From The New York Times:
The killing of George Floyd has brought an intense moment of racial reckoning in the United States. As protests spread across the country, they have been accompanied by open letters calling for — and promising — change at white-dominated institutions across the arts and academia.
But on Tuesday, a different type of letter appeared online. Titled “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” and signed by 153 prominent artists and intellectuals, it began with an acknowledgment of “powerful protests for racial and social justice” before pivoting to a warning against an “intolerant climate” engulfing the culture.
“The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter declared, citing “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”
“We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other,” it continues. “As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.”
. . . .
The letter, which was published by Harper’s Magazine and will also appear in several leading international publications, surfaces a debate that has been going on privately in newsrooms, universities and publishing houses that have been navigating demands for diversity and inclusion, while also asking which demands — and the social media dynamics that propel them — go too far.
And on social media, the reaction was swift, with some heaping ridicule on the letter’s signatories — who include cultural luminaries like Margaret Atwood, Bill T. Jones and Wynton Marsalis, along with journalists and academics — for thin-skinnedness, privilege and, as one person put it, fear of loss of “relevance.”
“Okay, I did not sign THE LETTER when I was asked 9 days ago,” Richard Kim, the enterprise director of HuffPost, said on Twitter, “because I could see in 90 seconds that it was fatuous, self-important drivel that would only troll the people it allegedly was trying to reach — and I said as much.”
. . . .
Mr. Williams, a columnist for Harper’s and contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, said that initially, there was concern over timing.
“We didn’t want to be seen as reacting to the protests we believe are in response to egregious abuses by the police,” he said. “But for some time, there’s been a mood all of us have been quite concerned with.”
He said there wasn’t one particular incident that provoked the letter. But he did cite several recent ones, including the resignation of more than half the board of the National Book Critics Circle over its statement supporting Black Lives Matter, a similar blowup at the Poetry Foundation, and the case of David Shor, a data analyst at a consulting firm who was fired after he tweeted about academic research linking looting and vandalism by protesters to Richard Nixon’s 1968 electoral victory.
. . . .
Mr. Williams said the letter was very much a crowdsourced effort, with about 20 people contributing language. Then it was circulated more broadly for signatures, in what he describes as a process that was both “organic” and aimed at getting a group that was maximally diverse politically, racially and otherwise.
“We’re not just a bunch of old white guys sitting around writing this letter,” Mr. Williams, who is African-American, said. “It includes plenty of Black thinkers, Muslim thinkers, Jewish thinkers, people who are trans and gay, old and young, right wing and left wing.”
“We believe these are values that are widespread and shared, and we wanted the list to reflect that,” he said.
. . . .
Nicholas Lemann, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former dean of Columbia Journalism School, said that he rarely signs letters, but thought this one was important.
“What concerns me is a sense that a lot of people out there seem to think open argument over everything is an unhealthy thing,” he said. “I’ve spent my whole life having vigorous arguments with people I disagree with, and don’t want to think we are moving out of this world.”
The principle of open argument, he added, becomes especially important outside liberal-leaning enclaves, “where people don’t have the option of shutting down these supposedly completely unacceptable views.”
Mr. Pardlo said that as somebody who has felt the “chilling effect” of being the only person of color in predominantly white institutions, he hoped the letter would spark conversation about those “chilling forces, no matter where they come from.”
He said he was surprised by some of the blowback to the letter.
“It seems some of the conversation has turned to who the signatories are more than the content of the letter,” he said.
. . . .
Amid the intense criticism, some signatories appeared to back away from the letter. On Tuesday evening, the historian Kerri K. Greenidge tweeted “I do not endorse this @Harpers letter,” and said she was in touch with the magazine about a retraction. (Giulia Melucci, a spokeswoman for Harper’s, said the magazine had fact-checked all signatures and that Dr. Greenidge had signed off. But she said the magazine is “respectfully removing her name.”)
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. She also said that the letter, which was about internet shaming, among other things, was now being used to shame people on the internet.
But Mr. Betts, the director of the Million Books Project, a new effort aimed at getting book collections to more than 1,000 prisons, was unfazed by the variety of signers.
“I’m rolling with people I wouldn’t normally be in a room with,” he said. “But you need to concede that what’s in the letter is worthy of some thought.”
