It sounds like you are trying to dismiss my criticism by associating it with a different ideological movement, as well as taking it off topic from my initial reply about this Reddit crowd. At issue here is the left’s disgust at actually engaging ideological opponents in discourse in most fields of life. The relative lack of leftist perspective in mass media, because it doesn’t sell in a marketplace of ideas based upon exploitation. What “liberals” often actually do is 1. collectively complain, both in pockets of the internet as well as in public spaces, and 2. leave it to the professionals, petition our corrupt representatives. It is easy for us to complain how liberals and those further left are perceived by the public and the media, but the only viable solutions probably lie not in us attacking each other, but rather being more involved in the cultural discourse.
It’s not a criticism of who we are, but rather what we do. Yes it is a bit general and reductive. It does not apply to those who are actually feeding the hungry and other actual important practical work.
The left is largely based upon critical analysis. And scary conservative bugbears such as “political correctness” and “cultural Marxism” are actually tools that the left devised to critique first ourselves and our own movements. If people’s reflex is to tar anybody who criticises the liberal movement with the same broad brush they intend for conservatives, then they are probably being a bit reactionary themselves and might benefit from some perspective.
Are you referring to me? In what sense was anything I put forth anti-intellectual? Quite the opposite - what I am calling for is more popular intellectualism. That we DO put ourselves in ideological bubbles when we refuse to engage opponents on the pretext that we find their words and/or actions abhorrent. So we really cannot afford the disgust. As the saying goes, cooler heads will prevail. Avoiding debate and dialectic against “Trumpkins” and other reactionary bigots literally takes us out of the cultural dialog, and brings a risk of many better ideas being popularly perceived as lacking relevance. Saying that “we shouldn’t have to” might be true, but it’s also a feeling of entitlement that carries risk.
My experience - which I acknowledge might not be representative - has been that many on the left prefer to quietly excise bigots from discussions, and/or avoid spaces and conversations where they are deeply entrenched because it doesn’t feel “safe”. No, it isn’t safe, but retreating on a cultural battlefield, exposing your back to your adversary isn’t safe either. There seems to be a real tendency for us to constantly give up ground at the slightest resistance. Which indicates a severe lack of strategic planning.
The point is not what our opposition didn’t do, it’s what we are actually doing instead.
Um… is this academia? Cause I most certainly seem to be publicly engaging here, wouldn’t you agree?
It would be immensely helpful if leftists weren’t actively ignored in mainstream discourse or shouted down as commies, radicals, or anti-American. The right also lives in a little media bubble, and as a matter of fact, we all kind of do. This is not a problem of an unwillingness to engage by the left, it’s a problem of being shut out of the discussion, not only by the right, but by what is supposed to be our political representatives in the Democratic party. They shut down leftist discourse just as much as the right wing.
As far as people going on Reedit, going on their sub-reedits does little good when you can’t get a word in edgewise or get ignored.
No personal offense taken. Like stereotypes usually are, I think the examples you gave are intended to be unflattering exaggerations based upon some real characteristics. So we have the options of confronting those both in the public dialog, as well as within our own movements.
I see this reversal in the current gun discussion. People bring up the congress in voting on removing regulations on “silencers” this week, and people who are disapprove of gun regulation respond to that by saying, “Ha ha, you don’t even know what a suppressor is or how it works.” It’s exactly the same kind of condescension that people from flyover states complained about from the “liberal elite”.
When people are in real pain and cry out, pointing out they don’t really know what they are talking about makes them resent you, and rightly so. I think we’re living in the blowback from technocrat* smugness. If people who like owning guns don’t want to live in the blowback of pro-gun smugness, they need to do what the technocrats didn’t do and use their position of “knowing better” to offer a better solution than the one being called for by those ignorant of the issues.
* “technocrat” can be loosely understood to mean Reaganists/Thatcherists/Supply Siders/Neocons/Neoliberals/etc.
