This story, from reason.com, is a few weeks old, having languished in the queue of stuff I have to post. But it’s still timely, for it demonstrates clearly how the Left is beginning to eat itself as various groups vie for the title of Most Oppressed.
On March 22 the site reported that the “LGBT+ Campaign” of Britain’s National Union of Students—that most ridiculous of Authoritarian Leftist groups—has decided that gay males aren’t as oppressed as the rest of the LGBT contingent, and passed a resolution that gay men should no longer be represented on their committees. (See also the report on PinkNews.)
The motion, which you can find here (it’s #408) says this:
That is, the committees are there to ensure not that bigotry based on sexual behavior or identity is eliminated from society, but from the groups themselves, and apparently gay men on the committees perpetuate bigotry. Therefore, they have to go.
Here’s the resolution (see #4):
As Pink News noted, this resolution is in fact at odds with assertions in the rest of the NUS document:
Pink News noted the irony of the motion—other approved motions stressed that gay men were at increased risk of HIV infection, and even violence, relative to other marginalized groups.
Other motions were just as absurd. One asserted that the ‘A’ often found in the LGBT+ acronym should and must always stand for “ace” (as in, asexual), rather than “ally.”
It’s easy to laugh at these developments, though they speak to a real sickness on the left: hysterical obsession with group identity. In the eyes of the NUS LGBT Campaign, no one is an individual—everyone must be labelled according to their sexual preference, skin color, and gender expression, and then assigned a grievance based on the collective wisdom of their similarly marginalized peers.
In Resolution 210, the NUS instructs local LGBT+ groups on the proper use of acronyms:
There’s really nothing to add to this; all we can do is sit on the sidelines and watch people who are basically on the same side ingest each other.
Every time I see one of these stories, I’m reminded of the film “PCU” in which the dean can be overheard in conversation “Well, I think that Asian bisexual studies should have its own building…”
Remember, this movie was from ’94.
that is an awesome line of dialog
I will have to look that movie up.
Identity politics and the oppression Olympics tears people apart instead of bringing them together.
If I was one of the Koch brothers, I would have invented the SJW in order to get the left to destroy itself.
And this happened a few months ago, also NUS:
http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/feb/26/first-trans-student-to-run-for-womens-officer-stands-up-to-backlash
Trans woman runs for head of woman’s group…
While I understand why people are mad, I think a good point is made at the end of the article:
Unless there’s a rule saying only women can be in the women’s group, I don’t see a reason to object. The role is to fight for women’s rights, and even a cis man can do that. (For instance Bernie Sanders probably the strongest record on women’s rights of any Congressman. He’s a stronger supporter of abortion rights than Hillary Clinton, for example.)
actually, no
wimmin born female have a different struggle than those who become women later.
there is almost nothing to relate to each other; thus not actually able to speak to or for
and people’s ability to hide in the mainstream has been the bitterness in the community
closet vs pride parades
frankly, if I get told I am a genetic woman again, the burden of the adverb is not on me
it is about displacement, representation and inclusion, the pecking order continues
Hmmm, that sounds suspiciously close to credible.
gravelinspector-Aidan
You are a geologist right?
For the longest time, I had it in my mind that you were an actual gravel inspector.
There is a quarry nearby that processes various sizes of gravel, and I always imagined you as one of the people who gets his instruments out and ‘inspects’ the gravel:P
One of my class-mates spent a year immediately after graduation in charge of a gravel pit. As you say, checking quality of the material. Grain size, amount of fines, moisture content (very important if mixing with cement to make concrete). Not the most exciting of jobs, but it paid the bills.
The nickname refers to examining rock cuttings in an oil rig – which comes over as “gravel” size cuttings. I check rock type, evidence of oil (present, or “dead oil” that passed through the rock in the past), organic matter content and type (closely related to potential as a source rock), presence or absence of microfossils. Also QCing and interpreting petrophysics measurements from down-hole tools. Advice on directional implications of the current structural interpretation of the rock units that we’ve seen previously in the well. Oh, and safety implications of all geological data.
This is all getting a bit ridiculous. Those students have way too much time on their hands.
I could ask “Shouldn’t they be studying?”, but I think I know the answer to that one.
The ones that are studying aren’t the ones involved in student politics. Thus it ever was, and probably thus it will ever be so.
“Not sufficiently oppressed?” I guess they didn’t see the article I saw this morning, “50% of British Muslims think Homosexuality should be outlawed”. Are these children even bothering to attend classes anymore, or are they spending all their time thinking up ignorant shit like this?
