So maybe what we’ve got is a right-wing strongman superseding a fascist movement, sort of like what Franco did with the Falangists.
Or is that quite right? The group in question was quoting civil rights hymns after being banned and vowing to carry on — apparently by holding private gathering that was broken up by the cops — could it be that we’re talking about a racial justice organization being suppressed by majoritarian tyranny? We appear to have a glitch in the matrix along these lines, with a Buzzfeed reporter tweeting that the detentions of white nationalists were “fast becoming a Hungarian free speech issue.”
Both interpretations probably give the conference too much credit. Both of their marquee partnerships pulled out or didn’t show; Jobbik and Aleksander Dugin (whom the conference organizer’s wife did translation work for). Though Jobbik still apparently claims it’s not a racist conference.
Anyway, Richard Spencer bet on Hungary, with a right wing among the strongest in Europe, as being hospitable to the sort of ideas that are expressed at your average NPI conference. This was not just incorrect, but as Jobbik pulling out seems to suggest, vastly unrealistic.
Abigail, an evil wind is blowing through the land
and they need every man to drive it away
As Rorschach-like interpretations of the hipster phenomenon continue to pile up, one interesting feature is that certain segment of the left is very uncomfortable with what Will Self called this week a global “seisdick shift.” The classic example is this Adbusters essay from 2008, which in a momentary lapse of concern for Western civilization, proclaimed hipsters the dead end of it, for having turned all our once-subversive countercultures into saleable parts of an ever-changing consumer identity:
An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the “hipster” – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society. …
With nothing to defend, uphold or even embrace, the idea of “hipsterdom” is left wide open for attack. And yet, it is this ironic lack of authenticity that has allowed hipsterdom to grow into a global phenomenon that is set to consume the very core of Western counterculture. Most critics make a point of attacking the hipster’s lack of individuality, but it is this stubborn obfuscation that distinguishes them from their predecessors, while allowing hipsterdom to easily blend in and mutate other social movements, sub-cultures and lifestyles. …
An amalgamation of its own history, the youth of the West are left with consuming cool rather that creating it. The cultural zeitgeists of the past have always been sparked by furious indignation and are reactionary movements. But the hipster’s self-involved and isolated maintenance does nothing to feed cultural evolution. Western civilization’s well has run dry. The only way to avoid hitting the colossus of societal failure that looms over the horizon is for the kids to abandon this vain existence and start over.
Just to be clear, you’re reading about the suicide of the West in the publication popularly credited with starting Occupy. Hopefully the author was taken out back and shot for his counter-revolutionary thinking.
Because many of Adbusters’ readersare hipsters, they did run a “acknowledgment of potentiality” by Ilie Mitaru to qualify it a little later. The poor sap wants to believe in hipsters’ “revolutionary potential” sooo badly you feel bad for him:
Haddow approaches hipsters as a potential revolutionary group, and when they fail to uphold characteristics of previous groups – cohesive ideology, symbolism and behavior – the lack of historic parallels leads him to conclude that the hipster holds no revolutionary potential. If hipsters are to evolve into anything meaningful, however, they will adhere to no historical pattern and must be given the benefit of the doubt, the opportunity of the unknown. …
Formed by the empty promises of our predecessors, history has dealt hipsters more defeats than triumphs, more distractions than direction, and abandoned them to the hollow embrace of commodity fetishism.
But they are collectively filtering through the facade. Evidence of this can be found in the adoption of bike culture, urban gardening and art/music-based activism and even in rallying for Obama. Many are also acting on their distaste for corporatism by starting businesses and nonprofits, engaging in progressive work both locally and internationally. …
Still new in respects to movements, the hipster is groping in the dark for authenticity. He does not claim to be an activist when he rides his bike, buys used clothes or works as a freelance designer, though he may have labeled himself as such a few decades ago. His path may not have been inspired by revolutionary ideas as much as a search for personal meaning. But ultimately, motivations matters little if the roads lead to the same place.
Au contraire, mon frere! Nothing could be further from the truth! Whether he’s simply not been presented with the argument that waving signs for Obama has revolutionary potential, or rejected it as daft or irrelevant or passe, is of great importance indeed. If it’s the first case, we need only sell more Adbusters subscriptions.
The discrediting of voices in intellectual discourse is not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, when a person holds a position that is indefensible and plain wrong, they should either accept that they are wrong or have their soapbox revoked. Most of the time it isn’t this clear. Different opinions are held by disagreeing parties, and silencing dissenting voices requires tactics that are a little more underhanded. The tactic of dishonestly re-framing a viewpoint into something outrageous in an attempt to discredit those who hold the viewpoint is known as intellectual bullying.
This is a powerful tool. With enough voices dishonestly insisting that someone holds all those beliefs that everybody hates, the person in question will either be shamed into silence or suffer from character assassination. The black box takes an honest input and produces a dishonest output. But what goes on inside the black box? I am going to try to explain that, both in general and specifically for the GamerGate controversy.
A lot of of the tactics of the anti-GamerGate intellectual bullying campaign were famously codified in Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals. The ideological guerrilla warfare tactics encouraged in that book and others like it include character assassination, isolation, and ridicule. Ad hominem attacks are implicitly encouraged, because people are easier to hate than abstract ideas. Strawman arguments are particularly effective – rather than addressing actual arguments, so one should ignore the points of those who disagree with you and respond to something else.
I initially scoffed at the prospect of Cultural Marxism being real, because in common parlance among conservative pundits, it’s used as a stronger pejorative in place of “political correctness.” Despite what the noise around the provocative term might sound like, Cultural Marxism is not Alex Jones-style paranoia. From the beginning, Marxism rejected positivism – positivism meaning the belief that mathematical logic and scientific experimentation are the sole authoritative sources of knowledge. This should be interesting for the reader who has heard of Marxism being scientific socialism. To Marx and Engels, scientific was merely a nice sounding word that meant that their socialism had a philosophical methodology behind it. This is true: Marxism does have a methodology, it’s just a non-rationalistic methodology.
