serakit

It's become a thing to laugh at the Harper's Letter. "Cancel culture doesn't exist!" you cry. "People who can get published in Harper's are the opposite of cancelled! Clearly nothing is happening!"

But see, there's a contradiction with cancellation: the people who have a platform loud enough to tell you it's happening are the people who are affected by it the least. It is absolutely happening-- you're just never hearing again from the people it's happening to severely enough that they actually lost their platform. The recent example that springs to mind is Isabel Fall, who we haven't heard from again after she was harassed off the internet for writing a messy, complicated story about gender, and who was forced to come out as trans to try to defend herself from the onslaught, which didn't precisely work-- and a lot of the people who were doing the harassing, instead of recognizing they'd done something wrong, blamed Neil Clarke for not including that she's trans in the author bio, especially since her birth year includes a Nazi dogwhistle number. That's the problem with "internet mob as justice"-- sooner or later you're going to get it wrong.

(As an aside, I asked at the time "What message does this send to the trans people who *did* find something to identify with in it? 'Your stories are wrong''. Just recently I discovered that in the aftermath there was an Atlantic article which included the reporter's encounter with someone who wanted sensitivity-writing classes in writing her own gender, because she was concerned about getting it wrong if she just wrote from personal experiences-- after all, look what happened to Isabel Fall!)

Or look at what happened to Amelie Wen Zhao. She was writing a book heavily inspired by modern slavery as practiced in Asia and Eastern Europe and was accused of (and initially pulled her book over) writing an inaccurate portrayal of American chattel slavery, which wasn't even something she was *trying* to portray in the first place.

Over in fanfiction-land, this has progressively escalated over time-- it used to be that if you were writing fics about certain subjects you had to give some details of what happened to you to be "allowed" to write such things free of harassment, since the only reason it was valid to write such fics was processing trauma. Now they seem to have escalated to "people writing such things need to do it privately" and have started suggesting that writing romance about teenage characters makes one a pedophile, because writing about fictional teenagers in a romantic or sexual context, to them, means you must be thinking about real teenagers that way too. They also suggest that any story in which an amoral character is not immediately called out in the text is inappropriate because the author is then "glorifying" whatever the behavior is. And again, this is accompanied by quite a lot of harassment online and sometimes threats and "you should kill yourself" type messaging.

I guarantee you there are writers who are looking at all of that and saying "if this is what's going to happen to me for trying to write about my experiences which do not fit the established social justice orthodoxy, I'm not going to write." But you'll never hear about them, because they either were harassed off the internet while still too small for you to hear about it, or they never wrote at all.

(And if, after all this, you still want to argue about it? You might also consider that the signatories on that list were not just Rowling or people confined to the Ivory Tower. Also included were Margaret Atwood, who has had her books banned in several countries, and Salman Rushdie, who's survived actual assassination attempts for his speech. Are you really going to try to suggest the guy someone tried to kill over this stuff is out of touch with what it looks like?)

There are two ways to get someone to do something they don't want to do: forcing and convincing. Laws are forcing; protests are kind of a combination of the two.

Mask mandates would be forcing. But since we don't have mask mandates in the places with the worst outbreaks and no one's mass protesting the lack of mask mandates, that leaves us with convincing. Which, yes, *does* require people to go talk to a lot of insecure white men buried in toxic masculinity and find out what their motives are and try to soothe their feelings. You can think whatever you want about that insecurity, but the fact remains that if you can't force them-- and yelling at them on Twitter does not constitute forcing-- you *have* to convince them, or deal with an unfettered pandemic. Therefore the correct response when someone posts an article in which they went to talk to a bunch of anti-maskers and discuss what tactics worked to get them to agree to wear a mask at least in the most high-risk situations is not a whole bunch of yelling about how you shouldn't have to coddle the feelings of white men.

Because no, you shouldn't have to coddle the feelings of people who don't want to listen to science. But your choices here are coddle their feelings somewhat and get them to wear masks at least in the highest-risk situations, or have them not wear masks at all and feel good because you got to yell and be morally pure on Twitter. At some point you have to stop and think about "is this action going to achieve my desired result". No one's saying you have to go talk to the anti-science people-- but when someone *is* doing so, try to refrain from attacking them for it.

At some point I really want to sit down and dig deep into the many meanings of the phrase "respectability politics", because the original meaning was very assimilationist and people opposing it were opposing assimilation, but it seems to have mutated into something with which to attack anything that acknowledges that the majority group has power and will necessarily need to be involved in social change attempts, especially if it goes so far as to acknowledge that it is *necessary* to involve and get the support of people who are not 100% Ideologically Committed To The Cause.

