A new moralism is gripping the literary world
persuasion.community
persuasion.community
Regarding your example of "stop asian hate"- the asian instagram community has been talking about it a lot in wake of current events. It is entirely unsurprising that people would be checking it out after being previously unaware.
- For example, only in 2003 was gay sex legal throughout the US. Is that a form of cancelling?
- It’s still legal to fire or not hire gay people. Is that a form of cancelling?
- US conservatives also fight for the right of any public official to follow the calling of Jesus by refusing to sign marriage licenses. Or the constitutional right to refuse business.
- Does one not remember the Bush Jr presidential race where a US constitution ban on gay marriage was the get out to vote issue for Christian evangelicals?
- We have doctors who cannot follow the prescriptions of their professional societies, such as the American Pediatric Society, because they are banned by law from advising youths on transgender treatment.
- There is a race around the country to make it harder for those over 65 to vote, or to reduce voting locations.
What is Cancellation? At the core of cancellation is the freedom of association. But freedom of association doesn’t make it so TX can prosecute gay men for having sex in a bedroom. Freedom of association means people either like you or don’t like you, and they will either associate with you or they won’t.
Any discussion of harmony must account for a history of cruelty.
Because any one with minimum education in history can recognize wokism as the new cultural revolution being adapted for americans. It is not only junk it is also a vile ideology.
But of the "wokism" stuff, 90% of it will be crap - morally and intellectually bankrupt junk.
Possible after a time something enduring will precipitate out of recent thought.
There is no shame in confessing having sold "wokism" short, should it prove other than so much folly.
This extends beyond the contents of the book. Here a "white" (but really Catalan) man was fired from translating a poem because his identity didn't mirror the poet's.
I want to stress that honest and open communication about opinions and a commitment to truth and the long process of fact-checking seems to be the best way forward, if not necessarily the easiest.
Looks like this modern moralism really does extend much farther than publishing books.
https://www.elconfidencial.com/espana/2020-11-05/la-comision...
Where's that argument today? Why is anything "problematic" an assault against society as a whole, automatically, as well as whatever underprivileged group its offensive to?
Have humans lost the ability to tolerate the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may disagree with them? Or is it just the attention elite that think this way?
> We can face almost anything
> But Reality we can do without
I don't actually think the situation is all that different. I think it's still a perfectly reasonable counter-argument, which the other side will ignore, just as it did back then!
This is all a proxy for tribal, cultural warfare. It's never been about the books themselves, their potential for hurting people or anything else. It's about destroying the other side. The books and their authors and their readers are a means to to that end. There's no room for compromise under that framework. It's a ridiculous and unproductive situation.
- For example, only in 2003 was gay sex legal throughout the US. Is that a form of cancelling?
- It’s still legal to fire or not hire gay people. Is that a form of cancelling?
- US conservatives also fight for the right of any public official to follow the calling of Jesus by refusing to sign marriage licenses. Or the constitutional right to refuse business.
- Does one not remember the Bush Jr presidential race where a US constitution ban on gay marriage was the get out to vote issue for Christian evangelicals?
- We have doctors who cannot follow the prescriptions of their professional societies, such as the American Pediatric Society, because they are banned by law from advising youths on transgender treatment.
- There is a race around the country to make it harder for those over 65 to vote, or to reduce voting locations.
What is Cancellation? At the core of cancellation is the freedom of association. But freedom of association doesn’t make it so TX can prosecute gay men for having sex in a bedroom. Freedom of association means people either like you or don’t like you, and they will either associate with you or they won’t.
Any discussion of harmony must account for a history of cruelty.
Maybe the majority never had it. That's what I've been thinking recently. In the past, a person could mold themselves to a much more static community. A person that grew up in a Presbytarian community would not much interact with a Muslim family and vice versa. It's also much easier for a person so sensitive of disagreement to delude themselves that all their friends and neighbors were basically of the same mind on serious political/moral issues in meat space. Essentially, the past had naturally occurring filter bubbles.
The Christian social conservatism you recall of the 80s and earlier were people that were pissed about control of mass culture dominated by cosmopolitan urbanites, but they had their own parallel culture to an extent. With smartphones, everyone is suddenly in each others face and I think it's broken the brains of some of the people that never comprehended that level of social friction and disunity.
Ooh, I just read Gurba's blog.
Her argument in essence: a white author's inexperience with a culture leads to bad writing.
Example from her blog: Mexican protagonist described by her husband as the smartest women he knows. But Mexican protagonist is continually shocked by occurrences that would not shock a Mexican, but would shock an outsider. Bad writing.
