Tag: Sociology

Julian Vigo – How Privilege and Woke Politics are Destroying the Left

Link to an article by Julian Vigo:

“How Privilege and Woke Politics are Destroying the Left”

 

Bonus links: Review of Kill All Normies and “Too Much of Not Enough: An Interview with Alenka Zupančič” (“(Moral) outrage is a particularly unproductive affect, yet it is one that offers considerable libidinal satisfaction. By ‘unproductive’ I mean this: it gives us the satisfaction of feeling morally superior, the feeling that we are in the right and others are in the wrong. Now for this to work, things must not really change. We are much less interested in changing things than in proving, again and again, that we are in the right, or on the right side, the side of the good.”) and Beautiful Soul Quote and Review of Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History and  “The Politics of Online Friendship” and “Against the Neoliberal Blackmail: Identity Fetishism and the Privatization of Affect” and “What’s Wrong With Identity Politics (and Intersectionality Theory)? A Response to Mark Fisher’s “Exiting the Vampire Castle” (And Its Critics)” (“The upshot in political practice is a static pluralism of reified social categories, each vying for more-subaltern-than-thou status on a field of one-downsmanship.”) and “The Politics of Identity” and “Multiculturalism, or, the Cultural Logic of Multinational Capitalism” and “Amuse-Bouches II – Testimony and the Pass” and Review of The Trouble With Diversity and “The Political Economy of Effective Altruism”

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor – Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

Link to an article by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor:

“Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?”

 

This article raises some excellent points and identifies many key issues (for instance, aptly referencing Jo Freeman’s classic essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”), though its analysis is often vague and occasionally superficial (that vagueness and superficiality being explainable in political terms)

Bonus links: “Social Service or Social Change?” and Crowds and Party and The State and Revolution and Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (the gist of Taylor’s theoretical framework is more thoroughly stated in this book) and …And the Poor Get Prison and “Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People” and “The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State”

Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz – Against Happiness

Link to an interview with Edgar Cabanas & Eva Illouz, conducted by David Broder, regarding their book Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control our Lives (2019):

“Against Happiness”

 

Bonus link: “In the Name of Love” and “Žižek!” and “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Interesting?”

Scapegoating Mountain Bikers

There is a small but determined group of people claiming to protect wilderness by scapegoating mountain biking and mountain bikers.  Their normal tactic is to highlight one or two absolutely true—but nonetheless isolated—facts about how mountain bikers are a threat to wildlife in particular areas to suggest that mountain biking should be banned to protect wilderness/wildlife.  On the surface, this seems appealing.  But the problem is that once you scratch the surface this is a highly chauvinistic approach that involves absolving hikers/backpackers/horseback riders/etc. from their own threats to wilderness/wildlife.  This can be detected even in the language that these self-styled protectors of wilderness use.  The best is “backcountry”.  This is a term that denotes at least limited openness to hiking/camping/homesteading!  When deployed in conjunction with words like “protecting”, what we see is not a plea to protect wildlife and wilderness, but to protect certain human uses in certain sparsely populated areas from certain other human uses thus reserving those areas for selected uses.  Here is an article that sums up this phenomenon:  “Griz Expert Says Mountain Bikes Are a Threat To Montana’s Bears.”  (actually, the headline was changed in response to some of the negative feedback).  It is worth reading the comments because people absolutely nail the author’s anti-bike bias (which the author explicitly denies!) and cite countervailing evidence that the author ignores or actively minimizes.  This article is not isolated, though.  People like George Wuerthner write similarly—for instance, he deplores the self-identities that mountain bikers and ATV operators cultivate but excludes from his scorn the self-identities that hikers, etc. cultivate (he does note in passing that hikers can also harm wilderness, but minimizes those admissions and quickly returns to biker-bashing scapegoating).  This is basically typical political liberalism: policing the line between the community of the free (the “good” hikers/backpackers/etc.) and those unworthy of liberal freedoms (the “bad” mountain bikers).  What is pernicious is that this is “discourse of the university”, that is, the advancement of normative political/ideological positions in support of a disguised mode of social domination.

Mertonian CUDOS-norms

Link to Robert Merton’s four norms that constitute “four sets of institutional imperatives taken to comprise the ethos of modern science… communism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism.” (CUDOS is the acronym):

“Four Mertonian Norms”

 

(contrast that with this: “Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Celebrity Salesman for the Military-Industrial-Complex”)

Rob Urie – Race, Identity and the Political Economy of Hate

Link to an article by Rob Urie:

“Race, Identity and the Political Economy of Hate”

 

Bonus links: “Why Liberals Separate Race from Class” and “The Politics of Identity” and “The Ideology of Postmodernism is to Present All Existing Injustice as an Effect of Discrimination” and The Trouble With Diversity and Racecraft and “Should We Care About Inequality?” and “King of the Hate Business: Inside the Southern Poverty Law Center”

Lance Olsen – Why All the Uproar Over the Green New Deal?

Link to an article by Lance Olsen:

“Why All the Uproar Over the Green New Deal?”

 

Bonus links: “Will A Green New Deal Save the Climate, or Save Capitalism?” and “A Class Struggle Strategy for A Green New Deal” and “The Green New Deal, Capitalism and the State” and “A Green New Deal for Agriculture” and “This Historical Moment Demands Transformation of Our Institutions. The Green New Deal Won’t Do That.” (the Stan Cox quote is willfully obtuse — R. Buckminster Fuller? — but otherwise the article is good) and “How Green is the ‘Green New Deal’?” and “Modern Money Green Economics for a New Era” and “Communism, Fascism and Green Shaming” and “Politics, Democracy and Environmental Rebellion” (“Calls for a stripped down Green New Deal, one that forgoes a robust Job Guarantee, is a ploy to engineer a capital strike where millions of workers will be tossed out of their jobs to ‘prove’ that the economy requires environmental destruction and militarism.”) and “Planning the Green Tech Revolution” and “The Realism and Unrealism of the Green New Deals” and “Bernie’s Green New Deal Is for the Working Class” and The State and Revolution

John Steppling Quote

“I am struck almost daily, I think, with the fact that the worst and often most psychologically unstable and damaged people are in the positions of the most power. And the second horror is the apathy of those who are able to see this. They see it and justify to themselves their own lack of action. There is another group, the not apathetic, but the rationally fearful. And this sort of leads back full circle to the first horror. For it is not insane or irrational, at all, to fear arrest and punishment by the state. By the organs of the state. And the power of these organs of state are in existence because the people in authority are never so crazy as not to protect their own authority and power.”

John Steppling, “Algorithm Kids”

 

Bonus links: Critique of Cynical Reason and Alain Badiou Quote and Snakes in Suits