Over on Tumblr the fandom is doing a whole bunch of characterization notes and discussions for GBBO AUs and several people have said that as a result of all the "Tim would be X! Jon and Martin are this flavor of adorable!" on it they're starting writing them and just... this is AMAZING and I WANT THIS THING! I want a MILLION fics of THIS THING! I want this to become a fandom trope, where everyone writes a GBBO AU because that's one of the things you do in this fandom.

It's very... academic.

No, really, *very* academic. Has sentences like "My psychosocial development was inculcated in a white supremacist culture in which I am the superior group" level academic. (The whole book is like that.) I've been steeping in discourse and I frequently had trouble following it. In fact, I was frequently only following it because it's not saying anything other than Racism 101, nothing that a hundred other resources out there don't say in far easier language. Like, it really does seem like she said "Let's take Racism 101 and say it in the most abstruse language possible!" The actual definition of "white fragility" seems to be "that defensiveness white people have when someone brings up race", and people have been talking about that for a long time before Robin DiAngelo came up with a catchy name for it that people can use to hit each other with in their Woker-Than-Thou discussions. Sure, later on in the book she defines it thusly: "White fragility is much more than mere defensiveness or whining. It may be conceptualized as the sociology of dominance: an outcome of white people's socialization into white supremacy and a means to protect, maintain, and reproduce white supremacy." But all of the examples of it that she gives on a *practical* level? Are defensiveness or whining.

It's also not very practical. She spends a lot of time talking about societal constructs and interrogating your feelings and does not present any sort of things you should actually be *doing* once you interrogate your feelings-- and the part where she says that if you're not talking about race with your friends of color they probably don't trust you to handle it *really* needs to have a section about whether and how to address that with them in a way that doesn't end in dramatically going up to them and being like "You know I'm not RACIST, right?" (Yes, near the end there's a little about this, but it's a hundred pages later and in very impractical language.) Towards the end of the book she gets into the practicalities of running an anti-racist workshop, and a lot of the things she says there makes me think the reason she has so many stories of people angrily challenging her is that she's bad at running workshops, specifically in the "acting like the world is as it should be rather than as it is" sense-- yes, people *should* respond to antiracism training in certain ways, but since they don't, you as the trainer need to structure your training to try to account for that.

(Nor does she at any point *define* what an "authentic cross-racial relationship" is, though she does note that they're good and we should have them. I think I've just found yet another context in which I'm wary of the word "authentic.")

Also she spends a *lot* of time being like "White people do things in this way, which is bad. This is how I do things, which is the Correct way to do them." She is, I will note, also a white person, and she does not ever give examples of *other* white people behaving in the Correct way, nor does she give more than one example of herself making a mistake-- and that example is given to show off the very elaborated self-flagellation she does by way of apologizing for it.

I actually don't think I agree with the people who think it exists solely to promote anti-racism corporate training; she spends more than half the book wandering through heavy academia and only starts getting into corporate anti-racism training at the end-- most of the really egregious stuff comes from the last few chapters; while the first several have occasional digressions into WTF they're mostly just "none of this is innovative or new and you could have used SO MANY FEWER words."

While I've yet to read "Waking Up White", I have seen seen its author speak and I suspect it will be much better if you're looking for "white woman talks about coming to terms with your participation in structural racism" books. Or you could go check out one of the many lists of "read these Black authors instead of reading White Fragility" that have been circulating.

(As a tangential aside: I am *deeply distrustful* of the "this will make you uncomfortable, in fact feeling uncomfortable is desirable; that's how you know it's working" discourse that's common in a lot of dismantling-your-privilege work and heavily emphasized here, because while yes, doing it right often will make you uncomfortable, there really needs to be some sort of way of getting across to neophytes, standard when that is brought up, about the difference between "uncomfortable because it's breaking down your stereotypes" and "uncomfortable because someone is using social justice lingo to promote terrible things." I do not want people assimilating the idea that to be enlightened they have to accept all the discomfort from anyone who proclaims it's in the service of the cause; that's how you get cults.)

So according to the internet, the reason for the fireworks being such a thing is because the police are distributing fireworks to people in order to make lot of noise so we won't notice when they start their armed assault on... the protestors? I think? It's vague on that point. We will by that point be so used to the pounding of fireworks that we won't hear and therefore won't notice guns mowing down the protestors by the hundreds.

