An article mentioning among other things Paglia and you are saying the Koch Brothers are vouching for Paglia??? This is as silly as the Soros hysteria on the right. — ssu

Um, the article literally says this at the bottom of it:

"This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."

Which was also appended to the original article posted, it should be noted.

Are the Koch Brothers vouching for Camille Paglia? Are they funding her?

Or would it be Tom Nichols, the writer of the article?

Or the actually, the Atlantic???

They're paying for - or at least funding - an article on Camille Paglia, which is exactly what Maw said. Not sure what you're getting hysterical about.

Bullshit.

If you want your 'alt-right' culprit, it would be the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg:

Today The Atlantic begins a year-long reporting project, “The Speech Wars,” exploring questions of American free expression and public discourse. The project will unfold across TheAtlantic.com, in video, and through live events, beginning with an event next week in San Francisco looking at the debate about free speech on campuses, on tech platforms, and in politics.

“The Speech Wars” is born out of The Atlantic’s legacy of covering threats to free expression, freedom, and justice—beginning with the magazine’s founding in 1857 as a nonpartisan journal that argued for the cause of abolition—and more urgently by the public’s increasing sectarianism and declining tolerance for challenging points of view.

“The Atlantic is, and always has been, a marketplace for competing ideas,” said Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic. “We need to understand why so many factions and individuals across America have traded dissent and useful argument for intolerance and illiberalism.”

“The Speech Wars” will seek to understand where free speech is in danger and where it has been abused. With social media and the internet enlivening the marketplace of ideas—and giving every citizen access to the public square—we should be living in a golden age of free expression. The opposite is now true: over the past two decades, liberals and conservatives have increasingly come to believe their ideological opposites aren’t just misguided, but dangerous. The Atlantic’s reporting will explore all of these complicated realities, offering a range of reports and essays from staff writers and contributors.

See The Atlantic Begins “The Speech Wars” Reporting Project

Sorry, what's bullshit? The line literally says:

"This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."

Is reality bullshit? Why are you dancing around this?

First, the article takes Paglia as an example, but it also takes professor Samuel Abrams. To infer then that Paglia is vouched by Koch Brothers is a long shot. So long, that it goes to the Alex Jones -type of conspiracy. That is my point.

If you want to describe the 'evil workings' of the Koch brothers, then far better to talk about the actual project they are funding, which I referred above.

To infer then that Paglia is vouched by Koch Brothers is a long shot. That is my point. — ssu

Did anyone say that 'Paglia is vouched by Koch Brothers'? [sic]

Here's what Maw said:

"The Atlantic published another article on Camille Paglia paid for by the Koch Brothers."

Here's what I said, paraphrasing Maw:

"They're paying for - or at least funding - an article on Camille Paglia".

Because of a byline that reads:

""This article is part of “The Speech Wars,” a project supported by the Charles Koch Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, and the Fetzer Institute."

Maybe should you reassess the relevance - or complete lack-thereof - of 'your point'?

I don't really want to get on the wrong side of this, because I'd happily see the Koch brothers pistol-whipped, but this hysteria (of maw's, not you) does not help and I think ssu is (sort of) right to call it out. What was actually said was...

The Atlantic published another article on Camille Paglia paid for by the Koch Brothers. Just incredible. — Maw

...if the claim really was just that the Koch brothers paid for a series of articles to be produced about a topic they are politically in favour of, then why "Just incredible"? What on earth is incredible about a company funding a series of articles?

To then say...

This illustrates a subtle strategy for some right wingers who have counted on being protested and/or uninvited at college campus and leveraging that by writing articles (or being the subject of them) about how the Left is silencing them, and the articles of course receive many more clicks and public discussion than some measly campus speech. — Maw

...is the conspiratorial part which seems to me to qualifiy the use of "incredible".


I may be completely misjudging maw's comment, but it did sound to me like an accusation that the Koch brothers incited the whole incident - controversial comment>kick back from liberal students>complaints about 'suppression'>article in the press.

I think that is a bit far-fetched, but, as I said, maybe I've read too much into the unusual appearance of the the term "just incredible"?

Yet what you are implying is that someone funding an institute project that publishes something is then directly supporting the factual arguments of any article written in the project. Billionaires give to a lot of things money and their decision is just to whom they give the money.

Isn't that a bit overreaching conclusions? It is really similar like the conspiraty-theorists in the right.

I'll take an example: George Soros has given money to associations that some are close to Black Live Matters. And OMG! All the hubbub around that in the right. It is similar to think that the Koch brothers are funding articles about Camille Paglia.

This conspiracy bullshit of billionaires meddling through journal articles (because they have given money to the institutions) is simply silly.

This conspiracy bullshit of billionaires meddling through journal articles (because they have given money to the institutions) is simply silly. — ssu

At the risk of just pissing everyone off by disagreeing with all sides, do you really think it's "silly" to think that billionaires don't just donate their money and then walk away?

I'm with you as far as it being rather ludicrous that the Koch brothers somehow cooked up the whole Paglia incident as part of a right-wing conspiricy to generate stories about the erosion of 'free-speech', but to think they'd have no influence at all on the contents of the articles they find might be going too far the other way, no?

