The reasonable right includes people like [Ben] Shapiro and the radio commentator Dave Rubin; legal scholar Amy Wax and Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who warns about identity politics; the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; the New York Times columnist Bari Weiss and the American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers, self-described feminists who decry excesses in the feminist movement; the novelist Bret Easton Ellis and the podcaster Sam Harris, who believe that important subjects have needlessly been excluded from political discussions. They present their concerns as, principally, freedom of speech and diversity of thought. Weiss has called them “renegade” ideological explorers who venture into “dangerous” territory despite the “outrage and derision” directed their way by haughty social gatekeepers.In these plaints, she hears echoes of the southern Civil War rhetorical style:
In Dave Rubin, who says that “if you have any spark of individualism in you, if you have anything about you that’s interesting or different, they” — the left — “will come to destroy that,” I hear the pro-Southern newspaper editor Duff Green: Abolitionists’ intent is “to drive the white man from the South.”Following the link to a RedState interview with Rubin, we discover that Facebook refused to run certain political ads "because the school administrator’s refused to identify as partisan." So essentially, she sidesteps the issue of politically-motivated deplatforming by just calling Rubin a racist (or the next worst thing, a Confederate). But, you see, the real problem is that the left is a buncha patsies:
...[T]he reasonable right has recruited the left into serving its purpose. Media outlets and college campuses now go to extraordinary lengths to prove their “balance” and tolerance, bending over backward to give platforms to right-wing writers and speakers who already have huge exposure.Wow, one whole overblown incident where a thin-skinned Twitter blue-check causes some soul-searching? How about the FIRE disinvitation database, where two-thirds of the incidents are caused by liberal hecklers and/or gadflies? Jonathan Marks in Commentary had maybe the best response to this swill:
Neither Fairbanks nor the Post’s fact-checkers can be bothered even to verify that the objects of her smear are, you know, conservatives. For example, she gives us Jonathan Haidt, co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind. Haidt is a self-identified, and seemingly actual, centrist. Then there’s Sam Harris, the militant, and by no means conservative, atheist. But that doesn’t matter because Fairbanks is simply using the term “conservative” to apply to anyone with the gall to criticize left-wing intolerance. The individuals she names—from Haidt to Harris to Bari Weiss of the New York Times—have nothing in common apart from the opinion that freedoms of speech and thought should be defended against efforts to curtail them.The routine equating of anyone defending free speech with odious people in the past will eventually backfire ... won't it?
That’s the problem for Fairbanks, you see, because one of the arguments that Southern slaveholders made was that the North was infringing on their freedom of speech and thought. Advocates for slavery, she explains, “anointed themselves the defenders of ‘reason,’ ‘free speech’ and ‘civility.’” Get it? By her bizarre logic, while advocates of free speech and thought aren’t slaveholders, per se, they sure are slaveholderish.
There’s not much more to Fairbanks’s disgraceful argument than that, and in truth, it all goes the other way around. As Nadine Strossen has observed, the claim that certain speech should be suppressed because it inflicts “emotional injury” was made by slavery defender John C. Calhoun. Free speech advocates often point out that abolitionists like Frederick Douglass were on their side of the argument, whereas the proslavery crowd, where it could, made anti-slavery speech a crime.
Certainly there are many Americans whose beliefs fit Coates’ description, who regard Trump’s racial vision as basically benign if occasionally insensitive, who think he’s an unjust victim of the liberal media’s race card, and so forth. These Americans are Trump supporters, for the most part, plus a smattering of left-wing gadflies and other contrarians. But Coates is very clearly not arguing with Fox-watching Trump supporters in his essay: His piece quotes and critiques anti-Trump conservatives and Democrats and liberals, not Sean Hannity or his epigones, and his examples of the supposed “race is incidental” consensus are figures like Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden, Mark Lilla and my colleague Nick Kristof, Charles Murray and Anthony Bourdain. His great complaint is not that Trump backers deny their own racist impulses, in other words, but that the “collective” of Trump opponents barely acknowledge the role of race and racism in his rise.Douthat repeats the same error that marred Coates' essay, namely, its refusal to look at anything resembling polling data, but it still represents a step up from that "caricature" in that it seeks to understand individuals who might have voted for Trump for reasons wholly (or even mostly) divided from racism or sexism.
