Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

+ 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

this latest part of the thread makes as much sense to me as a cricket thread

i mean, i guess the hellish reality we are moving toward is neoliberal "identity politics" vs. reactionary/populist "class politics", which is also a kind of identity politics insofar as it is based on white resentment

― Treeship, Thursday, July 14, 2016 3:48 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

idk i strongly suspect the identitarian neoliberal is a strawman with few examples outside of twitter. economically 99% of sjw are at least centre-left. i mean, in left narcisism of small differences arms race neoliberal can mean centre left, i guess

i've read a lot of online conservatives pine for the good old days when leftists were Marxists ('at least they had a theory' or 'at least you could argue with them and not be told to shut up bc ur a straight white man') and hate the identity politics stuff like nothing else

It's not so much about the individual opinions of the identitarian activists as it is the fact that the Democratic party is better able to assimilate the identity side of a left platform -- an equal plank, i'm not saying "class" should have a privileged role -- than it is the class side. This is especially true in the case of rhetoric. They could be the party of wall street and still be "woke." Meanwhile this would all buffer the Republican pitch to working class whites that Democrats don't care about them.

With Trump you can almose sense a total realignment -- he advocates "protectionism" and has even claimed to be for "fair trade" rather than "free trade." Of course he means something different by that than fair trade coffee marketers -- Trump's critique of globalization is solely from the perspective of American interests, unlike the left wing case which says it hurts both American workers and foreign workers -- but still.

This is still years out. Republicans still have higher incomes on average than Democrats, but still. I think an incoherent politics of cosmopolitan elitism vs nativist populism could be our future if the left gets too comfortable with cultural victories. Again these are important but they are just one half of the equation when it comes to building a more equal world.

the sanders campaign did indicate their is a lot of interest in class issues among young democratic voters, which might point to a different future. i just think it would be a tragedy if somehow this was pitted against identity politics.

will consult tea leaves and get back to you with more prognostications later

What do you mean by 'cultural victories'? Abortion, mariage, police violence, these are very real problems.

Fuck you

Thats exactly what i am talking about. I never said these werent real problems or tried to subordinate them to class issues. I said they were equally important. I said that the danger is the left being divided against itself

50% of students in American public schools live in poverty. black people are being murdered by police with impunity. Neither of these problems is worse or more pressing than the other. They're both worse. They are also not unrelated.

i think it's a good pt that you're making. the marxist left often argues that social liberalism w/out a class critique can easily resolve as neoliberalism + diversity. but a class critique without liberalism easily becomes protectionism/nativism. neither sides are immune to cooption by the right-wing (though at this pt i think i'd argue that liberalism is the more essential good - i'd much rather live in bastion of capitalism america than any kind of repressive left-wing country).

Apparently whoever was in control of the account in that moment couldn’t put out a sequence of three tweets in two minutes without producing two mutually exclusive stories to excuse one retweet. Remarkable.

good lord this is petty

Either alternative, taken too far, sucks. If worker protections and the safety net were totally liquidated and America becomes a world of mass instability and suffering -- old people without pensions starving to death and things like that -- that would be horrible even if there was no more racial and gender inequality. (nb this society is impossible -- something would break and old bigotries would reassert themselves among the underclass, if not the 1%.) on the other hand a white suprematist welfare state is no better and probably less morally defensible. I don't think either side of the left -- identitarian or marxist -- wants either alternative so they should stop disparaging each other's signature issues.

Xp to mordy

this latest part of the thread makes as much sense to me as a cricket thread

― droit au butt (Euler), Friday, July 15, 2016 6:50 AM (2 hours ago)

treeship otm tho - just to be safe

http://www.xojane.com/issues/online-harassment-left

This article gives a very personal account of history of extreme daily harrassment and abuse online. The author, S.E. Smith, says that most of this stuff comes from "left wing" types. It includes sending her photos of her own house as an intimidation tactic, like the literal plot of the horror movie Cache. I don't want to sound naive because I knew this was a thing thay happened but daily? The open letter was useful for bringing this stuff to the surface if nothing else. I wish there was more information on exactly who is doing this kind of thing and why. The attackers should have to answer for this. Tbqh its no secret i am a socialist but if i was a woman on the receiving end of this stuff from ppl alleging to be socialists I would probably want fuck all to do with class politics as well. In such a situation, of course you would just try to get as much power for women and other marginalized people as possible, even within an oppressive paradigm.