On trans flight, moon bases, and choosing your moment
A sublime song, a few actual threats to free speech, and more
Hi dears, a chatty post this month that includes a snatch of gorgeousness and my number-one apocalyptic fear. Tell me what you think in the comments!
Amia Srinivasan, “Cancelled: Can I Speak Freely?” Srinivasan, a blazingly smart and serious scholar and the author of The Right to Sex: Feminism in the 21st Century, is just about the only author I’d want to read on the wretched retreaded turf of free speech and campus culture. Srinivasan’s essay explores how the right, in the UK and in the US, is using a rhetoric of free speech precisely to abridge and weaken academic freedom. State-sanctioned restrictions on people’s legal right to speech, she writes, are not the same as criticism (maybe noble, maybe intemperate, maybe petty, maybe sharp) of another’s speech.
No doubt it can be painful, infuriating or upsetting to be called a racist or a bigot or a sexist or a transphobe. Most of us would find it horrible to be told that we aren’t worth engaging with, that our views are socially unacceptable or merely a function of demography. But that it is painful to be on the receiving end of such remarks doesn’t mean that one’s own rights to ‘free speech’ are thereby imperilled; it might simply be a reminder that speech can wound. The failure properly to metabolise this point is what leads to the ludicrous spectacle of people with enormous speaking platforms complaining about having been ‘cancelled’.
The UK’s recent Higher Education Act, supposedly created in defense of free speech, instead criminalizes much criticism of others’ speech. It makes universities and student unions possibly liable to investigations and fines in situations such as “a student union voting to no-platform fascists; a university failing to quash student protest at a visit from, say, a war criminal; a student group putting out a statement condemning a professor for being transphobic; faculty changing a syllabus in response to student complaints about its racist content; students peacefully protesting outside a lecture; a geography department voting not to hire a climate change denier.” This is beyond anything what we have in the US, yet, but the hope is the same: to force universities to “to silence dissent before it happens.”
Dressing these right-wing attacks as defenses of free speech is preposterous. And, Srinivasan says, it’s also true that students are engaging in more no-platforming, more organizing around disinvitations at universities, than they were ten years ago. How then, as defenders of academic freedom as well as free expression, should we talk about the way students exercise power? Srinivasan writes:
[Students’] self-description and sometimes self-understanding as weak, disempowered agents has become, for them, itself a form of agency. This isn’t necessarily a good thing. Too often it leads students to seek to exercise power through university bureaucracies, evincing a trust in institutional authority that sits in tension with any properly leftist politics.
This trust—that a bureaucracy will put my harm right—also operates at cross-purposes, Srinivasan argues, to the fundamental leftist work of organizing: creating coalitions across divides of ideology, experience, and identity. This coalition-building takes direct immersion in another’s experience that can’t be skipped over by external intervention. “Good organisers listen to people to figure out what it is they need – and then show them that, through the collective exercise of power, a world in which those needs are met is, contrary to appearances, possible.” This, for me, is the heart of the love and attachment I have—whatever the unprecedented eruptions or recurring cycles of student or national poiltical work—for left politics of any kind. I’m grateful that Srinivasan is feeling toward one way to honor its potential.
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“‘He Has Nothing Else’: Our Writers on Trump and the 2024 Election.” This New York Times piece—part of their series where opinion writers weigh in on Republican candidates—is a prime example of the exasperating and narrow loop that the American media is trapped in when they write about our past and maybe-future president. Liberal media despises Trump and they can’t live without him; they consider Trump a unique and malignant disease rather than a symptom of a wider rot in public trust and civic life; they show almost no curiosity about the grievances (and the structural conclusions—wrongheaded, often bigoted, but deeply potent) that motivate people who are passionately pro-Trump, nor about how these supporters experienced his time as president. This frightened, riveted, exhilarated batch of mostly-liberals—stars in a personal past-and-future #Resistance drama—orient themselves in part around the unique and unprecedented menace they believe Trump presents; in so doing, they give Trump exactly the kind of attention in which he thrives. Even the Times’s smartest opinion writers often got Trump wrong. Since Trump’s election, the New York Times has cemented its dominance in our reading environment and its subscription model has skewed its readership liberal; it has a market-driven appetite for giving that readership what it believes it wants. And in this case, it’s exciting and awful Trump drama.