It’s rather fascinating to see the social radicals fight amongst themselves. Hilarious, even. Especially when it turns into a high school gossip match.
That is one takeaway from the “backlash” that spouted from Michelle Goldberg’s recent New Yorker piece, “What Is A Woman?” While I haven’t read the piece in full, there are definitely some moments of introspection here and there mixed with some intellectual sloppiness (but then, social radical thinking was always filled with that). It’s not a great piece, but it’s definitely readable, all things considered. It’s one of those rare moments where the “radical” feminists actually take a look at themselves and say, “The fuck are we doing?” It comes at a time when the radfems (such a dumb name) are really at odds with what social media has done to them: Creating nihilistic pursuits of ideological purity through groupthink combined with incentivized “sharing.” But more on that in a moment.
More interesting in all this is not Goldberg’s piece, but responses from various “radical” transgender sources. Autostraddle, a “intelligent, hilarious & provocative voice and a progressively feminist online community” that is neither smart, funny, nor challenging or stimulating (but then I don’t watch television and film), dropped a turd of an article whose title basically states its own weakness:
“The New Yorker’s Skewed History of Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism Ignores Actual Trans Women”
Putting aside the fact that headline is incredibly long and ostentatious, it shows that the writer (some nerd who probably failed journalism class named Mari Brighe) is too busy focusing on their own personalized agenda to notice that they sound incredibly stupid when they say these things. I mean, if it’s about these so-called TERFs – which, by the way, even my friends in the Down’s community called a retarded acronym – why would they discuss trans people in any great length?
Brighe tries to make a case about how awful Goldberg is:
Let’s start with the numbers. In the piece, Goldberg mentions the names of 14 radical feminist activists (frequently providing physical descriptions), and provides quotes from nine of them — including two from books penned by radfems. In contrast, she mentions and quotes a total of four trans women (zero from books), and two of them are quoted to supporting the radical feminist position.
Forgive me if I stopped after the first sentence. You’re forgiven if you’ve done the same: Slights disguised as statistics do not an analysis make. Utter nonsense. Maybe nausea, but that could just be because I haven’t eaten yet today.
It’s interesting what happens when you see two nations, diverse and distinct as they can be, interact. A minor hostile interaction can tend to escalate very quickly if you let it. When all you have is emotions and pure instinct to go by, a slight can become a fistfight very quickly. That goes with people. Communities. Nations.
Conflict takes a lot to inspire these days, but it’s far easier to incite it as the number of people you need to provoke grows ever smaller. It’s made all the more so when you see the other as not just some other person, but as something else. If you think that Other person isn’t respecting you and your space in that moment, what do you do? Are you calm enough to let it slide? Do you run away, as some would argue here? Or do you fight?
It’s admittedly strange to compare violent conflicts of recent, especially because the reasons and methods are so diverse, and because sounds so simplistic. But applying the economics of scale, you become more appreciative of what is happening from a holistic perspective, even you don’t have a complete understanding of things. In two such conflicts, the lack of clarity makes a comparison apt. When you have two distinct groupings, clarity is beyond important when a mistake is made in interaction. Sometimes, that requires patience.
Three teenagers kidnapped and killed. Or maybe they were killed already, and the butchers had made a large mess in the clear-up. Or maybe they were kidnapped and accidentally killed. The killers are (not) state-mandated terrorists. Or they’re (not) militants associated with the government. Or they’re (not) just a bunch of morons with AK-47s and some unabashed sense of righteousness. Or the leadership admitted their (non) role in the situation.
A teenager is shot and killed. Maybe he was (not) a suspect in a robbery. Maybe he was (not) reaching for a cop’s a gun. Maybe he was (not) picking a fight. Maybe he just said (did not say) “fuck off, pig” with his hands up. The cop’s a rookie. The cop’s a veteran. The cop is (not) hiding something. The cop is (not) hiding. There are (no) death threats.
All this information is as much a jumble as the items found in a trash can. Yet we seek to answer this slight as fast we can. Why? Why bother asking? We demand justice, revenge, blood. Screw the first two words, we’ve always wanted blood. It’s one of the few things we yearn for more than sex.
Usually when libertarians talk about marriage, it’s about how the government shouldn’t be involved. When we talk about children, we debate whether or not we can sell them. Rarely do we ever talk about the role of the family in a free society. The US is experiencing a huge decline in the nuclear family, and with it, some very clear economic costs. Fewer people are getting married and the ones who do are waiting longer to take the leap. The average number of children per family is down to .9 from 1.3 in 1970, causing some people to refer to our current period as the “baby bust.” In the face of these statistics and the popularity of social experimentation among young libertarians, it is essential to take another look at the role of the nuclear family in relation to both the well-being of society and the individual.
At first glance, it’s easy to look at these statistics and sing the praises of human progress and individualism. In his article, Capitalism and the Family, Steve Horwitz argues it was capitalism that pulled women out of the household and into the workforce, while simultaneously reducing the demand for child labor. In other words, the birth rate declined and women were able to focus on building their careers before getting married.
While I admire independent women (and men, for that matter) and respect a couple’s personal decision to have fewer or no children, I think my generation is going to experience a huge amount of non-buyer’s remorse for choosing the #singlelyfe or the increasingly popular DINK life. To be clear, I think that less child labor and more working women is likely a good thing; I just think that the pendulum may have swung too far to the other side in an attempt to rebel against the “shackles” of traditionalism.
