I wonder if it’s okay with Jonathan Chait if we tell this guy to STFU?
RawStory: Rafael Cruz warns Christians: ‘God will hold you accountable’ if transgender people use public toilets http://ow.ly/I2Zgs
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After the cringe-inducingly insular stuff Chait came up with during his dust up with Ta-Nahisi Coates last year (links to most of it here), I stand by my one-liner. He’s doing the exact same thing here that he did in those which was to treat his subjective experience, cultural norms and worldview formed through his life experience as a white male in this society as objective and universal, or at least the norm.
Chait is really at his absolute worst when he talks about stuff like this and the thing that makes him that way is that he doesn’t realize he’s at his worst and is incapable of seeing why.
It’s a rather common and widespread problem as it happens . . .
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Same peevishness and insularity that marked the mannerly public intellectual slap fight with Coates last year.
On the whole, I like Chait and usually agree with him on most things most of the time. But this is a real blind spot of his.
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I do recall telling you on that thread that “your citation to a conservative concern trolling contrarian rich white conservative male asswipe douchecanoe website dedicated to crusading against all that teaching of liberal stuff at colleges is certainly going to do nothing but enhance the credibility of your argument here.”
And I stand by that statement.
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This stuff makes my hair hurt these days. I think maybe I’m just gettin’ too old and cranky and lazy to give a rat’s ass. But, to NCSteve: I’m stealin’ ‘douchecanoe’, and I don’t care if you’re offended…or not.
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So we should be very sensitive to conservatives, while they yell at us. Got it.
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Because apparently it’s too hard for you to actually discuss the article you’re cheering on.
Did you just tell someone that they should censor their speech followed directly by ordering them to read an article in which the author purportedly rails against the calls to censor one’s speech?
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i don’t think you or the author understood Chait’s points. or perhaps she intentionally misunderstood them. after all it is easier to debate a straw man than a real argument. Chait wasn’t seeking to ban any speech or even limit any speech. but he was pointing out that pc enforcement itself sometimes has the effect of stifling speech. he provided countless examples. he even provided examples where sometimes genuine acts of violence and harassment are defended by leftists because the violence or harassment was “triggered” by other speech. Do you think a university professor should be allowed to assault a pro-life activist because the pro-life activist held up a sign that “triggered” the professor?
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It would probably be more effective to just laugh at such stupidity.
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Still not a word of substance about the article lol. Like the various hitpieces today, just general attacks on Chait for other things he did (some deserved some not) and the usual boring “white male” argument.
The Muslim conservative that got fired for a satirical editorial mocking PC sensitivities who ultimately got fired because a single person was offended: was this a fair reaction by all involved? Can any of this potentially maybe possibly perhaps might have a stifling effect on speech of people who feel the same way? Should supposed liberals care about this?
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What?
Oh, finally, the conservative concern trolling contrarian rich white conservative male asswipe douchecanoe website dedicated to crusading against all that teaching of liberal stuff at colleges was right, and you were wrong. My point at the time was you have such a thickheaded worldview that considerations of which team is presenting you with an argument informs how you react to the argument itself, rationality be damned. If you go back and read the substance of the piece instead of just playing ingroup-outgroup, you would’ve actually learned something of importance a few days before the story completely broke down anyway.
And I stand by that statement.
I’m confused. Did he get fired twice?
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If you can’t see the defensiveness in Chait’s article maybe it’s because you’re not looking at it in the context of his previous battles? I also think political correctness has run amok and the contagion effect of social media exacerbates the problem but I can see it.
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That’s perhaps a fair take. To reverse engineer, is it all that surprising that the guy who has had similar run-ins with the Twitter PC crowd would be the one to pen a big article about it? Does this inherently make his actual points wrong?
Just about every piece I’m reading about this has been focusing very specifically on Chait’s past indiscretions (of course Chait has said some dumb stuff in the past and he’s part of the Respectable Liberals Who Support Iraq Crew who deserve endless criticisms on those grounds) and really obvious points of social justice framing while ignoring basically everything he actually said. It’s not a counterpoint, it’s a deflection on ingroup-outgroup boundaries.
lol got me there
You can walk into any bar in the vacinity of Fort Bragg and test the theory that someone’s freedom to swing their fist stops at the tip of your nose by saying Chris Kyle sucks.
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No, I agree with his points but the reasons you mention are the give away. It’s not hard to find examples, I’ll bet he had more but had to keep the piece to a reasonable length.
It’s not just the province of the left though. That’s the whole reason Twitchy exists as far as I can tell. Matt Taibbi was fighting dragons on twitter the other night after he wrote a review of American Sniper. That’s Amanda’s point. Maybe Chait should’ve included some PC policing by the right?
I guess my point is, if like you say a lot of his points are agreeable, and there’s a huge focus by detractors to essentially change the subject or question his motives without dealing with the substance…to me, it doesn’t really invalidate his points. Or even count as a counterargument. Let’s say he was just mad about his Coates feud and meanies on Twitter and wrote this article solely for that purpose - he’s still quite right about the stuff he’s actually substantively talking about. You know?
And absolutely agreed on the “not just the province of the left” thing. In the late 90s it was evangelical christians doing letter writing campaigns (Hashtags 1.0) to try and get the people they disliked tossed off TV, in the early 00s it was the neocons sending a mob against anyone criticizing the wisdom of their move in Iraq. Google “horseshoe theory” if you ever get bored, but it just seems like depending on the way the pendulum is moving on the culture wars, one side suddenly finds reasons to stand up for free speech (not just as a bland reference to a legal concept but as a larger societal value) and the other side suddenly joins what Salman Rushdie has called the “but brigade”. Free speech, but…let’s not say this, or let’s tread carefully around this, or let’s censor this, or let’s make a mob up to essentially censor this, or this thing I dislike doesn’t actually count as speech and therefore destroy it. Right now social liberalism has been on a roll for a long time - which is awesome - but the #CancelColbert crew rising to prominence again is an unfortunate side effect. And suddenly the right loves free speech again! What a coincidence.
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