"Everything is problematic" - McGill activist's story about deradicalizing

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "Everything is problematic" - McGill activist's story about deradicalizing

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Exclamation Marx posted:

Reminds me a little of this piece I read a while back
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/06/bro-bash/

Yeah, gently caress journalists, researchers, and anyone else who dares to share information without immediately magicking themselves into a high enough political office to singlehandedly enforce their preferred response to that information! Public discourse is meaningless, and anyone who writes an article without including a full academic-grade bibliography is a "pop" writer and a hack who blah blah blah, seriously? Okay, sarcasm time is over (for now), because I'm noticing a disturbing trend.

I know that preaching your superiority over the dumb sheeple who like popular things is a time-honored internet nerd tradition, and blaming victims for their failure to achieve is already a Thing that minorities suffer regularly so I guess it's not super surprising to see it pointed at the fight for equality itself, but would you people just get over yourselves? This is disturbingly similar to Reddit's "Tumblr SJW scum" stuff, and I'm not inclined to trust that, partly because everyone I ever see bringing it up is an absolute shithead in some way and partly because at it's core it's basically a tone argument cloaked in patronizing concern trolling.

Mortley posted:

ReV VAdAUL, How on earth did you use that quote and make that analogy? She writes that gay views on homophobia "more important"; you write that that equates to "women's experiences of being women are irrelevant." Yes, some poorly educated and hateful people will misread her, but that's always the case with any public rhetoric.

I also see absolutely nothing wrong with the argument about otherkin, which no one responded to substantively. Are you responding to the fact that otherkin are just obviously wacky and no one needs to take them seriously? If so, that makes me question your viewpoints on the mentally ill. Her point is that if you don't take every group who claims oppression seriously ("they're denying me my right to be a little fox, the human-bodied-privileged scum!"), why would you automatically take other groups' claims of oppression as fact? Automatically, meaning, without engaging your own judgement (which you more than likely do with regard to otherkin).

Regardless, I appreciate y'all's comments on both sides of the argument.

I'd like to add a personal example about not being able to trust the viewpoints of oppressed peoples. The example of the homophobic gay person, while rhetorically sound, was pretty hypothetical. Anyway, I worked in immigration advocacy for a couple of years. Some of the most virulently anti-amnesty people (amnesty meaning, providing a path to citizenship or at least decriminalization of being unauthorized/undocumented) were those immigrants who had arrived to the US in the last 5-7 years and who had successfully obtained documentation and authorization. They had to pass through a poo poo system with widespread, clearly evident racism, and they wanted them illegals to get the same lovely treatment. Just because those documented immigrants were linguistically (most of them were Spanish-dominant), racially, and otherwise oppressed, didn't mean that I was going to become anti-amnesty just to adhere to the viewpoints of oppressed people.

To throw in a language-based example, many speakers of indigenous languages in Latin America, even monolinguals, believe their native languages to be worthless and that their children should learn Spanish or English. They're oppressed, but I don't agree that the source of their oppression is their mother tongue itself (rather than society's widespread discriminatory attitudes toward it), which should be discarded.

Am I failing as a leftist?

The thing a lot of people miss about institutional racism is that even members of the affected minority display that racism. Many black cops, for example, give the same disproportionately bad treatment to blacks as white cops do. This is because discrimination isn't just a personal thing - it can worm its way into culture and afflict society as a whole, even the discriminated-against group. Remember in the nineties when people used to talk about how important it was that black teens have successful role models to show that they weren't worthless and had a chance to get out there and become successful? That was a real thing that mattered, because discrimination invades society and culture to such a degree that the victim really starts believing it - that even if they themselves aren't inferior, the rest of their race is. Of course, white weasel words helped encourage that as well; when "okay maybe blacks aren't inherently inferior but their culture is inferior and driving them to inferiority, just look at those kids with their rap music and saggy pants and their weird hairstyles and their ebonics and their crack cocaine" was A Thing then it was really easy for black cops and employers to develop a habit of discriminating against blacks without actually thinking blacks were inferior, because successful blacks were often a prime target for the concept that black culture was a mark of inferiority and failure.

