Freddie deBoer

Just a brief note - this post from TechCrunch is pretty bizarre overall, and it really demonstrates the extent to which people in the media don’t even bother to articulate why or how free speech is now bad. More relevant to me, it links to my piece on the historical futility of attempts to censor right-wing extremism

you only get to be an outsider artist if everybody hates you, now

Affirmative consent is a policy on sexual consent that became a legal requirement in public universities in California in 2014, spread to other schools and states from there, and became a socially and politically mandated policy position in progressive spaces soon thereafter. The idea is that, instead of the traditional standard where rape occurs if someone says no to sexual acts and the aggressor doesn’t stop, the standard holds that someone has to explicitly (affirmatively) consent to sex, or else any sexual contact that follows is legally sexual assault. As with the traditional standard, under this policy consent can be withdrawn at any time. But affirmative consent invites a vexing metaphysical question, which is what constitutes a sex “act”; if consent must be given not merely for an encounter to take place in general but for every aspect of that encounter, it compels people to ascertain when exactly a new element must be consented to, while in the midst of an intimate encounter. Whether this results in a mandatory string of constant “May I place my hand on your right breast? May I place my hand on your left breast?” questions is controversial - defenders of affirmative consent frequently call that a caricature, but that is the letter of the infamous

there is no there there to make fun of anymore

concepts within the market economy don't always make sense outside of it

the fourteenth weekly digest post