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Javier E

The Phantasms of Judith Butler - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...677874

trans gender debate critical

shared by Javier E on 28 Mar 24 - No Cached
  • The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones.
  • Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer.
  • Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims?
  • Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.”
  • why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate
  • The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”
  • But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asser
  • Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”
  • ascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet.
  • As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own
  • Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality.
  • They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part.
  • They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”
  • Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope.
  • It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want.
  • what is authenticity
  • In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.
  • I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”?
  • The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.
  • They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists
  • What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?
Javier E

Inequality: The 1 percent needs better defenders | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...inequality

inequality economics entrepreneur innovation creativity luck superstar

shared by Javier E on 26 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product. Think of the entrepreneur as Steve Jobs as he develops the iPod, J.K. Rowling as she writes her Harry Potter books, or Steven Spielberg as he directs his blockbuster movies." Everyone wants to buy the entrepreneur's product, which results in a hugely unequal distribution of income. Should the government shift to a progressive tax system to reduce the inequality?Obviously Mr Mankiw discovers that the answer is "no", because that's the answer he has built his analogy to produce.
  • Mr Mankiw's analogy sneaks in his conclusion by implying that greater inequality is the price we pay for more invention and creativity. But his own choices of hero-entrepreneurs make it clear that there's no evidence to support this claim.
  • Of the three Mr Mankiw proposes, only Steve Jobs plausibly had an irreducible, unique effect on material culture and the structure of an industry. Mr Spielberg and Ms Rowling are acclaimed artists, but their startling wealth and prominence are entirely due to the increasing power of network effects in mass culture over the past several decades. Mr Spielberg happened to be directing his first movies just as Hollywood was beginning to stage coordinated marketing blitzes that created round-the-block lines for top-grossing films. Ms Rowling hit the bookshelves just as a similar superstar phenomenon was taking over publishing, with sales increasingly concentrated on individual mega-bestsellers rather than spread across a few dozen authors and titles. Mr Jobs is an unusual figure in that his ability to combine engineering, aesthetics, and a vision of how users might interact with the digital universe has created a kind of integrated multi-product entity that might not otherwise have existed; it's not clear that BlackBerry, Nokia or Samsung would have been up to the task. But even in Mr Jobs's case, much of the power that accrued to Apple was due to the gradual sorting of the consumer information-technology world into integrated ecosystems
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • "The music industry is a microcosm of what is happening in the U.S. economy at large," Mr Krueger said. "We are increasingly becoming a ‘winner-take-all economy,’ a phenomenon that the music industry has long experienced. Over recent decades, technological change, globalization and an erosion of the institutions and practices that support shared prosperity in the U.S. have put the middle class under increasing stress. The lucky and the talented—and it is often hard to tell the difference—have been doing better and better, while the vast majority has struggled to keep up."
  • why does Mr Mankiw pick three figures from the entertainment and computer industries, where everyone knows the "superstar" phenomenon is strongest? Because if he used examples from other industries, it would be even more difficult to convince the reader that the immense rewards being reaped by those at the top had anything to do with their unique contributions to the economy
  • Perhaps those other guys wouldn't have been as good at their jobs; in that case, these firms would have lost market share to competitors. So what?
  • The social purpose of high executive pay is to create incentives for hard work to maximise profit. But these guys are being paid double what their predecessors were making in the 1980s
  • Are we seeing startlingly better corporate performance today than we were back then? Is there greater productive innovation in, say, medical technology or commercial real estate? Is our economy growing faster? Are general standards of living rising faster? No, no, no and no.
  • Mr Mankiw's analogy stacks the deck by making it appear as though great creative entrepreneurs create the consumer demand which leads to inequality. This is not how things work.
  • If the government were to, for example, return top marginal tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the 1990s or the 1970s in order to compensate for the superstar effect, there is no reason to believe that the top one percent would produce any less value for society than they do now. Mr Spielberg would likely have worked just as hard at 1970s tax rates as he does at 2013 tax rates; indeed, he did so when he made "Jaws". Similarly, Mr Jobs worked very hard on the Apple 2e in the 1970s and on the iMac in the 1990s, and Ms Rowling worked quite hard on the Harry Potter series even though tax rates in Britain are much higher than those in America.
Javier E

