Let’s do a little thought experiment. For the purposes of this experiment, we will assume two things are true: that I have an Uncle Mortimer, and that I have an opinion about YA author and vlogging personality John Green.

Neither of those things are true, but we will stipulate them for the sake of argument.

Now imagine that I got on Twitter and said, “You know who John Green reminds me of? My Uncle Mortimer.”

Question: Am I wrong? Or to put another way: can I even be wrong? I mean, can I be proven wrong?

No. This is a qualitative impression that I am reporting, not a quantitative fact I am asserting. I mean, I could be lying, I suppose, for whatever reason. I could also be in some strange way mistaken, like actually thinking of my Uncle Vladimir but confusing him with Uncle Mortimer.

What I cannot be is wrong in the factual sense because I am not speaking to facts but—again—reporting an impression. John Green reminds me of my uncle. So what?

People who are familiar with both individuals might quibble with me, but no one can actually refute the assertion that he reminds me of my Uncle Mortimer. At best they can debate the resemblance, but even if you could disprove a resemblance somehow (how, though?) it would not necessarily change my impression. If somebody could sway me, it would require an appeal every bit as subjective as the initial impression.

I’m probably laying more groundwork than I need to here, though. Nothing in the idea that saying “_____ reminds me of _____” is making a subjective valuation is actually that complicated or controversial.

Now imagine I went on to say, “John Green reminds me of my Uncle Mortimer, who always tries way too hard to impress ‘the youth’ and obviously wants to be seen as one of the kids while also being looked up to by them as an authority. There’s something downright creepy about the way Uncle Mort insinuates himself into certain situations, and John Green sometimes gives me the same vibe when he’s interacting with his teenage fan base.”

So… in this hypothetical situation, am I wrong?

Nota bene: I am not asking if what I am saying is fair, or justified, or proven, or provable, but merely if what I am saying is factually wrong.

In fact, it’s the same question I asked before: if I say John Green reminds me of my Uncle Mortimer, can anyone tell me, “No he doesn’t!”

The answer remains no.

And now the backstory:

Recently, a young woman on the internet said that YA author and vlogger John Green creeps her out. She said that John Green reminded her of the one creepy dad in a friend group who watches a little too closely, a comparison that is sadly quite relatable for a lot of teenage girls. I’ll link to Camryn Garrett’s commentary on the subject, as it is the best article I’ve seen on the subject, as well as one of the most relevant (being written by a teenage girl as well).

John Green’s response to this post was to deny that he sexually abuses children and rant about how the language of social justice is being misused. A lot of people have already pointed out that he jumped to sexual abuse when that wasn’t even mentioned. I would also point out that the crack about “the language of social justice” is equally out of left field, part of a dangerous trend where people are internalizing and repeating reactionary memes used to dismiss criticism.

A number of news outlets picked this up in the most irresponsible fashion imaginable, using headlines and ledes like “John Green responds to child sexual abuse allegations” (there would have to have been such allegations in the first place) and conflating the original poster’s words and actions with those of later commentators who tagged Green in on the post and dared him to defend himself.

Even the more mild write-ups describe the initial post as a series of allegations, and… no. Just no. So many of the people who have attacked the girl have done the same, and also… no. Just no. I’m sure they’d say they’re defending John Green, but against what? She found him creepy. Other people find him charming or funny or approachable or warm or awkward or infuriating or frightening or ridiculous. None of these things are allegations. She described how he comes off to her. That’s all. She’s not wrong.

Other people have pointed out the danger of taking a girl who’s talking about adult behaviors she finds creepy and saying, “No, you’re wrong. You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is slander.”, about the danger of that, about how it comes from and contributes to rape culture. And other people—including people who should know better—have jumped at the mention of rape culture and acted like its mention means that yes, John Green is being accused, specifically of rape, and therefore a spirited and vigorous defense is in order.

But, sheesh. Finding someone creepy is not an allegation and is not—or should not be—actionable as slander. Imagine if it was. Imagine if you, or your children, could not say, “This is making me uncomfortable.” about any person or situation if you couldn’t prove just cause. Imagine if you couldn’t withdraw from a room or a situation that no longer feels safe without providing evidence.

And the thing is, I think that for all the hurt bluster of his post, John Green understands that his young critic is not wrong, because he talks about how he’s going to be using Tumblr differently, taking more of a hands-off approach, engaging less and simply speaking his piece into the ether more.

In other words, he’s decided to step back a bit. That’s a perfectly reasonable response when a young woman says one is standing too close.