@Maw @ssu @StreetlightX

Is it cynical or paranoid to say that maybe the whole point of an article about Paglia with a Koch thing at the bottom is for a [maw] to post it, disgusted, and an [ssu] to counter it and a whole bunch of others who want to chime in (me included), reading it, click, click, click.

The article seems designed to be culture war fodder.

[incendiary paragraph]
[controversial paragraph ]
'introducing the 2019 chevy blazer.'
[ a paragraph that's just outrageous]
[Charles Koch, can you believe it?? link to show you're justifiably mad!]
'Sofi: no hidden fees on your student loan refi'

Maw, here, is standard issue Internet Leftist rage, tapped into a flagrant sense of intellectual and moral superiority. SSU, here, is standard issue erstwhile-centrist-liberal-now-battling-left-excesses-thereby-inexorably-becoming-right-as-leftists-just-get-more-and-more-ridiculous. i'm standard issue 'this is all just spectacle' buttressing my 'above it allness' at the expense of engagement.

But isn't it nauseating to be playing out types so exactly?? Don't you guys feel as gross as I do here??

I won't speak for Maw, but I imagine the 'strategy' is not to 'cook up the Paglia incident', but to elevate it (an already existing 'incident') to the status of an 'incident' to begin with - something to be debated over, something as part of the national (international?) discourse, a conversation or argument to be had writ large to begin with. So much in line with @Csalisbury's post.

To win the culture war is not to be on a particular 'side'; it's to shape what counts as a side to begin with. And that's the function of articles like that - to define the debate, as much as come down on a side of it.

I imagine the 'strategy' is not to 'cook up the Paglia incident', but to elevate it (an already exiting 'incident') to the status of an 'incident' to begin with - something to be debated over, something as part of the national (international?) discourse, a conversation or argument to be had writ large to begin with. — StreetlightX

Yeah, that I can definitely see being the case, so perhaps I did read maw's comment wrong afterall, if that was the limit of the implication.

To win the culture war is not to be on a particular 'side'; it's to shape what counts as a side to begin with. And that's the function of articles like that - to define the debate, as much as come down on a side of it. — StreetlightX

This is very true. So much of this is rallying cry dressed up as discussion. I imagine it like Wittgenstein's amorphous patches of colour grading into one another, with similar political groupings being the coloured shapes. Sometimes although the edge is hazy, it's clear enough to draw a rough line around and not be completely wrong, but most of the time it's more like the colours grade smoothly into one another and we couldn't really draw a line around any homogeneous group to distinguish it from another. Articles, speeches and the like are all about drawing the line anyway and hopefully making it so bold as to detract everyone's attention from the fact that they've just located it arbitrarily.

Maw, here, is standard issue Internet Leftist rage, tapped into a flagrant sense of intellectual and moral superiority. SSU, here, is standard issue erstwhile-centrist-liberal-now-battling-left-excesses-thereby-inexorably-becoming-right-as-leftists-just-get-more-and-more-ridiculous. i'm standard issue 'this is all just spectacle' buttressing my 'above it allness' at the expense of engagement. — csalisbury

All well defined, have to say.

(Of course I've never seen myself as a centrist liberal at all, but as coming from a socialist nanny-state that Bernie Sanders praises sometimes and not from North America, that definition can be understood)

I tried to make a similar point here.

I thought csalisbury was being sarcastic.

Only time will tell.

Sorry for the late response. I had some kind of food poisoning yesterday (but the threat has since been evacuated!)

I'm of the opinion that people like Shapiro are enabled by institutions and his widespread acceptance is nothing more than an entirely predicable consequence of that enabling. The idea that he has somehow 'emerged' as the representative of a group of people who have long harboured his views but until now had no voice is just not swinging it for me. — Isaac

Which specific institutions enabled Shapiro?

Shapiro basically clawed his way to notoriety over the last decade through mostly his own effort. I'm not aware of any major reason for his success other than his hard work and his ideas. (Before he became famous, he was making rounds on obscure media sites like "Blog-Talk-Radio", and slowly building his audience and body of rhetoric).

The thing about Shapiro is that he is actually persuasive to a huge number of people. You might feel like he is just singing the same old conservative song, but the way he sings it allows him to go viral; he seems to be mostly self-made...

Sometimes, yes. I'm not really sure why you are drawing such a line at physical force, perhaps you could expand on that? Why is it OK, for example, for media companies to use their wealth to distribute platforms to those controversial enough to make revenue (denying platforms to the mundane), but its not OK for students to use their physical mass to deny platforms to the likes of the Shapiro? What is it about physical mass as a tool that singles it out as reprehensible? — Isaac

Let's assume for a moment that physical force is a normal tool of political speech: so we go and shut down Shapiro's event by force, and any other event that espouses ideas we don't like.

But what will we say when a large group of Trump supporters shows up to shut down one of our progressive events? Throughout American history, liberal and progressive movements have often had to deal with violent push back from supporters of the status quo who also believed that might makes political right, and this is one of things we've been rebuking since the French and American revolutions (which though themselves used force, were also direct responses to force).

