New Testingstan

Jung, it's a nitpick but this is how you spell 'privileged'

Otherwise I agree with what you and Zab have observed.

Jung wrote:Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the problems of the poor are a poor (heh) cousin to the subset of problems blacks/gays/trans/what-have-you have that middle class/affluent people can easily empathize with in provoking internet anger?

It goes well beyond internet anger. The Left has fragmented since the 70s into identity politics and away from economically-driven class structures. I don't engage particularly thoroughly with political theory but I've seen a few writers in Australia like Guy Rundle discuss is tangentially. The decline of the Labor Party is blamed on it in part for example in that the 'Left' is a conglomerate of groups interested in specific issues (gay rights, environmentalism, etc) rather than a unified class one. Helen Razer has been big on the idea that much of reaction against misogyny in Australian public life driven by the Gillard prime ministership is missing the point totally because it focuses on the symptoms rather than the disease/cure.

That's what really struck me about the ongoing anger over Russian gay laws and the calls to boycott Sochi. Russia is an authoritarian country run by an overtly corrupt elite that routinely violently suppresses dissent, generally has a terrible human rights record etc. But it took the anti-gay laws to mobilise opposition to it. That's not to say the cause is wrong, cause it isn't, but that it's interesting that the activist structure only existed for that particular issue.

Jung wrote:Am I the only one who gets the feeling that the problems of the poor are a poor (heh) cousin to the subset of problems blacks/gays/trans/what-have-you have that middle class/affluent people can easily empathize with in provoking internet anger?

Like internet people seem to get more fired up about the problems of very small minorities like trans people or utterly trivial First World Problems issues like whether Miley Cyrus twerking is culturally appropriative than poverty issues.

First off, uh, I think it's a bit shitty of you to reduce the latter thing to an "utterly trivial first world problem". I've read several black women from multiple economic classes talk about how it's an issue, and for you as a white guy to just dismiss it like that seems pretty terrible.

Second, what makes you think the people who actually push for social justice like this are ignoring class issues? This may just be my personal experience but once you get past the liberal shit that a lot of the social justice movement openly fights against (for example, how in a lot of liberal circles GSM rights are boiled down to same-gender marriage), you don't find anyone who finds the current system acceptable. At the least you're dealing with people who find capitalism a necessary evil but usually the active social justice movement coincides with full blown socialism due to how interlinked capitalism is with the kyriarchy.

Jung, are you lumping like the kind of stuff found on sd.net with the kind of stuff I reblog on tumblr or what because the smug elitist/classist/racist/ableist sd.net-liberal attitude to politics is one I've publicy disavowed and is pretty separate from the kind of politics I'm involved in anymore.

Re-linking this from Infinity Biscuit's Tumblr, because I think it might interest several people here (those wanting to get into teaching).

Infinity Biscuit wrote:First off, uh, I think it's a bit shitty of you to reduce the latter thing to an "utterly trivial first world problem". I've read several black women from multiple economic classes talk about how it's an issue, and for you as a white guy to just dismiss it like that seems pretty terrible.

Wait, Miley Cyrus twerking is an actual thing about race? When/where/why did that happen? I'm confused.

EDIT: Keep in mind I didn't even know the word "twerk" even existed until the Miley Cyrus thing hit the Internet.

i like how it's natural for them to throw around suspensions casually, while here if a student gets supended they must have done something so bad you're bound to hear about in the local, if not national news

unless you go to one of the rich-only private schools of course

i guess like them america does not see school as a right that children have, but some sort of privilege or favour bestowed on them

A student blows up at a teacher, drops the F-bomb. The usual approach at Lincoln – and, safe to say, at most high schools in this country – is automatic suspension.

what the shit?

nevermind.

So I type in the address of the place I need to go in Google Maps, and then it sticks the pointer in an obviously wrong place.

But that's okay, maybe I got a bad address and I know what the place is called. So I type that into Search, to get an address.

It's the same address I just typed in.

And when I c&p that into Maps it takes me to the right place.

(the original pointer was a few blocks east for some reason)

WTF Google?

hmm i just got an email from a google headhunter asking if he can call me to talk about my "unique mix of knowledge of software engineering and experience"

i betcha it is because i'm a 2% on stack overflow this week. usually i only answer D questions, but in my quest to become a 1%er this week i branched out a bit and answered some css and c++ questions too

i said sure call me, how can it hurt to hear him out? ....of course that's the same thing i said to the mormons and now it has been like 4 months and i'm starting to be a bit too deep into that (btw last time they were here i was talking about my finances being in the gutter. and now i'm going to be talking a call from google's job department... and the email came while i was touring their church. they're going to have a field day with that one.)

