Re: Me tooby Mischief Maker 02/09/2018, 6:44pm PST
Roop wrote:
I've been waiting and wondering just how they'll take him out. So far, every time he's been attacked, it just has made his Patreon numbers go up. Peterson said himself, "I've figured out how to monetize Social Justice Warriors."
Monetizing right-wing aggrievement is NOT something Peterson invented. It was old-hat decades ago when I was an undergrad and professional Yoosta-Bee David Horowitz was claiming victimhood because people protested a full-page racist ad he published in the right-wing college paper on my campus. It's an old hat cliche ripe for ridicule, as seen below:
Anyway, you know how I think all this craziness will end? The SJWs will grow up and get jobs, then have a few kids, and suddenly their priorities will change, like they always do. Instead of having left-wing nitwit authoritarians who were never taught how to make an argument and instead blindly follow an ideology, you'll have right-wing authoritarian assholes looking for a new ideology. And then another Islamic Terrorist Event will happen, and these children who have never felt real fear in their lives will be very very very fucking afraid. And shit will swing hard fucking right and we'll all be fucked. You really should be more critical of these fucktards Mischief.
You've got the whole thing upside down. You think teenage undergrads being meladromatic on twitter are running the show. No, they're at the very bottom of the pecking order. If you keep looking to right-wing critiques of weaponized social justice, you're only going to hear about college students, one because they're easier to debate on camera, being teenagers, and two because the Right shares the same anti-union sentiment that fuels liberal social justice pedantry.
If you want to understand social justice pedantry from the top down, you're going to need to look to critiques from the progressive (as opposed to liberal) left. Thomas Frank's book Listen Liberal explains this movement in America starting under Clinton in detail. But for a quicker read I actually ran across an article this week that describes the same process happening in post-Blair England, Exiting the Vampire Castle. Here's a choice quote about how social justice pedantry is used to exclude the infamously despised "white working class" and more importantly the unions they represent:
The first law of the Vampires’ Castle is: individualise and privatise everything. While in theory it claims to be in favour of structural critique, in practice it never focuses on anything except individual behaviour. Some of these working class types are not terribly well brought up, and can be very rude at times. Remember: condemning individuals is always more important than paying attention to impersonal structures. The actual ruling class propagates ideologies of individualism, while tending to act as a class. (Many of what we call ‘conspiracies’ are the ruling class showing class solidarity.) The VC, as dupe-servants of the ruling class, does the opposite: it pays lip service to ‘solidarity’ and ‘collectivity’, while always acting as if the individualist categories imposed by power really hold. Because they are petit-bourgeois to the core, the members of the Vampires’ Castle are intensely competitive, but this is repressed in the passive aggressive manner typical of the bourgeoisie. What holds them together is not solidarity, but mutual fear – the fear that they will be the next one to be outed, exposed, condemned.
The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humour. Humour isn’t serious, by definition, right? Thought is hard work, for people with posh voices and furrowed brows. Where there is confidence, introduce scepticism. Say: don’t be hasty, we have to think more deeply about this. Remember: having convictions is oppressive, and might lead to gulags.
The third law of the Vampires’ Castle is: propagate as much guilt as you can. The more guilt the better. People must feel bad: it is a sign that they understand the gravity of things. It’s OK to be class-privileged if you feel guilty about privilege and make others in a subordinate class position to you feel guilty too. You do some good works for the poor, too, right?
The fourth law of the Vampires’ Castle is: essentialize. While fluidity of identity, pluarity and multiplicity are always claimed on behalf of the VC members – partly to cover up their own invariably wealthy, privileged or bourgeois-assimilationist background – the enemy is always to be essentialized. Since the desires animating the VC are in large part priests’ desires to excommunicate and condemn, there has to be a strong distinction between Good and Evil, with the latter essentialized. Notice the tactics. X has made a remark/ has behaved in a particular way – these remarks/ this behaviour might be construed as transphobic/ sexist etc. So far, OK. But it’s the next move which is the kicker. X then becomes defined as a transphobe/ sexist etc. Their whole identity becomes defined by one ill-judged remark or behavioural slip. Once the VC has mustered its witch-hunt, the victim (often from a working class background, and not schooled in the passive aggressive etiquette of the bourgeoisie) can reliably be goaded into losing their temper, further securing their position as pariah/ latest to be consumed in feeding frenzy.
The fifth law of the Vampires’ Castle: think like a liberal (because you are one). The VC’s work of constantly stoking up reactive outrage consists of endlessly pointing out the screamingly obvious: capital behaves like capital (it’s not very nice!), repressive state apparatuses are repressive. We must protest!
What was the fulcrum on which the fates of Anthony Cumia, Stephen Colbert, and James Damore were decided in the wake of twitter outrage? Managerial whim. Doesn't matter that they had elite and highly-paid positions, they all could have been let loose on a reflex because they had no union to provide clear rules and limitations on where the line is crossed. I heard a funny story once from an old-school union guy saying if James Damore was in his union back in the day, they'd have fought like hell for him to keep his job out of union solidarity. Then when that was done, they'd have cornered him after work and beat the shit out of him.
The Right doesn't want you thinking about unions, so they focus on the youngest and least-consequential people on the left for a message that pretty much can be summed up as "SJWs be crazy!" The Clinton/Blair neoliberals don't want you thinking about unions, so they seize any opportunity to declare their left-wing working class adversaries insta-bigots, "Eek! Bernie Sanders said, 'excuse me' in a debate when Hillary went over her time, that means he's a sexist troglodyte and you can safely dismiss any of his political views while Gloria Steinem calls his female supporters a bunch of ignorant sluts just trying to score dick.
Now watch, I'm going to be accused of minimizing the legitimate grievances of marginalized groups because one of the most crucial rules of the Vampire Castle is that economic justice and social justice must be framed as mutually exclusive endeavors, just because.
