I have been a little loath to write this because Freddie deBoer already has a huge beef with our blog for some reason (I’m mean to Jonathan Chait?), but…
Freddie deBoer recently wrote a post denouncing the less-hinged supporters of the proposed TPP, one of whom saw fit to compare Obama’s critics on this issue to the lynchers of Emmet Till. This was obviously an awful thing for Dem politico Allen Brauer to say, and most readers here probably regard both this and the TPP with unified disgust, putting us in agreement with deBoer. [UPDATED NOTE: since many people have found this post unclear (which is obviously my fault), I’m merely noting here that I entirely agree with FDB’s actual political point (and in all likelihood most of you do as well), and quoting the post written the other day to explain how I perceive it with suspicion because of his past remarks. It would be irrelevant and unfair to attack Freddie deBoer on the sole basis of a five-year-old dustup.] Allen Brauer fired back at his critics by high-mindedly calling them “dude-bros and manarchists” and saying he was wrecked after a “tsunami of white tears.” DeBoer correctly calls this bullshit:
Allan Brauer, I would argue, is today’s progressive internet in its purest form. He’s someone who’s learned all of the lessons of how we do things too well…. Do we still have the capacity, as a political and intellectual movement, to argue in a way that’s not entirely based on associating with race or gender in a totally vague, unaccountable, and reductive way?
Solid enough. But–
The stakes are much lower in our cultural writing, but the problem is largely the same: tired, rote arguments and magic words, treated as cutting rebuttals no matter how lazy and uninspired. You use magic words in your work, and no matter how good or bad it is, you’ll get credit for it. And if people criticize you, you just use the magic words against them, too.
UPDATE [which interrupts the post but needs to be above the fold]: as I mention below, I’ve said a metric f#$k-ton of dumb things in internet comments, especially years ago. So I feel a bit uneasy basing my complaint on a comment. If Freddie deBoer would like to say, “I made that comment on Tiger Beatdown when I was irritated and stung, but would retract it if I could,” I’m happy to edit the post to reflect this.
DeBoer goes on to complain this listicle on The Toast is terrible. It is indeed not hilarious, but I think it’s indicative of mediocre humour rather than emblematic of internet progressives’ inability to think seriously about politics. And it’s not by Mallory Ortberg, so I have trouble seeing why deBoer immediately went here, of all places [he doesn’t mis-ascribe authorship; he’s just linking the two ideas]:
Mallory Ortberg has carved out a really unique voice and place online, but she seems like a victim of her own success. She’s in a “Radiohead recording themselves farting into a paper bag” rut: her fans will call anything she does a work of genius no matter what, in part because they think doing so is somehow a meaningful political act, so there’s little incentive to branch out. I want her to do new, challenging things, just as a fan of her good work. It would be really amazing if The Toast would try to get its own readership to confront themselves politically rather than to see all political engagement as a way to identify who they’re better than. I’d like to see her get out of the very comfortable comfort zone that she has (to her credit) built for herself. But simply identifying work of Ortberg’s that I find better or worse feels like violating some sacred internet compact about Those Who Are Not to be Criticized.
Wringing your hands over Mallory Ortberg because you’re concerned she’s not growing as a writer is…bizarre. Like most authors she has her better and worse pieces, but she is hands down one of the smartest and funniest authors we have around at the moment. And unfortunately I couldn’t help but think of the last time Freddie de Boer was worried about whether women being funny on the internet is destroying progressive politics. Because five years ago the problem was that Sady Doyle was unserious. You should read Doyle’s post in its entirety.
You guys, Tiger Beatdown is a blog. And, on this blog, we have a comment section! Sometimes the comment section is pretty interesting. And sometimes, the comment section gives us some shit like this! From “Freddie”:
“I would ordinarily never, ever do this self-linking deal, but this post kind of compels it.
[LINK DELETED (by Sady Doyle!–Belle) BECAUSE NO-ONE CARES.]
Look, I have to tell you: your whole enterprise here, the whole long and short of it, appears to be an edifice designed to give you a platform that paws at discourse while denying the possibility of you ever getting called on anything. I mean the whole apparatus of the place. It’s like this constant recursion of LOLspeak/serious speak/LOLspeak, this Russian dolls style thing you’re so enamored with. It’s just a mechanism to introduce a self-limiting aspect on what you want to say; you want to be heard and to be taken seriously, but you want the out to be able to say that you were just goofing. Well, goof away, it’s the Internet, and it’s your dime, but understand that you are denying intellectual rigor when you do so.
This is your space, your place of power, and you can define it any particular way you choose. I am not particularly impressed with this post or the assumptions that undergird it, but mostly I am unimpressed with your defense mechanisms. Say what you have to say. I do, I have, and I will.”
FAINTING COUCH TIME.
It didn’t miss my attention, Freddie, that the jokes you specifically took exception to were about creepy dudes pretending to be feminist to get laid. Or, that you took exception to them because they made you think that the two feminists who made the jokes, Amanda Hess and I, might not sleep with you even though you are totes feminist and stuff:
“I guess what I’m saying is that I am thinking about that date that Amanda and Sady are talking about. If I went on that date, with either or them, they would indeed find themselves on a date with a feminist. But as I am a feminist whose feminism is not a product of feeling obliged to any particular women or to some vague category called “women,” but rather to the principles of equality and human liberation which inform and support feminism, they are unlikely to find me the kind of feminist whose feminism is guaranteed or even likely to please or flatter them. What I wonder is, what if their questions reveal a man who is a feminist that has ideas about feminism that differs from theirs? And what if that feminist man isn’t inclined to back down from his position in an attempt to please them?”
There are a few answers to this question, Freddie. The first is that I am never, ever, EVER going to fuck you, and Amanda has had a boyfriend for approximately forever as I understand it, and I have a boyfriend TOO but would STILL avoid fucking you were that not the case, so you REALLY don’t need to worry about how this theoretical feminist date of ours might go. It would always end with you not getting fucked, is the answer.
Oh FFS with the imaginary date. I am transitively embarrassed on his behalf. Now, in continuing here I am quoting a comment from deBoer, and as I have said a ton of dumb stuff on the internet in comments before (really, so much dumb stuff), I appreciate that this could be unfair, but I don’t think it’s out of line or that he would disavow it.
So, in other words, you aren’t capable of defending your ideas, and so you freak out when someone calls you out on some of them. That’s cool– like I said, your dime. But make no mistake, the fact that you are so incapable of actually engaging rationally– that you post with such obvious insecurity, emotionalism, and spite, rather than anything resembling a coherent argument– that, ultimately, undermines what you will accomplish for feminism.
Now– from my angle, what you could do is actually engage your self-critical process and become a better advocate for your ideas. Or you can censor, and flip out, and continue to police your space against any kind of constructive criticism. Meanwhile, I will engage in the ethical project of my life, which is the project of liberation, a project which I do not and will not ever ask for anyone’s permission to undertake.
Let this comment stand as is, please, if you value free expression.
[EDIT: THIS COMMENT HAS BEEN EDITED TO CLARIFY THAT FREDDIE CARES ABOUT FREDDIE’S BONERS. FREE FREDDIE’S BONERS! THEY ARE SAD WHEN WOMEN DON’T SUCK ON THEM REGARDLESS OF WHAT HE THINKS! FREDDIE’S BONERS: THE MOST OPPRESSED BONERS OF OUR TIME.] (This last, as above, is Doyle’s commentary)
All of deBoer’s other comments were redacted to [BONERS], which was possibly unfair but assuredly hilarious, and an appropriate response to the drama of “if you value free expression.” Let’s think about this a little. What did Freddie deBoer have to say to feminists who make jokes on the internet? That they are not intellectually rigorous, that they are insecure, emotional and spiteful, that they are incapable of defending feminism with rational arguments, that they “flip out” when confronted with logic, that they “censor” people when they don’t want to deal with anything other than the false flattery of servile male feminists, etc. etc. etc. These are the most tedious sexist criticisms ever. I’m sorry, but they are–insultingly so.
DeBoer is making a larger point which, if it were not so hideously sexist, would have some merit. Recursive LOLspeak and self-critical whiteness can be an idle diversion for minds that would be more profitably engaged in political activism. Frothing oneself to a lather about the latest outrage is counterproductive if it only redirects energy away from real issues. OK! These are, in principle, valid criticisms of the internet progressive milieu. HOWEVER: a) this goes awry when the complaint is a sexist one that codes the lamentable unseriousness as female b) the criticism itself can and has become an irritable gesture, quite entirely another matryoshka doll inside the online feminist one! The pose of the Orwell-like contrarian who calls people to action with high-minded seriousness is…also a pose! If you are mcmanus-sensei, you call for burning shit down at every opportunity and lament the trifling concerns of others. Then you accuse people of harbouring a desire for fascist conformity because they like monumental architecture. You didn’t see that coming, did you? No? That’s because mcmanus-sensei is a better troll than deBoer, who has a limited range. Every day Freddie deBoer turns his face to serious issues, and every day the paltry concerns of feminists online blast him like an ill-wind of dick-jokes, a Boreas enjoining him to drink a tall, cold glass of STFU, which batters his doughty vessel but cannot prevent him from steering on, tacking back and forth in the direction of personal liberation, which project he needs no woman’s approval to undertake [swelling strings and snapping pennants].
What I guess I’m saying is, if your complaints about online unseriousness have lead you to criticize Sady Doyle and Mallory Ortberg in particular, something has gone wrong. The most accomplished, hilarious feminists don’t need condescension on how they are Doing It Wrong from their purported allies. (Needless to say it’s perfectly fine to criticize either writer, but not in a sexist way.) I had been inclined to let the [BONERS] episode go on the grounds that it was five years ago, and Freddie deBoer is a genuinely smart guy who sometimes writes interesting things, but this concern-trollery about how Ortberg’s not getting challenged enough has raised my ire. Casting the unserious aspects of modern leftism as uniquely and pathologically feminine is bullshit.
{ 301 comments }
Saurs 05.23.15 at 10:49 am
Questions:
de[redacted] counts himself among Progressive Interwebbers?
de[r] believes the Prog Intweb what be can only handle so much anti-racism?*
de[r] finds “magic words” like White Tears** repugnant and intellectually stifling and possibly misandrical, but considers categorizing his critics as Dad Pants-Wearers a substantive and robust commentary?
“Censoring” de[r] creates cootie-riddled echochambers or whatever, but he doesn’t enable comments on his own blawg?
He’s really frightened by women laughing and joshing around and enjoying themselves, eh?
*I am being swallowed alive right now by piss and vinegar-flavored mirth that self-professed Prog Boy resents those comrades who are always shoving their non-default race and gender at him. ‘Could you guys, like, stop using your oppression to make me feel bad? I am uncomfortable when we are not about me? The time for combating racism is when I want to chide “fellow” lefties by reminding them of Emmet Till or by pushing the same tired, ahistorical mythology about MLK’s “nonviolence” for when I want people to stop tweeting. That I only know about the events in Baltimore because of real-time social media is irrelevant. You are the real aristo-warthog.’
**Classic De[BONERS] re-writing of history to flog the same dead horse: criticism of white supremacy is the invention of self-hating white people. I know he’s a student, so the educational void from which such an assertion can spew forth seems unexpected (provided you believe the Ann Coulter-of-the-left persona he puts on is sincere).
Lynne 05.23.15 at 12:59 pm
Belle, the final paragraph makes me think this is an interesting post but honestly I could hardly follow the post. Very confusing. Sorry.
Metatone 05.23.15 at 1:14 pm
I think there’s an interesting oddity at work here, which I’ve seen in plenty of places, so this isn’t a direct comment on the persons in the original post.
We have a set of theoretical critical tools which grew up around a mass-communication media space. They concern power and authenticity and validity etc.
The oddity is people go around applying them to ever tinier subgroups (often represented by a forum or a blog or other internet grouping.) And really, it just doesn’t make sense. You can’t move from a critique based on a context of power in society to a critique of someone’s small site that sits somewhere in their personal (digital) space.
Belle Waring 05.23.15 at 1:39 pm
Lynne, that was sort of John’s reaction, but when he said my post was too long I was like, “you, dude?” The confusing thing is that the quotes from Sady Doyles posts include deBoer’s words, in quotes. I could sub-blockquote them, maybe…I’ll try
Belle Waring 05.23.15 at 1:49 pm
Better, maybe? I thought it would be unreasonable to imagine everyone knew about the [BONERS] tragicomedy, hence my extensive coverage, and unfair to make the points other than by quoting, since I would be liable to summarize deBoer unkindly, so I let him speak for himself. But if I’m explaining myself I’ve already failed, so.
Lynne 05.23.15 at 2:10 pm
Belle, I just skimmed it again and I’m wondering what the first half has to do with the second, and whether the whole Sady Doyle recap is necessary. I’m trying to link the TPP stuff to the list stuff to something about Mallory Ortberg and all I’m coming up with is that the Mallory Ortberg critique is the point (?) and you reference the early Sady Doyle stuff because F de B misses the mark in the same way with her as he does with Mallory Ortberg…Is this right?
Understand that I don’t know Mallory Ortberg, and all I know of Freddie de Boer is what I learned in the Jonathan Chait thread (thank you for that! It led to the safe thread!)
But I still feel like I’m wrestling with a hundred pounds of wet wool. If I’ve got the general drift, though, maybe some of this obtuseness is in the reader.
Lemmy caution 05.23.15 at 2:46 pm
Deboers irritated act is tiresome.
That list of books white guys like was interesting. Lots of the books are good ones. And it is ok for white guys to have a specific taste in books.
The sociology of books interests me. How they rise and fall in status. There was that article where some dude complained about having to read Toni Morrison books in college because he read a lot of them in high school.
bob mcmanus 05.23.15 at 3:04 pm
3: Well. Okay. Maybe I should just do this in a word salad, because I can’t do it justice in a blog comment.
New Left. In a Different Voice. “Personal is Political.” Neoliberalism. Return to methodological individualism. Abandonment of metaphor, meta-narratives, and totalization. Critical theory. Politics rhetoric by metonyny and synecdoche and personal or journalistic narratives.
It really isn’t, but a personal narrative or targeted attack feels more concrete and real than statistics or theoretical analysis or the abstractions of metaphor. Very powerful stuff, but bourgeois liberalism and its moralistic melodramas has been refining its tools for centuries.
“I’m for/against the war!”
“My daughter died in the war. Joan had blonde hair and loved to pet kittens. My life has been so empty….”
Pat 05.23.15 at 3:50 pm
I really struggled to follow the point of this. That is, I struggled until I failed entirely.
I don’t know the collective ouvre of deBoer, and maybe there’s something there I would find horrifying, but I really don’t know with what it is I’m supposed to disagree at the linked post. It seems to be a lamentation that nearly everything on the Internet is garbage. But it is! That’s demonstrably true! If there’s coded sexism there… well, there might be—as a straight white male, I have neither orientation, race, nor gender, so these things often slip past me, and I’m not expressing any skepticism about it but merely saying that I didn’t see it.
But anyway, seriously: Can anyone seriously dispute that most political liberalism, feminism, pro-LGBT, and all the rest published today is insipid, lazy, self-indulgent, incestuous trash? I don’t think it’s even an open question. And the thing is, that’s not a claim about liberalism, feminism, or any other political stripe—it’s a claim about Gawker. And (lest I repeat myself) it’ s a claim you really can’t deny.
I really think the strongest argument mountable against deBoer is not that he’s antifeminist or sexist, but merely that he’s an intellectual snob complaining they let too many idiots into the Internet these days.
But c’mon. 4chan exists. Redstate exists. Gawker exists. They totally let too mahy idiots into the Internet these days.
Pat 05.23.15 at 3:51 pm
… let it not be said I had intended not to misspell “many.” D’oheth.
Soullite 05.23.15 at 4:03 pm
This blog will always find a way to defend people who hate white men. It’s kind of what it does.
Most people understand that this kind of rhetoric is wrong regardless of which group it’s aimed at. But too many on the left like to indulge in their petty bigotry — in no small part to deflect from their own massive class privileges (which somehow never gets brought up in these popular discussions of privilege. Odd, that…)
MPAVictoria 05.23.15 at 4:08 pm
I for one will never tire of reading Belle make fun of Freddie. He is simply too pompous to stand.
Bruce Baugh 05.23.15 at 4:09 pm
Bob, I can’t help reading your comment as if set to music for INXS’s video Mediate. I couldn’t begin to say if this is a criticism, compliment, or what.
MPAVictoria 05.23.15 at 4:14 pm
Yes truly white males are the most oppressed of classes….
Selective Quoter 05.23.15 at 4:43 pm
DeBoer, May 13: “But simply identifying work of Ortberg’s that I find better or worse feels like violating some sacred internet compact about Those Who Are Not to be Criticized.”
Waring, May 23: “What I guess I’m saying is, if your complaints about online unseriousness have lead you to criticize Sady Doyle and Mallory Ortberg in particular, something has gone wrong.
To be fair to Belle, Freddie didn’t offer any specific criticism of Ortberg, and it is unlikely that Belle would have responded in this way if he had. Still, one can see where he gets this (mistaken!) impression.
David 05.23.15 at 5:18 pm
Sigh. I think this is really about intellectual honesty, which is a particular problem with the modern Left (the Right is just as bad, but that’s no excuse).
I’m afraid much of this post went over my head, because it deals with things and people that I suspect only Americans with a dedicated interest in these issues would know about, and I’m neither.
But I have read de Boer’s work, and, as with many others, I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with him. But I usually find him challenging and (perhaps a sign of age) I prefer reading people now who make me reflect critically on my own ideas and, perhaps change them. But the modern Left doesn’t do Challenging very well (neither does the Right, but that’s no excuse either).
The problem is that the Left is fissioning into smaller and smaller groups, which cultivate pure ideological conformity, and do not welcome debate. They react to outside criticism, or questioning of their beliefs, by circling the wagons (I think that’s the correct metaphor) and not just defending their positions (which is normal and indeed helpful) not just by personal abuse (which is unfortunate, but not unknown in these sorts of debates) but by attempting to delegitimize criticism in advance, not because of what it says but because of who says it. Thus, the valuable and important insights of people like Foucault, that ideas, structures, arguments etc are never neutral, have been turned from a valuable analytical tool into a crude ideological sledgehammer, designed to pre-emptively destroy criticism by declaring it invalid before it is made. If the Left is really prepared to say that the validity of an argument depends on which identity group it comes from, we’re in a bad way.
You think I’m exaggerating? Well, take the case of France’s current Education Minister, Najat Vallaud-Belkachem. Like all appointments in the present government, this was part of a complicated balancing act between the identity groups and political clans into which the Socialist Party has fractured. NVB is an Hollande loyalist (tick) a woman (tick) young (tick) and from an immigrant family (tick). So that’s all right then. What do you mean, is she competent? It soon became clear that she wasn’t competent, and a lot of people regretted that the job had not gone to Segolène Royal, but she didn’t have the right profile, in spite of her experience. The Socialists dealt with criticism of NVB by whispering to the media that it all came from men, and so could be dismissed as sexism. Recently, NVB has published (she didn’t originate them) a series of proposals for reform of the education of 11 to 16 year olds, which has been almost universally panned across the political system, by experts and in the media. The Secretary General of the Socialist party has gone on record as claiming that all of this is just because she’s a child of immigrants, and it’s clear that the Socialists will fight this avalanche of criticism not on the merits of the reform (it has none) but by claiming that anyone who opposes it is a racist. Is this really what we want the politics of alleged left-wing parties to be reduced to?
mathmos 05.23.15 at 5:23 pm
The thing about the blogging academia having unacknowledged class privileges is, ain’t nobody else got time for that whole episodic sociopolitical writing. And that explains the constant nitpicking argutia over this or that obvious self-serving nonsense by neoliberals like Yglesias and the like rather than, say, how to fashion social movements from civil disorder.
tl;dr the revolution will not be blogged.
The Dark Avenger 05.23.15 at 5:30 pm
Louis C.K.
meets 05.23.15 at 6:50 pm
So your response is #notanally and you point out he’s a white male. Doesn’t that exactly prove his point?
Freddie is actually trying to convince people on the other side. And the tactics just don’t work.
Malaclypse 05.23.15 at 7:35 pm
Soullite, would you be so kind as to crawl back under your rock? Thanks.
Dave 05.23.15 at 8:03 pm
Maybe in the future these fdb rags could be in the form of shorters. As in, shorter fdb: Mallory Ortberg isn’t a very good or funny writer.
Also, a really painful thing here is that the dude’s motivation is only to be accepted among the intelligentsia. I think that’s why he’s so strident, anyway. He kind of reminds me of Corey Robin and Eric Loomis in that way.
Laura Clawson 05.23.15 at 8:37 pm
Well, I followed perfectly, did not know about the BONER episode, and tend to agree. I think Freddie de B is often interesting and often find myself in agreement with him or at least provoked in a useful way, but at the same time … this take rings true. And it’s unfortunate that reflexively dismissing his critics appears to be such a habit of his.
nnyhav 05.23.15 at 8:48 pm
Got no cat in this fight, find both hit-or-miss, but
DeBoer is sometimes trenchant, never funny (at least not intentionally). It’s one thing to make fun of the humor-impaired (not a protected class last I checked my privilege), another to impute motive. I think the listicle is go-to because the unfunny metafunniness is what doesn’t quite separate droll from troll (as the followup would seem to confirm), while the formulaic approach, funny at first pass less so for each subsequent, as then being full of insidery goodness (builds community!), is a related meta-complaint. I don’t think it has much to do with any specifically feminist aspect of humor he doesn’t get. But hey he linked Brauer & Ortberg so hey linking his Ortberg & his Doyle is fair game I guess (but look I just linked deBoer & Waring!)
