Трусость и ненависть

[tijd]

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До того, как появилось пресловутое открытое письмо в Harper's, обращенное непонятно к кому и призывающее непонятно к чему, было открытое письмо Anti-Defamation League о кампании "Stop Hate for Profit". Акции призывает компании, размещающие рекламу в Фейсбук, воздержаться от этого в течении одного месяца (июля 2020), чтобы вынудить Фейсбук принять меры к распространителям ненависти и лживых теорий заговора. Идее кампании помогло обращение Сашы Бэрон-Коэна.

"If civil society can expect civil discourse in the public square, then why not on the social spaces we inhabit online, where arguably the majority of public speech is taking place today?
Luckily, given where Facebook is now, improvement is not that hard: Clamp down on common misinformation and conspiracies. Stop recommending hate. Make a number of clear, common-sense changes to ameliorate and mitigate hate - we’ve made a list. Provide human beings to help people when they are being brutally harassed.
But while those steps are easy, we’ve learned that Facebook won’t take this seriously unless forced. So we invite businesses and all people of good conscience to join us, our partners, and the companies that have signed on already. Together, we can make sure that Facebook is good not only for advertisers, but also for society."
https://www.adl.org/news/letters/an-open-letter-to-the-companies-that-advertise-on-facebook

Our movement is working. We thank these advertisers and the hundreds more who have come together to tell Facebook that enough is enough, it is time to #StopHateForProfit. https://t.co/Jgr4egRNu2 pic.twitter.com/9nrh7P0hbM
- ADL (@ADL) July 9, 2020

В объяснении существуюших проблем с Фейсбуком на сайте "Stop Hate for Profit" говорится: "Large groups dedicated to hate and violent conspiracies grow unchecked, and Facebook often recommends users join these groups. Political ads contain bald-faced lies, and even outright voter suppression. Misinformation and conspiracies on COVID-19, vaccines, climate change and the Holocaust are considered matters of debate." https://www.stophateforprofit.org/faq

Следует сравнить с заявлением письма в Harper's "The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away."
https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

После этого становится понятным, кому понадобилось это письмо. Руководство Фейсбука пока не поддается давлению "intolerant society" и не собирается осуществлять изменений, которых от него требуют правозащитники.

"It was abundantly clear in our meeting today that Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook team is not yet ready to address the vitriolic hate on their platform. Zuckerberg offered the same old defense of white supremacist, antisemitic, Islamophobic and other hateful groups on Facebook that the Stop Hate For Profit Coalitions, advertisers and society at large have heard too many times before. Instead of actually responding to the demands of dozens of the platform’s largest advertisers that have joined the #StopHateForProfit ad boycott during the month of July, Facebook wants us to accept the same old rhetoric, repackaged as a fresh response.
The only recommendation they even attempted to address is hiring a civil rights position but were unable to commit to the crucial piece of the position being at the C-suite level or what the requirements for the position will be. However, they offered no attempt to respond to the other nine recommendations. Zuckerberg offered no automatic recourse for advertisers whose content runs alongside hateful posts. He had no answer for why Facebook recommends hateful groups to users. He refused to agree to provide an option for victims of hate and harassment to connect with a live Facebook representative. He declined to adopt common-sense content moderation policies and practices like the ones put forward by the Change the Terms coalition, or develop a process to ensure that their terms of service are fairly applied and do not bend to political expediency. And he did not offer any tangible plans on how Facebook will address the rampant disinformation and violent conspiracies on its platform. Instead, he offered a retread of the same old talking points from last week - tweaks around the edges - with no details or timelines around the MRC audit they have touted, with only the barest minimum of labeling misinformation in political speech, with a Civil Rights audit we asked for years ago, and empty refrains of we are trying.
None of this is hard, especially for one of the world’s most innovative companies whose founder coined the term move fast and break things. Mark Zuckerberg, you aren’t breaking things, you are breaking people. With a stroke of a pen, you could make Facebook better for your users, your advertisers, and society. We hope that you continue thinking about the consequences of what you have wrought and come back to the table soon with real change."
https://naacp.org/latest/statement-stop-hate-profit-meeting-facebook/

Как и в случае Fox News, издержки от потери рекламодателей окупаются олигархической близостью к власти.


