Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

my class politics is based on poor resentment

Wow, that Beijer piece is a vile pile of crap. So now the harassed has an obligation to ask every harasser why they harass them? What an asshole.

Also, the posibility (or inevitability) that mentally ill people will join in on the harassment is part of the reason why you don't dogpile in the way these guys does. Fuck that abusive creep.

Wow, that Beijer piece is a vile pile of crap. So now the harassed has an obligation to ask every harasser why they harass them? What an asshole.

― Frederik B, Thursday, July 14, 2016 4:33 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no. but if you want to smear someone as being "egged on by the circle around X" and then that person is unrelated, then you shouldn't accuse X of anything.

shitty analogy -- lots of people hated reagan and his policies. John Hinckley tried to kill reagan. should people have said "everyone criticizing reagan is responsible for this" ? or "the possibility that mentally ill people will try to kill reagan is part of the reason you shouldn't use sharp rhetoric against reagan"?

this is war on terror bs logic repurposed into a "social justice" setting.

Pretty much everyone involved in politics is unlikable.

as I observe them, they often shine in terms of social skills but generally not in terms of intellect or character

misogynist abuse is endemic to all online spaces. resistance to even looking at the gendered hierarchies within the left has a long history. those are both general truths.

that said, this piece places some recent online fights in the context of much older fights within the left over identity and solidarity. bringing in the transwomen at stonewall to relitigate all of your gross twitter beefs of the last 12 months is... some kind of something

this whole thing is just a proxy for the end of hillary-bernie contest. i don't think it makes much sense outside of that. a whole raft of feminists threw in for hillary and took a lot of (often nasty) shit for their candidate's bad policy history. it's structured like a plea for unity and an end to exclusion but it moves from one highly-euphemistic piece of score-settling to another.

good analysis, goole

if you really want me to show my cards, i think this campaign has turned sady doyle into a paranoid idiot, sarah kendzior is only intermittently honest, matt breunig was fired for nothing, a whole lot of the more anarcho-minded online ppl have frankly turned full fash lately, and the whole 'woke for hillary' set turned up the rhetorical heat on sanders supporters -- as retrograde white commies -- as a mask for their candidate's surprising weaknesses in the face of a vermont gadfly long before the 'berniebro' phenomenon broke out.

it doesn't really help matters that the new wave right wing psychosphere hates intersectional feminism a little more than it hates leftism generally and is always eager to join in.

it's been a really backward year for mutual understanding. instead of a writer making a case for a reasonable stance and debating it, it's acerbic tweets responding to half-baked arguments followed by articles that are just round-ups of one side of the argument, further dirtying the image of whoever seems to have come down on the wrong side of the most marginal of stances

would it make you feel better or worse if i were to say that most of us completely stopped paying attention about a year or so ago, and have spent the intervening time painstakingly attempting to explain to our white friends that saying "black lives matter" doesn't make you racist, 57 times over?

yeah I checked out long ago

not sure whether I'm happy I haven't had to explain blm to any friends, maybe I just need more varied friends

thanks to this thread i kind of know what's going on ish

i can never remember people's names though

let's be honest tho the online left has been a mess since before hill/sanders cf jacobinghazi shit this /fight/ didn't just spring from zeus' head after iowa caucus

yes, that's something that the WATL piece is accurate about -- these are recent manifestations of fractures in the left that go back generations.

+ trís is right that neither side acquits themselves v well - this coming from a guy who was on some 'class is more important than identity' crap all over ilx a few years ago but seeing deboer + beijer types makes it clear how gross that look can get even when it is staying on the right side of soviet LARPing (which let's be honest it rarely is)

i didn't think anything could make me sympathetic to fdb but this nonsense actually sort of has.

no. but if you want to smear someone as being "egged on by the circle around X" and then that person is unrelated, then you shouldn't accuse X of anything.

But that's not what Sady Doyle is saying. In the parts Beijer quotes, she never claims that that threat came from someone related to Bruenig and Beijer, she just says that that kind of abuse is what comes when harassment is legitimised. This is what Beijer quotes: "‘twist her tits clear off’...people piling on like that is a foreseeable consequence of inciting harassment and framing my harassment as a moral good. Which is, well, what Bruenig and Beijer did."' No need for that harasser to be connected to them. Also, she is 100% correct. And Beijer then uses that against her, to further continue lying and thereby further legitimising more abuse of her. It's absolutely vile and disgusting.

again, make the analogy to reagan and think for a second.

I think Fred's ideas are bad

But I urge fans of mine to not imply they are going to twist his dick off, be civil, guys

the whole purity politics these dudes specialize in is about guilt by association so i'm not shedding any tears for them

i didn't want to exacerbate any interpersonal type stuff #onhere but yeah, Mordy, i thought you might like beijer! i think he's ok generally. ruder than i'd be, but that goes for most online people. one of the people i'll read when something pops up but don't follow directly

fdb i think belongs in a monastery

it is ~interesting~ how earlier controversies like jacobinghazi and gamergate map onto or prefigured these divisions, but at the point of saying so you have to realize how fatally up-its-own-ass the whole scene is. if there was a way to deemphasize twitter across the board...

again, make the analogy to reagan and think for a second.