Why is it this way? I basically buy journalist Matt Taibbi’s argument (from early 2020, before Taibbi himself was hooked by the role of antagonizing our liberal and clubby professional-managerial class) that the deepening partisanship of our news media—our ability to find a niche and surround ourselves with sensational scoops and perspectives that reinforce only our own inclinations—represents its own form of manufacturing our consent. Media is a business. Single institutions no longer command a mass audience; there’s no longer money in equating centrism with an “objectivity” that keeps audiences in line. Instead, the market is fragmented and hyper-partisanized: audiences are riveted by a 24-hour news cycle that 100% convinces us that half the country is ignorant and evil; that any moment now a Final Scandal will bring down our enemies; or that at any moment Our Own Doom will arrive. Our passivity (or maybe our enervated cynicism) is no longer ensured by being fed a single national line, but from being in agitating and endless individual echo chambers. Meanwhile, genuine dissent is still frozen out of the largest outlets and genuine accountability for much of the egregious and entrenched corruption of our country’s political life is impossible.
Echo-chamber politics are bad for our country; I also believe that the media has some role to play in arguing our way toward (the impossible and useful ideal of) public reason. So I think it’s great that the center-left Times hired Jamelle Bouie (democratic socialist), Jane Coaston (lefty libertarian), and David French (Christian conservative contrarian), but how much of a further difference to its audience would it make if the Times benched Ezra Klein ten months a year and gave his interviewer’s chair and editorial slot on rotation to a crew like, say, Karen Attiah, Daniel McCarthy, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Cathy Young, Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz, Michael Brendan Dougherty, and Daniel Denvir? How would our national political consciousness feel different, wider, more receptive?
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The beginning of the Lord’s Prayer sung in Aramaic.
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Revolutions, Seasons 3, 4, and 5. Two more things I’ve learned—amid thumbnail bios, setpieces, nerdy jokes, and big-picture history—about revolution:
One: Revolutions erupt not when oppression is especially dire or severe, but when the ruling class of a country or empire is divided, bickering, or unsure of itself. When its wars of independence came, South America had been run for almost three centuries as a massive exploitative plantation-and-mine economy, with all trade locked in by the Spanish bourgeoisie and most political power in the hands of Spanish-born peninsulare colonial administrators. The Spanish American wars of independence that erupted in the early 19th century were not (with the exception of Mexico) popular struggles: they were led instead by liberal criollo patricians, soldiers, and intellectuals, and while they established constitutional governments, they did little to change the power arrangements of their societies. But these leaders were still sharp: they recognized their moment when, back in Spain, Napoleon pushed both Charles IV and his son Ferdinand VII—the whole Spanish Bourbon line—off the Spanish throne and appointed his brother as Spain’s new king. Spain collapsed: both Ferdinand himself and a variety of Spanish resistance regency governments sent competing emissaries to the colonies, all of whom claimed authority and all of whom were hampered by huge trans-Atlantic communication lags. The continent’s four colonial territories exploded at once and were independent twenty years later.
Likewise: when Toussaint L’Ouverture and the slaves of San Domingo rose up against the French metropole and their local plantation owners in 1792, they chose their moment with care. When news finally reached the colony that Paris’s radicalized masses had overthrown and imprisoned King Louis XVI, the colony’s French colonial administration and the military “sprang at each other’s throats” (C.L.R. James). France’s military expedition was led by royalists, and San Domingo’s colonial commission were all republicans, and they turned instantly on each other. It was then that L’Ouverture, camped in the mountains with a core group of two hundred loyal soldiers, first declared his intention to both liberate San Domingo from the French and free the colony’s slaves when he did so. As C.L.R. James put it in The Black Jacobins (a breathless work of history-as-revolutionary-praxis which you absolutely must read), “The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach.”
