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Roderick

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It's difficult to point to specific examples since, online, you only really hear back from the contrite or the committed shitheels. Having my own privileged nose rhetorically smacked my the rolled up newspaper of social justice in the past (and seeing it happen to others) led me to places like the Idle Thumbs forum, but I've always been open-minded and progressive leaning. However, evidence suggests it drives a lot of people to places like 8chan as well, where they become radicalized and legitimately dangerous.

Reactionary groups are fueled by the hurt feelings and bruised egos of the privileged. Sure, it's satisfying to dismiss them as they've dismissed others. But the thing about reactionaries is that they tend to have the tools of power and the vested interests of the status quo on their side.

Not really sure what to do with that...

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It's an interesting angle to consider on whether it helps radicalize people, though I would wonder how many of the people going to 8chan were likely to be turned towards a neutral or progressive stance.  I have my doubts that there are very many. 

 

Another thought.  Is it bad for people in the dominant group to feel what it is to be inhibited from speaking?  One thing dominant groups do quite well is inhibit the non-dominant from speaking.  So when people from the dominant group complain about being afraid to speak out, I wonder if there is any awareness that what they are experiencing is something that many people outside of the dominant group have already experienced.  That doesn't apply universally, but in something like Chait's piece, he appears to be completely blind to the toxicity of dominant cultures that suppress outsider thought within them. 

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Can someone actually point to concrete examples of when callout culture is truly bad and alienating?

 

It can be hard to present hard evidence for that kind of thing since a lot of it is in the nebulous (but still relevant) domain of feeling welcome or not feeling welcome. There are definitely times though, I think, when the bottled-up people anger people (understandably!) carry around goes off and can hit the wrong person, or be be disproportionately harsher than the crime. For example, here's a joke between Alan Williamson and Leigh Alexander (who know each other) that led Courtney Stanton to tear into Alan for, in her perception, being some random dude being creepy towards her friend. Leigh eventually told her to lay off, although that was not recorded, nor did she quiet down before folk like Christine Love took sidelong glances at what she was tweeting about and agreed that wow, dude's being creepy.

 

As I said before, this conversation was also generally happening around this time last year, so there's a lot of nuanced writeups if you want to go back in time a bit (the Critical Distance weekly writeups should have good links for it, I think). Here's what Mattie Brice had to say, for example, opposite something Jeff Kunzler wrote about Ben Kuchera being picked up by Polygon. In general, Kunzler is a pretty good example, I think, of someone who's tone is irreedemably toxic: he writes massive rants about current events in the games industry that always seem to be more about him blowing off steam than doing the subject justice or providing any sort of nuanced critique. Last year was around the time even people with similar viewpoints had to tell him that so many chained expletives weren't helping the matter.

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I cannot say myself (I'm white) if your reaction is somehow "more right" than your friends in this case, but it sounds analogous to a situation I see a lot with men chastising women on internalized misogyny - even if you disagree and you know why you disagree and you know that internalized misogyny is a thing, is it your place, as someone who benefits from sexism to necessarily check that vs. other women? That's a nuanced scenario I'm describing but it sometimes rankles me personally to see men do it because they still aren't removed from the system that creates that in the first place, and often, even monologues that are born from internalized misogyny are still subject to the power dynamics of whatever conversation takes place afterwards.

But all of this is probably what people grouse about "absolute identity politics" when really, in practise, it's not something you think about overtly as much. It's not my place, I believe, to tell people of color what they should think about racism as a structural institution is because I benefit from that structure existing - it would be more of the case of other peers of theirs in that regard, to check their POV.

To be clear, I stayed silent in the moment, but the conversation I watched happen colored my perception of the movie both because it was so different from what I thought and because it happened in the lobby of the theater while waiting for people to get out of the bathroom. When I brought up that I had been uncomfortable and tried to work out why with a third party, I got called out hard.

I think this whole callout thing is incredibly nuanced, and it necessarily has to be considered in its specific context. I think the majority of toxic callouts are ones that are more just a call to shut the fuck up based on identity politics than they are a way to continue a discussion, even if it would change into a different discussion. It's not that calling people out is inherently toxic, it's just that I see it used a lot as a way to just end a discussion or to discourage someone from talking about something, which definitely is toxic. That is largely about the reaction to being called out, but I don't think that makes it entirely about the person doing the reacting.

