Silence of the Lames

Been meaning to get to this one for a couple weeks, but too much going on IRL lately:  Dave Cohen recently posted an interview with author Lionel Shriver, yet another ponderous screed about the supposed vicissitudes of "woke culture" which are apparently ushering our collective freeze-peach DOOM.

This seems to be a favorite axe to grind for many soi-disant civil libertarians of the internets, once again prioritizing their principled defense of mouthy assholes over, say, children being abused and dying in concentration camps, or a rapey slapdick desperately trying to derp his way into a war while he continues upending the nation's treasury into his own pockets. I guess we all have our pet peeves.

Rather than the "god-given right to monetize" trope that I've already taken apart multiple times, the problem here is more along the lines of vague over-exaggerations of the supposed effects of collective squelching of unorthodox opinions, as it were. Call it the "Tim Allen effect" -- the whiny plaints of "getting beaten up" and comparisons to Germany in the 1930s (the latter of which Tim Allen actually made on the Jimmy Kimmel Show a couple years back).

Not to be a pedantic literalist about things, but hopefully most of us can agree on the fundamental principle that especially when you're talking about free speech, words are important, the meanings that they convey are critical. So using phrases that imply threats or acts of actual violence to describe some random assholes complaining about you on social media are, let's say, incongruous.



Of course they have to say "getting beaten up" on social media, because saying "somebody made a mean comment about me on Twitter" sounds, you know, fucking weak. Similarly, bringing up a period of recent history where peoples' homes and lives and businesses were targeted for violence, based entirely on their ethnicity and religion, and which culminated in brutal, literal genocide, as a comparison for a makeup artist giving you the stink-eye or some bullshit like that, is simply pathetic.

Tim Allen probably makes more money per episode of his shitcom than most working people see in a lifetime. He stars in the biggest movie on the planet right now, the fourth in a franchise that has grossed billions of dollars. The Santa Clause franchise did pretty well for him too. Whoever's beating up on poor Timmy is doing a really fucking bad job of it. If that's Kristallnacht, then I want some of what he's getting. We should all be so "beaten up" to be a shitty hack comedian who rode one lame joke to massive wealth. Too bad that no matter how much money he has in his bank account, poor Timmy still can't afford what it takes to not be a whiny douchebag.

More to the point:  don't say "beaten up" unless someone actually took a swing at you and connected. You mean criticized or said mean things about, and there's a big difference. Again, who are the real snowflakes here?

Anyway, back to the Shriver interview. I want to be more careful about this, in part because I liked Big Brother a great deal, and she and the interviewers are definitely not tediously hysterical dumbasses like Tim Allen. They are making a number of points with which I either disagree, or just find perplexing. But they're not idiots.

So I watched the entire thing, took notes at relevant parts (times are approximate), and the counter-arguments are below. I would definitely encourage you to watch for yourself, though; it's interesting and they are at least making a good-faith attempt to be thoughtful about the subject, even if ultimately I think they have the wrong end of the stick on this issue.

3:27 -- Shriver asserts that "if what you say gets you fired, then that's not free speech."

Almost right from the start, this fundamental misapprehension of what "free speech" actually entails, especially in the realm of commerce. For (an infamous) example, Alex Jones has the "right" to say that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax on his video podcast. And YouTube has a right not to carry that shit. You have the right to call me an asshole in the comments thread, and I have the right to delete that comment.

Take another infamous example, the Charlottesville polo-shirted, tiki-torched, fashy-cut, suburbo-nazis who marched through shouting Jews will not replace us! with their twisted, hateful grimaces. They didn't physically harm anyone; that took place the next day. But they're disgusting excuses for human beings all the same, and people have the right to say that in response.

They have the right not to be thrown in jail by the government for that shit, but the rest of the country viewing that vile crap, should they recognize one of these little closet cases, has the right to go to their place of employment and explain exactly why they'll never buy from them again if they continue to employ people like that. Fuck those little punk twerps.

I persist in my belief that it is every American's right to be wrong, and even to be an asshole about it. But with that right comes the realization that everyone else also has the right to point out that you're an asshole, and in the private sector, that can carry consequences for your tax status.

Anyway, let's move on. I'm going to group some of these together for convenience and time.

5:09 -- "If the right loses the right to say what it wishes, then that's a loss for the left as well."

