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Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

scottaaronson.blog

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Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#21

Post by ZeroGravitas »

skissane wrote: post #16
Spivak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for th…

> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online fem…

A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him:

> And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to keep you from lusting after your younger hotter students. God you’re such a fucking sexist creep.

Sounds like an obvious troll to me (and to some of his other commenters). But he replies in full earnestness to him. Probably a mistake, but I'd still put the blame on the troll rather than the victim.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#22

Post by commandlinefan »

> or tell us what we’re allowed to say or publish

Is this really the case on any college campus for any faculty member? It seems like this hasn't been true regardless of tenure for a few decades now - there are a lot of things that you don't dare speak, no matter who you are.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#23

Post by sterlind »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #21
skissane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online fem…

A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him: > And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to k…

Such trolls depress me because people will conclude 1) they're real and 2) representative. And then I and my people get blamed for their behavior, even though I'd never do anything like that. sigh

Anyway, what a cesspool. I'd enjoy reading his blog but I don't need that toxicity in my life.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#24

Post by skissane »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #21
skissane wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. In December 2014, Scott posted a comment [0] in a discussion on his blog about how, as an adolescent, he had struggled greatly with anxiety issues, and how he believed that some messages some feminists were broadcasting had contributed to his mental health problems. And in response, a huge number of online fem…

A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him: > And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to k…

I mean, sure, you can dismiss the perpetrator(s) of the recent trolling attacks on him as not really being "woke", maybe it's even an "anti-woke" person just pretending to be "woke" in order to make "woke" people look bad. We don't really know what the perpetrator's motivations are, all we can do is guess, and maybe one guess is as good as another.

But what about Amanda Marcotte's vicious public attack on him? (And many other less well-known figures besides). She's now a senior journalist employed by Salon.com, I don't think she can be so easily dismissed as just a "troll"

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#25

Post by green_man_lives »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #9

I like the term “Social Justice Fundamentalism”. I’m a fan of social Justice. I’m also a fan of feminism and liberalism. But some of what we are seeing today isn’t that, and I think using the term fundamentalism to describe it, which, I suspect deliberately, draws a parallel between the efforts to force everyone to adopt these moral views with the attempts by religious fundamentalists to force everyone to adopt their…

Preface: I say this as a leftist who believes in reparations and cooperative ownership of capital.

When I hear fundamentalism I think less about the proseltyzing aspect and more about the divergence from the core ideology. Fundamentalist is probably a misnomer, maybe "radical" or "sectarian".

For example, someone sufficiently "woke" would understand that the slave and sharecropping economy of the rural south impacted the majority of whites negatively and that racism was a tool used to prevent them from developing class consciousness.

With this knowledge, any discussion about anti-racism w/ respect to the US south needs to also be explicitly anti-capitalist to help the "poor white trash" understand that their economic anxiety is being redirected unproductively. These people do benefit from white privilege in some ways, but solidarity should be the primary message here as there is a spectrum of victimization going on.

A concrete example of how you could respond to someone saying "immigrants are taking our jobs" is to reframe it (correctly) that US immigration laws are being taken advantage of by employers. The immigrants and workers have no leverage in the system and the decision-makers are the capital owners. It is not productive to call this person a bigot and leave it at that (even if it is true).

People who want to fit into the cultural zeitgeist but without the fundamental understanding of the system they criticize will just use these people as a punching bag, which doesn't help anyone. These types of people are easily co-opted into positions of power that don't fundamentally challenge the system. The head of a DEI initiative at a college does not challenge the existence of legacy admissions or donations from war profiteers and oil companies. They are smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds them.

There's also a purity aspect to it. When there's no solid basis for the ideology you can just start measuring people against their purity level. "No true scotsman" and all that.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#26

Post by barry-cotter »

sterlind wrote: post #23
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A sample of the "woke" people that are attacking him: > And oh, your wife? I lookrd her up Scott and… She’s maybe a 3 on a good day. You know, maybe a 6 at a MAGA rally where all the other chicks are fat midwestern racists. She’s got that TERF Karen look Scott. Let’s be real, you wish you could have bagged one of those hot blondes instead but that’s what you ended up with. I really doubt that’s satusfying enough to k…

Such trolls depress me because people will conclude 1) they're real and 2) representative. And then I and my people get blamed for their behavior, even though I'd never do anything like that. sigh Anyway, what a cesspool. I'd enjoy reading his blog but I don't need that toxicity in my life.

