So let me just make sure I have this right: A huge mass of wildly anti-authoritarian groups including conspiracy theorists, some feminists, men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, gamergate supporters, social-justice critics, anticommunists, bigots, Bitcoin enthusiasts, anti-federalists, and Eric S. Raymond aficionadoes, all of which seem to have developed the apparently-disturbing ability to use computers, are in the process of aligning themselves against the forces of good and freedom?
Your characterizations (or indeed caricatures) of these people says much more to me about you than it does about them, I’m afraid.
Well, you’re asking me to tie a common thread around a group of people that in my mind don’t belong together, but since I applied the label to all of them, I will propose that all these people are railing against the status quo, for better or worse, to the best of their ability.
The article just seems to me to be like a ship’s captain looking around and seeing pirates, rocks, waves, squalls, and a few other nearby ships going about their business and shouting, “THEY’RE ALL WORKING TOGETHER AGAINST ME!”
my head is spinning. A lot of these so called “anti-authoritarians” seem to be resisting subconsious authority,
As a mildly liberal democrat. I’ve been sucked into reading a lot of political philosophy on liberalism/social contract theory in an effort to sharpen and focus my political prejudices. Looking at the source of that glorious flowchart (moreright.net) it’s apparent that my political counterparts are busy researching how to become better fascists…
[quote=“boingboing, post:1, topic:50898”]
Redpillers have frequently fallen victim to ones surrounding digital currencies such as Bitcoin.[/quote]
And thank goodness for them, in that one regard, anyway…
It feels good sucking up money from vapid, hubristic assholes you despise and redirecting their money to good uses (they would call SJW causes) that make their collective stomachs turn.
No, you’re probably right, they’re not all anti-authoritarian. A friend of mine points out that some of the men’s rights people are very authoritarian indeed. I retract that part of my assertion. But I still feel that lumping these people together is strange, and getting close to paranoid.
It has been said that a libertarian is just a Republican who does drugs. Most libertarians are in favor of free enterprise and a minimal (but nonzero) amount of government. There are some libertarians who are anarchists, and just to confuse things, anarchists used to call themselves libertarians. To confuse things further, there are the civil libertarians, who worry more about rights than about profits. Anyhow, the libertarian movement in America seems to have peaked, so you might
not have to worry about this kettle of fish for much longer.
‘Redpill right’ is not a common use term as far as I’m aware, it’s one that the author intends to popularize. I think you should keep in mind the possibility that the piece tells you more about the authors political views and goals than about the groups he is talking about. I assert that many people that fall under the authors’ sweeping criticism, either directly or by implication, are left-wing by broader societal definitions of the term. If you want to be informed in addition to being introduced, I recommend also looking at other sources than BoingBoing. You could do worse than reading some of the posts on this blog for an eloquent left-leaning critique of the social justice movement, and keep in mind that a majority of the readership of this blog identifies as left-leaning.
I’m interesting in such motivating. Part of what I was trying to get at with the graphic is that there are different levels of analysis. You can usefully characterize the early Republicans as a moderately left party, while recognizing that it had competing tendencies within it – as does any political movement, or any person’s head.
“Narrative” is a synonym for “story”, and implies dynamic relationships. A static image isn’t a narrative. Also, what astonishes me about the current speed of politics is that is not faster than it was a century ago. It is, if anything, slower.
I would have emphasized received – as in, they’re picking up the terminology primarily from their peers, not from “conventional” or traditional sources. The terminology is newish, but the pattern is not – this is how young people often start to explore identity.
The utility of left/right as a metaphor is that they’re relative directions, so this is a metaphor for relative motion. “Will this reduce oppression?” is a valid and coherent question. It’s not a facile question, and there are people who outright endorse oppression, in various forms, of course.
Fighting over what it means to be oppressed, in the context of social media, is a public discussion of the nature of oppression. That’s needed in order to understand how oppression works, and how to combat it.