-- assertion that "the left" has arrogated which opinions are permissible to hold, and "shuts down" anyone who "departs from orthodoxy."

7:29 -- "It feels good to tell people what to do."

One can agree with the basic premise that social media has devolved into a kind of Wild West scenario, where people pretty much do and say all sorts of nonsensical bullshit. Sometimes they get called out, sometimes they don't. My anecdotal experience with Twitter is that liberals will show up en masse and give conservative knuckleheads a hard time, but on Facebook it's the opposite.

But it's just that, either way -- people giving other people a hard time, via the bravery of internet anonymity. Responders, especially Trump supporters, frequently don't even bother with the barest pretense of intellectual honesty or common decency. Big fucking deal. You either grow a hide and tell them all to go fuck themselves, or you move on and find something that doesn't wound your delicate sensibilities. People are idiots; they lie; they deploy strawmen to prop up bullshit arguments. Who knew? Why is this commonplace occurrence supposedly such a dangerous thing?

It's not telling people what to do, it's  telling them what you're not going to put up with. Maybe they should find an honest wage, or at least appeal to one of the handful of psychotic billionaires who actually own and operate this here popsicle stand, and get them to bankroll your bullshit.

It is in fact very rare for anyone of any political stripe to get banned or deplatformed or demonetized or whatever, considering the tens of millions of users on these platforms. It is an extremely small percentage, and they come from all points on the political spectrum. It seems like it is only the alt-right douchebags, who have made monetization a cornerstone of their tedious efforts in agitprop and bafflegab, who cry like scalded dogs when their fag jokes and Pepe the Frog gas-chamber memes finally get their sorry asses booted.

Which is what they really want in the first place, so they can then play the martyr card and monetize that with their rube audience. Never forget that:  this is all a money game to them.

10:00 -- One of the hosts describes "swatting" and physical threats among gaming community denizens, without context or specific examples.

This is inexplicable in the putative context of "left-wing" harassment; the gamer culture has been the incubator for most of the incel and alt-right memes we have all become familiar with the last few years. Many of the swatting incidents had nothing at all to do with politics, and were over petty rivalries and wagers. And you know what? A lot of the worst of these assholes were tried and convicted, and are in prison now. So you can't say there aren't consequences to swatting. Turns out the cops don't take that shit lightly.

12:20 -- Reference to Harvard Law School dean whose class walked out on him, because he's part of Harvey Weinstein's defense team.

Weinstein is a pig-fucking scumbag, but he is entitled to vigorous legal representation in a court of law. However, again, people are also entitled to register their disgust by shunning that individual. Tell it to Colin Kaepernick, who lost a nine-figure NFL career for the high crime of taking a knee during the national anthem. Tell him about the high cost of free speech.

The fucking balls on these people, the way they cherry-pick only the incidents that they think will reinforce their tenuous argument. It cuts both ways; there is just as much or more political correctness and "cancel culturing" on the conservative side. I personally know people who refuse to see anything with Alec Baldwin in it. Hell, I know people who still insist Jane Fonda is a traitor, nearly fifty years later.

14:40 -- Shriver talks about publishing being affected by cancel culture, books being pulled from publication.

16:50 -- Shriver shows awareness and concern about the creeping influence of commerce in academia, that students are "customers" and administrative bureaucrats exert undue influence over "product" -- class content and academic publication.

There seems to be some truth to this, especially the second point. But it's a natural consequence of financializing the university system as drastically as it has been in this country. You cannot screw a quarter-million dollars out of people for a bachelor's degree, stick them on a debt hook for the next decade or two, and expect that they'll just sit there and passively let you spoon-feed them anymore, or that they'll just sit and listen to some bullshit pieties about the sanctity of the American legal system from a guy who's cashing in by defending a straight-up serial rapist.

I mean, people do still have the right to say no, right? Maybe not. Everything is upside-down anymore. The main thing is that you might have a nice career in Hollywood if you let Harvey Weinstein liberate some knuckle-children on your leg, like a ten-dollar back-alley hoor. As long as you sit and pretend that his pelf-grubbing defense lawyer has something useful to impart to you before you embark on your own legal career.

But yeah, Shriver is not wrong about universities treating students like customers. That's because they are customers, paying through the nose for a product that is rarely worth the asking price, but is now required for even a shot at a decent career anymore. It's bad enough these fuckers have our kids by the short hairs, but they also have to pretend to enjoy it?