― R.I.P. Haram-bae, the good posts goy (s.clover), 14. juli 2016 21:38 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I thought for a second. The analogy is laughably bad. Are you going to admit that you misrepresented what Sady Doyle said?

not sure whether I'm happy I haven't had to explain blm to any friends, maybe I just need more varied friends

― mh

don't bother, it was like talking to a wall. i had to ditch them all.

honestly this thread isn't doing much to educate me. it's like reading spoilers for game of thrones. everybody's all like "WINTER HAS COME!!!" and my reaction is "uh... that's bad, i guess?"

honestly i commend you for not staring into your phone 16 hours a day as a form of political engagement

also there's a deliberate association by adjunction thing going on here. there's a _clear_ and pretty bogus implication of causality even if individual statements are factually correct.

let me try this. "one man bought a wu-tang album. he has been denounced as a hipster douche who deserves to rot in jail, and people have said they hope he dies."

"one woman became the prime minister of britain. many people did not mourn her death."

"one man failed the entrance exam of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. many have since said he is the worst monster in history and even speculated as to going back in time and killing him as a child."

the existence of an online alt-right which attacks people is entirely disappeared. so if any liberal centrist dem gets any sort of online attack at all -- even if its from ppl with like swastika tattoos all over their timeline -- then somehow this is the fault of people who criticize them _from the left_.

Are you going to admit that you misrepresented what Sady Doyle said?

― Frederik B, Thursday, July 14, 2016 3:42 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no. are you going to tell me why my analogy is bad

Nah. I'm not going to waste anymore time on you when you're dishonest and won't admit it. Waste of time.

good talk! glad we could constructively engage as called for in that article you're so happy with!

another win for polite productive discourse on the internet, land of hashtag liberation

i feel like what this thread really needs is for morbs to show up and call hillary a liar.

i didn't want to exacerbate any interpersonal type stuff #onhere but yeah, Mordy, i thought you might like beijer! i think he's ok generally. ruder than i'd be, but that goes for most online people. one of the people i'll read when something pops up but don't follow directly

oh don't get the wrong idea my distaste for him is entirely based on reading him. i don't know him personally or really any of these ppl and outside maybe tweeting some snarky quip at them once on twitter i have no interactions w them. they just seem pretty distasteful and kinda rote in a predictable way. pretty much any writer whose /take/ i can write myself without seeing what they have to say first is not someone i'm interested in. and particularly regarding the online pro-bernie left there was a kind of descent into defensive apologetics that really i don't want to see from anyone for any politician. ppl like corey robin writing these long paeans about /where does the left go from here/ after california as tho bernie was the savior of the left idk it rubbed me the wrong way. no gods no masters and a lemieux type who at least is like 'politics aren't personality dramas but about executing ideology thru policy' is something i can respect. all these fdb guys seem like sad sacks in search of a revolution and none of them read enough.

like this thing was the first thing i saw from beijer and it's just... besides the implication that white sanders voters are better educated than hillary black voters which maybe he didn't really realize he was insinuating it's just over-the-top. there were good things about bernie and some pretty dumb things too. i don't know how he became the second coming of lenin among these bros.

oops - link: http://www.carlbeijer.com/2016/02/black-voters-and-2016-primaries-part-2.html

the childishness and bad faith on both sides of this is nothing short of stunning.

i used to be woke but this shit put me right back to sleep

time to invoke a few zen assholes to set these people straight

jeff kunzler, writing for medium:

Let me make it clear to the undersigned of “We Are The Left” one simple fact: you got pig poop balls in your mentions and other clapbacks because you were an outspoken supporter of a Liberal White Supremacy that infests our current political class.

powerful

i am inclined to agree with the general idea that the letter represents a sort of trendy faux liberalism more interested in symbolism than inequality but.... i think all of that is basically true for kunzler's analysis as well. except sub in "gross and tone deaf" for "trendy"

feel like half of these ppl are using liberal as a pejorative and it's flying over the heads of the other half

very true. i think the letter writers are more leftist than liberal in the end, though. like they might be into a liberal economy but they are also distrustful of old liberal chestnuts like transparency, preferring to contextualize everyone's statements via intersectional power analysis. (only mean this descriptively -- i have reservations about this tic but there is a use for it sometimes as well)

only barely germane to the thread, but, WHAT KIND OF SHIT IS THIS?? WHO THINKS LIKE THIS?

https://twitter.com/Alastair_JB/status/753655058445762560

Alastair ‏@Alastair_JB 11m11 minutes ago

Women followers: has that meme offended you? If so I am happy to apologise

oh man, i hope this controversy is resolved in a way that provides an opportunity for understanding!

apparently the wearetheleft editors added marissa johnson to the list without asking?

https://twitter.com/rissaoftheway/status/753648048824213504

no mention of that in the updates, though

lol

i wonder how many other ppl on the list actually agreed to be there. i mean.

idk. everything is a nightmarish farce now.

first as dreamy tragedy

http://i.imgur.com/O4BSKA7.png

https://medium.com/@deeperblue/the-life-and-death-of-wearetheleft-6a12b9489975#.zibv06ejd