A study published earlier this year by Boston University political science professor Douglas Kriner and Minnesota Law School’s Francis Shen makes the case quite compellingly.
Titled “Battlefield Casualties and Ballot Box Defeat: Did the Bush-Obama Wars Cost Clinton the White House?,” the paper rests on the premise that these wars have exclusively burdened a small but politically important group of voters — military families — and that “in the 2016 election Trump was speaking to this forgotten part of America.” Particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan — three states that Clinton lost — “there is a significant and meaningful relationship between a community’s rate of military sacrifice and its support for Trump.” Examining the data, the paper concludes that “inequalities in wartime sacrifice might have tipped the election.”
The saddest part of this story doesn't even concern me but concerns the universal woman's story. The nation's harmful narrative of disbelieving women first, above all else. Asking them to first corroborate or first give proof or first make sure we're not misremembering or first consider the consequences of speaking out or first let men give their side or first just let your sanity come last.Because false accusations never happen? Because memory is selective and frequently faulty? This coming from a political magazine in heels is par for the course, but it points at a dystopia.
In the 32 years I have lived in this great country, I have never once actively fought racism. I have simply used my own example as evidence of its utter stupidity and moved forward with absolute metaphysical confidence, knowing that the ability of other people to name or label me has no power over my self-esteem, my mind, my judgment, and—above all—my capacity to liberate myself through my own efforts.
On this matter, you have done your son—to whom you address your book—an injustice. You write: “The fact of history is that black people have not—probably no people ever have—liberated themselves strictly by their own efforts. In every great change in the lives of African Americans we see the hands of events that were beyond our individual control, events that were not unalloyed goods.”
I do not believe you intended to mislead your son, but in imparting this credo, you have potentially paralyzed him, unless he reappraises your philosophy and rejects it. In your misreading of America, you’ve communicated precisely why many blacks in this country have been alienated from their own agency and emancipatory capabilities. The most beleaguered people on the planet, the Jews, who have faced persecution since their birth as a people, are a living refutation of your claim. ...
This, incidentally, has probably been a major source of friction as women have moved into the workplace, and organizations have had to shift toward policies that everyone is entitled to respect. The men hadn’t originally built them to respect everybody.Her next complaint is against the "sleight-of-hand" of averages she claims Damore uses that she claims turns women "against their own gender." However, Damore is very careful to note that, "Many of these differences are small and there’s significant overlap between men and women, so you can’t say anything about an individual given these population level distributions. This doesn't matter; Lee has no interest in the real, measured preferences of populations, and as we see in the next section, this has catastrophic consequences for her argument (emboldening mine):
If, as the manifesto’s defenders claim, the population averages do not have anything to say about individual Googlers, who are all exceptional, then why is Google the subject of the manifesto’s arguments at all? What do averages have to do with hiring practices at a company that famously hires fewer than one percent of applicants? In the name of the rational empiricism and quantitative rigor that the manifesto holds so dear, shouldn’t we insist that it only cite studies that specifically speak to the tails of the distribution — to the actual pool of women Google draws from?Funny you should ask. That, actually, is the exact problem, and the fact that Lee misses it is unsurprising. Implicit in her argument here is the idea that men and women, taken as populations, will be interested in exactly the same thing, so that by the time you get to that narrow tail, you will have exactly the same number of individuals. This is categorically false; Damore cited evidence that, on average, women have more interest in working with people rather than things. The narrow tail of people interested in thing-work is where Google is hiring. She addresses this aspect of the population not at all. This is the crucial part of his argument, and indeed is what we see in practice, as her very next example demonstrates!