(Typed this on my phone while taking my lunch break walk, sorry if it's disjointed and full of autocorrect weirdness)

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I have no problem with call-out culture myself, although I didn't even know it existed and am too lazy to read anything about it, including the thing written by that Chait guy. I think why I don't care much is probably because it seems to be about US politics perhaps even more than about something relevant internationally, such as feminism etc.

 

I actually have way more problems with how many people are reacting when someone is getting called out. Often I see acts of calling someone out equated with censorship, bullying, attempts of limiting freedoms, and so on. Eventually someone will say, "if we continue like that, soon we will not be able to say anything". Although I don't really have a feel for what the local culture is as I haven't really read news or columns for two years. But from the occasional reactions of some otherwise very intelligent people I know, I will still often see rationality disappearing when someone gets called out and they jump into this mode where someone is being censored, bullied, or our collective freedoms (of speech) are getting erased because a person was criticized openly and perhaps had to apologize for something (someone having to apologize is apparently as good as cencorship). People should be more able to deal with criticism in a rational manner and not jump to extreme counter-opinions immediately and generally have better tolerance of critical opinions. So in my opinion, there should be way more calling out, for all kinds of reasons, so that people get more used to it.

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I think it's a trap to frame bad behavior from those getting called out as hysterical lapses in rationality, revealing weakness of character. Especially when what you are trying to do is make spaces more accommodating and safe for people with different and traumatic life experience.

Dismissing things like trigger warnings and engaging in tone policing is rooted in the false dichotomy of "logical" (white straight male) discourse and "shrill" (PoC female gay) ranting.

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I think one of the big problems with callout culture is that a given instance can snowball so rapidly as well meaning people try to add weight. That in turn can be advantageous to non-progressive movements and people who want to dismiss the original problem and cry about overreaction. That shirt at the ESA was a good example: He apologised, but conservatives kept their outrage at the callout rolling for weeks.

 

I'm not saying it shouldn't have been called out, but there's often no way to put the brakes on once it's done.

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In hindsight, I think my above post is a bit naive, but I wasn't really talking about reactions of the people getting called out, I also had for example that ESA t-shirt thing in mind where a lot of intelligent geeks were suddenly outraged at feminists that a Scientist had been forced to apologize and made to cry.

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One of the thing in Chait's piece that really rubbed me the wrong way was that he argues that trigger warnings in college syllabuses actually damage victims/survivors of abuse because they can avoid things that trigger those memories, and he explains that this is the case because studies show that controlled exposure to those feelings will actually help heal. (This reads to me as faux concern for victims/survivors of abuse, but he may be genuine.) But isn't that exactly the purpose of trigger warnings? Victims/survivors of abuse are then given the choice to either interact or not with a text on their own terms rather than being ambushed?

He seems to think that everyone who sees an applicable trigger warning is going to immediately skip that content rather than choose to engage it on their own terms, at a speed/environment they feel more comfortable with?

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The trigger warnings that Chait is referencing extended beyond trying to protect victims of abuse. Over the summer, students on different college campuses tried to get trigger warnings added to different works of fiction (trigger warning for classism in the Great Gatsby and trigger warning for racism in Things Fall Apart), with the intention that if a student didn't want to be triggered by those topics, they could elect to ignore that content in the class. That to me is such an abuse of the original intention of trigger warnings -- creating a safe space on feminist blogs for women to discuss their abuse -- and opens the door for people to simply ignore or hide from anything they find even remotely challenging, which is the entire point of getting an education. Roxane Gay wrote a much better explanation for why these Trigger Warnings are ultimately useless: http://therumpus.net/2012/08/the-illusion-of-safetythe-safety-of-illusion/

 

Going back to callout culture, Ariel Levy wrote a great piece in the New Yorker that examined both sides of the Steubinville rape case and the role that social media played. The conclusion isn't a definite 'social media is bad and callout culture is toxic' but it isn't necessarily positive either. Really worth a read. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/08/05/trial-by-twitter

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I am not of the opinion that trigger warnings are amazing OR useless because overall, I believe content warnings are incredibly useful. Not sure how I feel about them being on college syllabi, and I think that that is an extension of people not actually understanding the difference between trigger warnings and content warnings. I can't outright dismiss trigger warnings because I myself know what it's like to run into something in media I wasn't prepared for and be completely fucking floored emotionally for a couple of days. Let me tell you, controlled clinical spaces for immersion or interaction therapy is FAR different than being alone and having something sprung on you because you are not prepared for it, it completely sends you down a fucking rabbit hole and it often times makes you relive a really horrible experience in your life. 