20:00 -- Weird digression about campus culture in other English-speaking Commonwealth countries:  "even weirder in Canada", "lunatic in Australia", "goofball in Ireland". At no point is any specific example provided of the worldwide lunacy.

-- Digression about constraints on comedians and comedy, again no specific examples.

-- Digression about hate crime laws and "protected groups".

I can buy into the principle about hate crimes that all crimes are technically hate crimes, and therefore every crime should simply be prosecuted as vigorously as possible. But you can find countless examples from the civil rights and Jim Crow eras that should have been prosecuted and adjudicated with extra vigor. The fuckers who butchered Emmett Till should have received extra consideration just for the sheer ferocity and hate in their evil deeds. Instead they walked away scot-free.

So yeah, in a sense hate-crime laws are a modern attempt to offset historical atrocities. But I'll be damned if I can find an example of someone who was prosecuted and convicted and received extra time under hate-crime statutes, who didn't fucking well have it coming.

As for the other digressions without examples, that sort of thing is par for the course with these sorts of discussions. It's not terribly far removed from the standard reactionary trope when they talk about Obama, whether it's lying about his place of birth, or lying about him "giving" cash to Iran, or whatever. The freedom to lie is a close neighbor to the freedom to lob baseless assertions with no corroborating evidence or examples. One might think that the sheer prevalence of this creeping mortal threat to our freedoms would provide many salient examples, but apparently one would be wrong.

29:19 -- "As soon as we started calling everyone a white supremacist, then there's no such thing as a white supremacist anymore."

31:01 -- "The vocabulary goes to shit, because nothing means anything anymore."

These sorts of statements are fine as polemics, but for the thousandth time, they are not remotely empirically true. Again, provide examples:  who specifically is being unfairly saddled with the "white supremacist" epithet? Some of it may fall under the "all poodles are dogs, but not all dogs are poodles" rubric, but as general rule of thumb, the preponderance of "white supremacist" types one encounters appear to happily be at least supremacist-adjacent -- that is, they don't mind piggybacking on mutual associations.

Not to mention the truly Orwellian demi-monde of Fixed Noise, where nothing means anything, lies are epistemic currency, and the whole thing blares at its opioid-addled audience 24/7/365. To ignore a quarter-century of systematic gaslighting by one of the most powerful corporations on the planet, focusing instead on a handful of social-justic-warrior types who will be forgotten by the time this is posted, requires an unusually high level of selectivity. Pay no attention to the thirty-car pile-up over there, I found a ladybug!

Look, if I see a Twitter commenter with some Pepe the frog swastika-armband banner art, Q hashtags and "OK" hand signals, just because they don't explicitly say "white power" doesn't mean you can't tell what they're all about by looking at their knick-knack shelf.

And again, they have the right to be white supremacists, so long as they don't physically threaten or harm anyone. And others also have the right to say I refuse to have anything to do with those motherfuckers, and I refuse to do business with anyone who associates with them. For the millionth fucking time, being a loud-and-proud gaping asshole does not come without a price. People have been cut loose from their jobs for far less.

But that is an entirely different thing than simply asserting that the phrase "white supremacist" has no meaning anymore. It may mean something technically different than the herrenvolk / blut und boden system Trump is implicitly trying to establish, and it may even be technically different from the confederate aristocracy that his hardcore southern cracker contingent have been trying to reinstate since 1865.

But the desired outcome is the same, the tactics are the same, the associations and winks and nods with fascist street gangs are the same. Just because they don't have the official ink doesn't mean they don't speak the lingo. It's disingenuous and dangerous to play around with non-existent distinctions and pretend otherwise.

It goes on like that, this litany of grievances at "identity politics" and this imaginary "left" that "controls mainstream media," but with no context or sense of proportion to any of it. Who comprises this "hard left"? How many (roughly) are there in this supposed group, and what exactly is their actual political power?

Because the corporate media I know spends their time sucking shit from an incompetent time-share buffoon and his family of grifters. They're so deeply afflicted with Stockholm syndrome they fell over themselves to attend a going-away party for a press secretary who stopped holding press conferences three months ago, and treated them like shit when there were press briefings. (I wish I had a list of names that attended that shitshow, just so I could be sure to boycott them into eternity.) A leftist corporate media would not have smirking liars and hacks like Kellyanne Conway and Alan Dershowitz on every fucking day to gaslight the public.