I’m sure all this counts for credit as a practicum in the “gender studies” program.
not within the community
which is what is being addressed
not mainstream society
The last bit reminds me of a sketch from a few years ago.
“There is one group that is still excluded from society. Massively self-conscious people. You can help by talking to them at every opportunity, by bringing them to the front in any discussion or by pointing to them in the street and shouting your support.”
Haha. I especially like the last sentence.
From a programme of church events published in a newspaper and read out on a radio programme:
Thursday 7.00 PM: Meeting of of the low self-esteem support group. Please use rear entrance.
Haha!!
LOL
yes, do gooders and those who want to be in the club
imposing their solutions without any understanding of the issues
On that sentiment, and on the theme of various SJW blogging networks: yet Another shunning.
Thanks for that link. Will it ever occur to those people that the problem with their ideology is actually the nature of the people that are attracted to it? When I was a kid growing up, a fair number of the people my parents worked and went to church with were east-bloc refugees. I used to wonder where the communists got all the bad people to run things in their tawdry little empire. Now I know.
It has seemed clear to me for a long time that when you create a lever of power, someone will make a career out of pulling it just because it’s there. FTB and its spin-offs seem to be a reliable magnet for people that cannot be trusted with any form of the unearned authority that left-wing institutions seem to promote.
I haven’t look at FtB in quite a long time. I hadn’t realized there had been a split (or that Ophelia was back at B&W — wish she’d resuscitate her news section). It’s hardly shocking, though. They took one thing that everyone participating agreed on — Atheism — and then decided that they had to agree about everything else, too. Some people can’t even tolerate people they agree with. This quest for perfection leads only to coercion.
… thereby oppressing them so that they can be let back in.
/@
+1
So, if I started my own university, would it be defensible for me to ban such departments as “cultural studies”, or “women’s studies”, “LGBT studies”, etc? These departments seem to have no redeeming value, much like theology departments, yet are the source of much internal dissension.
SJW-Infighting Studies.
/@
Actually, this is an excellent idea. We are now entering an era where there is sufficient grievance material to have a college of LGBTQIA studies, with separate departments. An L studies department, a G studies department, and so on.
& every permutation.
/@
Splitter!
Simply tell the aspirant professor of “Quantum Herminutics,” that their funding will be welcome, and their support from Scott’s University will be directly related to the funding they deliver, and will be paid two years in arrears.
“Authoritarian Leftist”
These students merit the adjective, but I’m not so sure about the noun. The reasoning seems to be that since egalitarianism is a principle generally endorsed by those to the left of center, the brand of radical egalitarianism favored by these students must place them even more solidly on the left. But I’ve seen scant evidence that these students actually embrace leftist values — certainly not economic ones, and they’ve displayed little vigor for the panoply of leftist social policy positions beyond their own narrow range of interest.
Be that as it may, I suppose “authoritarian leftist” is with us to stay, rapidly passing from neologism into standard usage. So there’s little profit to be had in waging a rearguard language battle against it (anymore than there is concerning the use of “Islamophobia” for what would more accurately be labeled “Muslimophobia”), especially since I can offer no better alternative to it — what with “asshole” having already been taken.
I am not sure whether we should not challenge the term “authoritarian leftist” in regard to the people discussed in the post as well as all those others who wish to suppress free speech to advance their bizarre causes. I have always considered myself a liberal, which places me on the left side of the political spectrum, but these people repulse me. So, to call these people leftists runs the danger of jeopardizing the legitimate social, political, and economic goals that leftists have striven for over more than a century.
At the moment, I cannot think of a term to replace “authoritarian leftist,” but certainly creative people can come up with one. As a person who feels that the right wing, e.g., Cruz and Trump, represents the real threat to democratic and Enlightenment values, liberals must speak out to marginalize these views (but not the living people who enunciate them) from those of the vast majority on the left. In the late 1940s and 1950s, liberals severed any identity with or sympathy with the views of Communists. Liberals now need to do the same thing with the authoritarians.
If you’re willing to play Quixote, I’m happy to sign on as your Sancho Panza in the quest to find a better term. Just hoping the windmill hasn’t left the station, now that we’ve got our lances pointed in the right direction.
How about “authoritarian extremist” to replace “authoritarian leftist?” My proposed term accurately describes the nature of the viewpoint without confusing its adherents with those on the democratic left.