 

Hence why I tend to read synopses online or are grateful for websites that give heads-up of what a movie or book or show might contain. People didn't warn me about Black Mirror, for instance, despite the first season dealing explicitly with sexual coercion.

 

On the other hand, I've had shit with public transportation lay me out flat. I think the more nuanced approach to this is understanding trauma overall a lot better, and making more judicious use of content warnings. I like people making good use of tagging, because it allows me tools where I myself can decide what I choose to interact with in general - I filter out certain words on Twitter, Tumblr because it bothers me or otherwise causes me to feel like crap, etc. Giving people the ability to make choices is honestly a good goal in general. I mean, marking things with spoiler tags or "NSFW" are no different than "trigger warning" other than what they contextually imply and yet people are way more concerned about spoilers than trigger warnings because trigger warnings have been bludgeoned to death as "cossetting liberal bullshit" or feminist propaganda. I know that in many circumstances that they aren't useful but that doesn't mean they aren't useful in ALL places. 

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I don't know, every time I see that conversation happen it seems to bring with it the suggestion that less than 100% effectiveness is a good enough reason to not bother at all and that people need to be confronted with challenging material, which runs a little too close to the "adversity builds character" bullcrap that's used to justify bullying sometimes, for me anyway. Like, I doubt people are not going to have enough challenging stuff in their lives if we don't throw it at them?

 

Maybe the tool isn't perfect, I really wouldn't know, being one of the uninformed and fortunate people who have perfectly no experience with the need for that kind of warning. However, the concern that is expressed for what's going to become of society if we provide that kind of tool makes me uncomfortable since it almost universally seems to come from a place of assuming that people can't/won't make the right choices for themselves if we let them. "People are just going to roll up in a ball and hide from the world if we encourage them" strikes me as awfully close to "people are never going to get a job if we encourage their laziness by providing basic support" at least.

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It's a huge stretch to link trigger warnings in college to government support. The former is an excuse for an 18 year-old to avoid challenging material that may go against their worldview (again, the entire point of getting an education and becoming an informed, sympathetic human being) and the latter is an attempt to correct a market failure by protecting the very poor. And if you truly believe that people en masse are capable of making the right choice for themselves, then you would have to oppose most government programs, which are based on the idea that people quite often are incapable of doing just that.

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It's a huge stretch to link trigger warnings in college to government support. The former is an excuse for an 18 year-old to avoid challenging material that may go against their worldview (again, the entire point of getting an education and becoming an informed, sympathetic human being) and the latter is an attempt to correct a market failure by protecting the very poor. And if you truly believe that people en masse are capable of making the right choice for themselves, then you would have to oppose most government programs, which are based on the idea that people quite often are incapable of doing just that.

 

I don't necessarily know that I agree with you. Last year, when we read large portions of Olaudah Equiano in my class, it was heavy stuff with which a lot of my students clearly had trouble. More than a few didn't show up that day because of it. If that's what's happening already, I don't see a problem with formalizing it through a trigger warning or something similar ("content warning" sounds less like it comes from the internet and means the same thing) and encouraging students to talk to the professor if they anticipate issues with the material. It might help some of the students who skipped out entirely to access the material in a limited way, rather than not at all. The students who don't want to do the work will always find a way not to do the work, so classroom policy has to be based on enabling students who do want to do the work in any way possible.

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I think confronting challenging material is good which is why I wouldn't ever want them on a syllabus. But it's like yeah, the discussion never seems to swing in the middle of places where it IS good and where it isn't, but rather "eh, all of it is shitty and terrible, and trigger warnings should be gone" versus a more expansive understanding of why they are needed in the first place. There's definitely content which we (general) should be exposed to but might pose significant problems to people who are affected.

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Not link, compare. Perhaps it doesn't hold up quite well, but I also don't think it's fair to suggest (as far as I'm aware, before this has even been implemented anywhere) that the only thing it will achieve is allow people to skip stuff they don't want to read. Which, at least around here, also happens when it's officially verboten. And that's definitely not ideal, but I'm also not sure why you think stuff not being read is such a huge or new deal in that case. Education in particular is an area where you can lead the horse to water, but you can't force it to drink and you can't force it to make the most of the incredible opportunity its been given. Like, tests and exams don't dig that deep, and profound impact is something that's really hard to measure.