There are other points made in the blog. In fact there are some other accusations that stop short of plagiarism, but no examples are given which is pretty unprofessional IMO.
Regardless, Gurba is clearly and strongly asserting that the book is a piece of shit from a literary standpoint, and that the author's inexperience with the culture and people is the reason for that shittiness.
There's already a certain kind of click-baitiness to publishing a rejected piece that "dunks" on a popular book like this, ok, I get that. But the "New Moralism" author is downsampling that to a completely substance-free pure click-bait of "white people don't belong here" meme.
That is sneaky, sneaky, sneaky. If you got sucked in further to the article from that sentence you just got played by the author and possibly by HN's blackbox sorting algo, too.
“I was sure I was the wrong person to review this book,” Groff wrote, noting that neither she nor the author were Mexican migrants. “In contemporary literary circles, there is a serious and legitimate sensitivity to people writing about heritages that are not their own because, at its worst, this practice perpetuates the evils of colonization, stealing the stories of oppressed people for the profit of the dominant.”
(I mean, maybe it makes books by white males so bland that nobody wants to read them, and so books by white males stop being the dominant narrative...)
If you're writing fantasy or fiction in anothertime book, be my guest and write about any character (although if it is supposed to be based on history and you're completely off about the culture at the time, i don't want to read your junk, really). If you're writing about a character in modern time, either you do some really good research, or you'll be off, and if your book/movie is bad, the woke crowd will drop on you. I mean, even if "The Wire" or "Treme" was ran today, nobody would drop on it.
And i will take another example for people in the US. Books about the so-called "white trash"/"trailer trash" or who depict people in this population are mostly wrong. Sometime its hilarious, sometime you just stop reading because the book is so bad. For me it was books about Appalachians hillbillies. Since its the american crowd i know the most, i was quite exited to read about them. I've found on good book, one. The rest is complete trash. Honestly if my grandfather or any of his friends found those books, those would burn.
It’s like how only Americans identify as latinx.
I have an unsubstantiated theory that this moral compassing at the institutional level (like the article mentions) has gathered more steam after the internet went into our phones and thus became highly accessible to the general public.
My local libraries used to have day/week events specifically to read banned books. I wonder if that's still a thing? If not, publishers/libraries should bring it back as it's a win/win for them.
Right and left seem to have turned the culture wars into different flavours of tribal lifestyle branding - engaging and marketable, but also superficial and substance-free.
It's also possible that the most interesting writing is happening in the self-published world, or the near-self-published world. That's where current classics like Lolita or Ulysses came from. Or much of D.H. Lawrence.
I’m not sure about book publishers but the change is happening across media more widely. The progressive left keeps getting hammered in elections in Europe at least, but it seems certain institutions are going the other way, not least media.
I wouldn’t say I recommend the book, but I think you’re right that there’s a lot of self published stuff now that is really off the wall.
But here’s the thing: many of those small presses also double as vanity presses. Some of the manuscripts they publish they think are deserving literature and they take on the risk, but for other books they put out they simply accept the manuscript because the author is willing to pay them a few thousand euro (and in internal discussions with me as the translator, the publisher’s staff even admit that the book is author-funded crap). The ordinary consumer actually has no way of knowing which of the small press's books were published on literary merit, and which ones are vanity press. Also, due to the pressure on small presses to cut costs, both merit-published and vanity-press titles get the same lax proofreading and editing and poor typesetting.
Has anyone actually looked at the drawings in Dr. Seuss' books? His political cartoons? Has anyone actually read American Dirt?
I agree that we shouldn't be outright censoring books, but that hasn't happened yet. You can still read JK Rowling, you can still find the six discontinued Dr. Seuss books quite easily. And no doubt, some of the imagery is slightly offensive at best, to overtly racist at worst.
The next time someone decries the 'cancellation' of something. Look at their reasoning instead of knee jerk reacting.
Can you? Even used copies are now banned even on eBay. Where do you ‘easily’ find them?
It also turns out that used bookstores still exist and that eBay is not the only site on the internet where you can buy things.
You can’t distribute the book for people to read and criticize.
It really is censored.
I assume they wouldn't have bothered if the reaction hadn't been so extreme.
I read books about spaceships, about robots, about humanity that's split off into different evolutionary groups.
I credit part of my immediate acceptance of LBGT+ and people on the sci-fi books I read as a kid, where changing your sex/gender was as simple as a 15 min visit to a shop (or similar), and the protagonists switched genders or sexs regularly. Hell, or some where neutral (in one case, they were neutral, because they used to be a warship, and the author used the female pronouns to describe all characters, even men! Great book series, by the way. Ancillary Justice was the first one).