The problem with “authoritarian extremist” is that it doesn’t distinguish them from the run-or-the-mill authoritarians who make their home on the right. The rightwing is where you’ll customarily find the vast majority of authoritarians, and whatever else we might say about these students and academics, they aren’t your paradigmatic right-wingers.
How about “social justice authoritarians”?
I can accept “social justice authoritarian.” I will use that term in the future. Good thinking!
These people remind me that in the name of social and/or economic justice Communist regimes obliterated individual liberties. It took a while for liberals in the West to understand the nature of these regimes, but when they did they turned against the Communists as much as the conservatives.
“but when they did they turned against the Communists as much as the conservatives”
Did they really? When did that happen? Was it before or after the collapse of the Soviet Union?
Really, Richard, you are totally unaware of the anti-communist left? You’ve never heard, for example, of Americans for Democratic Action, founded in the 1940s by some of the nations most prominent citizens, including former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.?
These are not some Johnny-come-lately, post-Soviet groups. The anti-communist left emerged as soon as the reports of Stalinists abuses began filtering out to the West. Only the benighted and the willfully ignorant are unaware of this proud history.
No, actually I had not heard of that organization – but I then don’t live in the USA, and am not familiar with all its political history.
But I am hard pressed to think of any of the Left in the UK who opposed Communism and the Soviet Union. In contrast, they all all seemed only too happy to associate with the USSR – as when the late Tony Benn went on a tour of the USSR and came back telling the rest of us how much he admired the Soviet system.
I am not saying that there were no such people here – but if there were, they were not very vociferous.
How about Clement Attlee — First Earl Attlee, to you Brits — the deputy PM to Churchill during War 2, and his immediate successor in ’45. He was a staunch anti-communist man-of-the-left (and a contemporary and ally of those who formed the ADA over here). I take it you’ve heard of him?
There are many others; the UK has a long history of anti-communist and, in particular, anti-Soviet leftists. This is the milieu whence came Christopher Hitchens. Hell, Orwell himself was a British anti-communist social democrat.
I really don’t think the Left can wash its hands of this mess and disclaim all responsibility for it.
This is the natural end result of the Left’s long ideological war against all who don’t share its views. Hasn’t everyone here read ‘1984’ – isn’t “thoughtcrime” what we have today, in that no-one is allowed to do, say or even think anything that the Left finds unacceptable?
First it was racism. Then sexism. Then ageism. Then elitism. Then classism. Then ableism. Then … .
At some point it crossed over from being worthwhile social reform to utter absurdity, e.g. the woman (am I even allowed say that?) who uses gender-neutral pronouns for her cats, or the snowflakes who feel physically threatened by seeing “Trump 2016” chalked on their campuses.
“First they came for the racists, and I said nothing. Then they came for the sexists, and I said nothing … Then they came for the gender-specific pronoun users, and the hand-clappers, and I still said nothing. And when finally the SJWs came for me, there was no-one left to say anything.”
Holy shit, man, when the social justice warriors come for you, you might get “no platformed” or be subjected to disparaging tweets.
The Martin Niemöller quote you allude to above was written about the Nazis. When those guys came for you, you were headed for an extermination camp.
Now, really, who’s being Orwellian here?
SJWs have tried to ruin people’s lives and in some cases succeeded. They engage in public shaming and have even managed to get folks fired. I believe that some folks at FTB tried to get scientist Abbie Smith fired and career ruined because she disagrees with their dogma.
They are not on the level of the Red Guard but, I do wonder….what jf they *did* have that power? I have no doubt that some of them are socipaths.
Oh, I agree, which is why I steadfastly oppose them.
But to act as though they are somehow the equivalent of the Third Reich, as “Richard” does, is naught but low-grade demagoguery.
Sorry, did I really need to add an ‘irony’ tag to that paraphrase of the Niemoller quote?
My point was that the authoritarian left has become steadily more and more intolerant, continually expanding what it considers to be offences, and inevitably more and more people are considered guilty of those offences.
Still, the worst the (Soviet) left ever did was send people to the gulags, and that’s not as bad as the Nazis: estimates for the number who died there vary greatly, but it may be as few as one million.
Also, Cindy, I’m aware of instances where the SJWs have attempted to get people fired, but do you know of cases where they’ve actually succeeded? And who are the people whose lives they’ve “ruined,” as opposed to merely discomfited?
The social justice warriors, and political correctness more generally, are problems worthy of our attention. But they’re also ones that are easy for us to exaggerate.
