I hadn’t heard of Bailey Lamon before reader “Discovered Joys” called an Independent piece to my attention (click on screenshot below to go Lamon’s article), but, according to the Toronto Media Coop, she’s a Canadian activist:
Mike Roy [the man who’s Lamon’s partner] and Bailey Lamon are both members of The Indignants, a media collective that covers stories relevant to the marginalized and under-represented. Mike is a founding member of The Indignants: he and Bailey have traveled far and wide covering indigenous, social, environmental and animal rights issues.
And Lamon adds a bit more about her activities in the Independent article, originally published at Medium:
I’ve been involved in activism since the Occupy Movement of 2011. Over the years this has included anti-capitalist, labour and feminist organising, as well as coordinating a local Food Not Bombs chapter, a number of direct actions against big oil (in solidarity with First Nations people), and prisoner justice campaigns.
While I will always be part of the movement and believe in creating a better world through people power, over the years I have become increasingly frustrated with modern activist culture and the way that today’s left conducts itself.
It’s a very good article, infused with anger at those keyboard warriors who pretend to be changing the world for the better, but in reality spend their time attacking the ideology of other people who are supposed to be on their side. I’d excerpt the entire article if I could, as it’s full of good stuff, but you can read it yourself at the Independent. I’ll just give a couple of quotes. The only quibble I have, and it’s completely trivial, is the phrase “lived experience” in the first paragraph below, a phrase that seems redundant.
Lamon:
Yet I witness so many “activists” who ignore the realities of oppression despite saying that they care about those at the bottom of society. They think that being offended by something is equal to experiencing prison time or living on the streets. They talk about listening, being humble and not having preconceptions. Yet they ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are.
. . . I’m sick of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances. I am exhausted by the fact that any difference of opinion will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people who are consequently deemed “unsafe”.
It’s disgusting that the left claims to be fighting for a better way of dealing with social problems, but if a person makes a mistake or says something wrong, they are not even given a chance to explain their side of what happened. This is because the process of conflict resolution is now driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts. In today’s activist circles one is lucky to be given any sort of due process at all. Meanwhile, everyone is put under social pressure to believe everything they are told, regardless of what actually occurred in a given situation.
This is not freedom. This is not social justice. There is nothing “progressive” or “radical” about it.
It goes on. One thing I’ve observed about Authoritarian Leftists—and I quickly add that this doesn’t apply to all of them—is that they claim to hold the moral high ground, and to know what’s really necessary to help society, yet few of them really engage in active work to help the oppressed people they profess to care about. Does it really help the world to churn out blog posts attacking “Rich Old White Men” who are not only atheists, but liberals and progressives? Is demonizing Sam Harris over and over again really going to change our world for the better? If your activism consists solely of writing pieces about oppression, aren’t there better targets? Or better yet—physical actions you can take to create real change?
I think so. And I don’t exempt myself from this charge. Although I used to be more engaged in helping the marginalized and oppressed (I worked in a soup kitchen and taught illiterate adults to read), now I seem to do little more than write on this site and give money to organizations like Doctors Without Borders. I’m going to try to supplement that by acting more directly. Helping one homeless person find shelter and food, or one woman leave her abusive husband, does infinitely more for the world than penning yet another misguided and faux-outraged attack on Sam Harris.
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People’s Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We’re the People’s Front of Judea
Splitters!
We must all use Approved Middle Class Euphemisms at all times.
Absolutely: “One thing I’ve observed about Authoritarian Leftists…is that they claim to hold the moral high ground, and to know what’s really necessary to help society, yet few of them really engage in active work to help the oppressed people they profess to care about.” In fact, I’ve adopted this over the past couple years as a kind of litmus test for people I meet, in person or otherwise. Like any test, it’s not perfect, but the sensitivity and specificity both seem to be quite high.
In fact, I think the rule generalizes somewhat: if you’re not out in the world actively doing things, then chances are good that you will lack perspective and construe every minor deviation from your worldview as an affront to your sensibilities. And I’m not saying people need to necessarily be out in the world pursuing social justice causes for real. Just being out in the world actively performing art, or planting gardens, or picking up trash by the side of the road. There are a million things that put the ills and evils of the world into some perspective. But they all require getting out a bit and actually doing something.
When a conservative is unable or unwilling to help their cause directly, they pray. It makes them feel like they’re contributing something useful without them having to actually do much.
Now take those sentences and substitute “liberal” for “conservative” and “tirade” or “vent” for “pray,” and I suspect the paragraph works almost as well.
Your lazy generalisation about all conservatives being religious is puerile. There are many more right-wing atheists than you think.