Or with two characters fall in love, when they're not human, or not male and female or whatever.
One of my favorite authors (two of them, they're sisters, SK Dunstall) wrote some amazing male protagonists (and female ones). Not once while reading their linesman series did i ever stop and go "they shouldn't write about a male protagonist". Hell, at times their male protagonist was better written as a male protagonist than books I've read written by men!
There's a book on my reading list now, (to be taught, if fortunate) about humans genetically modified for specific environments, like space!
The discussions these books generate is important, in many cases. Some are meant to, others meant to just be enjoyed. Intent is important as is accurate research and characterization, when possible. Sure, if someone writes a book that's purposely harmful, or accidentally (but with a huge, disproportionate impact) harmful, then the book should be reviewed and maybe issues addressed to the author or by those who sell it. But only when its extremely harmful as a whole.
But the important thing is, these are all fiction. There's good fiction, bad fiction, and 90% of it is subjective. Fiction gives you the license to go beyond who you are, what you know, what ties you to the real world. And invites those discussions, invites people to learn more.
... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences.
On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories.
I haven't heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction. The only avenue that leaves is for straight white people to stop writing, and, y'know: No.
The outrage does seem selective. I mean, one of the seminal classics of science-fiction literature on the subject of gender - and a very popular book among feminist readers - is The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. LeGuin. And I've never heard anyone complain that she wrote a black protagonist, despite not having black experiences. But on the other hand, The Left Hand of Darkness isn't much about the black experience. It's more of a travelogue of a genderless society.
So maybe that's the distinction?
American Dirt isn't just about a Mexican, it's a story of the Mexican-American immigration experience. And maybe it's right that stories like that should be written by people who're closer to them?
Both books should be able to exist simultaneously.
The best way to reconcile it is to stop engaging in the fallacy of division.
Literature should be inclusive. Not every individual work of literature needs to be inclusive of every identity. Yes, a cis-het-male-Euro-American writer writing about unique experiences of cis-het-male-Euro-Americans (where characters of other backgrounds are seen only through the perspective of cit-het-male-Euro-Americans) might not speak to lots of people who aren’t cis-het-male-Euro-Americans. So what? It’s not a problem that such works exist, it is a problem when such works dominate available literature to the near-exclusion of other viewpoints.
What do you tell a single writer? Should they contribute to the problem by telling more stories about white guys? Exclusively focus on their own experiences?
Or should they try to learn from people around them and include those people in their stories to create more diversity? And if so, where's the line between diversity and tokenism? Between inclusion and appropriation?
“Do what thou wilt”
I'm not really into telling artists how to art, and the problem is not one that straight white artists are particularly poised to meaningfully contribute to solving through their art in any case.
> Or should they try to learn from people around them
I think this is a good thing for people to do as people, and if they happen to be artists it will inevitably have some effect on their art, but the solution to the problem of the world of any particular art being insufficiently inclusive of marginalized viewpoints isn't for artists from nonmarginalized communities to get to know marginalized communities so that the nonmarginalized artists art can speak for the marginalized communities.
But if you're just a run-of-the-mill writer, your stuff won't transcend anything. Still, you should try to include the real variety of people that your setting really has, and to do so with as much understanding of those people as you can.
Part of the resolution is to make characters' identities peripheral. The problem with the Magical Gay Friend story isn't that they're gay, but that they're in the story to be gay. What if you took some other character and just randomly decided, "The person he's married to happens to be named Tom". That's it.
Another part is to collect characters. This is something every writer is supposed to do. They meet interesting people and build their characters using the pieces of real humans. So instead of this being "the gay character", it's based on Mike, the drone flying, amaretto-sipping, former gas station manager who went into security consulting, and really hates San Diego but has to go there all the time because his stepmom lives there. Oh, and he met his husband Tom when he needed help pumping gas because he was wearing a tuxedo on his way to a friend's wedding and didn't want to pump it himself.
Your story about Mike could be anything. He uncovers a spy ring. He's unhappy with his new job and can't figure out what to do next. He tried heroin and really, really liked it. He and Tom don't have to be gay in this story. All they have to do is be people.
It was only later that she reconciled with feminism and began writing from the feminine perspective, and received a lot of criticism from her life long fans for it!
There are valid criticisms of Left Hand of Darkness from an LGBTQ perspective, but it's also viewed as revolutionary for its time. Today, she's viewed as a complex person who contributed greatly to feminist literature - despite not being perfect - based on her merits, not because of some mistaken identity.
