Monday, July 4, 2022

Pamela Paul's July 3, 2022 column in the New York Times

Concerning a screed by Pamela Paul

old photograph of woman baseball player pointing figure at umpire

Digression

Once, I wrote an essay, "There Is No War on Christmas". The right-wing likes to tell us: You can't say X anymore. The Left tries to forbid it. First, "Christmas?" Now, "woman"? This is a political lie, of course. No one prevents us from saying "Christmas". No one prevents us from saying "woman," either. Someone might criticize us if we use a word in a particular way that they think is inapplicable or inappropriate, because that is how dialogue works, but they have not stripped these words from the dictionary.

Singal is on it

Jesse Singal's version of anti-trans trolling is (a) wait for someone to publish an anti-trans article (b) wait for trans people to criticize it (c) counter-criticize by saying that's not exactly what the anti-trans person said on some excruciatingly tiny point.

An analogy of my own making, for illustrative purposes: (a) A random transphobe might say: You're a trash human being and you belong in a dumpster! (b) Trans person replies: Not gonna jump in a dumpster for you. (c) The Jesse Singal-ism would be: No one said they expect you to jump in it of your own free will. You should apologize to the transphobe for misrepresenting what they said.

Pamela Paul wrote, "As reported by my colleague Michael Powell, even the word 'women' has become verboten," linking to an NYT article by Powell a month earlier that noted that an ACLU tweet "neglected to mention a relevant demographic: women."

"Verboten" means "forbidden," FYI.

Thus the reply of Rebecca McCray, an ACLU writer: "I work at one of those civil liberties orgs being accused by the NYT of forbidding the use of the word 'woman'...this [is] a harmful lie..."

So the predictable Singal response was "at no point in the column did Paul say the ACLU has a policy outright forbidding the use of the word 'woman'".

No, she just used the German word for "forbidden," mentioned the ACLU, and linked to an article that also mentions the ACLU, ostensibly to support her claim that the word is forbidden.

You can probably understand why people are confused, right? Your social team, at least, was so scared to use the word 'woman' that they altered an important RBG quote! I think that came across as a bit much to a lot of people.
Also, just as a matter of fact given that you are calling her a liar publicly, at no point in the column did Paul say the ACLU has a policy outright forbidding the use of the word 'woman' or its variants. You should correct that, because it's just plain untrue.

The particularly infuriating part of this Singal response is that he says (in his 2nd tweet) that Paul never said the ACLU has such a policy, even though (per his 1st tweet) Paul, in his view, might have reasonably observed that the ACLU sure appears to have such a policy.

You can probably understand why people are confused, right?

It's his trolling method to say: The transphobe didn't say that — but very reasonably could have said it, or did say something functionally identical — but nevertheless can't be held accountable for it because your paraphrase will never be the exact actual thing they said.

Or:

Transphobe: I accuse you of X

Trans people and allies: Actually, Not-X, because Extra Details that disprove the accusation

Singal: Original Transphobe never alleged Not-Extra-Details, and your suggestion that they did is untrue and you should correct the record

Of course, he's shut off replies.

Update, March 2023: And he's also deleted his Twitter account. Technically, as a journalist (and not a healthcare provider) the HIPAA violation isn't his, but it looks like one of his sources violated HIPAA, and what he did was unethical on a human level regardless of the law.

Yes, bad NYT articles have consequences — The column ate Bette Midler's brain

Bette Midler tweeted her concern that people were avoiding the word "woman." The Washington Post clarified on July 6:

In a tweet, Midler said her statement was in response to a “fascinating and well written” opinion piece that ran in the New York Times over the weekend, which argued that “women” was becoming a forbidden word, edged out by gender-neutral terms such as “pregnant people.”

“There was no intention of anything exclusionary or transphobic in what I said; it wasn’t about that,” Midler wrote.

Others commented:

If you're famous, here's a thing you can do

Did you miss the column?

I have picked it apart. See "One Kind of Transphobia: Imagining Cis-Phobia". (12-minute read on Medium)

When she repeated the same kind of article three months later, I wrote a new article, "Pamela Paul's Latest Transphobia." (15-minute read on Medium)

And when she did it another two months after that: "I Listened to ‘Free to Be ... You and Me’" (9-minute read on Medium)

Medium lets you read a certain number of stories for free every month. You may also consider a paid membership on the platform.

