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Given how quickly this article has been spread around the web I think it is clear that it addresses something important. Obviously part of the appeal here is that it may tell certain people what they want to hear, but I also think it's pretty clear that people really do feel, wrongly or rightly, that this article is relevant to their lived experiences. As such I think it's important for serious leftists to read this article in a thoughtful and careful manner. I have to say that from my own experiences I think that while there are some pretty serious issues with the author's argument, she does have a point. Anti-intellectualism and groupthink are serious problems amongst the contemporary left. Now I hasten to add that I don't think they are problems unique to the left. They are common symptoms of any political movements. However, I think they are a problem for the left because the left is much weaker than the right. A right wing organization can sustain a lot more groupthink because they have access to corporate largesses and are typically welcomed into their respective movement. The right is articulating ideas that are helpful to the people in power so the right gets a level of institutional and monetary support that radical leftists are simply never going to receive. By contrast, the left has very little institutional support and very little money (which is necessary to do most things, like rent an office, print flyers, publish journals, pay people to do full time organizing, provide food and drink at gatherings, attract speakers, etc.). So while the left and the right (and liberals for that matter) all indulge in dogmatism and groupthink, those practices are going to be a lot more damaging to a leftwing organization for the simple reason that the left is weaker and just cannot afford to waste resources or energy. I also think the author does a better job than they intended of illustrating why rigorous theory is so important for the left. Here's what I considered the most interesting passage in the article: quote:Anti-intellectualism is a pill I swallowed, but it got caught in my throat, and that would eventually save me. It comes in a few forms. Activists in these circles often express disdain for theory because they take theoretical issues to be idle sudoku puzzles far removed from the real issues on the ground. This is what led one friend of mine to say, in anger and disbelief, “People’s lives aren’t some theoretical issue!” That same person also declared allegiance to a large number of theories about people’s lives, which reveals something important. Almost everything we do depends on one theoretical belief or another, which range from simple to complex and from implicit to explicit. A theoretical issue is just a general or fundamental question about something that we find important enough to think about. Theoretical issues include ethical issues, issues of political philosophy, and issues about the ontological status of gender, race, and disability. Ultimately, it’s hard to draw a clear line between theorizing and thinking in general. Disdain for thinking is ludicrous, and no one would ever express it if they knew that’s what they were doing. The problem is that when you're low on theory and high on moral outrage you produce exactly the sort of activist that the author turned out to be. Just look at how the author was superficially attracted to anarchism, tumblr-feminism and generic anti-capitalism. She developed these beliefs more out of passion than out of any kind of theoretical understanding of why, say, contemporary capitalism and patriarchy might have a strong and substantive link. So once the author's passions waned it was very easy for her to abandon these beliefs since their actual intellectual roots were very shallow. She may have been genuinely outraged at one point but she never seems to have developed much of an understanding of the theoretical left. She just had this powerful but vague sense that capitalism and oppression were linked. That clearly isn't a sufficient position from which to launch a sustained critique of capitalism. If the left can't provide convincing theoretical explanations for why it can solve the problems of capitalism then it's never going to migrate far off of university campuses, and it's going to constantly lose recruits once people graduate and are forced to deal with the pressures of getting a job, paying off their loans, and generally starting their adult life. So in conclusion I'd say that the biographical details given by the author actually support her thesis: her leftism was based more on emotion than reason, and as such once she left campus she quickly abandoned her commitment to any kind of radicalism. But while the author doesn't display much theoretical understanding of the left, her comments on the attitude of many young activists rings true for me. More humility and less dogmatism are in order, and there are too many leftists who are basically unwilling to acknowledge any viewpoint except their own as legitimate. Unfortunately I think certain theoretical tendencies currently in vogue on the left exacerbate this problem.