To be a bit cynical, here's a quote from Goethe:
> No one has ever properly understood me, I have never fully understood anyone; and no one understands anyone else
Just because you're the same ethnicity/gender/whatever as someone else, does it mean you're "entitled" to claim you understand them? Or is it just some assumption that you can only write from experience and everything else should be disregarded?
Many great works of literature contain a large breadth of characters coming from different environments, classes, genders etc. - should they be discounted automatically because the author could not have been "authentic" when writing them?
Both arguments are pushed by the woke on purpose, to both be able to complain if no minorities are in a story and to complain if there are.
The way to reconcile it is that no one should feel forced to be inclusive (this is how you get forced token characters) and "write what you know" is not a rule set in stone. Plus it's a terrible argument because minorities are not some hivemind. For example, I'm trans and just a trans person wrote a book, stars in a movie, etc, doesn't mean I'll agree with them and how they portray trans people. In fact in the current political climate we are far more likely to disagree (I don't believe in a hundred genders, I believe you need dysphoria to be trans, etc), and I often feel any representation is making a complete mockery of my condition.
And as someone else has already pointed out, both types of books can co-exist. Lets take the extreme case that someone writes a shitty portrayal of some minority, it's bad, filled with cliches (or my reality where I feel these are actually hurtful to how we're represented, etc). So what? I'd rather have the right to critique and ridicule them then not, while also retaining my right to write whatever the hell I want. The other side's argument against my views are after all, very similar, that my view is hurtful. Who's right? Who's to judge? Currently it's only the side complaining the loudest.
And let's go further. I'm not out except to close family. I'm also bi and not out due to the culture where I live. To anyone on the street/internet I look like a "straight white man". Were I to write a book with a character modeled after me probably no one would want to publish it because it's not pc, and if it was published many would try to cancel me. Another example, I might write something historically accurate with a minority character, but history is not pretty, it's racist and cruel, and whatever I wrote would probably have the same problem because context no longer matters. Is this really the world we want to live in?
And it's not limited to the aliens. James Doohan pretended to be a native scotsman even though he was born in Canada. Canada!!
The difference is minority people can fight back.
I feel like this kind of argument only serves as distraction (not implying that's your intent). Do you not think ant culture would be absolutely offended by someone doing this?
You people make mountains out of molehills.
I have some pet theories, but they're really speculative, and I'm not very confident in them.
Let's call that what it is. It ain't "passion."
We're seeing the modern equivalents of witch hunts and book burnings.
Yep, it's messed up.
It's hard to argue that thoughtful articles like this one don't pertain to an interesting new phenomenon. This concept is, of course, highly subjective. But I've seen countless articles on HN that existed in this space without being flagged. Why should this article, which garnered such high volume of feedback - without flaming - be treated differently?
You think the article is thoughtful because you agree with it. The article itself said the phenomenon isn't new. And interest declines when we get several articles a week about the same thing.
I'm still not convinced this is anti-trans. I mean it's reality so for people to want to cancel her over this is ridiculous (which sums up the woke-ideology pretty much).
If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
Equally does a man who wears women's clothes make them a woman? I'm happy for them to call themselves a trans-woman, and "she", but we have to have language that separates the sexes at the biological level.
> What if these people feel in their person like women?
The word "feel" in this context is extremely woolly. This is how we have gotten ourselves into this ridiculous situation where no-one can agree on anything to do with gender / sexes.
> If you read Rowling's comment inclusively then it's a clumsy, ambiguous complaint about shifting language norms that is harmless and warrants a clarification. If you read the comment exclusively -- which I think is fair given Rowling's other statements over the years -- then I find it hard to read in a charitable light. It is, I admit, entirely possible that Rowling doesn't hold trans-exclusionary views and has merely, accidentally chosen ambiguous wording over the years and is pig-headed enough to be unwilling to clarify but I do find this _unlikely_ considering that she's a famously clear author who is willing to clarify (and extend) her body of work for years after the fact.
So you might be partly right on this - but given her contribution to literacy and the arts and woman's rights we know she is a thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate person. Given all her positive contributions to society the hostile reaction from the trans-side is telling really.
Those are biological females (women).
>And many women don't menstruate.
What is your point here?
The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
What sort of answer to your original question did you expect?
This is false.
> The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
It was until it was high jacked.
If one would do a general survey, most ordinary people would consider sex and gender the same thing. Most of them would also say that they know the sex of somebody they see for the first time. Which is statistically true, because people whose sex and gender don't match are truly a small minority.
>The point is women isn't a synonym for people who menstruate even if you ignore trans people.
