Personally, I find it suspicious Jesse would take the time to write about this when the much more pressing issue of subscribing to Blocked and Reported on Substack goes unvoiced
Thank you for what you are choosing to write about, and for researching it so well!
I am getting sick of people who point out excesses on the left being told that the right is worse--and then trying to shut the whole conversation down. There are really bad excesses on both sides. Really.
I'm on the left. I'm seeing a lot of knee jerk "well, those on the right are bad, so we can't talk about anything else" and getting tired of it. For parents whose kids have medicalized due to gender dysphoria, with many on the (our) left squelching accurate information about the condition and treatment.... well, these kids are being poisoned and lied to...by the left...and the left has to step up and stop it.
It's like your kid saying that it's ok that they did something bad in school because someone else in school did something worse. Almost every parent has heard that!
"But there are a lot of people whose lives are dedicated to (say) reviewing video games who hyperventilate online about how fascism is at our doorstep. If they really thought that.....they’d quit tomorrow to fight the fascists."
This is why it was hilarious when these people were like "You can draw a straight line from Gamergate to Trump!" They think their little online obsession explains everything about the world.
It’s fundamentally disingenuous argument but fits in perfectly with the current liberal obsession with censorship.
The flip side is another attempt at censorship along the lines of “person X isn’t an expert in Y and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to write about it!”
People write about what they care about. And readers respond to passionate writing.
My first “peaking” experience was seeing lots of tweets trashing Jesse for being transphobic, I assumed they were true but decided to read his work and--wait, what?!
I see that you are planning to take a break from Twitter soon, Jesse. I support that. I agree that a lot of these criticisms are disingenuous bs, and I hate to see your valuable mental bandwidth get taken up by jerks jerkin’.
I was trying to explain why I found arguing with Johnathan Katz so frustrating and here is the answer. He kept complaining about how the NYT has an anti-trans agenda, accused Matthew Yglesias of being transphobic (which I found absurd), etc. I was baffled. Still am. Thanks for writing this
Actual comment: Whataboutism in the way it's proposed here is exactly that, a derailing tactic.
Sometimes however I think it gets lobbied against people looking for consistent principles in their interlocutor. If someone tells me it's a grave journalistic error to not contact the subject or a figure in a piece, but they frequently attack their enemies in articles without doing so themselves, it isn't whataboutism to zoom out and settle on terms like be "consistent in your application of principles" to ensure we can have a coherent conversation.
I like this post a lot, but I have some mixed feelings about it, because there are definitely some topics that seem to produce an outsized number of people with no discernible reason to care as much as they do. There is a nigh-limitless number of lefties, for instance, who are *constantly* talking about Palestine, who have no personal connection there, and who don't care a whit about any other geopolitical conflicts. The intensity of their involvement (and the frequency of this "type" of person) does make me think about *why* people focus on a given topic.
The outrage mobs have made numerous false allegations against J.K. Rowling. The fact that these allegations have no basis in fact and are trivially refuted has had no impact. Why? Because there is no downside for lying about anything as long as the lies are PC.
Just remember the people you need to convince are the onlookers. You’ll never persuade the people directly engaged but the poverty of their arguments is startling.
Illiberals on the left love to Mau-Mau lefty journalists who critique the left. Indeed, they say that more attention should be focused on right-wing illiberalism and fascism. As if mega attention is not given to this now.
Speaking of fascism, someone who actually knows something about it, the stellar historian, Richard J. Evans, wrote a superb article, Why Trump isn't a fascist, which the New Statesman carried on January 13, 2021.
Huge numbers of people on the left wouldn't know what fascism is if it bit them on the behind. I don't want to violate Godwin's law but if we're talking fascism, as Matt Taibbi has noted, it is the Democratic Party that supports the connivance of the state and of corporations to suppress opinions that this combine doesn't like and that is actual fascism.
Mau-Mauing lefty journos who critique the left, saying that these journos should write about other things is a power move to try to shut up people like Jesse and Glenn Greenwald and Fredrik deBoer and Aaron Maté, und so weiter.
The reasoning of these High Priests of Liberalism is so bad because it is reversed engineered. They want independent-minded lefties to shut up, so they work backward to try to find reasons to support their illiberal postures.
The statement "left-of-center intellectual life" is a self-contradictory expression. There is no there there.
The ENTIRE "left-of-center intellectual life" involves what you skin color is and who you interact with in the bedroom. There is no intellectual life, because so many topics are off the table.
The only actual intellectuals actually posing important questions are conservative - Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, anyone opposing the insanity of trans delusion.
Thank you for this timely essay. I read David Remnick’s interview with Masha Gessen this weekend and found it interesting and thought provoking but was left with a vague feeling of wanting to say, “Ya, but…” but I didn’t quite know why or “what about.” Hopefully, as they say at the end of the interview, the New Yorker will move forward from here with nuanced and careful coverage of the very complex issues of child gender medicine and transition as well as in the adult population and wider culture. Again, thanks for your work, Jesse.