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Dec 3, 2014 23:58
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Yeah but that isn't a symptom specific to "the radical left", it's a symptom specific to a particular kind of radicalism that has become very prominent on campus. For instance there's a community group in my home city based around the 'Jane-Finch' neighbourhood, which is generally considered to be one of the most deprived and stigmatized neighbourhoods in Canada. The group is composed of locals, mostly older folks, mostly from immigrant communities. They mostly come from extremely precarious economic backgrounds, face constant police harassment, feel their stories are basically erased by the media, and feel both exploited and unrepresented by their local politicians. While there's some mixture of diversity in the group's views (for instance, at a discussion whether they should ally with a campaign calling for a higher minimum wage there was an older Italian man present who said that this would leave to job losses) there is a pretty broad based distrust of capitalism and parliamentary democracy. I.e. this is very much a group based on 'radical' and in many cases explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-police politics. It's ridiculous to say these folks aren't aware of their "objectives". They are trapped in a cycle of poverty and oppression that is exacerbated by a mixture of neglect and outright hostility from the state and private capital, exacerbated by a media that is only interested in their plight when it can be used as poverty-porn for middle class liberals. Being angry at the "the system" is not confined to students on university campuses. Those are just the folks who, due to their privilege, you end up hearing about the most. A lot of people can't afford to decide that they're "exhausted" and don't feel like being angry any more. If you're a racialized person stuck in a poor community and you are concerned that your relatives or friends are going to either be murdered by gangs or beaten up by cops and thrown in jail then you can't just decide "gently caress it, I'll become a mainstream liberal and stop being so drat angry all the time." If you're working on minimum wage or are severly underemployed while trying to care for your family or build a future then you may find it isn't as easy to reconcile yourself with "the system" compared to if you're a young and upwardly mobile able bodied woman with a fresh degree in engineering who happens to be gay. So I reject the idea that there aren't clear left wing objectives or that contemporary society is generating very real and concrete grievances amongst the population. I think if anything the problem here is that the excesses of campus radicalism can end up discrediting the more substantive economic critiques of capitalism that we ought to be making. Also I think it has to be pointed out that she's writing in the McGill Daily, and only a couple years ago McGill students participated in an extremely effective strike that prevented their tuition fees from being jacked up (these protests are almost certainly what that student was referring to when she said some of her friends spent a night in jail). So even in the context of a university campus, the idea that the left never has concrete objectives is ludicrous. When students in Montreal were confronted with a perceived attack on their economic interests they proved more than capable of fighting for a concrete goal and actually managed to win despite a pretty harsh reaction from the Montreal police. The bottom line is that at its best leftwing radicalism is powerful because it actually offers to concretely improve people's lives. That's the great power of the left: that through solidarity you can give people the power to demand better wages and benefits, better representation for their community, a better life for themselves and their kids. When the left manages to focus itself on those goals it can still win significant victories.
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Dec 4, 2014 01:17
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rudatron posted:around. OWS is a good example, it tried to be all things to all people failed. It had a phobia of any kind of bureaucratic procedures or organization and as a result ended up being a joke. I'm not even sure united fronts can really work in such an environment, without some kind of core to build on. Like this right here: I think that the deeper problem here might be that for a theory to be helpful it needs to address the needs or concerns of of some constituency. If we think of classical liberalism, it spoke directly to the needs of a rising bourgeoisie who needed to tame the absolute monarchs of the feudal era. Or if we think of Marxism, we can see how it emerges directly from the struggles of the labour movement. Marx's theories weren't abstract formulations developed on a university campus, they were specific responses to the challenges of the movement that he was a part of. So perhaps the real problem here is that the left used to have labour as its central constituency, and that tended to produce structuralist theories like Marxism. Since the 1960s, though, the focus of the left has been the university campus, which means the dominant paradigm becomes post-structuralist. Unfortunately post-structuralism is probably more useful for getting into a tenure track position than it is for overturning the class relations of society. So that is sort of the paradoxical situation we're stuck in. I don't think the university campus is a particularly appropriate place to develop a new leftist programme or movement because the concerns of academic life can often be pretty removed from the concerns of life outside the academy. On the other hand the left cannot just will a new constituency into existence. We're sorta stuck with the troops we currently have, and that means that while its easy to recognize how a fixation on universities and their students and faculty is probably a dead end it's also a big challenging to conceptualize how we escape that trap. I think that bringing labour back into focus as a leftist issue is crucial but how you do that in practice is a really complex question, and if anyone else has thoughts on the topic please share them. Fargo Fukes posted:I think it's interesting that whilst celebrating the victories this woman helped achieve, you still can't resist taking a few swipes at her for being successful. Yes the left is capable of improving peoples lives, no it never will whilst everyone is squabbling over identity politics. She helped fight against increasing tuition fees, an actual concrete cause she could effect at the time, but this still reflects her privilege because only rich white people get to complain about tuition fees. Now she has her engineering degree (is this actually true or have goons made this up because she talks about paying attention to systems in the final paragraphs?) she's basically the enemy. She didn't change her political views, her situation changed so now she's not one of you. A competent movement might communicate that someone at a different point in their life that can help in a different way, or contribute to a push more closely connected to them, but the left is so wrapped up in who's more oppressed that there is no way to join without miring yourself in what an awful, rotten, privileged monster you are. Why do you feel that I'm attacking her for her success? Where do you see me suggesting that "only rich white people get to complain about tuition fees" or that it's bad that she successfully completed her degree? Honestly it feels like you're not reading what I said very carefully and are instead just projecting the things you're assuming I think onto a post in which none of those arguments are actually present. If you could maybe elaborate on why you think I'm saying those things then perhaps in the future I can make my position clearer and avoid this kind of misunderstanding.
