While I get the impulse to figure out whether the illiberal right or left is a bigger threat-and do so myself when forced, as when I voted for Hillary Clinton instead of DJT, seeing him as the bigger threat-I try to remind people that competing illiberalisms fuel one another, &
that this is so even when the illiberalisms are *not* equivalent, morally or practically.
And I find it a useful exercise to think of how we feel when the illiberalism we find to be the bigger threat manifests, and to understand that there are folks "on the other side" who
feel similarly in the other direction.
As an extremely anti-censorship person, this has certainly helped me to understand even impulses to censor that I sympathize with least. Of course, my project is to seek clarity, not to align in solidarity with any faction, and that bothers
people on both sides who believe moral clarify or the preservation of liberty demands constant rhetorical warfare against The More Dangerous Faction.
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IMHO, radical clarity here requires acknowledging the legal and principled differences between higher ed and K through 12 as well as the distinction between teaching versus promoting material.
Some Constitutionally protected speech, like hard core pornography, should absolutely be banned from first and second grade classrooms.
Some heinous ideas, like Nazi ideology, should be taught as part of history education, but absolutely never promoted or endorsed.
If you have public schools, which some anarchists and libertarians don't want, you have to bite the bullet and recognize that the state will be including some ideas and excluding others from curriculum. Some matters of controversy should be debated. But not all. Example:
Attention Californians and journalists: you should know about Assembly Bill 343 and Assemblyman Vince Fong's important, long-running efforts to strengthen the CA Public Records Act (1/x)
On paper journalists and all CA residents have a right to broad categories of public information. But as many reporters have discovered, bureaucrats often turn down legitimate requests, leaving no recourse except filing an expensive lawsuit (2/x)
Fong wants to create an independent ombudsperson to settle denied Public Records Act requests, creating a mechanism other than lawsuits to vindicate the rights of CA residents and journalists. And his bill passed the Assembly unanimously, but still faces the Senate and governor
Is it okay to generalize about a racial or gender group on the basis of something that is true of a mere plurality of its members? A majority? A supermajority? For many the answer is *that depends on the standard's implications for the ideological point I'm trying to make.*
So, for example, it's objectionable to be cisnormative, because it erases the small percentage of people who are trans; and Model Minority Myth is objectionable; but speaking of white people as possessing wealth privilege is fine. The logic is wildly inconsistent.
The correct insight that *Asian Americans are wealthy* obscures and elides e.g. *recent Hmong immigrants* and the correct insight that *white people have family wealth privilege* elides e.g. white Appalachian kids born into deeply indebted families are very similar.
This @benyt article about dysfunction in public radio reminds me that I've been meaning to pose a question about ReplyAll and its return-after-controversy episode:
In the episode they say they spent *two months* drilling down and reflecting on what went wrong (ostensibly! I add) with their piece on Bon Appetit. But then they... don't ever level with the audience.
The most we get is the assertion that 1) journalists should always ask, "Am I the right one to tell this story?" and the claim that 2) they didn't ask or adequately interrogate if they were the right ones to tell *that* story.
Apropos this convo between @benyt and @WesleyLowery on the convention of "objectivity," inspired by the unjust firing of an Associated Press reporter, I'm reminded of an obscure but powerful example of how that conceit has gone wrong that I'm privy to for personal reasons. 1/x
It will surprise some of you to learn that in 2011 some Occupy Wall Street protesters put a critique of Goldman Sachs that I wrote on a protest sign and chanted my words on the streets of New York City. 2/x
The sentence in question, describing a dubious deal Goldman did, was, shall we say, amusingly unwieldy--had I known it might appear on a sign I'd have done one more draft.