The new ghetto
Some right-wingers are, of course, saying it’s not fair, it’s censorship, it’s plickal krecknis.
Williamson’s hiring in March outraged some liberals, who pointed to 2014 tweets (since deleted) in which he opined “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide” and added, when considering an appropriate punishment for women who undergo abortions, “I have hanging … in mind.”
Williamson’s firing on Thursday prompted equally-angry responses from some of his fellow conservatives in the media, who contended the move shows they are an oppressed minority — “ghettoized,” in the words of the Resurgent’s Erick Erickson.
Ghettoized by the Nazis of plickal krecknis. It will be the gas chambers next, just you wait and see.
Kevin Williamson's firing is another reminder that much of American conservatism finds itself ghettoized not by choice, but by the left's active demands that the right be silenced. Socialists, national or otherwise, don't like to compete for ideas when they can shut up others.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 5, 2018
It appears that @TheAtlantic has fired Kevin Williamson.
That was close. They almost expanded their intolerant little bubble for a brief moment. In the end, we knew they couldn’t abide employing a talented individual with – gasp – a different worldview.
— Kimberly Ross (@SouthernKeeks) April 5, 2018
Yes, “a different world view” that women should be killed for deciding to stop being pregnant. Opposing abortion rights is one thing, and advocating mass murder is another.
Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg initially defended Williamson against critics, arguing that isolated remarks on social media should not preclude Williamson from working at the magazine. The liberal watchdog Media Matters on Wednesday resurfaced a 2014 podcast that revealed Williamson’s tweets were not isolated remarks.
“I would totally go with treating it like any other crime, up to and including hanging,” Williamson said of abortion.
“I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but I’ve got a soft spot for hanging, as a form of capital punishment,” he added. “I tend to think that things like lethal injection are a little too antiseptic. … If the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence.”
That kind of thing should just be beneath the Atlantic. There are plenty of frankly trashy outlets that are suitable for Williamson’s fantasy about killing lots of women, but the Atlantic should be better than that.
In the Atlantic’s reversal, we find one standard of civil discourse: It is okay — or, at least, forgivable — to tweet that women who undergo abortions should be hanged, so long as the tweet is hyperbolic rhetoric. It is not okay to actually think women who undergo abortions should be hanged.
No that’s not it. It is not okay to say that women who undergo abortions should be hanged and mean it. We can’t know what people actually think, we can merely know what they say and possibly whether or not they were joking or hyperbolizing when they said it.
Anyway, chalk up another win for plickal krecknis.
Yeah, The Atlantic is totally cowardly for choosing what views it will publish in its magazine. I mean, look at all of the liberal columnists who are featured in publications like National Review, The Weekly Standard, and Breitbart…
Oh. Um. Hm. Well, hey, there’s a ton of diversity in ideology on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, isn’t there? Non-libertarians in Reason?
Goddamnit. Oh yeah, well,…. Fox News used to give half of a show to that liberal Alan Colmes, so CHECKMATE, LIBS!
It’s not okay to say women should be hanged for abortions even as a “joke.”
Quotes because that sort of bloodyminded garbage is never a joke.
No, of course it’s not. But if it had in fact been a one-off meant as a “joke” I would have scowled hard but not said the Atlantic shouldn’t hire him. I would probably think the Atlantic shouldn’t want to hire him but that’s a different thing.
#2 and #3 – and it’s a “joke” that would be seen for what it is if addressed to certain other targets. For instance, I don’t think it’s just the left that would be jumping on the critique if he suggested hanging people for being black. That ship sailed a long time ago, and the Republicans are having trouble bringing it back, so they have to settle for other forms of discrimination than outright calling for their death. Over the past couple of decades, we’ve moved most of the LGBTQ into that category, as well: all right to discriminate against them if you are aware enough not to be obvious or blatant, or say you are doing that. In short, give yourself some “out” if you’re caught.
At this point, women have not reached that charmed position, and I suspect it’s because men of all political leanings are on board with the “women not quite as smart…capable…useful…as men” message. Many liberal men react with dismay if they think a field is being “taken over” by women, and often have a pretty low threshold for what “taken over” means – like, more than one woman in an office/classroom where they happen to hang out looks like “mostly women” to them. As long as this mindset is the norm, and as long as men are receiving the subtle and not-so-subtle messages from movies, television, music, books, plays, and every other form of media that the “normal” is men in charge, women as adoring helpers (who unfortunately frequently become nagging helpers), then we will not be able to get this into the mainstream mind. Too many women buy into that, and assist the men in their goal of keeping women from being too large and in charge. It took a lot of idea changing for any despised group to get to the point where you had to at least pretend you weren’t discriminating. Women have so far to go still….
