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A new moralism is gripping the literary world

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Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#151

Post by whatshisface »

space_fountain wrote: post #126
whatshisface wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some conflation going on. "Being ok with" is not the same thing as "allowing to speak." What you do with credibly accused criminals of any kind is, you punish them to the full extent of the law. If they want to write a book or something, they can still do that.

Lots of other peoples voices go into writing a book. You are in essence saying that they should all be forced to lend their voices and help someone they feel has merely dogged responsibility. Laws are not the same as justice and never will be

>Laws are not the same as justice and never will be

If the laws in a democratic country aren't on the side of justice, then neither are the people, and if the people aren't on the side of justice, an auxiliary prosecution system formed of the people won't be either.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#152

Post by xenocratus »

h2odragon wrote: post #121

When the right wanted to ban media, a quire reasonable counter argument was "you don't have to buy, or read, the things you don't like". Where's that argument today? Why is anything "problematic" an assault against society as a whole, automatically, as well as whatever underprivileged group its offensive to? Have humans lost the ability to tolerate the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may disagree with them? Or is…

There isn't a discussion about this where I'm not reminded of South Park's "In my safe space":

> We can face almost anything

> But Reality we can do without

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#153

Post by glaukopis »

AlexandrB wrote: post #127
glaukopis wrote: post #87

I always have trouble with stuff like this, because my inner teenage hacker is cheering that "information wants to be free!" while at the same time I'm cognizant of the fact that we have to treat information with a certain level of care. Here's a take I don't necessarily believe, but is about as generous to the new left as I can make it: Ideas can be powerfully virulent, and we're especially susceptible to them when…

The "virulent" media these days is 280 chr tweets, videos of guys talking into their phone in their car, and Facebook groups. The idea that anyone today is radicalized by long-form prose is pretty out there. Instead, banning problematic books creates the perfect rallying cry for our generation's ideologues to recruit more followers on social media platforms and Youtube. Of the people talking about the recently discon…

This is true, and another reason why I have problems with my "generous" take. However, I'd also suggest that the notion of a friction factor applies to new media as well: if Twitter makes it difficult to be casually racist on their platform, but there still exist sites which allow you to be casually racist, it spares the average individual from having their mental namespace polluted with those "virulent ideas" without eliminating free speech entirely. Whether this is a positive thing, or even an acceptable course of action is something I'm very dubious of, however.

This is all just my initial take on the topic though: I always have difficulty engaging with stuff like this and forming opinions constructively since it's just an exhausting concept to try to be productive with people on.

edit: I realize now that I misunderstood your point: I thought you were saying "new media can have a radicalizing effect" to which this comment was responding to by saying "light regulation works for new media as well". I now understand you said that "old media doesn't radicalize a significant number of people" which has the obvious endpoint "light regulation of old media isn't necessary". On balance, I definitely agree with that.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#154

Post by dragonwriter »

Pxtl wrote: post #66

I hate this kind of anti-woke reactionary stuff. ... but for aspiring writers, there is a problem. On the one hand, writers should write what they know. They shouldn't try to assume they know some minority's lived experiences. On the other hand, literature should be inclusive. That means including minorities, and not just as peripheral characters. We don't need more My Magical Gay Friend stories. I haven't heard a go…

> I haven’t heard a good discussion on how to reconcile this contradiction.

The best way to reconcile it is to stop engaging in the fallacy of division.

Literature should be inclusive. Not every individual work of literature needs to be inclusive of every identity. Yes, a cis-het-male-Euro-American writer writing about unique experiences of cis-het-male-Euro-Americans (where characters of other backgrounds are seen only through the perspective of cit-het-male-Euro-Americans) might not speak to lots of people who aren’t cis-het-male-Euro-Americans. So what? It’s not a problem that such works exist, it is a problem when such works dominate available literature to the near-exclusion of other viewpoints.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#155

Post by strictnein »

heterodoxxed wrote: post #40
Koliakis wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material. I've been trying to get the older Seuss books. They're impossible to get. And if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are ast…

| if one of them does happen to be available, the prices are astronomical Yes, they're out of print and the only people who want them are collectors, so the prices for collectibles are high. That's not unusual. What are you proposing be done? Force the Seuss Foundation to publish books it doesn't want to publish?