Justine Sacco’s satirical tweet about Africa got her fired:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html
The SJWs said she ‘deserved it’ because she dared to make a satirical joke. It was ‘punching down’ regardless of intent.
Then there was dongle gate:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/03/how-dongle-jokes-got-two-people-fired-and-led-to-ddos-attacks/
Two men fired because an SJW overheard them making a joke about dongles.
Next up, Gregory Allan Elliot 100k in debt and prevented from using a computer during the years that his case dragged out before the courts:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/twitter-harassment-trial-verdict-1.3415112
All because two SJW’s decided that his disagreeing with them counted as violent harassment.
——
SJWs = Nazis is hyperbole, as the bulk of them are just privileged white kids who like to signal their virtue on twitter.
But, there are some who are stone cold. They have a vindictive streak. They want to see people destroyed. I have no doubt that such folk would be right at home with the Red Guard. They seem to get off on punishing people for wrongthink.
I replied but I think it is under moderation.
Lots of links.
Richard —
No need to use irony tags; you need only use it ironically.
You were obviously being sarcastic, but I still fail to detect any irony. Irony would have been using the paraphrase of Niemöller to demonstrate the absurdity of comparing social justice warriors to Nazis.
Perhaps we need to divorce the terms “liberal” and “leftist”. Despite what politicians like Cruz would have you think, social liberals are the majority in US society today. All surveys show that a clear majority support same-sex marriage, accept the problem of man-made climate change, and even support Planned Parenthood.
The desire to control fellow citizens comes from authoritarians, left or right, though those on the right seem to be in denial as they also insist they’re against government. Both want strong government when it comes to enforcing their own ideas.
Leftists aren’t liberals. They have some pretty extreme ideas, including banning the right to speech they don’t agree with.
Because the US has a two-party political system, extremists in both parties get a louder voice than they would otherwise have. In countries with multi-party systems, extremists are relegated to fringe parties and don’t get the power they do in the US.
I imagine that if extremist authoritarian leftists were born in repressive Islamic societies, for example, that they would behave no differently.
It’s the authoritarian personality.
They are the same no matter their environment.
Yeah, I think you might be right. To me they don’t seem to think through the consequences of their positions – much is just a knee-jerk reaction to a particular situation which they immediately want to apply across the board. Like the “problem” of cis gay men in LGBT+ SUs. It’s simplistic and, dare I say it, Western-oriented thinking.
Yep I am a liberal and I really hate the meme that ‘conservatism is a mental illness’
It is not.
Authoritarianism is a mental illness!
It’s all too easy to look at authoritarian conservatives and to tar all conservatives with the same brush. After seeing how auth-leftists behave, I have come to the conclusion that authoritarianism is the problem, not political affiliation.
In places that don’t have the binary political system the US has, parties from both the left and right combined to make things like same-sex marriage legal. In my country the minority who voted against it came from both the left and the right, though almost all belonged to churches that were opposed to the law.
I completely agree that it’s authoritarianism that’s the problem. Referring to one of our other discussions as an example, it’s not being opposed to abortion that’s the problem, it’s forcing that opinion via the law on everyone else.
Yes! The (authoritarian?) objectors to gay marriage sometimes seemed to be arguing against the straw man of enforced marriage to a gay partner for everyone.
/@
Yeah. You may have noticed that on my blog I’ve told our regular anti-abortion and same-sex marriage commenter that those things being legal doesn’t make them compulsory!
More insane paranoid conspiracy than straw man, I think. The idea is vaguely “out there,” mostly in the form of dystopian science fiction, I think, of using enforced homosexuality as a method of population control. I don’t think it’s ever occurred to anybody to take such an idea seriously — save, of course, for the nutjobs you mention.
So…there’s as much merit to forced homosexual marriage as there is to UN black helicopters kidnapping people to put in FEMA refugee camps. But those ranting and raving about such do seem to sincerely believe it and aren’t merely using it for rhetorical effect.
b&
>
I’m so allergic to authoritarianism that I test for it in job interviews. I even took tests that showed I do not do well in authoritarian work environments. It worries me that there seem to be so many of them out there and I wonder if it’s a natural human response and I’m just a deviant.
I did the authoritarian test. Turns out I’m completely non-Authoritarian, which pleased me no end. I don’t like the idea I could change if circumstances did.
I am a liberal airhead
http://www.anesi.com/fscale.htm
I did even worse/better – I got 1.43 for “whining rotter”. The risks of not being born in the US I suppose. 🙂
I wonder if I can still get a visa if I ever decide to go there?