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Dec 5, 2014 01:00
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Effectronica posted:Marxism and liberalism and feminism and anti-racism all were formulated academically/intellectually, however. Academically and intellectually aren't really synonymous, and both those words have multiple meanings that themselves are not perfectly synonymous. Could you explain what exactly you mean by this statement? Vermain posted:I more and more suspect that the most significant issue amongst the modern left is really just a lack of effective strategy. There's a clear sort of discontent with what's going on (Piketty's book, I argue, would not have sold like hotcakes pre-2008), but there's no effective channel for people that is perceived as worthwhile. If one takes the Canadian example, we have the federal NDP, who, while certainly not the Conservatives, are not bringing up radical reforms or talking about the sort of deep-seated issues that are bothering people. Beyond that, there simply isn't anyone who looks like they can take and control state political power. Going along with this is an ingrained cynicism towards parliamentary politics, and while some cynicism towards representative democracy might be justified, it's still nevertheless the absolute best institution for controlling the levers of society that's available here and now. In the absence of any real (apparent) hope of controlling the levers of society, phatic or ritual actions tend to suffice instead: Tumblr wars, solidarity rallies, etc. (Not that I mean to disparage those sorts of things, but I feel that we tend to participate in a lot of them mostly to alleviate feelings of helplessness rather than with a long-term strategy of concrete change in mind.) I think this is a really important point. Failure to win concrete victories or even to effectively defend past gains has definitely lead some leftists to refocus their energy, and not always in ways that I would deem positive or effective. That having been said I think its important that we don't slip into this mode of being totally disparaging toward ideas like intersectionality or privilege. While I think that having these be the dominant left wing discourse has proven to be a dead end, they are still important concepts. If you look at, for instance, the history of the feminist movement then there are plenty of examples of middle class white women using their shared status as "women" to essentially erase the experience or needs of racialized or queer women. There really are cases, especially within the left, where privilege can be relevant. The fact that our fixation with privilege has maybe "metastasized" (to use the term the author employed in 'Everything is Problematic') into something unproductive does not mean that we should throw the concept out or stop thinking about its implications. But yeah, I don't think its a coincidence that the post-modern turn in the academy gets its start with the defeats of 1968, and becomes hegemonic in the 1980s right around the time that Reagan-Thatcher were implementing neoliberalism. Postmodernism and post structuralism didn't cause the defeat of the left, they just filled the spaces left by the retreat of the traditional left. They may not be helpful theories for getting out of our current impasse but we need to recognize that they're mostly symptoms rather than causes of defeat.
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Dec 5, 2014 01:14
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Effectronica posted:Montesquieu, Locke, Rousseau, Paine, Smith, Ricardo, and other liberal thinkers mainly developed liberalism through the academic modes of the time, as did Marx and Engels and Proudhon for socialism/anarchism (scientific socialism). W.E.B. du Bois, Ida B. Wells and many of the early founders of civil rights were trained academics. Even Elizabeth Stanton was trained academically, although suffragism (as opposed to the later feminists) was less academic and more practical. But even then, it was still primarily an intellectual pursuit with argumentation and the like over the rights of women. And of course the second wave of feminism was largely kicked off by The Feminine Mystique and The Second Sex. Most of the really powerful social movements have had academic and intellectual bases to work from- gay rights is about the only one where the academic basis was exogenous to the movement, but even then it still relied initially on the work of people like Hirschfeld and later Kinsey, although in a very different context from feminist writers using Friedan or Steinem. Montesquieu was a lawyer and Locke wrote his major works while his major political work while he was an acting physician (though it's true he wrote some of his other stuff while in med school). Paine was working, I think, as an Excise Officer when he first started wading into colonial politics. Rousseau was employed at various times (while he was writing) as a personal tutor and a secretary. Marx was a journalist and revolutionary, Engels was an industrialist. Ricardo was a banker and politician. That isn't to say that most of those folks didn't have the equivalent of top academic schooling for their times and they did spend a lot of time talking and thinking and refining their theories through dialogue with others, which is (or is supposed to be) a hallmark of modern academia. But I think it's dangerous to dilute our idea of what 'academic' means too much by applying it so broadly. What really stands out to me about these