I do have a separate problem with the platform (the-toaster?) in its ad-aggressiveness, including hiding ad-links behind ostensibly internal linkage (before cycling back on auto page reloads) (which took me to play WoW free! whilst tracking down above linkage) (same sort of reason I won’t ever click on any of aldaily’s weeklystandard links …)
bianca steele 05.23.15 at 9:14 pm
@16
So for David to be challenged, women must be bashed?
He doesn’t seem to know how to criticize an idea, only how to point out the supposed moral failings of a person. Neither does he seem to know how to write publicly without performing a pose that positions him as better-than a member of some group that’s lower-status than him. He doesn’t seem to have any knowledge or opinions about the positions he takes, other than the social positions and supposed motivations of the people he thinks don’t share them in the correct way.
I wasn’t going to reply, I feel bad at this point. But David’s attitude seems to be that we should encourage him to both make a fool of himself and defame his rivals because sometimes he makes reference at third hand to something interesting.
Rich Puchalsky 05.23.15 at 9:22 pm
BW: “Wringing your hands over Mallory Ortberg because you’re concerned she’s not growing as a writer is…bizarre.”
I criticize John Holbo for hitting the same easy targets in his political / rhetorical analysis pieces and not challenging himself by taking on something more difficult. I think it’s pretty common for people to criticize writers who they think are good but not as good as they could be — why would anyone waste their time criticizing bad writers?
As for the dispute at hand, everyone is in the wrong. DeBoer really does do the things his detractors say he does, and the people he criticizes really do do the things that he says they do. I predict that no one involved will learn anything.
LFC 05.23.15 at 10:45 pm
Dave @21
a really painful thing here is that the dude’s motivation is only to be accepted among the intelligentsia. I think that’s why he’s so strident, anyway. He kind of reminds me of Corey Robin and Eric [sic; should be Erik] Loomis in that way.
Robin is a public intellectual already “accepted among the intelligentsia.” Loomis is prob. not quite in the same ecological niche yet, so to speak, but seems to be getting there pretty fast. The idea that their online writing is aimed primarily at getting “accepted among the intelligentsia” thus strikes me as weird. They’re already in the
intelligentsia.
I don’t read (except very occasionally) F.deBoer, but if he really cared about “being accepted among the intelligentsia” I’m not sure spending a huge amount of time on the Internet (even though a lot of people apparently read his blog, an accomplishment in itself) is the best way to achieve that. (But as I say, I don’t read him.)
Jason Townsend 05.23.15 at 10:53 pm
Re: “everyone” being “in the wrong,” I don’t see a lot of ambiguity about how creepy and sexist deBoer’s criticisms of Doyle and Ortberg were. I take issue with his criticisms full stop, in view of the disconnect between what seems to imagine they should’ve be writing and what they actually do, and the spuriousness of his this-unanswerable-frivolity-will-ruin-discourse argument. (More trivially, his misattributing the authorship of one of the posts he critiqued was a little ridiculous in the context of his exacting standards for Internet Thought.)
But the criticisms having been made in a creepily sexist way (partly posted to Doyle’s comments section) is another whole layer of dubiety on top of that, and a good enough reason not to make some kind of “both sides have a problem here” equivalence between him and some people he wrote dumb things about.
Charlie 05.23.15 at 10:57 pm
I dunno. Comparing someone’s output to farting in a paper bag seems like really smart, high-minded criticism, especially since deBoer is getting a PhD in rhetoric.
Anderson 05.24.15 at 1:37 am
26: LFC, FdB’s problem, in part, is that he also wants to be accepted as cool. Which he is not. Partly because he thinks being the daring guy who calls out feminists re: trivia is cool. (When femin
SamInMpls 05.24.15 at 2:03 am
I really appreciated this post. I was aware of the recent exchange with Ortberg but hadn’t read the Sady Doyle post.
When I read Freddie’s piece on critique drift I don’t see him casting the unserious aspects of modern leftism as uniquely and pathologically feminine. And I’m not suggesting he hasn’t gotten up to that elsewhere.
It is simply that this sort of thing drives me nuts:
DeBoer is making a larger point which, if it were not so hideously sexist, would have some merit. Recursive LOLspeak and self-critical whiteness can be an idle diversion for minds that would be more profitably engaged in political activism. Frothing oneself to a lather about the latest outrage is counterproductive if it only redirects energy away from real issues. OK! These are, in principle, valid criticisms of the internet progressive milieu. HOWEVER: a) this goes awry when the complaint is a sexist one that codes the lamentable unseriousness as female b) the criticism itself can and has become an irritable gesture, quite entirely another matryoshka doll inside the online feminist one! The pose of the Orwell-like contrarian who calls people to action with high-minded seriousness is…also a pose!
If there are indeed principled and valid criticisms of the internet progressive milieu to be made, can we forget about Freddie and have that discussion? PLEASE?
[M]any in the broad online left have adopted a norm where being an ally means that you never critique people who are presumed to be speaking from your side, and especially if they are seen as speaking from a position of greater oppression. I understand the need for solidarity, I understand the problem of undermining and derailing, and I recognize why people feel strongly that those who have traditionally been silenced should be given a position of privilege in our conversations. But critique drift demonstrates why a healthy, functioning political movement can’t forbid tactical criticism of those with whom you largely agree. Because critical vocabulary and political arguments are common intellectual property which gain or lose power based on their communal use, never criticizing those who misuse them ultimately disarms the Left. Refusing to say “this is a real thing, but you are not being fair or helpful in making that accusation right now†alienates potential allies, contributes to the burgeoning backlash against social justice politics, and prevents us from making the most accurate, cogent critique possible.
Is this casting the unserious aspects of modern leftism as uniquely and pathologically feminine? Is it just not that interesting?
Finally, I have no idea who this mcmanus-sensei person is but they sound FUN.
delagar 05.24.15 at 2:03 am
I found it easy to follow, Belle.
Of course, I did know beforehand who Ortberg, deBoer, and LGM all were.
I also think Freddie is both annoying and pompous, for the record.
LFC 05.24.15 at 3:12 am
Btw what David @16 said about France’s education minister is interesting. (Obvs. if I followed French politics closely I wd have known that already, but I don’t).
Belle Waring 05.24.15 at 3:17 am
You cal totally criticize Mallory Ortberg! You can even say you think she’s not funny. You’ll be wrong, but that’s OK. I’m explaining that reaching for Ortberg when some other dude on The Toast writes something you dislike strikes me as odd, and given the specific history I put here, in overly great detail probably, likely to be motivated by reasons other than the World Spirit working itself out in history.
Dave 05.24.15 at 3:37 am
LFC @ 26
I mean fdb’s stridency reminds me of Robin and Loomis. He emulates their tone.
js. 05.24.15 at 3:49 am
I didn’t really have any trouble following the post (I did know about the BONER episode beforehand)—and I think I got the point. But the TPP bit at the beginning is just background/set-up that’s not really got to do anything with the point of the post, right? I think this might be throwing people off slightly (see e.g. Lynne @6).
js. 05.24.15 at 3:52 am
I’m basically in agreement with the post, but the byline of the Toast listicle post is Nicole Cliffe.
js. 05.24.15 at 3:57 am
Sorry, one last comment. That “white man’s books” list on the Toast: it just makes no sense! I seriously do not know one person, not one single person, who has both DFW and Dan Brown on their bookshelves. How does that even work?
KarlB 05.24.15 at 4:46 am
Good God, what a tedious twit he is.
In every sentence he’s either reading somebody’s mind for them or showing off his hipster intellect. And then there’s the absence of brevity. Even if you can forgive his sanctimony and pig headedness, the long, unrewarded slog through his prose would drive you to despair.
David 05.24.15 at 5:34 am
I question Debeers’ value to the Left. He seems to be doing little other than giving aid and comfort to the Right (look at the frequent commentators on his site). Kind of the David Frum of the Left.
What the Left needs is not squishy reconciliation with center-Rightists who might be convinced to not hate us. It is to put the kind of effort into a campaign to attack economic inequality and global warming that went into the fight over gay marriage.
Contra Deboers, I think the Left’s high minded cultural prestige and tactical condescension is a tool and an asset, not something to apologize for.
David 05.24.15 at 5:41 am
And, frankly, the reason that disregarding white liberal men’s opinions on things like racism and feminism is because white liberal men never cease having terrible opinions about those very things. They legitimize the criticism by being offended, no matter how high minded and concern trolley they can manage to come off.
ZM 05.24.15 at 7:00 am
I must say I have read The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series and the Harry Potter series and have also read serious books, although not DFW as I read a bit of Infinite Jest and the sentiment meant I did not want to read such a long book in that sentiment. Although I tend to keep just the serious books on my bookshelf, even when I haven’t read them all, as I take an aspirational approach to what is on my bookshelf.
SamInMpls: “If there are indeed principled and valid criticisms of the internet progressive milieu to be made, can we forget about Freddie and have that discussion? PLEASE?”
Well, Belle had posts not too long ago for people to discuss people’s views of problems they had with feminism.
Belle: “this goes awry when the complaint is a sexist one that codes the lamentable unseriousness as female”
I have experienced this sort of sexism from women not just from men. Although other women have also been more supportive. One of my undergraduate majors was art and I found the critical approaches from the male and female lecturers different and their gender was reflected in my marks although I don’t think there was so much difference in what I handed in to them. I usually got better marks from the women lecturers, while the men lecturers critiqued my work as too light or old fashioned. I also found it hard to take some direction — for instance from newspaper pictures I painted a portrait of an Afghan woman with her child like an icon and drew an East Timorese girl like an icon — it was a Catholic university so this should have been fine, but the lecturer wanted abstracts to work on technique for the assignments — but, I thought, I can work on technique just as well with traditional non-figurative designs or with figuratives. Also that sort of abstract work is more mid 20th C post-war modernism. There was a long drought here at the time so for one installation I poured clay slip on the floor to be like how the soil was cracking in the bush, and brought pieces of metal and discarded things from the bush into the piece as well. As you can see this was not so light or old fashioned. I also brought in a local indigenous wild orchid and placed it in an installation with rusty metal things. The other year the environment department put a press release in the local paper saying there was only one of that orchid left that they knew about, so I felt terrible — until I asked locals, and it turned out the department just was not up to date and thankfully there are more of them.
I also think Freddie deBoer must be quite behind the times with his ideas. We just had a talk given at uni by the president of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, Louise Brooke-Smith, and she is the first female to be in that office in the 147 years of the organisation. She spoke of the importance of diversity and inclusion in the profession, telling us that when she started out after graduating in Human Geography in Sheffield only 2% of the profession was female, now it has risen to 12-16% — so it is more inclusive than it used to be but there is progress still to be made. She took the medallion of the office off its purple ribbon and fastened it into a necklace instead so she can regularly wear it in carrying out her ambassadorial role on the international stage.
Walt 05.24.15 at 7:46 am
The reaction to the white male books list makes me actively yearn for the extinction of the human race as a failed experiment by nature. It’s just a silly list. It’s not a particularly good example of a silly list, but the nature of the genre is that it’s a mixture of observational humor juxtaposed with absurdity. Hence Slaughterhouse Five at 2 juxtaposed with The 9/11 Commission Report at 46. If it was about any other subject people would see that, but since it has “White Men” in the title people feel compelled to read it as pointed political commentary. But asking what it all means is like asking “What did David Letterman mean when he said that the number one number between one and ten is two?”
David 05.24.15 at 11:12 am
There seem to be several David’s here – I disclaim ownership of all posts except #16.
I thought Bianca’s response was interesting, not least because it drags in the subliminal innuendo that challenges to conventional leftist thinking are associated with violence against women, or at least approving of it. QED I think.
But that’s not really the point, not can I work up any real interest about who said what to whom about what and who’s right, when there’s a much bigger point at issue. Are you prepared to have your beliefs challenged or not? If you are a firm believer in higher taxes for the rich, are you prepared to read a coherent article by someone opposing them? If you are a strong supporter of homosexual marriage, are you prepared to read an article by someone arguing that not enough thought has been given to the wider social consequences? And so on for many other subjects. The answer should be “yes” in all cases, because if your views are based on considered thought and evidence, then you have nothing to fear by exposing yourself to different views held by others.
The test is not whether someone agrees with you (I’m fed up with reading people who agree with me and with each other) but whether they say interesting and provocative things that make you think.
It’s interesting that in another thread last week we were all singing the praises of independent leftists who opposed Soviet Communism. It’s always easier to admire independent thinking in retrospect. If you look at all of the acrimony heaped on poor Orwell, for example, for attacking his own side and providing aid and comfort to the Right, you’d see some similarities with current debates. Pity we don’t have anyone like Orwell today.
JPL 05.24.15 at 11:46 am
Walt @42
Didn’t hear Letterman say what you said he said, but if he said that, the meaning of it is perfectly clear. (I may be mistaken in assuming that you are looking for an example of randomness, obscurity or unknowable mystery, or saying that the list ultimately has no further significance, so we shouldn’t waste our time looking for any. Or do you want to say maybe that it’s like wondering why man’s best friend has to enjoy chasing cars?)
Belle Waring 05.24.15 at 12:33 pm
OK, not a list written by a dude! My mistake, but if anything it strengthens the point. As to whether we can have a conversation about the irritable gestures of LOL-speak etc. are a problem for the left, sure. I thought we were having that discussion recently when I responded to Jonathan Chait, and subsequently deBoer himself. It’s just that when white feminists decry minority women’s identity politics as divisive, they are trying to slam the door to social equality behind them, or at the very least move forward without these trouble-makers. And when cis feminists complain that advocating for trans* women (and men) is a dangerous diversion away from the essential feminist project they are doing the same. And when…white male progressives say that women feminists are distracting us from serious matters with their joking it’s the same. I’m inclined to be suspicious, that’s all. Liberation is importantly not a personal project in which someone changes themselves; it is a joint project in which people work cooperatively to change society.
dsquared 05.24.15 at 12:54 pm
Finally, I have no idea who this mcmanus-sensei person is but they sound FUN.
Less than you’d imagine.
It is kind of daft when people go on and on calling each other “badass” for doing things like writing a post about their aunt, or making a political movement out of not liking the colour pink, or ignoring how crazily self-indulgent and incoherent “Tiger Beatdown” was as a blog. But it’s no dafter than anything else on the internet, so why always bang this particular drum?
As I get older, I have less and less patience with people who think they’re being very deep and almost revolutionary by telling you that whatever you’re currently interested in, you should shut up about it and talk about social class. Not because they’re right or wrong, just because they’re invariably really boring. Like Randians with a minus sign in front of them.
Belle Waring 05.24.15 at 12:56 pm
Also, sure, it would be great if we had George Orwell. But what in practice we get is Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan. It can’t be an accident. Would-be Orwells tend to be reflexive contrarian #slatepitchers, not lambent torches leading people from the darkness of ideological conformity. I’m happy to listen to people I don’t agree with; TOO happy, otherwise I would never torment myself hatefucking MRA blogs. I listen with suspicion to white men speaking truth to the power of…fellow leftists who are not really powerful except in their own sphere, the way I am at this blog or Sady Doyle is at Tiger Beatdown. It’s usually not brave kicking-up but brave kicking-down.
Belle Waring 05.24.15 at 1:00 pm
I should probably make clear that I love bob mcmanus because he is my dad. No, really. If I didn’t know what number of dogs my dad has, I would be entirely convinced that my dad was commenting online under a pseudonym due to his extreme paranoia. They are in almost every other respect identical, save the dogs. So I have possibly excessive love for mcmanus.
bianca steele 05.24.15 at 1:12 pm
I have both DFW and Dan Brown on my shelves.
David @ 43
Because I used the word “bash”? Give me a break. That’s on par for criticizing (dare I say “attacking”?) someone for calling for a “brute force solution.” Or, for that matter, making you responsible for all the commenters calling themselves “David.” In other words, unserious.
In the future, when you’re describing the virtues of people who like certain good things, and explaining why those who don’t lack those virtues, please don’t associate those arguments with me. Especially when those good things are a person so thin-skinned that they can’t bear an explanation of how they don’t measure up,
Belle, Fdb has all the right attitudes, sure–except, just maybe, it was a little dumb to claim that the word “bro” is a slur meaning “left”–maybe not that?
dsquared 05.24.15 at 1:29 pm
And actually, you can see that this sort of scolding is not symmetrical. Take me, for instance. My hobby at the moment is pretending that I’m involved in international summits on the future of the euro. That’s ridiculous of course. A grown man, engaged in Angela Merkel cosplay. Ffs.
But that gets coded as Serious and Important Issues, so nobody is all on my case for it or regards it as a Distraction. Makes no sense. Sorry, just seen a really ace leather jacket on eBay, just like the one Christine Lagarde wears.
Ben 05.24.15 at 2:08 pm
Books Every ECB Executive Board Member Has On His Shelf
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
C, Tom McCarthy
Angels and Demons, Dan Brown (if Italian)
Lee A. Arnold 05.24.15 at 2:13 pm
Belle: “What I guess I’m saying is, if your complaints about online unseriousness have lead you to criticize Sady Doyle and Mallory Ortberg in particular, something has gone wrong.”
I think you should certainly extend that courtesy to Nicole Cliffe. I think her list of Big Toasticles is a fairly good representation of the highs and lows which have combined to give us the swamp of US middlebrow culture. She’s closer to the truth than anybody.
magistra 05.24.15 at 2:16 pm
David @43
If you are a strong supporter of homosexual marriage, are you prepared to read an article by someone arguing that not enough thought has been given to the wider social consequences?
Well, I’d probably read one article by that person. But unless they struck me as saying something really thoughtful and novel, I probably wouldn’t read another one by them on the same topic. And if I saw another article by a different person making the same arguments, I wouldn’t read to the end. It’s not the disagreeing with someone that makes me stop reading: it’s when I see the same tedious wrong-headed arguments again and again.
And this seems to be the problem with some people: that it’s not enough that you listen to them the first time round. It’s that you then have to listen to them some more, while they explain that they have a really important argument which will change your mind, which turns out to be almost exactly the same as their previous argument. And if you don’t listen to them the second time or the third time or the fiftieth time, then you’re close-minded. No, I’m just bored.
Rich Puchalsky 05.24.15 at 2:32 pm
I don’t see any sign that the people criticizing deBoer here have actually understood his argument. It’s not that he regards what he criticizes as a Distraction, a frivolity. What he criticizes is a major tactic of a movement that he identifies with that he thinks can’t help but backfire on and hurt that movement.
All of the people saying how he’s pompous, just wants to be cool and so on are being foolish. Yeah sure, maybe he is, but he’s also trying to do something important and it’s easy to dismiss that as him wanting intellectual cred or whatever. He’s a just-graduated grad student who needs a job. If he isn’t seeking intellectual cred, he’s doing something wrong, and the grade school BS about how he thinks he’s cool but he really isn’t cool is ridiculous.
Reading the various articles involved, from deBoer I read about things like “critique drift”; from his detractors I read that deBoer five years ago used some very sexist tropes in Internet argument. OK.
mattski 05.24.15 at 2:32 pm
Liberation is importantly not a personal project in which someone changes themselves; it is a joint project in which people work cooperatively to change society.
Are they mutually exclusive?!
If I believe I need not change myself for the better… aren’t I sand in the gears of change?
Belle Waring 05.24.15 at 2:46 pm
OK mattski, that’s fair. Certainly I recognize latent sexism or racism in myself and have to say, “I need to be conscious of this and check my attitudes.” But it seems curious to cast the struggle as a purely internal one that doesn’t need to be checked against the other people in your political movement.
bianca steele 05.24.15 at 2:52 pm
Rich seems to think arguments like magistra’s, though they seem to be directed at FdB, are actually secretly aimed at the people he disagrees with.
Bloix 05.24.15 at 2:54 pm
#54- the point is not that the other person’s arguments are tedious or boring – the point is that life is too short.
Take the extraordinary historian Garry Wills, who’s written any number of important and persuasive books: on Jefferson, Lincoln, the Kennedy assassination, the Reagan presidency, and many more. I read Wills on politics and history whenever I can.
Wills is also a committed liberal Catholic, and he has written books about the papacy, prayer, Mary, Augustine, Paul, the priesthood – all from the standpoint of a believer.
Wills is a smarter, harder working, deeper thinker – 1000 times so! – than I can ever hope to be. I would never presume to say that anything he believes is tedious or wrong-headed.
But I’m not interested in arguing with him or anyone else over the existence of God. I’ve had that argument, I’ve reached my conclusion, I need to move on if I am ever to make any progress.
That doesn’t mean that I have contempt for sincere and thoughtful people who have come to a different conclusion or that when they say something to me I respond by screaming at them to shut up.
Bloix 05.24.15 at 2:56 pm
Sorry, this is a response #53 – magistra –
bob mcmanus 05.24.15 at 3:18 pm
From Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois, talking about the rise of the melodramatic everyday in 19thc fiction
‘Middles and mediations—what the text calls mediums (“unfriendly ,
“pettyâ€, “embroiledâ€, “dim and cloggingâ€)— elude the time-killing or merely
catalytic function assigned to them, and actually deflect from the ending that they
were meant to reach’ (D. A. Miller, Narrative and Its Discontents, Princeton 1981,
p. 142).