Harper's Scarlet Letter. Matthew Yglesias, free speech, and… | by Berny Belve... - 0 views

arcdigital.media/rs-scarlet-letter-f7e29846fdbf

cancel culture analysis censorship

shared by Javier E on 15 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many of us didn’t see, and still don’t see, how Yglesias’s signing of the letter is supposed to increase the likelihood that VanDerWerff suffers harm. This is VanDerWerff’s most significant complaint against Yglesias
  • because it comes in the form of a worry over personal safety, rather than as an intellectual challenge to the letter’s contents, this has the effect of preempting critical engagement with VanDerWerff’s response, since disagreement with her no longer seems morally appropriate.
  • this is my second point — disagreement with her no longer seems logically appropriate, since what’s been offered is not so much a counterpoint to the Harper’s letter but something less cognitive, less vulnerable to the forms and checks of reason and argument
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • This is the element that those of us who agree with the Harper’s letter find most frustrating. We think the debate over where the discourse’s parameters should be (which is what the Harper’s letter is fundamentally about), and, more specifically, the debate over sex and gender identity that J. K. Rowling and her critics have been engaging in, are and should continue to be intellectually in bounds.
  • It’s no surprise that, when a move like that is made, the only thing the internet can produce in response is a torrential downpour of replyrage.
  • The move has the effect of disarming a would-be critic’s capacity to engage in counterargument.
  • But the suggestion that taking the contrary position literally endangers those on the opposing side has a clinching effect — the debate can’t continue. It is shut down because of safety concerns.
  • I don’t think it’s credible to suggest Yglesias’s signing of the letter complicates his employer’s ability to “build a more diverse and more thoughtful workplace.” If anything, the opposite is true — for Vox not to have a single staffer sign the letter harms its ability to do so. Diversity and thoughtfulness require … diversity and thoughtfulness, not uniformity and groupthink.
  • he reality is that the clinching move here is not an argument
  • Rather, it’s an assertion without supporting evidence that the letter’s contents are so damaging that, by signing it, you increase the likelihood that trans colleagues incur harm.
  • There is no support offered for this claim. There is no attempt to connect the letter’s contents, or the act of agreeing with the letter’s contents, to the incidence of harms experienced by trans people now. No attempt to chart out how the letter might lead to harms in the future.
  • the connection between signing a letter about discourse values and a colleague subsequently being more vulnerable to harm does need the dots connected. That can’t merely be asserted and the matter closed.
  • We now have a case in which affirming the importance of intellectual openness is met with severe professional discomfort. A journalist has accused her colleague of inflicting harm, complicating her job, selfishly disvaluing her person, violating their shared employer’s aims, and more.
  • (7) VanDerWerff claimed the letter contains “many dog whistles toward anti-trans positions.”
  • It’s about the letter itself. It’s a claim about the letter’s subtext.
  • How does this connect with the letter? I understand how, in seeing Rowling’s name next to the letter, a critic of Rowling’s stance on sex and gender could believe Rowling’s involvement shapes, in a very real way, the semantic content of the letter beyond what its linguistic elements strictly and independently suggest.
  • I understand it but I disagree with it. Because Rowling was not the only person who signed it — there were over 150 others, including some trans people, and including many who disagree with Rowling’s stance on trans issues.
  • In any event, I disagree with the characterization that the letter, either explicitly or implicitly, is “anti-trans.” Some people obviously think some of the signatories are “anti-trans,” but that doesn’t tell us much except that those signatories’ critics find their views deeply morally troubling.
  • Here is a brief account of what I take cancel culture to be
  • I take cancel culture to be person-variable, or community-variable, in the sense that what counts as an act of cancellation differs from person to person, or community to community, based on certain underlying beliefs. What beliefs are those?
  • I think we see a targeting as a cancellation when the person who is in the crosshairs is there for views we think should continue to be seen as discourse legitimate
  • Blake Neff, a longtime senior writer for Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News, was fired when his relentlessly racist and sexist online comments under a pseudonym came to light. Is this a cancellation? This one isn’t hard at all. It’s manifestly not.None of us think his views on black people or women are discourse legitimate.
  • But David Shor, who was fired for tweeting research findings that were taken to suggest the post-Floyd riots could harm Democratic electoral interests, does count as an act of cancellation. The protests’ effects on the political prospects of Biden unseating Trump is absolutely a live question. It follows that someone who gets fired, as a data analyst, for tweeting about it constitutes a prima facie case of cancellation.
  • This is also what explains why a standard skeptical response to asserting the existence of “cancel culture” is to counteranalyze it as “people merely being held accountable.”
  • It follows that, on some occasions, our “cancel culture totally exists!/cancel culture is totally nonexistent!” back-and-forths are really just disguised ways of saying “I think this view should continue to be debated!/I think this view should not be up for discussion!”
  • A harder thing to pin down is when exactly reputational damage, rather than employment status, counts as “cancel culture.”
  • is tough when the name itself, “cancel,” is a success term. If someone has not actually been canceled, then how can their targeting be called a cancellation? It makes intuitive sense to require a cancellation to involve a genuine canceling.
  • I want to move away from this understanding of it because, often times, the outcomes are predicated on arbitrary factors like whether the target is independently wealthy, or how amenable their boss is to outspokenness, or how fearful their university is of lawsuits, or any number of other luck-based factors that take us away from the supposedly inappropriate actions.
  • Rowling is impervious to cancellation, but that doesn’t mean the manner in which her critics have engaged her is meaningfully different than the way others who have had their livelihoods impacted have been engaged. Gillian Philip, a bestselling children’s author, was sacked from a group-publishing collective for tweeting #IStandWithJKRowling.
  • It’s a style of challenge that assumes the wrongness of the views and moves directly to affixing a culturally odious label, seeking a deplatforming or shrinking of the offender’s channels, or outright firing. It’s not the sort of challenge where evidence of the offending view’s wrongness is brought forward and an invitation to respond is either explicitly or implicitly offered.
  • Again, there are many occasions where I’d move straight to no-platforming. I would never publish Richard Spencer. I said, above, that Neff’s firing was absolutely the right call.
krystalxu