For the pedantic I guess she should have said: women who are in their fertile age without health problems or taking medications which prevent menstruation.
>What sort of answer to your original question did you expect?
A possible medical breakthrough.
People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
"gender markers" and "chromosomes" are the same thing for 99% of the population. So guessing really is knowing.
> People who menstruate is much shorter than your suggestion.
Women is even shorter and everybody in the whole world understands it.
People who menstruate is more accurate.
It’s not. Its TE (or racist, or whatever) to have a TE (or racist, or whatever) opinion.
Or is it only ‘TE’ within the theoretical framework of Trans activists?
Trans people exclude CIS people from the category of Trans.
Do we call them CIS exclusionary?
Just saying someone else is exclusionary is meaningless.
Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
True, but the relevance is not obvious because these aren’t problems caused by so called TERFs.
It’s also not true that censoring JK Rowling is required as part of solving them, either.
> Cis and trans are opposites by definition. They existed long before they were applied to gender.
Does that mean that you think that cisgender women are not in the same category as transgender women?
Rowling hasn't been censored.
Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.
This just isn’t true.
> I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say.
TERFs don’t say this. People controlling budgets do. They are are the ones withholding services from trans people. Not TERFs.
> Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.
Only according to certain trans perspectives.
You have clearly agreed there are two kinds of women. It is reasonable for them to not see one another as members of the same category.
Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men. Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment. Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.
It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent. I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.
Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective. And don't play games. You asked a question. I answered.
There are many more than 2 kinds of women!
Yes, but being allowed into women’s shelters is not the only solution to violence against trans people.
> Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men.
Do they? And if they see them as men, isn’t that their business?
I am not aware of TERFs arguing against services being provided for trans people.
> Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment.
So TERFs in general do not.
> Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.
Yes, agreed, and this is a terrible outcome but lack of services for trans people is not a consequence of TERFs.
> It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent.
This irrelevant statement to anything either of us have said so far.
> I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.
What do you mean by ‘start hedging’?
> Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective.
Of course not, but that doesn’t make it universal.
As far as I can see your argument is just based on there not being enough money for trans services.
That’s absolutely correct, but has nothing to do with TERFs.
Is it influenced by her view? Of course.
Does it perpetuate it? Surely that depends on how readers react to it. We are free to interpret works as we like.
My own view on this is complex.
The problems JK Rowling outlines are clearly real, but of course so are the problems of trans people in gaining acceptance in society. Both TERFs and Trans people are groups that face gendered violence.
If the mere writing of a character that holds a view ‘perpetuates it’, then don’t we need to burn all books written before the 1990s?
You can sanction Rowling, don't buy her books. You can criticize Rowling, you can publish books hating on Rowling, those are all great ways in a free society to show opposition. The problem is that activists want to destroy Rowling, erase her from public space, and deny others the right to buy and read her books. Rowling has enough power and stature where she isn't really threatened, but smaller authors are being "disappeared".
That is to say, I think there are actual true believers when it comes to free speech.
Edit: I just reread your comment and there's a "most" I missed the first time. Leaving this comment up, but safe to say I agree.
People building fame in art and using that fame to advocate for causes, including the cause of preserving the marginalization of particular marginalized communities, is not novel.
Famous people are still people, and they still have opinions. Opinions you might not even agree with. Are we to exclude the famous from speaking their opinions? I would love to see how that would work, both legally and as kind of a sci-fi premise. Actors interviewed on late night shows offering only the blandest of reactions to what is said. No longer are musicians able to fund charities with their wealth, since donations are speech, as per the Supreme Court. Court battles are waged over how wealthy must be or how many Google hits are found for their name before someone is too famous to have opinions.
It lacks laser-guns and aliens, but as a very dry, Burgess-like exploration of government policy as a near-future sci-fi, it might be workable.
First, my response was denying that the description was of a phenomenon which was in any way novel as the upthread poster claimed, it wasn’t my description.
Second, I don’t read it that way: it was simply describing that, Rowling achieved fame and then, having achieved it, used it to sell certain ideas. There was no suggestion that it was planned in advance as a strategy, or even that that use was especially prominent among her uses of the fame.
Surely, in many other books the serial killer is a straight male. Why are their authors not accused of anti-heterosexual speech? Are we promoting some sort of discrimination against straight males? Are they the only ones allowed to be evil?
That's not what OP is referring to. Go read her Twitter feed and blog.
Mostly the cultural effects of the Hays code and decades of queer-coding villains as evil or sexually depraved in fiction and popular culture. A fictional male serial killer tends not to simply "have worn a dress," that specific detail, like all details in fiction, is intended to communicate something to the reader/viewer, and most of the time it's to present the character's non-heteronormative behavior as a symptom of their moral evil.