Generalizations are generally true, not always true. Exceptions are normal, expected, common. Making a generalization is not lazy, it is a way to convey a trend that is… at least 70%, I would say.
Can we avoid this kind of invective? All you had to say was the second sentence
The substance of this post wholly resonates.
As with thus, “I am exhausted by the fact that any difference of opinion will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people who are consequently deemed ‘unsafe’.”
And because of having what I considered was “trying” (with little more over the last four decades to show for it than abysmal failures) at experienced activism, I have given up.
Sometimes I am sorry about that. About quitting at trying. And it .is. The Left, specifically The Jump on Their Keyboards And Little Else – Left, that has put me into this state.
At most other times now, however as I’ve stated before, I just recoil and stop at nearly everything but breathing. Hermitess – / reclusive – ing. It is all just too much. To care anymore.
Blue
Sub
“This is because the process of conflict resolution is now driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts.”
Where have I seen this behavior before? Oh yeah:
Church.
Awww, Blue….
Illegitimi non carborundum.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegitimi_non_carborundum )
ooops… meant as a conciliatory reply to Blue at #5.
One of my favorite lines is: “…the process of conflict resolution is now driven by ideology rather than a willingness to understand facts.” To me this says a lot about belief systems and their power in the world today. Once a person subjectively believes in something be it religious, political or in general linking a cause with an effect regardless of observable data, the objective facts become irrelevant and it can hide in plain site under a protective umbrella of freedom from offense against any rebuttal no mater how cogent the contrary point of view can be made.
As Nick Cohen put it in “You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom”:
“Politics is as much a part of the identity of the committed leftist, green or conservative as religion is a part of the identity of the committed Christian, Jew, Muslim or Hindu. When the political partisan’s beliefs are insulted or ridiculed, he feels the ‘offence’ as deeply as any believer who has heard his god or prophet questioned.”
So much for rational political discourse…
…and separating politics and religion. When one becomes the other, the task becomes impossible.
I find the same people who are constantly attacking Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, our respected host, and (still!) Christopher Hitchens, and complaining about the “New Atheism” being dominated by rich male whiteys, are the same ones who either attack or ignore ex-Muslims, Muslim reformers, Muslim feminists, etc.
The “movement” is in fact extremely diverse, and people like Dawkins, Harris and Jerry here, have always been among the first to recognize and promote this diversity. Their wannabe critics should get on board (and learn how to criticize: it doesn’t mean ascribing the worst possible private motives and then condemning them repeatedly for it).
Hear, hear.
I too find it exhausting and frustrating trying to argue with some of these people who judge others in much the same way many religious do. The worst thing is it’s then those of us who are trying to be fair and reasonable and sticking to the principle of freedom of speech that are accused of being the ones in some sort of cult.
To me, the behaviour described by Lamon is clearly tribalism, but in describing myself as a New Atheist, I’m the one who gets called cultist by the Authoritarian (regressive) Left.
Can someone send this to PZ Myers inbox, like 100 times?
PZ is their feeder; I doubt he’s listening.
The phenomenon isn’t new. I ran into the ‘authoritarian left’ at university in New Zealand over thirty years ago. Half-educated students, sanctimonious, adept at using their ideology as a device for asserting peer group status, and absolutely oblivious to their own hypocrisy. I suppose most of them grew up.
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
A applaud your commitment to useful action and feel prodded to do the same.
It also sounds a lot like a liberal version of McCarthyism.
Perhaps that’s what we should call them: McCarthyites. That should get under their skin.
I like this idea. Shows the requisite killer instinct 🙂
No, we should call them what they are, based on their ideology, which has actually been around for awhile:
-Their ethical reasoning is driven, at bottom, by power dynamics: individuals are defined in terms of groups, and those groups are then ranked by their respective power. The less powerful group is automatically the more virtuous in a dispute with a more powerful group.
-They think Western capitalism is the most insidious force in the world right now.
-They see the liberal/Enlightenment strain of ethical reasoning as a mere prejudice of Western culture, which only serves to protect capitalist interests.
Now, where have we heard this before…
“-They think Western capitalism is the most insidious force in the world right now.”
Well, of course, they’re wrong. However, it would be nice if capitalists would at least not so egregiously view flesh-and-blood human beings as “human resources” and “human capital.” But, so goes the “master-servant” relationship.
Agreed. The sociopathic tendencies of free flowing capital need to be held in check.
With that said, though, the way these people talk, you’d think they’re Marxists.
Because they are Marxists. And we should call them Marxists.
Indeed, but they won’t take that as an insult, which is my intent.