Today's top-performing Facebook link posts by US pages are from:

1. Franklin Graham
2. Fox News
3. Ben Shapiro
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Donald J. Trump
7. Dan Bongino
8. Bernie Sanders
9. Occupy Democrats
10. Mark Levin
- Kevin Roose (@kevinroose) July 10, 2020

The Trump campaign is currently spending $3,666,484 PER WEEK on Facebook ads pic.twitter.com/p42nJEVA1B
- Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 14, 2020

Но без дополнительных свидетельств не стоит подозревать авторов письма без адресата в том, что они работают на Фейсбук или другие темные интересы. По их заверениям идея письма родилось органически.

Williams, a contributing editor for Harper’s as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, noted that the letter grew organically and was passed among circles of activists and writers.
“The letter grew organically from an informal conversation among George Packer, Mark Lilla, Robert Worth, David Greenberg and myself about the climate of censoriousness we were noticing in cultural and media institutions and beyond,”
He continued: “We began drafting a letter last month, and soliciting signatures soon after. Quickly these writers and academics began offering feedback, agreeing to sign or declining, and we incorporated the language, to varying degrees, of at least 20 different people by the end.”
https://www.thewrap.com/harpers-letter-cancel-culture-backlash-thomas-williams/

То, как именно собирались подписи под письмом, вызывает вопросы, но это можно списать на неопытность.

The Harper’s letter is odd because the organizers’ standards for who may or may not have been invited to sign on weren’t clear. In search of a very broad display of ideological and occupational diversity, the list includes authors, journalists, professors, pundits, a tech founder, a union head and legal scholars. It also included writers such as Bari Weiss, who decries attempts to fire people for speech even though she tried to get a professor fired for his speech. The lack of a coherent theory of who was signing the letter ultimately had a big impact on how it was received. It may have also affected how the letter was represented inconsistently to different signers and appears to have put off at least one of the original signers for very understandable reasons.
https://medium.com/@aaronhuertas/its-about-ethics-in-open-letters-e6417654d000



Если что-то специальным образом объединяет группу выше перечисленных организаторов открытого письмо, так это то, что все они обломали зубы об автора по имени Ta-Nehisi Coates. Разногласия были вокруг избитых аргументов о том, что не следует преувеличивать проблему расизма.

Джордж Паркер и Марк Лилла упоминаются в длинном эссе Коатса про феномен Трампа под названием "The First White President":

