How I took a literary theory class and accidentally stopped hating Republicans, part 1 · 3:43am May 3rd, 2017
I used to be a good progressive liberal. If 3 years ago you'd told me that there was a conspiracy to overthrow Western civilization's commitment to progress, humanism, equality, and freedom, and that an army of changelings had set up a beachhead in many Western universities by taking over English departments--kicking out or muzzling the professors who were interested in English or literature, and redefining words to disguise the fact that they weren’t studying literature anymore--I'd have backed away slowly.
It's not quite like that sounds. It is an unfair way of stating things. But it's not exactly untrue.
I wrote this in early 2016, while taking a Literary Theory course at a local university, which was the soul-crushing, life-changing experience that alienated me from progressive politics. I went to understand literature and figure out why I didn't enjoy it anymore. I had been reading Wells Draughon's A Book Worth Reading (2003), and found myself agreeing with its dismal diagnosis:
Never has so much technical skill been employed to say so little. Today, the lowliest mainstream novel is better written than any novel published before the mid-century, yet we fall asleep reading it and when we do manage to reach the last page, we feel that we have wasted our time.... Today, the reader's choice is Hobson's choice: either genre fiction or neurotic fiction, either insipid entertainment or insipid boredom, either two-dimensional characters or sick characters.
Instead of literature, I found myself studying Marx's economic theories, contrasting second and third-wave feminism, answering questions about Adorno's critique of capitalism, boggling at the illogic of Louis Althusser's writings on ideology, and listening to three different presentations on body positivity. During the entire semester we only got around to reading one story, a feminist short story called "The Yellow Wallpaper", for which we had to do a Lacanian or Freudian psychoanalysis of the trauma inflicted on the narrator by the patriarchy.
When we started studying Marx, I protested that Marxism was the most thoroughly-disproven hypothesis in all social science and that Marx's writings were not taught in economics departments. Our professor told me that was because the capitalist hegemonic patriarchy was suppressing it. When we studied Lacan, I protested that psychoanalysis had been shown decades ago to be ineffective and was not taught in psychology (I minored in psychology). When we studied Saussure, whose linguistic theories are one of the foundations of post-modernism, I protested that his theory was based on work done in the 1890s, that it was all wrong (I also minored in linguistics), and that we should look at more relevant work from the past 50 years instead. All this got me was funny looks from everyone.
We kept talking and reading about the importance of encouraging diversity and acceptance. Yet I think I was the only straight male enrolled in the entire department. I wasn't excluded, but as the only straight white male "capitalist" in the room, studying essay after essay about how evil straight white male "capitalists" are, I did not feel like I was in a "safe space".
One day before class, our professor mentioned that she'd gotten an email that week from a man who had been her professor, who had inspired her nearly 40 years ago to get her doctorate in literature. He was already past retirement age, but had still never found a permanent position, bouncing all these years from temp position to temp position. He wanted her to write him a recommendation.
She said she'd written him a recommendation, then smiled, and said, "But he's a white male who wants to teach literature in an English department--so what can you do?" She shrugged her shoulders. At which moment I realized that she knew, and had known for years, that nearly everything she was teaching--including that the patriarchy still dominated academia and that Adorno's critique of capitalism was important to literature--was a lie.
Who defended Melissa Click?
Remember late in 2015 when Professor Melissa Click was fired for getting some students to kick a journalist out of a protest? This was part of the protests against racism at the University of Missouri. Eventually, President Tim Wolfe resigned when the school football team told him to, which is not as surprising as it may sound to people in other countries.
A reporter tried to cover the protest, and Click tried to get the students to throw him out.
Prohibiting journalistic coverage of public events on public property, besides kind of defeating the purpose of a protest, is seen as very bad in the US. It is traditionally interpreted as a violation of the first amendment to our Constitution. 100 Republican state legislators signed a letter asking for Click to be fired. In response, 115 professors at the U of M signed a letter expressing their support for using force against journalists Dr. Click. The letter concluded, ironically, with, "We call upon the University to defend her first amendment rights of protest and her freedom to act as a private citizen."
Dammit, they’ve got me siding with the Republicans.
Who would defend Click? Who signed that letter? What departments were they from? Black Studies? Gender Studies? Sociology? Place your bets now.
[Table is horked now because Knighty decided not to allow double-spaces on fimfiction, not even in code blocks; good luck posting your Python code]
Department #Signed #Faculty % signed
All sciences combined 7 386 1.8%
Anthropology 0 10 0%
Art 0 18 0%
Film 0 3 0%
Music 2 38 5%
Philosophy 1 9 11%
Communication 3 17 18%
Classical Studies 3 15 20%
Romance Langs. & Lit. 9 31 29%
History 7 23 30%
Black Studies 3 7 43%
Art History & Archaeology 4 8 50%
Sociology 8 13 62%
Religious Studies 10 15 67%
Gender Studies 8 10 80%
German & Russian Studies 10 11 91%
English 38 38 100%
Sampled Arts+Humanities 106 266 40%
1/3 of the support for Click from the entire university came from the English department. (Click was not in the English department. She was from the Communications department.) Every single member of the English department expressed support for her.