Entirely agree. I’m not sure whether Zado is slandering Marxism (and my brain is too tired to work it out), but the regressive left wouldn’t mind being called that. Whereas they are, and would positively hate being called, McCarthyites.
cr
sub
” now I seem to do little more than write on this site and give money to organizations”
This is good! Almost everyone contributes best by donating rather than than volunteering at a low skill or low-impact task. Scott Alexander has some posts on this, with plenty of evidence. This is certainly true of a guy who can make a lot of (ahem) coin by giving a lecture or writing a review and donating the proceeds.
I agree that more end-goal utility is generated by donating. However there is a certain amount of understanding and empathy that is generated by direction action that has it’s own kind of value.
I thought the same thing. Why waste time at a soup kitchen when you can write a book. But then, there’s something incomparably noble, dignified, and heroic about getting close to the action.
But the goal is to actually help others, not to be incomparably noble, dignified, and heroic.
It might be self-help.
Although for some people in some situations it’s more paternalistic, pandering, dilettante-ish, play-acting…
(Sorry, that’s what happens when you’re in a particularly misanthropic mood.)
Of course this is often the case. Probably the most charitable view of such service is if you serve as a model, encouraging a more significant sense of cooperation in the population as a whole. Like if the Queen of England dished out spaghetti on paper plates to the homeless. Wow, think of the press!
Why wouldn’t she use the royal china?!
😉
Ooooo no. Class contamination.
Campaign for equal heights in discworld comes to mind
http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Campaign_for_Equal_Heights
This, and the silicon anti-defamation league:
http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Silicon_Anti-Defamation_League
Terry Pratchett had a remarkable genius for pinpointing the foibles and quirks of humanity, while ascribing them to various mythical creatures and cultures.
cr
I’ll donate money, but I’ve always limited volunteering to causes where I have a personal interest like Easter Seals or Paralympics.
When I worked nights in the Loop I nearly always brought an extra sandwich for a man who slept on a grate outside the University Club. It wasn’t volunteering, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
From the photo, it appears that Bailey Lamon is a she.
Yes, I screwed up. It’s fixed now.
I think “lived experience” makes a useful distinction between experience contiguous with a person’s life v. experience you might get, e.g., as a reporter sleeping rough for a month.
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Ah, thanks, that’s helpful.
Unfortunately it sounds very tautological (was that a tautology?), and jargon-like, similar to ‘hegemony’ or ‘narratives’ or ‘conversation’. It would definitely be an item on any Leftist Buzzword Bingo card.
cr
But don’t you think it’s important to make a distinction between what certain people do live with day-in and day-out, and what activists, say, do in imitation so they can say they’ve “experienced what it’s like?”
They have different experiences, as do we all. But this purported distinction fails in that it implies that reporters don’t have “lived experiences” and can, presumably, be ignored if you don’t like what they report.
Well, I don’t think it should be ignored, but should the reporter’s opinions be given as much weight? Surely an experience you can walk away from does not give you quite the same perspective as one you have to continue living with… ?
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“If you called your Dad he could stop it all”
Pulp, “Common People”
Given as much weight? It depends on what the question is. It depends on how representative the two views are. But the phrase, to me, seems to be a facile way to dismiss a report one doesn’t like.
You could play it the other way; the “lived experience” could be dismissed as being of the “it works for me” claims variety …
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Putting aside my grammatical quibbles (how else can you ‘experience’ anything except by ‘living’ through it?) and my ‘buzzword’ quibbles, I also have reservations about its use. I think it carries hints of attempted appeal-to-authority (my experience is more valid than your experience) and it also tends to privilege (bzzt! buzzword!) a personal and possibly biassed point of view over a broader and more impartial viewpoint.
I’m probably being very nitpicky here. Use of the phrase doesn’t invalidate a statement, just raises a niggling query in my mind.
cr
“Very tautological” might be a tautology (or rather a tautonomy) only in logics with only one designated truth value.
I was with most of her piece until I came to this:
“Our ideas cannot be forced on other people, but must be adopted voluntarily. This requires patience and a willingness to work with others as they explore themselves. We need to be there to answer their questions, and make it clear that no question is a stupid one.”
Do we find therein any admission that other people with different ideas may have something to teach in their turn? No. They have the wrong ideas and must be corrected. The only difference here is that correction must be by education to correct ideas and not by force. No hint anywhere that leftist activists could and should learn anything themselves – they already know everything apparently.
This all goes back to Herbert Marcuse and Critical Theory, which in turn begat Derrick Bell’s Critical Race Theory. Through their efforts and the failure of other academics to push back against such absurdity, narrative became accepted as an equally-valid basis for scholarship in many departments.
