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Terrorist Fistbump posted:I read the book last night (it's surprisingly short and took me only a couple hours) and the discussion itt is highlighting the big failure of the book imo: failure to lay out a clear argument in favor of anything. This mirrors my own feelings about the book. I think some of the accusations getting leveled against it are unfair and really come off as people who are actively searching for a reason to dismiss the entire book without really engaging with it first. That having been said this is a very flawed book that feels way too much like a 200 page Baffler article (and I say that as someone who likes reading the Baffler). For instance, I think it's ridiculous to say that Nagle treats the alt-right as "sui generis" internet phenomenon, but I also understand why an uncharitable reader could reach that conclusion because Nagle's overly rushed treatment of the subject doesn't give her enough time to lay out an actual theory.
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Jul 19, 2017 17:16
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Ze Pollack posted:for all their protestations about the coarse nature of democratic rhetoric, they have no problem signing onto the crudest and most brutal republican candidates. what drives them is not civility. what drives them is one party saying "we (at least hypothetically) seek to address systemic inequality" while another says "we will preserve inequalities you benefit from."
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Jul 19, 2017 17:51
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you can try to offer them something that will benefit them, certainly. you can make the argument they'll benefit more from equality than they will from preserving existing inequalities. you can try to build a politics that speaks more to people like them. but as Martin Luther King demonstrated, if you wait for them to finally say "okay, you were polite enough to me, I will now ignore my personal interest in maintaining the status quo" you are still going to be waiting on Judgement Day.
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Jul 19, 2017 17:57
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Ze Pollack posted:you can try to offer them something that will benefit them, certainly. you can make the argument they'll benefit more from equality than they will from preserving existing inequalities. you can try to build a politics that speaks more to people like them. who cares. the goal of the leftist project is not to convert every voter into a singular political ideology. the majority of voters vote for what benefits them directly and puts food on the table, and this can be incorporated into policy that more evenly redistributes wealth and power between racial and gender lines. over 95% of the top 1 percent are white. by seizing their assets (which there are a lot of) and redistributing them into public programs like a universal standard of living and infrastructure programs, universal health care, etc - it disproportionately benefits people of color more than white people, who are still just under 2/3rds of america. by removing the economic crisis of debt to criminal financial institutions and meeting people's material needs, we cure the breeding ground in which racism festers and grows - which is what the "alt-right", Tea Party, etc. has been born in
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Jul 19, 2017 18:09
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My write-up for this chapter is shorter because Nagle delves into several asides on cultural history and analysis that I'm only going to summarize briefly. You can get a full sense of her arguments and the genealogy she traces by reading this chapter but I'm going to mostly focus on what I see as her core arguments. Chapter Two: The online politics of transgression In chapter one Nagle discussed how the history and development of online communities like 4chan first seemed to fulfill and then eventually disappointed various prophets of the digital utopia. She suggests that this credulous form of cyber utopianism caused many on the left to assume that the internet and the leaderless, horizontal and “networked” society that it was giving birth to would be fundamentally progressive in nature. In chapter two Nagle expands her criticism, arguing in effect that the left failed to anticipate the reactionary potential implicit within communities like 4chan because of a widely shared cultural bias which uncritically celebrates transgression for its own sake. As we shall see, in Nagle’s estimation the avant-garde’s cultivated contempt for the tastes of the masses, and the tendency for many figures on the cultural left since the 1960s to celebrate any rupture with the status quo, overlooks the fundamental political neutrality of transgression itself. In fact, Nagle argues, transgression against the status quo has often been paired with reactionary or misogynistic sentiments. Nagle writes: quote:Transgression has been embraced as a virtue within Western social liberalism ever since the 60s, typically applied today as it is in bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress. So elevated has the virtue of transgression become in the criticism of art, argued Kieran Cashell, that contemporary art critics have been faced with a challenge: ‘either support transgression unconditionally or condemn the tendency and risk obsolescence amid suspicions of critical conservatism’ as the great art critic Robert Hughes often was. But, Cashell wrote, on the value placed upon transgression in contemporary art: ‘In the pursuit of the irrational, art has become negative, nasty and nihilistic.’ Literary critic Anthony Julius has also noted the resulting ‘unreflective contemporary endorsement of the transgressive’. Nagle points to Milo Yianapolis and his claim that “conservatism is the ‘new punk’ because it’s ‘transgressive, subversive, fun.’ quote:"The ease with which this broader alt-right and alt-light milieu can use transgressive styles today shows how superficial and historically accidental it was that it ended up being in any way associated with the socialist left." Nagle then points to the history of using the swastika symbol, including by members of the counter culture, to signal transgression against postwar society. She also references an interview with professional troll weev, aka Aurenheimer, who has a swastika tattoo on his chest. Nagle quote’s weev’s transgendered companion and fellow troll, Jaime Cochrane, who says trolling is ‘satirical performance art’ and ‘aggressive rhetoric’ deriving from a tradition that includes Socrates, Jesus and Loki. Nagle quotes the interview at length, in it the interview relays how “Auernheimer likens himself to Shakespeare’s Puck. Cochrane aspires to Lenny Bruce and Andy Kaufman. They talk of culture jamming, the art of disrupting the status quo to make people think. They talk of Abbie Hoffman.” Nagle continues at some length, linking the “cult of the moral transgressor as a heroic individual” with Romanticism and then charting its development through various literary and media incarnations, its celebration of madness as non-conformity, etc. This is then linked back to various pranks performed by 4chan, typically at the expense of the relatives of dead people or the victims of various tragedies. Perhaps the following highlighted passage also gives a clearer sense of the relationship she sees between the alt-right and tumblr: quote:Another conceptualization of transgression that applies to this culture has been the idea of the carnivalesque. In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, Stallybrass and White considered the carnivalesque to be a form of radical transgression against hierarchy and hegemony: ‘The grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms designating what is high and what is low.’ This is very much how 4chan has long self-described and how it was described by its early ‘progressive’ boosters, except that the dominant ideology in the time of 4chan has been cultural liberalism, and the ‘low’ therefore meant un-PC poor taste, rudeness, shock, offense and trolling. The carnivalesque was also theorized by Bakhtin, whose ideologically flexible and ambivalent definition sounds like much like some of the self-descriptions of trolls on what trolling is doing: Nagles writes that despite a few exceptions it has been Rightwing commentators who have been the primary critics of transgression, while the left has tended to celebrate transgression and to view it as politically useful. quote:During the recent online culture wars, and their spillover into campus and protest politics, feminists have tried to embrace transgression with the Slut Walk movement and sex-positive pro-trans, pro-sex worker and pro-kink culture that was central to Tumblr. However, like the right, it has run up against a deep philosophical problem about the ideologically flexible, politically fungible, morally neutral nature of transgression as a style, which can characterize misogyny just as easily as it can sexual liberation. As Lasch understood, for progressive politics anti-moral transgression has always been a bargain with the devil, because the case for equality is essentially a moral one." I would point out here that this is a direct refutation of that review posted up thread which was suggesting that the clear implication of Nagle’s book was that the left should abandon critiques of sexism. The argument is actually something close to the opposite: for Nagle there is a fundamental incoherence in simultaneously arguing for equality on moral grounds while also elevating the transgression into a heroic stance, because transgression is fundamentally anti-moral whereas equality is fundamentally being argued for on moralistic grounds. Thus the left’s aesthetic preferences clash with its moral instincts, creating a cultural confusion which the alt-right was able to exploit during a time when discourse on the internet was hegemonically liberal. Nagle concludes: quote:That the transgressive values of de Sade could be taken up by a culture of misogyny and characterized an online anti-feminist movement that rejected traditional church-going conservatism should also not be a surprise. The Blakean motto adopted by the Surrealists, ‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’, dominance as sexual ‘sovereignty’ and the freeing of the id from the constraints of the conscience have all descended from this transgressive tradition. Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:12
