Within the Sarcophagus of Virtue

John David Duke Jr

David was begotten and conceived in the ordinary way in the middle of 1972, possibly on his father's birthday. Since then, it's been an unremarkable go, except for the time his dad took him to help disarm a Cherokee woman who was shooting at her mother with a rifle.

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21 Responses

  1. InMD says:

    I think this misses the mark on what’s going on. The power to forgive is in the hands of the dude Freddie libeled on social media. No one else has it or can attain it. End of story.

    To the extent we’re talking about the rest of the tweeting media class among whom he is persona non grata, well, antagonizing them is kind of his schtick. They don’t really care what he did. Citing this episode is an excuse for how they want to behave towards him anyway. His best and most biting writing is as a media and culture critic and as he regularly admits his disinterest in being part of the clique is what allows him to say what he does. Being a critic is not a sin and those (fairly) critiqued have not been wronged by it. Forgiveness simply isn’t at issue.Report

    • Marchmaine in reply to InMD says:

      Public sins, private forgiveness, virtue/vice, actions/consequences… death, judgement, heaven and hell?

      These are all things as old as dirt… it isn’t that we get them wrong, but that I’m increasingly reading people who think they are getting them right. That’s the distressing point; the point Ms. Bruenig tries unsuccessfully to make to the people who know they’ve figured out this who public morality thing.

      My crypto-catholic thought for the day is that everyone should read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and recognize that the only thing worse than penance is the lack of penance.Report

  2. Jaybird says:

    Well, Freddie continues to write stuff. Let’s look at his Substack.

    Hrm. Not a paying member so can’t see that one… ooof, not gonna touch that one with a 10 foot pole… okay. The Nation of Islam.

    No problem. I don’t know what “forgiving Freddie” looks like but “not forgiving Freddie” looks a lot like “Oh, like I’m going to read his post about the Nation of Islam? Isn’t he crazy? Isn’t he fat from his medications and therefore obviously morally wrong? Is he going to start accusing Louis Farrakhan of various bad things based on nothing at all? Did he ever apologize to Malcolm Harris anyway?”

    Hrm. If that’s what “not forgiving Freddie” looks like, I guess “forgiving Freddie” just means “I can read his stuff as if someone I’d never heard of wrote it.”

    Part of the problem, of course, is that the people who aren’t into forgiving Freddie have multiple reasons for not forgiving him.

    Some of them, yeah, don’t want Freddie to again have a position where he’s going to do what he did to Malcom to someone else. Imagine, if you will, Freddie writing an essay about how this or that major figure at this or that major institution ought to be cancelled because of this or that.

    As we all know, most folks will react to an unfounded cancelworthy accusation with important questions about what happened, give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, and dismiss the accusation out of hand unless there are some serious receipts given as a part of the tea, sweaty. But there will be a small number of folks who will look at this or that major figure differently from that point on. Like it or not. There are people who look at Malcom differently today than they did before Freddie’s accusation. That ain’t fair. It makes sense to not want to give Freddie that social power again.

    But there are also a bunch of people who oppose the things that Freddie likes and like the things that Freddie opposes and asking “did Freddie even apologize to Malcolm Harris?” is a quick and easy to change the subject from an interesting point that Freddie made to talking about how Freddie is bad.

    Heck, if someone discusses a point that Freddie made without bringing up Freddie, it’s possible to say “that sounds like something Freddie would have said… Did he even apologize to Malcolm Harris?”

    And, even now, I’m writing more about Freddie than Malcom Harris. Malcom Harris? He’s that guy. Not particularly interesting. I’m bored already. This isn’t particularly fair to Mr. Harris.

    Maybe “not forgiving Freddie”, ideally, looks like talking about the stuff that Mr. Harris thinks instead of talking about the stuff that Freddie thinks. Throw some clout to Mr. Harris! Did you know he has a book about Millennials? He does!

    But that seems to wander back to the whole “who deserves clout?” question of what do we do with forgiveness. Which strikes me as also unsatisfying.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Jaybird says:

      Freddie has a take. This one is on not only his critics, but the current Twitter crapstorm complaining about Substack.

      He is, as the kidz say, On Fire.Report

      • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

        Oh, um, well, that should probably settle everything down…

        “What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you – college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves”

        … I can feel the waves of self-reflection and self-awareness washing over his critics as my keyboard clicks its mechanical clacks.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

          In that vein, I hope you enjoy this piece that made waves over the weekend:

          Report

          • Marchmaine in reply to Jaybird says:

            Well, I have a deep vein of hatred for all references. In my line of work it’s the dumbest most tedious part of my job.

            “Oh? You’d like to talk to one of my hand-picked references about the software that I’m picking them to talk to you about?” Three times?