Could this have something to do with why I don't enjoy literature anymore?
Postscript
Professor Click told a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education that she was fired due to racism against blacks and against whites:
Under pressure from state legislators, she says, Missouri’s Board of Curators fired her to send a message that the university and the state wouldn’t tolerate black people standing up to white people. "This is all about racial politics," she says. "I’m a white lady. I’m an easy target."
The three kinds of permissible novels
In The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (2009, that link goes to a PDF of the first 72 pages), Mark McGurl wrote that three types of books can be published today as English literary fiction. I don't know how true this is, but I read at least a half-dozen reviews of it, and I did not see "this basic premise is false" among the criticisms.
- The Technomodern: Post-modernist fiction, especially when concerned with information technology. McGurl explains this as being based on a new ethnicity called "technicity". You might think this meant William Gibson, in which case I might have understood what he was talking about, but McGurl's examples are John Barth, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon, none of whom knew anything about technology AFAIK.
- High Cultural Pluralistic Fiction: Stories told in a high modernist style from the point of view of an oppressed or formerly-colonized race, gender, or ethnicity, especially if emphasizing trauma and the authenticity of the "ethnic".
- Lower Middle-Class Modernism: Not blue-collar fiction as John Steinbeck wrote, but fiction about middle-class boredom, anomie, and misery, expressed in a minimalist (Hemingway) or maximalist (Faulkner) modernist style, by white narrators who "silently aspire to become 'white'". Above all, McGurl says, this type of book requires shame. This includes Raymond Carver's shame of failure and Joyce Carol Oates' white guilt.
All three types, McGurl says, must be post-modern in at least being self-conscious and reflexive (what he calls autopoetic, which I assume is a misspelling of autopoietic).
McGurl calls this "program fiction", because he attributes the limitation of the permissible types of books to these three to the dominance in literary publishing of the Master of Fine Arts and creative writing programs. (His explanation of why writing programs produce these 3 types of fiction makes up most of the book.) He doesn't see this as a problem, but as a great thing. He calls program fiction "as rich and multifaceted a body of literary writing as has ever been."
Elif Batuman (2010), responding to McGurl in the London Review of Books, wrote,
Non-white, non-college-educated or non-middle or upper-class people may write what they know, but White People have to find the voice of a Vietnamese woman impregnated by a member of the American army that killed her only true love. … Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with writing about persecution, for either the persecuted or the non-persecuted, there is a genuine problem when young people are taught to believe that they can be writers only in the presence of real or invented sociopolitical grievances…. McGurl continues, inviting us to ‘think of Tim O’Brien and his lifelong use of nine months in Vietnam.’ Indeed, think of Tim O’Brien. As a White Person, he couldn’t write about most of his life experience, which was probably just like Father Knows Best. Instead, in If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home and the several novels that followed, he had to write about the period of his life when he – like the conscripted Native Americans, like the napalmed Vietnamese – was the victim of the murderous policy of the White Man. ...
Ironically, a preoccupation with historic catastrophe actually ends up depriving the novel of the kind of historical consciousness it was best suited to capture. The effect is particularly clear in the ‘maximalist’ school of recent fiction, which strives, as McGurl puts it, to link ‘the individual experience of authors and characters to the kinds of things one finds in history textbooks’: ‘war, slavery, the social displacements of immigration, or any other large-scale trauma’; historical traumas, McGurl explains, confer on the novel ‘an aura of “seriousness” …. Personal experience so framed is not merely personal experience,’ a fact which ‘no amount of postmodern scepticism … is allowed to undermine’. The implication is that ‘personal experience’ is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a ‘large-scale trauma’ – or, worse yet, that an uncompelling (or absent) storyline can be redeemed by a setting full of disasters. …
I think of myself as someone who prefers novels and stories to non-fiction; yet, for human interest, skilful storytelling, humour, and insightful reflection on the historical moment, I find the average episode of This American Life to be 99 per cent more reliable than the average new American work of literary fiction. The juxtaposition of personal narrative with the facts of the world and the facts of literature – the real work of the novel – is taking place today largely in memoirs and essays. This is one of many brilliant observations in David Shields’s recent manifesto Reality Hunger, in which he argues that we had best give up the novel altogether. But I don’t think the novel is dead – or, more accurately, I don’t see why it has to be dead. It’s simply being produced under the kinds of mistaken assumption that we don’t make when it comes to non-fiction.