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Inescapable Duck posted:And I don't get why everyone's so eager to defend or excuse the idpol crowd. What have they actually accomplished? Pretty much all their slogans become punchlines instantly and/or are construed in the worst possible way, and teach their members that it's perfectly okay to be a huge rear end in a top hat so long as you say you're doing it to protect women and minorities. (And who counts as a woman and minority can be changed in an instant when convenient) And their idea of social justice completely excises economic justice, which is perfect for Democrat co-option but pretty bad at actually solving pretty much any of the problems they rail about. like everyone who makes sweeping statements about 'idpol' you're going to have to define what you mean by 'idpol' before this can be placed on the [trivially true] - [substantively true/false] - [trivially false] continuum
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Jul 19, 2017 18:14
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Taintrunner posted:who cares. the goal of the leftist project is not to convert every voter into a singular political ideology Why does she say that "cultural liberalism" has been dominant, and not just "liberalism"? Seems like a deliberate attempt to ignore economics.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:21
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Why does she say that "cultural liberalism" has been dominant, and not just "liberalism"? Seems like a deliberate attempt to ignore economics. the mass acceptance of neoliberal economics by all parties of the political spectrum since reagan and thatcher has made it's economics go from merely dominant to a perceived essential fact of the world. while cultural liberalism has had to fight and have victories to the point where it can be said to be dominantly winning, neoliberal economics until recently was perceived as an inevitable law of society like gravity in physics
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Jul 19, 2017 18:30
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A Buttery Pastry posted:Why does she say that "cultural liberalism" has been dominant, and not just "liberalism"? Seems like a deliberate attempt to ignore economics. This is jumping ahead but in later chapters she describes how cultural liberalism was weaponized during the Cold War (and also later used in the 2010s to attack leftist calls for material redistribution). From chapter 4: quote:"It is sometimes said that the right won the economic war and the left won the culture war. And as political theorist Walter Benn Michaels has argued, it is the recognition of identity that has triumphed over economic equality as the organizing principle of the Anglo-American liberal left and of mainstream discourse more broadly. quote:It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism. Through the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert cultural soft-power initiative, it was the Cold War anti-communist liberals who used non-conformism, self-expression and individualism to rival the collectivist, conformist, productivist and heavily restricted Soviet Union, which still revered the uniformed pre-60s anti-individualist forms of culture like army choirs, marching bands, orchestras and ballet. By the time Buchanan gave his speech in 1992, the Cold War was over and the economic program of the Western democratic left had suffered a catastrophic defeat during the Reagan and Thatcher years. However, the socially and morally permissive, transgressive, nonconformist cultural project within the US New Left had by then emerged triumphant and, as it turned out, coexisted quite comfortably with the scorched-earth free-market economics of the right –a fusion that reached its fullest expression in the Blair/ Clinton era, when a non-conformist cultural gesture could still cover a multitude of economic sins
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Jul 19, 2017 18:33
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Helsing posted:I would point out here that this is a direct refutation of that review posted up thread which was suggesting that the clear implication of Nagle’s book was that the left should abandon critiques of sexism. The argument is actually something close to the opposite: for Nagle there is a fundamental incoherence in simultaneously arguing for equality on moral grounds while also elevating the transgression into a heroic stance, because transgression is fundamentally anti-moral whereas equality is fundamentally being argued for on moralistic grounds. Thus the left’s aesthetic preferences clash with its moral instincts, creating a cultural confusion which the alt-right was able to exploit during a time when discourse on the internet was hegemonically liberal. Yeah, I agree with your assessment here. Reading through it a second time more the flaws shine through and I think it's more than fair to say this is a piece of long journalism than an actual academic treatment. But people suggesting that Nagle is anti-feminist or pushing some kind of syncretic leftist/alt-right system of beliefs is misreading her work.
