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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

#281

Post by cameldrv »

acdha wrote: post #279
cameldrv wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call myself a conservative. Obviously as private companies, Amazon and eBay are able to make rules about what they allow to be sold. I do think it creates a real chilling effect when both Amazon and eBay refuse to sell these books, since they are essentially an oligopoly in book sales. It's actually the libraries pulling them from the shelves that seems so bizarre to me. I could understand them moving them…

It's less whether you're a conservative than that almost all of the people pushing this as a story are, and they're doing it with the intention of politicizing it so you really want to look for primary sources and make sure that critical details aren't being removed. Librarians are generally quite opposed to banning books and I haven't seen any sign that this is different: some large systems (e.g. NYPL) have said the…

Well I'm not so interested in the meta-political aspect to this. What I think this shows though is that perhaps librarians aren't quite as opposed to banning books anymore as I thought they were.

It's easy for Chicago to say that they're figuring out what to do long term, but somehow these books were all fine (and in the children's section!) for something like 70 years, and now they're suddenly radioactive.

What this suggests to me is that there has been a shift in values among librarians, and when the publisher made the decision to take them out of print, this forced a reevaluation, and then we discovered that avoiding any whiff of racism is a more important value than free speech. I think that's really sad and depressing.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#282

Post by pseudalopex »

zepto wrote: post #268
pseudalopex wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TE people advocate policies that create those outcomes. I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say. Rowling hasn't been censored. Cis women and trans women are in the category of women.

> TE people advocate policies that create those outcomes. This just isn’t true. > I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say. TERFs don’t say this. People controlling budgets do. They are are the ones withholding services from trans people. Not TERFs. > Cis women and trans women are in the category of women. Only according to c…

Trans exclusionary people advocate excluding trans women from women's shelters. This leads to trans women being excluded from women's shelters.

Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men. Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment. Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.

It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent. I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.

Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective. And don't play games. You asked a question. I answered.

There are many more than 2 kinds of women!

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#283

Post by zepto »

pseudalopex wrote: post #282
zepto wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> TE people advocate policies that create those outcomes. This just isn’t true. > I've seen none support creation of separate but equal facilities for trans people. It's too costly for such a small minority they say. TERFs don’t say this. People controlling budgets do. They are are the ones withholding services from trans people. Not TERFs. > Cis women and trans women are in the category of women. Only according to c…

Trans exclusionary people advocate excluding trans women from women's shelters. This leads to trans women being excluded from women's shelters. Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men. Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment. Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice. It shouldn't surprise you politically acti…

> Trans exclusionary people advocate excluding trans women from women's shelters. This leads to trans women being excluded from women's shelters.

Yes, but being allowed into women’s shelters is not the only solution to violence against trans people.

> Most trans exclusionary people say trans women are men.

Do they? And if they see them as men, isn’t that their business?

I am not aware of TERFs arguing against services being provided for trans people.

> Some say they should be treated like cis men in all respects including imprisonment.

So TERFs in general do not.

> Others accept keeping them apart from cis women means putting them with cis men in practice.

Yes, agreed, and this is a terrible outcome but lack of services for trans people is not a consequence of TERFs.

> It shouldn't surprise you politically active people have opinions about tax and how it's spent.

This irrelevant statement to anything either of us have said so far.

> I've seen it myself. Even people who say they support separate but equal facilities start hedging when asked about funding.

What do you mean by ‘start hedging’?

> Cis women and trans women being categories of women isn't just a trans perspective.

Of course not, but that doesn’t make it universal.

As far as I can see your argument is just based on there not being enough money for trans services.

That’s absolutely correct, but has nothing to do with TERFs.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#284

Post by Thuggery »

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…

> Have humans lost the ability to tolerate the knowledge that someone, somewhere, may disagree with them?

Maybe the majority never had it. That's what I've been thinking recently. In the past, a person could mold themselves to a much more static community. A person that grew up in a Presbytarian community would not much interact with a Muslim family and vice versa. It's also much easier for a person so sensitive of disagreement to delude themselves that all their friends and neighbors were basically of the same mind on serious political/moral issues in meat space. Essentially, the past had naturally occurring filter bubbles.