Re #5 – I think it may vary depending on how much mental and social adjustment it requires to fit someone in the charmed circle without deeply-held assumptions hanging out the side.
Race is superficial. Ignoring or forgetting it isn’t hard – that is to say, there’s nothing but what we’ve picked up as racism there to get in the way. Outside of some bizarre fringes, no one’s got conceptions of people and society that run on racism – it’s just tacked on. It may be subtle and hard to spot to clean out – it may linger in corners of the mind or culture where it’s not recognized – it may be altogether too convenient for nefarious reasons for some people to want to purge it. But there’s no profound adjustment to make to scratch race out as a category of consideration.
Sexual/gender identity/orientation goes deeper. For anyone who isn’t purely and indifferently pansexual and panromantic, it sorts people out into (usually MUCH) more or less possible mates. That’s fundamental – again, outside the uncommon set of people with no interest whatever in anyone in any way sexual and/or romantic. Not much less important is the awareness of how people are sorting us, or sorting one another. And for every new-to-us category that pops up, there’s that much more trouble (and/or opportunity) to consider that category in sorting anyone you have to. There’s going to be pressure to avoid having to consider great swathes of such identities as freaks or otherwise marginal for sheer ease, and beyond that, as threats. Getting past that can be hard. That it’s an obligation of human decency is a mightily inconvenient fact – it will be denied, and nostalgia for “the good old days” gets recruited to do the work.
Just how to conceive of half the species, with our most fundamental sexual distinction, is as hard as it gets and so much is built up on it. We get a whole lot more tolerance of the LGBT[alphabet] set when someone knows someone on it, when all that’s asked is “hey, we’re here, and we’re just folks too”. But with women, knowing one (or being one) won’t help when they’re known/lived as women, inside all the conceptual baggage that constitutes that familiarity. We don’t seem to have a strict “just folks” mental category – it’s more like “just men-folks” and “just women-folks”. (That may account a lot for how difficult it is to work out a simple, easy position on transgender issues, too.)
It’s why feminism ends up being radical or inadequate.
Jeff, I see your point, but I’m not sure it’s right. After all, there are a large number of people (men and women both) for whom race is a fundamental, essential difference. Think Sam Harris or Jordan Peterson, or any number of people who are happy to point out that they are not racists because they think black athletes are innately better at sports or have more rhythm, so why can’t they point out the ways they are not as good? For many, many, many of the people I’ve met, this is so fundamental as to be unquestionable, just like they see gender as fundamental and unquestionable. Neither to them is superficial or a social construct. They divide people easily into groups based on numerous characteristics.
The main difference is that even most of those who see race as a fundamental difference will check themselves before saying black people should be hung for anything. They might say “drug dealers” and mean it euphemistically (because, of course, we all know that there have never been a white drug dealer, right?). They may talk about groups of people such as bankers without saying Jewish, but understanding that their listerner will hear it as Jewish, because it is such a fundamental group characteristic to be Jewish. But even most of the people who see race as inherent, unchangeable, easy to discern, etc, would not say that members of a race should be hanged for something associated only with that race (or believed to be associated only with that race). This has not been the case for all that long. It has also not been all that long since people were rounded up and jailed for being LGBTQ, and Matthew Shepard was killed. People get queasy about that, and it is unlikely that the Atlantic would have considered hiring anyone who had tweeted out that a given group of black people should be killed, or that a given group of gay people should be killed, or whatever.
The problem is that people assume that every characteristic associated with a particular gender must be inborn. They see the obvious differences that are real, and attach other differences to them that are social, and believe the whole damn package, while noting that “not all” women will have those characteristics.
I think feminism is radical. But no more radical than abolitionism or Civil Rights were at one time. No more radical than LGBTQ rights were at one time. For some reason, women remains the one group that it is okay to be blatant about, as long as you use the word “scientific”, of course, even though most people assume they can easily divide people into races, and easily spot the LGBTQ (using purely superficial characteristics that do not fit all LGBTQ).
Jeff Engel #5
Or, rather, men are seen as “just folk” whereas women are seen as “just women-folks”. I.e. if you are a man, your sex is seen as irrelevant and a non-issue in most contexts, but if you’re a woman your sex is always an issue and on the radar.
Right on, Bjarte. I am a woman-playwright and a woman-scientist. The ones I work with and around that happen to have been born male are just playwrights and scientists.