SocraticGadfly: Jesse Singal hypocritically goes stanning for the Harper's letter

July 11, 2020

Jesse Singal hypocritically goes stanning for the Harper's letter

A lot of my closer regular readers are surely familiar with the letter that Harper's Magazine released earlier this week, decrying the so-called "cancel culture" without using that phrase explicitly.

Seeing nobody I recognize as an actual leftist among signatories was antennae-raiser No. 1.

No, Noam Chomsky, safely ensconced in the "duopoly-only" world on voting issues, and a co-signer of another letter this spring, one calling on Green Party nominee Howie Hawkins (just the leading candidate at the time) to run a "safe states only" strategy, is not a leftist. Howie politely, and I impolitely, told Chomsky to shut the fuck up. (Chomsky has LONG been a sheepdogger.)

Cornel West claimed Dear Leader fooled him, when it was rather that he was self-delusional. Update; And, given all the peregrinations, ramblings and background of his 2024 presidential run, this is more reason not to vote for him.

Jeet Heer leads me to raise an eyebrow. He's not horrible, but, I still question him. Nadine Strossen, since she tried to censor the ACLU's board, not a surprise. Wendy Kaminer, one of the targets of her would-be censorship, IS.a surprise.

At Current Affairs, Nathan J. Robinson has a further takedown on some of the names involved. Beyond Chomsky, the more problematic are West, Heer, Zephyr Teachout, Randi Weingarten, Matthew Karp and Samuel Moyn.

Update, Dec. 12, 2023: In light of the Israel-Gaza war, and having originally noted Bari Weiss, below, I suspect Zionist-related reasons for other signatories, too. And, speaking of, has a SINGLE non-Zionist signatory of this letter protested against the silencing of Palestinian voices?

More serious issues arise after that. And yet more after Jesse Singal wrote a column at Reason magazine defending an attempt to cancel free speech. So much for First Amendment absolutism from libertarians, eh? I quote:

The people furious at this letter largely have genuine ideological problems with liberal norms and laws regarding free speech.

Jesse, here's the mirror. Take a look and see yourself.

So, I shot out a thread of Tweets to Jesse about some specific problems. I'm going to drop them in, with additional comments on each.

Let's start:

Seriously? When I saw Fucking Bari Weiss as a signer? Game over RIGHT THERE. And the thing is, Singal has, elsewhere, called out BDS opponents. She's not the only one, by any means. But, trying to get Palestinian profs fired at Columbia? That itself is "cancel culture." (And now, Bari Weiss has quit the NYT op-ed staff, boo-hooing that she's a cancel culture victim.) Much of the activities of the most ardent anti-BDSers are exactly that. And, beyond active opponents of BDS, you've got a bunch of neocons, and a bunch more bipartisan foreign policy establishmentarians, all of whom arguably perform "cancel culture" on free discussion of Palestinian issues in the US. (Jacobin, to which I shall not link, gets this wrong. Hypocrisy may not be a sufficient reason to reject this dreck, but it is one of a group of necessary reasons.)

Pinker, and I assume wife Rebecca Goldstein, are both vigorously anti-BDS. So is Jonathan Haidt, though the way he phrases his opposition, I'm sure he'd deny he's an opponent. Robinson notes Pinker's ties to the so-called Intellectual Dark Web, too.

Haidt, and others on that list, also have a consistent history of overstating illiberalism, or often more specifically, anti-conservativism, in academia. I've specifically called out Haidt before, for ignoring how in much of both the social sciences and the natural sciences, religious conservatives self-select out of academia because of anti-intellectual stances.

And, I'm not just being metaphorical when I accuse anti-BDSers of their own cancel culture. From intimidation of Palestinian student groups at universities, contra Haidt's narratives about academia, to the variety of bullshit that Weiss pulled at Columbia, and on through getting universities to cancel speakers and events, this is literally cancel culture.

Even IF the letter were totally right otherwise, how two-thirds of signatories could have put their names to the other one-third, I don't know. Were I famous enough in the media world (I wish) to be asked to sign such a letter, I would have refused, even if it were totally right.

Note those IFs and let's go on in the thread.
That said, this is coming from someone who actually largely agrees with Jesse's take on the trans activists' portion of cancel culture.

Update: At Current Affairs, the spot-on Nathan Robinson agrees with me in general and specifically on this issue. He also calls out Harper's for its own in-house editorial hypocrisy. And, as usual, gotta love his writing style, such as when he talks about "a motley assortment of luminaries" who signed the letter. (Jacobin totally misses this angle, or rather, rejects it.)

