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On Being Blacklisted

aaronkunin.medium.com

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Re: On Being Blacklisted

#91

Post by nobodyCloak »

walrus01 wrote: post #54
josephg wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He expects that by calling the publishers of some journal "craven" and "scared", that he's going to elicit a reversal of their decision Thats not my read of the situation. I agree that if his goal was to convince the authors, it would make sense for him to be more accomodating. And it wouldn't make sense to call them out in public. But thats not his goal here. To my eyes, this piece takes a shot at the culture whic…

What I find amusing is that the same center-right and right-wing mouthpieces that complain the loudest about 'cancel culture' have themselves been deeply involved in attempting to 'cancel' things for the past 40 years, anything they dislike or find distasteful, a random assortment of which includes. rap music and any music with "vulgar" lyrics (PARENTAL WARNING labels on CDs) harry potter (satanic magic messages offe…

Isn't that kind of lumping a great number of people with very different mindsets into a big group of Idiots Because They Don't Think Like Me?

I won't spend the time to go through and contradict every single one of your points, but let's not forget that Tipper Gore (Al Gore's wife at the time) was the main push behind the parental advisory labels, freedom fries is a joke to 100% of the people I've talked to about it, and just because not everyone agrees at what point (or whether) an abortion becomes synonymous with a murder does not mean that everyone on the right wants to rule over women (unlike some cultures that do exist to this day in other countries).

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#92

Post by wvenable »

pochamago wrote: post #81
walrus01 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find amusing is that the same center-right and right-wing mouthpieces that complain the loudest about 'cancel culture' have themselves been deeply involved in attempting to 'cancel' things for the past 40 years, anything they dislike or find distasteful, a random assortment of which includes. rap music and any music with "vulgar" lyrics (PARENTAL WARNING labels on CDs) harry potter (satanic magic messages offe…

Shouldn't that make us more sympathetic to the issue? In all the fights over those issues it was a constant among the left that free discussion is vital. Was that really just an attractive political stance, held only until it was no longer useful? I don't want to believe that, I have to believe that people were sincere and we can return to it as a universal principle.

It's basic tolerance of intolerance. We want to be tolerant in all things -- be sympathetic -- but the more you are tolerance of intolerance the less tolerance there is in the world.

It's a delicate balance and not one that is so black and white.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#93

Post by [deleted] »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #72
cpitman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like calling it a collection of dog whistles is directly addressed by this paragraph: "The trouble is that Nazis are human beings, and they have many benign thoughts along with their antisemitism. So I might avoid repeating some ordinary, unthreatening statement uttered by someone with a Nazi reputation, lest you think that I sound like a Nazi. Soon only actual Nazis and a few weirdos who don’t care what oth…

But why discuss Nazis if they are not strictly necessary for the article? It rubs me the wrong way that some people seem to delight in the intellectual brinksmanship of philosophising about what we can keep from Nazis and what not. It's normally useless and foolish speculation that just serves to delegitimze the threat of nazism. Please just forget about the Nazis. Never forget what they did, but don't rationalise th…

[deleted]

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#94

Post by fatbird »

refenestrator wrote: post #79
fatbird wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By including Kunin, they lost enough other contributors that their project was threatened. As a voluntary effort by grad students, they don't have the time or money to make a spirited defense of Kunin. He's had to take up his martyrdom on his own. I'm sure Kunin would have been very happy for them to burn their project down for his sake. Kunin's sake is not the only one at play here.

Ok, let's take that at face value. Are the unspecified others who would burn them down justified? At the end of the day, is there any positive moral case for this?

The others aren't burning them down, the others are making clear that they have conditions on participating, and if they're met, they're happy to do so. Triaging your project to get it done by excluding the one person who makes five others leave, by forcing the one guy out, is basic management. It's the basic stuff of editorial decisions.

As for the larger case of "blacklisting", as Kunin describes it, the moral case is that amplification is bad, that by appearing onstage with a villain, you dignify his villainy by taking it seriously, when it should be rejected out of hand; you provide a platform for odious ideas that, even met with a superior response, get more airtime and borrowed legitimacy than they would otherwise.

You can certainly disagree that avoiding amplification justifies cancel culture, but acting like there isn't a moral case for not getting onstage with someone you don't want to amplify, begs the question.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#95

Post by marshmallow_12 »

marshmallow_12 wrote: post #72
cpitman wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like calling it a collection of dog whistles is directly addressed by this paragraph: "The trouble is that Nazis are human beings, and they have many benign thoughts along with their antisemitism. So I might avoid repeating some ordinary, unthreatening statement uttered by someone with a Nazi reputation, lest you think that I sound like a Nazi. Soon only actual Nazis and a few weirdos who don’t care what oth…

But why discuss Nazis if they are not strictly necessary for the article? It rubs me the wrong way that some people seem to delight in the intellectual brinksmanship of philosophising about what we can keep from Nazis and what not. It's normally useless and foolish speculation that just serves to delegitimze the threat of nazism. Please just forget about the Nazis. Never forget what they did, but don't rationalise th…

I'm not sure what part of my comment could possibly be argued against with a straight face. Someone thinks there's something fundementally correct in Nazism?