(I find interesting the notion that today's novels should circle around epic disasters because post-modern scepticism has acclimatized us to misery, so that we require bigger and bigger hits of it to get our anomie fix. One would expect a publishing industry so snotty about sentimentalism to likewise object to manipulating emotions via mass tragedies, but not so. The Victorians didn't do it, so it's okay.)
McGurl's effervescence over program fiction, and his praise of it as "rich and multifaceted", is understandable when you compare it to what came immediately before: the wasteland of late Modernist fiction.
NEXT: HITALTCAASHR, Part 1.2: Annie Dillard on modernist fiction
Well that was depressing. I always assumed that incidents like Click were ridiculous but just over-reported. That breakdown really shakes my faith in the common sense of faculty. I can only hope that their main objection was that this was not an offense worthy of firing.
I don't really understand what a technomodern story would be (infinite jest ?) but the other two are intriguing. Is this what we reap from years of Oprah's book club? Is this really what sells?
There is no accounting for taste, but the proposition here is so bold and I want to believe it so much that I reject it out of hand for fear of self indulgence. I would love to read a paper with this as its thesis, though I have no idea how you'd prove it.
Looking forward to your next post. As distasteful as you've shown far left university politics to be, I would remind you to take stock of how harmful or harmless they actually are, and keep perspective that you have reached the edge and stared over, or enlighten me further on these spaces I'm so unfamiliar with.
Imma go back to reading in just a sec, but I want to say:
Second-wave feminism is the good, sensible, smart one. Third-wave feminism is the crap one that no one should pay attention to.
I'm a proud second-wave (ETA: sex-positive) feminist.
And this is why I give not one shit about 'literary criticism" or anything about that field. 90% of it is just pretentious assholes using stories as Rorschach tests and seeing what they want to see versus what is really there.
Just enjoy stories for STORIES, and screw this political crap.
And the end bit might be a reason I've read almost nothing for the last few years but Pony Fics, Dresden, and Discworld.
Soon the deeper revelations will come.
Once you know, you'll never be able to go back.
About the political angle:
There's nothing wrong with siding with Republicans, or Democrats, when circumstances favor it. I've said many times, in other Pony Fiction company, that these sorts of things just can't rile me the way they seem to rile... let's say "other people of our mutual acquaintance". Stupid people don't deserve attention; and there are a lot of very stupid people working at universities in the US.
I figure the useful political stance in life is to know what you care about, and to side with whoever advances your own personal agenda. Stupid people basically never advance my agenda, so my vote tends to be for the least stupid person in the room. I used to think Republicans had the market pretty well cornered on stupid—but (as seen above, and in many other places when you go looking) that's clearly not the case.
Oh man this is going to be a fun comment section and I had a picture of discord or starlight eating popcorn but I don't because I'm lazy because I'm withdrawing from my ADHD medication right now
This feels more like a meditation than an argument—perhaps as a result of the fact that you're publishing in parts—but you make a statement that's so controversial to me that I feel compelled to argue. Yet, I'm having a hard time finding a position you take that I can really discuss my thoughts on or attempt to evaluate from my own perspective. I was trying to write a response to one of your paragraphs, but I just couldn't figure out the words in a way that didn't boil down to a vaguely question mark-shaped noise. Not in the sense that any of this is unintelligible, but more that the argument itself is somewhat evasive.
It feels sort of like you're providing small context, making a statement, and letting the reader infer the argument you're implying. Maybe I just don't get it. Or maybe I should just wait for part 2. Or maybe I just need to read more of your blogs. (Which I do very much enjoy, however often I may find myself angry at my computer screen over them.)
4518142
You've gotta know that these are fightin' words, right?
4518139 Oh no, my friend...Click's is one of the few that is REPORTED.
Crap like that (and other events in the same vein) happen all the time.
4518189
Seriously?
I mean, c'mon, intersectionality? I'll believe intersectionality is a thing we should care about the first time I see someone make any type of cogent argument that the prejudice experienced by a black woman is more than the sum of the (considerable) prejudices experienced by women and by black people.
Nobody gets special distinction for being an extra-unique minority.
4518194 ah good old Andy, the persecuted white male.
How's it feel to be on the receiving end of just the tiniest of fractions of shit everyone else has gone through throughout modern history at the hands of white men?
4518142
...Isn't second-wave feminism the one that called all PIV sex rape, and recommended all women become political lesbians?
Get out of my head, Bad Horse.
That said...
derpicdn.net/img/view/2016/3/29/1119875.gif
...I'll be back in the morning. This ought to be good.
4518202
That... doesn't sound much like second-wave feminism to me. Maybe third-wave, but even that's a stretch. I've heard those ideas before, but only second-hand—i.e. not ever from real people suggesting them, only from people reporting on them as stupid.
Anyway, based on the goals and issues most associated with second-wave feminism, it's hard for me to imagine second-wave feminists ever staking out positions like that. Sure, one of the principle concerns of second-wave feminism was domestic abuse, but it takes some real cray-cray to stake out the position that every penis that enters a vagina is a domestic abuser.
