Kamala Harris: Enjoy The Long Weekend

[Dill]

(06-18-2021, 06:59 AM)Belsnickel Wrote: How the ever-loving **** has one of the most ridiculously overblown criticisms of a politician that was 100% rooted in a falsehood gone on for 10 pages and has continued for over two weeks? I managed to contain myself and refrain from responding to a Brad thread, but how this inevitable shit show has gone on for this long is baffling. I certainly haven't been keeping up and I'm not going to catch up, but every time this thing pops up with new posts I just don't understand.

(06-18-2021, 08:50 AM)hollodero Wrote: Well I am particularly uninclined to post in a fritzy thread either, but this debate has gone far away from Kamala and went to the imho interesting topic whether a professor describing white people as demented, out-of-their-mind predators and sharing fantasies of shooting white people without much guilt needs academical context before being condemned. It is kind of fascinating and has little to do with the OP.

I say that mainly to excuse my own contributions to this thread's length.

Agreed. Hollo is largely to blame for extending this thread.  

But he is right. It is no longer about Kamala's terrible snub of our fine military members.
 
Rather, the discussion has turned to negotiating the pitfalls of “hate speech” at a moment people are caught between an old paradigm for understanding racism and a new one still developing with unsuspected repercussions. (Thus this discussion complements the one we were having on the “Fascism” thread about Biden’s “racism.”)
 
This case is complicated by its academic setting: a psychoanalyst’s lecture to an audience presumed to understand repression, projection and transference and other concepts, as used by psychoanalysts. It’s an audience also engaged with effects of white supremacy on mental health curricula, training, students, and practice, and so perhaps better prepared to hear white denial of such effects posed as a professional problem.
 
I have been arguing 1) that when our press presents hate speech “outrages” to us, we ought not to simply react, but to consider how and why the incidents might have been selected and put into circulation, with special attention to how such reporting may de-contextualize such incidents and invite us to substitute our own, pre-given assumptions about hate speech. And
 
2) that the academic setting complicates evaluation. Before rushing to judgment, we ought to at least know the speakers intent and argument, how her statements fit into demonstration. I have tried to supply some of that, though the bad recording means I have only securely grasped about 1/3 of the presentation.
 
Others argue that such contextualization is unnecessary. We get all we need to know by just looking at the statements. 
 
Wes has added another layer by listing assaults on speech at various U.S. campuses by people who, so far as I can tell, also agree that contextualization is unnecessary: you “see” and you condemn, go after people’s jobs, etc.

Now you are up to speed, Bels. (Also, as a budding political scientist, you might find my characterization of "academic freedom" in #179 worth a look/comment.)