He said that as someone who had spent more than eight years in prison for a carjacking committed when he was a teenager, he was given pause by what he called the unforgiving nature of the current moment. “It’s antithetical to my notion of how we need to deal with problems in society,” he said.
Link to the rest at The New York Times
And here’s a copy of the complete Harper’s Letter:
Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.
This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.
| Elliot Ackerman Saladin Ambar, Rutgers University Martin Amis Anne Applebaum Marie Arana, author Margaret Atwood John Banville Mia Bay, historian Louis Begley, writer Roger Berkowitz, Bard College Paul Berman, writer Sheri Berman, Barnard College Reginald Dwayne Betts, poet Neil Blair, agent David W. Blight, Yale University Jennifer Finney Boylan, author David Bromwich David Brooks, columnist Ian Buruma, Bard College Lea Carpenter Noam Chomsky, MIT (emeritus) Nicholas A. Christakis, Yale University Roger Cohen, writer Ambassador Frances D. Cook, ret. Drucilla Cornell, Founder, uBuntu Project Kamel Daoud Meghan Daum, writer Gerald Early, Washington University-St. Louis Jeffrey Eugenides, writer Dexter Filkins Federico Finchelstein, The New School Caitlin Flanagan Richard T. Ford, Stanford Law School Kmele Foster David Frum, journalist Francis Fukuyama, Stanford University Atul Gawande, Harvard University Todd Gitlin, Columbia University Kim Ghattas Malcolm Gladwell Michelle Goldberg, columnist Rebecca Goldstein, writer Anthony Grafton, Princeton University David Greenberg, Rutgers University Linda Greenhouse Rinne B. Groff, playwright Sarah Haider, activist Jonathan Haidt, NYU-Stern Roya Hakakian, writer Shadi Hamid, Brookings Institution Jeet Heer, The Nation Katie Herzog, podcast host Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College Adam Hochschild, author Arlie Russell Hochschild, author Eva Hoffman, writer Coleman Hughes, writer/Manhattan Institute Hussein Ibish, Arab Gulf States Institute Michael Ignatieff Zaid Jilani, journalist Bill T. Jones, New York Live Arts Wendy Kaminer, writer Matthew Karp, Princeton University Garry Kasparov, Renew Democracy Initiative Daniel Kehlmann, writer Randall Kennedy Khaled Khalifa, writer Parag Khanna, author Laura Kipnis, Northwestern University Frances Kissling, Center for Health, Ethics, Social Policy Enrique Krauze, historian Anthony Kronman, Yale University Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University Nicholas Lemann, Columbia University Mark Lilla, Columbia University Susie Linfield, New York University Damon Linker, writer Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Steven Lukes, New York University John R. MacArthur, publisher, writer | Susan Madrak, writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy, writer Greil Marcus Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center Kati Marton, author Debra Mashek, scholar Deirdre McCloskey, University of Illinois at Chicago John McWhorter, Columbia University Uday Mehta, City University of New York Andrew Moravcsik, Princeton University Yascha Mounk, Persuasion Samuel Moyn, Yale University Meera Nanda, writer and teacher Cary Nelson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Olivia Nuzzi, New York Magazine Mark Oppenheimer, Yale University Dael Orlandersmith, writer/performer George Packer Nell Irvin Painter, Princeton University (emerita) Greg Pardlo, Rutgers University – Camden Orlando Patterson, Harvard University Steven Pinker, Harvard University Letty Cottin Pogrebin Katha Pollitt, writer Claire Bond Potter, The New School Taufiq Rahim Zia Haider Rahman, writer Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, University of Wisconsin Jonathan Rauch, Brookings Institution/The Atlantic Neil Roberts, political theorist Melvin Rogers, Brown University Kat Rosenfield, writer Loretta J. Ross, Smith College J.K. Rowling Salman Rushdie, New York University Karim Sadjadpour, Carnegie Endowment Daryl Michael Scott, Howard University Diana Senechal, teacher and writer Jennifer Senior, columnist Judith Shulevitz, writer Jesse Singal, journalist Anne-Marie Slaughter Andrew Solomon, writer Deborah Solomon, critic and biographer Allison Stanger, Middlebury College Paul Starr, American Prospect/Princeton University Wendell Steavenson, writer Gloria Steinem, writer and activist Nadine Strossen, New York Law School Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., Harvard Law School Kian Tajbakhsh, Columbia University Zephyr Teachout, Fordham University Cynthia Tucker, University of South Alabama Adaner Usmani, Harvard University Chloe Valdary Lucía Martínez Valdivia, Reed College Helen Vendler, Harvard University Judy B. Walzer Michael Walzer Eric K. Washington, historian Caroline Weber, historian Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers Bari Weiss Sean Wilentz, Princeton University Garry Wills Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer Robert F. Worth, journalist and author Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Matthew Yglesias Emily Yoffe, journalist Cathy Young, journalist Fareed Zakaria |
Link to the rest at Harpers
The recent craziness in the United States (PG doesn’t know if Bizzaro World has also set up shop elsewhere) reminds PG of the protests which characterized the Vietnam Antiwar era in the US when PG and others like him voiced a few truths and a truckload of stupidity with the volume set to maximum.