For example, we could look to the percentage of women majoring in computer science at highly selective colleges and universities. Women currently make up about 30 percent of the computer science majors at Stanford University, one key source of Google’s elite workforce. Harvey Mudd College, another elite program, has seen its numbers grow steadily for many years, and is currently at about 50 percent women in their computer science department.Yet as Scott Alexander showed, MIT and Harvey Mudd get their female graduation rates by stuffing the pipeline with more women than most institutions that don't discriminate:
...MIT admitting 2x more women than men matches nicely with their computer science department being 40% women (= 2x the national average of 20%). Harvey Mudd admitted 2.5x more women than men matches nicely with their computer science being 55% women (just a hair over 2.5x the national average of 20%). Plus everyone in this discussion agrees that a bunch of colleges are desperately trying to admit as many women as they can to get even close to parity in CS.t(While I don't have figures for Stanford, it would certainly be interesting to learn the percentage of female applicants accepted into their program. I would not be shocked at all if they did the same as Harvey Mudd, and indeed recent figures make it appear that is the case.) The reality is that computer science, and engineering more broadly, has been stuck at about 20% female (or less) for decades, regardless of gimmicks. Using two cherry-picked institutions that in turn cherry-pick their candidates is a perfect example of Damore's argument: they haven't magically found a way to get girls to like coding so much as they've found more girls who do (at the expense of other institutions' admissions). The strong argument would be explaining away why the female CS/engineering population is what it is at, say, Iowa State, or at a random sample of universities. Lee does not attempt it. (I also note in passing she does not wrestle with something Alexander observed, and that is that CS/engineering gender parity is best in nations such as Zimbabwe and Thailand, countries "not exactly famous for [their] deep commitment to gender equality.") In so doing, she cedes her entire argument.
Right-wing activist Jack Posobiec and a coalition of free speech groups are organizing marches against Google next week to protest Damore’s firing.
“We are going to raise awareness about Google’s one-sided bias and campaign against dissenting opinions and voices,” Posobiec told The Mercury News on Thursday.
A Wired profile digging into Damore’s personal history (this is politics now, so we do opposition research) gives us this description: “Damore’s fellow students at Harvard remember him as very smart but awkward around people.” Gosh, it would be a real shame if people like that were allowed to be hired in Silicon Valley.Surveying this landscape, it's easy to imagine how the politics will align going forward. Having collected Damore's scalp on the basis of merely acknowledging that men and women have divergent interests (as populations), what else could the diversity mavens accomplish with sufficient dudgeon behind them? I have previously noted Anita Sarkeesian's censorious tendencies. It does not seem even a slight stretch, given the Euros have introduced a "right to be forgotten", that Google is or will soon be on the list of targets. That is, at some future date, they will demand wrongthink such as Damore's be banished to PageRank purgatory. No pinnacle in modern content distribution is higher, and for that reason we must fight this at all costs.
I’m joking, of course, because this is precisely the kind of personality that built Silicon Valley. But maybe not any more. Yet that’s not the biggest, most dangerous part of this story for Google and the other tech giants. The most dangerous part is that they are now beginning to be seen by the public (or revealed, depending on how you look at it) as politicized entities. Politicized entities to whom we are giving enormous amounts of data on our lives, thoughts, and interests.
Everything changed when the document went viral within the company and the wider tech world. Those most zealously committed to the diversity creed—that all differences in outcome are due to differential treatment and all people are inherently the same—could not let this public offense go unpunished. They sent angry emails to Google’s human-resources department and everyone up my management chain, demanding censorship, retaliation and atonement.
Upper management tried to placate this surge of outrage by shaming me and misrepresenting my document, but they couldn’t really do otherwise: The mob would have set upon anyone who openly agreed with me or even tolerated my views. When the whole episode finally became a giant media controversy, thanks to external leaks, Google had to solve the problem caused by my supposedly sexist, anti-diversity manifesto, and the whole company came under heated and sometimes threatening scrutiny.
It is horribly ironic that of all the disgusting nonsense Yiannopoulos has said — about women, about Muslims, about transgender people, about immigrants — it is only now that the moderate right appears to have reached the limits of what it will tolerate in the name of free speech. The hypocrisy is clarion-clear: This was never, in fact, about free speech at all. It was about making it OK to say racist, sexist, transphobic, and xenophobic things, about tolerating the public expression of those views right up to the point where it becomes financially unwise to do so.How is it that the "moderate right" was responsible for expelling him from a CPAC address? Were they the same ones who threatened to resign from Breitbart if he didn't? In the end, it's just another label for her to feel superior to, just as she declares "Milo Yiannopolous [sic], possibly alone of all the smug white people in the world, is not a racist", as though the rest of them are. (Presumably, Penny feels guilty about her racism, and of course we need not ask her about sexism.) Too, she fails at understanding what it is that finally felled Milo. She chalks it all up to moral conservatism, rather than Milo's ambiguity and indifference to appearance. Even in apology, he failed to understand what he appeared to defend.