What you're suggesting will inexorably lead to increasingly violent conflicts as both sides convince themselves that they're ethically justified to use force. Your justification seems to be that wealthy individuals and corporations are able to purchase political influence, and therefore wealth inequality warrants the use of force as an equalizer. The problem with this is that there is wealth being spent on both ends of the political spectrum (often by the same groups), so the use of violence on one side also justifies the use of violence by the other side.

This is exactly the point I'm trying to make. It has virtually nothing to do with free-speech in the sense most people seem to use the term (we must listen to and rationally argue against ideas for the sake of our collective intellect). There's no debating going on here. No one is listening to the arguments with a rational mind, neither for nor against. It's language being used entirely as rhetoric just to stir up a movement in a particular political direction. To say we should use language to oppose it is to give the 'discussion' a legitimacy it does not deserve.

These events are no more than rallies, a show of force. — Isaac

Is it really fair to assume that Shapiro has nothing rational or original to say, and that since he is only rabble-rousing to gather physical force, we ought to use physical force against him/them?

I find most of Shairo's rhetoric to be polemic, misleading, and insidious (though there are some basic things we agree on), but he does actually make arguments and engage in political suasion. If we ignore what he has to say and insist he is just a bogeyman to be de-platformed, we're actually living up to his caricature of the left. Shapiro uses ideas to appeal to emotions, and if we respond to his followers with threats, we're just going to entrench and validate their emotions.

Where is this idea coming from that they're waiting to see what we do to decide what tactics are acceptable? They (by whom I mean whomever one considers opposed to them) are going to use whatever tactics they can to shut down ideas that don't meet their requirements. Not necessarily even ideologically, I don't think the media, for example, are motivated by anything but the fact that controversy sells. But the point is, they won't hold back. — Isaac

I disagree.

The alt-right exists as a mostly reactionary movement (and to be fair, Shapiro tries to distance himself from it) that started as a rejection of identity politics, but eventually began reciprocating the tactics of the left, which now happily appeals to race and gender as a means to credibility (instead of claiming to champion non-white and marginalized identity groups, the alt-right claims to be the champion of straight white men). Once "Antifa" caught a whiff of their rhetoric, they decided that violent opposition was the way to go, which ironically caused the alt right to galvanize into the "culture war fighting" white supremacist cluster of fear driven lunatics and opportunistic con-men that it now is.

If we start attacking Shapiro events as a matter of course, don't you think that's going to cause some kind of response?

This is how we get violent clashes between opposing mobs, which is decidedly unproductive. The radical left created the alt-right.

I guess to some extent the issues are different for different sides in a debate. If you're arguing against someone who has money, they're not going to use physical force against you (why would they) but you might need to against them. Your resources are obviously not going to be the same as theirs. — Isaac

This is such a strange perspective. Leftists have money too, so does that mean the poor Trump supporters of Appalachia should take up the use of force to prevent their region from being associated with political enemies?

We fund leftist representatives, and given they have more money and platforms than the whining right wing masses, the same argument can easily apply from their perspective.

It sounds like your position derives from a deeply seated dissatisfaction with the "status quo", which makes you willing to forego democracy and the rule of law in order to bring about change, but if Shapiro is high on your list of enemies regarding "the status quo", then I think you're sorely mistaken (and as I have been saying since the beginning, responding to the likes of Shapiro with force almost always backfires by giving them attention and by apparently fulfilling his self-trolling prophecies of "cultural marxism" and the like).

So yes, an even playing field and fair rules of engagement are very important to any adversarial system, but I think what we too often take for granted the playing field and rules we currently have which are neither even nor fair. They are stacked massively in favour of the institutions of the status quo. — Isaac

Which status quo?

In my view, Shapiro does not represent the status quo (evidenced by the fact that corporate PR departments wont touch him with a 39 & 1/2 foot pole). The status quo is more money for more money, and unless we have some kind of massive economic reform there's going to be no change to the economic plights of the middle and lower classes of all colors and creeds. The Besos and the Zucherbergs of the world claim to be progressive, but they act like psychopaths in the way they manage their ultra-powerful corporations. The Koch brothers are one thing, with their spider-web like funding of propaganda, but a corporation that can fundamentally control the landscape of our collective psychology, or extort entire nations for exorbitant profits by threatening to withhold their crucial business, are problems of an entirely different magnitude.

Shapiro, to me, is like one of those annoying midges whose high-pitched buzz is too close to our ears, but Facebook et al. is the swamp in our front yard that generates them in the first place (and worse). We need reform of such magnitude that fighting these polemic and niche battles with the likes of Shapiro or Paglia would be a waste of time even if the left knew how fight them successfully. But by constantly defining other political groups as the enemy, and giving up all hope of cooperation or compromise, we're simply dividing and conquering ourselves.

