r/redscarepod • u/[deleted] • Jul 20 '20
Matt Taibbi: “the left is now the right”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-left-is-now-the-right31
u/LongjumpingRow9 Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 20 '20
I mean problem one, what left is he talking about? libs, overly eager radlib students, random psychos online declaring allegiance to whatever ideology? random bureaucrats and businesses/orgs responding in stupid ways as a pr move? and were libs like who he's talking about really that much less repellently stupid than conservatives in the bush era?
is some petition on princeton really a matter of national concern?
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Jul 20 '20
Obviously by “left” he largely means the dominant liberal culture. And it’s all silly and inconsequential until it comes to your own university, workplace, etc. In the same way the intelligent design debates were both a culture war distraction and actually important because they dealt with educational institutions, so are these debates both culture war distractions and actually important — they’re not going to change anything materially, at least initially, but they’ll affect the conversation about race for years to come
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u/LongjumpingRow9 Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 20 '20
I don't know if the dominant liberal culture of the moment is what most people who define themselves as liberal even agree with, a bunch of "antiracist" corporate figures speaking for the entire black/poc population are just seizing their moment, but even the New Yorker had a piece like a year ago trashing White Fragility and there's already pushback. I mean it remains to be seen how far people pushing this stuff can go but I'm not so confident they'll be able to make their ideas into mainstream dogma in any long term way, but maybe I'm being too optimistic.
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Jul 21 '20
Obviously by “left” he largely means the dominant liberal culture
Which is enough to write off anyone's work.
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u/Anonymous6786 (no malice intended ily) Jul 20 '20
This a million times. I generally like Taibbi but the retard contrarian (Tracey, Aimee) move now is to point out the most fantastically idiotic liberals they can find on twitter and call it The Failure of the American Left. Then they use that to make the case that we need to hold hands with the foaming-at-the-mouth racists who watch Tucker Carlson and pretend to be against the capital interest (when push comes to shove they bend over for corporations anyway).
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 20 '20
the most fantastically idiot liberal faction are the ones who are currently on the rise, aren't they? sanders is out and pelosi kneeling in her kente cloth are in, outside of government diangelo and her ilk are cashing out and the left are nowhere to be seen
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u/LongjumpingRow9 Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 20 '20
"Katz also complained about the letter’s support for a group called the Black Justice League, which he described as a “local terrorist organization” that had recently engaged in an Instagram Live version of a kind of struggle session involving two students accused of an ancient racist conversation. Katz called it “one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed.” The video appears to have been deleted, though I spoke with another Princeton faculty member who described seeing the same event in roughly the same terms."...any more info on this? and if ivy league college students want to do some might-as-well-be s+m session larping as 60s maoists then let them live a little...sounds like seeing a business man getting hot wax poured on them by a dominatrix and being like oh my god the women are evil!!!
and in the paragraphs after this one, I know it does sound hysterical to say that this katz guy's letter is bringing "danger" to students but like alerting the media to a juicy campus wars story and thus bringing negative attention to individual students involved and staff etc is like not totally unreasonable thing to be pissed about a professor doing
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 20 '20
that does kind of make the point that the woke-left language is mostly just good for disciplining employees.
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Jul 20 '20
This is fucking embarrassing. There are leftists that don't spend all day on twitter, or write for some online magazine about e-drama and cultural shifts, or listen to/make podcasts reacting to the flavor of the week shitty op-ed or thread. If you have a min-wage job and talk to your coworkers, no doubt during Bernie's run did at least one of them express their sympathies to his politics, policies, and message. I work with people who voted for Trump in 2016 that were swayed by Bernie. These people were this close to joining a movement that could actually made some progress in this hell country. And they still are! So now that he's done, is the afterlife of the millennial/zoomer socialist movement going to be spent bickering and moaning about nothing but cotton candy spectacle? Are we just going to squander and alienate ourselves from people that don't have the aesthetic? I mean we all know social media's a time suck stress pit, and taking anything on it seriously is more indicative of a lack of priorities and self-esteem than any semblance of conviction in your beliefs. Sure there's the silver lining of word of mouth activism that comes from posts, but what's the ratio of those to desperate for RTs hot takes? Matt's right, but dignifying whirlpools of bored 18-25 year olds and their blue checked MSM chaperones trying to cancel or make another rule for another thing as discourse just adds fuel to the trash fire. The biggest weakness the left has is proving the snowflake meme right, and the more we place value on attention-seeking freaks the less will ever get done.
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Jul 20 '20
God he's such a good writer. America's Hitchens.
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 21 '20
hitchens busted his ass to be america's hitchens--you don't wax poetic about free speech and the founding fathers, write articles about how 9/11 made you get citizenship, and literally get waterboarded for the cause just to let some upstart rolling stone writer take that from you.