4518202
Here we go. That stuff (which seems to stem most prominently from Andrea Dworkin, who was a "radical feminist" during, yes, the second-wave era) was one of the big things contributing to what seems to often be seen as the transition point from second-wave to third-wave feminism.
Again, my position:
workplace equality, legal equality, sexual equality good
thought policing, overfocus on intersectionality bad
ETA: Some more related stuff for you. Okay, it's looking like a better call that this is part of second-wave feminism. So let me be clearer: second-wave sex-positive feminism is good. Third-wave and anti-pornography feminism is dodgier. Which isn't to say I think pornography is necessarily an awesome thing, but there's some pretty bad stuff coming out of this group that's exactly what you were talking about.
4518199 Ah, Stupor Trampoline, the wannabe revolutionary.
The white men who crafted the lovely civilization that allows you to so casually malign it say "you're welcome".
For all the things that annoy me about Orwell's "1984", I'm glad I read it - if only for the concept of 'doublethink'.
4518195 4518189 Hey, hey. You don't know yet if he's a third-wave feminist who wants to fight you for being a tool of the patriarchy, or a first-wave feminist who thinks you've gone too far.
4518228
Fair point. And it turns out there's even a fourth wave.
Wait, no... I only called out the third-wave feminists—so if they're fighting words, it's gotta be about third-wave, doesn't it?
Anyway, I totally don't want to go up against any Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton shit. Those bitches were hardcore. Probably gut me and use my entrails to prove they had the right to vote or some shit.
4518199
Don't worry,
One day you'll experience what they did.
4518199 Edgy.
Remember, everyone, Super Trampoline is running for office on an Antifa platform.
Antifa throw bottles at old people wearing Trump hats and attack peaceful protesters exercising their free speech rights under the guise of "attacking hate speech".
When questioned about whether or not they endorse this, Super Trampoline has declined to answer.
There are also many rumors flying around that there are strong ties between many Antifa factions and the pedophile-advocate group known as the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), who publish and spread pamphlets about how adult men can have sex with underage boys and get away with it.
So...antifa advocates violence in our streets against any political ideology that disagrees with them, and many of them support pedophilia.
Makes you wonder about Super Trampoline, doesn't it?
Uh...
Okay, you're going to have to bear with me because I don't anything about the "literary field", so I find myself completely confused reading this.
When you talk about "these are the only types of books that get published anymore", do you actually mean these are the only books that win awards anymore? Because nothing in this essay describes the books I see when I go to a bookstore or browse Amazon.
4518245
No, not really.
I'm not a fan of some of Super Trampoline's rhetoric, but personally I wonder more about users with Nazified pony avatars trying to do some sort of stupid "guilt by association" attack. Seriously, my eyes are rolling at you to an inexpressible degree.
Most ponies on all sides of most political issues are completely unreasonable and unwilling to engage in respectful discourse. None of the above about Click surprises me.
The problem isn't that you've turned conservative. The problem is you're a rational moderate in a very liberal domain, which makes you seem like a conservative for not being completely out of your bucking mind. It's correct to make a concerted effort to recruit from underrepresented classes, but it should bother ponies when affirmative action goes too far in the selections process in any department—or when it is used to hire less qualified applicants for diversity's sake. That only furthers the bigoted perceptions you're trying to counter.
I hate to say this, but literature and gender/minority studies departments are completely insane at some colleges (though not all departments or all colleges). The problem is that the methodology of theorizing they use is self-perpetuating, which leads to bizarrely rigid dogma that begins to push the boundaries of logical reality. They start with a sensible-seeming theory with face validity that has some truth to it, like beauty magazines leading to lower self-esteem and eating disorders (even though quasi-experimental, this is almost certainly true to a large extent: teen depression and anorexia/bulimia always skyrocket when Western culture becomes normalized in a country). But then they use the theory to reinforce itself and derive truth from "facts" that haven't been measured or tested. This leads to some of the "microaggressions" at places like the UC system, many which are completely insane. It also leads to censorship in the name of fighting whatever a small portion of the student body considers to be bigotry.
I teach at OSU, as you know. In practice, nopony gives a shit about microaggressions. Students outside of those disciplines brush off minor slights because they're mature adults, and they take responsibility for themselves. The idea behind microaggressions is based on subliminal reactions to comments or actions that hurt one's self-esteem, but there is no research (that I know of) to support the conclusion that students are actually harmed by them in any measurable way. Most microaggressions are basic rudeness, and some are borderline racist. But some of them aren't racist or sexist by any stretch of the imagination.