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Jul 19, 2017 18:49
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The radicalization of the internet seems almost inevitable in retrospect. The specifics and contingencies of our actual history matter less then the trends baked into the internet. All the action, reaction, counter reactions stems from the abolition of geography and the weird melange of private and public that the internet occupies. It forces us together with other ideas in a confusion beyond any historical counterpart, dozens of ideologies shoved together into zero real space. It let's evangelicals of every political faction wander into our e-living room and start preaching and criticizing and asking us if we'd heard the good word of (insert whatever here). Things like gamergate are the inevitable result. It was public discourse on the outside and coming into your home and yelling at you from the inside and both conceptions are simultaneously true. It mobilized a bunch of people who would have normally just lived a life of quiet desperation because it was read as an invasive assault on their home/refuge. If they would not be allowed to be weird lovely nerds in videogames, the mainstream political discpurse intrudes even there, then the solution was to take up arms and fight for the right to be weird lovely nerds. The personal is the political in a very real way on the internet and the unfortunate logical result of that is that political disagreement becomes tinged with existential struggle The Internet is a panopticon in just about a completely literal way. If you don't have the cultural high ground it can feel like you're at the whim of random and arbitrary social censure. SickZip has issued a correction as of 19:00 on Jul 19, 2017 |
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Jul 19, 2017 18:52
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Since were sorta talking about reaching out to the opposition i just wanted to tell a story. Im in a union and every 2 years we do contract negotiations and i got to be on the negotiating team a few times. The first time i did it was one of our more active members who, despite being an active member, is also ultra right wing and conspiratorial (in my first few month on the job he told me at length about how Abe Lincoln was a war criminal, i had not asked). Our union rep leading the team was a younger guy with endless patience and perhaps too much willingness to help and engage. Near the end the old guy and the rep finally had it out and while the old guy veered wildly to unrelated topics and back to the contract the young guy countered well and eventually cornered the old guy. But then something happened, instead of relenting, admitting defeat or and sort of loss, he just sheepishly started repeating mantras and catchphrases of his right wing stances despite them being countered and proven false. The rep just moved on in negotiation discussion and the old guy shut up and stewed and bitched about it at a later date. I applaude my reps fighting back but years later i wonder if it did any good. Maybe it did but the old guy is still the same. Well thats my story
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Jul 19, 2017 18:55
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Jeb! Repetition posted:The hippies made leftism cool among young people though, and were the underdogs, and were big on personal and intellectual freedom. Of course that turned into a very bad thing when they started considering neoliberal economics to be a form of freedom in the 80s, but still. he's probably thinking yippies but aghhhhhhhh New Left 
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Jul 19, 2017 19:54
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Helsing posted:This mirrors my own feelings about the book. I think some of the accusations getting leveled against it are unfair and really come off as people who are actively searching for a reason to dismiss the entire book without really engaging with it first. That having been said this is a very flawed book that feels way too much like a 200 page Baffler article (and I say that as someone who likes reading the Baffler). thanks so much for breaking this book down! your critiques are heck of lucid and cool and good 
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Jul 19, 2017 19:57
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Uncle Wemus posted:Since were sorta talking about reaching out to the opposition i just wanted to tell a story. Im in a union and every 2 years we do contract negotiations and i got to be on the negotiating team a few times. The first time i did it was one of our more active members who, despite being an active member, is also ultra right wing and conspiratorial (in my first few month on the job he told me at length about how Abe Lincoln was a war criminal, i had not asked). Our union rep leading the team was a younger guy with endless patience and perhaps too much willingness to help and engage. Near the end the old guy and the rep finally had it out and while the old guy veered wildly to unrelated topics and back to the contract the young guy countered well and eventually cornered the old guy. But then something happened, instead of relenting, admitting defeat or and sort of loss, he just sheepishly started repeating mantras and catchphrases of his right wing stances despite them being countered and proven false. Hahaha this is exactly how Prester Jane describes authoritarians react.
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Jul 19, 2017 20:15
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Slim Jim Pickens posted:Hahaha this is exactly how Prester Jane describes authoritarians react. I'd love a spinoff of Kids React called Authoritarians React.
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Jul 19, 2017 20:18
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Helsing posted:This is jumping ahead but in later chapters she describes how cultural liberalism was weaponized during the Cold War (and also later used in the 2010s to attack leftist calls for material redistribution).
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Jul 19, 2017 21:04
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the trump tutelage posted:It's great that you think you have a good handle on what's really going on, but until you're willing to discuss their concerns and motivations in a way that they would recognize and understand, you're useless as anything more than a Lefty cheerleader. Well you seem to have a good handle. Come on explain what really is happening.