Two: “Wars lead to revolutions, and revolutions win otherwise unwinnable wars.” Eric Hobsbawm wrote this. In the heat of its own revolutionary conflict, France dragged Europe into a twenty-year meat grinder of war, and it was not France’s more radical Jacobin party, but the moderate Girondin party, that first flipped the switch. In the spring of 1792, leading Girondin deputy Jacques Pierre Brissot gave a fiery speech to France’s Legislative Assembly accusing France’s royalist neighbors in Austria and Prussia of honeycombing France with subversives and spies, working to restore absolutist monarchy to power in France. France declared war days later.
Why? In part, Brissot and the Girondins believed that the war would inaugurate France’s messianic duty to liberate the rest of Europe. But the Girondins also believed that war would expose the revolution’s more radical voices as agents provocateurs: the Jacobins and Parisian sans-culottes whom Brissot believed were pushing France into chaos to deliberately weaken it. James in The Black Jacobins (read it!) suggests in passing that the Girondins, all liberal revolutionaries but also all bourgeois, wanted to check radical demands—the abolition of feudal dues, the expulsion of land speculators from confiscated noble properties, price maximums on staple goods—and they hoped that a successful war would wag the dog, distracting the radical masses with patriotic fervor and making centrism easier to maintain. But the Girondins were exactly wrong: total war abroad leads to radicalism at home. The national mobilization required for all-hands conflict resulted in an “iron and heroic age” for France’s revolutionary government, of radical social reform and state-led terror and violence as well as once-unimaginable military success abroad. This mobilization also devoured the Girondins: they were expelled from government by angry Parisians and, after a show trial before a Revolutionary Tribunal, twenty-nine deputies, including Brissot, were guillotined in 1793. In a national war effort, political moderation is impossible.
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Erin in the Morning, “US Internal Refugee Crisis: 130K-260K Have Already Fled.” How huge are the consequences of the national tidal wave of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-trans legistlation? In her Substack, Erin Reed reports on data analytics showing that “8% of all transgender people have already moved out of their community or state as a result of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation”; she interviews both those who’ve gotten out of states where their lives are criminalized and those who can’t.
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Zeynep Tufecki, “The Government Must Say What It Knows about COVID’s Origins.” In the United States, as well as in China, virology research is happening under gruesomely inadequate safety protocols; the US and the NIH itself, in fact, were among the bodies funding the virology research in Wuhan that, the Wall Street Journal reports, sickened lab workers in November 2019. So is a lab like this where COVID began? No one is saying; WSJ’s reports are backed up (for now) only by unnamed sources, and the Biden administration hasn’t yet kept its promise to declassify what it has on COVID’s origins. Biosafety incidents are numbingly, horribly common. All the distance we, of the prosperous the Global North, enjoy from the climate-change disasters we visit on the poor, won’t protect us from viruses either zoonotic or leaked. Tufecki writes bluntly that governments must share more about what they know. “When people lose trust in institutions, misinformation appears more credible. The antidote is more transparency and accountability.”
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Eleanor Lutz, “How 3 NASA Missions Could Send Astronauts Back to the Moon.” I’m basically pro-moon base. A research station in the ultimate Antarctic, staffed by rotating crews, examining rocks, peering into the ice frozen in craters in permanent shadow: why not? While our civilizations are a long way from cleaning the shit out of our own planetary bed, I think I still believe that being part of a solar civilization would be… Ennobling? Prudent? Humbling?
Yes, a zillion questions and qualms come up: How could we keep from turning Mars into a pit mine or ATV course? How many people would you need to create a thriving independent economy on another planet, and how much genetic care to create a healthy microbiome in its agricultural domes? How can authoritarianism be prevented if the bosses have their hands on their air supply? Can we even thoroughly scrape tardigrades off the sides of our space probes so we don’t accidentally feed any of Europa’s possible ocean life to our invasive fauna? But something in me still thrills to the thought of our roach-y and adaptable species scratching out a life in our solar system’s corners.
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Substack recommendation: Erin in the Morning, an absolutely tireless journalist reporting on trans issues.
Incredibly thought-provoking and well-researched, as usual! I like ending with optimism about the moon, too. :)