Bizarre pre-dawn experience...

After writing the last post, about a WaPo column by Alyssa Rosenberg, I clicked on my "Alyssa Rosenberg" tag. It only had 2 other posts. One, from a year ago, was to another WaPo column ("Hillary Clinton and I are done"), but the other was from 2009, about whether long novels are still worth reading. It was a clip from a Bloggingheads diavlog, Rosenberg with Matt Yglesias, and I needed to fix some code, so I clicked through to the Bloggingheads website. I saw that there was a new diavlog with Bob Wright and Christina Hoff Sommers. I'm interested in that, but it goes on for more than 2 hours, so I decided to click on one of the subtopics that jumped out, "Bob denies Christina’s charge of 'benevolent sexism.'" Here's the clip...



Hoff Sommers criticized Wright for "benevolent sexism" because of the way he'd diavlogged with a feminist philosopher. Instead of going at it with her, he babied the female philosopher with softball questions. Okay. Wright says he wants to defend himself and: "I've done dialogues with Ann Althouse that got so contentious that she accused me of being sexist in the other sense, of being too hard on her."

Bizarre. I'm just idly clicking around. I didn't expect to hear my own name. And now I feel called upon to correct the record. I didn't say it was sexist to be "too hard" or "contentious." I don't like that characterization, and now I feel sort of nauseated. Good lord, what all do people say about you when you're not around? Stumbling into one example, it makes me wonder! What a strange world!

Wright was referring to this diavlog with me from February 2017, which was the last time I talked with him. Watch this clip and you may see why I'm annoyed to be characterized as having called him sexist for being too hard on me. What's sexist is that he treats me differently and with far more hostility than he treats the men who engage vigorously and give him a hard time. He's never had me back on the show after this:



If you watch that clip, you'll see that I'm talking about how podcast listeners might not want to hear yelling. Wright volunteers that every time he talks to me he ends up yelling. "9 out of 10 of my podcast conversations do not involve this level of voice raising, however, all of the ones involving you do." That's what makes me want to do feminist analysis, which I introduce in the form of asking him "What's your analysis of that?" He says he doesn't know, so I tell him what my husband says: "He says that you should at least pretend to be enjoying speaking to me and that you should show appreciation for me and, whether you actually feel it or not, to make it feel like this is a fun, enjoyable conversation, this is a good place to be as opposed to an intense struggle."

I'm really talking about the aesthetics of radio at that point, the subjective experience of the brain between the earbuds, the listener. Wright repeats that he usually doesn't raise his voice, and I say, "but you do with me" and suggest again that it could be "analyzed." I remind him that I was the only woman on Bloggingheads in the early days. I say, "To some extent, I feel I'm being badgered and bullied because I'm a woman (and because you perceive me as conservative, even though I'm not)." I never use the word "sexism," but at 89:00, he tells me I've accused him of sexism.

Anyway, my objection wasn't to tough opposition and hardcore debate, it's about getting yelled at and treated with disrespect. Something about me triggers him, and he came right out and admitted it, but he resisted any sort of analysis of why. I think it's shallow (or repressive) not to want to consider whether there's a gender element to why another person is aggravating you so much. I'd go on the show — back when I got invited — and, as you can see, I'm smiling and really into the joys of conversation. Why is he yelling at me?!

"Althouse also wrote a blog post about how free speech is much, much more than just a 1st Amendment protection."

"I've tried twice in earnest to find it, but the 'free speech' tags are endless," wrote Browndog in in the comments to yesterday's post about Facebook. That post ended with these 2 questions, "What about the freedom of speech of users of Facebook? Is Facebook unduly censoring speech based on political viewpoint?"

In that post, I linked to a post of mine from March 27, 2011 — "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News" — so that shouldn't be what Browndog means. There I said:

Back on February 2, I wrote “When did the left turn against free speech?” and used some clips from a Bloggingheads I did with Bob Wright, in which I talked about free speech values and rejected Bob's attempt to restrict the idea of free speech to the constitutional right to free speech, which only deals with the problem of government restrictions on speech. The text of my post, however, doesn't restate our disagreement about the meaning of the term, and Bob emailed me to complain. And then last Friday, I did another Bloggingheads, and Bob brought up his beef about the definition of the term again. So I invited him to give me permission to publish the whole email exchange, and he agreed, so here goes...

That's a long post, but I think this is closest to what Browndog was looking for:

My standard free speech answer is going to be in favor of expression, access to expression, and more speech, not repression of speech and not cutting off conversations that are still in play because they offend some other people who think the conversation should have already ended....