Waring: Casting the unserious aspects of modern leftism as uniquely and pathologically feminine is bullshit. …I got to be careful here, huh?
“Feminine” is not a word I use without quotes, apparently unlike Waring.
There is the “feminine” as essence, biologically determined.
There is the “feminine” as role, socially determined and performative
(There are surely others)
Is there a “feminine” to be protected, defended, and liberated by “feminists,” some residual after subtracting the first two?
…
There is a lot of something goin round as various “masculinities” “masculinisms” and sexual politics and gender critiques get merged with critiques of late capitalism.
One example: as we change from secure industrial labor to a service neoliberal economy, there have been some (Silvia Federici?) who have used terms like “feminization” of the labor force, or “housewifeization” (Maria Mies Patriarchy and the Global Accumulation of Capital 1986) of labor, meaning:precarious, underpaid, 24/7/365 and oncall, disrespected but motivated with affective ties and shaming, etc.
One should not confuse critiques of the role or performance, or aspects thereof, with critiques of particular “women” or what, the “feminine-in-itself,” all “womankind?” I have difficulty even talking about something that may not exist except as an oppressive fiction.
But with the rise of “feminism,” the movement of “women” into labor markets, positions of power etc, there is something here, about how capitalism and patriarchy re-appropriate old/new gender roles into new improved tools of exploitation and oppression, in ways under the rules of neo-liberalism, are attractive even/especially to those oppressed, and feel like agency…that bears examination.
I would expect DeBoer to do a hell of lot better job than anything I might attempt, and to do a better job, a more serious informed job, than the one he is doing.
bob mcmanus 05.24.15 at 3:37 pm
Shorter to DeBoer: “Critique drift” if such a thing, is most likely global, part of the totality, has applications outside of “feminist” discourse (to be fair, FdB does mention instances involving anti-racism) and if gendered, then gendered as ideology and hegemony. “Whose hegemony” remains in question.
politicalfootball 05.24.15 at 3:45 pm
What he criticizes is a major tactic of a movement that he identifies with that he thinks can’t help but backfire on and hurt that movement.
Yeah, see, the problem with this is that he doesn’t show much evidence of actually giving a fuck about this major tactic of the movement, but is instead all caught up in his own butthurt. When this “major tactic” is used, he claims to be offended by its use. When it’s not used, he’s still offended.
The use or non-use of this tactic is entirely irrelevant to Freddie’s point.
What’s his gripe about the list of books? He seems to think that it somehow fits into the category he’s talking about, but what’s his evidence?
The actual text doesn’t support him – this is a woman saying something about what it means to own a set of books that she owns.
But it is a woman writing about men. That’s all he’s got, and he runs with it. He’s offended because he just knows what this type of woman thinks of men.
Freddie is correct in pointing out that the list is outdated. Would he have been happier if the list had been designated as being for “old” white males? I doubt it.
Me, I was amused by the list precisely because it was aimed at me. Not only have I read a lot of those books, but almost all of the ones I’ve read are important to me. I had that pleasant little shock of recognition as I scanned the list, as was the author’s obvious intent.
I’m prepared to consider the possibility that my reading habits say something negative about me, but the author of the piece was explicitly not asking me to consider that – or, at most, she was asking me to consider that there was something wrong with both of us – with me and her. She wasn’t laughing at. She was laughing with.
Freddie employs a clever little jiu jitsu trick here. When a woman writes about men on the Internet, no matter what she says, certain men are going to get all butthurt, and they’re going to say so. Then, often, the female writer will note this.
That’s what happened here, but somehow Freddie finds this to be the fault of the author!
Belle, I think, is mistaken in giving Freddie a pass for this:
That’s just stone bullshit. How does Freddie defend this assertion? By showing all of the progressive support for Brauer? Well, no, that would be impossible because, you know, there wasn’t any.
Instead, he misrepresents the sentiment expressed by one Toast author, and concern-trolls another.
Freddie’s got a knack for getting readers to confabulate. “Surely a smart guy like Freddie must not be saying something that’s as stupid as his actual words. Let me help him out by trying to connect his writing to some actual thing in reality.”
That’s a mistake. People need to take Freddie at face value and accept that the content of his writing is what it is.
politicalfootball 05.24.15 at 3:53 pm
Note Freddie in the OP:
Now look at him here.
It might be that, after a period of sufficient reflection, someone like deBoer could become a non-asshole, but I doubt that’s the trajectory he’s on. It would require some kind of self-reflection, and he’s shown little knack for it.
Stephenson-quoter kun 05.24.15 at 4:03 pm
Mallory Ortberg is awesome. I can’t really see why anyone would want to have a go at her.
I’m sure there are second-rate Mallory Ortberg imitators out there, and maybe they’re using some lazy gender politics to get cheap laughs, and maybe they’re using that gender politics to deflect criticism of their work. I can imagine such people existing, at least. But it’s hardly the worst crime, is it? It’s somewhere on a par with personalised car registration plates or keeping a saxophone in the corner of your living room when you can’t play the saxophone. One can rage against these things, but you have to be particularly entertaining if you want to do so, and FdB doesn’t seem particularly entertaining.
To be more serious – sure, tribalistic sacred magic words are always and everywhere a bad thing. The problem with ‘wealth creators’ or ‘defending the homeland’ is not just that they’re conservative buzzwords, but that they’re buzzwords designed to stop people from thinking about what these things might really mean (maybe wealth is created by workers; maybe you defend the homeland best by making peace with your enemies). Likewise concepts of privilege or oppression could degenerate from a genuine enquiry into the relative advantages and disadvantages of certain people in a given situation into a means of arguing that some people or arguments are automatically presumed to be correct or incorrect based on the identity of the speaker rather than the content of the argument. I mean, it’s possible, at least. And if it’s possible, there are certainly some strong incentives to do it (not least that it enables you to win arguments on the internet, and that shit is addictive).
What bothers me is that FdB is trying to pose as someone uniquely placed to see through this, a man with the courage and intellectual rigour to confront reality without the comfort of lazy sanctities, yet he proceeds to make pot-shots at unfunny listicles as a means of making his point. I mean, if he really believes that he is fighting the good fight against cognitive biases so strong that they have warped the minds of most of his fellow feminists (people already presumed to be more sane than the average), wouldn’t he understand the need for some pretty fucking strong arguments to bolster his case? If he’s slaying a demon, he’s going to need something better than a pea-shooter to do it with.
For what it’s worth, I do think that we all have a tendency to give a free pass to people who are on our ‘side’, and a rough time to people who don’t present themselves as we’d like. We do it all the time. Social identification trumps rational thought far more often than anyone would want to admit, and even admitting it doesn’t make it any easier to solve. At some point though, you have to accept that this happens and settle for a culture which allows questioning of sacred beliefs, and allows enough pluralism that if some really awful belief happens to achieve sacred status then it’s possible to escape. Beyond that you just need to decide which side you’re on and accept that not everything is going to make rational sense all the time. It is not necessary to force Mallory Ortberg to become the perfect version of Mallory Ortberg just because you can construct a rationally-sound model of the world in which this occurs, even if it’s a strictly better world than our current one. There are bigger problems, and given our lack of precision in aiming our efforts we’re best off shooting at the biggest problems we can see.
Rich Puchalsky 05.24.15 at 4:23 pm
polticalfootball, did you actually read FdB’s post? By “the list of books” you presumably mean the Nicole Clifte article.
1. “The actual text doesn’t support him – this is a woman saying something about what it means to own a set of books that she owns.”
No. It’s called “Books that Literally All White Men Own” and tagged “I own most of these books myself.”
2. “But it is a woman writing about men. That’s all he’s got, and he runs with it. He’s offended because he just knows what this type of woman thinks of men.”
There is zero evidence for this. Here’s what FdB writes:
“If ever a professional writer farted out a piece, this is it. Are some of these books indicative of a kind of vague dude culture? I guess so, although as is typical of these things, it mostly refers to the white dude culture of 20 or so years ago. But besides: you could literally take any twenty of the books on here, substitute them at random with any twenty other books, and the people who are going wild for the piece in the comments would go just as wild. What does that say about the exercise?”
3. “When a woman writes about men on the Internet, no matter what she says, certain men are going to get all butthurt, and they’re going to say so. Then, often, the female writer will note this. That’s what happened here, but somehow Freddie finds this to be the fault of the author!”
I’ll just quote FdB again:
“Well, I’m insulted all right, but it’s not because I feel affronted as a white dude. I’m insulted because an adult got paid to rifle through some Wikipedia list of best sellers and throw it on a Word doc. I wish I was affronted politically or personally, because that would imply that there’s something actually interesting going on in this list. There’s many more subversive ways to try something like this. For example: a more honest version of this list would have to include Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. Just like an honest music version of this exercise would require including Beyonce and Kendrick Lamar. Looking at how chichi white culture has grown to use performative love of black culture as a shield against social and political judgment, that might be useful, risky. It would risk, in fact, implicating The Toast’s audience. It would risk shaking them out of their complacency that they are The Good Ones.”
So, political football, when you had that “pleasant little shock of recognition” that you write about, you were participating in exactly what FdB was criticizing. He criticized the writer of that piece exactly for that: for giving you that complacent little pleasant shock of recognition, for flattering your preconceptions. It’s too bad for you that you can’t understand that.
js. 05.24.15 at 6:42 pm
bianca steele @49: Point taken. I should probably get out more (not the first time the thought has occurred to me).
I take Walt’s (amazingly expressed) point too. I guess I find that lists these are sometimes funnier if there’s somewhat of an identifiable target “type”, and I couldn’t tell what that type could possibly be. But maybe I should be reading the list in a slightly more Borgesian spirit.
Bloix 05.24.15 at 7:27 pm
That book list is a straight rip-off of Stuff White People Like, except that TWPL was funny. As for the list:
1) White men do not read for pleasure. Old guys read the paper. Under 40 – no.
2) White men who read for pleasure do not read fiction. History. Biography. Politics. Economics. pop culture. Not fiction.
3) White men who read fiction read genre fiction. Sci fi and fantasy. Thrillers and detective fiction. Some historical fiction buffs still out there (the Napoleonic Wars). Not literary fiction, not at all.
4) The ten or twenty white men in America who still read literary fiction read contemporary novels. Ian McEwan. Jonathan Franzen. The Art of Fielding, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, The Goldfinch. Fourth of July Creek. Not dead guy books.
5) The two or three white men in America who read Hemingway, Salinger, Fitzgerald, Updike, Roth, Vidal are graduate students in gender studies. And they’re gay.
6) Maybe there’s one guy who reads Roth. Henry, not Philip.
David L 05.24.15 at 7:28 pm
@David #16 and 43-
You are wrong but wrong in a very textbook way that cuts to the heart of the matter at hand.
Politics is not, contra you and DeBoer, a process of rational argumentation. In fact, I am very tired of it being presented as such, not least because I suspect that people who chide the Left for being close minded and authoritarian have far more respect for the ”intellectual” positions of the Right than they like to let on.
Arguments over issues like gay marriage and income redistribution are based on emotional empathy and positions of power, with the intellectual positions pro or con being smokescreens. Do you really think that hundreds of millions of people the world over read detailed scholarly arguments about the possible negative effects of gay marriage, and eventually decided that the benefits outweighed the risk? No. They received messages from the Media or their peer group that homophobia was uncool and unacceptable (or met and empathized with a gay man or woman) and rationalized to themselves changing their minds! (Not incidentally, the Left or at least center-left’s position as arbiter of cool in American culture is a powerful weapon, and discarding it would be a massive mistake. But DeBoer doesn’t care about that, because he is the ONLY SANE MAN)
brandon 05.24.15 at 7:46 pm
Um guys I guess this is just continuing to kill the shit out of the joke but it seems to me what Cliffe is doing in that White Guys Book List Toast post is, like a lot of the humor there, taking the clueless judgments of white patriarchy and turning it against them. Meaning, there’s a lot of clickbait lists floating around the internet that are like “9 things every college girl has in her room”, that kind of reductive bullshit, and the white guy book list is playing off of that. That it is so casually scattershot is part of the point.
Of course, to the extent the piece doesn’t work, it’s because “I am making a thing that is meta-bad, wink wink” so easily becomes “I am making a thing that is just bad”.
On the third hand it looks like Bloix in all seriousness can do a worse job compiling a list than Cliffe can do when she’s just shitting around, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Bloix 05.24.15 at 8:09 pm
I’M NOT COMPILING A LIST!
Oh, I left out Wolf Hall.
Seriously, do you know any white men? Do they read literary fiction? They do not. They read Churchill’s Lessons for Today’s Middle Manager, and 27 Ways to Stay Ahead of the Guy Who’s Angling for Your Job, and God’s Plan for Your Family, and Prudent Investing For The 55-Year Old Who Dearly Would Like To Retire Before 75.
The ones with intellectual pretensions read about WWII or the Opening of the West. Unbelievably outdated stuff. Either great men doing great deeds or great political movements. The other night I had dinner with a smart and educated man of 60 who prides himself that he keeps up with ideas outside of his profession, and he was reading Niall Ferguson. It’s pathetic, but there it is.
And if they read fiction, which they don’t, it’s JRR (GRR? MRR? MMR?) Martin.
Now, maybe the list isn’t what white men read, it’s what white men display on their bookshelves. Which is not those books, unless “literally all white men” means some east and west coast college educated men who majored in the humanities and graduated before 1975 and haven’t moved in the last 20 years, when they culled the shelves and dumped the crap they haven’t opened in decades.
And even then, not these books. Half of them are books my father might have had on his shelves if he’d read books, and he died 12 years ago.
Bloix 05.24.15 at 8:13 pm
And anyway, since the invention of the Kindle (circa 2007) the idea that you can look at a bookshelf and tell something about someone is ridiculous. The whole exercise smells like a nursing home.
Rich Puchalsky 05.24.15 at 8:33 pm
David L: “Not incidentally, the Left or at least center-left’s position as arbiter of cool in American culture is a powerful weapon, and discarding it would be a massive mistake. But DeBoer doesn’t care about that, because he is the ONLY SANE MAN”
I’m glad to see that at least one person has the right idea about what this is about. Let’s have high school forever.
Tyrone Slothrop 05.24.15 at 8:39 pm
Sit on it, Puchalsky!
David L 05.24.15 at 8:46 pm
”I’m glad to see that at least one person has the right idea about what this is about. Let’s have high school forever.”
Or lets slide further and further to the Right because evil feminists hurt my feelings.
Rich Puchalsky 05.24.15 at 9:21 pm
Sliding further and further to the Right would be bad, I agree. OK, I’m convinced. We’ll be the arbiters of cool, and they’ll have money and power.
Note that I don’t think that rational argument works either. I just wanted people to be clear that when they talk about being the arbiters of cool, they aren’t just talking about just the nice, friendly “it’s cool to be LGTBQ-supportive” thing that exists in middle schools these days. They’re also talking about the “It’s uncool to think about anything or take anything too seriously” bit that also exists. Let’s see: #9 “intellectual snob”, #12 “pompous”, #21 “motivation is only to be accepted among the intelligentsia”, “strident”, #29 “wants to be accepted as cool”, #31 “pompous” again, #34 “stridency”, #38 “showing off his hipster intellect” OK I’m getting tired and will stop. I don’t know why people think that the center-left really has control over what kinds of adolescent cool-tropes exist. You pretty much have to take all of them if that’s what you’re going to rely on.
David 05.24.15 at 9:30 pm
”We’ll be the arbiters of cool, and they’ll have money and power.”
Because only if we all become more like Freddy D will the REVOLUTION come.
MPAVictoria 05.24.15 at 10:03 pm
“Arguments over issues like gay marriage and income redistribution are based on emotional empathy and positions of power, with the intellectual positions pro or con being smokescreens. Do you really think that hundreds of millions of people the world over read detailed scholarly arguments about the possible negative effects of gay marriage, and eventually decided that the benefits outweighed the risk? No. They received messages from the Media or their peer group that homophobia was uncool and unacceptable (or met and empathized with a gay man or woman) and rationalized to themselves changing their minds! (Not incidentally, the Left or at least center-left’s position as arbiter of cool in American culture is a powerful weapon, and discarding it would be a massive mistake. But DeBoer doesn’t care about that, because he is the ONLY SANE MAN)”
Quoted in its entirety because it deserved to be. Well said.
MPAVictoria 05.24.15 at 10:15 pm
Rich I would engage with FdB if he was making a real argument as opposed to constructing the worlds biggest strawman. No one on of any influence on the left supports this wackjob on Twitter comparing opposition to the TPP to lynching. And a joke list on a COMEDY SITE doesn’t prove anything. Belle has this dead to rights. FdB is just annoyed about women being funny on the Internet.
novakant 05.24.15 at 10:45 pm
That was funny, Bloix.
So I read Henry James sometimes …
Lee A. Arnold 05.24.15 at 10:46 pm
Well this white man just started reading Titus Livy. Why? Because I think James Joyce might agree with Nicole Cliffe, too!
It all adds up. I try to explain:
I just started reading Titus Livy, because I just realized that James Joyce must have regarded the ancient Livy’s sympathetic portrayal of Hannibal as part of the literary framework he could use for Anna Livvy’s socially-enforced defense of her own “big H” (his full initials HCE), two of the characters in Finnegans Wake.
What does this have to do with anything here? Well the first thing is that the book is guilt denial, the monologue of a dream of guilt denial. Something happened one day to affect a 1920’s marriage. We never find out exactly what happened (although you can guess). Instead we are reading the interior monologue of a dream of the man, later that night. It’s all mixed up and it’s meant to be, to deny the guilt to himself. In fact it’s a grandiose dream, a Rabelaisian dream, in which the man dredges up the whole history of the human race through the collective unconscious, just in order to deny his guilt. And it doesn’t work — and she gets the last words: He’s gone from his own dream at the end, and now he’s dreaming her, and she hates his memory for doing this to her, but she loved him too, and she was forced in public to make a defense, and so she wrote a bitter letter — and in this way, all speech, words, meanings and histories have been generated, throughout time. This is the literary conceit of Finnegans Wake.
The second reason it pertains here is because the book has a strong proto-“feminist” slant. Now, this is not a term which Joyce countenanced, because in those days it signified the program of the Webbs –this does not mean “Internetts”, I hate to tell you young whippersnappers– which was not Joyce’s own style of spear-shaking. He preferred, shakespearing! Yet Joyce did indeed make the woman turn into into a river at the end, into all rivers, the river resenting to take the shit of the city, which is the man. (So amazingly it’s also proto-environmental, a point well-supported by Joyce’s own comments in Arthur Power’s Conversations with Joyce.)
And the third reason this is related to anything here? The dream history of the human race is dredged up as sounds, as words, as all the crap that’s ever been written, by sewing into the broken dream-language many hundreds of major and minor authors — their names, their prose phrases, their plot structures — from history and literature, including, quite deliberately, many things that were pop, cheap, mediocre yet widespread enough to be included in that Toast listicle, just as if Nicole Cliffe had time-traveled to the 1920’s.
Thus Joyce managed, quite consciously, to write a full critique of the contents of the modern mind, while writing the first work of post-modernism, though of course there’s Jarry.
So: you had better leave dear Nicole Cliffe alone, or you will have James Joyce, and me, to answer to.
p.s. Well what’s Livy got to do with it? It’s only that I just realized that Joyce probably coded something from Livy into the ending river monologue, why? 1. Because in this book, one of Joyce’s strict composition-rules is sound similarity (Livy = Liffey). 2. Because Livy also was driven to a defense of the indefensible (i.e. Rome’s tyranny over Carthage: he was forced to defend it as Roman historian but he shows a telling sympathy to Hannibal). And 3. because Joyce names Livy on the first page of the book, so something out of Livy has got to be somewhere in the final pages too. This is because the book is perfectly symmetrical because the story is cyclical. And isn’t that funny, because the fourth reason for here: here we are having this old conversation again.
Kiwanda 05.24.15 at 11:22 pm
Speaking of strawmen: this is not what FdB is claiming.
As usual, if an example is used in support of something I agree with, it’s emblematic of a broader trend. If it’s in support of something I disagree with, it’s a one-off, isolated, meaningless incident.
FdB says he wants to be able to criticize a not-very-funny listicle without inevitably getting a “white male tears” response. And he gets, inevitably, a “white male tears” response.
It’s hard to see how a five-year-old dust-up, where the “good team” responds to criticism with “you just want to fuck us, and you never will”, and with the trenchant hilarity of replacing his comments with “[BONERS]”, reflects badly on FdB, or is relevant today.
But as usual, if I can ascribe an intent to someone I disagree with, and rebut that intent, that’s a lot more satisfying than criticizing what they actually say. On the other hand, if I need to ignore their intent to interpret what they say in a bad light, then “intent is not magic”.
[Yeah, his recent drama here was odd and overblown (and he was wrong on the substantive point before he made it weirdly personal). ]
David 05.24.15 at 11:33 pm
”Yeah, his recent drama here was odd and overblown (and he was wrong on the substantive point before he made it weirdly personal). ”
Then why are people trying to defend him?
AcademicLurker 05.24.15 at 11:46 pm
Then why are people trying to defend him?