Or maybe whataboutism is more correct then logic.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#96

Post by rayiner »

Kunin writes: “Look. I’m a weirdo. I have worshipped strange gods. I have strange opinions about various subjects, and I have published some of these opinions in books, essays, and poems. My sexual preferences are unusual, and I have written about them extensively. There are lots of statements in my published writing for people to take issue with. However, I must admit with some embarrassment that the views expressed in ‘Self-Censorship in the Academy’ are completely unoriginal and vanilla. It’s just liberalism.”

There are parallels to what’s happening on the right: https://www.firstthings.com/article/2017/05/return-of-the-st.... This essay posits that the milquetoast nature of late 20th century liberal causes people (in that case in the right) to pine for the return of “strong gods.” It describes the status quo ante as follows: “All of this is summed up in his catchphrase the ‘weakening of Being,’ which he sees as a happy unburdening of the West, for weakening promotes tolerance, peace, and freedom. If there are no strong truths, nobody will judge others or limit their freedom. If nothing is worth fighting for, nobody will fight. Vattimo looks forward to a disenchanted world that encourages us to adopt a ‘moderate and generous’ approach to life.”

The essay argues that this absence of hard moral truths is unsatisfying to many, and is giving rise to thinking in the right wing that seeks a return to moral clarity. Kunin’ experience suggests similar things may be happening on the left as well.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#97

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #3
naringas wrote: post #2

There's also an ongoing 'cultural revolution' in which older artistic creations are being reassesed by modern political correctness. (see the recent ebay and Dr. Seuss news for a most recent example) I find this "revisionism" frightening. I fear it'll continue to get worse. I hope it does not.

There's even a movement to replace the term "Blacklist" with a less problematic words such as denylist or blocklist. Of course, "Whitelist" is just as problematic - if not moreso! - and should be replaced with allowlist or safelist. Edit: The etymology of these words have nothing to do with skincolor, Blackness or Whiteness.

My company actually got into doing this. The only reason it eventually stopped is because it cost actual money to complete that change in one of the systems. All of a sudden, it was harder to justify that change. So it didn't happen. I get it though. We recently got inclusivity executive something or other. You gotta show you are doing something. Incidentally, how do you even get those types of jobs?

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#98

Post by dragonwriter »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #3
naringas wrote: post #2

There's also an ongoing 'cultural revolution' in which older artistic creations are being reassesed by modern political correctness. (see the recent ebay and Dr. Seuss news for a most recent example) I find this "revisionism" frightening. I fear it'll continue to get worse. I hope it does not.

There's even a movement to replace the term "Blacklist" with a less problematic words such as denylist or blocklist. Of course, "Whitelist" is just as problematic - if not moreso! - and should be replaced with allowlist or safelist. Edit: The etymology of these words have nothing to do with skincolor, Blackness or Whiteness.

I wholly support “blacklist” being replaced with ”blocklist”, “denylist”, “exclusion list”, or anything else that is both more direct about the function and isn't a lazy use of a metaphorical reference to a centuries-long history of elite political and anti-labor (often both simultaneously) repression. (Ditto with “whitelist” which is itself a second-order reference to blacklisting.)

Just because something isn't specifically connected to race doesn't mean it is innocuous.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#99

Post by baggy_trough »

ariabuckles wrote: post #86
hirundo wrote: post #12

Is there anyone that wants to defend this blacklisting of the author by the Chicago Review for writing this article [0]? That is, not to reconfirm that they do indeed have the right to do so, but to argue that they are right to do so? Maybe some of us can avoid this fate if we understand the grounds for it, since they decline to make it explicit. What did he say that was not just wrong, but so wrong that he should no…

It's a pretty standard anti-inclusivity rant (although it starts by attempting to position itself as more than such), and then ends with an anecdote/strawman (which is contrary to every notion of inclusivity advocacy that I've seen) to propose that those advocating for inclusivity are the real people who want segregation. I think what a lot of the commenters are missing is that this article, and statements like "If I…

Any organization that concludes the ideas in that article are hateful or harmful can really no longer be considered an academic one.

Re: On Being Blacklisted

#100

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0 »

throwaw4ybio wrote: post #49
walrus01 wrote: post #32

Nobody owes you a free publishing platform. He expects that by calling the publishers of some journal "craven" and "scared", that he's going to elicit a reversal of their decision, and positive response from them, something to the effect of "oh, how dare we deny your article, woe unto us, we were so dreadfully wrong"... Really? The biggest takeaway that I got from his December essay, and this one? A sense of self rig…

If his goal is to change the publisher's mind, calling them "craven" is a terrible rhetorical tactic.

Well, while I happen to have a sympathetic view of the author's plight, the goal ( and the tactic ) is not to change anyone's mind. Quite the contrary, the goal is re-entrench and have people rage against cancel culture. And it works. Facebook may have perfected it, but it does not mean a more elaborate click-baiting mechanisms were not adopted by humans. In fact, clearly, they were. Rage, sorry, engagement, sells.
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