Zablorg wrote:While the lower class are frequently ignored and pinned as those people, I don't know that I've observed Randian things specifically so much? Like the immediate responsibility for being poor.

I don't think it's so much explicit Randroid beliefs per se so much as reflection of the way the social acceptability and widespread acceptance of fatalist and just world ideas about poverty shapes the debate.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:First off, uh, I think it's a bit shitty of you to reduce the latter thing to an "utterly trivial first world problem". I've read several black women from multiple economic classes talk about how it's an issue, and for you as a white guy to just dismiss it like that seems pretty terrible.

Maybe you're right but I gotta be honest the left often strikes me as diffusing a lot of its energy into a mire of symbolic shit. The best analogy I can come up with is it makes me think of guys in ancient Sumeria spending a lot of energy trying to get the king to put up some stelae saying nice things about peasants and women, as if that will really improve things when the structural dynamics that shaped that society to look the way it did remain untouched.

Generally the whole emphasis feels very Protestant. Like people think the oppressive system's power is all in the ideas it puts in people's heads, and the way to change things is obv to harangue people and get the right ideas in their heads I mean awaken true consciousness in them.

Maybe I'm wrong but a lot of it also feels very shit middle class people care about.

Second, what makes you think the people who actually push for social justice like this are ignoring class issues? This may just be my personal experience but once you get past the liberal shit that a lot of the social justice movement openly fights against (for example, how in a lot of liberal circles GSM rights are boiled down to same-gender marriage), you don't find anyone who finds the current system acceptable.

Just a feeling I get looking around; the feeling I get is yeah, they don't find it acceptable, but in the same way most people don't find cancer or hunger in Africa acceptable. There's this kind of abstract "yeah, that's terrible and something should be done about it" feeling, but the real passion is directed elsewhere.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:Jung, are you lumping like the kind of stuff found on sd.net with the kind of stuff I reblog on tumblr or what because the smug elitist/classist/racist/ableist sd.net-liberal attitude to politics is one I've publicy disavowed and is pretty separate from the kind of politics I'm involved in anymore.

Well, I can't say I'm that familiar with tumblr culture but from what I've seen of it it tentatively strikes me as having different and yet also similar issues as the kind of liberalism you see on SDN:

SDN is liberalism through the lens of STEM major lower middle class white dudes. Tumblr is liberalism through the lens of lower middle class humanities majors of more diverse demographics. They both represent perspectives of the disaffected middle which claims solidarity with the low but have a perspective shaped by the concerns, experiences, and culture of the middle.

PS while I'm ranting I'd like to talk about how I'm not sure I'm down with this whole "OH NO CULTURAL APPROPRIATION" thing either.

In the real world cultures take ideas from each other all the time and incorporate them and reinterpret them and expand on them and make them their own. This is the fuel of a vigorous culture with an advancing technology and rich art and philosophy and religion. Foreign gods and ideas and inventions and styles arrive from elsewhere and mix and mingle and react with each other to create all sorts of combinations. Good ideas from elsewhere are taken and adopted and improved upon and re-exported. This does not necessarily happen on terms the originators of the ideas would have liked; Muhammad and Jesus and Buddha may not have approved of or even recognized much of what today is called Christianity and Islam and Buddhism, still less the ideas that were influenced by them. It's not an accident that the more isolated a region is the more impoverished and technologically backward it tends to be. The strict control of what culture gets incorporated and on what terms is neither realistic nor desireable.

So while I see the point of people who don't like stuff like cigar store Indians I'm not really comfortable with people who seem to think that culture should be treated as a kind of intellectual property where you're only allowed to copy and use it with the permission of its originators and on terms they're comfortable with, which is the feeling I get from listening to the CULTURAL APPROPRIATION types.

man i dunno that wearing headdresses and getting so-much-more-meaningful chinese character tattoos is doing a hell of a lot for broader philosophical understanding

white american dismisses cultural appropriation as nonsense

jung congrats you are the recipient of my first 100% nonironic "check your privilege"

Infinity Biscuit wrote:white american dismisses cultural appropriation as nonsense

jung congrats you are the recipient of my first 100% nonironic "check your privilege"

If you want to write up a more in-depth rebuttal to my post I'd actually be interested in reading it. Like seriously I'm open to having my mind changed here.

