☭ Sup Marxists? ☭

More details?

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OMG I love that film.

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I’m currentlly listening to Me, Myself, and I by De La Soul, and that gif is weirdly syncing up…

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The most egregious example is Molly Crabapple’s hagiography of Andrew Auernheimer in Vice in May 2013, Lulz and Leg Irons: In the Courtroom with Weev, in which the harshest thing she can say about Weev still manages to praise him:

It’s useful to know that Weev is also a notorious trolley. He’s been profiled as such in the New York Times, for which he was photographed underlit in computer-screen blue like a gleefully malevolent djinn. While he’s instantly likeable in person, he’s done things that have offended. He claimed credit for the 2009 Amazon service disruption that led the online retailer to mistakenly reclassify all their gay books as porn. Weev is an official internet asshole—something prosecutors were perhaps banking on when they decided to make him an example.

And, she goes on to describe herself and others who were in the courtroom as friends of Weev.

This is before Weev “came out” as a white nationalist with a swastika tattoo, in October 2014. But, it was well after his publicly leading GNAA, after he admitted in 2007 (warning: that post is vile) that he’d initiated the misogynistic campaign of terror against Kathy Sierra, and in general had a long history of expressing brutal racist and sexist ideas and harassing people. Kathy Sierra had in fact contacted Crabapple directly about what Weev had done to her in May 2013.

When Weev’s essay about his white nationalist beliefs was published, people I followed on Twitter had varying reactions. Most immediately withdrew their support. The worst I saw was a Tweet from an indie journalist who said that she didn’t feel embarrassed about her support for Weev, because she had friends who ate meat, and meat-eating did more damage to the world than Nazism. (She deleted the Tweet; I hope because she realized how wrong what she’d said was).

The trouble is, by most accounts of Weev, you couldn’t spend time around him or follow his career without hearing his vile bigoted views. So the people who worked with him and called him friend couldn’t have been unaware of this. Yet there was little or no acknowledgment of this in the “Free Weev” campaign.

His prosecution in that case, I believe, was unjust, and defending him from that prosecution was legitimate. But I believe it was unethical, and possibly even politically short-sighted, for those who knew what Weev was, to fail to acknowledge it.

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Thank you; I had no doubts as to his “legitimacy” of being vile, but I couldn’t recall details on the beards.

Has Crabapple ever addressed this rather large elephant?

I like her work; it’s been featured here on BB several times.

I now find it all somewhat disturbing in the light of this.

Of course one can be friends with a racist. But when pointing this out to others, it sometimes helps to say something “He’s a racist, but still likeable. Weird, hunh?”

NOT saying that is… something. Deceptive? Disingenuous at best.

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:point_up: new band name.

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http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=384

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http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2015/09/like-most-every-poet-i-have-viewed-the-publication-of-each-years-best-american-poetry-with-happiness-i-love-that-poem-je-1.html

It’s a read that might be out of the comfort-zone (“poetry ZOMG!”) for many of you.

So, okay, as a result of these rules, what did I do with Best American Poetry 2015?

Approximately 60% of the poets are female.
Approximately 40% of the poets are people of color.
Approximately 20% of the poems employ strong to moderate formal elements.
Approximately 15% of the poems were first published on the Internet.
Approximately 99% of the poets are professors.

Actually, the bulk of the article deals with editor Sherman Alexie talking about having been taken in by a white man who submitted a poem under a Chinese-sounding name, and his reasons about why said poem was still included (basically: good poem).

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Suey Park has a good take on the poetry spoofer.

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This is more than a bit horrid.

The FBI picked up an online troll, who undertook a gross menagerie of hateful activities inciting pro-islmanic extremists, white supremacists, etc under various guises.

Of note, he was also an early gamur-gate supporter AND appears to have been an instigator in the attempted smear of Black Lives Matter champion Shaun King.

######ps- That’s two tips of the trilby to @Spacekatgal for connecting those dots.

