I’ve just read a fascinating article on the daily stormer:
Weev and the rise of the Nazi Troll Army
, which sort of puts your objections into perspective.
I’m sorry to say that you’ve completely missed my point. I know that there is no “objective baseline”. My major philosophical tenet is “everything contains within itself an infinite number of possibilities for the perception of itself”. The implications of that are wide-ranged, but suffice to say I recognize there is no “objective” viewpoint (I studied this subject ad nauseum in college as well).
I’m also not an idealist. I rather dislike ideologies and ideologues. I have strong philosophical reasons for this dislike, which I don’t want to go into here. I merely want to find common ground upon which people can stand to debate the important issues of the time. If that makes me an idealist, then I’m the King of England.
I try to “say what I mean”, but my ideas are also constantly changing as I encounter new information and new perspectives. The more perspectives one has on an issue, the better one will be able to debate said issue with others; since there are an infinite number of perspectives, our work can never be done.
Your dialectic is odd. I’m not sure what your point is. Is my view really that extreme? It’s based on experiential evidence, as well as evidence from the scientific community (someone else posted this already, but I’ll post it again: http://lifehacker.com/can-rational-arguments-actually-change-peoples-minds-1590008558). Give me evidence to the contrary, and my view will change. I’m merely a conduit of all of the ideas I’ve been able to assimilate; the process of assimilation will never be finished.
Actually, its the other way around, you’ve missed my point! 
I didn’t say you believe in an objective baseline for truth, I said that your arguments assume an objectie baseline for truth (Those pesky hidden assumptions can be maddening, I know!), and to my comment that you should “say what you mean”, you’ve responded to say what you don’t mean instead of what you do!
There’s a lot to unpack here for sure… Lets just move on.
But anyway, what do you think about the link I gave you? Does it adress the topic of polarized arguments you mentioned?
Yep. I grew up being beaten up pretty regularly, and actually got beaten unconscious by neo-Nazis at my high school. I think a lot of people get c/ptsd from high school, and it isn’t always easy to get past c/ptsd. Especially if new traumas bring back old ones.
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Jesus! Nazi punks, fuck off! I’m sorry to hear that! I think most of my abuse was mental in nature. I think a couple of times, some girls tried to go after me once or twice, but that was it. It’s kind of hard to believe how often schools allow this kind of stuff and actually ended up punishing the victims in such cases… “well, if you would just ACT NORMAL things like that wouldn’t happen…” What a load of bullshit.
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To be clear, I had heard that they were neo-Nazis, but didn’t have any way to check whether that was true or whether that was another bizarre high-school rumor. But I do know that they beat me unconscious. and the school suspended them the next day, and me the following day, and then expected us to have to deal with each other again. I do know that that was the extreme out of years of violence. I sometimes wonder if manhood and masculinity [the institutions rather than the sex/gender identities] can exist without violence against percieved traitors to manhood and masculinity.
Well, most neo-nazis I knew tend to advertise, if in at least subtle ways - the skinhead get up, with specific patches on flight jackets and certain tats and laces. But not all are like that.
It’s ridiculous that you got suspended. You got beaten… what did they suspend you for? Victim blaming, pure and simple.
As for masculinity… I hope that it can, but in order for that to happen, we have to actively work to redefine masculinity, too. this sort of thing will continue to happen as long as there is a sense that threats to manhood needs to be met with force… hence back to the new culture war.
Taking a break from building my sukkah, I’ll just reply as briefly as I can.
First off I’m not as unaware as you seem to think I am. In all honesty, the parallels of suffragettes and abolitionists don’t really apply here as far as I can see. This “fight” isn’t one which seems to have any genuine risk to life and limb. When you get down to the bare metal this is about dealing with trolls. I believe I did mention elsewhere in that post you quoted so shortly from regarding laws about harassment, etc. Feel free to re-read that.
As for my opinions about cultural norms and morality, I don’t think I could sum those up in a short post. Suffice it to say that as an orthodox Jew, a US citizen living outside the US for a very long time, I’m strict in certain areas and flexible in others, yet I don’t seek to impose my primary norms and morality upon others.
In any case this sukkah isn’t gonna finish building itself. Gotta finish it before the holiday starts at sunset so offline I go for a few days.
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Which implies you own a penis and therefore haven’t had to actually deal with any of the shit these women have. It’s not just about dealing with trollies.
So, you are unaware. Enjoy your sukkah building.
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Unaware? I may not be the “right” demographic but I assure you I get it. I’m a heck of a lot more fortunate than a distant member of my family tree who was strung up by the KKK for being a Jew. Thank God I’ve not yet been physically assaulted for my demographic but yeah, I’ve been threatened with death, passed over for jobs, received the stink eye and smiled when people speak in other languages about my demographic assuming I don’t understand them, etc.
However having had by share of physical beatings in the past for being different and knowing something about the history of various rights struggles, I’m still figuring the assault and mortality count for this Culture War at zero. I’ll stick by that statement about no genuine risk to life and limb and hope to God it stays that way. It is no fun to have your face bashed into a car repeatedly, I don’t wish that on anyone else.
I respectfully disagree. Conflict, like cooperation, is too complex to distill into hard and fast rules.
Sometimes a competitor’s strength can be used against it to accomplish more than a weaker opponent can on their own; martial arts teach techniques for this. It is judicious assessment and use of resources that make a good strategy.
There is also the consideration of relative strength: in a very uneven fight, there is little need for the stronger competitor to erode the weaker one when they can take out its heart.
Two examples:
Case A (fictional, goodies win): The Rebellion attack on the Death Star. Had they chosen to take potshots in backwaters like Tattoine and move inward to the power center slowly, the Empire would have had little trouble taking them out.
Case B (real, baddies winning so far): The Koch brothers buying the heart of American unionism. With labor protections in Wisconsin and Ohio shredded and support for complete deregulation stoked in the screechosphere, there is no need for them to even address smaller struggles because the solidarity that might have come from the big unions is no longer unavailable. They also have a multipronged approach - Citizen’s United, ALEC, Americans for Prosperity, etc. - to dismantling the very concept of democracy.
Culture is a very complex nonlinear system that can make sudden and unpredicted swings. What the New Culture War illustrates is that our orbit around the attractor of bigotry and misogyny is unstable. Where we fly off to from here is an open question, but organizing around terms like “Social Justice Warrior” is valuable because it gives a context, if not instructions, for trying to steer us to a better place.
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I love Laurie Penny!
And I love the you-want-some-of-this-motherfucker-ness of this.
Because the internet is a mess. And it is a glorious mess.
Because the same situation that allows all the flowering of ideas and cool shit on the internet also allows the juvenile dumbassery of the silly gameboys.
You can’t have one without the other. And nobody wants a lockdown.
But that doesn’t mean that we have to put up with the dumbassery.
And that’s why I love this so much. Go get 'em Laurie Penny! And all the other Laurie Pennys.
We have got to push back on this. We can’t get rid of it but we can call bullshit on it. And push it off to the margin of decent society where it belongs.
So, Yay!
Going only by the in-thread quotes, it seems the author spends some energy on the external characteristics, which is both irrelevant and overbroad. If you’re attacking a subgroup of a subgroup, hammering on the traits they share with the rest of the subgroup isn’t helpful at all.
("Some penguins are real kid-murdering assholes.They should take their smug tuxedolike looks and their stupid little feet and their silly flipper wings and their flashy decorative head-feathers and fuck right off … oh, and you other penguins should support me against those infanticidal jerks. ")
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So? Video Games and movies transcend borders. Attack her material and her methodology, not her looks or nationality.
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