In my view, Shapiro does not represent the status quo (evidenced by the fact that corporate PR departments wont touch him with a 39 & 1/2 foot pole). The status quo is more money for more money, and unless we have some kind of massive economic reform there's going to be no change to the economic plights of the middle and lower classes of all colors and creeds. The Besos and the Zucherbergs of the world claim to be progressive, but they act like psychopaths in the way they manage their ultra-powerful corporations. The Koch brothers are one thing, with their spider-web like funding of propaganda, but a corporation that can fundamentally control the landscape of our collective psychology, or extort entire nations for exorbitant profits by threatening to withhold their crucial business, are problems of an entirely different magnitude. — VagabondSpectre

I say this as a person who spends far too much of their time on the internet, but I say it with conviction.

The commodification of discourse comes along with the equation of discourse with politics. When one establishes a marketplace of ideas, attention is the currency, and attention generates revenue; it also generates more of itself. Along with content curation, this encourages clickbait both algorithmically through internet architectures of persuasion and emotionally by appealing to one's position in discourse and thereby retroactively identifying it (see previous post).

The overall social architecture that leads to commodified discourse is one where the items in it are marketable content, and labour is done to catch the eyes of your (largely involuntarily assigned) consumer base. That is to say, we're all working for Facebook and Twitter now.

This requires a coupling of ad-broker information gatekeepers with the conditions of possibility for expression; if Heidegger were still alive today, he might've said 'Twitter speaks man!' or 'Facebook is the House of Being'. This is true insofar as the conditions for expressing an opinion or otherwise reacting/contributing to public discourse must be done through an interface which can only exist so long as your opinions and potential expressions are bought and sold. Of course, this comes along with the alienated series of images we all know and love, for discretisation allows information to be sold by the unit.

What facilitates this, and accelerates the process of turning humans into retrojected consumer identities, are the algorithms which curate content exposure based on advertising/consumer profiles. That these consumer profiles can be of (or correlate with) political identity manifests in the troubling pigeonholing of expressions during the discourse which concerns itself with the norms of expression and social conduct.

Most of this is severed from institutional levers, and it is in the interest of those who enjoy meetings behind closed doors for there to be channels for expression of political foment alienated from actual political mobilisation and logistics. In terms of emergent strategy and management of political activity, social media functions like a heat sink for political zeal, trapping people into political consumer identities which are alienated from their own political interests, and alienated from other consumer identities in a way which generates more attention (and thus more revenue). Conflict is lucrative, so make speech a battlefield.

The Vampire Castle is more than the reduction of productive thought to reactionary clickbait, it's a festering wound in the prospect of political organisation along shared interest. It substitutes a representation for what it represents; the representation of the political is equated with the politics of representation.

That is to say, politics tout court.

The Vampire Castle is more than the reduction of productive thought to reactionary clickbait, it's a festering wound in the prospect of political organisation along shared interest. It substitutes a representation for what it represents; the representation of the political is equated with the politics of representation.

That is to say, politics tout court — fdrake

So how do we leave the vampire castle and move away from this virtual-real-politik?

How can we mature while trapped in the fun-house?

It seems like a catch-22: We need self-control to be able to coherently organize and institute reform and accountability measures, but reform and accountability measures are about the only thing that could help us regain our self-control and democratic composure in the first place.

Quite a few outrageously uncharitable (mis)readings from my comment on a Koch Foundation funding a series of articles on campus free speech in a national publication. I said this was "incredible" for two reasons. The first is that The Atlantic, over the course of several years, have published multiple articles on campus speech and protests, or how college students are pussies or whatever. Not only has this subject been routinely discussed and debated for decades, but more relevantly, is widely overblown today, so it's wondrous that despite being perennially topical, it is constantly treated as an emerging crisis that should the upmost concern for the well-being of America.

Second, encapsulated by @StreetlightX's point, is that the Koch Foundation is funding projects that magnify issues that are ultimately exaggerated in order to shape what is debated in the public sphere. Issues that are discussed on a national, well-respected publication is necessarily a zero-sum game. One conversation regarding a societal problem is platformed at the expense of another. It is given prerogative over other issues that plague society. This is even more true when issue is serialized. And the debate over campus speech is typically positioned as a problem generated by "regressive" Leftist students. Despite @ssu 's continued spurning of the Koch Brother's extremely well-documented influence in politics via "covert operations" the objective of which is to "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action". Often known as the "Kochtopus", the ultimate end goal has been to deregulate their industry and maximize their profits by promoting libertarian talking points. There's no conspiracy, it's merely capitalists using their capital to ensure they can continue to generate more capital by shifting what the public is discussing (viz. that it is not focused on progressive taxation, universal healthcare, regulation, worker rights, etc.), funding think tanks to promote libertarian political philosophy, donating money, dark or overt, to Republican politicians and their campaigns, while also, as @csalisbury noted here, hoping that continuously promoting conversation around campus protest moves centrists closer to the right.

As per my further comment on how campus speech issues have become a way to enhance one's public profile, this is true for both individuals ( and even Universities). The steps are fairly simple. Call yourself a provocateur and tour college campuses with lectures titled "Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes", or "The Dangerous Faggot". Then, when you inevitably face backlash because students aren't thrilled their college has decided to waste money on you visiting to discuss things like why "Muslims shouldn't be allowed in the USA" or that "feminism is worse than cancer", you can write about your traumatic experience, or have others write about you, on how the Left is so deeply intolerant and totalitarian.

or have others write about you, on how the Left is so deeply intolerant and totalitarian. — Maw

Mmm, the best part! Watching cherub-faced liberal dupes then vomit out defenses of free-speech in response (oh so enlightened, oh so sophisticated), while playing right into the hands of those happy to watch them safeguard their dirty work. And you don't even have to pay them. They'll do it out of the sanctity their own rightous good-guy soooo-not-mainstream convictions. An unpaid force of mercenary enablers. It's a maddeningly effective cycle.