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Jul 19, 2017 21:14
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Crowsbeak posted:Well you seem to have a good handle. Come on explain what really is happening. Take at a statistic like 78% of Trump voters prioritizing illegal immigration as an issue. It would be fruitful to try to unpack that and understand exactly why that is such a concern, from their point of view, so that maybe we can craft a narrative that better assuages their fears. Or, so that we could make more effective and informed appeals to people on the margins who could swing either way. Writing them off as racists and xenophobes is gratifying but lazy. Even if you do want to distill it down to racism and xenophobia, it behooves us to understand exactly what it is that's animating it in them. Refusing to validate these concerns - which does not necessarily mean validating the premises of these concerns - creates a vacuum that is happily filled by the Right, and we've seen that time and again in everything from Red Pillers to /pol/ to the rise of anti-immigrant movements in Europe and the election of Trump in the States.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:11
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Actually my answer is to offer them universal healthcare. I mean I know some who actually voted for Trump who would love to have that. I also know they hate the bankers. So I would probably run on a platform of hanging the bankers. n illegal immigration, I would run on a platform of locking up and fining the people who illegally hire one hundred thousand dollars per illegal. I also know that is strongly supported. I mean I know that your gimmick is to then say that all the Trump Supporters are ancaps or some idiocy like that.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:17
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Crowsbeak posted:I would run on a platform of locking up and fining the people who illegally hire one hundred thousand dollars per illegal. Do it one better - just raise the minimum wage on illegal workers to $30/hour, then have all the enforcement done by lawyers suing for back pay. 'Solves the problem' for 'free'.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:29
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Tunicate posted:Do it one better - just raise the minimum wage on illegal workers to $30/hour, then have all the enforcement done by lawyers suing for back pay. 'Solves the problem' for 'free'. I could work that. Although the rigth can turn that around really easily by saying. "You want to pay themmore then Americans" They have alot harder time defending their whoring themselves out to property developers and big agro when you can say. I WANT TO PUNISH THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE THE ILLEGALS, YOU'RE NOT A JOB CREATOR IF YOU DON'T HIRE AMERICANS!. As well as. HEY IF YOU CAN'T FALLOW THE LAWS TO STAY IN BUISINESS THEN YOU'RE NOTHING BUT A NO GOOD GANGSTER.
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Jul 19, 2017 22:38
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Helsing posted:I would point out here that this is a direct refutation of that review posted up thread which was suggesting that the clear implication of Nagle’s book was that the left should abandon critiques of sexism. The argument is actually something close to the opposite: for Nagle there is a fundamental incoherence in simultaneously arguing for equality on moral grounds while also elevating the transgression into a heroic stance, because transgression is fundamentally anti-moral whereas equality is fundamentally being argued for on moralistic grounds. Thus the left’s aesthetic preferences clash with its moral instincts, creating a cultural confusion which the alt-right was able to exploit during a time when discourse on the internet was hegemonically liberal.
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Jul 19, 2017 23:05
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Chapter 2 points toward the idea that liberalism won two consecutive culture wars and then rested on its laurels, expecting the work of convincing everyone to fall in with them to be easy. There's also some suggestion that the movement was either intellectually exhausted or just lazy. Those would be good directions to take the book if we're going to talk about liberalism in relation to the alt-right at all. Instead we got a rich description of Tumblr-liberalism without a lot of analysis to go with it. The transgression stuff is good and is probably the closest thing the book has to a thesis.
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Jul 19, 2017 23:30
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Crowsbeak posted:Actually my answer is to offer them universal healthcare. I mean I know some who actually voted for Trump who would love to have that. I also know they hate the bankers. So I would probably run on a platform of hanging the bankers. n illegal immigration, I would run on a platform of locking up and fining the people who illegally hire one hundred thousand dollars per illegal. I also know that is strongly supported. I mean I know that your gimmick is to then say that all the Trump Supporters are ancaps or some idiocy like that. Those ideas all sound better than writing them and their concerns off as an attempt to preserve inequality for its own sake a la Ze Pollack.