Rewind two weeks. It’s a wet night in Berkeley, California, and Yiannopoulos is running away from the left. He was scheduled to speak at the University of California–Berkeley, but the event has been shut down. It was shut down because thousands of anti-racist and anti-fascist protesters decided that there should be no platform for what they called white supremacy. They are marching to say that free speech does not extend to hate speech, that the First Amendment should not oblige institutions to invite professional trolls to spout an auto-generated word-salad of Internet bigotry just for fun, and that, if the institutions disagree, students and allies are entitled to throw fireworks and smash things until the trolls run away. Which is exactly what has happened.People actually smashing things, exercising the heckler's veto, silencing the "trolls" — these people receive not a word of vituperation or contempt from her, unlike everyone else in this essay. Does her conception of "free speech" include "hate speech", whatever that is? For all she claims she opposes "no platforming", she clearly granted herself some wiggle room when she wrote, "I think no-platforming is a bad tactic in almost all circumstances." Almost all. We do not know the precise dimensions of that space, but we can guess them, and they fill a void near the size of Milo Yiannopoulos. Why does she think she should be able to demand, at some website where the user base clearly opposes her opinions (viciously and crudely), she should be able to moderate comments out of existence she finds offensive? Hers is the voice of an expansionist and totalitarian view of speech that uses "safe spaces" as a sword; it is not the voice of tolerance. As with Anita Sarkeesian, whose censorious tendencies only became explicit censorship advocacy through her work with the ITU, the answer may come eventually, whenever an opportunity arises.
So why are conservatives cozying up to such hideousness? The best explanation they offer is that inviting someone so beyond the pale will shatter the tight boundaries drawn by political correctness and open the space for a wider airing of ideas. But the problem is that by using a stink bomb like Yiannopoulos they'll make their own ideas malodorous. Who will take conservative praise of civility, tradition, family values, manners, honor, moderation, and dignity seriously if a 31-year-old, out-of-control adolescent is their champion?
There are two different questions here. One, does Milo deserve sympathy and support? And two, is Twitter's enforcement of anti-harassment rules politically biased, rife with favoritism, and generally inconsistent?(The TL;DR answers are: not so much in this case, and yes.) Young observes that "his online conflicts tended to escalate into nasty personal attacks", viz. this one about former Breitbart colleague Ben Shapiro on the occasion of his son's birth:
Milo is a very smart, talented, charismatic man. I still believe he was on the right side when he joined the fight against the crypto-totalitarian "social justice" cult. But I've always thought that, unfortunately, any backlash against "progressive" cultural politics was likely to be a magnet for actual racism, misogyny, and other bigotries. Today, Milo is actively boosting these malignant forces. As his "Daddy" Donald Trump would say: Sad!Even though Twitter hasn't commented on the matter more extensively, it seems almost certain that the problem stemmed, in part, from faked tweets he posted, purported to be from Jones, which in turn "was both impersonation, a severe violation of Twitter rules, and a pretty clear move to pour more fuel on the fire."