I won’t defend him, and I’ve avoided commenting on the whole thing at all until now, but I am puzzled as to where all the energy driving the collective freak out that’s been ongoing for the last few days (mainly at LG&M, but now here) is coming from. “Some mid-list blogger wrote an overwrought, whiney post” doesn’t seem adequate to explain it.
Rich Puchalsky 05.24.15 at 11:57 pm
AcademicLurker: “I am puzzled as to where all the energy driving the collective freak out that’s been ongoing for the last few days (mainly at LG&M, but now here) is coming from.”
Like I wrote above, it’s high school all life long for some people.
Kiwanda 05.24.15 at 11:59 pm
@David #82: “Then why are people trying to defend him?”
This is an odd question. People can be right about one thing and wrong about another. They can be wrong and not be History’s Greatest Monster. They can be HGM and be right about something. They can be right for the wrong reasons. Usw.
mattski 05.25.15 at 12:03 am
Belle,
But it seems curious to cast the struggle as a purely internal one that doesn’t need to be checked against the other people in your political movement.
Is that what FdB does?
David 05.25.15 at 12:07 am
”but I am puzzled as to where all the energy driving the collective freak out that’s been ongoing for the last few days (mainly at LG&M, but now here) is coming from”
People don’t like the guy. I had never heard of him till yesterday, but he comes off as bending over backwards to sound Left while advancing talking points of the Right, essentially (apparently he is proud of being cited by the National Review!). I’ve met others like him, including an online soi-dissant Marxist who unironically used the term SJW, and they are generally unbearable.
More than that, the talking points of the Right he advances are old-hat culture war stuff. It is giving cover to people who don’t like the Left to advance similar positions under the guise of ”constructive criticism”. (Which is to say, concern trolling.)
Ben 05.25.15 at 12:30 am
It’s high school all life long for some people
“People don’t like the guy. I had never heard of him til yesterday [. . .] (apparently he is proud of being cited by the National Review!)”
Point: Rich
LFC 05.25.15 at 12:33 am
Didn’t get through the whole Toast book list b.c the computer couldn’t handle all the ads on the site. Nor have I read every word of this thread.
However, Bloix @67 does succeed — as novakant already remarked — in being rather amusing. Take this:
4) The ten or twenty white men in America who still read literary fiction read contemporary novels. Ian McEwan. Jonathan Franzen. The Art of Fielding, Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk, The Goldfinch. Fourth of July Creek. Not dead guy books.
I recently read an Ian McEwan novel (guilty!). However, I haven’t read most of the other stuff in #4. And a while back, inspired by a post or two of C. Robin’s, I read Benito Cereno (last I checked, Melville is dead). Also, Bloix left out Cormac McCarthy (who is actually worth reading, albeit perhaps in some moderation). Then there’s Robert Stone, who died only recently. He was so ******* cool, speaking of cool. The guy could write too.
Consumatopia 05.25.15 at 12:36 am
I like a lot of what FdB writes, but if the larger trends he’s complaining about are real, that’s all the more reason to call him out if he’s using those legit broader complaints about the movement as a cudgel against individuals who have gotten under his skin for obscure reasons. I can’t even figure out what his deal is with Ortberg.
Yeah, that means that all the people that he was right about over the years are gonna jump on him whenever he fucks up like this. I’m not sure that’s a bad thing, though–he really should stop getting himself into these messes, and at some point it becomes a bit absurd listening to him telling others that their doing things wrong when he’s so often–or at least, so prominently–doing things wrong himself.
not feeling very nymous 05.25.15 at 12:45 am
I wish we could achieve comity on the following points: (1) the listicle is not horrid, but not very funny (*); (2) there are bits of the progressive Internet which seem like they would do more good in the world if they weren’t so given to fits of rage; (3) point (2) is also true if “progressive” is replaced by nearly other adjective you’d care to name; (4) deBoer is a tiresome writer who occasional gets things right.
*: OTOH, I’m a man, and white enough for all practical purposes, and I own about a third of those books (nos. 1, 2, 3, 7, 12, 13, 16, 18, 19, 21, 34, 40, 44, 46, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75 and 76).
politicalfootball 05.25.15 at 1:03 am
Rich @65: Though I disagree with you, I really appreciate your effort to marshal actual evidence to rebut me. Much of this thread seems to involve an effort to defend deBoer without actually quoting deBoer, or without directly engaging this article. You’ve done both here, and I’ll try to maintain the high standard you’ve set.
You quote the key parts of the Nicole Clifte list:
No. It’s called “Books that Literally All White Men Own†and tagged “I own most of these books myself.â€
You read this as the author separating herself from the readers of the list – and, indeed, she notices that she’s not a white man. But if you don’t get that she’s declaring common ground with the readers of the list, I don’t know what to say.
Are you making a Harold Bloomish Great Books claim here – that Shakespeare (or whoever) speaks to the human condition and therefore there’s nothing gendered or racial about his work?
To say, “Heller doesn’t even see gender,” well, that sort of thing is a Colbert joke for a reason. The thing that Heller (for example) does is quite gendered, and I would be shocked to find out that women appreciate it as much as men.
Freddie assumes that attributing something to white guys is slamming white guys. You accurately describe the relevant bit. Are you really going to insist that the author is distinguishing herself from white guys by saying “literally all white men own” these books, but that she merely owns “most” of them? You don’t hear any irony at all in her “literally all?”
If so, you’re reading is not available to me. I just don’t get.
You pick another dead-on quote from Freddie:
This is great because it really gives away Freddie’s game. He’s not insulted for the obvious reasons – that he reads an insult to white men into this; that he connects her in some way to Allan Brauer – even though he directly says that this is somehow connected to Allan Brauer. No, that’s not it at all.
He’s insulted because the piece is poorly done. It’s just literary criticism – and bad literature is an insult to him, because … well, I defy you to finish that sentence in a way that doesn’t whine “It’s all about meeeeeeeee…..”
(I’m serious: Finish the sentence: Bad literature is an insult to Freddie deBoer because …)
To me, this again looks like a case of confabulating. Freddie can’t possibly be saying he’s “insulted” by writing that he finds lazy and imprecise, so let’s find something similar that isn’t ridiculous for him to say.
So, political football, when you had that “pleasant little shock of recognition†that you write about, you were participating in exactly what FdB was criticizing. He criticized the writer of that piece exactly for that: for giving you that complacent little pleasant shock of recognition, for flattering your preconceptions.
(Again, it’s gratifying to read someone who grasps my point and directly and correctly quotes the relevant part. I wish there was more of that on the internets.)
This has the look and feel of a false consciousness argument — that I should not, in fact, recognize myself in that list – or that, upon recognizing myself, I shouldn’t be pleased about it.
I’m not getting that. Can you elaborate?
js. 05.25.15 at 1:07 am
A Scott Lemieux–Freddie deBoer is so tedious the word “tedious” would like to retire itself. Belle though is making a sound observation:
js. 05.25.15 at 1:15 am
What a bizarre thing to say. If FdB is insulted every time some adult is paid to do some work that is trifling or unserious or silly or anyway Does Not Advance The Cause, he must spend every second of his life insulted on multiple counts. It’s a wonder he finds the time to write those endless posts of his.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 1:19 am
Look the guy is fundamentally unserious. See his follow up attack on LGM.
dsquared 05.25.15 at 1:44 am
And when cis feminists complain that advocating for
trans* women (and men) is a dangerous diversion away from
the essential feminist project they are doing the same.
by the way and not sure if this is of topic, for every one time I’ve seen this done, I’ve seen ten versions of online trans activists (often straight white men themselves) claiming that an attempt by women to organise something is the literal equivalent of transphobic murder.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 2:06 am
D2 I would say the ratio is the exact opposite….
Belle Waring 05.25.15 at 2:10 am
Yeah dsquared, that does happen and is tedious. But as a person who is older than most of the people doing work around this issue I feel I see more of the former problem among my peers, while recognizing the latter. White dudes will explain intersectionality to black feminists too! They are, like, super-powered that way.
LFC 05.25.15 at 2:25 am
Just went through The Toast book list again; this time my computer managed to get through it. I’ve read a few of these books but had no ‘shock of recognition’, unlike commenter politicalfootball. Of those on the list that I’d read, I don’t think any has been esp. important to me.
It does strike me that, given what Nicole Cliffe seems to be trying to do w/ the list, she should have included a Robert Stone novel. Stone was a good writer, but then so were (or are) some of the other writers on the list. And if Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise, in addition to being a very good novel, is not basically a (white) dude’s book, then I’m not sure what is.
mattski 05.25.15 at 2:33 am
In reference to my 86, to be clear, I read deBoer’s piece. I’m not familiar with his writing or any of the history here, but I didn’t see him “cast the struggle as a purely internal one that doesn’t need to be checked against the other people in your political movement,” as Belle suggested. He did write this:
And stop mistaking yourself for the movement.
Which seems to cut in the other direction. To me deBoer seemed to be railing against the human tendency to engage in herd behavior. I can imaging where his style might rub some people the wrong way. Unfortunately, that sort of reacting to “rubbing the wrong way” is an invitation to indulge our pettiest ego BS. Not usually an edifying place to go.
mathmos 05.25.15 at 3:02 am
Bloix, that was excellent.
floopmeister 05.25.15 at 3:06 am
FWIW, the List of Books White Guys Read should really be subtitled theList of Books White Guys, Who Actually Read, Read.
I have lost count of the times I have visited other people’s houses (relatives;friends of friends; parent group/school council members; the apartment yesterday where my son went for a film audition etc) and found no freaking books in the house at all. These are the homes of people who are pretty much white/Anglo and clearly aspirational/middle class… maybe there’s a copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo… maybe a ghostwritten sportsman’s biography (usually of Shane Warne- demonstrating the Australian context).
But there’s a $40000 home entertainment system, a trophy kitchen and an expensive BBQ on the decking…
Books? Pffft. People don’t read period.
floopmeister 05.25.15 at 3:09 am
Oh, and I forgot exercise and coffee table paleo diet cookbooks. They read them.
hix 05.25.15 at 3:09 am
People who do read a lot based on my very small sample at least, read almost exclusivly library/ebooks, no big visible collection to show off at home there either.
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 3:27 am
politicalfootball: “Though I disagree with you, I really appreciate your effort to marshal actual evidence to rebut me. ”
I guess that I’ll keep going, though I’m falling right into the “you’re uncool because you’re taking this too seriously” thing. But I can never resist textually digging into something.
pf: “You read this as the author separating herself from the readers of the list – and, indeed, she notices that she’s not a white man. But if you don’t get that she’s declaring common ground with the readers of the list, I don’t know what to say.”
You claimed that “this is a woman saying something about what it means to own a set of books that she owns.†But that’s literally not true. If we have to examine this list for some reason, I don’t see how we’re helped by making claims that aren’t true. Yes, the tag claims common ground, but that exactly fits FdB’s critique.
“(I’m serious: Finish the sentence: Bad literature is an insult to Freddie deBoer because …)”
… he thinks of himself as a professional writer and as a critic of online professional writing, with high standards. Try here or here.
“This has the look and feel of a false consciousness argument — that I should not, in fact, recognize myself in that list – or that, upon recognizing myself, I shouldn’t be pleased about it.”
I can only repeat FdB’s argument which I quoted upthread up at #65. This doesn’t mean that I *agree* with his argument, but it would be nice if people at least understood his argument before rejecting it. FdB says that you recognize yourself in the list (I’m presuming that you’re a white guy) because the list has been made to comfort and flatter you. He says that you reassure yourself that you’re a good white guy because you can say “Oh, a list of books that white guys read. I recognize myself in that list! And I’m one of the good people because I’m not offended by this recognition.” However, he says that if the list actually challenged you — if it included things like Toni Morrison’s _Beloved_ and made you think about “how chichi white culture has grown to use performative love of black culture as a shield against social and political judgment” — then you wouldn’t get the pleasant little shock of recognition. You’d get angry because you’d actually have to confront something that you might not like about your comfortable I’m-a-good-white-guy-ness.
David 05.25.15 at 3:27 am
I try not to collect books. Seems like a waste of space. I rarely if ever read a book twice.
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 3:30 am
Arghh, I broke the second link above. I was trying to link to this.
floopmeister 05.25.15 at 3:31 am
People who do read a lot based on my very small sample at least, read almost exclusivly library/ebooks, no big visible collection to show off at home there either.
Yeah I take your point (and Bloix’ as well). It’s just that in many cases I’m so interested/appalled/curious about the phenomena that I’ve straight out asked people if they have a Kindle or go to the library.
The response is usually one of bemusement… read? Why? They have the smartphone for checking FB on the tram commute so in what other context would they need to bother with reading a book? Reading is seen as a time filler that is more pleasantly accomplished in other ways.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 3:43 am
I have to say that I find all the comments about how nobody reads books anymore depressing/mystifying. I love to read and so does my partner (nothing high brow, mostly genre fiction like Pratchet, Holt, Greene, and similar (sci fi, fantasy and crime novels)) and I own about 600 books. This is not unusual in my social group.
Is it really so odd?
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 3:44 am
And the sad thing about ebooks is that they are not easily lent to friends and family. The best part of a good book is sharing it with a person you care about!
floopmeister 05.25.15 at 3:47 am
BTW this is pretty funny – all hail the anger of the white male nerd? :)
And yes these guys are a comedy act (so switch sarcasm/parody filters on now)
PJW 05.25.15 at 4:21 am
All of the books old white guy Art Garfunkel has read:
http://www.artgarfunkel.com/library/list1.html
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 4:27 am
Floopmeister that was a hilarious video. Thank you!
Angus Johnston 05.25.15 at 1:10 pm
David @ 16:
“The problem is that the Left is fissioning into smaller and smaller groups.”
I gotta say that this is the complete opposite of my experience with contemporary left-liberalism. I was on campus in the 90s, and college students today are FAR better at building cross-identity activist coalitions than we were then. I was on the internet in the 1990s, and online left-liberal spaces are far more diverse and inclusive than they were then. By any measure I can think of, today’s left is better at assembling demographically broad movements than its predecessors.
So why do we keep hearing these tales of woe? Why are so many people convinced that things are getting worse? Because coalition work is messy. You’re going to feel uncomfortable. You’re going to get yelled at — sometimes wrongly. You’re going to get frustrated — whichever side of the “inclusion” aisle you’re sitting on.
The left is made up of a bunch of different projects, many of them constituency-based. That’s the nature of the left. Asking people to put aside their personal sociocultural identities in support of the common struggle doesn’t make any sense at all when their identities are, in many cases, what brought them to the struggle to begin with.
But the idea that we’re splintering? In 2015? That we on the left used to have the ability to work together amicably across lines of identity but we lost it? That’s not an analysis that I recognize any validity to at all.
AcademicLurker 05.25.15 at 1:19 pm
So why do we keep hearing these tales of woe? Why are so many people convinced that things are getting worse?
Because on the internet (and even more so on social media) it’s easy for a few assholes to make lots of noise, so things can seem more fractious than they are?
politicalfootball 05.25.15 at 3:18 pm
I guess that I’ll keep going, though I’m falling right into the “you’re uncool because you’re taking this too seriously†thing.
Certainly if this is a trap, I have also fallen into it. As I said, I appreciate the seriousness with which you’ve pursued this discussion.
However, he says that if the list actually challenged you — if it included things like Toni Morrison’s _Beloved_ and made you think about “how chichi white culture has grown to use performative love of black culture as a shield against social and political judgment†— then you wouldn’t get the pleasant little shock of recognition. You’d get angry because you’d actually have to confront something that you might not like about your comfortable I’m-a-good-white-guy-ness.
I’ve not only read a bunch of novels that failed to do this, I was reading an instruction manual to put together a desk the other day, and it totally failed to make me see my white male hypocrisy. So what?
Authors get to pick their subject. The author, as you seem to agree, wasn’t trying to do the thing that Freddie wanted her to be trying to do. And thus, by Freddie’s ludicrous standard, she failed. I say again: So what? Freddie isn’t the Internet’s assignment desk, and thank God for that.
Freddie also wants Allan Brauer to be emblematic of the “progressive internet,” but I haven’t seen anybody in the progressive blogosphere leap to Brauer’s defense – including, as we now agree, Nicole Clifte, who was doing something entirely unrelated, and is included in Freddie’s article because … well, that’s a sentence I can’t finish sensibly.
Fox News can invoke Martin Luther King all it wants to – and it does, all the time. This doesn’t reflect in any way on MLK or on his actual supporters. Brauer’s invocation of Emmett Till is like Clarence Thomas describing himself as the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” These people do not speak for progressives and are the enemies of the “progressive internet,” not their highest expression, as Freddie alleges.
If Freddie wants to criticize progressives who write things on the internet, he needs to find actual progressives writing things on the internet, and not people who like Brauer who (as Freddie acknowledges!) deliberately abuse progressive tropes.
“(I’m serious: Finish the sentence: Bad literature is an insult to Freddie deBoer because …)â€
… he thinks of himself as a professional writer and as a critic of online professional writing, with high standards. Try here or here.
Freddie may be offended by bad writing, but why insulted? Taking offense has some overlap with being insulted – and if he were taking offense, he’d still be being insufferably pompous. But why is he insulted?
This idea that Freddie Is Literature, and an offense against literature is an insult to him personally is on-beyond-pompous, and is little but a demand for mockery.
Lyle 05.25.15 at 3:41 pm
Okay, I wasn’t familiar with the whole Freddie thing, but now I’ve read Belle’s post and this whole thread, which led me to some of Freddie’s posts and even some of his popular articles.
So far, all I can conclude is that while he may be sincere in his stated desire to push The Left further to the left, he’s not actually helping that happen. I’m not convinced that he’s consciously concern-trolling from the right, but I do think ends up having the same effect.
Oh, and I’ve also concluded so far that he should think more carefully before pressing “publish.” And that it’s sad if he already does that.
Stephenson-quoter kun 05.25.15 at 3:55 pm
AcademicLurker @114: I think it might just be that the internet makes the sausage-factory of other people’s activism a lot more visible and comment-upon-able. 20 years ago, there was nowhere to go to get not-especially-funny feminist articles if you were someone who wanted to root that kind of thing out of the Left. Now it’s just a search or a few tweets away, all the time. An endless stream of other people’s things just waiting for judgement to be passed on them!
Paul Ford wrote a really great article on this a few years back: The Web Is a Customer Service Medium. Thinking about it this way, it’s not surprising that some people think that it’s their right and/or duty to ‘help’ other people improve the standard of their activism (or the standard of their anything-else, for that matter). Relevant quote:
A lot of blogging consists of providing reviews of other people’s tweets or blogs, and reviews of those reviews (case in point: the OP). Which is all perfectly fine if you can pull it off with a sense of humour and make some good points and show an interest in genuine discussion rather than just ranting into the void. Some reviews are particularly difficult to write, too; if you’re Freddie de Boer trying to give customer feedback on other people’s feminism, you’ve got to be almost spectacularly good at giving feedback, because as a man reviewing feminism you run a serious risk of sounding like the person who gives something one star on Amazon because they ordered it by accident, and they really wanted the green one instead.
I’ve made some pretty bad arguments on the internet before, and this has occasionally resulted in someone comprehensively skewering whatever I said, and resultingly I do not say those things any more (after a while of avoiding saying things, you stop believing them too, and everything gets a lot easier). I can see why someone might object to the white male book list, but I just don’t care, and if I don’t care then I’m unlikely to have anything useful to add. I sort-of admire FdB’s obduracy here, in that I can certainly imagine times when he’s going to be thunderously right about something, giving a fuck when it’s not his turn to give a fuck. We do need people who can fearlessly call bullshit on things that need bullshit calling on them. I’m just perplexed as to how he ended up calling bullshit on something so entirely trivial as to undermine his entire argument (lest we forget, he was basically right about that Allen Brauer guy).
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 4:09 pm
Its interesting how people like in 100 and 116 find ways to rationalize why bad arguments, made in a mean-spirited way, are actually what Belle meant by “white self-reflection” and therefore good (aside from the fact that rich white people aren’t going to make a career of talking about themselves unless they can disguise it as something that entertains a larger audience, the rich kind of by definition not being a large enough group to maintain a consumer-based industry). Freddie isn’t reflecting on himself, that’s the problem. He’s claiming to be reflecting on women for them.
I didn’t read the list and I’m pretty surprised how many of folks around here have.
The Dark Avenger 05.25.15 at 4:14 pm
I didn’t read the list, and I’m very doubtful that I’ve read more than 25% of the books on it, based on the titles mentioned here and there.
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 4:31 pm
OK, I’ve read it now. It’s fluff and didn’t merit Freddie’s attack, nor does Freddie merit more than 140 words (which no matter what they are, he will take to justify himself and damn the person who dares talk about them).
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 4:32 pm
pf: “including, as we now agree, Nicole Clifte, who was doing something entirely unrelated, and is included in Freddie’s article because … well, that’s a sentence I can’t finish sensibly.”
It’s a two-part article. Part 1 is about Brauer, then there’s a row of asterisks, then there’s “the stakes are much lower in our cultural writing, but the problem is largely the same: tired, rote arguments and magic words, treated as cutting rebuttals no matter how lazy and uninspired.” In other words, Clifte’s article is supposed to illustrate the same problem with regard to cultural writing as Brauer’s tweets illustrate with regard to politics.
“not people who like Brauer who (as Freddie acknowledges!) deliberately abuse progressive tropes.”