So, I’ve received (and removed) a handful of mostly off-topic comments on my post “How Privilege Proves Itself” that focus in part or in whole on my analysis of the use of the word “lynched” by the subject of the article linked in the post. This one point is coming up often enough that I’d like to address it.

The defense I keep hearing is “it’s just a figure of speech”.

The thing is, people offering a defense are missing the point to begin with. Sure, I did mention the problems of using this particular word as a figure of speech, in passing. Because hey… they’re kind of important, right? But the point of my post doesn’t rest on those objections, and even if they are thrown out, the question of, “What exactly did he mean by this?” still remains, as does the logic behind my answer to that question, and the implications I draw from it.

See, so many people use “just a figure of speech” as if to say “it didn’t mean anything.” Some people even make it explicit: “Sheesh, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s just a figure of speech!”

The problem with that is this is the exact opposite of what “a figure of speech” is. Figures of speech, by definition, mean something. A figure of speech—to put it very broadly—is when you say one thing in order to convey another thing. When you say one thing in order to convey nothing… well, that’s babble? Politispeak? Blog comments?

Figures of speech aren’t literal, but they do have meaning. It means something that he said the other person would be told to shut up, but he himself would be “lynched”. My question was what the intended message behind that word is. Saying that it’s a figure of speech is equivalent to saying that the message consists of words. It doesn’t actually tell us anything.

There are only two real possibilities. One is that he fears an actual worse consequence for himself, in which case we should ask what that consequence is. The other is that he wishes to paint the consequences to himself, however inconsequential, as being worse so he chooses to use an emotionally charged word. He’s gonna get lynched. Geez, they’re gonna lynch ’em. A guy can’t speak his mind anymore, he’ll get lynched by the feminazis, right?

The thing is, you can say things like that, and as soon as someone ask what those words mean… well, they don’t mean anything, do they? It’s a great rhetorical dodge. The emotional impact of comparing criticism to lynchings and feminists to Nazis is still there, always there, but you can insist that the words are “just figures of speech” and thus don’t mean anything, et voila… it’s your own instant Get Out Of Consequences Free Card.

But that’s ludicrous. Obviously the words mean something. I mean, this isn’t some weird postmodern experimental dada anti-conversation, right?

And so when the dude says that he’d be lynched if he spoke about feminism, my question—for him, or the audience, or anyone who cares—is, “Well, what actually does that mean? What exactly are you afraid of?”

My question is somewhat rhetorical, as I provided what I thought to be the most likely answer in the post. I’m open to hearing other answers. What I don’t have a lot of patience for is non-answers like “it’s just a figure of speech”. Yes, and this post is just words, and words are just sounds or sights that people make when they want to say something.

The question is, what do they mean?

So, TV Land recently pulled re-runs of Dukes of Hazzard from its line-up.

They took a look around at the cultural landscape of the moment and made the decision that maybe it’s better to not be the network airing a show that prominently displays the iconography of the Confederate flag night after night right now.

In short, it was a business decision, made by a business, for business reasons.

For some reason, this nation’s cultural conservatives are up in arms over this. Conservative commentators on Twitter insist that this is an example of liberals “punishing” people they disagree with, claiming that it’s not fair that the stars of the show are no longer getting paid for the re-runs.

I thought the conservatives were supposed to be the party of personal responsibility, looking down on a culture of entitlement. I guess I thought wrong, though, if they really feel that John Schneider is entitled to receive residuals in perpetuity for a show that went off the air three decades ago.

Whatever you think about the merits of the show or the decision to pull it, surely any discussion must start with the basic premise that the timeslot in question is TV Land’s to do with as they see fit. Surely we can all agree that the right to freedom of speech does not lead to the right to dictate a cable channel’s line-up. Surely we can all see that the freedom of actors John Schneider and Ben Jones to do and say whatever they want to is in no way abridged by the business decision to show or not show re-runs of a show they were on once upon a time.

I mean, what’s the alternative? Do we decide that TV Land isn’t allowed to ever cancel anything once they’ve decided to air, lest some aggrieved conservative decide its aging stars are under attack?

Let’s have some consistency.

Thirty-five years ago, the producers of Dukes of Hazzard made the conscious decision to invoke a certain image in the marketing of their show. Maybe this decision had something to do with its runaway success, maybe it didn’t. But it’s their decision. They made it. If they are entitled to the fruits of their success, then they’re entitled to the consequences of their decisions, as well. Or are companies like TV Land, Warner, and the public at large required to subsidize them forever in the name of their creative freedom?

A tip of one of my many hats to Mary Anne Mohanraj for pointing out an article on Vox.com (no relation) about what internet anti-feminist trolls/Men’s Rights Activists are like in person.