Zablorg wrote:man i dunno that wearing headdresses and getting so-much-more-meaningful chinese character tattoos is doing a hell of a lot for broader philosophical understanding

Yeah, a lot of syncretic culture is of questionable value, but so is a lot of culture in general. I'm not sure you'd get the good stuff without the scope to experiment that also produces the bad stuff.

the whole talk of identity politics betraying the cause of proletariat solidarity reminds me of a similar thing within the feminism movement

"solidarity is for white women"

a slogan adopted by a lot of black feminists or womanists who find that the feminist movement has pushed aside things that help them entirely, have overriden and erased their own experiences in a drive to keep the message consistent in stuff that helps, well, white women, primarily. while I don't want to say anything definitive here, I would imagine you'd find similar sentiments in other marginalised women groups such as trans women

so I'm seeing a similar thing here, where straight white men want total solidarity because that's what would benefit them the most. identity politics probably doesn't push forward that one objective as well, but by actually pushing forward things that help so many people, especially marginalised groups that will not get benefits without pushing for it themselves, well, I think it should be pretty clear which of the two is better.

Jung wrote:If you want to write up a more in-depth rebuttal to my post I'd actually be interested in reading it. Like seriously I'm open to having my mind changed here.

As a white American, myself, I'm seriously not the best person to talk to about this. I would seriously suggest talking to the kind of people who actually are affected since they have the best appreciation for its consequences. That's how it went from something I didn't even know was an issue to something I see as important for me.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:so I'm seeing a similar thing here, where straight white men want total solidarity because that's what would benefit them the most.

I get the feeling this is directed at me. I don't want "total solidarity" or think everyone should devote all their energy to advancing one particular cause or people shouldn't press other issues. I was making a comment on how concrete poverty issues often seems to be relatively neglected in favor of issues that effect small minorities or stuff that seems more symbolic than substansive.

It was directed at what jester was saying, too. That the Left's fragmentation has slowed down progress. But if we define progress entirely as stuff that the pre-fragmentation Left worked for, then yes that isn't surprising. I just think the definition of what the Left should be working for needs to be expanded, as it is in the process of doing now and as I'm working for.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:It was directed at what jester was saying, too. That the Left's fragmentation has slowed down progress. But if we define progress entirely as stuff that the pre-fragmentation Left worked for, then yes that isn't surprising. I just think the definition of what the Left should be working for needs to be expanded, as it is in the process of doing now and as I'm working for.

I see your point and partly agree, but I worry that in the process the left has turned into something less threatening to the truly privileged and less good at defending and promoting the economic interests of the masses.

I worry the result we're setting ourselves up for is a world where poverty is evenly distributed among all races, genders, and sexual orientations; a world where to a large extent the "victory" has consisted of redistributing suffering rather than eliminating it.

I'd also like to point out that this is one of those areas where different oppressions strengthen each other, specifically the justifications for oppression of poors feed into justifications for oppression of blacks, women etc..

Open racism, sexism etc. isn't very socially acceptable anymore, so racists etc. tend to hide behind claiming that it's OK as long as there's equality of opportunity and that is a solved problem and the remaining inequalities of condition are the result of 'legitimate' reasons for shitting on people, like their bad choices and lack of talent. The Social Darwinist idea that it's OK to shit on people as long as you're doing it on a meritocratic basis is a huge enabling force for racism, sexism etc. in present culture.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:so I'm seeing a similar thing here, where straight white men want total solidarity because that's what would benefit them the most.

I'm pretty sure you're seeing what they believe will benefit the most people the most effectively.

Well, yes, I doubt there's a deliberate lens of "fuck those minorities". But the differing experiences, especially how it's a one-way street usually (the oppressed have a much easier time understanding the views and perspectives of the oppressors than vice versa due to the latter being seen as the default and normal one) means that they're often missing a lot of what actually helps people who aren't like themselves.

I'm not disagreeing that the goals of a purely economic class-based focus are good ones (in broad strokes). I just think they can't be what we rely on forever. To bring the analogy back to feminism again, the white cishet middle-class push of the first two waves of feminism in America brought us a lot of good changes into our society. However, while there are some things that they could probably help improve if given full focus, there's so much more, so much greater that will be improved by shifting over to the broader, intersectional goals of the most recent schools. And while a lot of it is probably a harder sell, it has to be done, and the gains are probably going to be much greater because there's so much more it's working towards.

I'll be honest, the idea of "just worry about economics since that will help everyone indirectly" sounds a bit too much like "rising tides raise all boats" to me, but I admit that's a purely emotional reaction there.

Infinity Biscuit wrote:It was directed at what jester was saying, too. That the Left's fragmentation has slowed down progress. But if we define progress entirely as stuff that the pre-fragmentation Left worked for, then yes that isn't surprising. I just think the definition of what the Left should be working for needs to be expanded, as it is in the process of doing now and as I'm working for.

The argument isn't that it's slowed down progress and it's not an argument that comes from privileged white males. It's that political and economic power are intimately linked and so if you want to actually substantially change the position of disadvantaged groups within society you have to work on establishing economic power.