Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

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.

yeah the free lunch thing is more about helping ensure kids actually eat decent food instead of cheap garbage iirc

Of course Matt Bruenig don't do that kind of thing. And no one has accused of him of that. What they accuse him of is co-ordinating and legitimising that kind of abuse, since a lot of women notice that if he says something mean about them, they will receive an unusual amount of harassment. Plus, he once admitted to have 'done his part' after a woman got hit by a barrage of abuse (the incident involving the 'twist her tits' tweet)

Who knows how to end it. But perhaps if people took it seriously, and stopped lying about it the way Beijer for instance does, it would be easier to have the conversation.

xp i agree, eephus. i was just hastily borrowing the washington post's language.

The vast majority of attacks on me, from the everpresent doxing to the growing file of threats I've forwarded to the friends who might have a chance to take action if something happens to me, have come from the political left.

see you can't just say this without any proof. why should anyone believe it. the article doesn't even say why this might be the case. or like anything. i've never heard of this person before, and i follow the ironyclown cru on twitter. this is just bad-jacketing

like why would you not actually name a single account or have a single screenshot of a bad actor here. especially if you claim this is from within the "left" and you want people to maybe turn against those bad actors?

What they accuse him of is co-ordinating and legitimising that kind of abuse, since a lot of women notice that if he says something mean about them, they will receive an unusual amount of harassment. Plus, he once admitted to have 'done his part' after a woman got hit by a barrage of abuse (the incident involving the 'twist her tits' tweet)

Who knows how to end it. But perhaps if people took it seriously, and stopped lying about it the way Beijer for instance does, it would be easier to have the conversation.

― Frederik B, Friday, July 15, 2016 2:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalinkn

this is such shit and exhausting. do you know what co-ordinating means? it means giving orders or direction. that's not just him being an individual voice. and if he doesn't do it, and says "hey don't do that" how is that legitimising.

i mean the issue here i think is people think its just fine to clown chait for getting salty about twitter criticism as "harassment" but there's a double standard when other people pull the same shit.

I guess the difference here is that what is being alleged is bigoted hate speech. And these people are saying they are receiving these kinds of messages so that they will be intimidated out of criticizing socialists for gender and race blindness. It's very serious. I don't doubt theyre getting such messages but I would like to have more specific information about who is sending these messages and why. Like is it a tactic from socialists or is it just ppl doing it to do it bc they are mras or what?

the whole "i saw this terrible thing and it happens every day but i can't give you evidence because it would bring on more bad things, but I _can_ write at length about it without giving you evidence and that won't bring on bad things" shtick is total nonsense. i mean, that _is_ why people clowned s- j- in the first place, well at first. Then she started organizing people to get accounts banned from twitter because they were clowning her, and things went downhill from there.

I'm a teacher with the summer off, so of course I've wasted a ton of time on social media. and I gotta say, the whole bad boys of socialism shtick is super-corny and tired.

Like, even when I agree with them, the whole atmosphere cultivated by the “big” socialist personalities and their #irony brethren is so noxious that I have no idea how they possibly think they're being effective stewards of their ideas. And it’s super-easy to see what happens when any of them go after one of their favored opponents: dozens of wannabe ironyboys rush in and fill twitter threads with total garbage. I’ve seen it enough times in the past, like, month that I’m inclined to believe that what gets DMed and emailed is worse.

like, the whole idea of "pig poop balls" as a "clapback" is basically the whole thing in a nutshell.