value their own autonomy of thought. But the spirit of the Harper's letter (which isn't primarily about the trans issue of course, despite Aaron bringing it up because Rowling's signature got so much publicity) is about being able to think and speak freely without fear of being publicly shamed or losing one's job, which does seem increasingly to be happening, to both the privileged and to "ordinary" people with regard to this and other issues. Since we have ended up on this issue, I've been asking myself some questions. Maybe you could think about your own answers. Are trans women and trans men "real" women and men? (whatever that means, which nobody seems clear about). Well, if it's going to hurt someone's mental health to insist that their sense of their own existence constitutes a state of "unreality", then yes, of course they are. What should the regulations be around administering hormones and puberty blockers to young people who begin to identify as trans? What age, if any, is too young? How do we know the young person isn't just a feminine boy or a "tomboy" and mightn’t it be better just to assure them that that they don't have to conform to stereotypical gender roles? I've no idea, I'm not a scientist or a doctor or a child psychologist and even those three groups don't seem to be able to agree either. Should lesbians who aren't interested in sexual relationships with lesbian-identifying trans women, because they are trans women, be considered transphobic and encouraged to move beyond this? Well, if the answer to the first question (are trans women real women) is unequivocally 'yes' then surely the lesbians must be considered transphobic. They've certainly been accused of it. But my instincts to agree with the woman in the video below and say 'No' are really strong.

https://youtu.be/dQ35T3H7Arg

So it's complex. Isn't it? And interesting. My point, and the point of the letter, isn't about the rights or wrongs of this, or any other question. It's that nobody should be losing their jobs or receiving death and rape threats for asking these questions, or giving the 'wrong' answers, or for thinking that the answers aren't obvious, that they contain contradictions, that they require some thought. But that's what happens. There are far too many death and rape threats for my liking. If anything is adding to prejudice against trans people and their allies it's this, rather than any inherent aversion to them as human beings.

https://mobile.twitter.com/tibby17/s...86483807113221

But yeah, Rowling probably needs to back off now. It's gone on far too long. And the bathroom thing is a silly argument.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sco...-2877977%3famp

I know the right wing media will jump on this sort of thing, as they will opportunistically jump on anything that might further their agenda. Like this, which you yourself linked to Aaron, in a previous thread, as an example of worrying stifling of speech by the left and which I assume is the study referred to in the letter.

https://twitter.com/jenbrea/status/1271148784316108800

I'm more than capable of discriminating between a thoughtful opinion and a hysterical right or left wing (or "woke" or whatever you want to call it) appropriation of it. Clearly the guy who retweeted Omar Wasow wasn't racist or right wing and didn't deserve to be fired and equally any right wing attempt to use the study to discredit the recent wave of protests would have a shady political agenda. And clearly Magdalen Burns, whose video I linked to above, is not right wing, though the right might happily attempt to appropriate her. You may think she's a hateful bigot and nothing more, but by no stretch are her views coming from a reactionary or right wing place. She was eulogised after her death in The Morning Star.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/arti...-gone-too-soon

I've no doubt it's true that the right uses institutional power to suppress speech it doesn't like, and that this doesn't get the same publicity as these "woke" cancellations. That's bad too!

But anyway, It seems I'm alone in thinking this letter has any value (apart from Kevin and while I've nothing against you personally Kevin, it's hard to get past the Trump thing)

[Aaron Novick]

Mark, your disagreement with Andrew (and me) is fundamentally a disagreement about whether the letter should be taken at face value. If we were taking it at face value, then we would recognize that, yes, it describes an issue that is not inherently a left/right issue. Of course, we would also recognize that the right is the far worse offender than the left. (This is why I tend to think that the left should be more robustly pro free speech than it is—actual restrictions on speech work always in the end work in favor of the right.)

