1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
kontextmaschine
theoutline.com

Mic's Drop: How Mic.com exploited social justice for clicks, and then abandoned a staff that believed in it.
kontextmaschine

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry.

trained-chimpanzee

whoever drank that particular flavour of neoliberal koolaid deserved it 

association-of-free-people

Oddly I haven’t missed them.  Hell, I didn’t even notice their absence.  

sadoeconomist

I noticed they were gone because Mic actually had me blocked here

Every so often I’d try to comment on some long discussion and I couldn’t because the OP was a shitty Mic article

association-of-free-people

I was blocked also, but their pandering shit kind of blended into the rest of tumblr I guess.

In a sense Tumblr stole their thing because any self-loathing hubris filled tween could write for them.

kontextmaschine

Wait a second don’t bury the lede, Mic blocked people on tumblr (as a way of making sure the reblog chains of their official ports-to-tumblr never went through ancaps and were more hugboxy) ??

One more thing I didn’t realize could happen until someone broke a norm and it looked obvious in retrospect. 2017!

mitigatedchaos

Yes, this is fascinating!  And I say this as someone quite averse to Anarcho-Capitalism.

politics

More you might like

osberend
kontextmaschine

Mike Cernovich acquired a copy of that “Shitty Men in Media” list (he was offering $10,000) and is using it to run hit pieces

says he’s going to give the accused a chance to reply, I suspect that’s an excuse to sequence them strung out for maximum news impact, in priority as culture war enemies

slatestarscratchpad

What a moron.

These people are going to get away with it, because the accusations will forever be associated with the alt-right. If he’d waited a week or two, someone else would have taken the bait, published, and the media would have eaten it up.

But now the whole issue has been coded “of interest to racists” and everyone else will be careful not to touch it. The people involved will defend with “You’re accusing me of sexual harassment? Aha, I see you’re a fan of Mike Cernovich” and it’ll never go anywhere.

shieldfoss

here you are assuming Cernovich intends to bring abusers to justice in an effort to help women

which

i mean

osberend

Nah, the analysis still applies if he wants to take down Biddle et al. for being sociopolitical enemies. Where it falls apart, of course, is if he really just wants to gather money and love from guess existing base for “boldly standing up to the hypocritical liberal media establishment,” etc. In that case, he’s actually better if the left drops it as a result of his support, because it gives him more “lone voice crying the wilderness” cred.

mitigatedchaos

Beyond just him, does it not empower the hard right in general if this wagon circling happens?

One of the things that’s been really empowering for the hard right (in my opinion) are conditions in Europe, including sex crimes.  Because of just who was committing those crimes, they were able to gain a temporary monopoly on “justice” as a platform for that particular issue.  

Do people realize how bad that is for Liberals?

They’re building a narrative that the Left and the Liberals are thick with pedophiles, molesters, and sex traffickers, and that when they aren’t committing those crimes themselves, the Left and Liberals are willing to overlook them depending on ethnicity.

Circling the wagons isn’t what the Liberals should do.  The way to prevent the hard right from gaining ground in Rotherham was to be better than they were, by actually enforcing the laws, like they are supposed to and, ostensibly, which is in line with their principles.

We’ve seen that at least some of the hard right are willing to fabricate a narrative if they have to, but a non-fabricated narrative has a lot more solidity to it.  

So maybe they circle the wagons, and this outsider can’t actually take these guys down.  But what if the point isn’t to take them down?  What if the point is recruitment?  Long-term recruitment, shifting the margins of power, which, when you only need a majority, matters.

Their faction is relatively small right now, but it has room to grow in proportion to how badly their rivals fuck up and/or are disconnected from reality.

Source: kontextmaschine rape discourse cw gendpol politics the culture war

@silver-and-ivory

Probably, part of what you’re seeing with yaoi being treated the way it is is that men and their sexuality are basically constantly under attack in the culture war as creepy, oppressive, objectifying, low-status, etc.

But of course, as the sex with higher average libido and a more visual sexuality (because hormones), they are far more vulnerable to these sorts of attacks.  Someone who has no sex drive at all can basically dunk on someone who does have a sex drive all day long, portraying them as evil and objectifying.

Of course, women (including lesbians, as TUOC has posted about) are not actually pure angels, despite what the culture warriors say.

Yaoi then, under this framework, is an exploitable vulnerability to snap back at the attackers and make them shut up - a weakness in the social justice armor.

And for those who have a Correct sexuality under SJ terms, it can be exploited for social standing.

Then of course there are the people that are actually annoyed by it.  Not all gay men, for instance, really enjoy straight women coming into gay bars.

the culture war
collapsedsquid
stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com

Economic roots of post-truth politics

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization. What I mean is that...
collapsedsquid

Here’s a conjecture: the rise of “post-truth” politics (defined by the OED as a process whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than emotional appeals”) is in part the product of deindustrialization.

What I mean is that in manufacturing, facts defeat emotions and opinions. If your steel cracks, or your bottles leak or your cars won’t start, all your hopes and fancy beliefs are wrong. Truth trumps opinion.

Contrast this with sales occupations. In these, opinion beats facts. If customers think a shit sandwich is great food, it’ll sell regardless of facts. And conversely, good products won’t sell if customers think they’re rubbish. Opinion trumps truth.