I got 1.90
Ah, another whining rotter! I guess we wouldn’t have fitted into 1950s USA too well. :-/
Cindy:: “” Diana and Heather are whining rotters!!11″ ”
PCC:: “” Cindy, that is against da roolz!! “”
Cindy:: “” I was complimenting them on their anti-authoritarianism””
Ok, it was funnier in my head!!
Amyhoo, just replace the questions on that test with SJWisms, and we will again find ourselves mostly or strongly disagreeing.
Definitely.
And it was funny. 🙂
Another here. Also 1.9.
/@
I got A whining rotter. I don’t really get it though.
1.37 – whining rotter.
I clicked ‘disagree strongly’ for almost everything, which was easy to do. I’m good at disagreeing.
Especially when the questionnaire mentioned ‘decent people’. I have more sympathy with indecent people 😉
cr
I got 1.37, whining rotter.
Not hard, I ticked ‘strongly disagree’ for almost everything. I find it easy to disagree with almost everything, specially when the question mentions ‘decent people’.
I have more sympathy with indecent people.
(Just to check, I went back and ticked ‘strongly disagree’ for everything and it did give a score of 1.00).
cr
Were they ever married – in EN_US terminology?
Problem is, “liberal” and “leftist” don’t have any fixed, widely-recognized meanings. (And we may as well toss “progressive” on this no-fixed-meaning pile, too.) Hell, at various times, I’ve self-identified as all three — and sometimes as all three at essentially the same time.
In the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was riding high, Republicans and their conservative fellow-travelers took to using “liberal” as something of an epithet, giving off a vaguely foul stench to la nez of the American body politic, That, in turn, gave rise to the popularity of the label “progressive” — especially among the faint-hearted on the left who’d grown gun-shy of openly professing their “liberalism.” This adoption of “progressive” was actually not so much a rising as a resurrection, inasmuch as that term had itself fallen into disrepute earlier in the 20th century, at the end of the Progressive Era, owing to its association with eugenics. (I’ll try to stop before we need an Arthur Murray dance chart to track the steps in the evolution of these terms.)
The nadir for the “liberal” label came — as it’s said the darkest part of night comes right before dawn — in the early ’90s on the cusp of the Clinton administration. Clinton himself always ran away from the “liberal” label, with his “triangulation” strategy and his close ties to the Democratic Leadership Conference. Clinton’s first term also saw the rise of the so-called “blue dog” Democrats — moderate-to-conservative congressmen, mostly from red or purple states, who were never going to get within barge-pole distance of the label “liberal” for fear that their GOP opponents would truncheon them with it come re-election time.
The anti-“liberal” pendulum did not start swinging in the other direction in any meaningful sense (for either the label “liberal” or liberalism itself) until the 2004 Democratic presidential primary season, during Howard Dean’s short-lived and ill-fated campaign, with his pronouncement that he was from the “Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” — a thinly veiled swipe at Clintonism. (For her part, Hillary, who now labels herself a “proud progressive” — especially when looking to peel left-of-center voters away from Bernie — never used the progressive label, or either “L” word for that matter, during her time as FLOTUS, or even much during her two senate campaigns in New York.)
One further factor complicates this “liberal” megillah: the existence of “Classical Liberalism”, which isn’t a position on the political spectrum, but an overarching political ideology, one favoring representative democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties, and free markets, as originally conceived by John Locke, Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, et al. (Indeed, it’s not too far off the mark to call “classical liberalism” an outgrowth of the Scottish Enlightenment.) As the limning of its broad tenets suggests, “classical liberalism” is something that Americans of all political persuasions — both sides of the aisles, both wings of the spectrum — can get behind. To that end, the principled, responsible conservatives we might label “Burkians” (a sensible species barely clinging to life on the critically endangered list in today’s Republican party) often lay claim (and not wholly without justification) to being the true heirs to “classical liberalism.”
… Now where were we, anyway, when I went off on this rambling, poli-sci-splainin’ tangent? 🙂
No, Ken, that was interesting, and explains the different experience I’ve had of the word liberal in NZ.
I was shocked when I discovered via US TV back in the 80s that “liberal” was an insult. To be recognized as such here was a compliment. Also, in centre-right politics both here and in Britain, liberal refers solely to economic policy, and such parties tout their liberalism, by which they mean free-market.
It was only a few years ago that I came to know just what progressive meant -it’s not a term that was used here because we kept using liberal.