About fifteen years ago, we learned about The Wisdom of Crowds. Today we are relearning that crowds can be extraordinarily stupid.
From The Atlantic, July, 2013:
The theory of the “wisdom of the crowd” has been used to explain everything from the overall accuracy of Wikipedia to the logic of democracy. And in general, that principle is true: Choices made by many are usually better than those made by a few or one.
But new research from Arizona State University and Uppsala University in Sweden adds a caveat to that notion, showing that while crowds might indeed be wise when it comes to making tough, close calls, they are actually worse than individuals at choosing between two options, one of which is vastly superior to the other. When the choice is easy, in other words, the crowd can actually be pretty dumb.
. . . .
“I went to buy something on Amazon, and I was supposed to compare options and features and cost,” he said. “But what I did instead was just buy the most popular thing.”
The study authors write that such quirks in group decision-making are “known in many animal groups, including humans, fish, and cockroaches. Studies in honey bees have shown that social interactions do not always improve collective foraging.”
Personally, these ants reminded me of soccer riots, mob attacks, or even the decision to join terror groups.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic
The Woke have turned on the Woke, and the Woke don’t like it. Stay tuned for ever more sanctimonious moral exhibitionism.
Popcorn?
“This has happened before and it will happen again.”
It’s just a matter of waiting who’ll be Robespierre, Saint Juste, et al.
And of course, who leads the Thermidorian reaction.
If they don’t completely cancel themselves before it gets that far (like in ’68).
So far they’re on track.
Ah, here we go, the first of many to come from academics and others:
https://theobjective.substack.com/p/a-more-specific-letter-on-justice
Unavoidable.
You find the best articles.
Thanks…
The issue at the heart of the letter is *thought* not action.
The signees are old-school liberals who are finally realizing their succesors are absolutist thought police, who seek to silence all variance, whether offensive or merely irrelevant. And they’ll be coming for *them* soon enough. They’re right but about 25 years late.
They are warning that allowing divergent thought to be verbalized in public allows it to be discussed and if needed, prepared for. Driving divergent thought out of the public space merely creates Weathermen or McVeighs.
You can bully people into squelching their words but not their thoughts.
The Soviets put disenters into Gulags and insane asylums because anybody willing to voice dissent had to be crazy. Dissenters mostly outlived them.
The Chinese learned from that so they send their “deplorables” to reeducation camps and organ harvesting clinics. That’s one way to outlive dissenters.
We’ll see soon enough what the Jacobins plan for the west.
On a purely theoretical basis, I wonder how far they’ll get before reaping the whirlwind they’re sowing. Being a STMer, though not a Second Amendment Hugger, I have a healthy respect for both because I fully intend to outlive the current age of forced conformity. (I have a date with Hayley’s Comet.)
In the meantime, I’m keeping my eyes for signs of the next phase of the culture wars.
(Gun sales are booming. Ammo sales even more: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/06/03/americans-buying-guns-and-ammo-wake-race-protests/3124011001/)
Yeah, go ahead: defund the police. Undo drug convictions. Release violent prisoners on their own recognizance. Colt and Remington appreciate the gesture.)
This phase isn’t going to stay online for much longer.