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Jul 19, 2017 23:33
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Terrorist Fistbump posted:Chapter 2 points toward the idea that liberalism won two consecutive culture wars and then rested on its laurels, expecting the work of convincing everyone to fall in with them to be easy. There's also some suggestion that the movement was either intellectually exhausted or just lazy. Those would be good directions to take the book if we're going to talk about liberalism in relation to the alt-right at all. Instead we got a rich description of Tumblr-liberalism without a lot of analysis to go with it. I agree, and it's also a discussion that could easily extend beyond the overly narrow parameters of the book as well as informing our approaches to the future. Hell, the whole appeal of the "dirtbag left" (and many of the problems with same) are rooted in that exact same transgressiveness. Expanding on that, not drawing a direct comparison but noting lessons from the strengths and weaknesses of the alt-right's rejection of social norms, could be an interesting and valuable discussion all its own.
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Jul 19, 2017 23:53
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So all the people freaking the gently caress out over Nagle blaming tumblr didn't read the book, because the implication of this chapter is that both are symptomatic of the fetish of transgression that preceded them.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:00
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Crowsbeak posted:I also know they hate the bankers. So I would probably run on a platform of hanging the bankers. I dunno, according to polls Republican voters on the whole think banks and financial institutions do more good for American society than unions or universities. Are you sure this would work? Do you think it might somehow alienate more Democrats than it wins non-voters and Republicans? A lot of Dems suck poo poo, but people are also reductive about the complexity of the challenge facing them. Even many Americans who support socialist reforms have deeply internalized right-wing or liberal values that render socialist reform much more difficult to achieve.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:19
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rudatron posted:So all the people freaking the gently caress out over Nagle blaming tumblr didn't read the book, because the implication of this chapter is that both are symptomatic of the fetish of transgression that preceded them. Correct. Like I said, most criticisms of the book tend to zero in on the part that focused on them to the exclusion of the rest of the book which is impressive since the book isn't all that long. Here's another, uh, interesting take on the book from a perspective not from the center or the left. I think. Dreylad has issued a correction as of 00:31 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 00:26
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I have actually read the book and it's pretty good and it is factually wrong to say that the central argument is that the alt-right had been primarily created or midwifed by the tumblr left. It's more about how the alt-right appealed to a certain sort of white guy who felt excluded from both general society and the countercultures "available" to it. The form of 4chan and similar networks breeds a certain kind of Katamari Damacy ball of id and transgression, which allowed disparate losers to unite. The stuff about the tumblr left goes more towards how that aspect of the left did not produce that same energy, especially with regard to that kind of transgressive feeling. The lower tier of that stuff showed off a distracted, inward-looking sort of tut-tutting church choir, without the alt-right's frenzy of creative destruction, or even its ability to bring together many different (lovely) people.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:27
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Universal health care is great, and I mean that, it's awesome. But note that countries with universal health care still have many of the same problems as America, except with universal health care as one of the social institutions which the political class constantly whittles away at. The problem with identity politics has for quite some time been that it conveniently ignores class privilege while grasping at any and every other form of intersectionality to leverage against any claim being made against it. This is a deliberate strategy which has fed not only the recent rise of the alt-right, but the fundamental dynamic of politics for some forty years. Hodgepodge has issued a correction as of 00:33 on Jul 20, 2017 |
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Jul 20, 2017 00:31
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Oh also the tumblr left is also relevant because the alt-right does not exist in its current form without being a reaction to so-called SJWs. Of course reactionaries are not new: the difference is that these reactionaries have a particular form and style. They emerged from a cauldron in 4chan, reacting to an online world in which wokeness is a very real thing...online. They have inserted themselves into a particular online conflict, one pretty far removed from the day-to-day of people with lives, and/or people who do not literally work in media.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:35
