Rowling & Rushdie's stupid letter

The killing of George Floyd showed that many innocent African Americans have been victimized by a Racist Criminal Justice system. This has caused many other classes of people to come forward with their own horrific tales of Victimization.

As a case in point, Thomas Chatterton Williams, whom I rate, mooted the following letter signed by Chomsky, Atwood, Rushdie, but also J.K Rowling who isn't a boring cretin at all- at least most of the time.

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial.

No. If Cultural institutions try to do something other than simply exist for the benefit of their founders, then they open themselves to infiltration. If they fail to gain broad based support on the basis of the utility they create, then, and only then, are they are overrun by some rent-seeking clique- provided it is profitable for that clique to do so. Otherwise, the Cultural Institution simply moulders on in a more and more senile and philistine fashion.

Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts.

Powerful protests? There is a wide difference between a genuine power grab & a bored search for distraction under conditions of lockdown.

But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.

There have been no 'norms of open debate' with respect to the culture industry. There has been marketing of various types. There have been junkets of various types. There have been innumerable circle jerks of mutual-congratulation. But when was the last time the literary elite debated anything? Sartre v Camus? Chesterton v Shaw? My point is, open debate between phrase-makers is productive of phrases not an overlapping consensus of the sort Juries arrive at regarding the facts of the case.

As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second.

So, you are making two different types of noise for two different purposes. Why not also fart for some third ineffable purpose? Oh. I see. You did. It is your farts which sustain the multiverse.

The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy.

Very true! He may cancel the Presidential elections because he is doing badly in the opinion polls.

But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting.

Either it has already hardened, in which case there is some point to this letter, or it hasn't. If it hasn't, then there isn't a dogma- i.e. an overlapping consensus re. a reform agenda- and there is no coercive mechanism. If it has, then either you are against it or you are for it. Saying this dick mustn't get hard is saying you want no part of it. Saying no dick of a particular sort should ever 'be allowed to harden' suggests you aren't DTF at all. You showed up at the orgy to look cool, but you don't want anyone to do anything more exciting then nibble canapes and make small talk.

The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

But the democratic inclusion the rest of us wants is one that will benefit us by benefiting society at large. These cretins think it is about the masses longing to hear them speak out rather than write about werewolves or wizards or Dictators or Djinns or other imaginary threats to the commonweal.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.

No it isn't. Institutional and Oligopolistic information aggregation has been disintermediated by Technology. That's a good thing.

While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.

But this was the case even before Sartre v Camus.

We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought.

So what? Does 'democratic inclusion' mean that this elite should have its ears protected from calls they think unseemly?

More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms.

Good. They were creatures of straw. So what if they soil themselves and run away? We are no longer greatly discommoded by bolting horses or piles of horse manure on our highways. We have cars and buses now. Similarly, why should we care about the fate of Institutions from the Guttenberg era? Us guys got Google.

Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.

So, some scapegoats have been offered a mob made restive by the lockdown. So what? Why should we greatly care? Hundreds of millions are out of work. What makes a handful of editors and journalists so special?

Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal.

Nonsense. The threat of reprisal was always there. It is the reality of a small but monetary and reputational reprisal which worries these shitheads. They know the Police will protect them against fanatics- this may help them make more money. But if their market share erodes, if people see them for what they are- elderly cretins- then their profits and perks diminish.

We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

But this price is trifling and temporary.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time.

But what good did any of these shitheads do 'the most vital causes' of our time? Did they invent something useful? No. Did they bring about any desirable legal or social change? No. They preened themselves and pocketed their profits.

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.

No. It has no effect whatsoever because 'debate' of the sort these cretins are talking about was always regarded as cretinous.

The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away.

Nonsense. The way to defeat bad ideas is by ridiculing them or, if it is unsafe to do so, ignoring them completely. You may certainly silence anyone it is in your power to so do if what they are saying does not promote your interests. I can tell a plumber who wants to lecture me on the correctness of the Mochizuki proof of the abc conjecture to shut the fuck up and fix my sink. Otherwise, I won't pay him a dime. On the other hand when my Dad lectures me on why I must lose weight, I don't wish him away, coz he's a lovable dude and can make me laugh like no one else I know. Also, I do feel better when I try to lose weight.

We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.

You may also refuse the false choice between dying and living on the grounds that life and death can't exist without each other. But you are either alive or you are dead and beginning to smell real bad. It is not the case that doggy is just sleeping in the backyard where your parents buried him 50 years ago. Where Justice exists, some people lose their freedom. They are incarcerated. Where freedom is unfettered there is no Justice system. Unfortunately you must be prepared to kill, or yourself be killed, if you don't want to end up a sex-slave to Tina Turner, beyond the Thunderdome, same as I was back in the Eighties as I still fondly recall.

As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes.

No. You need a mind capable of doing such things. But, the truth is, you guys find and stick to a winning formula and write more and more worthless shite of the same stripe till the market for it disappears.

We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

This will happen, provided there are low barriers to entry, in any competitive field sustained by the utility- and hence fungibility- of its product. By contrast, if the thing is 'rent dissipation' simply then all sorts of shibboleths and taboos will arise. You make your living in a shitty way. It follows you must swallow a little shit each day of your working lives.

If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

So Rushdie should have defended his own life against the Iranians. He shouldn't have expected the public or the state to defend him. Cool! He should have learned Ninjutsu in a secret monastery in Japan and parachuted into Iran and felled the Ayatolloah with a karate chop.