You do get thing like “feminists” who only worry about white cis women. But if you think intersectionality is not something very many activists care about, you legitimately have no idea what you are talking about.
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Your argument carries no weight without specific examples. The devil is in the details and it’s perfectly reasonable to be against some forms of fringe ideas and for other ones.
Simplistic techno-libertarian free speech is not right because it’s simple. That just makes it childish.
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Yes, race- and gender- interest groups have been some of the biggest successes for technologically-mediated organizing outside the traditional media landscape, that’s the premise (going way back even, I’m not a technological determinist but there is some cool shit about the abolitionist press as a disruptive communication network). And now those groups are the source of some of the loudest voices about decency codes for media they used while their ideas were regarded as indecent.
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Yeah, groups that worked to give for instance trans people a voice are often very opposed to using those same platforms to organize hatred against trans people. This is not hypocrisy. It only looks that way when you look at the form and ignore the content, like you are doing when you acknowledge the organizations and speech but not the people they exist to help. It’s a false equivalency and like I said an extremely telling one.
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Intersectionality x Pop-Culture has been a predictable (and predicted, see Solidarity of Strangers*) disaster of oppression-Olympics that bears little resemblance to the ideal as an introspective tool. Watching that go dramatically fucking sideways is a big part of the “People will be shitty in approximate proportion to their ability to be shitty” (Looping back to Bauknin, “If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.”) idea that sits deep in my political ideology and makes a lot of things hard to have good answers for.
- Bringing up Jodi Dean here is super topical, she was one of the major causes on considering the net as a potential public sphere (Why the Net is not a Public Sphere), which is an essay I’ve understood completely differently every time I’ve read after a gap. She also has some later ideas about soviet apologia that I find pretty distasteful.
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I don’t think I have ever heard a labor activist say anything like this. And I grew up with a union organizer father. Since you are being critical of the left, I am assuming you mean “white” when you refer to “the wrong people.” There are certainly folks out there who would reject any action if it might benefit Blacks, LGBTQ people or women, but I doubt very much that position would be found in anything even remotely considered “left.”
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Problems are often “not real” to people who are not personally affected by them.
Same as it ever was…
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Pretty much.
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Now seems as good a time as any:
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Bullshit. they are strongest voices for not being treated like 2-dimensional side pieces to white men in the media.
Not to mention history. And current lived reality for those of us who aren’t white men. There is literally a law up for debate in TN that would make women legally unable to make their own choices about their reproduction. People who say that it’s a distraction for real politics probably don’t actually care about women being denied the basic rights men enjoy, such as not having others make decisions for us.
Exactly.
Women’s actual rights are being restricted across the country. There are actual attacks in state legislatures on trans kids. right now. As we speak. that’s REAL things that are happening right now.
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I get the impression some people bring up Gawker that don’t actually care about ethics in journalism…
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Gawker was a shitty rag that the world’s better off without. Whether or not he publication was owned by an openly gay man makes no difference. The fact that Gawker outed the Condé Nast CFO with a story about him soliciting a gay escort never gets brought up anymore. Gawker used their publication to strike at Condé Nast, which was one of their competitors. They suffered next to no consequences for it and moved right on to exploiting even more people and leveraging sensationalist reporting for clicks and views. Their main defense against lawsuits was the fact that they would have tons of money to mount a legal defense for longer than a plaintiff could fund their own legal team.
Peter Thiel is a fascist asshole. He indeed acted out of spite by funding this court case. But the takeaway from the Bollea v. Gawker story should be “It’s pretty fucked up that it took a spiteful fascist asshole’s funding for a court case against a remorseless tabloid to make it all the way to its verdict.” Gawker defying a court order that asks them remove a sex tape from their site is not the hill that people who want to defend journalism and free speech should be planting their flag on. Not then, and not now.
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I want to make clear (post-splitting off) that I was referring to Elizabeth Spiers personally, NOT Gawker
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I believe you are now talking about myopic issue voters who only care about one issue that happens to be on the left. When I said, “That’s not the left,” I meant that they are not the entirety of the left or even representative of the left. I really do not understand why you believe that the left has been reduced to nothing more than that. And your insistence on defining a “true left” is the real no true Scotsman argument here. You are right when you say that performative leftism exists, but I am telling you, that is not the whole left or representative of the left as a whole.
I also find it bizarre that you are now arguing that you want to see a more conspicuously armed left with a greater capacity for violence, when before you were decrying the rise of extremism. I know that you are not calling for violence specifically, but I am also beginning to wonder how you are defining extremism. Is it only extremist if there is actual violence, or are you simply substituting the word “extreme” for “myopic?”
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