Just to give you an idea, OSU's student body recently produced an informative guide on sexual assault, in which it actually quotes a student saying (I am not kidding), "Hurting a woman's self-esteem is a form of sexual violence." It's quoted from the student, but the document does not refute the idea and suggests it is an reasonable statement in context. I guess I'd better give all the women in my classes A's then, no?
Even terminology has been ruined in these areas. You can no longer distinguish between coercive rape and violent rape, because all sexual contact is a form of "sexual violence". The attempt of this greying is to place, say, me rubbing my tits against somepony in the subway, on par with me tying a guy to the radiator and sodomizing his ass without lubricant. Desiring to make anything remotely rapey seem very bad leads to difficulty distinguishing victim and event characteristics that are important. For another example, that 15 year-old that eloped with her teacher: of course she's not legally at fault for being "kidnapped", but she made some poor choices. Being 15 doesn't mean you're brain-dead or mentally retarded. Many 15 year-olds I've known are more competent at making life decisions than adults are. But suggesting that she and her family should agree they have some responsibility—which would assist in empowering her to overcome similar situations in the future—will cause you to be labeled a rape apologist (or even a rapist). You just can't discuss these topics rationally with most people.
This is an issue in transgender terminology as well. Now you have to say "transgender" for everything and there are no defined terms beneath that umbrella, because "everypony should be able to define themself". I certainly agree with that in principle, but the problem is we're now prevented from defining terminology because that's seen as transphobic. Gender used to be the social component of sex: how most people will perceive and interact with you. By that definition, some cultures have three or four genders. America has two: male and female. The social construct isn't something you can change by reengineering the word. If the word gender means "whatever you want it to mean" rather than holding a useful, operational definition, you can't study gender effectively. Plus, you draw ire from the wide majority of Americans who think tinder suggesting there are 37 genders is ridiculous. And none of those 37 genders have firm definitions, either.
It's a mad world, and it's getting worse by the day. Liberals and conservatives are polarizing like never before, the loudest voices are the most insane and the most commonly lampooned, and most people think the other side is simply filled with stupid people. And that isn't the case.
I'm going to start a blog soon, and this is related to the sorts of things I'll be discussing. Maybe I should post a link to it on my FF blog when I do.
4518249
Basically, Literature is the part of writing world which is disappearing up its own backside like post-modernist musical composition and art, as described in my comment on Bad Horse's last blog post.
It is identifiable by its incestuous nature and its lack of outside appeal--these are both causes and symptoms of the problem, in a tragic feedback loop.
4518139 Eh, there's still a larger percentage of faculty that didn't support her. That said - yea, the Humanities have kind of gotten obsessed with butt-sniffing, but...
On some level I'd argue that that's really less about true adherence to dogma and more about a game of continual one-upsmanship as people chase an increasingly small number of positions & publishing opportunities that can grant them a secure career.
Basically, it's the humanities version of degree inflation - a college degree 30 years ago did way more for you than a base degree does today, and so people chase Masters degrees and when that becomes too saturated they go for PhDs and...voila.
We're seeing that glut in other areas - Psychology, Law, etc - but it manifests differently because there are more solid metrics one can weight people by to judge them.
And in literature, it has manifested as the race to be the most progressive, most inclusive, most whatever, because that's the only way to actually get a job, and it becomes self-reinforcing. It's like how in politics it's increasingly impossible to have a conservative democrat or liberal republican, because they aren't pure enough. Basically, it's Moloch unleashed.
STEM remains more immune because STEM inherently depends upon quantifiable results - so while there's still a push for having a greater diversity pool in terms of who is working in STEM, which makes sense because there are plenty of non-white non-men who'd be fantastic engineers/programmers/etc and we don't want talented potential engineers not becoming engineers because they don't feel welcome - well, in the end results are results and if you can write awesome code or do amazing math you'll be fine.
But in literature, since it's all subjective, what is 'Good' is going to depend on the opinion of other people in literature and bam. Recipe for a shark tank.
4518245
4518250
I will 100% echo what Bradel said. I don't agree with Trampoline's rhetoric all the time, but there's a world of difference between that and sporting either flat-out Nazi or Nazi-evocative personas.
4518250 Firstly...Oh, dear God, no. A stern, righteous eye-rolling. Whatever will I do. Let me go be an hero.
Seriously, is that the worst you've got? You and my niece would get along splendidly, and she's 13.
Secondly...Let me see if I get this straight.
You wonder more about the guy who has a Nazi PONY avatar (for which the Nazis would probably shoot me for being a degenerate), which doesn't hurt anyone and is probably a joke or partaking in a meme (hint: one of those two...or maybe BOTH
") over the guy who openly advocates, and is (or at least was) openly running for political office on a platform based on, the ideologies of a group that is well-known (and in fact notorious) for violence, vandalism, and general mayhem in the streets against dissidents and random passersby, including businesses that are targeted simply because they are there, and innocent, law-abiding trashcans.