As for identity politics, aside from a couple of plaints about reparations (which, frankly, will get them absolutely nowhere), the Democratic party is the usual gaggle of ineffectual technocrats, taking turns lining up to get pushed around by a useless closet-case leather gimp like Mitch "the Bitch" McConnell, who is the closest thing this nation has to a flat-out traitor, and gets away with it every time regardless.

Around fifty-three minutes into the proceedings, Shriver complains acerbically about having to waste valuable time and effort having to write refutations of the "stupidity" that has "contaminated and infested [her] mind....our time is valuable." Yeah. I couldn't agree more.

When they're right, they're right, though:  the end credits show one of the hosts (both do some stand-up comedy work) being told to sign an agreement with a college to not do any material they deemed "controversial" -- which, to his credit, he refused to do. Politically moderate comedians such as Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock have stopped performing at college campuses for the same reason, and Pete Holmes' terrific HBO series Crashing had a storyline about the same issue.

So there is something to that, and it is wrong, wrong, wrong. Good comedy is supposed to be controversial and critical and challenging. But you look at any of the strictures that American conservative private colleges routinely impose on students and guests and performers. And whether these attempts at censorship at more liberal public universities are indicative of a more pervasive culture of ideological orthodoxy, or simply another symptom of misguided have-it-your-way consumer empowerment, is just a point on which people are going to land a little differently.

One final note, and it is a major point of agreement I have with Shriver:  at the very end of the conversation, Shriver is asked what should we be talking about, that we aren't? Shriver's answer is population, especially in the context of the ongoing discussion about climate change, and she is absolutely correct about that, both that the ongoing overpopulation of the planet rarely gets discussed, and does not seem to be brought up in the context of climate change at all, when in fact it is a primary cause.

I am most of the way through David Wallace-Wells' feel-good hit The Uninhabitable Planet, which is a fine book with plenty of descriptive commentary as to the expected effects of the more turbulent climate events we can all expect to see around the world in the very near future -- indeed, that we are already seeing, and have been experiencing with increasing frequency and severity.

I'll have a more extended post on this when I finish reading the book later this week, but the baseline principle is that it is utterly incomprehensible to me that any serious person could propose a conversation about climate change and all of its repercussions, without talking about the massive volume of people involved, and what can be done for them.

The Central American refugees who are being held in miserable conditions in Trump's concentration camps are escaping unimaginable violence and poverty, but many of them are also escaping climate change that is rendering their already meager subsistence farming unsustainable. As Shriver herself notes, Africa is projected to have four billion people by 2100. They have to go somewhere as they have less and less arable land to use.

Population control should be at the forefront of the climate change conversation. I don't know why it isn't, and if that possibly has anything to do with some sort of misguided "political correctness," a knee-jerk assumption that first-worlders are recolonializing developing nations by attempting to help rein in runaway population growth in those areas. If so, so what? Say it anyway.

The real cultural shift taking place is that no matter what you say, no matter where you are on the political spectrum, there are always people out there who are going to sweat you about it. They have the tools at hand and time to kill. Maybe you have to recheck your premises and arguments, make sure you have your facts straight and that you aren't missing some piece of the puzzle.

And then you press on. But these people have invested quite a bit in whining about assholes being marginalized for being assholes. I don't know what to tell them. This isn't even the hundredth most important issue facing the country and the planet.

This is really about people being held accountable for crossing the line. I don't think federal law enforcement personnel have the right to trade photoshop pornography about politicians they hate, without any professional repercussions at all. These are vile humans, through and through, and I'm annoyed that my tax dollars go to pay people who think it's funny to force women and children to drink from toilets, to go without bathing or changing clothes for weeks at a time.

I sincerely wish upon them all of the very worst things that life has to offer. (Although it's too bad to hear that apparently there is a growing problem with CBP staff committing suicide and going on the EAP program, it needs to be pointed out that, as fucked up as this country is in many ways, no one forces anyone to do a specific job. If they're tired of abusing asylum-seekers, there's plenty of honest work elsewhere.) This is a goddamned national disgrace, and it belongs on a very tall stack of things that are more important than whether some barstool drunk gets his grift suspended by the company that owns his platform.