 

 

then you would have to oppose most government programs, which are based on the idea that people quite often are incapable of doing just that.

 

They certainly can't always I guess, but this is such a profoundly personal thing that I'm not sure we shouldn't just acknowledge that the individual themself will know best when they're ready, how they want to confront that kind of material. Either way it seems pretty blase to assume they wouldn't have any interest in doing so.

 

EDIT

 

The students who don't want to do the work will always find a way not to do the work, so classroom policy has to be based on enabling students who do want to do the work in any way possible.

 

Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel about it. It's worth noting, perhaps, that I'm talking about a different academic system as well, one where the lack of tuition fees tends to bring in more half-committed people than folk from across the pond might be used to, but in essence I feel like if people are unwilling to learn, grow and confront something challenging then they aren't going to do so either way and if people are willing and ready then they won't suddenly become lazy sods because there's an opportunity to.

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Wow. I just read the last several pages and, like clyde, I want to say how impressed I am at the discussion. There's a lot of food for thought in here.

 

I think a lot of the big points have been mentioned, but something that hasn't really been brought up is Chait's slippery use of "liberalism." This is pretty common in current political discourse in general, but I think it's particularly relevant to this discussion because part of Chait's argument is that call-out culture is "liberals attacking liberals." But what the hell do we mean when we say "liberal"?

 

While he differentiates between "liberal" and "left" and discusses the historical origins of liberalism in the Enlightenment, he makes it seem as though that Enlightenment liberalism is the same thing that we talk about today when we say "liberal." That's not true at all. Enlightenment liberalism was about the free market economy, property rights, the primacy of the individual as the basis of society and the ability of man to perfect himself and the world around him. In that, it looks a lot more like today's "conservatism" or what's often called neo-liberalism. There wasn't much about race or gender or class in that thinking (heck, classical liberalism denies the existence of class at all).

 

This is important because Chait takes liberalism's correctness as a given, while only picking out the parts of liberalism that appeal to him and not questioning them at all. He writes

 

Liberals believe (or ought to believe) that social progress can continue while we maintain our traditional ideal of a free political marketplace where we can reason together as individuals. having an opinion challenges that bedrock liberal ideal.

 

But he doesn't ask what "social progress" is or what a "free political marketplace" looks like. For a long time, "social progress" in liberalism was the Industrial Revolution, colonialism, Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden. A "free political marketplace" was one in which only propertied white men could vote.

 

Now of course, the meanings of words change, but Chait uses this same word to deal with two very different ideas. And that conflation results in paragraphs like this one that ends the essay:

 

The historical record of American liberalism, which has extended social freedoms to blacks, Jews, gays, and women, is glorious

 

Really, Jonathan Chait? Martin Luther King, Jr. was a democratic socialist; Jewish support groups like The Workmen's Circle were socialist; I don't have time to find sources right now, but if you look at the history of LGBT rights and women's rights, you'll find plenty of influential people who did not support "American liberalism."

 

I don't mean this to be a linguistic "Gotcha!" but rather point out that Chait is framing his argument in a way to make it seem like "liberalism" has been historically able to introduce new people into its fold without outside pressure from "non-liberal" groups. That's simply not true.

 

My broader point is that "liberalism", along with the whole "right-centre-left" spectrum, as a political concept is less than useless and needs to be exchanged for something more specific.

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So I just wanted to point out this article in the Nation that is a year old at this point, and is basically discussing many of the the same issues that appear in that Chait article, but I feel like this article approaches it with more careful nuance compared to Chait who I feel badly overstates his case by dialing it dangerously close to "Clash of Civilizations" style rhetorical flourish.

 

http://www.thenation.com/article/178140/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars?page=0,0

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I don't have time to find sources right now, but if you look at the history of LGBT rights and women's rights, you'll find plenty of influential people who did not support "American liberalism."

 

Just because I've been reading up on it lately and it's kind of interesting, something like LGBT rights were mostly heralded by the anarchists in the late 1800s/early 1900s, with people like Alexander Berkman personally documenting his transition into accepting homosexual love in some memoirs he wrote while in prison. The Bolshevik revolution led to the abolition of all sex crimes in Russia somewhere in the early 1920s with prominent women like Alexandra Kollontai championing free love with some success before Stalin came in and did his Stalin thing. Or there's Mujeres Libres, a libertarian/anarchist feminist group that was active in Spain around the civil war.