While the journalist behind the piece took the time to interview some of the falling stars of the men’s rights movements, the focus of the piece is one guy he managed to meet up with because he happened to be local and vocal at the right time. The subject, who is identified only by a pseudonym, had this to say during one of their public meetings:

“If both of us stood up on this table right now and started yelling what we think about feminism, somebody might tell you to shut the fuck up. But they would lynch me.”

You hear this a lot, from people who are against feminists or “SJWs” or “the PC thought police”: the fear of the so-called “lynch mob”. And yes, I’m using both scare quotes and saying “so-called”, because… seriously? Every time I see someone engaging in this bit of highly disrespectful hyperbole, I invite the person doing so to consider the implications behind what they’re saying. I’m usually told that words change meaning all the time, which is weird because supposedly it’s us weird lefty fringe types who are re-defining words in order to strip them of their meaning and weaken them.

This example of misappropriating the word “lynching”, though, is almost breathtaking in the stark simplicity of what is happening. If I could talk to the person who said this, I would ask him what I usually ask people in this situation: what exactly is it that he’s actually afraid of happening, when he says that he’ll be “lynched”?

Because I doubt very much he means that he will be publicly tortured and then murdered before a crowd of people who are in little danger of facing any consequences for their actions, which is what lynching has entailed at its historical worst. He certainly can have no realistic fear of even a physical attack for speaking his mind.

So what does he mean, exactly?

What exactly is he afraid will happen?

The same thing that every straight white dude who talks about his fear of “lynch mobs” means: he is afraid he will be criticized. He is afraid that if he were to speak his mind, other people would also speak their minds, doing the exact same thing that he’s doing.

So if we parse out his statement with the hyperbole translated into plain speak, what we would be left with is this:

“If both of us stood up on this table right now and started yelling what we think about feminism, somebody might tell you to shut the fuck up, and that’s okay. But they would tell me to shut the fuck up, too, and that’s terrible.”

This is how privilege proves itself real, again and again: in the fact that its defenders regard any criticism of themselves as being so awful that it’s comparable to the murderous treatment that others have received (and continue to receive) for merely existing.

A few days ago, I made a post about Edward Schlosser’s Vox article. I started by addressing his thesis, saying that I thought he was onto something, suggesting that maybe he’s putting the blame in the wrong place, but acknowledging that I’m not a student or an academic so I’m not the best person to judge. I didn’t offer a final judgment on his larger point, or try to sum up what I thought his point was. I certainly didn’t try to argue with him.

The main body of the post was concerned with one specific thing he did in that article, which was calling out an individual woman on Twitter by name and holding her up (falsely, he was wildly misrepresenting what she was saying in the Tweets he selected) as an example and cause of the problem he described.

As I noted in my post: she was not one of his students, one of his colleagues, or a part of any community he belongs to. She also didn’t call anyone out by name or point to anyone as a target.

And him holding her up and making an example of her subjected her to vitriol, threats, and other abuse from people who were all too eager to buy what he was selling about her.

The point of my post is that this was wrong. He was factually incorrect in how he characterized her statements, but disregarding that, what he did was morally wrong.

And here’s the thing: ever since I made that post, I have had people in the comments on my blog and in my Twitter mentions saying, “Yes, but Edward Schlosser has a point.” or “I don’t think you can say this proves him wrong.” or “You’re just cherry-picking to try to throw out his argument.”

Every single person saying this is making one very disgusting assumption.

And no, this is not a leap. It is a conclusion I am drawing, and I will explain how I drew this conclusion.

The disgusting assumption you are making is that the only reason a person would have to object to Schlosser’s treatment of his online scapegoat is if they desired to use her as a a pretext to attack him. You’re overlooking the possibility that anyone could actually care about her, about her feelings, about her safety, or even about the basic concept of fairness as it applies to her as a human being.

I’m saying, “What he did to this person while making his argument was not cool, and we should not stand for it.”

In order to take away from that is that I must have an axe to grind against him or I must be trying to discredit his larger point, you must not consider the possibility that I actually care about what he did to the person to be worth entertaining.

Now, I’m not claiming to have read your mind. I’m not saying you sat there twirling your Evil Mustache of Evil and said, “ZOUNDS! COULD SHE HAVE CARED ABOUT THIS OTHER PERSON? I SAY THEE NAY!” I’m saying it honestly didn’t occur to you. You leaped right past it.

And why did you do that?

Well… obviously any guess I would venture would be something of an assumption. That’s not to say that certain more obvious possibilities didn’t spring into my mind. I’ll bet they sprang into your mind, too… you were thinking that this is one of those “sees racism/sexism everywhere” things, weren’t you?