England - Cultural life | Britannica.com - 0 views

www.britannica.com/...Cultural-life

england life com

shared by krystalxu on 31 May 18 - No Cached
  • Many writers also found a new audience in children, giving rise to work such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and generating later classics such as Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit stories, A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and even, it can be argued, the late 20th-century work of J.K. Rowling.
Javier E

Matthew Yglesias: A Defense of Free Speech | National Review - 0 views

www.nationalreview.com/...s-we-must-defend-matt-yglesias

cancel culture free speech

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • he Vox writer currently is under fire for signing a letter critical of “cancel culture.” For criticizing cancel culture, Yglesias might very well end up being canceled.
  • It begins, as these things do, with a tiny little voice squeaking about being made unsafe by the expression of contrary opinions. Emily (formerly Todd) VanDerWerff, a critic at Vox, is incensed that Yglesias would sign his name alongside that of such great monsters of our time as Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling and other “prominent anti-trans voices,” a letter that allegedly contains “many dog whistles towards anti-trans positions.” Such an outrage, VanDerWerff wrote, “makes me feel less safe at Vox.” What else? “I don’t want Matt to be reprimanded or fired” — Mr. Chekhov gently lays down his revolver — but “I do want to make clear that those beliefs cost him nothing.”
  • VanDerWerff no more felt threatened by Yglesias’s name on a letter than Amy Cooper felt threatened by that Ivy League bird-watcher in Central Park. This is simply the weaponization of victim status by vindictive, sophomoric busybodies who cannot bear the fact that someone else sees the world in a different way.
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  • The predictable backlash is having the predictable effect. Historian Kerri Greenidge of Tufts denied endorsing the letter in spite of her signature being on it. Others have gone into intellectual hiding. From the New York Times: “Another person who signed, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in an effort to stay out of the growing storm, said she did not know who all the other signatories were when she agreed to participate, and if she had, she may not have signed.” The terror of being seen alongside J. K. Rowling is now up there with being the first one to stop applauding after Stalin’s speech.
Javier E

It's the powerless who suffer when free speech is threatened | Kenan Malik | Opinion | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...when-free-speech-is-threatened

free speech censorship mideast

shared by Javier E on 19 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Many of the questions facing writers and artists and comedians are, however, similar. What is taboo? How far can we upset people? Should we transgress consensual boundaries?
  • there is also, unlike in most of the Muslim world, a general presumption of freedom of expression and laws and institutions that broadly protect free speech. This has made many sanguine about threats to speech.
  • Arab activists recognise that censorship aids the powerful, while free speech is a vital weapon for those struggling for change. It’s a point often forgotten in the west.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Consider the furore over the recent letter in Harper’s magazine in defence of free speech signed by 153 public figures
  • A key criticism of the letter is that it is the voice of privilege.
  • It’s the “little people” without power or platforms whose lives are particularly disrupted if they say the “wrong” thing, whether that be Muslim students in Britain, Mexican-American truck drivers, children’s authors, shopworkers, anti-Israel protesters or political activists.
  • the harsh conditions make Arab activists aware of the significance of free speech in a way that many in the west no longer seem to be
  • Being able to dismiss concerns about censorship? Now, that’s the voice of privilege.
Javier E