Mark Lilla’s New York Times essay “The End of Identity Liberalism,” published not long after last year’s election, is perhaps the most profound example of this genre. Lilla denounces the perversion of liberalism into “a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity,” which distorted liberalism’s message “and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.” Liberals have turned away from their working-class base, he says, and must look to the “pre-identity liberalism” of Bill Clinton and Franklin D. Roosevelt. You would never know from this essay that Bill Clinton was one of the most skillful identity politicians of his era-flying home to Arkansas to see a black man, the lobotomized Ricky Ray Rector, executed; upstaging Jesse Jackson at his own conference; signing the Defense of Marriage Act. Nor would you know that the “pre-identity” liberal champion Roosevelt depended on the literally lethal identity politics of the white-supremacist “solid South.” The name Barack Obama does not appear in Lilla’s essay, and he never attempts to grapple, one way or another, with the fact that it was identity politics-the possibility of the first black president-that brought a record number of black voters to the polls, winning the election for the Democratic Party, and thus enabling the deliverance of the ancient liberal goal of national health care. “Identity politics … is largely expressive, not persuasive,” Lilla claims. “Which is why it never wins elections-but can lose them.” That Trump ran and won on identity politics is beyond Lilla’s powers of conception. What appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics-except the politics of white people, the politics of the bloody heirloom.
White tribalism haunts even more-nuanced writers. George Packer’s New Yorker essay “The Unconnected” is a lengthy plea for liberals to focus more on the white working class, a population that “has succumbed to the ills that used to be associated with the black urban ‘underclass.’ ” Packer believes that these ills, and the Democratic Party’s failure to respond to them, explain much of Trump’s rise. Packer offers no opinion polls to weigh white workers’ views on “elites,” much less their views on racism. He offers no sense of how their views and their relationship to Trump differ from other workers’ and other whites’.
That is likely because any empirical evaluation of the relationship between Trump and the white working class would reveal that one adjective in that phrase is doing more work than the other. In 2016, Trump enjoyed majority or plurality support among every economic branch of whites. It is true that his strongest support among whites came from those making $50,000 to $99,999. This would be something more than working-class in many nonwhite neighborhoods, but even if one accepts that branch as the working class, the difference between how various groups in this income bracket voted is revealing. Sixty-one percent of whites in this “working class” supported Trump. Only 24 percent of Hispanics and 11 percent of blacks did. Indeed, the plurality of all voters making less than $100,000 and the majority making less than $50,000 voted for the Democratic candidate. So when Packer laments the fact that “Democrats can no longer really claim to be the party of working people-not white ones, anyway,” he commits a kind of category error. The real problem is that Democrats aren’t the party of white people-working or otherwise. White workers are not divided by the fact of labor from other white demographics; they are divided from all other laborers by the fact of their whiteness.
Packer’s essay was published before the election, and so the vote tally was not available. But it should not be surprising that a Republican candidate making a direct appeal to racism would drive up the numbers among white voters, given that racism has been a dividing line for the national parties since the civil-rights era. Packer finds inspiration for his thesis in West Virginia-a state that remained Democratic through the 1990s before turning decisively Republican, at least at the level of presidential politics. This relatively recent rightward movement evinces, to Packer, a shift “that couldn’t be attributed just to the politics of race.” This is likely true-the politics of race are, themselves, never attributable “just to the politics of race.” The history of slavery is also about the growth of international capitalism; the history of lynching must be seen in light of anxiety over the growing independence of women; the civil-rights movement can’t be disentangled from the Cold War. Thus, to say that the rise of Donald Trump is about more than race is to make an empty statement, one that is small comfort to the people-black, Muslim, immigrant-who live under racism’s boot.
The dent of racism is not hard to detect in West Virginia. In the 2008 Democratic primary there, 95 percent of the voters were white. Twenty percent of those-one in five-openly admitted that race was influencing their vote, and more than 80 percent voted for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. Four years later, the incumbent Obama lost the primary in 10 counties to Keith Judd, a white felon incarcerated in a federal prison; Judd racked up more than 40 percent of the Democratic-primary vote in the state. A simple thought experiment: Can one imagine a black felon in a federal prison running in a primary against an incumbent white president doing so well?
But racism occupies a mostly passive place in Packer’s essay. There’s no attempt to understand why black and brown workers, victimized by the same new economy and cosmopolitan elite that Packer lambastes, did not join the Trump revolution. Like Kristof, Packer is gentle with his subjects. When a woman “exploded” and told Packer, “I want to eat what I want to eat, and for them to tell me I can’t eat French fries or Coca-Cola-no way,” he sees this as a rebellion against “the moral superiority of elites.” In fact, this elite conspiracy dates back to 1894, when the government first began advising Americans on their diets. As recently as 2002, President George W. Bush launched the HealthierUS initiative, urging Americans to exercise and eat healthy food. But Packer never allows himself to wonder whether the explosion he witnessed had anything to do with the fact that similar advice now came from the country’s first black first lady. Packer concludes that Obama was leaving the country “more divided and angrier than most Americans can remember,” a statement that is likely true only because most Americans identify as white. Certainly the men and women forced to live in the wake of the beating of John Lewis, the lynching of Emmett Till, the firebombing of Percy Julian’s home, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Medgar Evers would disagree.
Trump’s legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagogue can get away with.
The triumph of Trump’s campaign of bigotry presented the problematic spectacle of an American president succeeding at best in spite of his racism and possibly because of it. Trump moved racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed. This presented the country’s thinking class with a dilemma. Hillary Clinton simply could not be correct when she asserted that a large group of Americans was endorsing a candidate because of bigotry. The implications-that systemic bigotry is still central to our politics; that the country is susceptible to such bigotry; that the salt-of-the-earth Americans whom we lionize in our culture and politics are not so different from those same Americans who grin back at us in lynching photos; that Calhoun’s aim of a pan-Caucasian embrace between workers and capitalists still endures-were just too dark. Leftists would have to cope with the failure, yet again, of class unity in the face of racism. Incorporating all of this into an analysis of America and the path forward proved too much to ask. Instead, the response has largely been an argument aimed at emotion-the summoning of the white working class, emblem of America’s hardscrabble roots, inheritor of its pioneer spirit, as a shield against the horrific and empirical evidence of trenchant bigotry.
Packer dismisses the Democratic Party as a coalition of “rising professionals and diversity.” The dismissal is derived from, of all people, Lawrence Summers, the former Harvard president and White House economist, who last year labeled the Democratic Party “a coalition of the cosmopolitan élite and diversity.” The inference is that the party has forgotten how to speak on hard economic issues and prefers discussing presumably softer cultural issues such as “diversity.” It’s worth unpacking what, precisely, falls under this rubric of “diversity”-resistance to the monstrous incarceration of legions of black men, resistance to the destruction of health providers for poor women, resistance to the effort to deport parents, resistance to a policing whose sole legitimacy is rooted in brute force, resistance to a theory of education that preaches “no excuses” to black and brown children, even as excuses are proffered for mendacious corporate executives “too big to jail.” That this suite of concerns, taken together, can be dismissed by both an elite economist like Summers and a brilliant journalist like Packer as “diversity” simply reveals the safe space they enjoy. Because of their identity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/ta-nehisi-coates-whiteness-power.html