Here’s the thing that gets overlooked in all this “LIBERALS TODAY ARE TOO SENSITIVE BLAAAAAAR” stuff: if we only consider racism as a factor when it’s wearing a sheet and burning a cross on somebody’s lawn, we end up missing a lot of stuff.

Let me make a postulate here: Edward Schlosser did not in fact have any elaborate sinister plan when he called out the person he mentioned in his article. He did not in fact have any conscious agenda in using her as a lightning rod to gather outrage unto himself and support for his cause. I know, I know. You’re thinking, if I believe this, then why did I make my post?

Well, my post still stands.

Because racism doesn’t require evil schemes.

All it requires is callous disregard.

And callousness… we hear “callous” and we maybe still picture a sneering villain. But cruelty and callousness aren’t the same thing. To use an example from fantasy fandom: Severus Snape wasn’t callous in how he treated Harry Potter; Albus Dumbledore was.

Edward Schlosser did not consider his scapegoat to be worthy of the same regard he took for himself when he published under a pseudonym. He did not consider his scapegoat to be worthy of the same regard he reserved for his colleagues when he denounced call-out culture as creating a toxic aura of silence and fear. He did not consider his scapegoat to be worthy of the same respect he gives his students in actually hearing their words and taking in what they mean.

And when I say “did not consider”, I don’t mean “thought about it, then decided no”.

I mean “did not think about it”.

The same is true of each and every single person who came to my blog, read my post, and decided that I wasn’t really defending his target, but only attacking his message.

I could tell you how much I respect and admire his target, or how long I’ve been aware of her in a friend-of-friends sort of way, but here’s the thing: I shouldn’t need to prove my bona fides in caring about another human being. My point was and is that what he did to her was unacceptable, period. It would have been unacceptable if it happened to my best friend. It would have been unacceptable if it had happened to a perfect stranger.

This is a moral stance. This is an ethical stance. This is barebones, basic human decency.

I’m going to close this post by reiterating what I said before:

What he did to her was incitement, it was exploitation, and it was abuse, and we should not stand for it.

I note that Vox.com agrees enough to have edited that portion out of his piece. People are crying censorship, but notice that his argument is still there, exactly as intact and complete as it was from start to finish. That’s because the attack, the scapegoating… it never had to do with him making his case on a logical level.

You know this, because the article he just wrote for Vox.com (no relation to Vox Day, for those playing along without a program) opens by saying so.

He is afraid because there’s a different “vibe” in academia now. He’s afraid because now a man’s career can be ruined merely because he spent the entire career making academia a hostile, toxic place for women (or as he prosaically refers to it, “being creepy at conferences”). He’s afraid that claims of racial or gender insensitivity might be taken seriously in a way that, before this changed vibe, an obviously spurious complaint about reverse-racism was pointedly not.

And the thing is, I don’t know.

I really don’t.

Specifics aside, I think he’s on to something about the problem of treating students as consumers and then adopting a “customer is always right” approach to teaching. This is a knife that cuts across ideological divides, as Professor Shannon Gibley was reprimanded in 2009 for making white students uncomfortable when teaching the truth about structural racism and imperialism.

There’s something there. I’m not the best person to engage with what’s there, as I’m not an academic. But I’ve seen enough and heard enough to know that there’s something there.

I don’t think the problem here is necessarily with the students, or with liberals, so much as it is with the commodification/consumerization of education as a whole. When college makes itself into a big business and positions its degrees as product, the student-as-consumer model seems like a necessary end result. It’s probably not quite that cut-and-dried, though, and this could be a fascinating discussion to have.

The thing is, Edward Schlosser doesn’t seem to be having that conversation. Rather than asking what’s been changing over time in the environment in which he’s working, he’s looking outward. He’s blaming “call out culture” and “a simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice”.

And he has examples.

In an article whose subject is, I remind you, “my students scare me”, he chooses to highlight a couple of tweets by blogger @bad_dominicana, Zahira Kelly, talking about bias in science.

Note that Zahira Kelly is not one of his students. Zahira Kelly is not one of his colleagues. Zahira Kelly has bother-all to do with him or his. What Zahira Kelly is to him is a convenient target of opportunity, a person who can be used as both a scapegoat and a lightning rod.

I have the feeling that Schlosser knows none of his students would actually be that scary to the Vox.com reading audience. I’m sure he knows that it’s hard to sell his fear describing them in the abstract. But what is scary to his audience? But an outspoken AfroLatina blogger, a self-described “Bad Dominicana” speaking her unvarnished thoughts in Tweet form?