men and women is that they were deeply involved in the political movements of their time. They were active participants, taking part in ongoing debates with high stakes. Unless there's some kind of movement going on outside the halls of the academy I do not think we can expect academics on their own to accomplish much. I also suspect that's where some of the more toxic parts of the whole SJW movement comes from. A lot of the contempt and vitriol that you see coming from some of the more toxic parts of the SJW crowd are born of impotent fury. I think that if the left was actually scoring victories or perceived itself to be advancing then there'd be less toleration for people who can't contribute anything beyond exhortations to "check your privilege!" Fargo Fukes posted:The last few pages of this thread have been a marvellous example of how much good identity politics and privilege theory have done for the right. I mean, they've just been a gift from God for the powers-that-be. Informed by what we've read here, lets run a thought experiment: Is this based on a real event? Because if so you should just post about the actual event. I'm not really sure how plausible your example actually is and you've tailored it to specifically fit the argument you want to push. Somebody could just as easily invent their own story which proves the opposite point. As for your larger contention that "identity politics and privilege theory" are somehow handicapping the left, where is the evidence? The left lost its significant battles in the 1980s and 1990s. The problems with the left right now seem to be more of a reaction to those defeats rather than cause of them. Honestly you seem to just be doing the exact same thing as the SJW's in reverse, where you pretend that people talking about privilege on tumblr or university students getting really passionate about causes they only vaguely understand is somehow this really significant political issue rather than being fairly banal and inconsequential. Space Whale posted:I do wonder why they attack privilege, when the point was to help the under privileged until they were as privileged as everyone else. Because without an awareness of privilege it can be very easy for those privileged people to monopolize control over a group. Second wave feminism ended up mostly being about giving white middle class women the opportunity to pursue bourgeois careers while largely side lining or erasing the experiences of queer, impoverish or racialized women. There are actual material consequences to ignoring privilege in some situations. But of course a privileged person who hasn't taken any time to reflect on their own situation nor the situation of others won't necessarily recognize that.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:00
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I'm all for the privileges being at the same level, I just want them to go up.
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Space Whale posted:So how do you go "hey we count too" without it just being like it is now, extremely irritating? Because if you do that too much the privilege havers get annoyed and do their own thing for themselves, since they have the privilege to do so, and then the poor, queer, brown and radical people are just left there talking about privilege on tumblr. It really depends on the particular situation and context. There's no one-size-fits-all solution here. You're trying to bring this back to the internet and what is happening on tumblr. But that is the point that I'm trying to drive home to people. Any political movement mostly centred on internet bickering is going to be grating and stupid and filled with people arguing in bad faith. That is not a function of any particular theory, its just a function of how people act when they're on the net. Privilege theory was developed in the context of an actual political movement that was scoring actual victories (i.e. Women's lib). It responded to a problem that was real and serious. If you want to learn more you could check out Bell Hooks' "feminism is for everybody". I'm not sure that she actually uses the term 'privilege' but she does give some personal reflections on how Second Wave Feminism ran into difficulties because of these issues.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:15
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Space Whale posted:So what do I have to lose to give black kids walk past cops and not get shot 'privileges'? You know it is fair to ask questions but if you have literally no knowledge of this at all then you should go educate yourself. It`s not the obligation of any poster on these forums to spoon feed information to you. And after a point it starts to look like you don`t really care about the answers and are just using this endless line of banal questioning as a way to shut down a more interesting or substantive discussion.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:17
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Nevvy Z posted:The gently caress? He's using rhetorical questioning to point out a flaw in the reasoning of the post he quoted. But those rhetorical questions would only make sense to somebody who has spent little or no effort first trying to understand the other side of the argument. Space Whale posted:Oh fine ruin my fun then. So your argument basically boils down to "I have the right to be stupid" mixed with "wink wink, nudge nudge, I'm totally just trolling right now and it's not that I actually feel kinda threatened by these ideas."