So if Google or Facebook, private corporations, took steps to squelch free speech[,] that would just not even make sense to you as a concept because they can't affect free speech since they are not the government? If people organized and regularly showed up at events to shout down speakers they disapproved of, it would be incoherent to urge them to respect free speech[?]...

As for the right to free speech, the First Amendment says that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech." Just on that text alone, you can see that there are 2 different things "the freedom of speech" and the specific direction to Congress not to abridge it. Now, if you say freedom of speech is nothing more than the direction to government not to abridge the freedom of speech, try to picture what the text would need to be: "Congress shall make no law... abridging Congress's proscription against abridging the freedom of speech" which would make no sense at all. The freedom of speech is something which we enjoy, and the Constitution bars Congress's interference with it.

Maybe that is what Browndog had in mind, but I looked through the archive. (My method was to click on the Facebook tag, then search the page for "free.") Here's what I came up with, from oldest to newest:

January 3, 2009: There was Facebook group called "I Wonder How Quickly I Can Find 1,000,000 People Who Support Israel" that, noting that the First Amendment only limits government, pressured Facebook to enforce its own Terms of Use that barred "any content that we deem to be harmful, threatening, unlawful, defamatory, infringing, abusive, inflammatory, harassing, vulgar, obscene, fraudulent, invasive of privacy or publicity rights, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable." I said:

Sorry. My free speech values extend a lot farther than what's protected by the First Amendment. And I think Facebook's Terms of Use are horrifyingly restrictive. Censoring everything "hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable"? Ridiculous! I'd rather join a Facebook group called "Facebook's Terms of Use Are an Affront to Free Speech."

January 16, 2015: "After the [Paris] massacre, Mark Zuckerberg justifies Facebook censorship":

"It wasn’t just a terrorist attack about just trying to do some damage and make people afraid and hurt people. This was specifically about people’s freedom of expression and ability to say what they want. That really gets to the core of what Facebook and the internet are, I think, and what we’re all here to do. We really stand up and try to make it so that everyone can have as much of a voice as possible,” [Zuckerberg] said....

When I started to read Zuckerberg's remarks, I thought they were going to go somewhere else. I thought he was going to say that by creating a more friendly environment within Facebook, more people would be encouraged to join and participate, and that would ultimately provide more speech for more people. The nasty, ugly speech would be silenced, but it could go elsewhere, and he was trying to facilitate speech by those who feel intimated or bullied or offended by the speech of others. But Zuckerberg is only justifying Facebook censorship as a response to repression coming from foreign governments.

April 16, 2016: "Internal poll at Facebook: 'What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?'"

It is true that Facebook would be protected by the First Amendment, even as it screwed with the freedom of speech of over a billion human beings. What's tremendously important here is to maintain pressure on Facebook to respect our freedom. We don't have a legal right to assert against Facebook, but that is absolutely not a reason to give up and let Facebook do what it wants to repress speech. We have moral, political, social, and economic power, and we should assert it. We assert it through — of all things — speech. It can be very effective... which is why we care about free speech in the first place. Even where you don't have a legal right, as long as you are still speaking, you have the power of speech, and the urge to repress it occurs because the speech is effective. The trick is to use speech to convince the would-be repressers not to repress speech.

November 15, 2016: "Facebook, don't even try to censor fake news. You can't draw that line, and you shouldn't want to":

I absolutely do not trust Facebook to decide what's fake and what's not fake, so I'm with Zuckerberg here... The chance that such a power would be used in a politically biased way is approximately 100%. I don't know how much Zuckerberg is really committed to the freedom of speech, but I think he knows if Facebook started deeming some political stories "fake" and taking action against them, Facebook would be accused of bias and censorship and it wouldn't be good for Facebook, the business.... Those of us who care about freedom of speech should try to make it vividly apparent to the people of Facebook that censorship will hurt them economically. You can't trust them to believe in freedom of speech. They've already got a heated-up, self-righteous band of insiders who think censorship is the cutting edge.

ADDED: I realize that my search method left out everything that didn't include Facebook, which is probably a lot. One reader emailed to point me to...

Camille Paglia says the Duck Dynasty debate really is about freedom of speech.

