The Plague Of Bullshit: Model View Culture / "In Defense Of Twitter Feminism"

I'm not going to address this crap in detail.

But it's basically a paradigm of loony lefty web gibberish.

(And, I noted with exactly no surprise after having read it, it was typed by Suey Park (and some dude)...)


Standard disclaimer: yes, I do realize that the American right is (currently) more dangerous than the loony left. The GOP is actually out there denying climate change, working to disenfranchise voters, working against alternative energy, and logjamming the government for political ends. Oh yeah. I know they're worse. The loons on the right are actually in power. The loons on the left are very far out of power.

However...
(And somebody does need to articulate this case clearly and in depth at some point...)
The deep crazy of the far left is still very dangerous in its own way. It is allied with the academic left, and that is a crucial, strategically crucial salient. From that position, the left exercises non-trivial control over young, impressionable minds. Though I think the right exaggerates the power of the left in academia, there's still a problem (or so I believe) even when the case is unexaggerated. We've seen the pernicious influence of the illiberal far left flare up in the PC movement of the '90's. Even a little bit of this deep crazy affecting university students can have a significant effect on the future of the country. Furthermore, American liberals ought to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, ideologically speaking. European liberals are used to opposing extremists on both ends of the spectrum. There's no reason that we can't oppose the excesses of the left as well as the excesses of the right.

One of the biggest problems with the web left, IMO, is the irrationalism that pervades it. The linked article above--which is by no means specially selected--it's just something I happened to run across a few minutes ago--is a decent example. The kind of dogmatic, rabidly ideological free-association on display there is characteristic of an important segment of the far left. It's largely word salad. It's an almost random collection of buzzwords, jumbled together to build a kind of logically hollow rhetorical case for a political conclusion that is, of course, never in doubt. In this case: white people bad. That's a constant over there, of course...

It might be useful to go through the thing paragraph-by-paragraph...but, frankly, if we spent even an hour trying to disentangle that tangle of verbiage, we'd be spending twice as long as the thing probably took to write. And I'm not at all sure it would be worth it.

On the bright side, the far web left is already at odds with itself, as demonstrated by the linked post. The loony left tends to slice itself thinner and thinner, always aiming at total ideological purity, until there is, in any given case, nothing left. (Cue The People's Front of Judea vs. The Judean People's Front...)

So that's comforting...

So, at any rate, I continue to think that the far leftish brand of crazy is worth being aware of and worth understanding, even if the rightish brand of crazy is currently much more dangerous.