Oh, and one cat because it apparently had a moustache that resembled Hitler's.
TL;DR You're worried about a cartoon instead of someone's voiced viewpoints and opinions.
I will meet your eyeroll, and raise you one facepalm.
You need to sort out your priorities.
4518259 Please do; while I may not agree with you on everything, you seem like a well-reasoned and even-keeled individual.
Your Moderate stance (if I am gleaning that correctly?) will be a nostalgic break in the coming balkanization.
4518259 OSU is generally good in my experience; what I've seen that I think is a big contributor here is the Echo Chamber effect the internet creates and the constant tribal signaling that becomes self-reinforcing and leads people to become more radical.
It's interesting since I can see it in my own family. Myself and both my younger siblings are all various stripes of leftist.
I'm the 'Try to talk it out with people, understand the other side, and advocate via positive persuasion' one.
One sibling is very much the militant get-in-your-face and yell you into submission one.
And the last is basically a tug-of-war between the first two, and where they lie at any given time varies; sometimes they lean towards me and sometimes the other.
It's a constant battle against Moloch, and it's one that we can probably never fully win - only hopefully lock Moloch in a box and constantly remain vigilant to ensure there's no escape.
4518266
Dude, you're not worth more than an eye roll. Maybe you should stop taking your debating cues from your niece?
I'm not complaining about your SS-Pony, I'm complaining about the white nationalist pot calling the kettle black. You're in the blog comments for a discussion of politics and literature, and do you make a meaningful contribution? No. You show up so you can do a guilt-by-association hit on another user in the comments.
See, that's the problem—and the source of the guilt-by-association thing. Many of us disagree with Super Trampoline. We don't show up like the proverbial genie-in-the-
oven-lamp when someone rubs us the wrong way, just so we can talk about how ST's stated political party is associated with bad things. And your whole argument is undermined by having the Nazi avatar. Like, you're saying "you should think badly of this person because he's associated with a political party that does bad things" while openly associating yourself with a political party that did some bad things.You're not even attacking ST, you're attacking the zeitgeist of the political movement he says he likes. And, again, you're doing it in a random location for no discernable reason.
I'll meet your facepalming with... more eye-rolling. Because seriously, dude, this is sad.
4518266 The 'Antifa' thing I have seen paraded around as some major movement in the last 4 months by the Alt-Right seems to be the newest bogeyman.
Yet when I look at like...actual verifiable sources of information, all I can find basically is:
1. Some anarchist shitheads are fucking with right wing shitheads at UC Berkeley and each is trying to bait the other into acting even crazier. Meanwhile, less-shitheaded leftists & conservatives are caught in the crossfire.
2. Maybe some of them maybe were involved in rioting which disrupted otherwise peaceful protests, and maybe the person who decked Richard Spencer is involved with this group but who knows?
And that's it. That's far from any coherent movement with actual power. They're no Weather Underground which despite being small actually did things one can point to and go 'Yes, this happened as part of a concrete extremist movement'.
Meanwhile? Yea, when your name evokes WW2 Germany, and your avatar evokes WW2 Germany, it doesn't really matter if the historical Nazis would have killed you for degeneracy, the fact is you're still willingly associating with their iconography and legacy and that means you also get all their unpleasant baggage. And if, for you, it's an ironic nose-thumbing thing? Well, there's no distinguishing you from actual would-be-Nazis, and this isn't a category people get given the benefit of the doubt - when it comes to dressing like a Nazi, the assumption is you are a Nazi because Nazis are fucking dangerous and the vast majority of people understand they should avoid that whole thing like the plague.
So, yea. It may be a joke. Thing is? We can't tell. There's plenty of literal Nazis on Fimfic. So if you don't want us to treat you like one, then stop dressing yourself in Nazi regalia.
4518270 Hey, hey, let's be accurate. He's not associating himself with the political party that did some bad things, Bradel. I mean, you're a statistician, you understand the importance of accuracy.
He's associating himself with the political party that did some extremely, extremely fucked up things! And that's an important distinction in the Horse Web, you know.
I had my own taste of this aspect of modern "academia" in my senior year, so I understand how you feel. One professor in particular tried to encourage the students in some sort of uprising against the university administrators; he wouldn't tell them exactly why they should be angry, but he did use some rather cleverly indirect incendiary rhetoric that I could have sworn I had heard almost verbatim in Nazi/Bolshevik propaganda.
This class was also when the Baltimore riots were going on, and I remember one discussion about whether a riot that involved breaking store windows and burning shops and police cars was really a "violent" protest, or if "violence" was just a term invented by white people to prevent oppressed minorities from speaking their minds. I can't say the discussion wasn't "interesting," but unfortunately I think I'm probably stupider and more jaded for having heard it.