She said:

"I speak with authority here because I was openly gay before the 'Stonewall Rebellion,' when it cost you something to be so... And I personally feel as a libertarian that people have the right to free thought and free speech. In a democratic country, people have the right to be homophobic as they have the right to support homosexuality — as I 100 percent do. If people are basing their views against gays on the Bible, again they have a right to religious freedom there … to express yourself in a magazine in an interview -– this is the level of punitive PC, utterly fascist, utterly Stalinist, OK, that my liberal colleagues in the Democratic Party and on college campuses have supported and promoted over the last several decades. It's the whole legacy of the free speech 1960's that have been lost by my own party."

Meanwhile, some liberals are making the predictable narrowly legalistic point that freedom of speech has only to do with rights held against the government. This is a point I've strongly objected to over the years, most obviously, in debating the liberal Bob Wright (see "When did the left turn against freedom of speech?" and "[W]hat free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News"). Why is the left taking the narrow view of the concept of freedom? It's a general principle, not something you save for your friends. Like Paglia, I remember the broad 1960s era commitment to free speech. There was a special zeal to protect those who said outrageous things. Today, we're back to the kind of repression that in the 60s seemed to belong to the 1950s. What the hell happened?

"Wright’s is a Buddhism almost completely cleansed of supernaturalism. His Buddha is conceived as a wise man and self-help psychologist..."

"... not as a divine being—no miraculous birth, no thirty-two distinguishing marks of the godhead (one being a penis sheath), no reincarnation. This is a pragmatic Buddhism, and Wright’s pragmatism, as in his previous books, can touch the edge of philistinism. Nearly all popular books about Buddhism are rich in poetic quotation and arresting aphorisms, those ironic koans that are part of the (Zen) Buddhist décor—tales of monks deciding that it isn’t the wind or the flag that’s waving in the breeze but only their minds. Wright’s book has no poetry or paradox anywhere in it. Since the poetic-comic side of Buddhism is one of its most appealing features, this leaves the book a little short on charm. Yet, if you never feel that Wright is telling you something profound or beautiful, you also never feel that he is telling you something untrue. Direct and unambiguous, tracing his own history in meditation practice—which eventually led him to a series of weeklong retreats and to the intense study of Buddhist doctrine—he makes Buddhist ideas and their history clear. Perhaps he makes the ideas too clear. Buddhist thinkers tend to bridge contradictions with a smile and a paradox and a wave of the hand. 'Things exist but they are not real' is a typical dictum from the guru Mu Soeng, in his book on the Heart Sutra. 'You don’t have to believe it, but it’s true' is another famous guru’s smiling advice about the reincarnation doctrine. This nimble-footed doubleness may indeed hold profound existential truths; it also provides an all-purpose evasion of analysis...."

From "What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t/Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism," by Adam Gopnick in The New Yorker. He's reviewing "Why Buddhism Is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment," by Robert Wright (AKA Bob Wright of Bloggingheads).

Here's Bob talking to Mickey Kaus (about 10 days ago) about "mindful resistance," and Mickey says he doesn't even know what mindfulness but people tell him "it's Buddhism stripped of its religious aspects so it can be sold to the masses":

A hot new Bloggingheads episode.

I can't figure out how to embed it, so you have to go here.

Topics:

How bad were Milo’s pedophilia comments? 8:21
Are evangelicals demonized? 5:40
Debating the limits of free speech 18:35
Is the media’s coverage of Trump unprofessional? 7:38
Is Trump anti-Muslim? 7:26
Ann’s “hypothetical Trumps” thought experiment 11:10
How not to oppose to Trump 3:36

ADDED: This might work:

The deplorable notion that Twitter should kick out Donald Trump.

Addressed by the NYT's Farhad Manjoo in "Twitter Has the Right to Suspend Donald Trump. But It Shouldn’t."

If you think private entities should engage in censorship because they have a legal right to do it, you should be ashamed of your lack of free speech values.

This has been a big topic of mine for a long time. I'll just refer you to:

1. "When did the left turn against free speech?"

2. "The Bob Wright/Ann Althouse email exchange about what free speech means in the context of saying Roger Ailes needs to kick Glenn Beck off Fox News."

"Well, my concern is that they are so ham-handed about it — they're so obvious about it — that it won't work."

Said Bob Wright, early last month, worrying that the media bias against Trump:



(I've blogged this clip before — here and here.)

"Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media 'to report the news fully, accurately and fairly' has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history..."

"... with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year."



Well, what did they expect when they went all in for Hillary? And now Trump is climbing in the polls — 6 points up in the new L.A. Times poll — and they've already squandered their credibility. They can't help her now. They tried too hard before. Too bad the Democratic Party didn't give us a democratic experience this time. They foisted a candidate on us, they rigged it, with the assistance of the media. And now the candidate we didn't want zombie-walks and stumbles to the finish line, and there is nothing the Party or the media can do to stir up our affection. Meanwhile, the man the media loved to hate is powering through to the Presidency, looking only stronger for all the shots he took.