I’m with Heather on that. ‘Liberal’ in NZ (or I think UK) meant something quite different from what it did in the US. It implies, I think, moderate political views. Nothing extreme.
(But then, the same with ‘socialist’ I think. Here it just means left of centre. In the US it seems to imply some sort of Communist plot to overthrow society).
cr
Yeah, here in the States “socialist” still carries a stigma from the cold war, in particular from its early days in the late 40s and early 50s, during the so-called “Red Scare,” when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) was hauling high-profile Americans before congress to question them under oath “are you now or have you ever been a communist” and to compel them under penalty of perjury to name the names of their friends and fellow travelers — and when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin was making baseless, wild-eyed allegations about all the commies and “pinkos” who had infiltrated the US State Dept. Overall, it was an ugly and dangerous time in US history; many careers were ruined, many lives shattered.
It is the lingering hangover from this “scoundrel time” (the term is playwright Lillian Hellman’s) that has many left-of-center Americans hesitant to back Bernie Sanders on the grounds of his purported “un-electability,” out of fear that the Republicans will tar-and-feather him in the general election with nefarious insinuations that — well, no one seems to be able to say just what, but they know those dirty-dealing Republicans will get’er done somehow.
Part of their fear is based upon the American rightwing always having resorted to “socialist” as its slur du jour to oppose every progressive legislation and social-policy change to come down the pike — from women’s suffrage to child-labor laws to the 40-hour work week to social security to Medicare to Obamacare to campaign-finance reform.
Personally, I think its high time for the American Left to step out of the long shadow of the Cold War and to embrace the “socialist” term — in its “social democrat” and “democratic socialist” sense. We’d be a better and more-just nation for it.
Yeah – I’d go along with that re socialist definition too.
I think the question is, Would they consider themselves Leftists? I think the answer is yes. If you look at the NUS website, it’s clear that their goals and activities are not Rightist. (We can split hairs about whether their methods are Rightist or Leftist; as someone else points out, Authoritarianism is Authoritarianism.) To say they are not Leftist, though, sounds like saying that Muslim extremists are not Muslims. They’d be surprised to hear that.
They also see themselves as paragons of social justice and egalitarianism and would no doubt deny to their last that they are, in fact, “authoritarian.” Are we bound by their self-labeling choices here, too?
This:
Whenever I hear of stuff like this, on this site or others, it causes me some amount of stress. I feel besieged, as if I myself am under attack. I feel frustration because of the stupidity and hypocrisy of it all and most alarming – I start to have right-wing thoughts.
Does anyone else have this reaction, or do you guys just see it as just folly for amusement?
Being left or right is a spectrum, and there will be people to the left of me. Of course there is also being left on some things and on the right on other things. I am a leftie, overall, but I guess I am a rightie when it comes to free speech these days.
Not just you.
I have the same feelings, especially in regards to how the SJWs are welcoming Islamic rapists and bombers with open arms.
However, I always remind myself that the right wing is just as authoritarian.
However, this got me thinking. I now understand why there is a right and a left, and why it has persisted over time. Because both extremes can be very authoritarian. They keep each other in check. A leftist only world would be a totalitarian hell-hole, as leftists kept trying to out-left each other.
I never thought I’d say this, but thank d*g for classical libertarians (not the Rand kind).
It brings out the libertarian liberal in me. I grew up in the Canadian version of the religious right and would rather not return. I think liberals need to stop seeing the capital-L Left as just a more intense extension of themselves. They’re not. They are every bit as deluded, dangerous, and illiberal as a Ted Cruz, and every bit as far from my thinking. I think the linear left-right sliding scale metaphor for political ideologies that would place liberalism as slightly left has left us dangerously unable to understand pathological political personalities that use whatever rhetoric suits their immediate environment.
I see politics arranged as concentric rings with enlightenment values/liberalism at the center and the totalitarian impulse spreading out from there. Whether the totalitarians/authoritarians are Jesus freaks or Marxists or SJWs means naught to me.
I partially console myself by reminding myself that most of this nonsense is coming from college age kids. When I started at my current job they were young children.
I think I’ve noticed a general phenomena, in many of my students, and in myself and my friends at that age – that as people (especially bright people) emerge from childhood they become very enthusiastic about exploring and testing their intellect. This can take many forms but it makes certain political ideologies more seductive to the young.
Of course it was young people that drove some of the nastiest movements in recent history, whether the Cultural Revolution or the Khmer Rouge. It was high school age kids who would arrest and execute people for being “intellectuals” simply because they wore glasses.