The New York Times' trans coverage is under fire. The paper needs to listen | Arwa Mahd... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...es-trans-coverage-open-letters

trans debate nyt

shared by Javier E on 20 Feb 23 - No Cached
  • I’ve got a feeling the poor alien might get the impression that every third person in the US is trans – rather than 0.5% of the population. They (I assume aliens are nonbinary) might get the impression that nobody is allowed to say the word “woman” any more and we are all being forced at gunpoint to say “uterus-havers”. They might get the impression that women’s sports have been completely taken over by trans women. They might believe that millions of children are being mutilated by doctors in the name of gender-affirming care because of the all-powerful trans lobby. They might come away thinking that JK Rowling is not a multi-multi-multi-millionaire with endless resources at her disposal but a marginalized victim who needs brave Times columnists to come to her defense.
  • “In the past eight months the Times has now published more than 15,000 words’ worth of front-page stories asking whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast”. Those, to reiterate, are newspaper front-page stories. As Popula notes, that number “doesn’t include the 11,000 or so words the New York Times Magazine devoted to a laboriously evenhanded story about disagreements over the standards of care for trans youth; or the 3,000 words of the front-page story … on whether trans women athletes are unfairly ruining the competition for other women; or the 1,200 words of the front-page story … on how trans interests are banning the word “woman” from abortion-rights discourse.”
  • This letter, addressed to the paper’s associate managing editor for standards, accused the Times of treating gender diversity “with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources”. That relevant information being that some of those sources have affiliations with far-right groups. That “charged language” being phrases like “patient zero” to describe a transgender young person seeking gender-affirming care, “a phrase that vilifies transness as a disease to be feared”.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The second letter was signed by more than 100 LGBTQ+ and civil rights groups, including Glaad and the Human Rights Campaign. It expressed support for the contributor letter and accused the Times of platforming “fringe theories” and “dangerous inaccuracies”. It noted that while the Times has produced responsible coverage of trans people, “those articles are not getting front-page placement or sent to app users via push notification like the irresponsible pieces are”. And it observed that rightwing politicians have been using the Times’s coverage of trans issues to justify criminalizing gender-affirming care.
  • Charlie Stadtlander, the Times’ director of external communication, put out a statement stating that the organization pursues “independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care”. While that was all very diplomatic, the executive editor, Joe Kahn, and opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, sent around a rather more pointed newsroom memo condemning the letters on Thursday.
  • “It is not unusual for outside groups to critique our coverage or to rally supporters to seek to influence our journalism,” Kahn wrote in the memo. “In this case, however, members of our staff and contributors to The Times joined the effort … We do not welcome, and will not tolerate, participation by Times journalists in protests organized by advocacy groups or attacks on colleagues on social media and other public forums.”
  • Here’s the thing: there is no clear-cut line between advocacy and journalism. All media organizations have a perspective about the world and filter their output (which will, of course, strive to be fairly reported) through that perspective. To pretend otherwise is dishonest. Like it or not, the Times is involved in advocacy. It just needs to step back for a moment and think about who it’s advocating for.
Javier E

JK Rowling and the Cass report reckoning | The Spectator - 0 views

www.spectator.co.uk/...-and-the-cass-report-reckoning

trans debate culture

shared by Javier E on 13 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • Was ever a ‘liberation’ movement ever so risible from the start? Did any other allegedly oppressed group’s bid for equality include seeking to rob another oppressed group of their rights? Did any other oppressed group claim their freedom by dressing up as another oppressed group? And, crucially, did any allegedly oppressed group ever carry out such a comprehensive and conclusive capture of the most conservative and capitalist corporations and institutions? No, they didn’t – because previously, oppressed groups weren’t mostly composed of white middle-class men, as the trans-lobby are.
Javier E