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the trump tutelage posted:Those ideas all sound better than writing them and their concerns off as an attempt to preserve inequality for its own sake a la Ze Pollack. their concerns are that taking the inequalities they benefit from away will leave them behind. you will achieve nothing by telling them 'no actually we aren't going to do that.' because you are going to do that. that is the point of leftist politics. when you agree that some economic inequalities should be preserved in the name of your convenience, you are no longer advocating leftism, you are advocating Cory Booker 2020. you will achieve something by telling them "you'll profit more than you lose when we do so." speaking to their material conditions will allow you to pick off some of them! trying to hippiebash your way into their good graces will accomplish less than nothing.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:43
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:Now that is interesting. It's an interesting point and definitely a tension I've felt myself, though it's a species of the commonplace observation that irony is easy but has difficulty when the need comes to advance a positive thesis. But I wouldn't underestimate the extent to which advancing that positive thesis is a strength. A standard left analysis is that neoliberal centre-left parties are hollowing out and losing to the right because they aren't doing so. It's an aesthetic problem and creates an aesthetic opportunity for the right, but I'm not convinced it's a political problem. It's not ultimately that difficult or even rare to have an ironic attitude and also actual convinctions in practical terms.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:52
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Ze Pollack posted:their concerns are that taking the inequalities they benefit from away will leave them behind. This was more relevant when there were material inequalities which were benefiting them beyond the brute fact of white supremacy allowing them to see black people get shot instead of them. At this point it's a little out of touch to not notice that they're already being left behind and are grasping for identities (race and nationalism) which might allow them to leverage a claim on power. The problem with identity politics as it is currently deployed is that it reifies white identity in order to use it as a wedge between lower-class white people (particularly men) and any allies which might otherwise be made on the basis of class and/or common oppression. The white lower class are encouraged to identity with whiteness and the patriarchy and to see victories against these interests as antagonistic to them (see the desperation for someone to be mad about the new Doctor Who), because the alternative is a claim to power and identity on the basis of class and common humanity.
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Jul 20, 2017 00:55
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Dreylad posted:Correct. Like I said, most criticisms of the book tend to zero in on the part that focused on them to the exclusion of the rest of the book which is impressive since the book isn't all that long. Thermidor is an interesting mix of neo-reactionary navelgazing and "[Your aunt] is scared of moslems"
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Jul 20, 2017 01:36
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Hodgepodge posted:This was more relevant when there were material inequalities which were benefiting them beyond the brute fact of white supremacy allowing them to see black people get shot instead of them. At this point it's a little out of touch to not notice that they're already being left behind and are grasping for identities (race and nationalism) which might allow them to leverage a claim on power. only thing I'd split hairs with in this is the statement 'more relevant' as the advantages people have are slowly pared down to the theoretical, their willingness to accept losing largely theoretical advantages in exchange for some abstract bullshit like "equality" evaporates. when all you have is "at least I'm not black" you will fight like hell to keep that. gotta sell those people real good on what they're going to gain if you're going to ask them to give up the last thing they have. i take comfort in the knowledge it's been done before, and we'll do it again. it is also important to distinguish the Seriously Suffering from the alt-right crowd, who tend to be extremely white, extremely suburban, and extremely online enough to talk about how tumblr redpilled them with genuine sincerity. "My material needs are going unaddressed" and "I first comprehended the depravity of the West when I saw bunnyfucker73's blog screencapped" are not -quite- mutually exclusive statements, but they come real loving close.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:43
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wizard on a water slide posted:I dunno, according to polls Republican voters on the whole think banks and financial institutions do more good for American society than unions or universities. Are you sure this would work? Do you think it might somehow alienate more Democrats than it wins non-voters and Republicans? The onlyones that seem to love the banks, are those with something to lose.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:43
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Dreylad posted:Correct. Like I said, most criticisms of the book tend to zero in on the part that focused on them to the exclusion of the rest of the book which is impressive since the book isn't all that long.
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Jul 20, 2017 01:54
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Dreylad posted:Correct. Like I said, most criticisms of the book tend to zero in on the part that focused on them to the exclusion of the rest of the book which is impressive since the book isn't all that long. this sentence made me want to kill myself quote:This was accomplished, seemingly single-handedly, by Milo Yiannopoulos, with his (admittedly brilliant) application of his trademark flamboyancy and a cool punk rock aesthetic (Sex Pistols, c’mon).
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Jul 20, 2017 02:07
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