No, it’s not academia. But do you find indignation an unusual response here? I agree that we do engage fairly well here, and I think that BB as a community has a fairly healthy range of opinions and positions. But there is also a tendency I think to treat it like a retreat from the terrible “real world” of greater online discourse. The moderation likes to keep things light and breezy, so more serious discussions do sometimes get shut down or avoided. It is usually a decent enough compromise.
Of course, but if when feels ignored the response is to disappear, then that seems like giving up ground to me. It amounts to the left internalizing the right’s cultural narrative, at least to the extent of how it frames our own relevance. These media bubbles don’t just happen, they are constructed. And unfortunately, those on the right seem to be generally more keen in participating in how they are constructed than we are. We allow ourselves to be intimidated, and accept our lack of participation, instead of crashing the party of >public/civic life< and doing it anyway.
One strategy is to own the labels used against us. I am in a shitty position, for instance, because conservatives call me commie, radical, and anti-American. Meanwhile many on the more liberal side of the left then prefer to distance themselves from me for accepting and using those same labels for myself, giving them more context and subverting the intent of those who applied them. That makes me the scary left that more liberal people don’t want to be associated with, because they internalize the pejoration of those labels. That is again an example of giving up ground, and it is an aspect that we do have control over.
Reliance upon people we don’t trust in hopes of having a say - such as our political representatives, Democrats, etc is precisely the problem I am trying to address here. Pressuring them is necessary, but it is not likely to be successful, so we need to be able to actually organize and engage in daily public life as well. Back other parties. Do more direct governance and community/infrastructure building. And actual education, which means using and engaging the media in some organized way.
Depends on the issue at hand. I tend to get indignant when myself or others are summarily dismissed on topics that we have direct experience with, for example.
That’s often because those discussions attract disingenuous trollies who delight in derailing a topic in various ways.
There is a problem of a particular narrative dominating, but that is partially (if not primarily) because certain voices and ideas on the left have been essentially censored or not taken seriously in the first place. If people won’t listen or those who a leftist bent aren’t allowed to be part of the public discussion (which now overwhelmingly happens in spaces that are owned by private corporations for profit), how are they meant to assert their own relevance without it turning into an echo chamber.
Of course, but you’re assuming that all of us engaged in a public discussion have the exact same access to a public audience. We don’t. Some guy with a tenured position at, say, Harvard or Yale is far more likely to be called in to make a public comment than, say, me, with a VL position at a larger public university. The people constructing the people isn’t just you or me, it’s the people who have more power in society. You can’t keep ignoring power and expect things to make sense, Popo, you really can’t.
But we’ve already been here before. If people can contort their brains to believe Sandy Hook/Newtown was a false flag, they can do anything.
The only comfort might have been that they were 4chan-types making things up to be contrary, but on /r/The_Donald, its entirely believers preaching to believers. There’s no need to trolley if you’re among (trolley) friends. These people live out their lives in doublethink.
I can relate. But I think there is a risk of conflating dismissal with disagreement. One can acknowledge a person’s personal experience, while challenging a social consensus of cause or effect of such experiences that others may consider implicit. So refuting one may be construed as refuting the other, when that isn’t necessarily the case. Us being able to share our experiences, and having others accept our doing so, does not make them obliged to be uncritical of the related cultural context. I see that happen a lot here, and that’s when people don’t like to agree to disagree.
Yes, but that inability or unwillingness to have those discussions can result in our community developing blind spots. It yields an ingroup who then require certain apparent truths to remain unexamined. We thus indirectly give those trollies a power over the shape and scope of our discussions.
Agreed. There is no guarantee of success, but if we accept marginality and internalize it, this would be a guarantee of failure. That is central to my point - if we refuse to engage them, then we have already lost by default. And that is also how we avoid turning into an echo chamber, we engage with the other rather than retreat into an easier cozier bubble where we know that we and our our ideals will be more well-received.