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Dec 5, 2014 20:30
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Effectronica posted:I have never, ever, seen anybody talk about privilege theory who wasn't denouncing it. It does not exist. This is a dangerous argument, because you could say the same thing about misogyny or racism. I agree that the impact of 'privilege theory' or whatever is being massively overblown but I think on some level everybody in this thread understands what is being referred to is a complex of ideas and behaviours that actually do exist, at least to some degree. The actual debate is how noteworthy all of this is and whether its actually unique to the left.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:24
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Well whether or not it should be elevated to the status of "theory" I think there's a sense that on some parts of the campus left we've reached a point where talking about privilege has become more of a form of social signalling or status building than an actual tool for dismantling oppression. I've certainly met people who seem to be using it that way (usually they are white dudes, no less). I had a discussion with an anarchist once who said that the first thing he thinks about whenever he talks to anyone is all the reasons that their privilege caused them to say that. And he explicitly used the world 'privilege'. I asked him what room his framework had for the idea of solidarity and after a bit of debate he basically said it was impossible for solidarity to ever happen. Then he claimed that every actually existing leftist movement ever was a failure that only advanced the privilege of white people. I asked him about how he would apply his ideas to a real world setting (if someone is worried that a wage increase will lead to price inflation that eats up the increased purchasing power then how do you use your ideology to address that question? How do you determine if it is or isn't a valid concern?) and he said he had no interest in empirical reality. Also, ironically enough, this guy could literally not shut up and would talk over his poor girlfriend who rarely ever got a word in edgewise. He was a walking embodiment of many of the stereotypes he thought he was fighting against and his constant refrain about how everyone else should check their privilege was basically just a technique for allowing him to dominate any conversation. So people like this do actually exist outside the fevered imagination of right wing internet trolls and I think its useful for the left to pause for a moment and think about where these people are coming from. If they waste resources or push away well intentioned people from getting involved in progressive causes then that's a problem and I don't think we should just ignore it because of a circle-the-wagons mentality.
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Dec 5, 2014 21:42
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Xibanya posted:I have to admit I have been conflicted about the best way to approach one recent web-based attempt at activism. In the wake of the Garner and Brown grand jury decisions, the twitter hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite has been trending. In the hashtag, white people describe committing small crimes and being let off easy by police in order to highlight the difference in treatment that they receive versus what black people discriminate. However, the general consensus is that this hashtag is counterproductive. It sorta sounds like the Ice Bucket Challenge or Movember. It's a form of slacktivism where you're superficially doing something for a good "cause" but mostly you're getting the opportunity to talk about yourself or share info about your banal adventures on social media. GlyphGryph posted:That's not the privilege the cops have. The privilege is being able to kill someone and get away with it. There is no "privilege" not to kill someone. And the "privilege not to care" isn't much of a privilege when not paired with the "because they are not a target" bit. That's the bit that makes it a privilege. A more accessible example for most folks might be workplace rules on sexual harassment that limit your ability to tell jokes or flirt with coworkers because those actions, while seemingly harmless from one perspective, can actually create a really alienating and hostile work environment for others. Now whether or not we add anything to the discussion by labelling this "privilege" rather than just saying "don't sexual harass people" or "think before you speak and make sure you aren't carelessly making people uncomfortable" is an open question, as far as I'm concerned, but basically that seems to be the kind of stuff that privilege relates to. Another example might be "if you're a white middle class activist then before you start throwing rocks at the cops or breaking windows, pause a moment and consider that while you're relatively protected from the consequences of your actions, the black guy standing next to you is not." Or, in the context of feminism, maybe think about the fact that while you as a white middle class woman might think that the biggest issue of the day is pay inequality in white collar jobs, some of your colleagues might feel that lack of access to affordable childcare or long hours working a minimum wage job is actually a bigger problem. So don't assume that just because you are a woman that you can therefore speak for all women with consulting them first." I feel like when you state the whole 'privilege' issue in that way it seems a lot less contentious, or at least it should. Yes, people can abuse these ideas, but that doesn't mean they have no basis in reality.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:47
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Gantolandon posted:The problem with the concept of 'privilege' is not the idea it represents, it's its usefulness. It does tell you that some people got it easier in the society than the others, but offers no insight why this happens or what can be done with it. It presents inequality as some mysterious force that simply exists and cannot be ever defeated. Even if you belong to the privileged group, you can do nothing to level the playing field, because privilege exists outside of you whether you want it or not. If you're a minority, you can do nothing by definition. It's presented as an outside, malicious force that can never be fought except by making everyone aware of its existence and mitigating damage it causes. I don't think this is accurate. I'd agree that the whole discourse surrounding 'privilege' has been used as a bludgeon to shut down actual debate but that doesn't mean it isn't addressing a real issue. There are a number of occasions with recent social movements, such as women's lib or gay rights, where you start out with a large group that has shared interests. But as the struggle progresses and concessions are made those interests begin to diverge. So, for instance, with second wave feminism you eventually started to have cracks emerging where queer or racialized women were basically being ignored and exploited by white middle class feminists. This is where stuff like "solidarity is for white women" originates. I don't particularly