If you mean like this, sure. Cold war people may have gone beyond that, but the poor have demonstrated a strong willingness to vote against their own interests in our time. And a couple of billionaires have come forward, exposing and complaining about the way the system is supporting them at the expense of others. This isn't Cold War in other words.

I hope you are feeling better now.

Which specific institutions enabled Shapiro? — VagabondSpectre

Publishers, corporations supporting advert-funded media like Breibart and YouTube, and funding foundations like the David Horowitz Freedom Centre.

Shapiro basically clawed his way to notoriety over the last decade through mostly his own effort. I'm not aware of any major reason for his success other than his hard work and his ideas. — VagabondSpectre

Really? So, the publishers published his books purely out of recognition of his hard work and ideas, and not becausethey thought the books would earn them a pack of money? Breibart made him editor purely because of his hard work, and would have done so even if their corporate advertisers were opposed to it?

the way he sings it allows him to go viral; he seems to be mostly self-made... — VagabondSpectre

This is what you're not seeing. The first part of this coupling is not some naturally occurring state of affairs. It is a deliberate structure. There is a reason why Shapiro 'singing' the way he does goes viral, and some dry climate scientist talking about ocean heat-stores doesn't. Its not random, it's designed that way (largely but not exclusively, to generate income for the platforms concerned).

This means that it is simply impossible to promote some messages (mostly moderate, or anti-commercial ones) in the way Shapiro can promote his. It's not a level playing field.

But what will we say when a large group of Trump supporters shows up to shut down one of our progressive events? — VagabondSpectre

I'm not really talking about the sort of progressive event that Trump supporters might turn up to shut down. I'm talking about the dull, but factual communication of things like economic policy, climate science.... Trump supporters don't have to turn up to shut these messages down. They they're already shut down. Who wants to publish a news story about the fact that the poor are still just as poor as they always were? Who wants to tweet about a rally to encourage the same economic policy we've all know is probably best in the long term but still haven't done yet? Who's going to advertise and provide commercial support for the message that we should all just buy less, including from our kind sponsor?

These messages already have their means of being shut down - lack of funding, lack of interest, lack of media support.

Shapiro can't be combated by these means, he has the funding, has the media support, has the interest. So do we just allow the unlevelled field?

Your justification seems to be that wealthy individuals and corporations are able to purchase political influence, and therefore wealth inequality warrants the use of force as an equalizer. — VagabondSpectre

To an extent, yes. Though I wouldn't advocate extreme violence, but that's not because I think the other side will follow suit, it's because avoidance of extreme violence is one of the things I'd be standing for in the first place. It'd be like using racism to combat a racist.

The problem with this is that there is wealth being spent on both ends of the political spectrum (often by the same groups), so the use of violence on one side also justifies the use of violence by the other side. — VagabondSpectre

Your making a presumption about whose 'side' I'm arguing in favour of. I disagree with a substantial proportion of the student protestors, as is clear if you've read my comments about Paglia. I'm arguing in favour of the principle that unless we level the playing field, then it is unreasonable to expect one side to limit its tactics and allow the other to keep all its weapons unfettered. If both sides have equal access to all the same weapons, then great, but that is simply not the case. The generic 'left' might have some money behind them. The generic 'right' undoubtedly has more, but the specific "this is my campus and I don't want you rabble-rousing on it" are not funded by anyone.

Is it really fair to assume that Shapiro has nothing rational or original to say, and that since he is only rabble-rousing to gather physical force, we ought to use physical force against him/them? — VagabondSpectre

Yes, basically. I'm of the view that rational argument proceeds from shared premises, and that the conclusions can only be rationally countered on the basis of the inferences drawn between premises. One cannot rationally discuss the premises themselves unless they are rational conclusions drawn fro higher order shared premises, and were merely being assumed for the sake of argument.

Shapiro has been demonstrated on dozens of occasions to work from premises which are factually incorrect. He makes frequent assertions about moral rights and wrongs (which cannot be rationally countered) and the vast majority of what I've heard has been statements about states of affairs, not rational inferences. I may be exposed to an unfortunate selection of his work, but thus far I've encountered very little to argue against other than to say "no".

The radical left created the alt-right. — VagabondSpectre

That may or may not be the case, but I'm not talking about either group.

It sounds like your position derives from a deeply seated dissatisfaction with the "status quo", which makes you willing to forego democracy and the rule of law in order to bring about change — VagabondSpectre

Not a million miles off. I don't vote and I don't obey the law, so I suppose you're right in those respects, but I think your and my deninitions of what constitutes the 'status quo' may differ radically. Ben Shapiro is just as much a part of the 'status quo' I'm referring to as Facebook, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders are.

