Not All Woke on the Left

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Some Schmo
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Some Schmo »

I've never been able to relate to identity politics, but that might have something to do with the fact that I'm a heterosexual male.

For a long time, I've been of the opinion that politics should never cover any topics except law and finance. I have no "F"s for what a politician's opinion is on most cultural topics. I want to know their policies on law and how they intend to manage our money, and that's it. That's supposed to be their goddamn job. Most of the insane crap people talk about under the rubric of "politics" has no business being in political conversations.

They should have no public opinion on, say, abortion, and the law should reflect that. The law should be based on the general opinion of medical experts. Politicians should be taking the advice of people smarter than they are, and then writing laws based on that information, not based on their own emotionally driven nonsense.

And of course, I blame the electorate for that. We seem to be clamoring to argue over idiotic crap like gender pronouns and Wuhan labs rather than the real problems, so the politicians are simply representing us (i. e. what we seem to want to argue over), which makes all the oligarchs in this country very happy (or, at least, feel safe for now).
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Res Ipsa »

Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:54 pm
Morley wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:45 pm


The pronoun issue is one that occurs often in academia.
So in other words, it is not something that is a political issue that affects people outside of a few universities that are dominated by corporate neoliberals. The average person does not encounter this in their daily lives.
That's not the conclusion I draw. in my opinion, that it is in issue in universities, where we educate our young people, is in and of itself important. In theory, professors should be insulated from the political issues de jour by tenure. In practice, that seems to have broken down, at least in some schools. The substitution of adjunct professors for tenured professors prevalent in modern universities makes the problem worse. The conclusion I draw is that the issue from Kish's perspective is different from that of most of the rest of us, so we should put in a little more effort into thinking about the problem.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 7:52 pm
Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:54 pm


So in other words, it is not something that is a political issue that affects people outside of a few universities that are dominated by corporate neoliberals. The average person does not encounter this in their daily lives.
That's not the conclusion I draw. in my opinion, that it is in issue in universities, where we educate our young people, is in and of itself important. In theory, professors should be insulated from the political issues de jour by tenure. In practice, that seems to have broken down, at least in some schools. The substitution of adjunct professors for tenured professors prevalent in modern universities makes the problem worse. The conclusion I draw is that the issue from Kish's perspective is different from that of most of the rest of us, so we should put in a little more effort into thinking about the problem.
The far right has been whining about godless, communist, politically correct, marxist, woke professors for more than 100 years. According to Republicans, American universities have been controlled by nefarious communists for decades, always supposedly just a few years from turning everyone into a violent communist revolutionary.

This nonsensical claim was the subject of William F. Buckley's 1951 book, "God and Man at Yale," which claimed that godless socialists were poisoning children's minds and that they needed to be forcibly canceled and brought to heel by authoritarian Christians.

Very obviously, if Buckley's claims had been true, the United States would have long ago become an atheistic Stalinist dictatorship. That did not happen because Buckley was fearmongering about non-Christians being allowed to have free speech and to challenge dogmatic fundamentalist notions about the Bible and evolution.

Since then, Christian fundamentalist reactionaries have repeated Buckley's grift many times, trying to scare moderates and conservatives into seeing communists under every dorm room bed.

That isn't to say there's nothing to these complaints, but rather that they are dramatically overblown. And as I said earlier, whatever merits they may have, it is obviously the case that Donald Trump and other Republicans are far more totalitarian in their ambitions and actual enacted policies.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Morley »

Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 7:34 pm
Morley wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 7:14 pm


That average folks don't encounter this in their daily lives is what makes this even more of an issue. They often think that (as you put it) "a few universities that are dominated by corporate neoliberals" are dictating right-minded culture to them.
Your remark is illogical. If something exists in only a very small sector of the population then it is even less of an issue. It's like saying that a dispute between McDonald's and its employees affects everyone else and is of greater importance than Republican politicians in dozens of states trying to impose totalitarian censorship against public libraries offering books some adults want to read.

It's fine not to like corporate liberals who obsess about pronouns and such, but they are a tiny minority of people on the left. Most Democratic politicians and basically all Democratic voters are not buying what these people want.

Less than 5,000 activists in a few universities who constantly whine about stuff are nowhere near as important as what Republicans are trying to do to criminalize running a drag show, reading a book about Ruby Bridges, or being an open atheist or LGBT person. Donald Trump trying to glorify the treasonous attack of January 6, 2021 in political rallies and openly threatening mass violence against prosecutors who uphold the law is infinitely more concerning.

How you counter annoying corporate neoliberals is that you talk about how their essentialist complaints betray left-wing values. Calling someone what they want to be called is no different than learning how to pronounce their name correctly. It has no bearing on one's own moral worth or intelligence. So what if it's awkward at first?
You misunderstand me. I'm not a proponent of, nor am I arguing for, the rightwing position. If you've read anything I've written on this board you'd realize that. I am, however, trying to explain why some on the Right think it's a concern.

It's not illogical for society to be worried about the culture that's being transmitted through the nation's universities. A good portion of the population either attends, or has attended, university. Those who haven't gone on to college (on both the right and the left) are sometimes concerned that they're being dictated to about what they should do, or how they should think. Brushing this off as being as inconsequential as a McDonald's labor dispute is counterproductive to a progressive agenda.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Morley »

I think Kish's larger concern has to do with the suicidal tendencies some of these policies are having on society--and more especially, the Academy. But I'll let him speak to that.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Kishkumen »

Res Ipsa wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:40 pm
I don't understand why you frame economic action and "identity politics" as an either or choice. In particular, given the correlation between race and income/wealth in the U.S., it strikes me as difficult to rebuild the middle class without considering racial "identity politics."
I am familiar with the “walk and chew gum at the same time”
talking point. The purpose of identity politics is to emphasize division in order to keep people from taking up a common cause. As long as the goal is attending to individual groups as opposed to the whole, the latter of which is done by harnessing the “shared antagonism” of the different groups (Zizek), then it will be extremely difficult to make the shared economic progress that helps people unite. Success in a common cause with common, substantive benefits is much more unifying.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Some Schmo wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 7:46 pm
I've never been able to relate to identity politics, but that might have something to do with the fact that I'm a heterosexual male.