Technically speaking there's nothing wrong with depicting a Black person eating a watermelon and fried chicken but there's context behind the tendency to interpret it other than purely literal terms.
Except the details of being white or male - those are not intended to communicate anything?
Not typically. Being white and male (and straight, and Christian) is considered so normative in Western society and culture that it's basically a blank slate, "default human." How often is a white character's race specifically mentioned, unless it's to form a contrast with some other non-white character's race?
It almost never happens, because white male characters are often just there. Every deviation from that norm has to be specifically mentioned and pointed out, and unless the author is part of the group or culture being portrayed, is usually done through stereotype.
Basically, there's a long and sordid history of the Cross Dressing Predator as a literary and film trope and this has been used against trans people heavily.
But the online trans community is extremely aggressive against any criticism, trying to slander whoever they consider their opponents and performing character assassinations.
Anti-trans speech may be perfectly fine. They're not saints and they're not perfect, why should they be beyond critique?
This kind of response is precisely the thing that irks me to no end and it's something nobody will ever discuss. They'll just shun you or hurl a slogan at you as if you said something utterly ridiculous.
Let's broaden our time horizons a bit to something longer than the time it takes to read a tweet. When did you start to stand up for "trans" and oppose "anti-trans"? I'm asking a serious question, if only rhetorically. When did this become the obvious thing to do, the right thing to do, a matter of fact, and beyond discussion? Was there ever a discussion? Because all I can remember is that one day we were calling this gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, and the next day, a bunch of aggressive campus demonstrators were making demands and hurling accusations and trying to silence and bully people into going along. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of college graduates started entering the workplace repeating these stock slogans verbatim. What are they, agents of the Komsomol?
What horrifies me is how easily people go along without question. It is truly horrifying. It horrifies me that they don't even seem to realize that that's what they're doing, floating downstream, wherever the current takes them. Milgram was crude child's play by comparison!
So when you condemn JK Rowling for disagreeing as if she had committed some crime against humanity, in light of how things actually transpired, in light of how viciously this program has been and is being implemented, I really makes me wonder.
Correct or not, JK Rowling's thoughts about femininity are likely shared by the vast majority of the world. Exaggerating her beliefs by calling her transphobic and radical isn't going to progress trans rights in any way.
Note that this attitude is entirely monopolized by "woke culture." It happens in other spaces as well (e.g. encouragement to name and shame a company you had a bad interviewing experience with).
https://www.mit.edu/afs.new/sipb/user/ayshames/Python/LORETT...
I thought and still think it's funny, "Where's the fetus going to gestate Stan, are you going to keep it in a box?" But now I'm afraid to laugh or reference it in public. The movie is probably going to end up on a list, and its fans made to feel bad for being horrible people. I think I can both laugh at Stan, who's not real, and accept and support misgendered people, who are.
Here's a take I don't necessarily believe, but is about as generous to the new left as I can make it: Ideas can be powerfully virulent, and we're especially susceptible to them when they support something we already suspect (confirmation bias). Under complete deregulation, people seek out information that confirms their biases, and our societal inertia continues unrestricted. The naive solution to me is something like we have now: introduce a friction factor. People are generally lazy, and if they don't have immediate access to something, they won't seek it out. If we make problematic media difficult to find but nevertheless available, we change the general cultural milieu without outright banning difficult texts.
This obviously falls apart when it comes to introducing new texts and ideas into the mainstream - if people are disincentivized to print anything that isn't playing by the rules, it's terrible for innovation and creates a whole new brand of inertia. It's also terrible in that it's an unstable equilibrium: if people care enough to keep their foot on the gas in terms of narrowing access to virulent media, it doesn't take much to convince them to go pedal-to-the-metal and start banning everything.
This is all just my initial take on the topic though: I always have difficulty engaging with stuff like this and forming opinions constructively since it's just an exhausting concept to try to be productive with people on.
edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your point: I thought you were saying "new media can have a radicalizing effect" to which this comment was responding to by saying "light regulation works for new media as well". I now understand you said that "old media doesn't radicalize a significant number of people" which has the obvious endpoint "light regulation of old media isn't necessary". On balance, I definitely agree with that.
What do we do with William Burroughs then?
One thing I have noticed is maybe Jesus had it right with the forgiveness thing. But the woke crowd would probably condemn him too
Edit: And please tell me the admins of HN aren't engaging in wrongthink censorship.
Bullshit. It still is.