Amanda Marcotte and Jessica Valenti exist. There are lots of people who take great joy in their hatred on every side of political issues.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#27

Post by Spivak »

klyrs wrote: post #18
Spivak wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for th…

> Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. "Woke" is a synonym of "enlightened." Don't trust anybody who claims to be enlightened, or rails against enlightenment.

Oh I completely agree which is why I put it in quotes. I've never found anyone on any side of the political spectrum actually self-identify with that label except ironically. Right now today it just seems to be pejorative-de-jour for people who are vaguely liberal.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#28

Post by Spivak »

effingwewt wrote: post #20
barry-cotter wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who actively wish ill on all kinds of groups and the “woke” are no exception. Plenty of people hate their political enemies and have no great concern if they are hurt and some take real joy in the idea. Yale invites speakers who talk about their fantasies of killing white people. Mainstream feminist websites do backflips trying to sugarcoat that they think every single man is a threat. > Yale speaker…

The new Harry Potter game is a perfect example. They went around screaming the game and JK Rowling were causing 'real world harm to trans people' which of course was BS. But the people trying to boycott the game couldn't leave it at that. They bullied and doxxed streamers just for enjoying a game without gender politics. Because of perceived slights they resorted to becoming actual bullies. We have come full circle.

I mean JK herself literally is, the game definitely isn't. If you've stayed out of this dumpster fire enough to actually not know you're probably better off.

JK is a 70's-era radical feminist who's always been a little transphobic (that was the era, everyone was) but in this decade got sucked into the feminist-lesbian-to-TERF pipeline and dug her heels in when people started calling her out for it. Ever increasing levels of escalation on both sides later she's weirdly become the most prominent transphobe in the English speaking world and throws her weight behind hate groups like the LGB alliance. She even got a shoutout from Putin for it which is kinda funny.

This is no way whatsoever justifies being mean to someone playing a video game but it's not hard to see how we got here. We live in a world where absolutely horrible people are so completely insulated from the consequences of their actions that the people who are harmed by them are pretty much powerless to do anything and have nowhere productive to direct that anger and frustration. In a less civilized time a mob would have shown up to her house with pitchforks years before it got to this point.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#29

Post by s1artibartfast »

Spivak wrote: post #5
quantified wrote: post #4

Lifting for those who don't read the comments in the post: > Scott Says: Comment #12 April 17th, 2023 at 11:26 pm So, why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of universities, if they’re full of woke ideologues who hate me? One might just as well ask: why shouldn’t I cheer the destruction of the earth, if it’s full of assholes, and morons, and antisemites who’d probably kill me if they got a chance, and wild animals tha…

I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people. Such a thing is practically the anthesis of what it even means to be part of that group. I'm in no way saying this means they're good people or that their legislative direction is good public policy but the only time hippie liberals push back at all is when someone tries to hurt one of their own. Liberals for th…

>I would be curious what kind of person feels like they're on the receiving end of hate from "woke" people.

An arbitrary example I saw yesterday:

An elderly white man was leaving a parking lot with one-way traffic flow. A young white woman was standing in the road talking with a friend. He pulled few feet away from them, waited, then politely asked them to move when they didn't.

One woman started accosting him about entitlement, white privilege, male privilege, and refused to move. The scene went on for a while until he was able to reposition the car and barely drive by her brushing her with the car.

These are the "woke" people who are poisoning the well for others. They just use it as a pretext to rage and hate on strangers simply because of their race, age, or gender.

I'm not saying this is typical behavior, just an interaction where someone probably felt targeted.

In a more general sense, I have been told by hiring managers and recruiters that white males shouldn't bother applying for some jobs. That certainly made me feel angry and targeted by ideologs.

Re: Will UT Austin and Texas A&M survive beyond this week?

#30

Post by zenapollo »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #9

I like the term “Social Justice Fundamentalism”. I’m a fan of social Justice. I’m also a fan of feminism and liberalism. But some of what we are seeing today isn’t that, and I think using the term fundamentalism to describe it, which, I suspect deliberately, draws a parallel between the efforts to force everyone to adopt these moral views with the attempts by religious fundamentalists to force everyone to adopt their…

I agree that fundamentalism is good descriptor of the problem. A lot of comments replies arguing about the meaning of the word. To me fundamentalism means this. Where you fall on a certain issue defines a set of values. Fundamentalists are those believe that their one issue and the subsequent value structures are THE fundamental issue and value structure that individuals should be judged (morally and otherwise) as well as how we should see the world and organize society - above all other issues and value sets. With that definition one of the things you see a lot in American culture aside from Christian fundamentalism is capitalist fundamentalism - that free markets divine what and who is right. Social Justice fundamentalists do just that - dismiss or trample over other world views and values systems, in the name of equality.
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