Want to really worry? Try these numbers:
https://www.mediaite.com/news/gun-sales-surge-70-percent-in-june-breaking-all-time-record/
—–
Gun Sales Surge Up to 145 Percent in June, Smashing All-Time Record
Gun sales surged in June, according to data released Wednesday, exceeding the same month last year and smashing the all-time record.
According to FBI data, more than 3.9 million background checks were processed through the bureau’s NICS database in June, a record for the month. The number of checks is an indicator of how many guns are sold, though the correlation isn’t precise. Licensed dealers are required to run a check in the database every time they make a sale. Checks are also processed when individuals seek a license to carry a firearm.
Sales have been driven by Americans seeking handguns in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic and uprisings across the country. “The boom in handgun sales has been particularly noticeable in recent months,” Jurgen Brauer, chief economist for Small Arms Analytics & Forecasting, said in June.
Brauer’s firm estimated that gun purchasers acquired 2.3 million firearms for the month, an increase of 145.3 percent compared to June 2019. The figure includes a 177.5 percent increase in hand gun sales (for a total of 1,511,714) and a 114.3 percent increase in long-gun sales (for a total of 690,212).
Gun sales routinely hit record-highs under former President Barack Obama, often when the president threatened regulatory crackdowns. Sales fell briefly after President Donald Trump’s 2016 election but hit another record in 2019, when 28.3 million background checks were conducted.
A total of 19,180,047 background checks were processed during the first six months of 2020, putting the country on track to set a new record this year.
—–
Those folks (on both sides) aren’t counting on letters to stay safe.
Here’s a great part from the movie The President’s Analyst, about guns.
The President’s Analyst – Liberals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSlE_GrK2sw
At the four minute mark:
“The Right-Wing extremists, disarm them and us Liberals will disarm.”
I love this film. It could never be made today.
Bass Pro had a rope line at the gun counter last week. The rope kept everyone four feet from the glass counter cases that anyone can normally approach.
Customers had to line up to get in. As each counter person finished with one customer, they admitted another. Four guys were working the counter and there were eleven people in line at 915am.
The entire aisle devoted to handgun ammunition was bare. Not a single box.
Still ongoing, huh?
Doesn’t give me the warm and fuzzies.
Sam’s and Walmart have similar lines, but they sell food.
Food, shelter, security.
Yup.
Maslow’s pyramid.
Thing is, food and shelter are supposed to be the top priorities, with safety and security being next.
But in today’s economy, that kind of stampede to arm up, spending money that should go towards the top tier indicates serious anxiety.
And in a country where 3% own half the guns (mostly collectors), 2 million first-time gun owners is a lot and it indicates the anxiety over security is reaching beyond the usual “deplorables”. And the heavy focus on ammo indicates they expect to need it and soon.
And nobody is worried?
Having lost all respect for signatory J.K. Rowling due to her pronouncements on people I dearly love without her having met any of them (and having it be no business of hers to comment on them or their lives anyway), I can see why she would sign this letter.
You can’t fix bad behavior by joining up with a bunch of people who say it isn’t bad behavior.
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out,
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me,
and there was no one left to speak for me.
Who shall speak for you?
At some point, the McVeighs wilo speak for tgemselves.
It won’t be pretty because intolerance invites intolerance.
And, those “occupation zones” look like a clear invitation, no?
And some civilian drones are getting big enough…
Ah, the story potential is high but alas, so are the odds of bloodflow…
“Nothing good can come of this”.
Then they came for me
That’s a classic.
I think that I’ve posted this before.
Don’t Be a Sucker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGAqYNFQdZ4
I saw that at school as a kid. They liked to play short films in class. It was so long ago, I forgot I’d seen it, but the message sunk in deep. I would dream that I was the old man in the dark suit.
Now I am that old man, but I wear khaki, and this nonsense is happening again.
I think Rowling was following the science. Chromosomes. X and Y stuff.
The 60’s activists were absolutists and purged anybody who didn’t past the litmus test du jour. And since the litmus test grew ever more stringent they eventually purged themselves off the scene.
As of now, everybody who signed the letter is being flagged as impure.
What the signees don’t realize is the purity test has already left them behind.
And it will get worse still.