The question is whether it makes any sense to take it at face value. And when the examples the letter provides are all coming from the left (even though the right is the far worse offender), and when these examples often grossly misrepresented—as they must be, since they aren't actually good examples of "cancel culture" at all (see the link I posted at the bottom of the last page)—and when prominent signatories have in fact engaged in or supported the very practices the letter allegedly deplores (directed against left-wing folks), well, at that point I began to worry that it's something less than a good-faith defense of free speech, and instead is better interpreted as (primarily, not exclusively) a bunch of powerful people who don't like that the plebs can subject them to scrutiny. I think this gets the measure of it: https://twitter.com/RottenInDenmark/...59257970159618

edit: cross-posted with Erik, who makes a similar point

On the substance of trans issues, two points. (1) The reality of transition regret (and it is real) is a really bad reason to make medical care harder for young trans people to access, for a fairly basic reason: delay regret is just as real—indeed, it's one of the drivers of the incredibly high suicide rate among trans people. It's not in the least hyperbolic to point out that lives are at stake here. And that leads to the second point. (2) Not wanting people to feel uncomfortable is noble. But feelings are secondary to material harms. I'm sorry that some women apparently feel that legal protections and readily available medical care for trans people undermines their "lived experience of oppression". But when I put their feelings on the scale next to the actual lives that they apparently wish to sacrifice to their comfort, I think the choice is a fairly simple one.

[Erik Olson]

If you take the presuppositions of this letter as true and valid, the argument it lays out is nothing if not reasonable. If you take those presuppositions as misassumptions or mischaracterizations, the argument is nothing if not specious. I, for my part, am not so sure about what the letter bases its argument on and does not give any detail about: Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study, and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. What if that professor was offending students by using the n-word? Is an investigation such an outrage then? What if that book taken down for inaccuracy was peppered with unscientific hogwash given as fact? And so on and so forth.

[Kevin Rainbow]

Kevin, it's a bit rich of you to complain about me "lying" about what people said when your post contains, by my count, at least three outrageous lies about me.

Again you give no proof to back up your accusations and labelling.

What you said is already on the record here in your posts.

You said: "she is a horrible person" (An insubstantiable over-the-top, rude labelling of a person, not a judgement of her moral position.)

You said: "she has faced no consequences more severe than criticism" (A lie. Mischaracterizations, insults, lies, death-threats from people reacting to her beliefs are serious consequences, more than just "severe criticism")

You said: "she has used threats of legal action to suppress such criticism." (A lie. The tweet you shared specifically shows she is reacting against a misrepresentation about her, not attempting to suppress disagreement and constructive criticism from people.).

You said: "she says hateful things about trans people." (A lie / false generalization). There is no evidence of hatefulness in what she says about transpeople, no matter how much you disagree with her position. )

If this were an isolated case, I wouldn't bother with it. But this kind of approach is literally now a common and casual approach to treating people who have a non-mainstream opinion about something, resulting in over-the-top negative labellings, intolerance, fake news, and varying degrees of censorship, preventing people from getting to the truth of things and communicating in a civilized way.

so perhaps you subscribe to the rather different moral view that we should be as pointlessly cruel to people as possible. Different strokes, as they say.

You say this right after saying your moral view is "we should be kind to each other." If you can so casually write JK Rowling off as a horrible person, then I can only imagine what you are willing to think about Trump, and by extension about anyone who supports Trump, especially when further fueled by the media.

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[Mark McDonnell]

I added some stuff to my last long post, so if it looks like Aaron wasn't responding to some of my points in his post below it, that's my fault not his. Just wanted to make that clear. No doubt he will now haha. As so often in these discussions I'm kind of sorry I brought this up. Oh well.

Be nice to each other everyone.

[Aaron Novick]

Kevin, a good example of your outrageous lies is your claim that I have given no substance to shore up my claims. But since you are either illiterate or pretending to be, as has been evident since your very first response to me, I am not surprised that you are unable to see this.

My conception of being nice to people does not involve giving them a pass for harming others. If Rowling wants to use her massive platform to stir groundless panic about trans people, I will judge her for it. If you want to wholeheartedly support the breathtaking corruption and petty cruelty of the Donald Trump administration, I will judge you for it.

You are, in any event, correct that what I say is on the record. As such, I do not think I need to defend myself from your lies any further. Anyone who cares to (probably very few folks) can see for themselves the dishonesty and bad faith you have brought to this discussion. Good day.