These attacks on Ms Jones speak to something more than the raucousness of Twitter, which can often be a good thing, certainly to the extent that it allows unheard, eccentric and potty voices to be heard. It speaks, more importantly, to the derailment of the important task of challenging PC. Tragically, for those of us who want to prick PC from a genuinely liberal and pro-autonomy perspective, the anti-PC mantle has in recent months been co-opted by the new right, or the alt-right, as some call them. These lovers of Trump (they call him ‘daddy’) and conspiracy theorists about feminism (whose wicked influence they spy everywhere) have turned being anti-PC from a decent, progressive position into an infantile, pathological, Tourette’s-style desire to scream offensive words out loud, like the seven-year-old who’s just discovered the thrill that comes with saying ‘f**k’.Yet simultaneously, as Freddy DeBoer points out, it's pretty obvious that Yiannopoulos got the boot at least in part because he's not in the club (emboldening mine):
When Emmet Rensin was suspended from Vox for following liberal logic on Trump to its obvious conclusions, it was trivially easy to find Vox employees who had said far worse things on Twitter, while Vox employees, with absolutely no consequences. The #WeAreTheLeft debacle was made extra funny/sad by the fact that so many of the signatories of that letter were objectively guilty of the kinds of behaviors the letter indicted. People who gleefully trashed Justine Sacco complain about pile-ons; people who say doxing is wrong get others fired from their real-life jobs. There are no principles; there’s only who you’re cool with and who you aren’t. I’ve been for saying this for years, 8 in fact, and the response has always been a kind of muttered shiftiness, a desire to change the subject. Because most people know I’m right. They always have. But for some reason, there’s this dedication to maintaining the pretense, this addiction to plausible deniability. Nobody really thinks this stuff is about principle, but to be a member in good standing, you have to go through the motions. That hasn’t changed.Which is what makes this so frustrating, and why all defenses of free speech ultimately grow tiresome, because they tend to involve the defense of sometimes terrible behavior. As Ken White recently wrote at Popehat, "nobody needs free speech rights to protect admirable speech by people we like." Anita Sarkeesian, Yiannopoulos' longtime #Gamergate foe, appears to have finally won the game started when she landed on Twitter's "Trust & Safety" board. But let us assume that she and her like-minded cohorts indeed turn Twitter into a mammoth echo chamber, a place where orthodoxy and adorable cat pictures are the only permissible tweets. Where will she go to gin up the death threats so central to her shtick?
Cyber VAWG includes hate speech (publishing a blasphemous libel), hacking (intercepting private communications), identity theft, online stalking (criminal harassment) and uttering threats.Sarkeesian expanded on those goals considerably:
According to feminist culture critic Anita Sarkeesian, who spoke at the event, online “harassment” doesn’t simply consist of what is “legal and illegal,” but “also the day-to-day grind of ‘you’re a liar’ and ‘you suck,’ including all of these hate videos that attack us on a regular basis.”As a bonus points follow-on, Yiannopoulos found a Redditor willing to slog through all 120 of the report's footnotes, concluding that 30% are broken, blank, duplicated, or nonexistent in some other way, with another 15% self-referentially linking back to UN documents. (Also, yikes, for Popehat phoning it in, though at least he recognized it at the time.) The benefit of the doubt no longer applies; schoolyard taunts provide sufficient cause for Sarkeesian to demand governments silence others, and that the mechanisms for doing this be built into the technical infrastructure of the Internet. Sarkeesian is nothing more than a schoolmarm with an overgrown ego.
Unable to prove that they are the victims of a wave of “misogynistic hate” – no bomb threat against a feminist critic of video games has ever been deemed credible and there are serious doubts about threats supposedly levelled at transsexual activist Brianna Wu – feminists are trying to redefine violence and harassment to include disobliging tweets and criticisms of their work.
In other words: someone said “you suck” to Anita Sarkeesian and now we have to censor the internet. Who could have predicted such a thing? It’s worth noting, by the way, that if Sarkeesian’s definition is correct, Donald Trump is the world’s greatest victim of “cyber-violence.” Someone should let him know.
Attempts to shield students from words, ideas, and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for the students. They are bad for the workplace, which will be mired in unending litigation if student expectations of safety are carried forward. And they are bad for American democracy, which is already paralyzed by worsening partisanship. When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as willfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.While the idea that political games can ever be "positive-sum" betrays a profound indifference to how the sausages get made in D.C. and elsewhere, the rest of it is certainly true. So of course The Mary Sue had to publish a fairly predictable attempt at rebuttal; Maddy Myers tries heroically to live up to the headline ("Saying Trigger Warnings 'Coddle The Mind' Completely Misses The Point") and even more the sub-hed ("Why doesn't anyone understand how PTSD works?"). Myers admits she was helped by exposure therapy but then demands the world outside the psychologist's office should be encased in bubble wrap for the protection of anyone who might find something offensive or skeery:
This article does very little to explore how educators might better serve PTSD sufferers; instead, the piece seems to assert that educators shouldn’t have to change a thing. Also, the title, photo, and overall framing of the piece emphasizes the myth of the oversensitive, trophy-hoarding millennial who just wants to get out of doing their homework. This assumption supposes that young college students are using their “fragile” natures as an excuse to not engage with “words and ideas they don’t like” (e.g. “students seem to be reporting more emotional crises; many seem fragile”).