like that sentiment but I'm not going to give it a snide blanket dismissal because it actually speaks to a very real issue. Solidarity is great, but it can become an excuse for ignoring real and serious problems. Effectronica posted:I think that the fact that it isn't a theory is important. There are critical weaknesses (well, maybe not for someone as self-aware as that guy, but frankly, depressives are easy to shut up) in the way of thinking because there's nothing holding it together, it's just people repeating "check your privilege", "solidarity is for white women", and other catchphrases. This means that it's much easier to attack than, say, someone who sincerely believes that you need two X chromosomes, a vayjayjay untouched by the scalpel, and a womb in order to be a woman, because you have to out-maneuver their theory and they can just sit within it (granted, trans people are exactly what all the tedious anger about identity politics is about, probably) untouched and almost untouchable. I think you're being overly dismissive. Intersectionality (which seems to basically be what privielge theory is derived from, at least so far as I can tell) is a real issue. Like I said, I agree that there are some critical weaknesses with this perspective but its a bit insulting and reductionist to just label everybody who adopts these ideas as arguing in bad faith or simply being deluded about their real interests. There were real material causes that lead to the splintering of the leftist movement - some internal, some external. I think there has to be a balance between criticizing theories or political tendencies that have gone all in for identity politics without automatically dismissing the concerns or experiences that lead them in that direction in the first place. Jazerus posted:I am not sure that most of the people who are MRAs ever intended to participate sincerely in any kind of feminist discourse to begin with. When your main "political" concerns are circumcision and ethics in video game journalism then I don't see how it can be believed that really you intended to contribute to feminism but an accusation of "mansplaining" forever turned you to the dark side. Effectronica posted:Things like Iron John started cropping up with third-wave feminism, so some bitter kid with a hard-on for the second wave (which hardly, hardly talked about how patriarchy hurts men) writing a theory about how third-wave feminism caused backlash due to it not being solely concerned with abortion and equal pay needs to accommodate that. I think the notion that somehow mean leftists have directly caused (or are about to cause) a right wing backlash is psychologically gratifying to a lot of people. Its an argument that doesn't make a lot of sense on its own merits but you can see how it acts as a sort of 'just world theory' for ideologies. 'These people make me uncomfortable or say things I don't like, so of course the universe will punish them by having everybody turn against their cause. After all, deep down almost everybone basically thinks the same way I do, so if I don't like what they are saying then surely other right thinking people dislike it as well.' I doubt people are actually that self conscious about it, but that seems to be the real function of that belief. People who make me uncomfortable will be punished, perhaps not by God, but by some equilibrating force. None of which is to say that the left never alienates people through rhetoric. Any political movement will scare some people off that way (just look at the Tea Party losing winnable Republican races in the 2012 cycle). But the idea that tumblr-feminists are directly responsible for MRAs, as opposed to, you know, the actual loss of status and income that men have suffered in the last 40 years, is just so patently silly that it really makes you ask 'what is the appeal of this absurd belief? what psychological use does it have to the people who hold it?'
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Dec 6, 2014 22:30
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That seems a bit unfair. For one thing I don't really think Canadian employers give that much of a gently caress whether you had lefty beliefs in college (unless you're trying to go straight into the RCMP or CSIS) and for another she still expresses admiration for market socialism and just generally comes off as an honest though slightly clueless person who got drawn into the student movement out of genuine conviction but who left it after getting burned out by the toxic atmosphere. I mean, whether or not her views are actually representative of the McGill student body as a whole, it's perfectly easy to believe that the particular social circle she fell into had some of the attributes she describes. Political movements of any affiliation can get really cultish if the wrong sorts of people take control of them.
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Dec 6, 2014 22:35
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On the unlikely chance that Star Dolphin is genuinely clueless and not actively trolling the thread here's a run down of the kinds of privilege you might lose as a cisgendered white male. This is a useful question to ask even if the person asking it doesn't appear to be debating in good faith. What privileges would you lose? Ideally you would lose the nebulous but very real advantages conferred by your race, gender and class. Since disadvantaged groups would presumably be allowed to exercise a greater claim on the shared resources of society you yourself would probably have slightly less access to those resources. You might face more competition for your job of choice because you would no longer get an automatic advantage from being white or a man. You might lose the privilege of being treated as the social default. You might see more cinema, literature and games with protagonists that don't look like you. You might be forced to confront the fact that much of the sucess you've had in life is due to circumstances beyond your control - that you were born into the right race, class and gender to reap the social advantages that you did. You might lose the privilege of believing that the people you see who are mired in poverty and misery have done something to deserve their current fates. In other words, you might lose the privilege of believing that we live in a just world. You would probably lose some of your personal autonomy. This sounds scary until you realize what it actually entails. To use an example I cited earlier, sexual harassment regulations in the workplace have made it so that joking and flirting around the office are less common than they used to be. Some people really don't like that but those regulations were put in place to prevent a hostile work environment and to remove the bosses ability to use his position as leverage to get sexual gratification from his employees. This is all really common sense stuff Space Whale and if you spent even the tiniest amount of time genuinely trying to listen to what other people are saying or, God Forbid, if you actually researched some of these issues on your own before becoming the loudest and most repetitive voice in this thread then maybe you wouldn't be so confused poo poo like "what do you even mean by privilege"?