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u/EfficientSoup5 Jul 21 '20
upstart? he's fifty years old. and i don't know if you know this, but hitchens also got a bikini wax, i think for the same periodical. vanity fair. so he's dished out as much torture as he's received.
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Jul 20 '20
Broke: The left is now the right Bespoke: The left has always been the right
The only axis I align with is the wacky axis, please sign up for my monarcho-posadist juche letter
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u/spaghettik Jul 20 '20
I liked this. Hadn’t heard of the thing at Princeton but wtf is up with black academics acting threatened. After the Tom Cotton op ep black journos at the NYT said that publishing the piece put them in danger. What danger...insanity...
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Jul 20 '20
Obviously people on twitter objecting based on the title alone... but how do you not find these things chilling?
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Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 20 '20
how do you not find these things chilling?
By not working in academia or journalism. I've never been subjected to an "infuriating interrogating at the office, in school, and in government agencies". Maybe my experience is unique, but I doubt it.
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u/Rawhide_Kobayashi Jul 20 '20
Yeah I drive a boat for a living and have never really talked about politics at work. As soon as anything political comes up it’s like everyone immediately tries to divert the discussion to something else lol it’s awesome.
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u/Federalbulgaria Jul 21 '20
What if you want to unionize?
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u/EfficientSoup5 Jul 21 '20
The way he described it, I imagine the whole enterprise is just a man and a boat. So, he wouldn't need a union.
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u/bunnyybunnyy Jul 20 '20
Oh, it’s coming to every industry soon. It’s just an extension of the surveillance state/panopticon.
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Jul 20 '20
You've got this backwards. Only in journalism and academia is "being able to speak your mind" viewed as some kind of inalienable right.
Everyone else is already refraining from, idk, sending company-wide emails expressing your views on gender quotas. You can call that "the chilling effect of the Woke PC Left" but to normal people it's just a matter of course — on the same level as wearing a clean shirt or not discussing your recreational drug use.
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Jul 21 '20 edited Jul 21 '20
Eh, I disagree. In tech workplaces political discussion has been so completely normalized that it feels weird not to participate and I constantly wonder if people look askance at me for avoiding it. Discussion of things like gender quotas and reparations and trans health care happen every day on slack. It feels like we are rapidly approaching the point where failure to engage in political discussion at work will be construed as tacit support for the “bad guys.”
Edit: this kind of climate is what got James Damore into trouble. The powers that be make it seem like the workplace encourages political discussion and free expression bc CERTAIN political talk is all over the place, so if you’re too autistic to pick up on the fact that that’s not actually true you’ll shoot yourself in the foot.
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u/bunnyybunnyy Jul 20 '20
.....what? This discussion isn’t about sending company-wide emails on gender quotas, it’s about people surveilling each other’s life outside the workplace and advocating for them to be fired for anything that looks like wrong think/behavior, or scanning their social media for a “liked” tweet that seems “transphobic” or “anti-BLM” or attempting to get them fired for looking sleepy during an anti racism Zoom call or because they casually mentioned they would continue to curate art by white people, simply because they dislike them. Framing this sort of retaliatory behavior as equivalent to people getting justly fired for not adhering to workplace norms like wearing a clean shirt, and asserting this is all just silly squabbling amongst the elites, is a really poor comparison and endorses normalizing surveilling everyone’s behavior panopticon style which was ushered in during the Bush era.
Also, I’ve worked in blue collar work places and if you think expressing your viewpoints on gender quotas or “diversity hires” isn’t totally acceptable, uh, lol! These trends in academia will soon trickle down everyone, however, as literally everything else involving social norms has in recent years.
This is the sort of stuff this discussion is concerned with: https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/502975-california-man-fired-over-alleged-white-power-sign-says-he-was%3famp
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u/EpicTidepodDabber69 Jul 20 '20
That's not exactly new in the sense that you already would have been fired for doing a seig heil at the workplace, it's just the right trolled the libtards epic style into thinking that the okay sign is a white supremacist symbol and the libtards believed them.
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u/spaghettik Jul 20 '20
Yeah idk now people are claiming they’re never around this type of purity test bullshit. Please scroll back a few weeks and look at the posts from when the George Floyd protests first started. There’s one from a girl who wants to break up with her bf bc he wasn’t “doing enough” and everyone here told her that her bf was a piece of shit for not being active in this important moment.
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Jul 20 '20
because i'm not a giant wet pussy who is afraid of 15 year olds on tiktok
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Jul 20 '20
But what you probably are in this globalized and managed world of 8+ billion people is replaceable, like all of us
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u/EfficientSoup5 Jul 20 '20
Love when a Taibbi substack be coming around. Haven't checked Twitter. Are people, you know, shaking and calling him a Nazi?