Excellent, by @thomaschattwill: "So long as we fetishize race, we ensure that we will never be rid of the hierarchies it imposes." https://t.co/W6t2H9dTAf
- Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) October 6, 2017

Томас Чаттертон Уильямс, инициатор письма, изложил в колонке New York Times собственную критику Коатса, под названием "How Ta-Nehisi Coates Gives Whiteness Power". Ее оценили другие подписанты, в том числе Яша Мунк, создатель нового портала Persuasion. Уильямс использует в буквальном смысле выражение "both sides", чтобы противопоставить антирасиста Коатса расисту Ричарду Спенсеру и сообщить, что они друг друга стоят: "Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice."

Еще один подписант и колумнист New York Times Дэвид Брукс вначале написал критическую колонку "Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates While White", а несколько лет спустя решил поддержать Коутса в вопросе о репарациях и назвал свою колонку так же, как называлась нашумевшая статя Коутса "The Case for Reparations". Статью Коутса опубликовал в 2014 недавно ушедший в отставку редактор отдела мнений NYT Джеймс Беннет, за которого авторы письма вступаются, не называя его по имени: "editors are fired for running controversial pieces".

James Bennet has resigned as editorial page editor of the NYT. I will always remember him as the editor who gave Ta-Nehisi Coates the space to write the groundbreaking Case for Reparations. https://t.co/vcR8HKMd58 when few would entertain the idea. That's the James Bennet I know.
- Farah Stockman (@fstockman) June 7, 2020

Скандал, который привел к отставке Беннета, заключался в публикации призывов к насилию со стороны расистского сенатора. Пояснение редакции: "After publication, this essay met strong criticism from many readers (and many Times colleagues), prompting editors to review the piece and the editing process. Based on that review, we have concluded that the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published." https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html

Что касается идеи репараций, то за пять лет она прошла путь от запредельной до приближенной к реальности: в Конгресс внесен законопроект о создании комиссии (Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act), а в прошлом году проведены слушания с участием Коатса.