            Do you think you’ll learn anything in this day of you-tube videos and tech-sites rating my software? I can see from LinkedIn that you are connected to about a dozen of my other customers… some of them like our software, some don’t. You should check with your network, not mine. Or have you not updated your procurement process/spreadsheet from 1992?

            For students? Increasingly I’m thinking that a simple testing regime plus a grade rating system (like WAR that accounts difference in ballparks but for grade inflation and school systems) plus a lottery system should be the new admissions regime (at least for state schools). Just pure luck based on minimal qualifications.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to Marchmaine says:

              When it comes to a job for, say, coding, just ask them to explain “Fizz Buzz” to you on the whiteboard.

              Ask them to whip up a quick Birthday -> Astrological Sign program.

              “What is your birthday? Please enter your birthdate in the form MM/DD.”
              (enters 3/22)
              YOU ARE AN ARIES!

              If your interviewee cannot explain Fizz Buzz on a whiteboard and cannot whip up an astrological chart program for you at a moment’s notice (I mean, maybe they’ll need the horoscope section from the newspaper as a reference), then their references probably don’t matter.

              But when it comes to college? Hey, we’re going to be putting you into debt for around 50% of the median price of a house in the US. Convince us to do it!

              Well, yeah. We’re going to need references.Report

  3. KenB says:

    I recognize the distinction you’re making, but the terms are throwing me off — maybe it’s just my own idiosyncratic definitions. I think of “virtue” as being opposed to “vice” and representing more of an individual standard, with the recognition that we all face various temptations and the virtuous ones are those who best resist them and stay on the best path. The reward for virtue is respect and admiration and the price of vice is disappointment & contempt — “forgiveness” isn’t something I would associate with this axis. Forgiveness goes hand-in-hand with interpersonal morality.

    But the judgment of Freddie in this case is maybe not really about “morality” either — it’s more about “moralism”, where a few noisy people who are already predisposed to dislike him are quick to judge him harshly and reject any context. For this personality, no forgiveness is possible, unless perhaps he sheds any trace of apostasy and grovels for mercy.Report

    • North in reply to KenB says:

      No forgiveness is possible AND no forgiveness is necessary. Freddie owes those he wronged and that is it. The chatteratti who are the primary people bringing this up are owed nothing and deserve nothing; they would have despised Freddie even if he hadn’t done the things he did.Report

  4. DensityDuck says:

    RE: AutoDeletion on Twitter

    One useful thing to do, if you find a tweet or thread that you particularly enjoy, is to use ThreadReaderApp (or some similar bot-based service) to get an Unroll page, and then do the “save a PDF archive” of that unroll. Obviously this doesn’t help for purposes of citation or linking, but at least it lets you keep the tweet.

    Another option is to screenshot the tweet rather than just quote-tweet or retweet. This tends to clog up your feed, though, unless you make a separate account solely as a retweet-saver (and if you’re going to that much troubleyou might as well use ThreadReaderApp.)Report

    • Brandon Berg in reply to DensityDuck says:

      There are also archiving services, like https://archive.today. Short of actually getting server logs from Twitter, which isn’t going to happen without a subpoena, this is pretty much the gold standard for proving that something was published. It’s kind of like getting a screenshot notarized: A neutral third-party certifying that the web page at the specified URL looked like this at a certain time.Report

  5. Chris says:

    I find much of the Freddie forgiveness dialogue (not necessarily here, but you know, out there) depressing, because I think as a society we have deeply dysfunctional conceptions of forgiveness and guilt, though I recognize that Freddie’s is a case that comes with piles of baggage (not just his mental illness, which affects our reasoning in complicated ways, but also his two decades of being an asshole online, and the controversial nature of many of his opinions), but what really irks me about all of this is that we’re having the dialogue entirely because a guy whose mental health is adversely affected by being online has been forced to be online after an extended absence because it is the only way for him to make money given his mental illness and the way it affects how as a society we think of him. Regardless of whether he should be forgiven, he shouldn’t be forced to risk his mental health to simply survive, yet that’s what our society does to so many people.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to Chris says:

      He tried to get a real job that didn’t involve being a horse’s ass online. He was a teacher.

      He no longer has that job.

      So here we are.Report

      • Chris in reply to Jaybird says:

        Yeah, and the main reason he doesn’t have that job anymore is because of his mental health issues.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Chris says:

          I’ve only heard his side of the story on why he doesn’t have the job anymore.

          That said. His side of the story involves our deeply dysfunctional conceptions of forgiveness and guilt rather than him sucking at his job.

          But, again, I’ve only heard his side of the story on why he doesn’t have the job anymore.Report