For a long time, I've been of the opinion that politics should never cover any topics except law and finance. I have no "F"s for what a politician's opinion is on most cultural topics. I want to know their policies on law and how they intend to manage our money, and that's it. That's supposed to be their goddamn job. Most of the insane crap people talk about under the rubric of "politics" has no business being in political conversations.

They should have no public opinion on, say, abortion, and the law should reflect that. The law should be based on the general opinion of medical experts. Politicians should be taking the advice of people smarter than they are, and then writing laws based on that information, not based on their own emotionally driven nonsense.

And of course, I blame the electorate for that. We seem to be clamoring to argue over idiotic crap like gender pronouns and Wuhan labs rather than the real problems, so the politicians are simply representing us (i. e. what we seem to want to argue over), which makes all the oligarchs in this country very happy (or, at least, feel safe for now).
I'm not sure if you realize this but all of the "idiotic crap" that you correctly dismiss as irrelevant to public discourse is injected into it by the right wing. Credible news outlets are not having endless discussions about whether M&Ms are racist, the gender of Mr. Potatohead, or useless speculation about where covid came from. Normal people do not care about this crap.

Fox deliberately stokes these nonsensical debates because they want to distract from the actual Republican agenda which is to:
-Raise costs on non-wealthy people
-Allow unlimited pollution
-Remove FDA and other federal consumer protection regulations
-Remove religious freedom from anyone other than far-right Christians
-Block employees from having rights against their employer
-Force public school students to be subjected to evangelical propaganda
-Stop all efforts to remove racial discrimination
-Force anyone who is LGBT back into the closet
-Eliminate or roll back programs like Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare

They would rather have the public talk about literally anything else than campaign on their actual policies.

Getting to a more fair political system will by definition require discussions about race and gender. The trick Republicans have pulled is to get people not to realize that their entire political movement is built around white Christian identity. If you are not one of those two groups, they want you to have fewer rights. It's that simple.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Alphus and Omegus »

Kishkumen wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:15 pm
Res Ipsa wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 6:40 pm
I don't understand why you frame economic action and "identity politics" as an either or choice. In particular, given the correlation between race and income/wealth in the U.S., it strikes me as difficult to rebuild the middle class without considering racial "identity politics."
I am familiar with the “walk and chew gum at the same time”
talking point. The purpose of identity politics is to emphasize division in order to keep people from taking up a common cause. As long as the goal is attending to individual groups as opposed to the whole, the latter of which is done by harnessing the “shared antagonism” of the different groups (Zizek), then it will be extremely difficult to make the shared economic progress that helps people unite. Success in a common cause with common, substantive benefits is much more unifying.
The Republican Party is built entirely around identity politics. It's been this way since the Tea Party forcibly canceled and threw out the few remaining Republicans who were not interested in Christian supremacism.

White Christian Republicans invented identity politics when they burst onto the scene in the 1950s through the John Birch Society and Joe McCarthy. Other groups started to advocate for themselves in response as a defensive measure.
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Kishkumen »

No one here, least of all me, is trying to make concern about identity politics out to be more urgent than threats to democracy. But, channeling Zizek yet again, it is crucial to ask why we are fighting to stave off authoritarianism in the first place. The answer to that question is the very obvious failures of our neo-liberal world order.

The go-to rhetorical strategy of the Dems has been to demonize religious belief and ignorance as a way to blame their former white, once middle class constituents for their own failures. In sweep pseudo-populist authoritarians who counter with false promises and false pride, stoking their anger against the party and its intellectuals that abandoned them and insulted them regularly.

That remains the strategy up to the present. Now corporate neo-liberals wring their hands and ask what is to be done about the threat of fascists supported by superstitious rubes.

Meanwhile, we need to be very concerned about acknowledging white privilege and making sure we don’t make any wrong moves in our discussion of gender issues. As I have argued here, just don’t support racist policies and do treat everyone with respect. That should be good enough, I think. And, yes, at my job one feels beat up by both sides. Republicans say we are indoctrinating kids in bad ideologies, while liberal colleagues and students police their peers to make sure they are on the correct manual.
“If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about the answers.”~Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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Some Schmo
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Re: Not All Woke on the Left

Post by Some Schmo »

Alphus and Omegus wrote:
Mon Apr 03, 2023 8:18 pm
I'm not sure if you realize this but all of the "idiotic crap" that you correctly dismiss as irrelevant to public discourse is injected into it by the right wing. Credible news outlets are not having endless discussions about whether M&Ms are racist, the gender of Mr. Potatohead, or useless speculation about where covid came from. Normal people do not care about this crap.
The left may not be talking about M&Ms, but they do tend to entertain a lot of the talking points the right foists on everyone. In an effort to seem "balanced" a lot of left wing media is giving GOP talking points way more oxygen than they deserve. It's why I argue the mainstream media is right wing biased. A moderate network would just call the right nuts (i. e. not dealing in facts) most of the time and move on, because that's what's true.

Every time someone answers to one of these distracting topics, or topics with no basis in reality, it lends it more credibility than it warrants. Journalists and "influencers" need to stop commenting on the irrelevant and insane and just declare it insane, or ignore it altogether like you'd ignore the whiny complaints of an irate child.
Religion is for people whose existential fear is greater than their common sense.

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