Andrew Sullivan: We All Live On Campus Now
Years ago I ended up in several web-arguments with progressives making every excuse they could think of for campus PC madness. One of their most idiotic arguments was: it's just on campuses, so there's no reason to worry about it. As if the rights of students and faculty didn't matter. As if what starts on campuses doesn't spread to the rest of the world.
Well, here's Sullivan, right on the money as usual. The PC cult has now spread from campus to the rest of the cultural superstructure, and the country is--obviously--much worse for it.
[And, incidentally: if you want even more proof of how bad and widespread the problem has become, look at the train wreck that is the comments under the Sullivan piece.]
Well, here's Sullivan, right on the money as usual. The PC cult has now spread from campus to the rest of the cultural superstructure, and the country is--obviously--much worse for it.
[And, incidentally: if you want even more proof of how bad and widespread the problem has become, look at the train wreck that is the comments under the Sullivan piece.]
posted by Winston Smith at
3:36 PM
9 Comments:
He's wrong about #metoo. I compare it to the Ferguson and Baltimore riots. Both were in response to long-lasting, intractable problems in law enforcement and criminal justice. Both put the problem on the map and got genuine federal action in response. (The Baltimore drug interdiction TF is now largely in prison.) Metoo is a similar response to a more diffuse but equally pernicious problem. And yes, innocents will get injured by it just as they did in the riots. That does not make them unjust: society was emphatically not solving the issue, so society is at fault.
It's an interesting take, though I'm inclined to disagree.
To start with, how were the Ferguson riots just? The rioters were wrong about the specific case they were rioting over, and wrong about the general phenomenon they thought it was an instance of.
As for "Me Too"...well...I thought we *were* dealing with sexual harassment. For like the last 20 years or so. A lot of the "me too" phenomenon seemed to be about women who didn't report the incidents. We've gone so far as to implement anti-sexual harassment laws and policies that *don't even make any sense*--e.g. that anything that makes a woman uncomfortable is SH. Even if no reasonable person would feel that way.
So...I'm skeptical about this being "society's fault" in both cases. Basically everybody I know wants to get rid of sexual harassment. None of them would do it, all of them would side with the harassee given decent evidence. But if victims don't report the violation, what is it, exactly, that we're supposed to do?
In the Me Too cases, a lot of the victims were rich women who didn't want to risk their even-greater future wealth. I don't have a lot of sympathy there, I have to say.
And both BLM and Me Too have, IMO, made things worse. BLM was just wrong about the phenomenon, and reacted crazily, and alienated people like me. Me Too has gone so far as to say that they don't even care if innocent men are ruined.
I just don't see it, I gotta say.
Metoo is a Twitter tag, not an organized action. I'm dubious of any general claims about whether or not its posters care if innocent men are injured.
And you are mistaking proximal cause with final cause in the Ferguson riots. By the time of the riots, the Ferguson police had lost any expectation of reasonable doubt. Have you read the DOJ report on it? It's damning.
Yeah, I agree that Me Too is diffuse. At least some people posting under that tag are saying what I said they're saying--but, of course, every movement has its assholes...
And: Ah, the Ferguson police. Right. That's a different matter. So:
1. Michael Brown was a criminal who attacked a cop; this can't justify the riots.
2. Ferguson cops were very bad; this *can* justify the riots.
3. There is no increased tendency of cops to kill black people in the U.S.; this cannot justify the riots.
But, to whatever extent the general shittiness of the Ferguson cops was the cause: yeah, that's a different story.
Good points, PM. Thx.
"2. Ferguson cops were very bad; this *can* justify the riots."
I would push back on that. Just on purely pragmatic grounds, riots will guarantee harm to innocents, and probably have less than even odds of moving towards fixing the injustice that caused them.
Ferguson is a great case of that. It's a small suburb that has now guaranteed it will be economically dead in the next decade (see Detroit). That will likely exacerbate the revenue policing problem, no matter who has political control there. The suffering caused by the riots and the consequences of it almost certainly will overwhelm the suffering that caused it by orders of magnitude.
(...and if we really want to make the point more brutal, compare the rise in murders post Ferguson due to lower police intervention to the total number of police homicides in a given year - much less those possibly avoided by sensible regulation. The tradeoff is not pleasant.)
Also, as a purely historical matter, the shittiness of Ferguson's cops weren't the cause of the riots. It was the Michael Brown murder. You can look at the demonstrations, the rallying cry was "hands up, don't shoot!". If you asked anyone there at the time, they would have said they were doing it for Michael Brown. The DOJ report was a post hoc justification of an idiotic political spasm on the Left. BLM did try to morph the case into an argument against police behavior broadly afterwards, but they have deservedly lost that argument.
Anon: the trouble with your argument is that the vast majority of police shooting don't cause riots. If the Ferguson police had been even modestly trusted prior to the Brown shooting, the riots would not have happened. This is the case over and over for this kind of riot: there is an underlying (and usually legitimate) distrust of law enforcement.
Was the riot politically successful locally? That's a different question. But it is a certainly a useful reminder to other cities on the potential costs of bad policing.
I need to change 'justify' to 'excuse': the shittiness of the the Ferguson PD probably doesn't justify the riots, but it's more likely to excuse them.
"Anon: the trouble with your argument is that the vast majority of police shooting don't cause riots. If the Ferguson police had been even modestly trusted prior to the Brown shooting, the riots would not have happened. This is the case over and over for this kind of riot: there is an underlying (and usually legitimate) distrust of law enforcement."
There has been underlying distrust for the police in the black community for decades, and surprisingly fewer riots, so that argument cuts against the distrust argument far more than your argument against the particular cause from the Michael Brown case.
(Also I wasn't saying police shootings generally, but the Michael Brown shooting, which is a unique case because of the media and activist firestorm that was created in response to it. Shooting plus media sensationalism plus left wing activist overkill easily creates a riot. The evidence in favor of this is easily surveyable by looking back through the now permanent record of our follies on social media and google-able online news.)
I need to change 'justify' to 'excuse': the shittiness of the the Ferguson PD probably doesn't justify the riots, but it's more likely to excuse them.
How does that distinction work?
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home