Marginal Revolution: Winner take-all economics - 0 views

www.marginalrevolution.com/...winner-take-all-economics.html

economy skills technology market winner take-all inequality

shared by Javier E on 14 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The top 1 percent, for instance, has gone from capturing about 8 percent of the national income to 18 percent. But there's no obvious skills differential between workers in the top 1 percent and the workers directly beneath them
  • In a winner-take all economy, however, small differences in skills can mean large differences in returns and we have moved towards a winner take-all economy because technology has increased the size of the market that can be served by a single person or firm.
  • Rowling has the leverage of the book but also the movie, the video game, and the toy.  And globalization, both economic and cultural, means that Rowling's words, images, and products are translated, transmitted and transported everywhere - this is the real magic of Ha-li Bo-te.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Time is limited and people want to read the same books that their friends are reading so book publishing has a winner-take all component.  Thus, greater leverage brings greater inequality.  The average writer's income hasn't gone up much in the past thirty years but today, for the first time ever, a handful of writers can be multi-millionaires and even billionaires.  The top pulls away from the median.   
  • The same forces that have generated greater inequality in writing - the leveraging of intellect, the declining importance of physical labor in the production of value, cultural and economic globalization - are at work throughout the economy.  Thus, if you really want to understand inequality today you must first understand Harry Potter.
Javier E

Can a New York Day School Teach True Grit? - Edward Tenner - National - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...245139

grit adversity education failure character success private school

shared by Javier E on 18 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • The article reviews the copious psychological literature behind the value of adversity in building success. It isn't as new as it seems. It's recently been invoked by luminaries from Steve Jobs to J. K. Rowling. Centuries earlier, grit and systematic, conscientious planning was a major theme of the archetypical American self-made genius, Benjamin Franklin, and the other Founders also displayed it, as I suggested here.
  • suggests that inner-city charter schools may have an advantage over expensive private ones like Riverdale, if only because teachers consider themselves responsible primarily to the community rather than to parents
  • Mr. Tough also observes that the virtues of self-advancement aren't necessarily those of service to others. In fact, grit may work against compassion
jongardner04

Europe hates Trump. Does it matter? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...magazine-35702584

europe trump

shared by jongardner04 on 06 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Europe hates Trump. Does it matter?
  • This is America's choice, not anyone else's. How would British voters feel if Texans weighed in on Brexit? This time, however, the international reaction to Donald Trump is so forceful and so unanimous in its condemnation that it is worth drawing attention to.
  • Back in 2004, Europeans assumed that their own well-publicised opposition to President Bush's Iraq war would make it harder for him to get re-elected. In fact, anti-Americanism had the opposite effect
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • That same year, Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper ran a public campaign targeting a critical county in Ohio with a letter-writing blitz, urging people there to vote for John Kerry.
  • It was a bid to give foreigners a say in the US presidential election. Clark County was a swing district in a swing state; in 2000 Al Gore won the area by a narrow margin.
  • In 2008 of course the world rallied firmly behind Barack Obama. Two hundred thousand people turned out to see the candidate in Berlin before the election. Italian trattorias started a roaring trade in Obama pizzas, a curious, un-Italian mix of ham and pineapple toppings.
  • So, what does the world make of Donald Trump? Mr Trump has some admirers in Europe. A few on the extreme end of the political spectrum like his tough line on immigration. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, said if he were American he'd vote Trump.
  • What really matters is whether the 6-10% of voters in the middle of the American political spectrum, the people who actually decide elections here, are swayed by global opinion. And they may be, for two reasons.
  • middle-class and working-class people have been neglected by the existing political establishment,
  • There are echoes of Trumpism in the nationalist parties of Britain, Denmark, Netherlands, Greece as well as France.
  • Here's a sample of the public disapproval. Germany's Der Spiegel has called Trump the most dangerous man in the world. Britain's David Cameron says his plan to ban Muslims is divisive and unhelpful.
  • The French liberal newspaper Liberation has described him as a nightmare turned reality. JK Rowling tweeted that he's worse than Voldemort
  • Will the international reaction make a shred of difference to Trump's chances of getting nominated and then elected? 2004 would suggest not.
  • But the voices of support are drowned out by almost universal condemnation. When it comes to Trump, Europe is apoplectic. Fascinated, but appalled.
  • Invoking global opinion in the context of US elections is a fool's errand. Perfectly understandably, voters in Paris, Pennsylvania, really don't give a damn what voters in Paris, France, think about their political choices. And why should they?
  • At the time, a local newspaper editor told the BBC that it was the well-publicised letter campaign that lost it for the Democrats. It will go down in history as one of the biggest fiascos in foreign meddling.
  • Imagine if your much-respected but slightly annoying older sibling (the US) came home with a fantastically unsuitable date (Trump). Part of you is titillated but part of you is appalled, thinking, "Oh my God, this could go horribly wrong." After Super Tuesday, Europe is fast moving from the former to the latter.
  • Although America still feels under siege from Islamic extremism, American troops are not being killed in large numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Supporting Bush was in some ways a proxy for supporting those soldiers.
  • It's hard to know at this stage what impact foreign opinion will have in this race, but it's fairly clear the world is not going to suddenly fall in love with the man Republicans are rapidly choosing to be their candidate for the White House.
Javier E