The article is about the abuse of progressive tropes. Nothing in his article that I saw claims that Clifte is a progressive. His article says that Brauer is “a partisan Democrat and Obama zombie” who “is today’s progressive internet in its purest form. He’s someone who’s learned all of the lessons of how we do things too well.” But he doesn’t establish that Brauer actually is a progressive, because it’s not important — what’s important for his post is where this rhetorical style is supposed to lead the movement and how it can be picked up by anyone.
pf: “Freddie isn’t the Internet’s assignment desk, and thank God for that.”
And here’s where I reach the limits of explanation. I didn’t say that Freddie should be the Internet’s assignment desk, so I can only shrug. Maybe he really is “beyond pompous”. But pomposity is a personal failing. All the way back up at the top of the thread, I wrote that everyone involved in this seemed to me to be right in their criticisms of each other. That means that FdB really is sometimes pompous and really does sometimes write using sexist tropes. It also means that the people he criticizes really are self-centered and destructive to the social movement that they are supposedly trying to help. Which is worse? I read the people saying that we should all go back to high school, or acting as if we should all go back to high school, and I see stupid and vicious people with nothing interesting to say and no ideas of their own. Should they really be satisfied that they got the better of FdB?
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 4:55 pm
Well Rich, you’re a white guy, so I guess you’re well placed to take Freddie’s low-tier blogging position when he moves up to the Show. Then you’ll attack him, the way he attacks LGM, for being no better than you, to signal that you’re in the same game. And when your Gooogle Rank gets high enough, a place will be made for you in Blogademia too. And you too will get to choose who among us girls is worthy, by granting or denying us points.
Ronan(rf) 05.25.15 at 5:02 pm
I’ll cop to being someone who has been dismissive of ‘social issues’ in the past. (and I would say particularly with feminism – before I started becoming aware, only recently enough, of my profound ignorance of what I thought feminism was.) A lot of this carrys over. I do think I respond more negatively to ‘LOL speak’ when it comes from female writers rather than male, or from someone espousing ‘social issues’ rather than ‘economic’ ones .(Although I do think these categories are becoming anachronistic) I, like all of us, have an inner reactionary trying to get out.
So, on the one hand, I find a good bit of the rhetoric from certain factions of the left frustrating at times, but on the other I see something (for example) like the recent movement for gay marriage in Ireland, which was driven by ‘this’ group (the ‘young and idealistic’) that we tend to dismiss and patronise, that was moving and inspiring in a way I’ve never actually witnessed in politics. So I have to question why would I concentrate on the first (slight annoyance) over the second?
I think it’s quite easy to drift into becoming an embittered curmudgeon. Ive known people so consumed by anger and resentment that they suck the good out of anything positive in life, and it’s extremely tiring. So my new years resolution is to stop looking for reasons to be annoyed, and start looking for reasons to be inspired. (Basically, I’ve become an American)
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 5:05 pm
Also, I’ve read Trinity (in high school), and wasn’t it about Israelis?
JanieM 05.25.15 at 5:21 pm
Should they really be satisfied that they got the better of FdB?
Should you really be satisfied that you got the better of them?
Is there any way out of this game except to leave the keyboard and go outside? ;-)
nnyhav 05.25.15 at 5:39 pm
Obliquely relevant:
I’m kind of surprised that David Auerbach’s piece on fractiousness, #JeNeSuisPasLiberal: Entering the Quagmire of Online Leftism, hasn’t been referenced hereabouts. (Not that I endorse this particular taxonomy, but underneath it is something ponderable.)
As for book lists, NYTimes’ summer reading reaches ‘peak caucasity’: see Aaron Bady and thru him Jason Parham at Gawker.
novakant 05.25.15 at 5:41 pm
So what do the black guys think? And what about Japanese guys?
Bruce Baugh 05.25.15 at 6:28 pm
MPAVictoria: Lots of people read regularly. Women more than men, in pretty much all social strata and and ethnic groups, at least in the US. But book sales are good in lots of genres, and in non-fiction categories. Print, electronic, and audio are all thriving. Young adult fiction is doing really well, and so is a bunch of genre stuff marketed specifically to (and usually written by) African-Americans, Latin@s, and so on. Friends in the publishing field say that although there are continuing structural problems associated with consolidation and such, it’s basically a good time for the field.
Angus Johnston 05.25.15 at 6:37 pm
Rich @ 120,
If it were true that FdB is right about how to fix what’s wrong with the left and his critics were right about him being a jerk, then certainly his criticisms would properly carry more weight than theirs. But is that what’s going on?
FdB offers very little in terms of of useful analysis and less in terms of a positive strategy for change. He’s not actually interested in being in dialogue with the folks he criticizes. He’s not modeling the behavior he claims to want to see, or offering concrete alternatives to the behavior he condemns.
But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m reading him uncharitably, or not reading the right stuff. So you tell me — what’s he proposing? What’s his way forward?
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 6:51 pm
“Friends in the publishing field say that although there are continuing structural problems associated with consolidation and such, it’s basically a good time for the field.”
Glad to hear Bruce! Thank you. I was just surprised at the volume of commentators here basically saying that no one reads books anymore.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 6:52 pm
“what’s he proposing? What’s his way forward?”
For everyone to shut up and listen to him?
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 6:58 pm
Angus Johnson @ 129, I’m not sure whether I should really try to summarize what I think is useful about FdB’s writing. I have time and energy for like three paragraphs, and it’s sure to sound trivial. But I’ll try it.
1. FdB is an anti-war organizer, and in my own (less active) organizing I’ve run into the same kinds of situations that he talks about. For example, what do you do when someone from a lower socioeconomic situation gets called out by someone from a higher socioeconomic situation. This destroys movements and solidarity, but the people doing the calling out are right about what they are calling out. Anything that he says about this might be helpful.
2. He offers a theory, however minimal, for how and why callout culture goes wrong that goes beyond “But it makes people feel bad.” I think that you’re going to have to take this assertion on trust: I don’t have time right now to find a best of FdB link or something like that. Suffice it to say that his theory may be bad, but at least he has one, and I think that he does approach some kind of solutions in some of his posts.
3. I have to disagree about him not being in dialogue with the people he criticizes. As far as I can see, he is. Even the Sady Doyle comments were, well, comments on a blog. As far as I can tell, FdB is himself part of the same subculture that he criticizes: even his argument about the book list was (as I went through with politicalfootball above) an argument that such lists should do more to make people really examine their privilege. As such, his criticisms are more valuable to me than those of someone on the outside, because he doesn’t disallow so much of the framework that no dispute is really possible.
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 7:07 pm
131.1
Your search – war pacifism site:fredrikdeboer.com – did not match any documents.
Andy Zell 05.25.15 at 7:15 pm
bianca @123 Uris does write a lot about Israelis, as well as Jews during WWII, but Trinity and its sequel Redemption were both about Ireland. He was my favorite author back when I was in high school, and I read most of his books. Looking back on them, I’m rather embarrassed for myself that I loved them so much. His portrayals of women and Arabs are lousy.
bianca steele 05.25.15 at 7:16 pm
Many of the books on the list are books that, if you hang out with certain groups of heavy readers (possibly online), you will often find used as touchstones. Under the Volcano, Lolita, House of Leaves, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Road. Lucky Jim and The Agony and the Ecstasy seem a little dated from that perspective, but who knows.
Angus Johnston 05.25.15 at 7:37 pm
Rich,
I understand that you can’t speak for FdB, and I apologize for putting you on the spot. That said, none of what you wrote speaks to my specific question — What is he proposing?
But setting that aside, when I say he’s not interested in dialogue I don’t mean that he’s not willing to argue with people. He’s certainly willing to do that. What I mean is that in my experience the arguments pretty much universally generate far more heat than light, and I don’t think it’s entirely the fault of his critics.
But I’m admittedly .
Angus Johnston 05.25.15 at 7:38 pm
Not sure how the html on that link got screwed up. It should have said “I’m admittedly not an unreliable source” and linked here:
http://studentactivism.net/2015/01/31/freddie-deboer/
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 8:22 pm
Angus Johnston: OK, now I remember that article, now that you’ve linked to it. I don’t think that the kind of solutions that were advocated in it are applicable to the situation that I work in, which is one of adult organizing rather than student organizing. Your article offers this as a possible comeback: “I think James has heard everyone’s critiques and is taking them to heart. Let’s give him some space to chew on what’s been said.†That presupposes that you have higher status than James and pretty much everyone else in the room: that you are e.g. a teacher talking to students. If I said that in an Occupy group, James would say something like “Why are you speaking for me?” What FdB writes comes closer to the situations that I’m in because he doesn’t seem to assume what you assume.
As for my not answering your specific question, I said in part (2.) of my comment that I thought he was approaching solutions, that I didn’t have time to find a link, and that you’d have to take my assertion on trust. But OK, I’ll try one more time. Hw was substantially right about the anti-vaxxing brouhaha. Note that his post is negative criticism, not “finding a solution”. We had endless arguments on this blog, backed up by scientific studies, about what was most likely to actually keep vaccination rates up, and I’m not looking for an overall solution from someone who hasn’t studied this in depth. But FdB was right about what he wrote about, and that’s valuable.
As for “not interested in dialogue” meaning “he does argue, but at times and places of his choosing, and those arguments are heated” — I don’t see how that contradicts what I’ve written.
Sus. 05.25.15 at 8:30 pm
MPAVictoria: “And the sad thing about ebooks is that they are not easily lent to friends and family. The best part of a good book is sharing it with a person you care about!” – I loan my out-of-date kindles to friends so they can read the books I’m recommending (a big advantage of being able to download to multiple devices). I used to read a lot, then got out of the habit before I tried e-books. Now I read more than I ever have.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 8:38 pm
“I loan my out-of-date kindles to friends so they can read the books I’m recommending (a big advantage of being able to download to multiple devices).”
Great idea! :-)
Bruce Wilder 05.25.15 at 8:56 pm
It took me a long time to get used to reading on a Kindle HDX and I find myself fatally vulnerable to distraction syndrome at times, but the ability to download many classic texts and pdf’s for free and refer to them easily is a great thing. I read a relatively new history of the Stuarts alongside Hume’s History recently, something I could never have done before outside a substantial library, and it was great. I have a ready copy of Hazlitt that I can look at, to follow Quiggin’s posts. New fiction is mostly really cheap (and I can “borrow” a book a month). And, in a concession to video in the digital age, I am reluctantly and hesitantly following a university lecture course on the French Revolution.
Angus Johnston 05.25.15 at 9:07 pm
Rich, there are a bunch of different ways of phrasing that kind of an intervention. What I described would work in most of the organizing spaces I’ve been in coming from a facilitator, but any random individual could also pipe up by saying they thought the subject had been discussed enough and maybe the meeting should just move on. More effective still would be to push for agreed-upon groundrules for those kinds of things in advance, which I gave lots of examples of in the post and the comments that followed.
But my point in linking wasn’t to say that all my answers were great ones. My point was that in that blowup FdB went on and on claiming that nobody had any answers at all to the questions he was raising and that nobody was willing to engage him in his search for those answers because nobody took the problem seriously — but when tried to engage him, offering answers of my own and pointing out that LOTS of people take the problem seriously and have been working on it in all sorts of ways, he mocked and excoriated me.
So yes, FdB is right that sometimes people on the left alienate each other for nonsensical reasons, and yes, he’s right that such behavior is harmful. But it’s behavior he himself engages in all the time. And as I said earlier, it’s behavior I don’t see him offering any remedies for in others, beyond “do as I say, not as I do.”
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 9:12 pm
“So yes, FdB is right that sometimes people on the left alienate each other for nonsensical reasons”
What really bothers me about this whole thing is why does FdB get to be the one to decide which reasons are nonsensical and which ones are reasonable? I have no interest in being part of a movement that doesn’t support LGTBQ rights, labour rights, women’s rights and so on. This is my right. Why are my issues less important than FdB?
His sterile brand of “rational” leftism has very little appeal outside of some small circle of upper class white males.
bob mcmanus 05.25.15 at 9:55 pm
141 is kinds perfect in succinctness. Usually the rhetoric flows in reverse, from “less important” to “doesn’t support (at all)” to “white males go away.” Translated” I give social issues a 4 on a scale of 5 and class a 3, you give class a 4 and social issues a 3, and so you don’t care about me at all and are my enemy. This is why I see the movements, or the social issues see themselves because Marxians and class warriors will always concede that social issues are vital, as a one-sided fight not even for hegemony, but for dominance and exclusion. One should read 141 carefully. Anyway:
…
I never read FdB until you send me there (his Mad Max:Fury Road posts are decent, and very feminist) but while looking around his site for the mark of the beast, I followed a link to Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig at New Republic profiling Suey Park. This sentence struck me as interesting, and close to topic:
ESB: “In the hive mind that is the Internet, sentimentality and cruelty are twin aspects of the same brand of self-indulgence, and whether you wind up on the receiving end of moist-eyed mercy or an endless stream of 140-character bile is mostly a matter of chance.”
because
Waring:”I should probably make clear that I love bob mcmanus because he is my dad. ”
Leaving aside the “cruelty,” I am more interested in the “sentimentality” of Breunig’s insight, because before you can direct an attack at an Other, you have to create an “Us” that can attack. That is the process I tend to watch in these threads, the use of sentimentality and cruelty to create community.
2) That “sentimentality and cruelty” is not only about Twitter and the thread, or at least observed by others in different circumstances, I have a movie recommendation,
Class Enemy, Rok Bicek, 2013, Slovenias submission to Academy awards. In large part about a rebellion of a high school students against what they perceive as a cold and authoritarian teacher, it is very current because the teacher is not at all “conservative” a reserved “Thomas Mann” liberal and the students are not Marxists or right but vaguely motivated by an unearned sentimentality toward a student suicide. The teacher is just not warm and empathic enough for their tastes, so they call him
“Nazi.” A very strong parable of something goin on beyond twitterstorms andd blogfights.
Teacher: “I think we fear the students more than they fear us.”
Principal:”Welcome to the 21st century.”
novakant 05.25.15 at 10:12 pm
Thanks Bruce, sounds like a great film.
Rich Puchalsky 05.25.15 at 10:23 pm
bob mcmanus: “That is the process I tend to watch in these threads, the use of sentimentality and cruelty to create community.”
e.g. “high school”, and why a vast number of TV series and movies are about high school.
MPAVictoria 05.25.15 at 10:35 pm
Thank god I have bob here to translate for me…
Bruce Wilder 05.25.15 at 10:40 pm
. . . the use of sentimentality and cruelty to create community.
provocative phrase, and I’ll try to find a way to see that movie — looks very interesting.
mattski 05.25.15 at 11:05 pm
142
because before you can direct an attack at an Other, you have to create an “Us†that can attack.
Yes. Which is why it is better not to think in terms of “movements” that one is part of. Tough sell I know.
But this is a great Let’s Argue About Nothing thread, anyway. Proves we’re human.
hix 05.25.15 at 11:26 pm
Indead, if theres ever been one thread in urgent need of derailment, this ones it.
About the reading, did you know the Freudians believe reading a lot is a way to surpress an unfulfilled desire for oral sex. True fact.
David J. Littleboy 05.26.15 at 12:48 am
“About the reading, did you know the Freudians believe reading a lot is a way to surpress an unfulfilled desire for oral sex. True fact.”
Sounds about right.
When I was in high school, I found two books both titled “The Psychology of the Chess Player”. One was by a bloke who was a trainer for the Russian team and had all sorts of good advice about how to organize one’s thoughts about chess positions efficiently and play better chess. The other was about sex.
(One of the strongest US chess players ever (well, before Bobby Fisher, anyway) was a Freudian shrink at his day job.)
bianca steele 05.26.15 at 2:37 am
Matt Zell,
You’re right, I was thinking of Follett’s Triple. I probably read Trinity too around the same time, the cover looks familiar.
Witt 05.26.15 at 3:05 am
It’s a bit odd to read this on a day when I had already (separately) come across the deservedly-famous Doyle post and a very recent exchange between Jay Caspian King and FdB.
So here’s the thing. The thing I keep tripping over with Fdb is that the stuff he objects to is so darn easy to avoid. I have been online since circa 1990, and there has seriously never been a better time to instantly, powerfully be able to be connected and take meaningful action on political issues. NEVER. I do not use this word lightly.
I spent probably too much time for my mental health watching livestreams last August/September/October and on into the winter of waiting for the Darren Wilson verdict. In that time I sought out and treasured the Twitter feeds of passionate and disorganized and sometimes at-odds activists. I made probably thirty small donations to various GoFundMes, some of which I am sure helped* and others which were probably less helpful.
I read articles. I read trial documents. I watched videos. I linked, tweeted, and sometimes live-transcribed livestreams in order to signal-boost and amplify important work being done on the ground. I talked about the issues with people in my daily life. I attended protests in my hometown. And on and on.
What does all this have to do with Fdb’s complaints? Well, I guess that they just seem so…self-indulgent. To agree with a commenter above: there are bits of the progressive Internet which seem like they would do more good in the world if they weren’t so given to fits of rage.
Well, sure. But if — faced with this reality — you decide to spend your time making tedious and unpleasant gestures at criticism,** then I reserve the right to think you are squandering your one wild and precious life.+
*If you are inclined to give.
**As distinct from making actual criticism, which might be helpful.
+With apologies to Mary Oliver.
LFC 05.26.15 at 3:17 am
B Wilder @142
I have resisted the idea of an e-reader (am somewhat old-fashioned, I guess), but that’s interesting. Although the lecture course you’re following surely you cd do just as easily, if not more easily, on a computer, no? (Or is it somehow tied to the e-reader?)
Collin Street 05.26.15 at 3:33 am
e-readers are more portable/convenient than desktop computers and the ergonomics — and the battery life — are better than laptops.
Belle Waring 05.26.15 at 4:03 am
Witt is right! And people with no paper books are wrong, even though kindles are great. John and I had to get rid of like…two thousand books in 2013 when we moved and it was horrible. Also, I feel this became disproportionate arguing about nothing simply because my initial instinct was to say something mean and hilarious about FDB, but then I reflected and thought I would be more tempered, and let readers draw their own conclusions, which resulted in a post whose length belied its contents. Next time I’ll just be an asshole? (Asking for a friend.)
Val 05.26.15 at 5:42 am
Coming in a bit late to this one, but I do read The Toast quite often, so ….
The Toast is coedited by Mallory Ortberg and Nicole Cliffe (please note the spelling of Cliffe, there has been a bit of a chain effect of people spelling it wrongly here).
I have read a bit of the FdB stuff and I think there are two simple explanations, you can choose either or a combination of both:
1) Mallory and Nicole are two very bright young women who have a devoted following, which includes some men. A ruling class male needed to put them in their place, and FdB decided he was the man to do it.
2) In the tradition of Who Weekly, etc, you can make a career of writing about whether female celebrities are too fat or too thin. FdB is doing that at a slightly upmarket level: Mallory and Nicole are internet stars and he is pointing out the shallow and flabby bits in their writing.
(have been slightly put off commenting on CT by D2’s patronising comments to me on an earlier thread, but the combination of knowing something + having a smart jokey thing to say is too much of a temptation, as ever)
Val 05.26.15 at 5:47 am
so obviously Belle if saying smart jokey things translates as being an asshole, I’m in favour of you doing that, though I didn’t mind the long reasoned explanation either. (It was probably a lot easier for me to follow as someone who is familiar with a lot of the stuff you’re referencing though)
Matthew Morse 05.26.15 at 7:43 am
Freddie didn’t exactly apologize to Sady, but he did say this: http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/01/06/why-i-didnt-delete-tiger-beatdown/#comment-40224
The [BONERS] episode was my first encounter with Freddie de Boer, and I freely admit that every time I’ve heard his name since, my reaction is always, “Wasn’t he the [BONERS] guy?”
I love me some Tiger Beatdown. I love it in part because of how crazily self-indulgent and incoherent, as dsquared put it, it was. Sady Doyle continues to do good work, and I’m all for her getting paid to write rather than posting to her blog, but I miss the TBD experience.
Also, searching for “boners” on Tiger Beatdown was a remarkably ineffective way of finding that comment.
The Dark Avenger 05.26.15 at 10:34 am
Belle, I’m sorry to hear that your father suffers from dysphasia.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 1:32 pm
Bah. This has been bothering me so I am going to comment again.
Bob at 145 is a prime example of traditional leftists telling new comers to progressive politics that their priorities don’t matter. Well to most young people social issues are just as important as economic issues. If you want us to show up (am I still an us for young people? Maybe just) you are going to have to take our concerns seriously. Or maybe we will just stop inviting you to meetings….
Daniel 05.26.15 at 1:42 pm
#161 is an important point, although it cuts both ways with respect to the way people treat each other. The New Statesman ran a really good feature on second-wave feminism a year ago, suggesting that younger activists are missing out on quite a bit due to a habit of ignoring people and telling them to die in fires because they don’t have the right views on sex work regulation, inherently oppressive nature of.
bob mcmanus 05.26.15 at 2:12 pm
161 is bad faith projective bs
I’ll just quote MPAV at 144
I have no interest in being part of a movement that doesn’t support LGTBQ rights, labour rights, women’s rights and so on. This is my right. Why are my issues less important than FdB?