As Bob Wright said to me: "Well, my concern is that they are so ham-handed about it — they're so obvious about it — that it won't work."

Ham-handed Hillary-helping, continued.

"Yes, Most Donald Trump Supporters Are Deplorable and Irredeemable," by Jonathan Chait. ("Clinton committed a gaffe because she acknowledged a reality that literally every other person in America, including Donald Trump himself, is permitted to speak aloud.")

The post title references that quote from Bob Wright: "Well, my concern is that they are so ham-handed about it — they're so obvious about it — that it won't work."

"They" = mainstream media. "It" = pro-Hillary bias.

The problem with anti-Trump bias is that the media are so "ham-handed about it... that it won't work."

Says Bob Wright (talking with me):

Bob Wright and I talk about Donald Trump.

Yes, I know, Hillary stumbled and collapsed today. You already know that. If I can think of something original to say about it later, I'll post about that. Right now, I wanted to show you this new Bloggingheads episode, which just went up. It was recorded on Friday morning, so that was before "basket of deplorables." We do talk quite a bit about Trump and the election. I'm going to watch it now, so I'll add some details in an update as I'm reminded of what we talked about.



ADDED: This is the best part, I think, about whether Trump deserves more credit than he's gotten:



ALSO: I think this is the Peter Beinart article that Bob refers to: "Trump's Immigration Policy Trap." I don't think it says what Bob claims it says. I said — as I'd already said on this blog — that it's very hard to find any direct statement from Trump that he would deport the 11 million people who are here illegally but living peaceful, settled lives. Bob says Beinart found them, but what Beinart says is:

At the second debate, on September 16... Trump had promised only to deport undocumented immigrants who are violent criminals. He had ducked Tapper’s question about the entire 11 million....

[I]n the third debate... Trump ignored the reference to deporting 11 million and focused his answer on the wall...

That's my point!

It’s not that Trump never discussed deportation during the primaries. Over the course of hundreds of interviews, he was occasionally forced to admit that, yes, he would send all the undocumented home. 

Where's the quote? I think Trump only said things like "They will go home," not that they'd be actively seized and thrown out.

But he discussed the topic as little as possible....

That's my point! 

I'm recording a Bloggingheads episode soon (with Bob Wright). He wants to talk to me about Trump.

I really don't want to be on the receiving end of a bill of particulars about Trump. I'm at my worst when I'm bored.

When you broaden the meaning of a word, Lena Dunham, can we hold you to that meaning... at least until the end of a sentence?

Calling for "new codes of conduct" on Twitter and drawing us in with the assertion that she is "experiencing violent bullying in the internet," she said:

“I think it’s important to remember that threats are more than someone saying I’m going to come to your house and I’m going to hurt you... Insulting someone’s appearance, insulting someone’s religion, or their race, you know, all of that to me constitutes a threat and I think we can make changes to how we control that dialogue on the internet without threatening our First Amendment rights.”

So, you want a broad definition for "threat," going beyond what you called "violent bullying." (I'm going to guess that "violent bullying" refers to words of violence — like "kill" and "rape" — directed at a particular individual and not restricted to a context where the target is going to need to worry that the the violence will occur.) You want "threat" to cover insults of all kinds, including the banal remarks about how somebody looks and the politically important critiques of religion. Then you want to avoid "threatening our First Amendment rights." But if I accept your meaning of the word "threat," then you are already threatening our First Amendment rights.

This word game works both ways. 

I don't know if Dunham was thinking in terms of the actual law, but she did say "First Amendment." "First Amendment" understood narrowly only refers to what the government might do to us. Since Twitter is a private company, no control of the dialogue by Twitter can threaten First Amendment rights, if we stick to the narrow idea. Therefore, we can even adopt Dunham's definition of "threat" and say there can never be a threat to First Amendment rights, no matter how restrictive of speech Twitter becomes, because our oppressor is a private corporation.

"First Amendment" is already too narrow a term for the threat under discussion. We need to say "freedom of speech." This is a topic I've discussed at length elsewhere on this blog — notably here — so I'll stop this post now.

ADDED: Here I am in March 2011 fighting hard for my position that we need to care about what private enterprises can do to our freedom of speech:

Mickey Kaus fears a future in which robots do all the work and we, consequently, have no basis for self-respect.