The Muggle Problem - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ter-rowling-corbyn-muggle.html

culture elitism liberalism politics Potter

shared by Javier E on 28 Jun 17 - No Cached
  • Which makes the thrill of becoming a magical initiate in the Potterverse remarkably similar to the thrill of being chosen by the modern meritocracy, plucked from the ordinary ranks of life and ushered into gothic halls and exclusive classrooms, where you will be sorted — though not by a magic hat, admittedly — according to your talents and your just deserts.
  • blogger Spotted Toad, who wrote a fine post discussing how much the Potter novels and movies trade upon the powerful loyalty that their readers feel, or feel that they should feel, toward their teachers and their schools. But not just any school — not some suburban John Hughes-style high school or generic Podunk U. No, it’s loyalty to a selective school, with an antique pedigree but a modern claim to excellence, an exclusive admissions process but a pleasingly multicultural student body. A school where everybody knows that they belong, because they can do the necessary magic and ordinary Muggles can’t.
  • Thus the Potterverse, as Toad writes, is about “the legitimacy of authority that comes from schools” — Ivy League schools, elite schools, U.S. News & World Report top 100 schools.
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  • And because “contemporary liberalism is the ideology of imperial academia, funneled through media and nonprofits and governmental agencies but responsible ultimately only to itself,” a story about a wizarding academy is the perfect fantasy story for the liberal meritocracy to tell about itself.
  • the premise of a great deal of youthful liberal activism these days — that once the last remnants of Slytherin are eradicated from the leafy quads of Yale or Middlebury, once Draco Malfoy’s frat or final club is closed and the last Death-Eater sympathizers purged from the faculty, then the battle of ideas will have been finally and fully won.
  • But even if it were, beyond the walls of the imperial academy all of our world’s Muggles would still remain, with an agency and a power that they don’t have in the Potterverse.
  • It is Muggles who keep turning to parties of the far left and farther right, Muggles who drift into radicalism and set off bombs. Mass migration, rising nationalism, Islamic terrorism, rural despair — many disruptive forces in our era flow from global Muggledom’s refusal to just be a tame and subsidized surplus population
  • In our universe, though, the meritocracy of talent expects the chosen to actually go out and try to rule. On the evidence we have, they are not particularly good at it. And how to lead wisely in a society where most people did not go to Hogwarts is a lesson that J. K. Rowling’s lovely, lively, but ultimately childish novels do not teach.
Javier E

Nobel-winning novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro warns that 'cancel culture is stifling new wr... - 0 views

www.dailymail.co.uk/...ture-stifling-new-writers.html

cancel culture self-censoring creativity fear writers

shared by Javier E on 02 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Sir Kazuo, 66, said they were avoiding writing from viewpoints outside their own immediate experiences for fear of being cancelled by an 'anonymous lynch mob' online.
  • Novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro has warned that a 'climate of fear' is forcing young writers to self-censor
  • The Nobel Prize winner whose novels Never Let Me Go and The Remains of the Day were adapted for the big screen, said he was concerned for less established writers.
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  • They would feel that 'their careers are more fragile, their reputations are more fragile and they don't want to take risks'.
  • 'I very much fear for the younger generation of writers. Novelists should feel free to write from whichever viewpoint they wish or represent all kinds of views. Right from an early age I've written from the point of view of people very different from myself. My first novel was written from the point of view of a woman.'
  • Sir Kazuo, whose new novel Klara and the Sun is published today, said he does not fear being cancelled.
  • Last year more than 100 high-profile cultural figures including JK Rowling, Noam Chomsky and Gloria Steinem signed an open letter which claimed the spread of 'censoriousness' was leading to 'a vogue for public shaming and ostracism'.
  • Booker Prize-winning author Sir Salman Rushdie, 73, also voiced his fears for literature and rejected the idea that writers can only write about their own experiences.
  • Prue Leith, 81, revealed last year she had 'abandoned' her novel after falling out with the publisher 'because they kept wanting to tell me what was politically correct'.
Javier E