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Dec 8, 2014 06:57
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If you've never encountered a complicated theoretical topic then maybe you should do a basic amount of research before trying to have a debate about it. Just a thought.
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Dec 8, 2014 07:01
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Space Whale posted:I've done my own research and reading, I've "shut up" and listened for years, and also spent most of my adult life, a decade, extremely poor. I saw my family die off due to a lack of access to medicine and then fall apart as a result of it all. Throughout all of that time I thought "man, this loving sucks, having food rot in the fridge when the power is off and not being able to do poo poo for my situation. I'll go be a babby socialist and hope society can change." I was into this poo poo when LF was still on SA. I know what many different people think privilege is. It's not a singly defined thing, since it's nebulous to begin with, so I have to ask what any person means by it, since it's so ill defined. That's one of my biggest issues with it. But please pretend I'm just an idiot. Look I really appreciate your post and I actually think it's really helpful. I hope that if you look back at your other posts in this thread that you'll recognize that a lot of the time you're coming off as being extremely dismissive of these ideas without seeming to have spent much time trying to understand them. If you'd lead with a post like the one you just made I think you would have gotten a completely different reaction (or at least you would from me). Perhaps there's been some miscommunication here so far but if you want to reset this discussion and try to move forward in a more productive manner I'd do my best to join you in doing that. It might involve putting SedanChair on ignore though. quote:Needless to say all I got was "just imagine how much worse it would be if you were brown or gay or a woman." No sympathy, no aid, just "you poo poo lord, it's not really bad." Around the time I was recovering from the grief of my last parent leaving my life and this earth, my remaining family all pulling away, I had a black woman tell me how what I went through was awful - but it would be worse if, say, it happened to her, so I should feel bad for her, even though it didn't happen to her. Said woman is a programmer, so she's hardly not doing well. That sounds really awful and all I can really say is that you have my sympathy. Unfortunately people who have faced disadvantages don't necessarily become empathetic themselves and identity politics can easily mutate into tribalism. quote:It finally sunk in when I was finally truly alone in the world that they never gave a poo poo, and I should try to find groups that did. I also realized "oh, I'm not the only person running into these poisonous cess pools of identity politics infected internet-leftie slacktivist tweeting harpy screecher shitheads" and thought about finding other people who actually care about issues but don't want to tear each other apart until only a queer woman of (every) color muslim amputee was left to arbitrate the truth. Those groups can't get anything done. That's the problem. That's the reason that this privielge stuff can mutate into something really angry and unproductive. There's no getting around this fact: the left got smashed to bits forty years ago and never fully recovered. There was a moment in 1968 when a lot of people thought some kind of revolution was going to happen. In Paris it almost did: the centre of Paris was taken over by protesting students and workers, the president of France briefly left the country because he though the government was on the verge of falling. But then the situation stabilized, cracks appeared between the students and workers, and everything fell apart. Then the 1970s rolled around, the economy started going to poo poo, and that set the stage for Thatcher, Reagan, "neoliberalism", "neoconservatism", etc. etc. The final nail in the coffin was the collapse of the Eastern Bloc - as terrible as the Stalinist regimes were, they at least demonstrated that you could have a none capitalist economy that was globally competitive with America - and basically the left was left in utter disaray. The left has yet to recover from that and the result has been, among other things, a lot of bitterness. If you've run into people who use their leftism or their identity politics as an excuse to be bad people then you should shun them. But also please try to recognize that this anger and bitterness comes in a historical context: identity politics didn't cause the left to drive into a ditch, rather the left was defeated and identity politics went from being a useful idea to a full fledged ideology that was plugged into the Marx shaped hole at the centre of the leftist conceptual universe. quote:
Well, like us all you're privileged in some ways but disadvantaged in others. I totally agree that dismissing the pain and deprivation of your working class life is both asinine and cruel and anyone doing it is an rear end in a top hat and most likely a terrible leftist.