(Finance is a mix of these. In trading and asset management, beliefs are constantly defeated by cold hard facts. In asset gathering, sales and investor relations, however, bullshit works.)

Isn’t it therefore possible that a shift from manufacturing to other occupations will contribute to a decline in respect for facts and greater respect for opinions, however ill-founded? In 1966 – when employment in UK manufacturing peaked – 29.2% of the workforce were in manufacturing. This meant that millions more heard tales from fathers, husbands and friends about how brute facts had fouled up their day. A culture of respect for facts was thus inculcated. Today, however, only 7.8% of the workforce is in manufacturing and many more are in bullshit jobs. This is an environment less conducive to a deference to facts.

Hot take on how method of labor influences mode of thought.

mitigatedchaos

I hereby award this take one pepper for spiciness.

I can think of two supportive facts. One is that post-truth politics seems (I might be wrong) to be less strong in countries where manufacturing still looms large in culture if not in economics, such as in Germany or Japan.

However, many of the people decrying Post-Truth Politics don’t particularly care for the policies of Japan, and Japan’s politics are quite different from Germany’s.

the invisible fist the culture war
flakmaniak
argumate

hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people

shieldfoss

…I

OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.

But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently. 

flakmaniak

Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)

mitigatedchaos

More seriously, while being racist towards white people is bad on its own merits, either as a violation of justice - judging someone for the actions of another - or on more Utilitarian grounds, most of the people that are seriously racist against the whities aren’t going to accept those arguments.

Thus the appeal to something they might actually care about.

It’s possible to create political will out of thin air, but a lot of the time it’s in reaction to historical or material factors, and political will with those factors will have deeper roots.

It’s important to realize along with this, that most politics will occur around the margins - whether groups of white supremacists are growing or shrinking, whether swing voters shift from one party to another, and so on.  Strong believers do have an effect, but it’s necessary to have raw power mass at your disposal.

As such, the question is not about “but if we be nice to our rivals, they will still be maximally evil,” but about “what’s the marginal rate that people will enter or leave our enemy’s coalition?”

Now that doesn’t mean playing along nicely all the time, but for goodness sake people should be very careful and specific in who they are targetting, and most racism is really bad at doing that.

Source: argumate racepol politics the culture war
kissingerandpals
kissingerandpals

Really pisses me off that they condemn thoughts and prayers because what are tragedy mourning memes other than secular prayers performed in mass and ritualistically

God is dead, and there’s not enough water in the ocean to wipe clean the blood from our hands, but, you know, memes and stuff

mitigatedchaos

The implication is “your own dumb policies caused this,” both from the Left (guns) and the Right (terrorism).

politics the culture war
tanadrin
tanadrin

This pisses me off so, so much. Warning: what follows is not very calm. Probably not very charitable either. I write “fuck” a lot.

Keep reading

mitigatedchaos

< caring about opinions being actually good vs being seen to be good >

 Well, there’s your answer right there, isn’t it?

Scott may be the Rightful Caliph (or a contender for the position) within Rationalism and its Adjacency, but outside of our sphere, he has all sorts of markers that are low-status, or are tribal low-status, and he poses a danger to a lot of people that are farming status through toxic takes.

I mean, imagine if Rationalism became the new normal.  Sure, this would probably crash a lot of metaphorical trains and the results would be observable in the global GDP, but one of the trains that got crashed would be most of the established Commentariat, their pundits, the outrage-farming, clickbaiting and so on.

New ones would likely develop in the aftermath, because Rationalism doesn’t actually remove all sorts of base human emotions.  However, the new ones would be different people.  

Scott’s social status is zero sum with these people.  His gain is their loss.  They’re going to attack, attack, attack.  They may not even fully know why they’re doing it.

politics the culture war the rationalists
mutant-aesthetic

Blink twice if you’re OK

big-block-of-cheese-day

Re: http://afloweroutofstone.tumblr.com/post/164602028137/id-like-to-thank-everyone-who-provided-me-with

Am I crazy, or do post-pile-on, post-death-threat “I’m so so so sorry and promise to make myself as small as possible and defer to my betters” posts sometimes sound like the statements they make hostages read in front of the cameras?

isaacsapphire

A bit. Hadn’t realized before this that the OP had blocked me, had to do my usual work around to see if they’d deleted or blocked.

mutant-aesthetic

Honestly, these sort of gushing “I’m sorry for not being sufficiently woke” posts gives me some degree of schadenfreude, though it is a little bit sad that people seem to be afraid to take the Michael Tracey/Fredrick DeBoer route in terms of not backing down in the face of public pressure.

mitigatedchaos

Is it really the correct route?  I’m unsure.

Maybe the correct route is to bow and scrape, wait several months, then go back to doing exactly what you were doing before.

Source: big-block-of-cheese-day politics the culture war

Other issues with attempting to replace Nationalism include many Liberals are currently ideologically prohibited from noticing what is required to induce Liberalism and are instead obligated to pretend that it just happens on its own.

This is why we aren’t seeing a focus on the cousin marriage stuff for instance, when it’s an obvious vector for preservation of illiberal and oppressive cultures in otherwise liberal or social progressive environments.

the culture war politics
See this in the app Show more
Top Photos