"Evolutionarily, we are designed for work. We are unhappy when we're not working. We become a sociopathic bachelor herd.... What do we do with all these people who have no productive work?"



ELSEWHERE: "Why Do Americans Work So Much?/The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted a society so prosperous that people would hardly have to work. But that isn’t exactly how things have played out."

The NYT looks at "Why Marco Rubio’s Chances Are Rising."

Nate Cohn writes:

A lot has changed since April, when Marco Rubio announced his presidential bid. Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin was the top candidate of mainstream conservative activists and donors. Jeb Bush seemed like a fund-raising juggernaut with natural appeal to the party’s moderate voters, who play an underrated role in the Republican primary process. Mr. Rubio, a broadly appealing candidate but the top choice of few, looked boxed out.

Today, Mr. Rubio isn’t blocked. Instead, he has a big opening....

I said it back on June 10th:



I originally embedded that clip in a post titled "The get-Rubio movement" — which called out the NYT:

We're seeing evidence of this movement this week with the NYT article "Marco Rubio’s Career Bedeviled by Financial Struggles" and last week's "Marco Rubio and His Wife Cited 17 Times for Traffic Infractions." These are ludicrously weak attacks. Rubio bought an $80,000 fishing boat (which the NYT called a "luxury speedboat") after he received an $800,000 and he chose to lease an Audi (a "luxury item") when he needed a car in 2015. And he's gotten 4 traffic tickets in 18 years. The main thing we learn from all that is that the NYT really wants to get him.

Let me take you back to May 22, when the NYT had a piece titled: "A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats."...

So view the new article in that context.

"Let's See What Republicans Learn From Losing Boehner."

A Megan McArdle column that ends:

But maybe the only way Republicans will learn their limits is by crashing into them, as the Greeks did. Maybe they need to elect someone who will try what they’ve been longing for: a full throated, take-no-prisoners approach that doesn’t bother with compromise or concession. Like the Greeks, they’ll discover that this leaves them worse off, not better. If Republicans can't see that coming -- if they can't learn from Syriza's mistake -- then they will very likely learn their lesson from President Hillary Clinton.

ADDED: McArdle did something I wouldn't do — submit to a cross-examination on the "meaning of life":

The problem of drunk-on-drunk sex.

The get-Rubio movement.

We're seeing evidence of this movement this week with the NYT article "Marco Rubio’s Career Bedeviled by Financial Struggles" and last week's "Marco Rubio and His Wife Cited 17 Times for Traffic Infractions." These are ludicrously weak attacks. Rubio bought an $80,000 fishing boat (which the NYT called a "luxury speedboat") after he received an $800,000 and he chose to lease an Audi (a "luxury item") when he needed a car in 2015. And he's gotten 4 traffic tickets in 18 years. The main thing we learn from all that is that the NYT really wants to get him.

Let me take you back to May 22, when the NYT had a piece titled: "A Hillary Clinton Match-Up With Marco Rubio Is a Scary Thought for Democrats." ("Steve Schale, the Florida strategist who wrote the 'Marco Rubio scares me' blog post, said that when he worked for the Democratic leader of the Florida House of Representatives, his boss, Dan Gelber, had a saying about Mr. Rubio’s effect on crowds, and about his sincerity: 'Young women swoon, old women pass out, and toilets flush themselves.' And Mr. Gelber himself recalled the day in Tallahassee, Fla., in 2008 when he and Mr. Rubio, then the speaker of the State House, gave their farewell speeches. He spoke first, followed by Mr. Rubio, as Mr. Gelber’s wife looked on. 'She’s sitting there weeping,' Mr. Gelber recalled, still incredulous. 'And I look up, and I mouth, ‘Are you kidding me?'")

I recorded a Bloggingheads episode with Bob Wright on the day that "Marco Rubio is scary" NYT article came out, and I used it when Bob was talking about the idea that Marco Rubio is not the right kind of Hispanic:



A bit later in that discussion, I'm invited to predict who the GOP nominee will be, and I say Rubio:

A juxtaposition.

A reader looking at this morning's Bloggingheads clips puts these 2 images together:

"I don't believe in Twitter."

The post title is a quote from me from that clip. This morning — the day after the dialogue — I'm contemplating the line to the tune of the old John Lennon song: "I don't believe in I-ching/I don't believe in Bible/I don't believe in Tarot..." etc., etc. "The dream is over...."

"I mean, the consistent absurdism...."

"And I hope the people appreciate the convincingness of my physical comedy."