... This is just one in a long line of misunderstandings on the part of older college professors who actually just seem angry at the “political correctness” their modern students have begun to demand. They may try to characterize us as literal babies, but they’re the ones who look like babies to me, given the refusal to acknowledge their students’ experiences. They can’t be bothered to make small changes to their own curriculums that might better facilitate conversations among their students about media depictions of violence, rape, assault, war, kidnapping, and so on.The "refusal to acknowledge their students' experiences" demands that the world needs to bend to the author's wishes; professors are not there to instruct. Instead, in this telling, they exist to serve PTSD sufferers, i.e. a minority. It derives directly from a very self-centered place, i.e. the prerogatives of the customer, even though she has no evidence they're even helpful in dealing with people having PTSD symptoms:
I like the idea of trigger warnings, but I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not sure they do much to protect people from panic attacks. Unfortunately, almost no articles that discuss trigger warnings seem particularly interested in centering the experiences of people with anxiety and PTSD, and how those people might be better served by institutions and classes that they’re paying thousands and thousands of dollars to attend.Complaints that the university is increasingly in thrall to the student-as-customer are very old, but it's hard to think of one more starkly destructive to actual learning. She similarly doesn't grapple with Lukianoff and Haidt's many examples of the negative consequences of "trigger warnings": Harvard Law students asking out of rape law classes, idiotic "microaggressions" at U. California that included such "triggers" as “America is the land of opportunity”, or, even reading books in public:
In a particularly egregious 2008 case, for instance, Indiana University–Purdue University at Indianapolis found a white student guilty of racial harassment for reading a book titled Notre Dame vs. the Klan. The book honored student opposition to the Ku Klux Klan when it marched on Notre Dame in 1924. Nonetheless, the picture of a Klan rally on the book’s cover offended at least one of the student’s co-workers (he was a janitor as well as a student), and that was enough for a guilty finding by the university’s Affirmative Action Office.Going against type, the non-adulatory comments following The Mary Sue essay are actually interesting. One commenter points out that, despite the author's insistence that trigger warnings are merely misunderstood, The Mary Sue itself recently carried a story about a Crafton Hills College student, upon learning she was assigned as reading the graphic novels Persepolis, Fun Home, Y: The Last Man Vol. 1, and The Sandman Vol. 2: The Doll’s House, suggesting that proper courses of action:
Schultz’s response? “At least get a warning on the books. At most I would like the books eradicated from the system. I don’t want them taught anymore. I don’t want anyone else to have to read this garbage.”Which is to say, the final destination is censorship. Unfortunately, Myers doesn't especially care about that.
“Don’t talk like one of them. You’re not. Even if you’d like to be. To them, you’re just a freak. Like me. They need you now, but when they don’t, they’ll cast you out like a leper. See, their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke to be dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be.”I doubt Mytheos Holt has really any polling data to find whether he's right about the fungibility of Whedon's audience, but the early tally of receipts from the current Avengers point at a $700M walloping of, well, everything. Of course, that this was part of a dialogue between the Joker and Batman is probably not something Holt would advertise, but the "dropped at the first sign of trouble" certainly rings true.
“I saw a lot of people say, ‘Well, the social justice warriors destroyed one of their own!’ It’s like, Nope. That didn’t happen,” he continued. “I saw someone tweet it’s because Feminist Frequency pissed on Avengers 2, which for all I know they may have. But literally the second person to write me to ask if I was OK when I dropped out was [Feminist Frequency founder] Anita [Sarkeesian].”I am not entirely convinced even he believes this, though:
What did happen, Whedon said, is that he chose to embrace his long-standing desire post–Age of Ultron to reclaim his personal life and creative spark — and that meant saying good-bye to Twitter. “I just thought, Wait a minute, if I’m going to start writing again, I have to go to the quiet place,” he said. “And this is the least quiet place I’ve ever been in my life. … It’s like taking the bar exam at Coachella. It’s like, Um, I really need to concentrate on this! Guys! Can you all just… I have to… It’s super important for my law!”