The Christian social conservatism you recall of the 80s and earlier were people that were pissed about control of mass culture dominated by cosmopolitan urbanites, but they had their own parallel culture to an extent. With smartphones, everyone is suddenly in each others face and I think it's broken the brains of some of the people that never comprehended that level of social friction and disunity.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#285

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

I think there’s going to be some serious lash back to this, it’s going way too far for the mainstream leftist.

What do we do with William Burroughs then?

One thing I have noticed is maybe Jesus had it right with the forgiveness thing. But the woke crowd would probably condemn him too

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#286

Post by ulisesrmzroche »

jancsika wrote: post #167

> She went on to argue that Cummins, a white American woman with some Puerto Rican background, had no business writing about a culture and identity group to which she didn’t belong. Ooh, I just read Gurba's blog. Her argument in essence: a white author's inexperience with a culture leads to bad writing . Example from her blog: Mexican protagonist described by her husband as the smartest women he knows. But Mexican pr…

What bugged me about that blog post is that if we go by her logic, she shouldn’t be writing about Mexicans either. She’s an American with Mexican heritage. She should only write about chicanos and that’s it.

It’s like how only Americans identify as latinx.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#287

Post by shockeychap »

pseudalopex wrote: post #261
shockeychap wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a bit of an HN neophyte, having recently left FB for a place where thoughtful discussion was still welcome. I'm not being rhetorical when I ask, what is going on? Are some highly-rated users just abusing their power to flag, or is this something else? Is HN on its way to being more concerned with virtue signaling than open discussion?

"If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

It's hard to argue that thoughtful articles like this one don't pertain to an interesting new phenomenon. This concept is, of course, highly subjective. But I've seen countless articles on HN that existed in this space without being flagged. Why should this article, which garnered such high volume of feedback - without flaming - be treated differently?

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#288

Post by pseudalopex »

shockeychap wrote: post #287
pseudalopex wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it."[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." It's hard to argue that thoughtful articles like this one don't pertain to an interesting new phenomenon. This concept is, of course, highly subjective. But I've seen countless articles on HN that existed in this space without being flagged. Why should this article, which garnered such high volum…

Articles rise and fall because of luck partly. And having more comments than points works against them. It's programmed in as a sign the discussion has more heat than light. Which it does.

You think the article is thoughtful because you agree with it. The article itself said the phenomenon isn't new. And interest declines when we get several articles a week about the same thing.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#289

Post by chillacy »

shockeychap wrote: post #194
happytoexplain wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is anything classifiable as "wokism" automatically morally and intellectually bankrupt junk? That sounds an awful lot like simply dismissing a broad category of opinions that may contain a reasonably moral/intellectual subset, much like the thing that wokism is being accused of right now.

Fair observation. But consider that proponents of "wokism" have busily engaged in censorship of thought and speech - showing no interest in a fair and open debate - while simultaneously demanding unquestioning fealty to its principles. For me, that speaks to an intrinsic and inherent moral and intellectual bankruptcy.

Scott Alexander has an interesting post called Conflict vs Mistake which makes the point that fair and open debate might actually be a consequence of certain world views but not others.

Re: A new moralism is gripping the literary world

#290

Post by nickthemagicman »

whydoibother wrote: post #275
nickthemagicman wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skin color is s an arbitrary physiological trait. There's no bald people culture. Or innie bellybutton culture.

It's not arbitrary when black folk were specifically enslaved and segregated due to the color of their skin, and therefore developed a culture around that shared experience. If we enslaved people based on their baldness for a few centuries and then kept discriminating against them for another century, I am sure they would have their own culture born from that shared experience.

See the hole in your argument is that not all Black people experienced slavery.

Southern Black people were the only ones in America that did.

Then if you expand that definition globally...the number of total black people experiencing slavery from white people during that time, was actually the very small.

It's like saying all White People share a culture because the Irish had a hard time during British or American repression.

Your using one definition to support your argument but then saying that definition also doesn't apply to other groups.

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