'Cancel culture' doesn't stifle debate, but it does challenge the old order | Billy Bra... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...free-speech-young-people

cancel culture liberty accountability free speech culture politics

shared by Javier E on 10 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • a quote from the preface of Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
  • Orwell’s quote is not a defence of liberty; it’s a demand for licence, and has become a foundational slogan for those who wilfully misconstrue one for the other.
  • Over the past decade, the right to make inflammatory statements has become a hot button issue for the reactionary right, who have constructed tropes such as political correctness and virtue signalling to enable them to police the limits of social change while portraying themselves as victims of an organised assault on liberty itself.
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  • Many of those who attached their names to the letter are longstanding cultural arbiters, who, in the past, would only have had to fear the disapproval of their peers. Social media has burst their bubble and they now find that anyone with a Twitter account can challenge their opinions.
  • An open letter that is clearly decrying cancel culture (without naming it as such), signed by 150 academics and writers from all sides of the political spectrum, appeared this week in Harper’s Magazine. The signatories complained of a censoriousness that was stifling debate and called for arguments to be settled by persuasion rather than action.
  • the main thrust of their argument was a howl of anguish from a group that has suddenly found its views no longer treated with reverence.
  • The latest creation in their war against accountability is “cancel culture”, an ill-defined notion
  • The ability of middle-aged gatekeepers to control the agenda has been usurped by a new generation of activists who can spread information through their own networks, allowing them to challenge narratives promoted by the status quo.
  • The great progressive movements of the 21st century have sprung from these networks: Black Lives Matter; #MeToo; Extinction Rebellion. While they may seem disparate in their aims, what they have in common is a demand for accountability.
  • Although free speech remains the fundamental bedrock of a free society, for everyone to enjoy the benefits of freedom, liberty needs to be tempered by two further dimensions: equality and accountability
  • Without equality, those in power will use their freedom of expression to abuse and marginalise others. Without accountability, liberty can mutate into the most dangerous of all freedoms – impunity.
  • a new generation has risen that prioritises accountability over free speech. To those whose liberal ideals are proving no defence against the rising tide of duplicitous authoritarianism, this has come as a shock. But when reason, respect and responsibility are all under threat, accountability offers us a better foundation on which to build a cohesive society, one where everyone feels that their voice is heard
Javier E

Andrew Sullivan: You Say You Want A Revolution? - 0 views

nymag.com/...say-you-want-a-revolution.html

revolution iconoclasm woke Cultural Revolution Mao Jacobin cultural repression illiberal orwell extremism