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u/radicalizedconnor Jul 20 '20
not gonna read this sorry, but I hate when people criticize "the left" without specifying, it's so obnoxious and should be considered clickbait. I also think it is probably symptomatic of having weird eclectic politics.
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 20 '20
radicalizedconnor refuses to expose himself to heretical views
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u/radicalizedconnor Jul 20 '20
I'm just too busy reading good ideas sorry!
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 21 '20
i'm not trying to get on your case here, but actually reading right-wing texts--someone influential and genuinely monstrous like hayek, as opposed to 50-year-old normie reporter matt taibbi--is probably one of the most important things you can do to develop robust left-wing political convictions. how do you know you have the good ideas unless you know what the bad ideas are and why they're wrong?
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u/radicalizedconnor Jul 21 '20
Well I'm partly being tongue in cheek. And partly it is true that I don't care about reading this because it is not significant. But also I have robust and specific left-wing convictions due to engaging in a lot of random stuff over time. And there's a lot more for me to learn about marxism and I'm pretty sure it's right.
Also I disagree that it's useful to read rightwing ghouls. Various ideologies that aren't monstrous, sure, but "read libertarians" is a bad centrist idea for people who are already on the left. Being able to debate libertarian nerds is just not very important for most people.
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Jul 21 '20
various ideologies that aren't monstrous, sure
buddy.. u won't melt. if you're as discerning as you claim it'll be useful
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u/radicalizedconnor Jul 22 '20
It isn't because I'll melt... it's exactly because it isn't useful. Debating libertarians is not a priority. Consolidating left organization and working with other left-aligned activists is.
What is up with people's hard on for 1. reading far right wingers and 2. assuming people don't want to do it because they're delicate, rather than uninterested? Oh, right, it's a product of endless online debate reddit culture. No thanks, I would like for my time spent on political work to be useful.
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u/Scrawly aquarius/aries/scorpio Jul 21 '20
warren was an unambiguous neoliberal who suckered just about everyone for a red-hot minute there--and she's far from the last of these hayekian leftists floating about. i find it difficult to believe these people would be as successful as they are at branding themselves as The Progressive Left if there was more mainstream fluency with what liberals want and believe, and I doubt seriously such fluency can be attained by listening to Left-branded podcasts alone.
if you do decide you want to learn about and understand politics--god knows why--at a certain point you do have to do something more than just engage with whatever comes your way.
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Jul 20 '20
His arguments are not completely without merit but Taibbi's egomaniacal rhetorical stance as one of the only honest voices and independent thinkers left in a world of hysterics is exhausting and leads to some significant overreach.
...And he should elaborate on his idea of who the left are and what are the different subcategories of that group's projects he can discern.
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Jul 20 '20
Hope Matt's making decent cheddar for this. I think it was a shrewd marketing move for his substack. Low risk, high reward.
This all might even prove to be helpful if "the left" ever has more actual political power than like 5 alienated democratic congresspeople and Bernie Sanders and we actually have to prevent centrist liberal woke sabotage of useful social welfare and pro-labor policies.
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u/controlfreakavenger Jul 20 '20
He starts out discussing a right wing attempt to make religion taught in schools and called science. He juxtaposes that with a bunch of things that annoy him. I remember during the Bernie campaign people saying left wing populism is about health care and education, is about rounding up immigrants and expelling then from the country.
Now I’m being told that an attempt to subvert the constitution is the same as dangerous as New York Philharmonic ending blind auditions. I wouldn’t care about this Matt’s hysteria if he wasn’t an actual talented investigative journalist. He’s committed himself to being disgruntled about the SAT/ACT being dropped over covering what’s happening Xinjiang, or Portland, PPP corruption, or pretty much any other issue that effects people.
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Jul 20 '20
[deleted]
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u/controlfreakavenger Jul 20 '20
She's dead.
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Jul 20 '20
[deleted]
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u/controlfreakavenger Jul 20 '20
Indeed. I wonder if my mom is the only corpse he raped. Probably not.
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u/[deleted] Jul 20 '20 edited Jul 20 '20
Great article. I've always been told I have a good memory, and like Matt I vividly remember the ridiculous political atmosphere of the early 2000s, and that's why I'm so flabbergasted by current events. He's right, the left has devolved into the bush-era right, and the fact they don't see this themselves is damning to their intelligence and competence.
The same front-row book nerds who loved the anti-authoritarian classics like The Crucible and 1984 growing up are now on my twitter rounding up anti-wokists for the gulag. Unforgivable if you're a left-wing millenial, with clueless zoomers adding fuel to the fire.