It has also always been a place where doing that provoked backlash, and the path of least resistance has been to avoid doing that and follow conventional morality; that, too, has not changed.
What has changed is that particular ideas which until recently have themselves been extremely transgressive have moved their way into conventional morality, at least in substantial sectors of society, so that the backlash once associated with transgressive ideas and approaches is now being experienced with what were fairly recently conventional, safe ideas and manners of expression.
I should point out that I don't support 100% of the positions of the mob, but I won't say which ones I disagree with because I don't want to be next. The differences I have are minor, and I'm willing to change them immediately if necessary.
I don't know where parent lives in the world, but from my perspective in the United States, I deeply fear that there are many Americans who would support an anti-democratic coup (or mob) in a heartbeat so long as it aligned with enough of their political sentiments.
Edit: maybe parent is a little too-secretly sarcastic, but even so I suspect many others think like this unironically.
The point is to demonstrate utter obedience and submissiveness to the hivemind.
Imagine that you are 6 years old and your mom is a psychotic, occasionally violent, control freak. It's a bit like that.
What drove our society to this height of neurosis?
My tired brain can't figure out if this is a joke or not?
It's a depressingly common pattern for an oppressed group which begins to break its chains to be co-opted and weaponized by people who are more interested in revenge than justice and equality.
Pay attention, this is how the book-burnings and the witch-hunts start. "Wokism" is the new Right Wing Authoritarianism of this age.
When things are judged, not by how the author intended, but by the readers interpretation, it's a bad situation.
> There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
In today’s highly polarized and tribal world, books must also be a way to signal virtue and tribe membership.
Marcel Duchamps Fountain was one of my favorite pieces of art because it called out the art world for judging art based on the fact that it was made by a member of the accepted 'art world' but it was a frickin urinal.
What actually MADE that urinal art was that it was made by a member of the artistic ingroup.
If I go hang a urinal in a museum as a web developer I will get arrested and it will be thrown out.
Big chunks of her book excerpt "Mein Kampf", which I previous hadn't read at all.
I have very little problem reading Hitler's text through my own critical lens, without adopting the authors intent. I have a very different view on the world than Hitler, and I have no problem at all saying that my views are less pathological than his and further, I feel like history has judged the dude rightly and quite harshly.
Is that a bad situation? And if not, how is this different than what you're describing?
You can never know what the author intended when writing. And every reader has a different subjective experience of a piece of literature or a work of art.
So it's actually fucking impossible to even judge a work of art or writing based on the authors or readers perspective or in any thing beyond the aesthetic.
Because what you think about something may not be what someone else thinks about it.
And every persons thinking is influenced by so many different experiences: cultural, personal, moral, etc.
So to attempt to create a concrete narrative about the intentions of a specific work of art or literature is impossible.
This applies to reality as well.
I've never read Mein Kampf, but I assume Hitle has good intentions for his country and wants peace and prosperity for the particular ingroup of people he identifies with. This is the same that everyone wants for their particular ingroup. Hitler did terrible things to accomplish that.
So your perspective on Hitlers work is affected by the genocide that he commited.
However, history is written by the winners and the present reality is merely one narrative, that the winners create.
AMERICANS and every single other country in the world have commited genocide and other horrible atrocities.(see Native Americans during settler times and 400k innocent civilians killed in the middle east during the past decade)
However, they won.
If Hitler had won WW2 I can't help but wonder if the Jewish Holocaust would have been as minimized as the Native American Holocaust, and pushed under the rug.
And Hitler would have gone down in history as a hero based on the news media spinning that narrative and nationalistic exuberance.
Narratives are the most powerful thing in the world but also the most untrue.
To answer your question, a bad situation in my mind would be something like this example: a few years ago a relatively bright friend who had worked for a famous national politician got into a disagreement with me when I referred to The Colbert Report as satire. He did not think there was satire or that Colbert was putting on another character for the show at all. I was a big fan of the show, but it was alarming to me how many people might not understand subtlety like satire in novels and movies.
Maybe there was never a golden area when everybody got it. In Voltaire's day, did the majority of the populace comprehend his meaning? Were the majority even aware of his messages?
I have always loved reading novels from an early age, and find them superior in understanding other people's ways of thinking. As advanced and educated as many people enjoy being in the 21st century, I fear too many might still not bother to dig deeper into the intentions of a writer to truly understand what they were hinting at. It's an excellent skill applicable to other areas in life, and with controversial topics it can really help to bridge the gap in a polarized debate. Hitler is an extreme, and I personally don't believe all writing is fundamentally good and edifying to your soul, but I do think effort should be made to understand an author, especially when the writing clashes with contemporary norms. You can still discard it after carefully weighing it, but if you discard it without giving credit to what the author was trying to say because you don't even understand it, that's a loss.
