Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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.

academic infighting sure is weird

Idk adrian chen found violentacrez. Something similar could be done with the serial twitter dm harassers embedded in the left. I know this is just one component of the overall situation the letter described but it seems like a starting point.

Like i want to know if the ppl sending evil messages and disturbing images are literally michael bruenig or just some insane people just playacting leftists or something else.

Matt bruenig, whatever.

I don't know why you'd think ppl with no self control when they're not anonymous would have /more/ when they are anonymous

Well i am assuming the really evil messages she is getting are from anonymous sources. Like, well know bloggers and organizers dont openly send ppl pics of their house to frighten them do they?

no right i just mean he's clearly a jerk and acts like a dick to ppl when his name is attached. i'm sure he's not a nicer person when shrouded in anonymity.

true

50% of students in American public schools live in poverty.

not the main point of the thread but i do want to point out this isn't actually true

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-us-public-school-students-are-in-poverty/2015/01/15/df7171d0-9ce9-11e4-a7ee-526210d665b4_story.html

depends how you define poverty. 51% of students come from houses whose combined income is low enough to qualify them for federally subsidized free lunches.

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

i wouldn't give up hope yet- i think there's some small chance that identitarians' plan to wholly remake the global left by writing lengthy essays critiquing steven moffat's conception of gender may somehow fail to bear fruit.

depends how you define poverty. 51% of students come from houses whose combined income is low enough to qualify them for federally subsidized free lunches.

Right, but poverty has a definition, and that's not it. In fact, by definition, you're eligible for subsidized lunch if your family makes up to 185% of the poverty-line threshold. So however poverty is defined, kids who are doing substantially better than families in poverty are eligible (and that's as it should be, in my opinion.) According to NCES about 22% of public schoolchildren are living in poverty.

http://nces.ed.gov/blogs/nces/post/free-or-reduced-price-lunch-a-proxy-for-poverty

I know it's not the point, the point is that a large percentage of US families (not just those with kids in public school) are so strapped for money that the price of a daily school lunch is a financial burden, I just think things should be called what they are.