What is 'cancel culture,' by the way?

Parker Molloy:

"After HuffPost revealed that right-wing commentator Richard Hanania spent years writing on white supremacist websites, he seemed to actually gain support on the right.

* * *

...people with horrific views come to realize that the public genuinely doesn’t seem to care — at least those who matter to them: the decision-makers, the benefactors, the pundits, and the politicians. None of it seems to matter at all, and I think that’s sad.

And before anyone goes, “Yes, but if they changed their opinion of him, that would be cancel culture!” I want to point out how hilariously detached that term’s present use is from how discussions about “cancel culture” in mainstream media began.3 At first, the argument against “cancel culture” was that people shouldn’t be judged on their worst moments, that people should have room to grow and change over time, that decade-old tweets that don’t reflect someone’s current beliefs shouldn’t be wielded as a weapon against them. And generally, I think that’s good. Yes, it is good to grow and change. But that’s not at all what “cancel culture” means when being discussed today.

Now, when people talk about “cancel culture,” it seems to be in a very “how dare you criticize someone’s currently held views and actions!”

* * *

It’s frustrating because it means we can't have substantive discussions about these ideas. Try it. Try to have a substantive discussion about Hanania’s views. The response will be, “Oh, so you’re against free speech!?” By turning every single discussion into a referendum on “free speech” (and using the extraordinarily flawed belief that criticism, boycotts, and protests aren’t also forms of speech), the actual ideas being pushed in major media outlets aren’t able to be challenged."

— "Our Homelander Moment, Our Homelander World: Ann Coulter is writing for the New York Times. How did we get here?" Parker Molloy. Substack. August 23, 2023.

Here's an example of the thing:

On December 21, 2023, Jonathan M. Katz posted within a Substack discussion: "Hanania has never disavowed his racist views. If Hamish disagreed with them he never said so on the podcast. And as repeatedly noted that was nowhere near the only time he and Chris have played footsie with the far right, which they did to a far greater degree in his Sept. 3 post." In response to which, someone else: "Huh? So let’s put you in charge as you have moral superiority over all views. Your opinion is of most importance. Censorship is discrimination." In other words, Katz was trying to talk about Hanania's "racist views" and how he's "played footsie with the far right" and how others are representing the facts of the matter, — and, exactly as Parker Molloy predicted, the response is: Oh, so you're against free speech!?

And here's another sort-of example of the thing (below). Admittedly, in this case, Substack was indeed asked to stop platforming and profiting from Nazis (effectively, to go ahead and cancel them, not just criticize or discuss them):

"There also remains a criticism that Substack is promoting these fringe [Nazi] voices. This criticism appears to stem from my decision to host Richard Hanania, who was later outed as having once published extreme and racist views, on my podcast, The Active Voice. I didn’t know of those past writings at the time, and Hanania went on to disavow those views. While it has been uncomfortable and I probably would have done things differently with all the information in front of me, I ultimately don’t regret having him on the podcast. I think it’s important to engage with and understand a range of views even if—especially if—you disagree with them. Hanania is an influential voice for some in U.S. politics—his recent book, for instance, was published by HarperCollins—and there is value in knowing his arguments. The same applies to all other guests I have hosted on The Active Voice, including Hanania’s political opposites.

— Hamish McKenzie, Substack, December 21, 2023

To which Daniel W. Drezner replies: "Okay, what specifically would you have done differently? Because it’s hard not to infer from the rest of this note that your answer is 'nothing.'"

August 2023: Ann Coulter is writing for the NYT now

"'My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building,' The New York Observer quoted her as saying on Aug. 20, 2002. She clarified those remarks with RightWingNews.com: 'Of course I regret it. I should have added, ’after everyone had left the building except the editors and reporters.''" — NBC
Don Moynihan on Twitter, Aug 23, 2023: If wokeness was really in control of major journalistic institutions I am pretty sure Ann Coulter would not be writing for the New York Times.
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