 

Two of those aren't American movements, but even if you limit yourself to American movements you find things like the Mattachine Society, a gay rights group from the 50s that was founded by a member of the Communist Party of America (who was later basically blackballed by the communist party for it, buuuuuuuut whatever).

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I love this line.

 

The argument for marriage equality is hardly radical; a radical argument would involve, for example, calling for an end to civil marriage as the de facto requirement for wealth-building, legal protection, and social approval for relationships in this country.

 

This is something that has been irritating me about the marriage stuff. I don't think the government should be giving advantages to married couples at all. "Equal rights for single folk!" I say.

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I'm glad to have read this because I think it both communicates the parts of Chait's piece that I agree with better than Chait did, and also explains what is frustrating about it better than most of the social media replies I've seen have.

This excerpt sums up in large part what I was trying to get at earlier in this thread, particularly when I shared my own experience, but I don't think I actually achieved that:

 

The problem with identity politics—in this particular manifestation, anyway—is that it assumes that just because a person claims a certain identity label, that person is necessarily empowered to be judge and jury on all issues pertaining to that category. The truth is, identity grants experience (and experience should be valued to a point); but it does not automatically grant wisdom, critical distance, or indeed, unassailable righteousness. To forget this is to turn individual people who possess a range of intelligences, backgrounds, self-interests, and flaws into two-dimensional avatars for the condition of humanity in which they happen to share. And, by corollary, to assert that it is impossible on some fundamental level for those who don’t share that condition to ever relate or speak to that person as merely another human being with ideas and opinions.

 

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Great discussions! 

 

I agree with a lot of what Argobot's putting down, and if I can paint it with a broad brush, it often feels like "the left" is perpetually cannibalizing itself before it can reach some critical mass. It's a problem with no solution other than trying to be understanding, but sometimes it seems like the fragmentation is endless, and the right rarely has this problem. 

 

I've seen it smaller communities often relating to feminism issues, and one that always jumps out to me is Kathleen Hannah/Bikini Kill/Riot Grrl stuff, which when it hit was so vital and revolutionary, but now whenever it comes she's getting dumped on for failure to be more inclusive, and being called an egomaniac or asshole. To the former I will totally acknowledge that they didn't do a great job bringing in non-whites, but she was basically a kid and people trying to shake things up from a position of less power can't get it all right the first time. For the latter, she was trying to make something happen and that almost always requires a person with a near unreasonable degree of self confidence. It ends up being a case where everyone could have been more understanding, but I also feel like we wind up tarnishing inspiring figures.

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Do you ever feel bad about arguments on the offchance that you made somebody else feel bad? Because that happens to me a lot.

 

Anyway, I wanted to say that I think you're all lovely people and I hope I didn't come off as flippant earlier. Or end up doing so later.

 

I'm glad to have read this because I think it both communicates the parts of Chait's piece that I agree with better than Chait did, and also explains what is frustrating about it better than most of the social media replies I've seen have.

This excerpt sums up in large part what I was trying to get at earlier in this thread, particularly when I shared my own experience, but I don't think I actually achieved that:

 

This is much better than Chait's piece for sure. I think Mangela already pointed out how weird it is to feel something is sexist/racist/whatever opposite a woman or person of color who thinks it's just fine. It's a complicated subject I guess. Obviously internalized sexism and racism exist, but also I think the goal of these progressive causes should generally be to empower marginalized folk and not to "save" them (the idea of handing down liberty contains some weird notions about natural power relations, see also Chait's point about American liberalism "extending" certain freedoms to people rather than admitting that they fought for those themselves, claimed them for themselves). So it's also not ideal to go like "Hush, child, don't you know how oppressed you are?" At least it's something that I always try to avoid in these conversations, if only because there's never a reason to not simply point them towards somebody who both experienced and critically analyzed the thing in question.

 

In general, I think people's worries about where we'll end up at if Social Justice gets its will misunderstand that people (in my experience) often push for such things not because they want to establish them as a new norm, but in order to challenge the old one or draw awareness to something, give the misplaced dial a nudge towards centering it. But then people look only at the direction it's moving and flip out like "You want to take us all the way over there!?" For instance, I share his view that a fully customized gender pronoun system would be wholly impractical for publications and should be saved for personal relations, but also I'm not exactly sure that's why Smith asked for it, and not simply to draw attention to the fact that genderqueer or nonbinary folk routinely get sorted into one category or the other unless they present in a suitably unreadable fashion. I'm not entirely familiar with the case though, of course.

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