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Особая история дискуссий с Коутсом - у либерального колумниста Джонатана Чайта. Чайт не подписал письмо в Harper's только из принципа не подписывать коллективные письма, но в остальном всецело его поддерживает.

В 2014 у него была заочная дискуссия с Коутсом, после которой он заболел идеей о левой нетерпимости, которую невозможно терпеть.

A year ago, Jonathan Chait had an extended debate with The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates, an incredibly talented writer whose ongoing research and thinking on race and American politics and history have led him to become one of our foremost critics of American liberalism as a credo and philosophy. Chait, a strong believer in the righteousness of American liberalism, could not let it go, and he went on to embarrass himself. A broken Chait is now taking on the entire goddamn Internet, to prove that he's still the important political thinker - and good liberal - he knows he is. <...>
Chait, like many liberal commentators with his background, is used to writing off left-wing critics and reserving his real writerly firepower for (frequently deserving) right-wingers. That was, for years, how things worked at the center-left opinion journalism shops, because it was simply assumed that no one important-no one who really matters-took the opinions of people to the left of the center-left opinion shop seriously. That was a safe and largely correct assumption. But the destruction of the magazine industry and the growth of the open-forum internet have amplified formerly marginal voices. Now, in other words, writers of color can be just as condescending and dismissive of Chait as he always was toward the left. And he hates it. <...>
When men like Chait are exposed to criticism of this nature for the first time, they generally respond with operatic self-pity. And then we get a column or an essay or a book about how people who criticize straight white men are Actually The Problem. This is Chait's On Snark. This is his "Digital lynch mob."
Chait is understandably upset that the left is playing dirty by impugning his view of himself as a good, tolerant liberal, on the side of justice. No one wants to hear that the place that they worked for many years was actively fighting for white supremacy! But it's fun to imagine Chait responding to the equivalent of this piece written by a conservative, about liberals. Chait understands the absurdity of the conservative position that to be accused of racism is worse than racism itself. He accurately notes that when conservatives bemoan "political correctness" they are generally upset that they have been asked to be respectful of people of different backgrounds. He simply cannot take that next step, and admit that perhaps his own concern about the proliferation of dangerous anti-speech Marxists and Social Justice Warriors is actually misplaced anxiety about his getting called on his shit.
https://gawker.com/punch-drunk-jonathan-chait-takes-on-the-entire-internet-1682078451

Выражение "getting called on his shit" - подходящая замена для "cancel culture".

It’s a wild Friday night on Fox News pic.twitter.com/ERtb0zTOxc
- Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) July 11, 2020

В нынешнюю борьбу с воображаемой "cancel culture" Чайт подбросил историю некоего Дэвида Шора. Точно неизвестно, за что именно Шора уволили из некоммерческой организации Civis Analytics, но Чайт заключил, что это было за твит. Во время уличных протестов в июне Шор рассуждал о том, что уличный вандализм может помешать на выборах, напугав избирателей, как это было в 1968 на волне протестов после убийства Мартина Лютера Кинга. Кто-то другой в Твиттере упрекнул его за черствость, назвав этот твит "tone deaf". У Чайта от этого моментально сложился знакомый ему по 2015 страшный образ нетерпимой толпы.