4518228 Are there any first-wave feminists still alive? IIRC First Wave was Stanton and Anthony and the suffragettes, whose emphasis was on legal and political rights. I mean, there are folk out there who use Anthony as a battle-flag, but they're pro-life activists and part of the conservative intellectual movement.
I'm weak on what makes any given figure 2nd or 3rd. Are the anti-porn crusaders who allied with the Moral Majority in the 80s 2nd or 3rd? Is Camille Paglia 3rd or 4th? I could swear I heard people talking about 4th Wave back in the day - all that sex positive business - but then my reading material shifted. That was back in the day when I could read Salon and not vomit.
I've found that as I grow older, my capacity for digesting wild and radical nonsense faded away. The truism that the young are more radical than the old is true. It's a matter of what microfauna you've cultivated in your intellectual gastrointestinal tract. But even well into full adulthood, that can shift, depending on diet.
You are what you read.
What I find interesting is that things like this is making Conservatism punk rock.
Being persecuted is cool and edgy, the same way being a liberal was a few decades ago.. The upcoming generation will be the most conservative in the last 80 years according to some predictions. The pendulum will swing back so hard the other way if they continue.
This however does not seem to be a Democrat vs Republican issue. it is turning into a authoritarian vs free society issue.
There are many classical liberals in cooperation with conservatives fighting to bring down this massive cancer in the education system.
4518293
I wish that still held true, that there was some kind of correlation between age and people growing more moderate and compassionate, but I don't think that is applicable any more. I just need to open Facebook to see family and family friends over 50 throwing around those same old communism vs. fascism arguments. They might not take the more direct and violent (and stupid) approach, like the alt-righters and Antifas do, but the rhetoric is there.
4518273 In all likelihood, Antifa itself is about as large a group as the alt-right, and shouldn't be considered this great threat. The problem with this type of anarchist black clock, however, is that they are not only accepted, but also used by the organization of a certain type of "popular" movement[1]. This allows them to integrate these movements, giving the protests the outward pretense of there being some very dissatisfied people, while allowing the organization to sustain some level of plausible deniability[2]. It also gives some nice shots of the police throwing gas grenades against the peaceful protesters, followed by that same police having to defend themselves against a raging "populus". It creates a nice narrative, one that is really attractive for the segments of the population that are more likely to sympathize with their agenda. It is worrisome because it is a tactic more than a movement.
[1] This I speak from seeing how the that works in Brazil. I have no reason to believe that the US black blocs are any different, since both are using the same tactics in everything else.
[2] Just say that the protest is over before they start doing anything. Whatever they do can be twisted as unrelated to the main protest whenever it is convenient.
4518307 I don't really see these terms in a moral dimension. It's more of a... description of scope and coherence. The old collect an array of checksums and sign-posts and BOLOs and other shorthands designed to catch 'problem' or 'annoying' or 'obviously incorrect' arguments and ideas. We call these short-cuts variously 'prejudices' or 'principles' depending on whether you want to be pejorative or sympathetic. The young have not yet fully developed a full array of these shortcuts. Their intellectual defenses are not fully formed, and their minds are plastic enough to absorb all sorts of things, no matter how oddly shaped. They can get radically sick on what they consume when they're young and unprotected, but they can also be intellectually... adventurous.
The old are grown used to whatever particular intellectual diet they've habituated themselves towards. This may be extreme and alarming from an outside perspective, but it's usually their own peculiarly conservative brand of extremity. An old Marxist is very, very set in her particular sect of Trotskyite dogma, for instance. An old Straussian just becomes more and more dug into his philosophically conspiratorial idealation. My mother became addicted to Fox News and Bill O'Reilly books. One of my old roommates couldn't keep a job and ended up becoming one of those insufferable Facebook scolds, all aggressively evangelical atheism and de Grasse Tyson memes. We all set in stone, eventually. All you can hope for is that you don't cut others on your sharp edges.
I dunno. Pony was supposed to be my escape from politics.
I am very left wing—and not just because American politics is way to the right of European politics, I am left-wing in Europe too. I am all about decentralization, solidarity, and freedom from coercion. I say this in preparation for this:
There is no longer anything in what Americans call 'left' that I recognize. Not agree with. Recognize. It doesn't seem like the traditional left nor the traditional right. It doesn't seem like a political position at all. It seems, most of all, a cartoonishly evil death-cult. An incarnation of what DH Lawrence called the apocalyptic impulse. A roiling cauldron of hate and intolerance.
I worry for you guys.
Well, this has attracted the sort of comments I expected. As an aside, I didn't realize there were so many users here with nazi-flavored avatars.
I consider myself a moderate-liberal, and I typically roll my eyes at Fox News and their audience. I am distressed by Trump and the character of his administration. But sometimes, when I read about what happens when universities invite speakers like Charles Murray, I'm a little glad that he won. The anti-liberal tendencies of so many college liberals are as frightening to me as the populist/nationalist bent of our current administration.