Also saw one with "If we know and believe the feds and narcs distribute firearms and drugs in the hood, is it really such a leap to fireworks?" Which I suppose it might not be if one believed they were in fact *distributing* either firearms or drugs. (Planting them on people, sure, but they're not running around *distributing* such things. What would be the point? If you want to arrest someone for drugs and you have some drugs you can come up with a pretext to search their car and "find" the drugs, and this is much less risky for you than just... distributing them.)

Now, several news organizations have looked into this and found that there are lots of people buying and reselling on Instagram in the fireworks stores and even gone out and talked to some of the illegal fireworks dealers selling stuff out of the backs of their cars. Gothamist had a story about the ridiculous amount of fireworks before George Floyd was killed and the protests were even started.

(Also, "calling 311 sends you to 911 and 911 sends you to 311" is... the sort of thing that would be REALLY REALLY NOTICEABLE if it were actually happening and definitely marks the person saying it as consciously spreading lies rather than being a paranoid dupe.)

But even without the news organizations debunking this, it's ridiculous. Because the majority of people don't actually react to noises that sound like an aerial assault in the moment; they wait and see what the news told them it was anyway. And the news is all out at the protests, so they would notice and report it if the police started just opening fire.

I didn't actually get into any arguments with anyone about this one; I'm just sort of staring at it like "Y'all do realize this is the sort of thing that leads to no one believing you when the government actually *does* do something that sounds like a conspiracy theory, right?"

(Also, in a bit of hilarity, while looking up news articles about this I came across an online fireworks store that's selling a "conspiracy pack" full of their most elaborate bangs and booms.)

In which the Magnus Archives needs to comply with the GDPR. It's *hilarious*, especially since the new compliance officer has no idea what the Institute actually *is* (and thus assumes Jon's complaints about "I don't have time to meet with you because I got kidnapped a bunch" are jokes). The HR manager *does* know some but not all of what's going on, having worked at the Institute long enough to know what's going on in Artifact Storage, and so she's allowing for the possibility of "Jon can read minds and actually was kidnapped," while still trying to get him to fall into line with normal HR stuff. And it continues with Elias's determination to make his stint trying to destroy the world as bureaucratic as possible. https://archiveofourown.org/works/24257458

(Also be sure to check out "works inspired by this one", in which we see things like how Brexit affected the Institute.)

I've been somewhat skeptical of the Paradox of Tolerance for a while, but today I came across the original quote:

"The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”

(Which I pulled from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/25998-the-so-called-paradox-of-freedom-is-the-argument-that-freedom but I've seen the whole thing quoted in a few other places.)

Specifically, note the part in the middle that all the Paradox of Tolerance people generally like to excise, that says that you shouldn't start suppressing them until they start getting violent and stop meeting you on the level of speech.

So as it turns out I've been right to be extremely skeptical of it, because he didn't actually *say* what most of his proponents say he said. Not that I think saying "Maybe you should go read the actual quote" will get me anywhere arguing with the sort of person who buys into it.

Other relevant thing I've discovered recently: the people who think we should have hate speech laws like Europe has should sit down and look at how those laws are actually enforced; The Intercept has an article about how those laws are used to suppress left-wing causes at least as often as they're used to suppress actual hate speech. But again, I expect the response I'll get is "but in America it wouldn't be like that!" Especially when you consider current Library Science Discourse, from people who really should know better, of a vocal group of librarians suggesting the Seattle Public Library should have denied the TERF group the use of their meeting room despite the fact that any lawsuit over doing so being one the library would be certain to lose. This course of action is advocated on the grounds that unjust laws (ie the First Amendment) are to be disobeyed. I've also heard "we fought back against the Patriot Act despite lawsuits; not fighting this is just proving your bigotry!"

We fought the Patriot Act with the aim of getting the courts to strike it down; the courts *can't* strike down the First Amendment. If they lose that lawsuit (which they will), the city loses a lot of money, the TERFs get a lot of money and media attention, and any good the library could have done for marginalized communities is lost. But honestly? The consequences of them *winning* that lawsuit would be worse-- because losing that lawsuit would at least be localized. If the library *wins* that lawsuit... well, "hate group" is not a legally defined term. If they win that lawsuit all the libraries in the South are free to call whatever active political groups they dislike hate groups and deny them use of their meeting rooms. Do you *really* want to open that can of worms? Do you have a strategy for ensuring that wouldn't splash back negatively and cause a whole lot of unintended, undesired consequences? (I have yet to meet a single person espousing this who has an answer to that question that isn't some variation on "by asking that question you're proving that you're part of the problem" or "that's why we need wholesale revolution." Librarians really should know better.)