If in doubt, search around online for the reports on Seattle’s Office of Civil Rights recent sensitivity train solely for the melanin deprived, called, “Training on Internalized Racial Superiority for White People.”
Don’t expect it in any mainstream media outlet, though.
Make of it what you will but we’ve seen this play out before.
The next phase will feature a COMMITTEE OF PUBLIC SAFETY.
They’ve already trotted out the first guillotine. In front of Bezos DC residence.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/activists-set-up-guillotine-outside-dc-home-of-jeff-bezos-during-protest-of-amazon
The don’t call themselves Jacobins for nothing.
Now that Fritz has convinced me to “embrace nonsense” I have a Story folder to put these articles in.
– Once Fritz freed me to “embrace nonsense” I could see the past 400 years in WOKE context. History is filled with them. They always eat their own.
From the European religious groups who fled Europe to be WOKE here in America, to the Salem Witch trials, up through every other WOKE group that convulsed society into war, through McCarthyism, through the Hippy Movement, the hysteria of the Militia groups of the 90s, the jingoistic WOKE of the 911 Bush wars, and now this latest nonsense where every Troll is coming out of the woodwork to seize the territory of the mind.
These are a series of links about the dangers of Critical Theories and the nihilistic SJW movement. These are all long format discussions that I have enjoyed but probably no one else will watch. HA!
This is the YouTube channel for videos from Mike Nayna
Mike Nayna
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzk08fzh5c_BhjQa1w35wtA/videos
He has the entire Critical Theories, Grievance Studies expose. Along with the Evergreen fiasco with Bret Weinstein that warned what was going to happen now.
This is their book coming out in August.
Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody Hardcover – August 25, 2020
by Helen Pluckrose (Author), James Lindsay (Author)
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634312023/
This is the clarion call to fight back against the WOKE nonsense.
The Truth About Critical Methods | James Lindsay
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSHL-rSMIro
This is the YouTube channel for videos from Peter Boghossian with the rest of the lectures.
New Discourses
https://www.youtube.com/c/newdiscourses/videos
The Weinsteins have their own channel with a bunch of lectures discussing Evergreen and what they have been doing since.
Bret Weinstein
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi5N_uAqApEUIlg32QzkPlg/videos
Like Fritz said, “Of course, you’re going to need a bigger hard drive. . . “
Well, they priced the Kindle edition fairly.
Should help reach folks who haven’t been paying attention.
Who is Fritz? CTRL+F didn’t help out there.
I did recognize the names of those authors you linked to, though. They’re the people behind the Sokal Hoax 2.0, the success of which came as no surprise to no one. I hope their book does well.
For those that might be coming late:
https://highplainsskeptic.com/2018/10/11/what-critics-get-wrong-and-right-about-sokal-2-0/
—–
“A duped science journal can improve its review methods. The same can’t be said of fields that are rooted in a wholesale denial of one or all of the following claims: there is an objective reality shared by all humans, the nature of that reality can be discovered, and the knowledge produced will be universal.
Branches of the humanities that reject these claims ensure that whatever methodological standards they adopt are ultimately arbitrary. Thus, any properly constructed attempt to sidestep them will be undiscoverable. Even the most painstakingly constructed act of scientific fraud will be uncovered by its final failure to reflect reality. ”
—-
Reading that article is looking back to a simpler time, 2018, when people could laugh at the antics of those “whacky kids” writing their parody papers. It took Boghossian over 18 months of inquest to be found “not guilty”. He can’t say what happened because of the NDAs he had to sign.
Joe Rogan, James Lindsay & The Kindly Inquisition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lduU81aHGF0
The speed of events has gone so fasts that the book, Cynical Theories, coming out in August, is either incredibly timely or already out of date.
I think they should have Indy Published so that they could have written a whole series of books as the Trolls came out to play, but I suspect that they were still trying to follow the “Rules” in their efforts to point out this dangerous nonsense.
50/50.
I expect a lot of suspense, thrillers, and near future SF novels are being furiously edited or held back, waiting for the dust to settle.
Who is Fritz?
“Fritz” is codename to protect you-know-who when the Committee shows up to Cancel us.
“They seek him here, they seek him there”, and will never find him.
They will never get his name from me. HA!