Ok, I’m not consoled anymore.
I see it as people solving the wrong internal problem and failing to address the larger issues
“do you guys just see it as just folly for amusement?”
Best way to look at it, really.
In Victorian times, people used to go to lunatic asylums to laugh at the inmates. Now we can do it on the Internet. 🙂
No point getting stressed about it, since they are only bashing each other. I’ll leave getting indignant for occasions when they manage to impose their idiocy on innocent outsiders.
cr
That is so ableist.
I am offended!
When I put on my SJW hat, it is so so easy to find ‘problematic’ things *everywhere*
“Four feet good. Two feet bad”
Clearly, the LGBT+ Sub-Committee members learned well at the feet of their Stalinist grandparents. Cis-Deviationism will not be tolerated within the CP-LGBT+. I expect white cis lesbians will be next.
What’s that rotating sound from Eric Blair’s grave?
So, we’ve gone from LGB to LGBT to LGBTQ to LTBTQOMGWTFBBQ+!…
…and now we’re dropping the “G.” So, “LBTQA+”?
How long before the “L” goes, too? And then the “B”…?
b&
Call it ‘progress’?
“\_(“~ )_/“
They came for the ‘G’s, but I did not protest, for I was not a ‘G’
…
Heh.
But that’s only if they reach manhood. Maybe these Brits need to come to American high schools where boys can be taunted to suicide for their sexual preference. This is disgustingly naive.
[Shakes head].
Pass the blunt vegetable knife.
Do the majority of students care what’s going on in the student union, besides how much money they have to pay in dues?
The price of the beer was always the #1 issue. Which bands were on the gig list was next. Price of food in the canteen.
And in my day, the political fight to maintain student grants, a fight that we lost.
It’s like watching absurdist theater at this point.
I suppose I should have known this, but I have no connection with academia and I wasn’t aware until yesterday that degrees in Social Justice Studies are being offered all over the place now.
Maybe this nonsense is spreading because the schools are not just reacting to it but actually teaching it.
http://justicestudies.eku.edu/bachelor-science-social-justice-studies
And I actually thought that a “degree” in ‘Surf Studies’ was a pointless waste of time…
BTW, since some other examples of grievance-culture have been brought up in this thread, here’s another recent one.
Yusra Khogali, one of the leaders of Toronto’s Black Lives Matter movement, has just written a commentary piece in the Toronto Star, titled
I was vilified for telling the truth about racism in Toronto
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2016/04/10/i-was-vilified-for-telling-the-truth-about-racism-in-toronto.html
But what she was actually “vilified” for was her tweeting: “Plz Allah give me strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today.”
And in the article she doesn’t even bother acknowledging the tweet as even being unwise.
It’s just “I’m a victim.”
But to me these portions perfectly capture the problem of the new grievance-culture.
Khogali makes this claim to start the article:
“To be a black Muslim woman in Toronto is to feel deep isolation, the result of omnipresent systemic anti-black, patriarchal and Islamophobic discrimination. It is to be under constant attack.”
Ok, that would be awful if it’s true. But…how true is it? What evidence does she present? She then follows, writing:
“Evidently some do not believe this is true. During Black History Month, I was bombarded by tweets from white men asking me to prove that racism, Islamophobia and misogyny exist. Why should I have to prove the existence of the forces that torment me and members of my community to people who don’t believe they exist and, worse, who perpetuate them?”
Amazing. She can’t figure out why she should provide evidence and justification to skeptics? It’s WHAT IS EXPECTED of you when you make a claim – especially a claim that deeply impugns a great many people!
The position seems to fall in line with standard grievance-culture: I FEEL this way, that is good enough. Only a racist would be skeptical. So, I claim you are racist, and why do I need to support or my claim to someone who is racist?
I’m certainly for examining whether there is some form of systematic oppression in a society, or police force. But let me see the data supporting the claims, please. The problem is that as grievance-culture becomes ever more prominent, and slights are taken everywhere, and “catastrophized” so that
innocently made comments are “micro aggressions” that “do violence” to people, it starts becoming the boy who cried wolf. It’s harder than ever to know just how serious an offense is against an aggrieved feeling person, and in this atmosphere actual evidence becomes all the more significant to sort things out.
That is..you know….to us “old guard” folks who value evidence based reasoning.
“Plz Allah give me strength not to cuss/kill these men and white folks out here today.”
She was merely punching up.