“I’ve said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically,” he said. “Because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do — for example, in my case, feminism. If you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist. It circles directly back upon you.”Well, at least, that's how it works if you have camp followers who believe you must conform to their narrow (and frequently unknowable) ideals of how such a creature should behave, and think, and create. I have read elsewhere — and cannot now put a finger to — a story claiming that Whedon has previously deleted his Twitter account, so there's reason to think he'll be back.
"THIS. Funny, angry, clear & true. @PennyRed takes no prisoners - she'd rather free 'em. #weaponizeourshamelessness http://t.co/VLb9u3RDV7"I find Whedon's assessment questionable to say the least (without that I haven't read it), given her prior work, which is largely hostile to the audiences and authors of those genres. If, as Whedon previously claimed, Anita Sarkeesian "is just truth telling", she also engages upon a political struggle whose long game is the social (if not legal) power to micromanage others' work. As Cathy Young wrote about a different matter, the retracted cover of Batgirl,
The worst message to send creators is that if your female character doesn’t get a Good Feminist seal of approval — if she shows too much weakness or too much sexuality, if she has too many stereotypical female qualities or too many “male” ones, if she suffers a failure or a harrowing ordeal, if she is shown in an overly disturbing situation — your work may be attacked as anti-woman. That’s a prescription for bland characters and dull stories.You can't be orthodox for everyone, and eventually, something like this had to happen. Whedon proved that airing the right sentiments on Twitter is not proof against attack; surely, he cannot be the last victim, but he might be the biggest scalp collected to date, and for a long while.
How soon until @scalzi and @wilw get Joss Whedon treatment? It's coming, you gutless cowards, and it will be glorious! #ComeBackJossWhedon
— Mike Cernovich (@PlayDangerously) May 5, 2015
Scalzi is certainly on my short list of SJW hacks for his arrogant, condescending whining about white male privilege, which is really a sort of intellectual prejudice pretending to be wisdom. Like a lot of the motte-and-bailey frauds, it says something uncontroversial (some people have it easier in life because of birth) while later asserting something both insulting and controversial (subsequent successes are largely a function of birth). It can't happen soon enough.
tell me we don't need feminism pic.twitter.com/kz4rDzQbHY
— banksy (@thereaIbanksy) February 7, 2015
There was a great deal of hand wringing about Google's autocomplete results when one put in certain leading phrases, such as "women should", "women shouldn't", and so on. As the UN ad campaign these came from was launched back in October, 2013, I was curious to see whether things have changed since then. Running a test on all the phrases, not one of them autocompletes anymore.While the autocomplete restrictions may imply that Google is masking just how bad things are, there are also causes for hope. The top search results for “women shouldn’t have rights,” if you type it in completely, are now dominated by pages about the ad campaign. [Note: autocomplete no longer works on this phrase as of this writing. — RLM] The sheer volatility and self-modifying nature of the Web makes it difficult to pin down prevailing notions for any great length of time. Autocomplete and search results are very sensitive to so-called “freshness,”—all the better to pick up sudden trends—so they use less long-term hysteresis (the dependency of a system on its past states) than you might think.If the point of feminism is meaningful equality between the sexes, learning what people think of women is important, offensive or not, and shutting off such knowledge is ultimately counterproductive. Whether Google has taken this step due to external pressure or internal desire to silence a controversy, we are the poorer for the outcome.
Of the top results that aren’t about the UN Women ad campaign, not one of them unequivocally promotes an anti-woman position. Some are websites attacking the anti-woman positions, such as an atheist blog on Patheos that quotes and ridicules a Baptist preacher’s misogynistic sermon at great length. Others are debate websites that tend to come down on the equal rights side. One is a Yahoo question, “Reasons why women shouldn’t have equal rights?” posted by a high school girl looking for anti-woman arguments for a school debate. (“Being a girl, I obviously don’t agree with this.”) Most of the respondents say they’ve got nothing. The worst it gets is a troll-infested forum on bodybuilding.com, which, despite being described by poster KingOfChaos as “heavily populated by males who like to think of themselves as 'alpha' or dominate over women,” still has a number of sentiments such as “IRL most sane ppl think that women should have equal rights.”