I’m just seeing this. It’s simply untrue. The cases are too many to enumerate in one letter is all. But I mentioned three in the NYT piece that ran today. And I’ll repeat one here: the case of David Shor, which @jonathanchait wrote about in detail: https://t.co/PVza5dY9aC https://t.co/4WM5oeT4lL
- Thomas Chatterton Williams 🌍 🎧 (@thomaschattwill) July 8, 2020

Перу Та-Нехиси Коутса принадлежит одно из лучших определений связи предрассудков со страхами и трусливостью. Речь шла об однополых браках и гомофобных страхах, но наблюдение применимо и к другим обстоятельствам.

Bigotry, in all forms, requires a shocking arrogance, a belief that other communities deepest desires revolve around your destruction. It is the ultimate narcissism, a way of thinking that can only see others, through a paranoid fear of what one might lose. The fears are almost always irrational. To go back to Chuck D, perhaps he was too cold when he said, "Man, I don't want your sister." But there was deep truth in it, the idea was, "Fool, this ain't about you and your fucked-up sexual hangups." In much the same vein when I read people complaining that gay marriage is a threat to traditional marriage, I think, "Fool, these gay motherfuckers ain't thinking about your marriage. This ain't about you and your hang-ups."
Bigotry is the heaping of one man's insecurity on to another. Sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, anti-Islamism, anti-immigrantism, really all come from the same place--cowardice. In his history of lynching, Phillip Dray notes that mob violence against black men wasn't simply about keeping black men in their place--it was about keeping white women in their place. Lynching peaked as white women went to work outside the home in greater numbers, developing their own financial power base. White men, afraid that they couldn't compete with their women, would cowardly resort to lynching. I am not saying that the anti-gay marriage crowd is a lynch mob. But in tying opposition to the sexual revolution what you see is, beyond a fear of gay marriage, a fear for marriage itself. A fear that their way of life can't compete in these new times. It's ridiculous, of course. But bigotry always is.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2009/04/nihilism-and-gay-marriage/7174/

Параноидальные страхи отдельных либералов о том, что за ними скоро придут борцы с расизмом, объясняются похожей трусливостью.



О том, что страх и ненависть продолжают быть оружием в политике напоминают только что состоявшиеся перевыборы Анджея Дуды в Польше с 51% голосов. Накануне Дуда оперативно сгонял в Вашингтон заручиться поддержкой Трампа и усилил гомофобную риторику.

Duda is a conservative nationalist whose tenure as president has been characterized by democratic backsliding and the shrinking of civic space for the exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms. On the campaign trail, Duda has lashed out at “LGBT ideology,” which he has compared to “neo-bolshevism,” in a bid to attract conservative Catholic voters and members of the far right. In previous administrations, a White House visit would have been used as a carrot to reverse democratic decline and moderate hateful rhetoric; now these phenomena mirror our own lived experience.
Duda has also played Trump like a fiddle, appealing to his well-known appreciation for flattery. When Trump visited Warsaw in the summer of 2018, Duda delivered a large, adoring crowd for Trump’s public speech. Duda also offered $2 billion to construct a permanent base to house U.S. troops - which he suggested be called Fort Trump - and signed off on large weapons and gas purchases.
Duda’s two previous visits to the White House, in September 2018 and June 2019, also showcased the bromance between the two leaders and elicited promises of a larger U.S. rotational troop presence in Poland. While the White House visit is itself a gift to Duda’s election prospects, Warsaw hopes for a much larger deliverable. <...>
The problem with this visit is the “who,” “when,” “why,” and “how.” No U.S. president should meet a foreign leader - friend or foe - mere days before she or he stands for election. To do so undermines Poland’s democratic processes and our own values. Feting a leader who has spewed anti-LGBTQ hatred, curtailed media freedoms, and crippled his country’s courts also runs contrary to those principles. Yet this week, President Trump will once again embrace Duda, boosting the election prospects of a leader who - if elected - is likely to further dismantle Poland’s democracy, weakening a close U.S. ally from within.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2020/06/24/why-trump-shouldnt-be-hosting-polish-president-duda/

Вслед за Венгрией Польша продолжит благополучное скатывание из демократии в полудиктатуру фашистского типа.