From what I’ve seen, there are substantive discussions happening on Tumblr (and elsewhere) about the nature of oppression, and about solidarity among the oppressed. Sure, there’s a constant stream of whiners who complain about how criticism of white people hurts their feelings – but they’re usually countered, quickly and effectively. In fact, I think the quality of argumentation has improved over time.
The dominance of the US is of little or no benefit to the majority of people living in the US. The cost of maintaining that dominance is, I believe, actually close to the root cause of the oppression individuals face. One of the memes I most dislike is the “first world problems” meme – those are middle class problems. Material living standards in the US have been stagnant for over forty years, by the usual measures, and a cheap smartphone doesn’t make up for being unable to afford rent or medical care.
The fact that the “Redpill Right” can use some of the terminology of oppression doesn’t mean the terminology is invalid. It means the “Redpill Right” is full of crap.
He self-describes as left-wing in another post where he explicitly talks about reader survey results on politics. edit: I’m really sorry, I can’t find the post. I promise I’m not making this up though.
edit2: This here is not what I meant, but it gets the point across:
In the past two months I have inexplicably and very very suddenly become much more conservative.
This isn’t the type of conservativism where I agree with any conservative policies, mind you. Those still seem totally wrong-headed to me. It’s the sort of conservativism where, even though conservatives seem to be wrong about everything, often in horrible or hateful ways, they seem like probably mostly decent people deep down, whereas I have to physically restrain myself from going on Glenn Beck style rants about how much I hate leftists and how much they are ruining everything. Even though I mostly agree with the leftists whenever they say something.
No, but we have an amazing ability to read static images and find implied/implicit narratives. And there is a long history (ahem) of [narrative art] (Narrative art - Wikipedia).
Although
Static images in any artistic medium do not naturally lend themselves to telling stories as stories are told over time (diachronic) and pictures are seen all at once (synchronic).
We also find that
In painting in traditional Western art since the Renaissance, the concept of history painting covers most narrative scenes.
Having read a bit more, they’re clearly left wing of capitalism (centre to centre-right) rather than actually leaning to the left wing.
Maybe I was missing something but I also read nothing about solutions to the problems that were brought up about social justice. I have issues around most of the solutions too, I often find them far too authoritarian and neo-liberal for my Libertarian-socialist/Anarcho-communist tastes, but I’d rather have those solutions than nothing as keeping them is less bad than getting rid of them.
You can’t fix any social problem by disempowering the marginalised, which will be the end result of the current attacks on SJWs. Find better ways to empower people more equally and we might have something to talk about.
I’m pretty sure that the people there are on average left of the average person (in the US / western Europe). If you want to put everyone who believes that some form of capitalism is kinda a good idea on the right, that’s a pretty niche view. I pretty much agree with the politics expressed in the blog, and by any measure that compares me to the population at large, I"m overwhelmingly left-wing (within the American dichotomy, 95% of voters are to my right according to Pew). Similarly, the readership overwhelmingly self-identifies as left wing. Of course you are free to say “they aren’t left wing according to my definition of the term”, and I could turn around, take an even more extreme view than you and then call you a right wing asshole, but I feel the whole thing would be a bit pointless.
That’s precisely my issue with the post. I think it’s taking a rather niche view of leftism, and then complaining bitterly about all those evil right wingers in a post that’s less a rigorous analysis of what those groups believe in and more of an attempt to smear by association certain beliefs by labelling them “right wing”.
Maybe our issue is mostly with labels though, when I speak of left-wing / right-wing, I mean those terms in the sense that the Democrats are a center-left party and the Republicans are right-wing.
I also read nothing about solutions to the problems that were brought up about social justice
I think the “recommendations” for social justice are implicit but obvious: The ends don’t justify the means. Embrace evidence-based reasoning and individual rationality, reject bullying, distance the movement from radicals, use non-obfuscated epistemology, reject “fashionable nonsense” coming out of academia, embrace public debate, embrace public criticism rather than demonizing it, don’t use mob tactics against individuals, etc.