So your perspective is the real one, and my failure is ignoring the reality? No, the more honest explanation is that you and I disagree about how power works and where it resides. I suspect it is something people are socialized into and not easily changed. Power in society is based primarily upon organization and structure, along with adaptability. Of course, there are real material aspects of biopolitics, but it is the former that facilitate these in a modern society where power is mostly symbolic and abstracted. Many on the left balk at the idea of organizing amongst ourselves to so anything, so there is no basis of social power to build upon, and that isn’t anybody’s fault but our own. It’s not that our grand schemes are smacked down, its that there is a prevalent losing script which conditions people to give up the pro-active role from the outset. It’s how we get out-organized not only by shrewd well-funded groups by the NRA, but by 4-chan, for fuck’s sake.
Organization and communication have minimal cost in most cultures today, apart from obviously time and effort. So I think a refusal to use these for our communities and against destructive groups is indeed a strategy of powerlessness, and I find it deeply troubling. It’s not that we are being defeated in actual work by actual adversaries, the problem is doing the initial work is being successfully disincentivized by a few tacticians who play upon our psychology in rather transparent ways.
Yes, and plenty of times, it ends up being a summary dismissal as opposed to disagreement, with people’s personal experiences being completely ignored.
Do you think that people can’t understand the difference?
There are people who I disagree with here, who actually engage in a discussion. And there are people who come here specifically to move goalposts, nitpick, and deride people they see as “the enemy.” They refuse to treat some people as fellow human beings. How are they to be engaged?
You can’t engage everyone all the time. There is literally not time in our lives to do so. Not everyone comes here to engage, they come to shitpost, derail, or rail against “libtards” or “social justice warriors,” who they don’t believe are fellow human beings worth engaging.
Did I say that? I said you have an unwillingness to accept that there are situations where people’s actions are not equal. You constantly ignore real world power relations that have a material impact on people’s lives.
Maybe so. You seem to believe that guns, laws, social conventions, history, etc, are not real, physical things that have real power over our lives. That doesn’t mean that people can’t and don’t organize for their betterment, but ignoring the ideological structures that do exist, and addressing those are a necessity. YOu seem to want to just ignore them, though. Maybe I’m wrong on that. But I think you’re wrong in that I view us as helpless in the face of these ideological structures - we do have power, but it’s unequal to the power in these ideological structures. Individual agency is not boundless. Individual agency constantly pushes up against the structures we live within. I do agree that we can have an impact, collectively. But to ignore ideological structures in favor of forming our own ONLY does no good. Just ask the people who made attempts to do just that in history. Plenty of people sought to carve out spaces of independence from the ideological structures of their day. Often, they were violently or brutally attacked for it, or at the very best constantly undermined.
No - it would be an exaggeration if we were to say that. What I did say is that the left are generally failing to hold our own in cultural discourse, apart from in academia. This is in response to the OP being about some people on Reddit, and @hecep’s apparent disgust with them. I had not even mentioned “liberals”, nor was I criticizing the left in general terms. If you aren’t clear upon the distinction I was making, then please ask for clarification, instead of trying to put words in my mouth or otherwise misrepresent what I said.
but the lefts indignation at actively engaging in public discourse outside of academia has pretty much surrendered most of the country to “these people”. The little media-reenforced bubbles they exist in…
To me, this suggests:
The left is unwilling to engage outside academia.
The left lives in bubbles of the media’s creation, not in “the real world.”
I think these claims are incorrect. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand you. It means I disagree with you.
Well, it does mean that you misunderstand me, because those are not what I am “claiming”. You are of course entitled to your inferences, but you need to own those as being your inferences.
Perhaps, just because it seems to me that you are mischaracterizing my remarks does not mean that you might not genuinely disagree with what you thought I meant, and/or what my actual intended meaning was. They are not mutually exclusive. But the fact that you seem content to run with your interpretation despite my attempts to clarify does not indicate that this exchange will be productive.
YMMV, but I think there is a significant difference between disagreement with what a person acknowledges their position to be, and disagreement with what one decides their position to be. I am pretty well tired of people here arguing with me over what I “might as well have said”. And in a discussion about ideologically-motivated disingenuity in online discourse, of all places…