shared by Javier E on 20 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before.
  • The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole.
  • for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.
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  • Mao’s model is instructive in another way. It shows you what happens when a mob is actually quietly supported by elites, who use it to advance their own goals. The Red Guards did what they did — to their friends, and parents, and teachers — in the spirit of the Communist regime itself.
  • bram X. Kendi, the New York Times best seller who insists that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, now has a children’s book to indoctrinate toddlers on one side of this crude binary
  • Revolutionary moments also require public confessions of iniquity by those complicit in oppression.
  • These now seem to come almost daily. I’m still marveling this week at the apology the actress Jenny Slate gave for voicing a biracial cartoon character. It’s a classic confession of counterrevolutionary error: “I acknowledge how my original reasoning was flawed and that it existed as an example of white privilege and unjust allowances made within a system of societal white supremacy … Ending my portrayal of ‘Missy’ is one step in a life-long process of uncovering the racism in my actions.” For Slate to survive in her career, she had to go full Cersei in her walk of shame.
  • They murdered and tortured, and subjected opponents to public humiliations — accompanied by the gleeful ransacking of religious and cultural sites. In their attack on the Temple of Confucius, almost 7,000 priceless artifacts were destroyed. By the end of the revolution, almost two-thirds of Beijing’s historical sites had been destroyed in a frenzy of destruction against “the four olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old ideas.” Mao first blessed, then reined in these vandals.
  • take this position voiced on Twitter by a chemistry professor at Queen’s University in Canada this week: “Here’s the thing: If whatever institution you are a part of is not COMPLETELY representative of the population you can draw from, you can draw only two conclusions. 1) Bias against the underrepresented groups exists or 2) the underrepresented groups are inherently less qualified.”
  • Other factors — such as economics or culture or individual choice or group preference — are banished from consideration.
  • Revolutions also encourage individuals to take matters in their own hands. The distinguished liberal philosopher Michael Walzer recently noted how mutual social policing has a long and not-so-lovely history — particularly in post–Reformation Europe, in what he has called “the revolution of the saints.”
  • Revolutionaries also create new forms of language to dismantle the existing order. Under Mao, “linguistic engineering” was integral to identifying counterrevolutionaries, and so it is today.
  • The use of the term “white supremacy” to mean not the KKK or the antebellum South but American society as a whole in the 21st century has become routine on the left, as if it were now beyond dispute.
  • The word “women,” J.K. Rowling had the temerity to point out, is now being replaced by “people who menstruate.”
  • The word “oppression” now includes not only being herded into Uighur reeducation camps but also feeling awkward as a sophomore in an Ivy League school.
  • The word “racist,” which was widely understood quite recently to be prejudicial treatment of an individual based on the color of their skin, now requires no intent to be racist in the former sense, just acquiescence in something called “structural racism,” which can mean any difference in outcomes among racial groupings. Being color-blind is therefore now being racist.
  • And there is no escaping this. The woke shift their language all the time, so that words that were one day fine are now utterly reprehensible.
  • You can’t keep up — which is the point. (A good resource for understanding this new constantly changing language of ideology is “Translations From the Wokish.”) The result is an exercise of cultural power through linguistic distortion.
  • So, yes, this is an Orwellian moment
  • It’s not a moment of reform but of a revolutionary break, sustained in part by much of the liberal Establishment.
  • Even good and important causes, like exposing and stopping police brutality, can morph very easily from an exercise in overdue reform into a revolutionary spasm. There has been much good done by the demonstrations forcing us all to understand better how our fellow citizens are mistreated by the agents of the state or worn down by the residue of past and present inequality.
  • But the zeal and certainty of its more revolutionary features threaten to undo a great deal of that goodwill.
  • The movement’s destruction of even abolitionist statues, its vandalism of monuments to even George Washington, its crude demonization of figures like Jefferson, its coerced public confessions, its pitiless wreckage of people’s lives and livelihoods, its crude ideological Manichaeanism, its struggle sessions and mandated anti-racism courses, its purging of cultural institutions of dissidents, its abandonment of objective tests in higher education (replacing them with quotas and a commitment to ideology), and its desire to upend a country’s sustained meaning and practices are deeply reminiscent of some very ugly predecessors.
  • But the erasure of the past means a tyranny of the present. In the words of Orwell, a truly successful ideological revolution means that “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
  • We are not there yet. But unless we recognize the illiberal malignancy of some of what we face, and stand up to it with courage and candor, we soon will be.
Javier E

Opinion | Coronavirus Is Making Young People Very Sick. I Was One of Them. - The New Yo... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-young-people.html

Covid-19 treatment racism

shared by Javier E on 15 May 20 - No Cached
  • I became an amateur expert. This is the advice they gave me. Here’s what I’m telling my family and my friends: If you can, get an oximeter, a magical little device that measures your pulse and blood oxygen level from your fingertip. If you become sick and your oxygen dips below 95 or you have trouble breathing, go to the emergency room. Don’t wait.
  • If you have chest symptoms, assume you may have pneumonia and call a doctor or go to the E.R. Sleep on your stomach, since much of your lungs is actually in your back. If your oxygen is stable, change positions every hour. Do breathing exercises, a lot of them. The one that seemed to work best for me was pioneered by nurses in the British health system and shared by J.K. Rowling,
  • wonder how many people have died not necessarily because of the virus but because this country failed them and left them to fend for themselves.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Why are more people dying of this disease in the United States than in anywhere else in the world? Because we live in a broken country, with a broken health care system. Because even though people of all races and backgrounds are suffering, the disease in the United States has hit black and brown and Indigenous people the hardest, and we are seen as expendable.
  • As I began to recover, others died.There was Idris Bey, 60, a U.S. Marine and New York City Fire Department E.M.T. instructor who received a medal for his actions after the Sept. 11 attack.There was Rana Zoe Mungin, 30, a New York City social studies teacher whose family said she died after struggling to get care in Brooklyn.There was Valentina Blackhorse, 28, a beautiful young Arizona woman who dreamed of leading the Navajo Nation.
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