Tonight's round of terrible takes I found on Twitter (this sort of thing is why I spent most of the day not touching my social media): "Riots are changing things! This is a wake up call for the 'if you don't support Biden how are you going to change things' people!"

And this represents such a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works. Because yes, the protests are causing local governments to do things. They may yet cause some *state* governments to do things. Those run on fairly slim margins, and they're close to the ground. They really need to be responsive to their people, when their people are this upset-- and in the case of some of the changes, particularly in Minneapolis, I gather that the politicians have wanted to be making those changes for years and what the protests doing is giving them is cover more than anything.

But the Republicans don't actually care about public opinion at this point, and any protest that's sufficiently violent that it brings down the *federal* government is going to be an actual civil war. They're banking on voter suppression, disinformation, and racism to win again, and to ensure they have another four years to rewrite the government so they can do away with elections altogether and just be dictators. Not voting for Biden still gets another four years of Trump (or, apparently, possibly Tom Cotton, who probably won't be dealing with Russia but is still... the person who wrote that op-ed and also it seems really late in the process to be putting your name forward), and with it the strong possibility that there will be no more elections ever in this country. If anything, I'd say the protests and unrest make it *more* important to vote for Biden, because Biden's not going to send death squads to kill the protestors later and a Biden administration's Justice Department would probably at least consider evidence that local police departments are disappearing protestors. (I have not done actual research into whether that is a thing that's happening. There are a *lot* of people who seem to think that a suspicious number of Ferguson organizers are dead and were probably assassinated by cops and while I haven't done a ton of research into that, that one... might be real, y'all.)

But then, I suspect the people sharing takes like that *want* to completely overturn our governmental system and set up something new, and are ignoring the example set by the French Revolution.

I've been listening to Endless Thread's special five-part Madness series, which is about Ewen Cameron, widely accepted as the author of the most horrific of the MK ULTRA experiments.

Apparently psychic driving is *not* a procedure invented by Hannibal. Apparently it is a real thing that Cameron was actually doing. The podcast takes pains to note in the beginning that things bear resemblance to Brave New World and implies that he was pulling more of his psychological theory from science fiction than actual science. While I can believe that to a point, I've read enough about the early history of psychiatric institutes to know that that didn't make him particularly unusual, even in the fifties and sixties-- he was not doing any of this *that* much later than lobotomies were the highest of psychiatric fashion.

Similarly, while the podcast implies he invented insulin shock therapy, that well predated him and was quite widespread. I can *kinda* see how you get from that to sleep comas as a therapeutic agent, but as with a lot of psychiatry at the time it didn't work. Also he very quickly moved from treating schizophrenia to mind control. Which he was still claiming was therapeutic.

This podcast seems much more shocked by Cameron's behavior than I would be-- while his behavior is undeniably *awful* it's more a matter of degree than kind in terms of abuses going on at the time, and I think it's important to remember that, not to excuse him, but to make it clear that the whole profession was doing some bad stuff. There's a deep trek into the moral vicissitudes of "How does someone who was actually a fairly competent and accomplished psychiatrist in many respects wind up doing this awful stuff to people and keep doing it even when it's clearly not helping them" that I think bears some comparison to the "Stop using 'inhuman monster' to describe rapists" movement: ordinary people are capable of great diversity within themselves which includes being quite capable of monstrous acts, and it has more to do with a strong sense of your own importance coupled with never coming up against anyone willing to set boundaries or enforce consequences than it does with some innate sort of monstrousness.

But the very fact that I don't find it shocking in the context of what I already know about psychiatric practice at the time that wasn't an experiment makes me wonder just how much cross-pollination and bleedthrough there was-- Cameron, after all, was presenting at least some of his results at psychiatric conferences, and I can only assume others were as well, especially since most of them didn't know they were being funded by the CIA. Given the sheer scale of it, it wouldn't be surprising if that affected psychiatric practice more generally. The reverse could also be true, since Cameron got recruited on the strength of experiments he was already doing on things that hadn't occurred to the CIA on their own, that they saw him presenting at conferences--and this explicitly calls out Cameron as the author of some of the most awful MK ULTRA things. Hospital personnel telling the journalist that broke it that they were afraid of Cameron but didn't approve reminds me of the lobotomy craze; there were plenty of people who disapproved of that but weren't willing to risk professional opprobium from people who were at the top of the field.

(So I realized that part of the problem I was having with "consuming engaging and thought-provoking media" was having no one to discuss it with afterwards. So guess what y'all get to read about now!)