Csalisbury's totally accurate description of you above (and me) are so spot on that it's now just entertainment for others for us to continue this extremely stereotypical debate.

Despite ssu 's continued spurning of the Koch Brother's extremely well-documented influence in politics via "covert operations" the objective of which is to "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action". Often known as the "Kochtopus", the ultimate end goal has been to deregulate their industry and maximize their profits by promoting libertarian talking points. There's no conspiracy, it's merely capitalists using their capital to ensure they can continue to generate more capital by shifting what the public is discussing — Maw

Your utter inability to see how exactly similar your argumentation is to the right-wing hysterical outrage against Soros, even with similar figures of speech like reference to an octopus with it's tentacles everywhere and 'covert operations', is so telling that it's funny. Just change the names and change it from libertarian talking points to liberal/leftist talking points and it's exactly what you find among Breitbart following Trump fans.

Like to berries... or more correctly two strangling octopuses:

The steps are fairly simple. Call yourself a provocateur and tour college campuses with lectures titled "Why Do Lesbians Fake So Many Hate Crimes", or "The Dangerous Faggot". — Maw

Don't forget sending emails like 'urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween'. Oh those devious ways the evil alt-right gets innocent students to play along and get that angry response they have planned for!

Of course the campus nonsense hasn't been picked up in mainstream news as it hasn't become Trump's trump card like the kneeling NFL players or flag burning at the time of Bush senior (if I remember correctly), but that doesn't apparently matter.

So how do we leave the vampire castle and move away from this virtual-real-politik? — VagabondSpectre

Honestly? You don't. Social media has great potential to allow international organisation.

You also have to recognise that people who are actually on the far right don't give much of a shit whether their ideas are right or wrong, they care a lot more about whether people are broadcasting their message for recruitment purposes, and care a lot about marketing. This is part of why you find so many liberals defending the far right, or assholes like Shapiro and Milleanopolusapalalalais or whatever the fuck that guy's name is, not because they're defending the content of the ideas - but because they care that they are possible to express.

All you need to do is pay lip service to individual freedoms, and it is only lip service - remember these people actually want most of us not to exist -, being curtailed by 'hordes of irrational leftists'... then you get liberals defending the right from a left wing conspiracy.

A liberal won't even realise they're doing this, most of the time. This focus on optics and the understanding of viral marketing, as well as playing on structural weaknesses in liberal discourse (even liberal politics), is why the right is disproportionately influential on the internet.

Even if it's not a far right ideologue, the liberal sympathy for freedom of speech is being leveraged by these goons to get lots of money and idea exposure.

Remember, protests, deplatforming, critique are just as much a part of free speech as anti-protests, platforming and political program advancement. What matters is who, why and how much power they can mobilise.

I should probably say though, the suspicions I raised in the previous post aren't always appropriate. The forum here, for example, is exactly the kind of space where nuance thrives. What I really wanted to emphasise is that instead of lamenting the lack of nuance in reactionary media, we instead treat it as a medium that nuance suffers in and go from there.

Really? So, the publishers published his books purely out of recognition of his hard work and ideas, and not becausethey thought the books would earn them a pack of money? Breibart made him editor purely because of his hard work, and would have done so even if their corporate advertisers were opposed to it? — Isaac

I think Shapiro was the youngest ever syndicated columnist, and he's been a political pundit for over a decade (he's written 10 books since age 17). Strictly speaking, publishers will only publish if they think they stand to make money, and Brietbart hired him because of his notoriety (where political alignment is a pre-requisite)

I'm not really talking about the sort of progressive event that Trump supporters might turn up to shut down. I'm talking about the dull, but factual communication of things like economic policy, climate science.... Trump supporters don't have to turn up to shut these messages down. They they're already shut down. Who wants to publish a news story about the fact that the poor are still just as poor as they always were? Who wants to tweet about a rally to encourage the same economic policy we've all know is probably best in the long term but still haven't done yet? Who's going to advertise and provide commercial support for the message that we should all just buy less, including from our kind sponsor?

These messages already have their means of being shut down - lack of funding, lack of interest, lack of media support.

Shapiro can't be combated by these means, he has the funding, has the media support, has the interest. So do we just allow the unlevelled field? — Isaac

Climate science and economic policy are hot topics of late, even in some right wing circles. "The New Green Deal" might interest you. Bernie is running on a campaign of corporate accountability and economic reform, which I don't take as insignificant.

You're making it seem like Breitbart, Monsanto, et al.represent the average political agenda, when in reality they're political pariahs (In different ways). They certainly do represent the agenda of profit, but that agenda is somewhat a-political in that they don't care which politician gets elected (or which editors they hire), so long as they support beneficial policies for corporations (or in the case of Breitbart and its editors, so long as they bring notoriety and clicks, which is the product they sell to advertisers). Broadly speaking, there's a new corporate sustainability movement that is driving just about every major corporation to develop sustainability/green initiatives, but this is largely just a PR measure in response to rising public concern. Corporations don't actually want to spend money on minimizing pollution or giving back to the community because it affects their bottom line, but they're learning that we'll damage their bottom line even more through social sanctions if they do not. In reality, if they are able to do so, corporations will claim to spearhead and represent sustainability initiatives while actually subverting them (they derail our reform movements with superficial bull-shit). I just find it strange that you view Shapiro as a hero of corporate interest when most of what he says has very little to do with policies affecting corporate profits (he deals in petty moralizing mostly). I'm much more worried about the Zuckerbergs, the Musks, the Besos, the Dorseys, the Cooks, and the rest, who have the gall to pretend that we can trust them or that they're looking out for our interests; that if given the choice between profits and the right thing, they'll do the right thing. That's not how they got where they are, and it's not where they're going, even if they're self-deluded enough to believe it.