“Less important” separated from “doesn’t support” by 18 words. It doesn’t need translation or interpreting it directly says that not buying into MPAV’s priorities the precise way she ranks them is the same as not supporting her issues at all. There is no intersectionality here.
144 is just untrue, unfair and incredibly insulting.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 2:27 pm
“MPAV’s priorities the precise way she ranks them is the same as not supporting her issues at all.”
Where did I rank them bob? Show me.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 2:28 pm
“Bob at 145 is a prime example of traditional leftists telling new comers to progressive politics that their priorities don’t matter.”
His comment is confusing because of the way that CT comment threads work: they get renumbered when auto-moderated comments are released, so that he refers to “comment #141” and I’ve now forgotten which one that originally was.
But I’m not going to speak for him, I’ll just speak for me. When I wrote, asa a typical organizing problem:
“what do you do when someone from a lower socioeconomic situation gets called out by someone from a higher socioeconomic situation. This destroys movements and solidarity, but the people doing the calling out are right about what they are calling out.”
I was not saying that the concerns of the people doing the calling out were nonsensical. That would actually be an easier problem to handle. No, the more difficult problem is when the people doing the calling out are basically right, but the callout itself is still a destructive interaction because it almost inevitably leads to either the called-out or the caller-out leaving, and ideally you don’t want to lose either of them.
I guess I’ll divert this into a whole social-technical kind of digression. Standard answers are:
1. Agree on ground rules ahead of time. For most of the recent things I’ve been in, we can’t do this. Occupy, Ferguson (which I wasn’t in) etc. The paradigmatic contemporary adult organizational episode is a group of people getting together quickly in response to something happening. In any case, this can lead to an extended negotiation that drains energy at the start, and when new people come in they still need to educate themselves about what the rules are.
2. Leadership. Often concealed as “facilitation”, this relies on having someone boss the group around using their higher status. It works when it works.
3. Try to please everyone. Disputes become extended educational episodes: no one is really satisfied: called-out and caller-out are persuaded into an uneasy truce that may or may not hold.
4. Just reject people who don’t educate themselves. Group keeps its radical core and the people who would contribute most of its energy, loses the ability to grow.
These are all choices and none of them is intrinsically better than the others in all cases.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 2:33 pm
Interesting post Rich. Thank you.
“2. Leadership. Often concealed as “facilitationâ€, this relies on having someone boss the group around using their higher status. It works when it works.”
I have seen real facilitation work. It doesn’t have to be someone with higher status bossing others around. You can sometimes help people to see an issue from a different angle and reach an understanding. It is hard but it can happen.
Lynne 05.26.15 at 2:42 pm
Leadership concealed as facilitation isn’t facilitation as I have known it. The agenda is the group’s, and the facilitator actually has less opportunity to express her views than everyone else. Mind you, this works best in smallish groups.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 2:43 pm
My experience of facilitation is that it is an incredibly difficult skill to do well and that while there may be some people who are actually successful facilitators and not leaders, they are so rare that you can’t depend on your organization having one.
Lynne 05.26.15 at 2:44 pm
Yes, it is difficult, I agree. If the group is going to be together long, though, people can learn.
bob mcmanus 05.26.15 at 2:48 pm
Where did I rank them bob? Show me.
Why are my issues less important than FdB?
“Less important” usually is associated with ranking.
But you’ll just do this all thread long.
And honestly, 166
“Interesting post Rich. Thank you.”
the “when in a fight with the one to the left, flatter the one to the right to make myself look fair” is the stuff that makes me most nauseous.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 2:54 pm
““Less important†usually is associated with ranking.”
Is it? I asked why issues I care about should be less important. I never said more. You are misreading. Ask yourself why bob.
“the “when in a fight with the one to the left, flatter the one to the right to make myself look fair†is the stuff that makes me most nauseous.”
And you consider yourself to my left? I disagree.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 2:57 pm
Shorter bob: I am leftier, so much leftier than thou.
mattski 05.26.15 at 2:59 pm
Rich,
2. Leadership. Often concealed as “facilitationâ€, this relies on having someone boss the group around using their higher status. It works when it works.
The alternative, call it ‘group decision-making as equals,’ also works when it works which is overwhelmingly likely to be less often than when there is some organizational structure (which can often be impromptu.)
These comment threads–for example–wouldn’t work unless someone had the ability to put the hammer down when necessary. IOW, hierarchy does not necessitate disrespect.
MPAV,
What really bothers me about this whole thing is why does FdB get to be the one to decide which reasons are nonsensical and which ones are reasonable?
He doesn’t get to be the one! He gets to have an opinion. Just like Belle. Just like YOU!!
magistra 05.26.15 at 3:00 pm
Rich@165
“what do you do when someone from a lower socioeconomic situation gets called out by someone from a higher socioeconomic situation. This destroys movements and solidarity, but the people doing the calling out are right about what they are calling out.â€
You’re right that this is a big problem and no easy answers, but equally if you stop the calling out, you’re also destroying solidarity. If those who are gay, black or female, for example, learn that they must just put up silently with prejudice and insults from working class people in the movement because they’re middle class, why should they commit to the movement? And if you’re leave all the complaining about such behaviour to the people who are poor AND black, etc, that’s a burden on them.
I also don’t see an easy answer because the call out culture leaves so little room for forgiveness. From a Christian viewpoint, what keeps you from harshness in criticism of others should be consciousness of your own (greater) sins: we have all fallen short, etc. But if you can’t be forgiven by your fellows for your racism, sexism, ableism, classism etc unless by elaborate apologies and promises never to fail again (promises which you’ll invariably break) there’s no effective mechanism for reconciliation. I sometimes can’t help wondering whether there isn’t a streak of Calvinism (elect v damned) in some attempts at social justice.
mattski 05.26.15 at 3:00 pm
[MPAV, you are right on @ 172]
:^)
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 3:03 pm
“He doesn’t get to be the one! He gets to have an opinion. Just like Belle. Just like YOU!!”
Exactly! Except I am not going around telling women what they should be writing about and that they are DOING ACTIVISM WRONG.
mattski 05.26.15 at 3:08 pm
176
So your opinions are more legit than Freddies?
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 3:12 pm
“So your opinions are more legit than Freddies?”
Shorter Me: Too Legit To Quit.
/I don’t think anyone here is arguing he should be prevented from making an ass of himself. Just that he is wrong.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 3:13 pm
“You’re right that this is a big problem and no easy answers, but equally if you stop the calling out, you’re also destroying solidarity. If those who are gay, black or female, for example, learn that they must just put up silently with prejudice and insults from working class people in the movement because they’re middle class, why should they commit to the movement? And if you’re leave all the complaining about such behaviour to the people who are poor AND black, etc, that’s a burden on them.”
Agree completely with this. You can’t just expect people to shut up when they see a problem. The kind of people who bother to show up to these kind of things tend to be bad at that.
Plume 05.26.15 at 3:16 pm
Mattski @173,
(Warning: my response is pretty OT for the thread in general)
This may be the case. Thing is, there is no need to have a permanent hierarchy. One great way around the old “power corrupts, absolute power, etc. etc.” is to rotate it, frequently. Then everyone who gets their turn in the fish barrel realizes it’s only temporary, and that they’ll soon return to their original seat with everyone else. This tends to modify visions of grandeur and conquest.
Another aspect is the degree of hierarchy. At least on (digital) paper, this forum has the commenters and the blog owners. Basically two tiers. Of course, one could say there is a huge step up to the blog owner tier, depending upon their own view . . . . but we basically only have two. Trouble is in modern capitalist societies we have dozens and dozens of tiers, which guarantees massive inequality of power, access, wealth, income and life-chances.
The better way of doing things is to flatten that pyramid to the degree possible. You can still have your leaders, and folks who agree to follow that lead . . . but it’s insane to have dozens and dozens of “levels” between top and bottom.
Was hiking the other day, listening to music and a song tripped something for me: How much better the Native American “system” was, in that respect. Give or take, they had roughly three tiers. Children, the rank and file brave or brave-woman, and then the chief. Depending on the tribe, women could form their own tier, so you might have four . . . but even then, the chief wasn’t comparable to a modern day CEO or president. He just didn’t have that kind of power under his thumb. He had his council, lived with and didn’t try to avoid his rank and file, hunted with them, etc. etc. The chief in Native American societies was on the front lines, too, not detached, not sitting in his comfy chair or playing put put while his troops did all the work.
To me, the insistence that we must have hierarchies, especially as they appear in the world today, often comes as special pleading for the folks at the very top, usually by the folks at the very top, etc. etc.
Angus Johnston 05.26.15 at 3:17 pm
Rich, I’ve been called out plenty of times when it didn’t result in either me or the person who called me out leaving the organizing space. A lot of that had to do with how others in the space handled the situation — not just in the moment, but after — but it also had to do with my own choices about how to understand what had happened. And it’s not just me, either — I’ve seen lots of people get called out and continue to work with the people who did it.
So part of the problem here, to my mind, is rush to label all these callouts as crises.
Another problem is knowing — and agreeing on — when callouts are destructive. Sometimes they are, sometimes they’re not, and there’s no consensus on which ones fall into which categories. I’d like to see more low-intensity, presumed-good-faith discussion directed toward untangling that issue.
Finally, you list four possible ways of handling these kinds of conflict. I’d quibble with how you characterized some of them, and add others to the list, but setting that aside, one thing leaps out at me:
Nowhere on the list is there any recognition that working through these moments of friction can actually be a positive, even necessary, part of the process of building a strong, diverse movement. You talk about uneasy truces and extended negotiations draining energy and people bossing each other around. You don’t talk about people coming to understand each other better, people coming to feel true solidarity with each other, people bonding to each other by working through conflict.
Maybe this is just a difference in how we see organizing, and the organizing traditions we’re coming out of. But I see all that stuff as crucial, and I see it happening in activist spaces all the time.
mattski 05.26.15 at 3:21 pm
I don’t think anyone here is arguing he should be prevented from making an ass of himself. Just that he is wrong.
What is revealing, for me, is TONE. Maybe FdB can sound like a pompous scold to some people at some times. Fine. What is the tone with which they choose to respond to him? Who is introducing disrespect into the conversation in the more flagrant fashion?
When you use broad brush language like, “he is wrong,” are you doing justice to this situation? He is wrong about what?! That he criticized someone he ought not criticize? Because…. why?
mattski 05.26.15 at 3:25 pm
(Warning: my response is pretty OT for the thread in general)
Not only that, it is unresponsive to anything I wrote. Oy.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 3:29 pm
“What is revealing, for me, is TONE. Maybe FdB can sound like a pompous scold to some people at some times. Fine. What is the tone with which they choose to respond to him? Who is introducing disrespect into the conversation in the more flagrant fashion?”
Tone arguments are the worst mattski.
http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Tone_argument
“When you use broad brush language like, “he is wrong,†are you doing justice to this situation? He is wrong about what?! That he criticized someone he ought not criticize? Because…. why?”
Basically when I say he is wrong I am saying I disagree with him on:
– The way he used one random jerk to paint all of progressive activism with his very broad brush.
– The extent that it is a problem that women make jokes on the internet. I think it is a great thing that makes people happy and reminds them they are not alone. Also humour can be very revealing and can make people thing in new ways.
– His special knowledge about what would make the left more successful. As I said up-thread, the kind of sterile “intellectual” left he seems to be calling for isn’t appealing to anybody but FdB.
Helpful? Not helpful?
AcademicLurker 05.26.15 at 3:33 pm
I haven’t been involved in much in person activism since the run-up and early days of the Iraq invasion, so those who do more IRL activism currently can correct me if I’m wrong, but my impression is that “call outs” are much more likely to become seriously devisive online than IRL.
In the first place, people just tend to be more aggressively assholish in how they state things online. More importantly, the real poisonous dynamic online is that someone being (needlessly or not) aggressive will quickly attract a little cheering section to egg them on.
In face to face interactions, people are more likely to try to diffuse a tense uncomfortable situation, rather than crank it up to 11. Then again, my experience was with a bunch of people who were not generally “activists” by vocation, they were driven to it by the war. Vocational activists may be more likely to be assholes on an interpersonal level than the general population (no offense to any professional activists here, but I have heard this opinion from more than a few people).
Kiwanda 05.26.15 at 4:01 pm
@Belle: “Next time I’ll just be an asshole?”
Please, don’t. If he doesn’t say anything worth responding substantively to, why respond at all? What good does the “nee-ner, nee-ner, la-la-la-la, [BONERS]!” response do? I guess it has its own satisfactions, and good old-fashioned blog pile-ons are very affirming and everything, but please don’t. There are enough “white male tears” and “history’s greatest monster” responses as it is.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 4:15 pm
Angus Johnston: “Nowhere on the list is there any recognition that working through these moments of friction can actually be a positive, even necessary, part of the process of building a strong, diverse movement. You talk about uneasy truces and extended negotiations draining energy and people bossing each other around. You don’t talk about people coming to understand each other better, people coming to feel true solidarity with each other, people bonding to each other by working through conflict.
Maybe this is just a difference in how we see organizing, and the organizing traditions we’re coming out of. But I see all that stuff as crucial, and I see it happening in activist spaces all the time.”
No offense intended, but I seem to remember that you work mainly with students. I remember student organizing back from the distant days when I was a student, and yes, that kind of cathartic bonding was more possible because students share certain basic qualities: they’re young, they’re upwardly mobile, they’re verbal, they have status hierarchies within the group that easily take hold because they haven’t developed adult status differentiation fully yet. I’ve basically never seen it with U.S. adults. I agree that developing “strong, diverse movements” is necessary but really when I’ve seen movements do it it’s been on the Civil Rights Movement model: charismatic leadership and hierarchy. Doing it without that is not easy.
bianca steele 05.26.15 at 4:29 pm
I want to second what Lynne says above and say I think there’s sometimes a sense that there’s a “magic bullet” that will let a group do away with hierarchy, orders, and conflict, and that if only everyone understood it, the group could get on with things. Sometimes this may be outsourcing leadership to an outsider so everyone else can go on being conflict-free. Sometimes it may be a beautiful theory that will explain how things should go.
Angus Johnston 05.26.15 at 4:39 pm
Sure, Rich. That kind of stuff is more central in student and youth spaces than in others. (Though I’d argue it’s far from absent elsewhere.) But we’re talking about the plague of callout culture, right? About excessively zealous, incandescently passionate, identity-politics driven activists?
To say “that solution only works in student and youth contexts, so it’s not worth considering” seems weird to me, given the subject matter — and particularly given the fact that this whole thread is a response to Freddie deBoer, who has repeatedly centered his critiques of callout culture on the campus.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 4:43 pm
That’s a good point. I guess that what I was taking from the whole discussion was the parts of it that applied to cases where 40-year-olds get into conflict with each other — in which no one was really “excessively zealous, incandescently passionate” and so on but in which identity politics certainly appeared as am important factor.
Plume 05.26.15 at 4:55 pm
Mattski @183,
It’s definitely in response to what you wrote. You just have this strange idea that when someone responds to you, they’re always attempting a description of what you and you alone have just said, instead of what occurs in normal conversation:
“This reminds of me . . . . ” and “this makes me think of . . . ” and “if this, then . . . ” etc. etc. Think of riffs. Think of, well, threads, tangents, asides, etc. etc.
At least when it comes to our back and forths, you seem to have locked down on only one possible form: My comments are only and always directed at you, personally. Not so. Not in any way, shape or form.
Angus Johnston 05.26.15 at 5:22 pm
In my experience, Rich, when a public and aggressive identity politics callout blows up big between two 40-year-olds, it’s rarely a simple matter of someone reacting intensely to an innocent slip of the tongue. Generally there are deeper issues involved on one or both sides.
But my experience isn’t all that extensive.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 5:46 pm
“it’s rarely a simple matter of someone reacting intensely to an innocent slip of the tongue”
Well… I phrased the problem as one in which the person doing the callout was “right” to do the callout. That pretty much leaves out cases in which an innocent slip of the tongue was all that happened. The questions that FdB focus on are still applicable, I think: what theory do we have about what should really happen in these cases that distinguishes what kinds of response is the right one, and is there a way that we can adopt generally to change the whole challenge-and-response process? I’m dissatisfied with many of the prevailing answers because the ultimate way to prepare for this in advance is to have a socially accepted way of dealing with the situation that is widely known before people even join a particular organization.
I’ll also add that while FdB does talk about campus situations, his main focus is on things like Twitter. I agree that youth and student groups might get stronger through working out their issues, but I’ve never seen a Twitterstorm lead to a positive result like that.
Lynne 05.26.15 at 5:47 pm
Some activist groups value the decision-making process as an important part of the reason they are together. They are working for a more egalitarian social order, and aim to model that among themselves. To such groups, it would be unreasonable and counterproductive to work for a more just society without trying to have more just group dynamics.
Rich, I have formed the impression that this might not describe your group. Am I right? If so, the challenges to helping people work together are quite different.
Rich Puchalsky 05.26.15 at 6:02 pm
Lynne, I’ve written about what I think about this here and to a lesser extent here. People certainly tried for more just group dynamics, and I agree with that, but the results were not really that good and there are lessons that I think can be learned. As for other activist groups, of course practices vary depending on what kind of groups they are.
adam.smith 05.26.15 at 6:05 pm
considering that Rich’s main stated activism is in Occupy, which is very, very concerned about process, I’m pretty sure the answer is no, you’re wrong.
Lynne 05.26.15 at 6:16 pm
Rich, I love this whole paragraph:
“Anarchist organizers have to make some serious choices at this point. When the next movement springs up, are anarchists going to say that consensus flatly doesn’t work for a mass movement? They should. Bray is quite aware of this problem, and writes about how Bakunin’s anarchists worked by majority vote, or 2/3 for major decisions. But I’m impatient with hero worship of anarchists who have been gone for a century, and I think it’s much more convincing to say that based on our recent experience of a few years ago, consensus decision-making should be rejected. And, to take aim at a few other Occupy sacred cows, that not everyone below the 1% income level is magically part of “the 99%” without regard to their beliefs, that working people may have goals and interests quite different than those that we wish to assign to them based on anti-capitalist theory and we can’t really speak for them as a whole, and that not everyone who walks in off the street should have equal control of a movement in which different people do different amounts of work. ”
Working with a large group who don’t know each other is wholly different from working in a small group who have been together for a few years. Consensus decision making is cumbersome and makes for long meetings, even in small groups. Utterly impractical in a mass movement.
Angus Johnston 05.26.15 at 6:20 pm
Rich,
I’m actually pretty bullish on Twitter’s potential to lead to substantive progress — both in terms of fostering productive debate and in terms of winning real off-line victories. But that’s a whole nother conversation.
engels 05.26.15 at 6:32 pm
Perhaps OT but apropos of Occupy, vanguardism, etc I never heard of this until the other day:
engels 05.26.15 at 6:34 pm
PS. As a non-American who’d never heard of DeBoer, Ortberg or even listicles before today, I’ve got to say I found 90% of this post and discussion completely baffling. I don’t mean that as a criticism, just an FYI.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 6:35 pm
“PS. As a non-American who’d never heard of DeBoer, Ortberg or even listicles before today, I’ve got to say I found 90% of this post and discussion completely baffling. I don’t mean that as a criticism, just an FYI.”
Consider yourself richer for it engles.
Bloix 05.26.15 at 8:09 pm
#158 – “1) Mallory and Nicole are two very bright young women who have a devoted following, which includes some men. A ruling class male needed to put them in their place, and FdB decided he was the man to do it.”
What work is the phrase “ruling class” doing here? Is it a euphemism for “white”? Or is it intended as a redundancy for “male?” Is the idea that white men are not allowed to have opinions because shut-up shut-up shut-up shut-up?
Because FdB is not to my knowledge “ruling class.” He’s a newly-minted and unemployed Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Purdue. That’s a public university in Indiana which is famous for engineering but not so much for English. Maybe he has a rich daddy, but as his B.A. is from Central Connecticut State University, I doubt it. Perhaps you have more information.
To answer my own question, “ruling class” is there, I suspect, in the “all white men are oppressors, I am not a white man, therefore I am oppressed” sense.
Mallory Ortberg seems perhaps to have a rich daddy. Her father is “senior pastor” at a mega-church in California. He once paid her $50 to memorize the Declaration of Independence.
I can’t tell where Ortberg went to college. But Nicole Cliffe went to Harvard. This is how she describes her first job:
“Tell us a little bit about your previous life working at hedge fund. How did that happen? Why did you leave?
I went to work for a hedge fund in a touchy-feely-human-capacity role right after graduation, because they paid me more money than any book-y magazine-y job would, and also because they would sponsor me for a work visa. Much of my job was taking quants and programmers to lunch during their interview day and ordering the truffle burger at DB Bistro Moderne while talking about Doctor Who (so they would assume it was a place where women eating burgers would talk to them about Doctor Who).”
Ha-ha-ha!!! I was paid to flatter nerdy guys at lunch! (“Women” in this quote is of course a euphemism for “cute girls.”)
She lives in Utah now: “My husband and I didn’t want to stay in NYC once we didn’t have to work there physically. We love to ski, and it’s a very, very easy place to live.”
Look it up yourself, you have Google.
Who seems to you to be members of/aspiring commentators to/future pundits for/ the ruling class? Who is going to have pieces in the NY Times Weekly Review? Who is writing for readers who are aspiring members of the ruling class?
A. Nicole Cliffe and Mallory Ortberg
B. Freddie de Boer.
I mean, this is the free extra credit question, isn’t it?