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Dec 8, 2014 07:43
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Well I guess whatever uses this thread had have run their course but I guess that on some level this clusterfuck of a discussion is kind of instructive. wateroverfire posted:D&D is I think the best remedy for leftist tendencies. Like, I would show someone this thread and say "See, these are your allies" and they'd be scared off for years. Do you really think any political forum would look much better? The internet doesn't exactly bring out the best in most people when it comes to debates like this one and the right wingers and liberals in D&D don't exactly distinguish themselves in terms of ideas or personal conduct.
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Dec 8, 2014 23:15
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Space Whale posted:Having different life experiences - wrongs. The problem is that you, as an individual, are an obnoxious dumbass who is seemingly posting literally anything you can think of to get people to pay attention to you. You don't get to waffle between 1) using this thread as some kind of substitute for an actual social life because you've apparently got noting better to do on a Friday night 2) bragging about how you're a trolling puppet master and 3) crying foul about how people aren't giving you the respect you deserve. Or at least, you don't get to do all those things and then still expect to be taken seriously. wateroverfire posted:I don't know if D&D is uniquely bad. Honestly I think that's beside the point. How is it "beside the point" when your entire argument was that D&D somehow embodies "leftist tendencies"?
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Dec 9, 2014 04:48
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Its silly to try and use the front page of D&D as a baromoter for anything about "the" left. Especially given that D&D has, like most of SA, gone a bit batty and senile in its own age.
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Dec 9, 2014 07:12
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wateroverfire posted:I said D&D is a great cure for leftist tendencies. IDK what it would mean to "somehow embody" leftist tendencies and that doesn't even make sense. Is English not your native language? To embody something means to give it tangible or visible form. Isn't the implication of your post that because D&D manifests all the bad tendencies of leftism it will therefore scare away rational people? If not then your post would seemingly be a complete non sequitur.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:17
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Space Whale posted:include or contain (something) as a constituent part. Like most English words, embody has several overlapping definitions. Of course I hardly need to tell you this given that you would have had to read past the definition I was using in order to paste that here. beepo posted:I think the difference between lefties and staunch right wingers is that the left sees the average right winger as being mislead by the powerful or even willfully ignorant, but that they can be changed and educated. A small but significant portion of the right sees the left as morally bankrupt or even evil. Even if evidence supports the "liberal" position, if you think liberals are bad humans you probably wont be swayed. Spending time trying to win over the right through arguments doesn't really work. This depends on how you define "goals". Not everybody who participates in a political movement is fully commited to that movement's ultimate goals. Existing research on why people join political movements shows that often times you come to a protest or a meeting out of interest or because a friend invited you. Then, as you participate in movement events, you start to develop a conviction that the movement is "right" about the issues. Action precedes belief: Rortybomb posted:This dynamic Jaffe describes was found in the sociologist’s Ziad Munson’s excellent ethnography The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works. From the book (my bold): My point here being that a lot of folks, and I think this applies to a certain degree to the author of the article in the OP (though in her case she did have some commitment to Queer activism from High School), actually get involved with the movement for none-ideological reasons. They develop their ideological orientation later. So their "goal" in getting involved isn't necessarily to change society, but rather to belong to a group. We also have to recognize - and I know it's a bit reductive to say this, but I think it's still accurate - that humans have a natural propensity to try and control or dominate each other. Flinging around accusations of privilege can be a way to signal that you're part of the right 'in group' and a way to control the language of other people. Obviously I don't believe this is the only motivation for the whole privilege discourse, because I think in some cases privilege is a relevant concept to use, but I think we'd have to be blind to ignore the fact that some people use privilege theory in this fashion. So there are understandable reasons why people act this way. I think this is far from the only explanation or even the best one, but I think it has to be talked about openly. Strudel Man posted:The second reply to this thread, and first argument against it, was the following. You know the left somehow managed to score major victories in the past when people were seemingly much more misogynistic and racist than they are today so I'll have to disagree with you here.
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Dec 9, 2014 23:52
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wateroverfire posted:I know what it means but my post is pretty simple and you don't need to read any implications into it to get the point. In that case this argument is about as meaningful as me saying "wateroverfire is terrible, and exposing people to him is a great way to turn them off conservative politics." Also I find it hilarious and more than a little implausible that you're suggesting that you have ever actually been in a discussion with someone about politics and then sent them a link to D&D as a way of demonstrating why the left is dysfunctional. I'm pretty sure you're just describing your own partisan reaction to this forum and then assuming that any right thinking person would share this reaction because hey, surely whatever you think and feel is the same thing that any other rational person thinks and feels.
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Dec 13, 2014 23:35
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