Personally, I find it suspicious Jesse would take the time to write about this when the much more pressing issue of subscribing to Blocked and Reported on Substack goes unvoiced
Thank you for what you are choosing to write about, and for researching it so well!
I am getting sick of people who point out excesses on the left being told that the right is worse--and then trying to shut the whole conversation down. There are really bad excesses on both sides. Really.
I'm on the left. I'm seeing a lot of knee jerk "well, those on the right are bad, so we can't talk about anything else" and getting tired of it. For parents whose kids have medicalized due to gender dysphoria, with many on the (our) left squelching accurate information about the condition and treatment.... well, these kids are being poisoned and lied to...by the left...and the left has to step up and stop it.
It's like your kid saying that it's ok that they did something bad in school because someone else in school did something worse. Almost every parent has heard that!
"But there are a lot of people whose lives are dedicated to (say) reviewing video games who hyperventilate online about how fascism is at our doorstep. If they really thought that.....they’d quit tomorrow to fight the fascists."
This is why it was hilarious when these people were like "You can draw a straight line from Gamergate to Trump!" They think their little online obsession explains everything about the world.
It’s fundamentally disingenuous argument but fits in perfectly with the current liberal obsession with censorship.
The flip side is another attempt at censorship along the lines of “person X isn’t an expert in Y and therefore shouldn’t be allowed to write about it!”
People write about what they care about. And readers respond to passionate writing.
My first “peaking” experience was seeing lots of tweets trashing Jesse for being transphobic, I assumed they were true but decided to read his work and--wait, what?!
I see that you are planning to take a break from Twitter soon, Jesse. I support that. I agree that a lot of these criticisms are disingenuous bs, and I hate to see your valuable mental bandwidth get taken up by jerks jerkin’.
I was trying to explain why I found arguing with Johnathan Katz so frustrating and here is the answer. He kept complaining about how the NYT has an anti-trans agenda, accused Matthew Yglesias of being transphobic (which I found absurd), etc. I was baffled. Still am. Thanks for writing this
Actual comment: Whataboutism in the way it's proposed here is exactly that, a derailing tactic.
Sometimes however I think it gets lobbied against people looking for consistent principles in their interlocutor. If someone tells me it's a grave journalistic error to not contact the subject or a figure in a piece, but they frequently attack their enemies in articles without doing so themselves, it isn't whataboutism to zoom out and settle on terms like be "consistent in your application of principles" to ensure we can have a coherent conversation.
I like this post a lot, but I have some mixed feelings about it, because there are definitely some topics that seem to produce an outsized number of people with no discernible reason to care as much as they do. There is a nigh-limitless number of lefties, for instance, who are *constantly* talking about Palestine, who have no personal connection there, and who don't care a whit about any other geopolitical conflicts. The intensity of their involvement (and the frequency of this "type" of person) does make me think about *why* people focus on a given topic.
The outrage mobs have made numerous false allegations against J.K. Rowling. The fact that these allegations have no basis in fact and are trivially refuted has had no impact. Why? Because there is no downside for lying about anything as long as the lies are PC.
Just remember the people you need to convince are the onlookers. You’ll never persuade the people directly engaged but the poverty of their arguments is startling.
Illiberals on the left love to Mau-Mau lefty journalists who critique the left. Indeed, they say that more attention should be focused on right-wing illiberalism and fascism. As if mega attention is not given to this now.
Speaking of fascism, someone who actually knows something about it, the stellar historian, Richard J. Evans, wrote a superb article, Why Trump isn't a fascist, which the New Statesman carried on January 13, 2021.
Huge numbers of people on the left wouldn't know what fascism is if it bit them on the behind. I don't want to violate Godwin's law but if we're talking fascism, as Matt Taibbi has noted, it is the Democratic Party that supports the connivance of the state and of corporations to suppress opinions that this combine doesn't like and that is actual fascism.
Mau-Mauing lefty journos who critique the left, saying that these journos should write about other things is a power move to try to shut up people like Jesse and Glenn Greenwald and Fredrik deBoer and Aaron Maté, und so weiter.
The reasoning of these High Priests of Liberalism is so bad because it is reversed engineered. They want independent-minded lefties to shut up, so they work backward to try to find reasons to support their illiberal postures.
The statement "left-of-center intellectual life" is a self-contradictory expression. There is no there there.
The ENTIRE "left-of-center intellectual life" involves what you skin color is and who you interact with in the bedroom. There is no intellectual life, because so many topics are off the table.
The only actual intellectuals actually posing important questions are conservative - Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, anyone opposing the insanity of trans delusion.
Thank you for this timely essay. I read David Remnick’s interview with Masha Gessen this weekend and found it interesting and thought provoking but was left with a vague feeling of wanting to say, “Ya, but…” but I didn’t quite know why or “what about.” Hopefully, as they say at the end of the interview, the New Yorker will move forward from here with nuanced and careful coverage of the very complex issues of child gender medicine and transition as well as in the adult population and wider culture. Again, thanks for your work, Jesse.
I have only been on this substack a few hours, I have no feel for tone yet. Gimme time.
Leave twitter for a bit and come hang with us on Singal Minded!