Abbe Faria 05.26.15 at 8:36 pm
This is a really great thread all, keep it going.
Identitarians just have great rhetorical strategies which make it really hard to argue with them, they’ll cast your argument as a product of your identity thus invalidating it. That will justify their opinion and in their own mind prove them right. (Like the Hulk they get stronger the angrier they get). They’re also a genuine grass roots mass movement. They don’t have leaders so much as temporary figureheads raised by the zeitgeist and only an attention span or rhetorical misstep away from being cast down. Collectively they’re powerful (they’re one of the few parts of the left with recent victories), but if you argue with one of them individually you’ll get the “powerless so-and-so, victimised by the oppressive forces of x”. It’s hard to get past that.
SamInMpls 05.26.15 at 9:54 pm
@ Bloix
In this piece for Gawker, Mallory Ortberg wrote: “I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian.”
The Other DSCH 05.26.15 at 9:55 pm
The Other DSCH 05.26.15 at 9:57 pm
No, my blockquote was deleted! I meant to write:
“All of deBoer’s other comments were redacted to [BONERS], which was possibly unfair but assuredly hilarious…”
Was it really, though? I don’t know. When I was in seventh grade, people used to draw boners on my math homework after they had copied my answers. I guess it was pretty funny.
Soullite 05.26.15 at 10:03 pm
It’s amazing how much worse this site has become since going the full feminist… It used to be a place where lots of ideas were discussed. Now the first few comments are always about how someone you disagree with must hate, fear or resent women, otherwise they would never disagree with you!
bmore 05.26.15 at 10:35 pm
@SamInMpls
So Pepperdine.
The Other DSCH 05.26.15 at 10:35 pm
Bloix, upthread: “6) Maybe there’s one guy who reads Roth. Henry, not Philip.”
And that guy is Gary Shteyngart.
Bruce Baugh 05.26.15 at 11:23 pm
MPAVictoria: Speaking here as a reformed perpetrator myself, a lot of the “people read less now” stuff starts with a simple error. You’ve got a subculture or community of people who’ve read a lot for a long time, and then you get data about reading habits in the public at large, and you see that the public at large reads a lot less. Decline!
But the perp has to back up and realize that this is how things work. Some parts of society read a lot more than others. What parts are out there now? For instance, a lot of the much-maligned Tumblr crowd actually read a lot, and diversely, in both fiction and non-fiction. But it takes being willing to talk with them to find out what they’re reading and what they think about it. Clusters of reading activity turn up all over, and it can take a lot of effort to find them. Sneering at the presumptively awful masses and doomsaying about it all is regrettably easier.
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 11:39 pm
“Sneering at the presumptively awful masses and doomsaying about it all is regrettably easier.”
Indeed!
“It’s amazing how much worse this site has become since going the full feminist… It used to be a place where lots of ideas were discussed. Now the first few comments are always about how someone you disagree with must hate, fear or resent women, otherwise they would never disagree with you!”
Well I for one am devastated that you feel this site has slid downhill soullite….
MPAVictoria 05.26.15 at 11:41 pm
“Was it really, though? I don’t know. When I was in seventh grade, people used to draw boners on my math homework after they had copied my answers. I guess it was pretty funny.”
Point, making fun of a pompous, highly educated adult who is commenting on your blog and telling you how wrong you are may be SLIGHTLY different then bullying a 13 year old.
The Other DSCH 05.27.15 at 2:31 am
Yeah, yeah, I get it, we’re grown-ups now, and therefore should tolerate potty-mouth. Plus, it’s not like I never drew a dick on someone else’s paper. But maybe this is just a bully tactic that’s the same no matter the age of the children involved. Or maybe that was just the overall tenor of TBD, I never read it myself, though I’d really question the value of that kind of “political” “engagement.” (I’d also question why anyone else would feel the need to engage with it, as FredBo apparently did.)
Bloix 05.27.15 at 2:39 am
#212 – De Boer was not “commenting on their blog.” He was commenting on his blog. Doyle didn’t link to it. It’s here:
http://lhote.blogspot.com/2010/04/feminist-men-and-feminist-blogs.html
What he is arguing is that if feminism constitutes knowledge then it must be open equally to men and women. Therefore, he as a feminist must be able to contest positions with anyone, male or female, and sometimes he will conclude that he is right and the other person, male or female is wrong.
You can certainly take issue with that position. Lots of second-wave feminists did, didn’t they? I’m not an expert by any means but that’s my understanding.
But Doyle and Hess don’t take issue with his argument. They say, ha ha ha we’d never fuck YOU, Boners!!!
De Boer comes across as earnest, humorless, sincere, boring, and tone-deaf. Doyle and Hess come across as morons. The Beavis and Butthead of feminism.
js. 05.27.15 at 2:44 am
Bloix @214:
FdB was very much commenting on Doyle’s post as well. SD couldn’t have done the BONERS thing if he weren’t, obviously.
Bloix 05.27.15 at 3:10 am
#215 – yes, he took her post as an invitation to a dialogue and he left comments. Mistake. And we have no idea what he wrote because she deleted it. It’s not hard to win an argument when you can yell BONERS BONERS BONERS at someone who can’t talk back.
js. 05.27.15 at 3:19 am
I’m not interested in getting into this argument. I was just noting that the claim that FdB ‘was not “commenting on their blog.‒ was not quite true.
MPAVictoria 05.27.15 at 3:40 am
“was not quite true.”
i.e. It is a lie/wrong.
MPAVictoria 05.27.15 at 3:42 am
“De Boer comes across as earnest, humorless, sincere, boring, and tone-deaf. Doyle and Hess come across as morons. The Beavis and Butthead of feminism.”
I am glad we have Bloix to tell us what is funny. You thoughts on Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, subversive humour? Or Stupid potty mouthed garbage?
MPAVictoria 05.27.15 at 3:44 am
The thing about men is they often assume women posting on the internet owe them a response.
http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sea-lioning
The Temporary Name 05.27.15 at 4:03 am
The comment deBoer left at Doyle’s blog remains intact, with its link.
http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/04/09/sexist-beatdown-the-male-as-male-in-all-his-complexity-edition/#comment-8798
Bloix 05.27.15 at 4:19 am
Here’s Mallory Ortberg’s plan for the future:
I’m sure a couple years down the road when we’re able to hire an amazing full-time stable of writers, which is the dream, and I am a distant, benevolent wizard who pulls in a bunch of money for having invented the Toast, I’ll periodically grace the New York Times with op-eds about my opinions. But that day is definitely not here yet.
I tell ya, there’s someone who’s going to change the fucking world.
The Other DSCH 05.27.15 at 4:25 am
Wait a sec, I missed the part where Monty Python was an explicitly political project. Cuz if it was, it failed quite thoroughly. Though again maybe I’m misreading TBD, since I’m judging it by what was said here. If it wasn’t a politics blog, why are we talking about it as though it were a politics blog, and not as a Pythonesque satire site? I’ll give you my own theory: “humor” in politics functions the same way it did in middle school (which is why I brought it up): first it humiliates, then it sneers at the target for not having a sense of humor about the whole thing.
But shucks, that’s just my 2̧ cents.
The Temporary Name 05.27.15 at 5:15 am
Freddie must be a fool for paying attention to her.
floopmeister 05.27.15 at 5:41 am
Engels @200: Justine Tunney is pretty clearly connected to the Endarkenment movement/ideology/episode of
massexclusive paranoia. To get some idea of her trajectory read this:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/01/occupying-the-throne-justine-tunney-neoreactionaries-and-the-new-1-percent.html
A right bunch of unpleasant nutters and worthy of their own post and comment thread on CT.
“PS. As a non-American who’d never heard of DeBoer, Ortberg or even listicles before today, I’ve got to say I found 90% of this post and discussion completely baffling. I don’t mean that as a criticism, just an FYI.â€
MPAV: Consider yourself richer for it engles.
Well I don’t know… I may be an antipodean swine but not all of this discussion has resembled pearls. :)
Sancho 05.27.15 at 8:05 am
…nnno. I’m not going to plough through the comments trying to follow the arguments.
Freddie de Boer is a very intelligent narcissist who produces exactly the type of material you would expect of someone meeting that description. I’m not sure it’s worth scrutinising in great detail.
Val 05.27.15 at 10:29 am
@203
Bloix your comments are a bit boring and heavy handed, I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s hard to say something like that without being. But just to clarify a couple of things:
1) have you heard of patriarchy? Maybe you think it’s just a term of abuse, but it’s not. It’s an important historical structure like class and imperialism.
2) I believe Nicole Cliffe and others on that site have written about what it’s like to be scholarship students from low income families attending prestigious universities. Worth reading before you comment again.
In general, just because people are jokey, doesn’t mean they’re not both clever and serious.
Val 05.27.15 at 10:36 am
Bloix @223
What I said in my previous comment. A feminist makes an ironic comment and a man takes her Seriously and pretends she’s a Very Bad Person – boring, dishonest, please don’t do it.
Val 05.27.15 at 10:42 am
One can spend too much time rebutting silly arguments online, so the next time anyone here talks disparagingly about “identity” or indeed “identitarian” (?!) politics on CT, I think I will just respond “patriarchy, sexism, racism, slavery, imperialism – are you defending them?”
Bloix 05.27.15 at 2:57 pm
Val, #229. Her comment is not ironic at all. She means it. The point of the The Toast is to make money.
“Under Roxane, Mallory, and Nicole, we expect to build out a series of broad niche sites offering advertisers access to specific demographics cultivated by the sites’ editors… [I]’s our belief that advertisers want to be associated with a brand that offers integrity with a social conscience,” [part-owner Nicholas] Pavich added….
Ortberg confirms that the three have no immediate plans to take any money. But: “I sure feel like I think we deserve lots, ” she says. “We should be fielding lots of offers.””
http://www.fastcompany.com/3036230/most-creative-people/the-toasts-recipe-for-bootstrapping-a-profitable-media-business
And this is fine!!! It’s nice to see decent, ambitious people making a living in new media.
Just don’t tell me that an unemployed doctor of rhetoric from a public university is the ruling class while this for-profit web humor and cultural criticism site (funded by hedge fund earnings) that promises to be a great niche for advertisers of products for young women is the voice of the oppressed.
PS- yes, Nicole Cliffe got a full ride at Harvard. And she used that very expensive and exclusive education to get a job where she was paid to flirt with nerdy guys for her hedge fund employer. “If you come work here cute girls like me will go out for burgers with you!” That’s what she says she got paid for – do you doubt it? Not so horrible. But please don’t hold her up as a paragon of moral virtue who’s being slapped down by that tool of the “ruling class,” Dr Freddie de Boer.
Rich Puchalsky 05.27.15 at 4:18 pm
The debate between Jay Caspian Kang and Freddie deBoer has finished. I thought it was well worth reading. People who don’t want to deal with the “ruling class” “very intelligent narcissist” uncool 5-year-old-comment-BONER writing jerk presumably will not find it worth reading.
Val 05.27.15 at 8:50 pm
@231, 232
I shouldn’t have to explain this – only a desire not to understand could make intelligent people not get it – but I was suggesting that the ruling class is the white men who continue to dominate positions of power and wealth in English speaking countries (notwithstanding that the dominance isn’t total now).
Maybe someone who objects to what I said would like to do an analysis of the gender and race of professors in America (the section of the ruling class that I assume FdB woukd aspire to). I could be wrong about the “ruling class” but it takes more than assertion to show that.
Anyway, it would have taken you about two minutes to work this out for yourselves, so why didn’t you? Reflect on that!
Val 05.27.15 at 8:57 pm
@ 231
Again urging you to be honest in your responses to the Toast: the ads annoy me too but the editors clearly state they want to pay writers properly. Why didn’t you mention that?
Nicole Ciffe was MAKING FUN of the job. Sorry for caps but I’m getting a little bit tired of this. As a new graduate and young person, I once had a job in market research. We take what jobs we can get sometimes, do you remember that or have you been lucky enough not to have to?
Bloix 05.27.15 at 9:28 pm
#234. Nicole Cliffe was kidding on the square. Mallory Ortberg was being straight-ahead honest. I have no problem with The Toast’s business model. They say they want to pay a fair price for honest weight, and to do well by doing good, and I believe them. They are not in the liberation business, which – in his earnest way – is FdB’s line of work. (Not mine! Not by a long shot.)
Effectively, your argument is that FdB is a white man and therefore shut up. He has the right to agree and the right to remain silent, and that’s it. As he won’t do either, he is a tool of the ruling class. The content of what he says is irrelevant – the only points of interest are the color of his skin and the shape of his genitals.
Rich Puchalsky 05.27.15 at 9:32 pm
Val: “Anyway, it would have taken you about two minutes to work this out for yourselves, so why didn’t you? Reflect on that!”
It took me less than two minutes to reflect that even if FdB does achieve the lofty position of tenured humanities professor, he doesn’t become a member of the ruling class by doing so. In fact it’s rather a right-wing idea that humanities professors are members of the ruling class, able to sway the public to their will via teaching impressionable undergraduates and through … I don’t know … perhaps through being the “arbiters of cool” that someone mentioned upthread. People on the center and left generally think of the ruling class as being composed of wealthy and powerful people in politics and business, or possibly major media figures.
Of course, if you’d said that the ruling class in America is mainly composed of white men, you’d be right. But that’s not what you said. You said that FdB was ruling class, apparently because he’s a white man.
LFC 05.27.15 at 10:34 pm
mcmanus @164
it directly says that not buying into MPAV’s priorities the precise way she [sic] ranks them is the same as not supporting her issues at all
A side point: it’s clear to me from reading CT comment threads that MPAVictoria is not properly addressed as “she”. (‘MPA’ refers to a degree, and ‘Victoria’ to the [Canadian] university at which the degree was earned. This should not be an esp. difficult inference for anyone who has spent time on CT comment threads. I would h)
LFC 05.27.15 at 10:37 pm
I hit post too soon by accident:
[continuation] I would have thought mcmanus, given his fairly frequent presence here, would have realized this a while ago.
SamInMpls 05.27.15 at 11:21 pm
@ 232 Rich
I found it well worth reading, if only for the part where Kang informs Freddie that the calls are coming from inside the house.
Looking back at Jay Caspian Kang’s work for Grantland, I couldn’t help but think that writing imaginary biographies of the Harvard University Band is a lot closer to what is going on over at The Toast than what he does now for the NYT magazine.
Rich Puchalsky 05.27.15 at 11:27 pm
“if only for the part where Kang informs Freddie that the calls are coming from inside the house”
Yes, his “The backlash is you” was excellent.
Val 05.28.15 at 3:50 am
@236
Seriously Bloix if I was like you’re a white man- shut up, I’d be flat out here. Again, is it really honest to suggest things like that? Lets raise the level of argument a bit. In the same way someone is free to criticize the Toast, I’m free to disagree and critique their criticisms,.
Val 05.28.15 at 6:42 am
Rich @ 236
I’m sure we could discuss the relatively lowly position of humanities in universities at length – I’m a person who found myself moving from history to public health partly for just the kind of reasons you’re alluding to, I guess. However in the greater scheme of things, humanities professors are privileged. Also what we are talking about here is the realm of language and media, where can still have some influence (particularly if they don’t make enemies of media barons, I suppose).
Also, in my rather throwaway and not-entirely-serious comment, I suggested FdB was a self-appointed spokesman for “ruling class”, rather than a member of it (an aspiring member might well be more likely to take on that role, to prove his worthiness). But you know, when someone makes a suggestion designed to amuse and perhaps provoke some thought, it’s nice to take it that way rather than as a serious manifesto.
Rich Puchalsky 05.28.15 at 11:01 am
I didn’t take it as a serious manifesto any more than I considered “very intelligent narcissist” to be a serious mental health diagnosis. I did think your “why don’t you take two minutes to work it out for yourself” was kind of asking for people to say why they didn’t need that two minutes, though.
Professors of any kind are relatively high status in most societies: also, white males are privileged in American societies and men are privileged in a very large proportion of societies. That’s why people use the word “privilege”. The large majority of white men are not ruling class even though they are privileged, and confusing the two is one of the ways that the actual ruling class uses to help prop up the existing system.
Lastly, I got it that you were suggesting that FdB was aspiring to be a kind of ruling class enforcer with his comment. It was throwaway and not entirely serious an therefore might be treated as a joke: it was also a vicious and cruel joke.
Val 05.28.15 at 11:15 am
@243
“Vicious and cruel” – Rich are you serious about this? I dont quite know what to say but I am always interested in your contributions, even if I don’t agree with them, and I hope everything is ok with you.
Rich Puchalsky 05.28.15 at 12:00 pm
I don’t really know of many more serious insults than saying that someone who presents themself as being on the left aspires to be an enforcer for the ruling class. Maybe you didn’t intend it to come out that way?
Rich Puchalsky 05.28.15 at 3:11 pm
Now that I’m on the subject, here’s a handy guide entitled “You’re The Problem With the Left”, intended for use against person X who you know is more than just wrong. I’ve arranged the various types of reasons in something like what I consider to be increasing order of attempted rhetorical force, though this ordering probably tells more about me than anything else. Note that all of these can actually be true if you want to look at it that way.
1. Unintended consequences. “X is a sincere revolutionary, but X can’t see that trying for a revolution is what the state wants and they’d just use it as an excuse to crush us.”
2. Structural / continuing consequences. “X believes that the left-liberal order is a good thing and I agree that left-liberals have made some progress, but X doesn’t see that preserving the liberal order is what keeps us from having real socialism.”
3. Ignorance / non-reflection. “Poor X still can’t see he writes using white male privilege. I wish that he’d take the time to educate himself before he keeps going.”
4. Personal motivation. “Yeah, X has done a lot for social democracy, but who benefits from that? Mostly social democratic bosses like X.” “If only those purists weren’t so eager to get radical cred that makes them feel good about themselves, they’d see that we have to accept the lesser evil because it does real good for people.” (the LGM special)
5. Collective motivation. “X knows what’s going on when they talk about how good the New Deal was. They’re trying to preserve a system that’s sort of on the left but really it’s mostly good for people like X.”
6. Neener neener. “X is too chickenshit to be a real radical.” “Sure, X says they’re a radical, but they’re just looking for an excuse to hurt people.”
7. Bad seed. “I’ve seen ambitious attention seekers like X, and they really want to be one of the enforcers for the ruling class.”
8. Factual. “X is a police provocateur.”
geo 05.28.15 at 3:39 pm
246: That’s brilliant, Rich. You really should expand it into an essay.
politicalfootball 05.28.15 at 3:42 pm
Rich@232: That was, indeed, illuminating.
AcademicLurker 05.28.15 at 3:49 pm
The link at 232 was interesting. Even granting that all of the bad tendencies that FdB points out are, in fact, bad (I do think they mostly are), I don’t really see the backlash potential he’s worried about.
In the first place, while culture wars were certainly part of the 1994 story, they’re not the whole story. Secondly, a replay of 1994 is unlikely because the electorate and parties are both different today. Much more polarized. While a fair number of people call themselves independents, numerous studies have found that nearly all of these are partisans who identify as independent for self image reasons. The number of people who genuinely might swing D or R from one election to the next is very small.
You could say “OK, it’s all about getting out the base, but this stuff (“callout culture” or whatever) will turn people off and they’ll stay home”, but I don’t think that holds up either. Trolling and other bad online behaviors are ubiquitous. There are certainly characteristically leftist ways to behave like a jackass on the internet, but “being a jackass on the internet” doesn’t automatically get associated with the left in most people’s minds (I don’t think). So even if you have vaguely irritated negative feelings about twitter mobs or whatever, I don’t think those negative feelings will naturally transfer into electoral politics.
Unlike, I suppose, some people here, I think that the things FdB identifies as bad mostly are bad and have negative consequences. But the consequences are a lot more local and less high stakes than he seems to think. When he starts talking about the very fate of the republic hanging in the balance I have a hard time taking him seriously, even though it’s clear he genuinely believes this.
Yama 05.28.15 at 5:22 pm
Just a single data point. I consider the SJ left to be a hate group at this point. I will be staying home the next few elections.
MPAVictoria 05.28.15 at 5:42 pm
“Just a single data point. I consider the SJ left to be a hate group at this point. I will be staying home the next few elections.”
You don’t say?
Rich Puchalsky 05.28.15 at 6:06 pm
I have to admit that the part of the Kang / DeBoer debate that I’m still thinking about the most is the part where deBoer says that he’s into Black Lives Matter, not #BlackLivesMatter, and Kang says that they are one and the same. I’m not sure what I think about that.
politicalfootball 05.28.15 at 7:12 pm
250: I’m in the US, where there isn’t a prayer of the SJ left ever getting on the ballot except in odd, isolated circumstances.
LarryM 05.28.15 at 7:30 pm
249: I think you’re missing Freddie’s point. He’s not talking about a backlash in terms of contemporary Republicans/Democrats, he’s talking about a backlash in developing a meaningful, effective left wing political movement.
He may be right or he may be wrong, but that’s the issue.
William Berry 05.28.15 at 8:20 pm
@yama:
Why don’t you just stay home the next few elections? Take some like-minded folks home with you.
Give us haters a chance.
bob mcmanus 05.28.15 at 8:40 pm
246 is clever, but paralyzing, in that should I print, carry it everywhere, and constantly check it to see which particular wrongthink I am doing at any given moment? I am sure there will always be one that is pertinent, and several in this comment.