American college is messed up. Get out of there asap!
I suppose that im one of those filthy centrists, i dont give a buck about the political parties and think long term things like p.ps are stupid. Giving your loyalty to the party over the country and its people is the end result of it. I get why it exists but cant there be another way, forming the best you can gather for any field, regardless of political believe would work out best for a country maybe. Then again p.ps allow for the "i have no idea what im doing but i like x from y party so ill vote for that party!"
Regarding the nonsense in the comment section: "antifa" are just fascist scum pretending to be anti-fascists ( didnt churchil predict that that would happen in the future lol... ) . My grandfather had to flee into the woods and join the partisan movement at 15, to not be killed for saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. Moden day "antifa" are offended that someone says or thinks ( or maybe doesnt but they will still claim they do to justify violence) something they dont like, so the answer is to "fix" it with violence. Yeah totally didnt just replace hitlers brown shirts with black hoodies and scaefs to hide their identity.
4518142
SWERF and TERFs make me angrier than the alt-right most days.
4518300
Citation needed.
4518321 Solidarity, comrade.
4518335 SWERF and TERF can catch these hands.
4518322
The Brony movement largely started on 4chan, so it's not surprising that there are a distressing number of edgy far-right users who hide behind "come on, it's only a joke guys".
I'm very much in favor of you stopping hating Republicans.
Actually I'm very much in favor of reduced hate all around.
Just stop being cocks to other people. Right now. Everyone.
Per the three publishable stories of literary fiction is that "these three stories are the only ones who make it through publishing houses" or "these three are the only ones that sell?" If the former, does that mean there could be an untapped/underserved Amazon market for some other kind of literary fiction?
Genre fiction is AWESOME.
long live detective novels from cozy to hard-boiled forties closet-marxist 'the system is unredeemable so I'mma die honorably whilst scorning it', and long live cyberpunk and the Turkey City Lexicon of it, the only true technomodernism! 
By the way, another effective way to generate cheap traffic is to cite X numbers of something, ideally a prime number, and then in your list either include something annoying or leave out something vital. See WatchMojo.com's youtube videos, which are a master class in jerking around comments sections and being conceptual junk food
4518321
Easy now *hugs* it's less bad than it looks. What BH is not acknowledging is this: in any tug of war, nobody ever wins by getting to 'equal' and quitting. Over-reach is not only a natural condition, but necessary from ANY direction to get to the desired place. You've got to stand well behind your side of the line and pull like hell or you fail before you even start.
Older people sometimes understand this (says an old graying horse). You go to some places, like tumblr, and see a hell of a lot of hysterical younger people who just don't have the perspective to see WHY that is, and the first thing they do is commit to a direction rather than a goal, and then go bonkers pulling in that direction. It's HARD to step back and consider anyone else's point of view, and it can be impossible when you're losing ground.
My sister's a psychology teacher at a college. I'd recommend the book 'the Inklings' to anyone interested in that sort of thing, because it's an outside look (a biography-like exploration) of the Tolkien/C. S. Lewis cabal, which touches on many things including Lewis's view of cabals and inner circles. Bad Horse, I think you'd get a lot out of this: I'd give you my copy if there's a convenient way to do so.
Lewis saw cabals everywhere, not least because he and Tolkien were diehard anti-modernists in literature. The curriculum was changing from study of Old English classics, and the Tolkien crew were not having it. And so, effectively, Lewis created his own cabals to battle what he saw as some kind of centrally controlled ideological cabals against him and his. And neither his, nor the ones he saw in opposition, were nearly as coherent as he believed. There was no Dr. Evil, not even T. S. Eliot
Just a lot of people, all of whom respectively believed, "We all need society/culture/the college to go HERE. And oh man, are we way behind the line! Everybody PULL!"
The smug ideology of your professor in your Literary Theory class (ye gods, who would want to take a course like that and return to reading your Agatha Christie?) smacks of this. I read her 'what can ya do?' reaction like this: surprise! The tug of war was hugely successful and now it's a given that 'other' people can get professorships AND public respect AND collective authority. And what then? Pretty much if you stop pulling it all goes back, to the extent that there's tension on the other side of the tug-of-war rope. If your people on YOUR side of the rope are frantic true believers (see Eric Hoffer's book 'The True Believer') then they elicit a polarized response, creating true believers on the other end of the rope, and thus making it true: let go now, and twang! You're gonna snap back to way behind the line.
And that's what happens.
I try not to take it too seriously, or I'll be found pulling on the far end of some rope or other. My own pet hobbyhorse is that I profoundly disagree with neoliberal 'third way' ideology, which puts me both out of step with American politics and very much in step with the dirtbag left. If I wasn't so poor I'd be a grey wolf, for those who know that lingo.
As for cabals, either nothing or everything is cabals, including you and me. Try not to fret about it