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I think this article may become relevant to the so called culture wars.

THESIS: Honor culture
ANTITHESIS: Dignity culture
SYNTHESIS: Victim culture

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I don’t know… how much of that article rests on the notion of reigning in anger by those who are on the receiving end of microaggressions from a society that is sexist and racist?

Also, TNC rocks the world:

Can’t wait to see him speak in a few weeks… I’ll be totes fangirling!

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What interested me in the article was when they talked about how it seems like there are communities that form that care about microaggressions and communities that don’t care, and while the latter are actually more problematic communities, the whole framework doesn’t do much to them. That is, on one side of campus you have people ostracizing someone because of a poor work choice that they would happily correct if given the chance, on the other side you have a fraternity hosting a sexy cowboys and sexy indians party.

The thing is, I don’t know how legitimate that is. I do not spend time on American college campuses. Is there really an atmosphere of fear amongst the faculty and the progressive student body? My father was an economics professor, and he told me a long time ago he preferred teaching statistics to economics, because in statistics you either got the question right or wrong, but in economics there was always a student saying you gave them a bad mark because you didn’t like them personally (for whatever reason, and for all I know my dad was sexist or racist in his marking). I think dealing with complaints from students has been part of being a professor since long before the word microaggressions was coined.

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What the hell is this:

How did that thread turn into a pity party for oppressed white males? I can’t take this shit anymore.

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Have you seen the Disney cosplay thread?

https://bbs.boingboing.net/t/i-went-to-tokyo-disneyland-cosplay-day-and-it-was-spectacular/66190/40

I’m bigoted!

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I feel like on these boards whenever “<insert minority group> gets treated badly” comes up there is always the counter “We should treat everyone better.” As if marginalization weren’t a thing. As if we could all just agree tomorrow that white people and black people were equal and that it’s just a coincidence that the white people will still live in the wealthier areas with better public services and the black people will still live in the poorer areas with crumbling infrastructure. That’s just an accident of history, what can we do about it now?

I’ve lived most of my life as an extremely privileged individual on a lot of possible privilege dimensions. And when I first started hearing about the concept of privilege it irked me because I’ve also lived my life from a very non-privileged position on other dimension. But when I felt the sting of having white privilege pointed out, I thought, “Jesus, is this a tiny peek into the way that black people are made to feel every fucking day?” and I adjusted my attitude.

I was trying to explain why the ability to commit sexual violence against women in GTA games (a well known feature of the games) was a sexist element of the game, in:

And it was just a wall. The fact that you can kill anyone and the in-game sex workers are just treated like other people is apparently an absolute logical counter to that (despite the fact that you can kill anyone in real fucking life and we have sexual violence in real life). At one point someone expressed how depressing it was to see people “warping facts” while arguing that it’s not possible for players to be encouraged to do easter eggs in games because easter eggs are hidden by definition. Like there aren’t multiple wikis telling me where all of them are, or there aren’t youtube videos with millions of hits showing them off. Like real live children aren’t encouraged to find literal easter eggs on actual easter. THEY’RE HIDDEN.

Every single time people try to go back to their logic. If judging someone based on their skin colour is bad, how could judging me based on my white skin be good? People like logic because in logic you lock in your premises at the beginning and you never have to question them. Do you know how often in logic class someone says, “Well, if that’s the conclusion then I guess one of the premises must be mistaken.” Unless the conclusion is a literal contradiction, it never happens. I don’t even want to talk anymore.

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I’m with ya! In the particular conversation I was having, I kept getting told what is and isn’t sexism, as if it’s not part of my daily experience. I don’t really understand how it’s so hard a concept to grasp, honestly.

Is it too early for hard booze? Betty White says no.

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Well, while I was on parental leave they replaced the office supply store in the basement with a liquor store. I think that was supposed to tell me something.

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I’m going to be at an anime convention this weekend, and I’m hoping for a sake stand somewhere…

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