He wants to talk about nuance and complexity over simplicity, but he selects two tweets from a series of larger thoughts and then extrapolates from them… well, let me do what he did and screenshot what I’m talking about. (Apologies to the Facebook readers, click over for the crosspost):

Kelly is not one of his undergrads, but let’s stop and marvel at the condescending manner with which he acts as though she is, as he praises her intelligence and voice while blowing past her point to work what she said into what he was saying, in more or less exactly the same way he describes dealing with off-track interjections into his class.

Except she didn’t interject. He went looking for her saying something, and then even though it’s not germane to his topic, he roped her into his article, held her up for the world as an oh-so-frightening example of why everybody else should be as scared as he is.

And except she’s not saying what he claims she is. If she were calling for us to reject science, why would she say that most (quotation marks hers) “scientific thought” isn’t that scientific? If the point was science is bad, she wouldn’t be arguing that anything isn’t science. She would have no reason to make that distinction.

And look at the phenomenal leap he makes from her calling out “white patriarchal bias” to saying she throws things out “just because it’s associated with white males”.

Maybe I have a low tolerance for or high sensitivity towards this particular leap because of how often it comes up in dealing with Sad Puppies, but really. Someone who claims he just wants to go back to a time when nuance and complexity and reason were allowed to rule over short-sighted oversimplifications and us-vs-them identity arguments should not be mistaking a conversation about bias for one about demographics. That’s inexcusable.

But at the risk of giving him an “AHA!” moment in support of his supposition that feels have superseded reals, I have to say that the fact that he’s wrong in the sense of being incorrect in his words is really secondary here to the fact that he is wrong in the sense of being morally indefensible in his actions.

Because whatever he’s using Bad Dominicana’s words to say, the fact is, he’s using her.

He knows—or at least has no business not knowing, given that he’s mining her Twitter timeline for pull quotes—that her writing makes her a target for abusive backlashes. He must know that there’s a receptive audience out there looking for acceptable targets to pile onto and an excuse to pile on them.

His piece is one of many out there right now that are full of hand-wringing and head-shaking over the plights of the poor, beleagured Joss Whedons and George R.R. Martins of the world, a world in which apparently anyone can just say anything to anyone else and it’s supposed to be okay. Cultural critics, activists, and bloggers like Zahira Kelly are routinely held up as being the face and muscle of an unstoppable juggernaut that lashes out without warning and strikes without repercussions.

This ignores the actual realities of online discourse. What power the internet has as an equalizer means that stuff can fly in every direction at once. As Joss Whedon got full blast the rage of angry/disappointed comic fans, internet trolls, and those labeled as “Social Justice Warriors”, there were people taking full advantage of the opportunity to lay blame for both that whole fustercluck and Joss’s decision to leave Twitter at the feet of feminists.

And always, always, these attacks somehow spiral out and grab hold of people who have nothing to do with them. It’s opportunism. At WisCon 39, on the panel at call-out culture, we discussed this tendency as it has shown up on Tumblr: somebody finds themselves involved in an argument or controversy (or wants to find themselves there); they pull in someone they know has a dedicated hate-following. The target of such a proxy attack is inevitably stereotyped as either “strong” or “thriving on attention”, or both, and thus immune to pain and in no need of empathy.

Edward Schlosser is participating in that pattern of behavior. Zahira Kelly isn’t his colleague, or his student, or anything to him except a villain for a story that needed one. Forget his calm, cultured mild-mannered professor at a midsize school act. When he appropriates tweets from an AfroLatina blogger and holds them up as the example and cause of everything that is rotten in the state of Denmark, this man is Gaston in the village square, holding up a stolen magic mirror and saying “IT’S TIME TO TAKE SOME ACTION, BOYS… IT’S TIME TO FOLLOW ME.”

It’s incitement, it’s exploitation, and it is abuse.

We should not stand for it.

Folks, it is downright eerie how many people are trying to leave comments on this post and either clearly haven’t read it, or read it and assumed that I’m saying “Edward Schlosser is wrong, wrong, wrong about his premise and I’m going to nitpick the way he treated an unrelated third party purely as a means of attacking his message,” as though it’s impossible for me to actually care about the subject I’m actually talking about.

The latest offender asked me if I’m in academia (a question this post answered!) and then dropped a link to her own blog post in support of his point. I treated this like spam. I’ve been telling people all week that if they want to debate Schlosser’s larger point, they should do so in their space. That’s not an invitation to use my space as a billboard.

If you want to comment on this piece, make sure you’ve read it and know what it’s actually about.