Critical Race Theory has begat the entire toxic identity politics milieu we experience in which claims of racism trump all other considerations, no matter how dubious, or even counter-factual. This is why a socialistic feminist like myself cannot decry Islamic norms without being denounced as a “neocon” et cetera.
Critical Race Theory was a boon for low-quality scholarship of the “autoethnography” sort that treats memoir as legitimate anthropological or sociological data. It is an even bigger boon for hacks pushing opinion pieces as legitimate journalism.
Indeed, and frustratingly, CRT is still not on most people’s radar as the most likely source of “social justice warriorism”. Even though the situation is admittedly complicated, and already was unclear in Sokal’s struggles with postmodernists (a remarkably similar situation).
CRT unites most facets that are associated with SJWs: narratives, lived experience, intersectionality (also popularized by a CRT founder), identity politics including its sectarian aspects (cf. “cultural appropriation”), CRT people are also active in “hate speech” and postmodern censorship — unsurprisingly.
Sometimes writing can be helpful, if you tear yourself away from online squabbles and write a LttE, or to your congress critters.
I sometimes wonder if Wiley Miller isn’t reading Prof CC(E)’s mind, at least so far as PCC’s upcoming posts go –
http://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2016/03/01
cr
Excellent cartoon…. (I just looked at my twitter feed. People are telling Rischard Dawkins to stop supporting Maryam Namazie because she disagreed with Sam Harris about something. It’s infantile.)
Well, I think we should simply support her ideas with which we agree with, but call her out on the bad ones like communism or Europe’s open border policy that she also espouses.
Why is Europe’s open border policy a bad idea? Why would you want to restrict the free movement of EU citizens among EU member states? Would you want to do the same for US citizens crossing state borders?
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I was referring to the policy of opening the European border to millions of migrants, not the Schengen policy (which BTW has been threatened by the incessant influx of migrants).
OK. That makes more sense. It seems that it’s not open, only “semi-porous”; there are restrictions in place. But I think it’s defensible on humanitarian grounds, despite any social and economic costs. Can it be abused? Yes. But that’s not a reason for not doing it. And there is historic precedent elsewhere …
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
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During her discussion with Sam Harris, Maryam Namazie couldn’t even bring herself to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants. So forget about the “semi-porous” border, she wants ALL migrants in.
Well, then, she’s not supporting EU policy as such.
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If only we had a foolproof sieve to separate the refugees from the economic migrants who’ll refuse to live by Western values.
Diane, whether a fundamentalist Muslim is going to refuse to live by Western values or not is independent of the fact if he’s a refugee or economic migrant.
“Diane, whether a fundamentalist Muslim is going to refuse to live by Western values or not is independent of the fact if he’s a refugee or economic migrant.”
Good point, thanks for the correction. I should have stopped at “…refugee or economic migrant.” Period.
But even if we had a guarantee that every economic migrant from Africa and the Middle East would become a secular humanist upon arriving in Europe, it still wouldn’t make sense to accept them all, because several European countries (Spain, Greece, France, Italy, Poland,…) already struggle with double-digit unemployment rates.
“But even if we had a guarantee that every economic migrant from Africa and the Middle East would become a secular humanist upon arriving in Europe, it still wouldn’t make sense to accept them all, …”
Agree. In case you didn’t see my previous post of this article, I offer it again on the chance that you might find it interesting:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/anthony-browne/folly-of-mass-immigration
Thanks for sharing the article, it does make a lot of important points…
Politics is usually described as a spectrum but I like to call it a circle. There’s a left and a right but there’s also a top and a bottom. Individual freedom at the top and authoritarian slavery at the bottom. You can be on the right or the left but if you go far enough in either direction, you end up in the same place.
Yesterday we talked about universal inherited behaviours and I think this is a good example. Like the song says ‘Everybody wants to rule the world’
There’s a “magic quadrant” for politics that I think someone else referred to elsewhere in this thread (I’m responding in email, not on the page).
One axis indicates authoritarian v. liberal, the other Left v. Right. See, e.g., http://www.politicalcompass.org/uk2015
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Thanks for that. I wondered where it came from.
I’d also add that I think there should be another axis: evolutionary/revolutionary. This can help distinguish some particularly on the right authoritarian side: the Catholic church is largely right authoritarian (with a few left points) but not revolutionary in the slightest. (This may be partially why, in addition to the “left” aspect, “liberation theology” went nowhere.)
Very nice! I especially liked the ending this time:
“then you will step out of your comfort zone and finally understand that comfort is in itself a sign of the power and privilege you wish to challenge.”