These zealous critics could apply their same logic to cancel my beloved Huckleberry Finn, a book that shed light on injustice more effectively than most even though the author did not come from the same ethnic background as Jim.
Of course, how can you do this when people's experience with writing is mostly 120-character tweets that are read and reacted to on first emotional impulse.
I don’t know, I think there’s a very good reason to give significant priority in judgement of acts to their consequences, especially forseeable ones, not just their intentions. That’s as true of acts of artistic creation as any other action.
That’s on top of the fact that forseeable consequences are often a better indicator of actual intent than convenient and otherwise unsupported post hoc statements of intent when an action is criticized for its actual consequences.
Unfortunately, shrill lunacy drives "engagement", so media and social media alike swarm around it.
If transgressive works dropped without a squeek, they wouldn't be transgressive, would they? It's nonsensical to to try to preserve a space for challenging works by removing the challenge to them.
There are new conventions forming. Writers who want to break them need to learn how to put up their fists. And writing a medium article complaining about cancel culture is not how that is done.
I don't really think defending Woody Allen is a good example of any of the purity politics that was first opened up with, and its use makes me suspicious of the entire essay's goodwill otherwise. It's super weird to rope in "these people don't like white people writing brown protagonists" and "the employees of this company do not want to participate in publishing the nonfiction of a credibly accused child molester".
I think the essay is significantly weakened by conflating the two in any respect.
The end of the essay even focuses on the race aspect! I just completely do not understand trying to conflate the purchasing of a credibly accused child molester's work to excessive purity on writing brown/black people in fiction.
>The above cases are each distinct. You may agree with how the book world responded in some instances, and disagree in others. But what these cases convey is how much the literary establishment is struggling with a dread of “harm,” related both to content and authors. It speaks to the spreading sense that it thinks of itself as carrying out a moral mission, whose standards are those of progressive activism.
Shouldn't be a question. Anyone should be able to write whatever they want without involving identity politics/purity tests.
"Not Guilty" does not imply "Innocent"
If the laws in a democratic country aren't on the side of justice, then neither are the people, and if the people aren't on the side of justice, an auxiliary prosecution system formed of the people won't be either.
There are the legal courts, and then there are is the court of public opinion. Is it always -fair-? No. But you can't force a private publisher to publish someone's material either.
We have a strong solution available to each of us: a wallet. Don't support publishers that cave to the court of public opinion.. or do! I'm not your parent.
Woody Allen has every right to write a book, but he's not entitled to a publisher publishing it. He could easily self-publish it using any one of dozens of self-publishing platforms, or just put it on the web if he wants. Nobody can really stop him unless there's something civilly actionable in there.
All I see is private companies refusing to provide a platform to content that they don't want to support (often because it offends or just turns off large numbers of customers) or violates their terms. That's not censorship in the legal sense. You aren't entitled to someone else's platform.
Carte blanche access to platforms has never been a thing. Can you imagine walking into a newspaper office in the 1980s and demanding to publish a full page classified ad with any content you want in their newspaper and then screaming "censorship!" and "cancel culture!" when they said no? They'd send you to the psychiatric emergency ward.
The right historically defends the rights of businesses to act freely and would be defending platforms and publishers if it were not far-right content that were being dropped. Since it's far-right content, now the right has suddenly decided that access to large scale platforms is an entitlement that needs to be guaranteed by the state. The right has also done a complete 180 on the anti-trust issue... both only for tech companies that operate content platforms.
It's just so transparently partisan. They wouldn't give a crap if left-wing speech were being deplatformed.
There's one last WTF here. The right was always critical of the sexual revolution going all the way back to the 1950s. This #metoo stuff would be a golden opportunity for conservatives to sling a bit of "we told you so" shade at sexual libertines, pointing out that some sexual taboos may have existed to protect people from sexual predation.
Instead the right sides with accused sex abusers and even pedophiles, but only when the accusers are "libs." It's no longer even remotely about ideas. It's about winning for the sake of winning.
I don't expect HN to understand this. But it is fundamentally different from the various tirades of the Moral Majority and friends. This is not an attempt to impose a religious set of restraints. This is an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. And it is a good thing.
No. It’s an ideology of the elites.
I really don't expect the woke communists to accept a free society though.
But the Moral Majority was also an attempt to make the world kinder and less awful. They just had different definitions of "kinder" and "awful" than you do.
If you don't like having it done to you (or viewpoints you like), then don't do it to others.