The real difference between our views regarding Shapiro is that I don't see Shapiro as having wide-spread "media support" beyond the fact that algorithms favor his polemics. In the realm of mainstream news, Shapiro and his ideas are somewhat ignored and avoided, where his best exposure (that I know of) comes from videos uploaded to Youtube ("take-down" or "destroy-the-libs" videos) which are vastly persuasive to the philosophically and politically uninitiated. Whether I like to admit it or not, Shapiro is an amazingly persuasive and attention-getting speaker (that's his value), and while he may be yet another in a long line of talking-shit-heads, somehow we've got to confront the persuasive elements of his rhetoric directly. Force and censorship simply won't work against him (it energizes his existing base), so really the only option is to beat him at his own game. It's a lame and difficult task, but it is an absolutely necessary one.

To an extent, yes. Though I wouldn't advocate extreme violence, but that's not because I think the other side will follow suit, it's because avoidance of extreme violence is one of the things I'd be standing for in the first place. It'd be like using racism to combat a racist. — Isaac

I think civil protest and disobedience is almost always more effective (even when you're fighting an enemy that has all the power (perhaps especially then)). But the other issue with the force approach (I'm starting to sound like a broken record) is that it will just engender the use of force by the other side. In other words, it escalates our conflict beyond what words, ideas, and reason can overcome, and more and more force becomes strategically necessary. As with the adversarial system we use in courts, if one litigant crosses the isle to assault the other side, there's a significantly reduced chance of the proceedings leading to a useful outcome. Maybe it's fair to say that the other side as already crossed the isle and uses unjust force against us, but even if that is the case, I still think it would be more effective not to reciprocate that force. Taking the higher moral ground against force and violence through a civil disobedience approach requires real sacrifice, but it actually works.

Yes, basically. I'm of the view that rational argument proceeds from shared premises, and that the conclusions can only be rationally countered on the basis of the inferences drawn between premises. One cannot rationally discuss the premises themselves unless they are rational conclusions drawn fro higher order shared premises, and were merely being assumed for the sake of argument.

Shapiro has been demonstrated on dozens of occasions to work from premises which are factually incorrect. He makes frequent assertions about moral rights and wrongs (which cannot be rationally countered) and the vast majority of what I've heard has been statements about states of affairs, not rational inferences. I may be exposed to an unfortunate selection of his work, but thus far I've encountered very little to argue against other than to say "no". — Isaac

Where he selects faulty premises, challenge them (in the most persuasive manner you can). Shapiro is highly practiced, and countering his gish gallop ain't easy, but it's doable. Many people here think that if you're engaging Shapiro in the first place then you've already lost, but if countering his actual rhetoric is of value, then someone has inevitably got to do it. The corporate status quo that I'm more concerned with is somewhat removed from Shapiro's sphere of influence (I'm open to corrections on this point) which is why I don't view him to be quite as pernicious as some suggest, but if I'm wrong, then directly addressing and overcoming his rhetoric is of even higher importance.

Not a million miles off. I don't vote and I don't obey the law, so I suppose you're right in those respects, but I think your and my deninitions of what constitutes the 'status quo' may differ radically. Ben Shapiro is just as much a part of the 'status quo' I'm referring to as Facebook, Hillary Clinton, or Bernie Sanders are. — Isaac

I think is shows the most contrast between our positions. I'm still willing to gamble on politicians that I have more trust in (Bernie being infinitely more trustworthy than Hillary). In a sense, Shapiro is like Facebook's useful idiot in the way he polarizes us all (nudging us into disparate political boxes that represent powerfully accurate market segments) in a way that makes it easier to exploit our political angst with learning algorithms. I still hold out hope that governments will be able to control these wildly powerful corporations (and mitigate their recklessness), or else we're in for a very dystopian future indeed.

I would describe myself as yet reformist rather than revolutionary.

Honestly? You don't. Social media has great potential to allow international organisation.

You also have to recognise that people who are actually on the far right don't give much of a shit whether their ideas are right or wrong, they care a lot more about whether people are broadcasting their message for recruitment purposes, and care a lot about marketing. This is part of why you find so many liberals defending the far right, or assholes like Shapiro and Milleanopolusapalalalais or whatever the fuck that guy's name is, not because they're defending the content of the ideas - but because they care that they are possible to express. — fdrake

I think this holds true for hardened figures within the alt right who care more about growing their following than they do about being right (Richard Spencer is a primary example of this; I don't think he believes a word of what he says, it's just his meal/fame ticket), but the people that they recruit are persuaded by the specific rhetoric. If we can't sway alt-right leaders, at least we can sway their followers (and we really ought to try).