Why you gotta be such a white capitalist male cishet supremacist bro?????????????
Ahem, “punching up” is cultural appropriation of people with dwarfism.
she tweeted about resisting killing people and she’s the victim?
talk about entitlement…
no wonder history repeats, eh?
I encountered something similar long ago. I explained that although I was a straight white middle class male, I had encountered prejudice because I was first language English and also socially awkward sometimes. My interlocutor stammered something, and I said that it shouldn’t matter the degree of prejudice, at least in the sense of being opposed to it. They had no answer. I later read Susan Haack or the like who had a name for this sort of concern, something like “oppression escalations” or the like. (I forget – it was wittier than that.) I realized that was what was going on in the situation I mentioned.
My point still stands: people who are subject to bigotry, including gay men, *are still subject to bigotry*. Yes, maybe priorities, but that shouldn’t work out so that they or anyone else are simply “off the map”.
These students look at people in the same way my wife shops for coffee- more adjectives are better. Shade grown, organic, fair trade, etc. Sure these things matter but at some point the flavor of the coffee has to be considered. Do you enjoy drinking it or is this all about making you feel good about buying it? Continuing the analogy; maybe I’m bitter because as a white male I’m just a cup of Sanka.
“Liberation committees” sounds like something Robespierre would lead. I guess we should be glad they only have access to figurative guillotines rather than the literal ones.
this is why the right is winning, they don’t play more victim than thou.
that said, it is true. Gay men, actually, White Gay men – who first were able to be out and visible, then white women
then the transgendered, who are more tolerated than bisexuals
what mainstream hets do to us, is almost as bad as what we do to each other……heavy sigh
frankly, it doesn;t help the community in any way and certainly ensures internal separtism
signed,
a white dyke in Canada
in the 1990s, the UK queers were really ahead of where we where in Canada and the USA…
http://dykewriter.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/queer-community-chairwomen-time/
this is what we have to look forward to
“I imagine that if extremist authoritarian leftists were born in repressive Islamic societies, for example, that they would behave no differently.”
I’m not sure of that. Only certain flavors of Muslims are designated as authentic and permitted to be valid authorities. Any other flavor of authoritarian speech or writings might be cause for a fatwah or beheading.
On another note: In some ways I view the fundamentalist authoritarian behavior of this group to be as bad as what is done by fundamentalist christians. Expecting every separate letter representing a facet of the LGBTQXYZ group to think, speak, or behave the same is crazy. No individuals in any group are precisely the same. No one should want them to be. Diversity is desirable.
I don’t feel the need to share my sexual preferences with the world. I’d prefer that the bulk of humanity not share theirs with me. (Friends and family, maybe). I don’t include or exclude fellow humans based on their sexual preferences. I don’t care what kind of sex people have as long as it’s consensual, occurring between mature adults (might as well include teenagers since it will happen anyway), doesn’t involve abuse and doesn’t occur between adults and children.
I agree, unfortunalty we exist in a hyper sexualized society
even a diaper commerical on tv will cause a pedophile porn scandal at the PTA
and it’s really the religious right, they obsess about other people haveing fun.
I’m 48 and I would like to be a person first, something I haven’t gotten to experience since I identified as lesbian and lost all my civil rights at 23.
Idiots. Ya gotta laugh. (Well, it’s either that or cry, and I’m not going to cry over the sheer insanity of theses precious twits. And they’re only doing it to each other, no real people were harmed in the making of this farce…)
But why are they still saying “LGTB”? Shouldn’t the ‘G’ be removed?
cr
This sort of thing always reminds me of Richard Pryor’s raging at a fete to promote Gay Rights in which the poor downtrodden gays apparently didn’t give a crap about the non-white servants at the event. It’s amazing how some people whine about how badly treated they are and yet they go right ahead and treat others equally poorly or worse.
After woman assaulted in woman’s bathroom at bar, bar owner builds gender neutral bathrooms for transgender persons (this includes all cross dressers, not just transexuals)
Bar owner is accused of bigotry and intolerance, since those who claim to identify as trans are entitled to use the woman’s restroom if they want.
http://m.omaha.com/news/metro/the-hive-owner-s-comments-on-transgender-people-bathrooms-spark/article_ab33239d-3675-5263-bfbb-f9d58f5a7bf6.html?mode=jqm
Methinks i,ve crawled through a Looking Glass, words fail me, what on Earth are we teaching these idiots? or not, as the case may be.
I barely fit in the world now!