BUT! While Jesse mentions trans activists' response to the letter in his column, that issue is nowhere mentioned in the letter itself.

That leads to:
Seriously. We're now, as I told an email list, into massive muddle-headedness. That, too, is not something I would have expected from Harper's, but, I guess this is the new normal. Without listing a specific "redress of grievances," to get back to my second tweet, one can't even make a reasonable assessment of how close to proportionality we are. Is the "cancel culture" left one-quarter as bad as Trumpism? One-tenth? One-fiftieth? For that matter, to go back to my first tweet, is the "cancel quarter" left one-quarter as bad as anti-Palestinian Zionists? One-tenth? One-fiftieth?

Onward to No. 4.
And, yes, beyond other issues, I see a certain amount of privilege there. It's a word used a lot by SJWs, and often overused.

And, at Bloomberg, Pankaj Mishra nails it. These are people, who, whether through skill, luck, nepotism and cronyism, or whatever, (often luck plus connections) who have risen to positions of pre-eminience and don't like having their "right to blather" challenged. Mishra also points out foreign policy hypocrisy issues beyond what I have done, in several of the signees.

Per Idries Shah? This is another issue with more than two sides, though:


I think that privilege — of CLASS as well as race and sex (and religion versus secularism or atheism) — does exist, even if I agree that the idea is also abused and overused.

And, I see many of the signatories exemplifying that as well. So:
And, you chose to sign it, Jesse. You chose to defend it. And, by ignoring the hypocrites, you're choosing to defend it and their hypocrisy.

And, we haven't even tackled other illiberalisms and hypocrisies. Like this:
When I saw Gladwell's name, that Exiled Online piece at the Twitter link was the first thing I thought of.

Update: I've heard people claim that my "co-signing a letter with a hypocrite is itself hypocrisy" is wrong because even Trump has defended free speech.
1. I'm not familiar with any such recent speech
2. Comments of his in the past have been selective and hypocritical
3. I wouldn't make a pro-free speech defense along with Trump, either.

And, not part of the thread to Jesse, but worth including:
This dreck about Lee Fang etc. is what I refer to. His Tulsi-stanning? Referenced here.

And, it's not just Merika. Mondoweiss notes that Israel lobby cancel culture is alive and well in Canada.

That's more than enough food for thought, and I'll post this live instead of going up in the morning so I can link it to my thread.

Update, July 20: Here's a mix of muddle-headedness and hypocrisy for you. The Intercept's Zaid Jilani, a signer, thought bossman Glenn Greenwald should have been invited to sign. In reality, he was cancel cultured by a vote, and organizer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who looks more and more like a general douche, laughed about it.

So Zaid, watch Glenn own the frauds. Does that include you?
Boom.

Worse? Williams, with Matt Taibbi and elsewhere, uses the attacks on the letter to play the martyr card. Fraud indeed.

Update, speaking of Taibbi?

Matt started blathering on Twitter with comments about the Harper's letter. Behind that blather is his latest Substack piece. It's about 20 percent real concerns about SJW issues, about 30 percent overblown concerns and about 50 percent total bullshit.

Related? Taibbi has also started stanning for Sully, including claiming he's not a racist. Pretty much no Overton Window that Matt won't go slouching toward now, eh? As I said on Twitter:
The man is losing credibility by the column.

Emily Yoffe, another hardcore Zionist and anti-BDS signer of the letter, has now decided to Lean In further on the hypocrisy of reverse cancel culture. She even mentions actions on campus life while ignoring cosigner Bari Weiss. These people have no shame.
 
Update, Nov. 14: Letter signer and Ezra Klein flunky (flunky of a flunky) Yglesias has joined the piety brothers swill at Substack. And of course, it's Conor Friedersdorf taking this with utmost seriousness at Atlantic. (Yglesias is also an  overpaid classist if he's buying $1.2M DC condos.)
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at Saturday, July 11, 2020 Posted by Gadfly

2 comments:

Staid Winnow said...

Nails the libertarian free speech absolutism, perfectly. These folks (at Reason, thefire.org) pick on the "left-leaning sift targets" such as students disrupting Kyle Duncan, but actual state-enforced censorship? They write a stern press release and forget about it.

6:07 PM, November 20, 2023
Gadfly said...

I downstarred on Goodreads a book I recently read, in part because Williams was one of its blurb-puffers https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5986913446

9:42 PM, December 12, 2023

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