252 on the other hand, and I only skimmed the article, is profound and nails the problem.
Geo came up with the Communism/communism distinction, arguing against Marxism/Leninisn/Maoism etc. But who should be the experts on Marxism/communism, but the ones who live it every day and have to make it work? The Ivy League professor with six figure grant money from the conservative thinktank?
So Freddie deBoer is indeed being a jerk in not accepting and submitting to the authority of women, oh I guess any random woman anywhere, say Palin and Schafley,
the authority of women on feminism.
But we should not mistake this kind of feminism or anti-racism as anything but an arbitrary and unjustifiable radical and oppressive authoritarianism, simply an opportunism replacing the old boss with the new. And the new boss has deliberately abandoned most of the inducements patriarchy used to gain adherents.
MPAVictoria 05.28.15 at 8:44 pm
Shorter bob: Feminists are the REAL sexists.
bob mcmanus 05.28.15 at 8:51 pm
And 256 doesn’t even begin to address all the implications covered in 252, which I will quote to make sure the numbering doesn’t confuse:
“I’m still thinking about the most is the part where deBoer says that he’s into Black Lives Matter, not #BlackLivesMatter, and Kang says that they are one and the same. ”
For instance, what may or not be the hypocrisy of slave/servant/elite/colonalist liberalism in the 19th century (sorry, geo, JS Mill said some very bad stuff). I say maybe not, because as a communist, I am trying to understand liberalism as at core about concrete and abstract ownership…and the possessiveness, the proprietary nature of Kang saying that #BlackLivesMatter own the issue seems to be onpoint.
Val 05.28.15 at 9:00 pm
@245
Let me clarify Rich. When I said “ruling class” in this case I meant patriarchy. Which I guess you would classify as 3 at your 246. I think you have successfully deflected this discussion away from any consideration of the criticisms FdB made of The Toast, and for at least some commenters, given them an opportunity to attack feminism and social justice. Was that your intention?
Val 05.28.15 at 9:29 pm
I read part of the link @ 232 (not the whole thing, its very long and I don’t have time). I think FdB self-aggrandises (I wouldn’t necessarily say narcissist, but certainly a tendency to self aggrandise – the lone voice speaking truth to power, which in this case is a lightweight joke Nicole Cliffe wrote on The Toast!).
This from JCK I thought was very good:
“But I’m ultimately confounded by the fact that deBoer felt the need to erect this particular straw man — why does he feel the need to justify his right to criticize “as a white dude?†When he looks around, doesn’t he see that the vast majority of people who are paid for the critical insight look a lot like him? Again, in whose direction is deBoer shaking his fist?”
geo 05.28.15 at 10:21 pm
bob@256: Geo came up with the Communism/communism distinction
Heavens, no. The distinction is as old as Bolshevism. Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Korsch, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, Bertrand Russell, Martov, Plekhanov, Kautsky, and countless others after them have pointed out, in the teeth of both Leninist and right-wing propaganda, that the Russian Revolution and ensuing dictatorship were a travesty of the ideals of socialism and communism as previously understood. Can it be, Comrade McManus, that for all your familiarity with the most up-to-date socialist theorists, you have neglected the far more valuable out-of-date socialist theorists?
bob mcmanus 05.28.15 at 10:39 pm
261: uh, “came up with” as in “recent discourses on this blog” If I thought you invented it, I would have said so.
In any case, I am used to the distinction being described in many different ways. For Luxemberg and many others, “left communism” or “council communism.” By the old Johnson-Forest Tendency and recently Resnick & Wolff, “state capitalism.” By some Trotskyists, “degenerate communism”
I am afraid in my ignorance I was unaware that all communisms not of the Soviet Union were always everywhere by everyone distinguished with the capital ‘C’
Rich Puchalsky 05.29.15 at 12:55 am
bob mcmanus: “should I print, carry it everywhere, and constantly check it to see which particular wrongthink I am doing at any given moment? I am sure there will always be one that is pertinent, and several in this comment.”
They weren’t intended to be wrongthinks: the low-numbered ones are simply amped-up versions of normal arguments, marking the place at which “I disagree with you, I think you’re wrong” rhetorically becomes “it really would be better for the left if you weren’t in it.”
ZM 05.29.15 at 1:41 am
bob mcmanus
“Geo came up with the Communism/communism distinction, arguing against Marxism/Leninisn/Maoism etc. But who should be the experts on Marxism/communism, but the ones who live it every day and have to make it work?
…
But we should not mistake this kind of feminism or anti-racism as anything but an arbitrary and unjustifiable radical and oppressive authoritarianism, simply an opportunism replacing the old boss with the new. And the new boss has deliberately abandoned most of the inducements patriarchy used…”
The People’s Republic of China went through identity politics too in the 70s – 90s. The only time I looked at it was for a short essay focused on cinema. There is a period where gender/religious/other differences were thought inconsistent with communist equality and modernity, then there is some gradual change, then there are the Fifth Generation filmmakers with a tendency to look back at gender difference and religious difference and other differences in pre-communist China as a critique of both past and present. Then there was the Sixth Generation, but I have not seen many of their films, I can’t remember the name of the director but in the 90s he made Platform about a travelling theatre troupe and the unevenness and unmooring-ness of the westernisation of China in the 80s, although it is a long time since I saw it. So in Communist China they also had and have identity politics.
Val 05.29.15 at 3:36 am
@263
Ok Rich I plead guilty to telling people the Left would be better off without them in a recent thread. I won’t rehash it all, except to say in the case of Harry b, his reaction to the UK Tory win – dissing SNP and the female leader of the Greens – was stupid, and arguably sexist. He’s admitted that if he’d thought, he wouldn’t have done the latter at least. In return I’ve looked more closely at Harry’s position and I acknowledge that he is not a so called left person who’s actually a middle of the road Blairite, and he does have left values even he did say something stupid on that occasion, so my angry reaction was to that extent over the top.
Ok mea culpa over, and stating for the record that that is the only time I can recall that I have ever told people they should stop calling themselves left was that occasion, I would like to make a more general case, leaving aside individuals, that it would be better if centrist (in Australian terms, right wing Labor) people did stop calling themselves left and eg, formed a centre party. I can talk about here because that’s the political situation I know best but I think it may apply in other English speaking countries.
Currently in Australia there is a significant proportion of grass roots members of the Labor party who actually have values similar to the Greens, but they stay with Labor out of loyalty or pragmatism. However the political directions and leadership of the party are controlled by the right faction, some of whom also have close ties to eg, mining industry. This means the major so called left party is not in practice left. I think if the Labor right split and called themselves a centre party, there would be a significant left faction who would form much closer ties with Greens and other minor left parties, leading to the formation of a decent sized political coalition which supported genuine left wing social justice values.
So – contrary to what you and others may think (possibly affected by unrecognised sexism?) I am not just a silly feminist SJW who likes going round having Twitter wars etc (I’ve never had a Twitter war actually – mild reproach is about as far as I’ve ever gone). I actually do think it would be politically better for the left if centrist types stopped calling themselves left.
As for the bob McManus faction, I don’t know – the ‘true socialist party that doesn’t happen to care about sexism and racism’, perhaps?
bob mcmanus 05.29.15 at 4:57 am
For example
I care about poor, working class or lower middle class women, and in instances that sexism and the Patriarchy are oppressive to them, even or especially separable from class oppression, I will prioritize sexist, Patriarchal, gender etc issues above class issues.
I do not care about rich powerful women at all and in instances where they are oppressed in the exact same ways that poor etc women are, I do not care or will not address their issues.
I do not believe, at all, that liberating elite women will have any significant effect on liberating subaltern women, and in fact, I believe that working for the specific liberation of elite women will almost always make subaltern and working class women worse off. There may be some relief from the oppressions of patriarchy, but this will be made up by the oppressions of capitalism, example most rural girls who become Foxconn slave labor.
The elite woman will of course tell me that they care whole bunches about the Foxconn women, texting it to me on the Iphones. I don’t have one of those. I don’t believe them.
In the last analysis class matters more to me, because I believe in the last analysis class aspirations matters more to them.
ZM 05.29.15 at 5:41 am
bob mcmanus,
I think you are making identities too one dimensional in what you say, where for many contemporary people they have to some degree hybridity. For instance, I am working class and have a disability, but I also attend an elite institution. I have an iPhone, but I would say that I care as much as you do about women and men in Foxconn, although I do not know what to do about the conditions and am not sure there is an ethical smart phone available as yet. When I wrote an essay on gender in Korea I found, at least at that time, Korean female factory workers are often only factory workers for a few years until they are married, because it is not considered suitable work for married women, but beforehand it is a way to save money to get married. I also do assignments focused on urban planning in other countries like China or Kenya to have an understanding of things in different countries.
In the new indigenous student magazine the editorial recounts the difficulty of being between two worlds “memories which remind me I’m caught in the wildlands between two great cities. One city sparkles in the glow of power and privilege. The other, a fractured and crumbling grid smeared with blood and tears, with an ivory tower standing in the centre of it.”
Both Sides Do It 05.29.15 at 7:44 am
What’s the mechanism by which the existence of Sheryl Sandburg deteriorates the position of rural girls in China? Acting as a distraction / safety valve for US feminist pressure that would otherwise have benefitted them?
magistra 05.29.15 at 8:25 am
Bob@266: if you prioritise patriarchal oppression against working women over class in particular situations then while I may not share exactly the same order of priorities as you, I wouldn’t regard you as an opponent. (Since I’m a middle-class feminist, you’d probably regard me as an opponent, but that’s a different matter).
The problem is whether in practice left-wing movements would do this and I’m dubious. The prime example of this is the UK Socialist Workers Party which has recently imploded because of rape allegations. Too many of the leadership thought it was more important to protect a sexually aggressive man in a senior position rather than have allegations be properly investigated.
Maybe the SWP is atypical, but historically there has been a lot of sexism in other ‘working-class movements’, such as the Communist Party and trade unions. Class-based movements that reject ‘middle-class feminism’ need to make sure that they don’t end up tolerating sometimes toxic levels of sexism because of the supposed greater good of the revolution.
Val 05.29.15 at 9:17 am
@266
I don’t think that’s a very coherent position bob. For example, would you say that sexual harrassment or assault of working class women is not ok, but sexual harrassment or assault of middle class women is? I think you are confusing two things – sexism and class – which are actually different.
lurker 05.29.15 at 10:11 am
@270, Val
Bob can speak for himself, but I’d say that defending members of the ruling class against other members of the ruling class would be a waste of effort that should go into defending my own class.
Being ok or not does not enter into it.
Val 05.29.15 at 10:59 am
@271
That would mean sexual assault or harrassment doesn’t matter as long as it is not practised against those you care about? Are you sure that’s what you mean?
I find it hard to believe you actually do.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 12:05 pm
Oh boy, we’ve got a sixty year old man and a couple of Catholic Aussies debating the state of feminist discourse in the US–this promises to be helpful!
lurker 05.29.15 at 12:14 pm
@272/Val
Of course it matters, it matters to them, and in this case they happen to be powerful and privileged people. They do not care about what matters to me.
There’s only so much time and effort, and it should go to helping people who are on your side, not your enemies.
Val 05.29.15 at 12:27 pm
@273
Bianca I’m certainly not Catholic, I am not religious. I do read the Toast, which is relevant to where this discussion started. Apart from that, WTF?
Val 05.29.15 at 12:30 pm
Like why on earth did you jump to that particular conclusion? Or do you think we’re all the same and if ZM is Catholic I must be too? And are Australians not allowed to comment now, because no one told me?
In other words WTF? Where did that come from? And why? I’m interested.
ZM 05.29.15 at 12:30 pm
“Bob can speak for himself, but I’d say that defending members of the ruling class against other members of the ruling class would be a waste of effort that should go into defending my own class.
Being ok or not does not enter into it.”
Well I have already given the example of China. In pre-Communist China mostly upper class women had their feet bound. Peasant women needed to do lots of work so it was not practicable to bind their feet. So when you look at gender there, it is at least arguable that it would be preferable to be a peasant if you were a woman, depending on other factors. As upper class women were potentially more powerful socially, they often could face greater gender inequality to limit this power, this was similar in early modern Europe I think.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 12:34 pm
Sorry Val, I thought you’d made reference to religion in the past, I must have missed it. (A couple of Freddie’s favorite feminists, in fact, write explicitly as Christians and give advice to other women, presumably, in light of their own choices to follow that tradition.) I have nothing against religion or Catholicism in general, but I am not especially fond of the form of “feminism” that consists of imposing traditional gender roles, to be accepted “freely and voluntarily.”
Bob’s not a feminist and for all his virtues he’s not all that well-informed about feminism, and I don’t see the point of arguing with him about what in the end is an important but not all-exclusive strand of feminism in the US.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 12:35 pm
missed -> misread
Val 05.29.15 at 12:36 pm
@273
And 60 year olds aren’t supposed to have opinions either? You’ve really hit the jackpot with this comment!
I don’t know if you’re talking about bob or lurker, and I think both of their opinions are confused, but I doubt it’s their age – I hope not anyway because I’m over 60 myself. And you no doubt will be too one day.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 12:39 pm
Val,
If you don’t think it’s humorous that we started the thread with a complaint that Freddie thinks feminism is him trying to school women about what feminism is, and seem to be ending it with Bob trying to school you and ZM about what feminism is, I don’t know what to say.
Val 05.29.15 at 12:42 pm
Our posts crossed but I’m still confused – it sounds like you’re mistaking me for someone else entirely. I’ve certainly never suggested that traditional gender roles be imposed on anybody or anything like that.
Something has gone completely whacko in this conversation, but it’s time for me to go to bed anyway, so I’ll take my misguided Australian opinions off for the night.
Val 05.29.15 at 12:45 pm
Oops crossed again. Actually I thought I was trying to explain feminism to bob, but yes it’s all pretty funny either way. Good night.
Val 05.29.15 at 12:56 pm
And you’re probably right – probably not much point arguing with bob or lurker – but I am planning to use an ecofeminist analysis in my thesis and I think I am just hoping against hope that it is possible to get people to understand feminist analysis, I suppose.
Sadly one of the feminist theorists I read recently suggested that it was safer not to use explicitly feminist analysis if you want to be taken seriously nowadays, but I’m still going to do it. One advantage of being old is that I don’t have to worry so much about my ‘career’. Anyway, that’s enough – I feel now I may have expressed a bit too much umbrage over your throwaway line (which I’ve complained about others doing with mine before) so enough said.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 12:59 pm
Val,
No, those were two different sentences. You’re free to clarify your opinions if you feel like the sentence about traditional gender roles, performative feminity, and so on, seemed to accuse you, but I was simply giving my sense of what the discussion has been about.
AcademicLurker 05.29.15 at 1:34 pm
So the conclusion of this thread is that 60 year old Australian Catholics are what’s wrong with modern feminism, and are also the reason their jokes aren’t funny?
Got it.
William Timberman 05.29.15 at 2:04 pm
This has been one of those threads where both the light and the heat seem to be emanating from the same source. Is the argument here about form, or about content? It may be a a poet’s sacred duty to confuse the two, but those who don’t distinguish between them in a political discussion inevitably run the risk of winding up in a free-for-all.
The reasons why a bourgeois middle-manager (male) unconsciously adopts the mannerisms of a feudal lord are a lot like the reasons why the Soviets felt it necessary to hang rococo chandeliers in their metro stations — ghosts from the past that linger in our consciousness and govern our judgments long past their sell-by date. This may not have much to do with the economics of fair distribution, but it has a lot to do, I think, with why even high-status women have a right to feel oppressed.
Rich Puchalsky 05.29.15 at 2:35 pm
WT: “Is the argument here about form, or about content?”
The vast majority of people here didn’t even understood what FdB was arguing until late in the thread, so the argument was about nothing. It was about showing off high school skills. There was an interesting-to-me digression into activist technique in the middle, but otherwise I see pretty much one or two actual responses to what FdB actually wrote.
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 3:08 pm
AcademicLurker @ 286
Close enough. “Comment thread” and “feminism” are both nouns, and both have three syllables. If you spread it around that I said bad jokes are what’s wrong with feminism, I can’t stop you. Maybe your interpretation will get traction, and then I’ll just have to suck it up.
(I don’t know what other people’s excuse for unfunny jokes is, but if called on this one, I plan to blame the dentist again. But I won’t write a blog post accusing other people of being unable to overcome the effects of the dentist’s chair.)
bianca steele 05.29.15 at 3:17 pm
I just noticed Val @ 284. No worries here.
William Timberman 05.29.15 at 3:17 pm
Rich Puchalsky @ 288
I was responding mainly to the you/geo/bob mcmanus axis of the debate, with bits of ZM and Val where they intersected, all of which did indeed come late in the thread. As for the Freddy dB vs. the World of Feminism stuff, I guess I’m just too old — half a century and more away from high school — to get it. To me it just seemed a weird combination of smarmy, smart-ass, and look-at-me.
Rich Puchalsky 05.29.15 at 3:26 pm
WT: “I was responding mainly to the you/geo/bob mcmanus axis of the debate”
Marx / William Morris / Bakunin cosplay does combine the content of the 19th century with the form of the 21st, but I keep having trouble finding a good Hello Kitty iron-on to put on the back of my black coat.
William Timberman 05.29.15 at 3:35 pm
RP: ;-)
Val 05.29.15 at 10:02 pm
Bianca I think I know why you thought I was Catholic – I talked about my Irish Catholic ancestors on another thread. However I’ve also got quite a few northern English Unitarian ancestors who came to Australia quite a long time ago.
Myself I think I’m more of a pagan, worshipping Gaia.
Val 05.29.15 at 10:09 pm
Actually on the topic of religion – this is completely OT I know but I think it’s interesting – I went to a workshop on Indigenous health last week (because it was Sorry Day) and one woman there who is Indigenous, a contemporary musician, and interested in spiritually and health, was talking about singing the Dreaming. She explained it to us by an example of singing a tree – when you sing the tree, you are not singing to the tree or about the tree, it is more like you are connecting to the tree by singing. I probably haven’t understood it fully, but it was fascinating.
Rich Puchalsky 05.30.15 at 11:44 am
Parenthetically, I just saw a formally perfect #246-7 “bad seed” argument from Sasha Clarkson here. Paragraph quoted in full:
“In the past, the right wing press has always made a big fuss about “entryism†into the Labour party, typically by Trotskyite groups. Now, whilst these allegations had some foundation, the elephant in the room has always been right wing entryism, by those who did not support the aims of the Labour movement, and wanted to steal the party from its roots and use it as a vehicle to advance their own careers as part of the ruling elite. Blair was the ultimate entryist and succeeded absolutely where others had failed, leaving to join the SDP etc. Blair is gone, detested by much if not most of the grass roots, but his spawn are well ensconced in key positions, holding the rest of the party hostage.”
Ronan(rf) 05.30.15 at 2:17 pm
Val, my Aussie pal. Always good to seeing you commenting around here. Hope all is good in the land down unda. For my part , I don’t think 60plus year old Aussies are too blame for all the troubles in the world . However, the twenty something’s who used to wake me up in Leicester on a Tuesday night when drunkenly coming home from the clubs are a different story ; )
Lynne 05.30.15 at 6:45 pm
I finally read the exchange Rich linked to at #232, and found it interesting. I was unfamiliar with Jay Caspian Kang, and only slightly family with Freddie deBoer (from Belle’s links here), and at first I kept wishing Freddie would give specific examples of what he was talking about, as Jay was doing. Then in Part 3 Freddie’s bit was so caring and sincere and worried about the state of the left that I was quite moved. From their back-and-forth I learned that some of the things Freddie has been most criticized for here come from his desire not to fracture the left. Which isn’t to say he doesn’t make mistakes, but it is often worthwhile knowing where someone is coming from.
Val 05.31.15 at 5:00 am
@297
Hi Ronan, sorry about my young compatriots! Congrats to the Irish on the gay marriage vote.
@ 298
Lynne you are always so generous in your assessments, I really admire your attitude. You prompted me to go back and read the rest of the exchange. It didn’t really change my attitude to FdB I have to say, but I at least tried to look at his writing from your more generous perspective. I’m not very familiar with several of the issues that are being referenced there, I really only commented because I do read the Toast quite often, but overall I’m still much more convinced by JCK’s arguments. I think the idea that we must moderate what we say so as not alienate middle of the road voters is a fundamentally unsound argument, leaving aside the problems with FdB’s style.
Lynne 05.31.15 at 9:55 am
Val, speaking of generous assessments…thank you.
Like you, I found JCK more convincing. FdB admitting he hadn’t considered how CancelColbert affected Asian Americans was startling, and made his go at Sady Doyle more understandable if no less misguided. As JCK argues, I believe there is room for many voices on my side, even ones I don’t really agree with. As a feminist this is not always easy as the popular view of feminism is often taken from media dumbing down, but I try to keep my lip zipped about other feminist efforts I find underwhelming unless I am talking with other feminists (one example is SlutWalk. Not a tactic I loved, and I’m not even sure I love the aim of a lot of participants, but…so what?)
Side note, as I composed this I realized that I became a feminist 40 years ago this year. (!)
Val 05.31.15 at 11:06 am
Congratulations, Lynne. I think it would be similar for me. I started to become aware of feminist issues when I was about 19, and then began to do some serious reading in my early twenties. It was a real eye opener to me.
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