> Yes, they're out of print because the only people who want them are collectors

What now? That's not what's going on here at all.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#156

Post by DC1350 »

ramraj07 wrote: post #4
stephvd wrote: post #2

If anything, such controversies make me want to get a copy of said literature and read it at the first possible instance. Can I call it the Streisand effect? Maybe. I have an unsubstantiated theory that this moral compassing at the institutional level (like the article mentions) has gathered more steam after the internet went into our phones and thus became highly accessible to the general public.

As long as you are able to do that, is it truly censoring? No ones burning books here. To say the publishing industry is especially censoring today than before is outrageous. The point is that it self censored in the ethnicity and gender of its authors instead of the material. There’s only one nytimes best seller that can exist about a Mexican immigrant, now do you want that to be written by a white author or a Mexic…

You’re just asking white people to quit writing since a book with 0 minority characters is also going to be criticized.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#157

Post by dragonwriter »

Avicebron wrote: post #137
dragonwriter wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

JKR is much more clearly TE than RF.

why is it TE to have an opinion?

That’s like asking “why is it racist to have an opinion?”

It’s not. Its TE (or racist, or whatever) to have a TE (or racist, or whatever) opinion.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#158

Post by bobthechef »

meanjeans wrote: post #24

I think the author here misrepresented the JK Rowling thing quite a bit. The idea is not to "scour" her texts for hidden anti-trans sentiment. The idea is that Rowling makes money off of selling her books and has built an empire, and the resultant power is now used by her as a platform to propagate anti-trans speech. Quite a different issue and also quite novel (pun unintended). Death of the Author is a concurrently…

> a platform to propagate anti-trans speech

This kind of response is precisely the thing that irks me to no end and it's something nobody will ever discuss. They'll just shun you or hurl a slogan at you as if you said something utterly ridiculous.

Let's broaden our time horizons a bit to something longer than the time it takes to read a tweet. When did you start to stand up for "trans" and oppose "anti-trans"? I'm asking a serious question, if only rhetorically. When did this become the obvious thing to do, the right thing to do, a matter of fact, and beyond discussion? Was there ever a discussion? Because all I can remember is that one day we were calling this gender dysphoria, a mental disorder, and the next day, a bunch of aggressive campus demonstrators were making demands and hurling accusations and trying to silence and bully people into going along. Then, all of a sudden, a new generation of college graduates started entering the workplace repeating these stock slogans verbatim. What are they, agents of the Komsomol?

What horrifies me is how easily people go along without question. It is truly horrifying. It horrifies me that they don't even seem to realize that that's what they're doing, floating downstream, wherever the current takes them. Milgram was crude child's play by comparison!

So when you condemn JK Rowling for disagreeing as if she had committed some crime against humanity, in light of how things actually transpired, in light of how viciously this program has been and is being implemented, I really makes me wonder.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#159

Post by imstate »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #35

What's actually happening: society is justifiably deciding that some things that used to pass without notice, because people were very racist or sexist or homophobic or whatever, are now recognisably and irreparably awful. And we should probably stop doing them because they are hurting people. Both directly, by being the constant micro-aggression wallpaper of marginalised lives, and indirectly, by sustaining a cultur…

Who decides what is ok and what isn't? In a free society people are allowed to express views, even if it offends someone.

I really don't expect the woke communists to accept a free society though.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#160

Post by throwawayboise »

blub wrote: post #69
KittenInABox wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one is saying Woody Allen shouldn't produce his own memoir. I am saying its weird to conflate not desiring to purchase the nonfiction rights of a credibly accused child molester and then profit off of selling that same nonfiction to otherwise significantly more niche issues such as whether or not a white author should be writing black protagonists. The end of the essay even focuses on the race aspect! I just compl…

Credibly accused is not a thing. You're either guilty or not guilty and he hasn't been found guilty.

Anyone who gets to the point of a criminal trial has been credibly accused. If the accusations weren't credible, the prosecutor would not bring the case. The standard for a criminal conviction is "beyond a reasonable doubt" which is a higher bar than "credibly accused" (and rightly so).

"Not Guilty" does not imply "Innocent"

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