Also, and this is especially true in immigration, there is a heavy gently caress You Got Mine factor. People who managed to successfully legally immigrate, struggling through a years-long ordeal, are such sticklers about immigration precisely because it was so difficult - they don't think it's fair that other immigrants people should be able to live in the US without going through the same kind of ordeal, especially illegals who just hopped the border against the rules. You know how some anti-DRM people whine that DRM just punishes legit buyers because pirates will just break it while people who followed the rules have to deal with dumb limitations? It's kiiiiind of like that, only with a lot more anger because immigration and its associated hurdles are a far bigger deal than how many computers you can install your videogames on - the legal immigrants feel like any kind treatment or amnesty toward border-hoppers is unfair to the people who suffered through the considerable difficulty and time commitment of legal immigration.

People tend to think that any given minority is a) a hivemind whose members all agree on everything, and b) always votes in their own best interests and those of their overall group, but neither of those are true. There are women who are anti-abortion, there are gay people who are anti-gay marriage, and there are black employers who would rather hire a white worker because they believe black applicants are lazy or poor workers. None of that really changes the oppression and discrimination those groups face, though, nor does it even change the debate that much. The GOP's token black officials never stopped anyone from calling the Republican Party racist, for example, and pro-discrimination people have trotted out the words of those kinds of people as evidence that discrimination is right after all for decades.

duck monster posted:

Unfortunately with a lot of activists now learning their politics from tumblr outrage blogs and loving facebook memes, that central insight just isn't being transmitted and its like all that hard earned wisdom from a couple of centuries of activist and progressive theory and praxis is just being ignored.

I mean gently caress. Foucault would have vomited blood at the practice on tumblr blogs of enumerating lists of priveleges and disadvantages. He'd be shouting "THIS IS NOT WHAT I MEANT!!!!!!" when he basically bootstrapped modern queer theory and laid the framework the third wave feminists built their house upon.

With that said, those that DO get it make the reverse mistake of assuming everyone who isn't an activist gets this. When a white dude complains about racism after being badmouthed by some black dude, the WRONG approach is to tell him theres no such thing as racism against white people, even if its true from a sociological perspective. That statement assumes he understands the theory of racism as a system, when he's just talking about racism as an event, and whilst wise activists discount the personal for the social, it behooves one not to silence individual experience either (which might sometimes confound our theories from time to time), simply because its spoken in non compliant common tounge.

In short. Activism has lost its smarts, and as a result is getting angry at all the wrong things.

Activism leaving the halls of political philosophy and being taken up by the common people is a good thing, though. You shouldn't need to know who Foucault was or what queer theory is in order to push for equality for gay people, and I'd argue that elitism like that is far more appropriate for the "circular firing squad" than popular sentiments traveling across widely-used social communication platforms without philosophical essays attached.

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Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Gantolandon posted:

You can bet if she still followed the correct denomination of her ideology, she would still count as oppressed enough for her voice to matter. The problem with modern radical left is not that they are too radical or ideologically pure, it's just that they created a set of beliefs that allows them to explain away any criticism and act like a dick towards everyone who doesn't speak the right words.

The ability to belittle and dismiss someone's point without addressing it: a power unique to leftism and possessed by no human who has not fallen prey to left-wing radicalism. Sorry, I know I'm opening myself up to being dismissed out of hand by a ~tone argument~, but it's hard to restrain the sarcasm in the face of things so obviously wrong. Not inly is dismissiveness not unique to leftism, but explaining away any criticism and acting like a dick toward everyone who doesn't say the right magic words or have the right magic attributes has worked wonders for conservatives, actually.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 18:29

Main Paineframe: Oct 27, 2010

Gantolandon posted:

I never claimed this is something that's unique to the left. Plenty of groups, especially the one isolated from the mainstream, create elaborate hierarchies with infallible, idolized leaders or dogmas that can never be questioned. They are beyond the scope of this thread, though. This discussion is about an essay which describes the state of "radical left" and talks about the problem in context of this particular group.

You're presenting it as something isolated, when in reality it's part of the human condition and absolutely a very mainstream thing. It's also an essential power, because not all arguments are equally valid, nor are they all deserving of having equal time spent addressing them. Would you argue that it is wrong for a leftist group to belittle and dismiss the argument of a person who thinks the real target they should be attacking is observatories, which are actually mind-control antennas for relaying the orders of the lizardman rulers who oppress us via telepresence robots like Mitt Romney?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 19:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > "Everything is problematic" - McGill activist's story about deradicalizing