All you need to do is pay lip service to individual freedoms, and it is only lip service - remember these people actually want most of us not to exist -, being curtailed by 'hordes of irrational leftists'... then you get liberals defending the right from a left wing conspiracy.

A liberal won't even realise they're doing this, most of the time. This focus on optics and the understanding of viral marketing, as well as playing on structural weaknesses in liberal discourse (even liberal politics), is why the right is disproportionately influential on the internet.

Even if it's not a far right ideologue, the liberal sympathy for freedom of speech is being leveraged by these goons to get lots of money and idea exposure. — fdrake

I view the alt-right-at-large as less of a marketing mastermind, and more as a lucky opportunist. Elements within the broad Left do have some significant ideological issues, and they make for more fodder and fuel than Shapiro and his ilk could ever exhaust. Figures in the left are generally too vulnerable to controversy, so when it comes to the alt-right in particular there's almost never any direct exchange. People like Shapiro who are considered alt-right-adjacent are indeed getting exorbitant exposure, but I don't think they could sustain it unless they were somehow appealing to a large number of people (especially the digitized youth). Given the current strength of appealing to identity (and given the current demographics of America), it's not at all surprising to me that the left is losing its broad appeal compared to Shapiro the rebel.

Remember, protests, deplatforming, critique are just as much a part of free speech as anti-protests, platforming and political program advancement. What matters is who, why and how much power they can mobilise. — fdrake

I should probably say though, the suspicions I raised in the previous post aren't always appropriate. The forum here, for example, is exactly the kind of space where nuance thrives. What I really wanted to emphasise is that instead of lamenting the lack of nuance in reactionary media, we instead treat it as a medium that nuance suffers in and go from there. — fdrake

I'm very reluctant to embrace the death of nuance in any political arena. I just can't accept that we've come back to Jacksonian rabble-rousing, and that it's either rabble or get rabbled. In mediums like Twitter it inherently can't be otherwise, but I think embracing that approach will blur and bleed into settings where nuance should be the focus. For example, our forum has probably seen a rise in ideological grand-standing in place of dialogue, and on university campuses (where nuance is what they're there to learn) I think it's equally important that ideas be met with ideas rather than a mobilization of force. We're better off abandoning media like Facebook and Twitter entirely as meaningful political arenas.

I wholeheartedly support protests, but not when they use force to interfere with the rights of others.

Don't forget sending emails like 'urging Yale University students to think critically about an official set of guidelines on costumes to avoid at Halloween'. Oh those devious ways the evil alt-right gets innocent students to play along and get that angry response they have planned for!

Of course the campus nonsense hasn't been picked up in mainstream news as it hasn't become Trump's trump card like the kneeling NFL players or flag burning at the time of Bush senior (if I remember correctly), but that doesn't apparently matter. — ssu

If you took five seconds to Google it, you would see that articles about the Yale Halloween costume controversy were published in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, Time Magazine, Slate, etc.. That a minor concern affecting no more than 6,000 students was discussed numerous times in a variety of well-respected publications demonstrates how absurdly perverted The Discourse is.

Your utter inability to see how exactly similar your argumentation is to the right-wing hysterical outrage against Soros, even with similar figures of speech like reference to an octopus with it's tentacles everywhere and 'covert operations', is so telling that it's funny. Just change the names and change it from libertarian talking points to liberal/leftist talking points and it's exactly what you find among Breitbart following Trump fans. — ssu

ssu, you demonstrably have severe reading difficulties and prefer to resort to crass 'both siderism' in lieu of anything beyond a nine-year-old level of intelligence. Thanks to this enlightened centrism ideology your brain keeps churning out, like a rusting meat grinder, you seem to be utterly unable to comprehend that there is a big distinction between the network operations as exposed by a "Breitbart following Trump fan" and by an actual investigative journalist who has worked at the New Yorker for over 20 years and who has received a wide array of awards for her work, including the George Polk Prize, the John Chancellor Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Goldsmith Book Prize; the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, two Helen Bernstein Book Awards for Excellence in Journalism, the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, the Sidney Hillman Prize, the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, the James Aronson Award for social justice journalism, the Toner Prize for political reporting, the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence, and the Frances Perkins Prize for Courage, and whose critically acclaimed 500+ page book, Dark Money, which was a finalist for numerous awards including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the LA Times Book Prize, the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Shortlisted for the Lukas Prize, reveals how the Koch Brothers have spent 40+ years pouring money into organizations, think tanks, universities, politicians, and now serialized articles on The Atlantic covering topics that have profound and immediate effect on the average American...Camille Paglia getting fired because she said a University shouldn't tolerate a rape accusation from a women if occurred over six months ago, in order to, in David Koch's own words, "bring about social change" through a "vertically and horizontally integrated" strategy, starting "from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action".

No, instead your extremely broken brain has decided that these two are actually equivocal, because apparently any issue the Left brings up automatically requires an ersatz right-wing counterpart in a shit-brained attempt to negate it.