The Woke Contrarian

I don't think I'm one of them either. I'm one of mine.

Category: Games with Words (Page 1 of 3)

Dumb takes on intelligence

2024-09-28 / / 0 Comments

On the one hand, there’s the entirety of Paul Cooijmans’s oeuvre. On the other hand, there’s Kaninchen Zero’s “Ableist Word Profile: Intelligence.” Both are supremely stupid.

Cooijmans’s concept of intelligence can be reduced to testing. Not intelligent behaviour, not developmental history, just testing. But the tests are supposed to reflect the ways that people recognise patterns, process information, and generate new knowledge. He can’t see the forest for the trees. (He’s also the kind of scum who links to white-nationalist sites like American Renaissance.)

In some ways, Kaninchen Zero’s post is even worse, mostly because we’re supposed to be on the same side. At least you know what you’re getting with Cooijmans—racist, sexist, ableist bullshit. Kaninchen, on the other hand, cannot separate individual differences in cognitive ability (which obviously exist, or we wouldn’t have a diagnosis called “intellectual disability” that necessitated accommodations) from the misuses of intelligence testing. It is a poorly argued mess.

Go right ahead and criticise biased IQ tests. But to pretend that intelligence doesn’t exist is to pretend that humanity doesn’t exist.

Dumb Dichotomies: the settler/Indigenous construct

2024-03-27 / / 0 Comments

When you divide Americans (as well as others from similar cultures) into “settlers” and “Indigenous,” you are unintentionally excluding Black people, who were brought to this continent by force. Stolen people did not steal this land. Instead, we were stolen from our own lands. This kind of good-and-evil, dichotomous thinking doesn’t stop anti-Indigenous racism. Instead, it just drives wedges and ends up alienating Black people.

(There is so much about “anti-imperialist” and “decolonial” cant that makes me want to pitch something out of a window—and I come from a miscellany of colonised cultures. I do not feel represented by these people at aaaaaaaaall. It’s sad when you have friends and colleagues talking like this, but you don’t want to make them feel bad.)

On using the “latest and greatest” language

2024-03-19 / / 0 Comments

I understand wanting to avoid offence, but the best way to do that isn’t by using the most up-to-date terms if community members aren’t even using them. I see terms like Latinx and even Latine being thrown around, and these terms are not popular outside progressive and leftist organising. Latine is particularly rare. People still use Hispanic if they’re from a Spanish-speaking Latin American culture like Mexico or Argentina. Not to mention, the best thing to do is refer to a specific ethnicity, such as Puerto Rican, Mexican, or Costa Rican instead. Latinx? Rarely. Latine? Practically never. I understand why people want to use gender-neutral labels, but there are more elegant ways to do that, including “Latin American” or even “Latin.” (Seriously, why bother with Latinx and Latine when you can just drop the final vowel and make it “Latin”?)

Over the past several years, some mental health advocates have shifted toward “psychiatric disability” from “mental illness,” but some international nonprofit organisations have already moved on from this and are now saying “psychosocial disabilities,” a term that your average person with a psychiatric condition will not recognise. There are enough people and organisations still saying “mental illness” that a term like “psychosocial disabilities” will seem alien to them. Even “psychiatric disabilities,” my preference, is still novel to them. You can’t hit people with too many novel terms or you’ll confuse them. This is one of my biggest problems with the state of left-wing activism these days. You need to introduce ideas to them slowly, with simple language, and all this jargon isn’t helping anybody get closer to understanding neurological or ethnic minorities (yes, I still use the word “minorities,” despite all the pushback I get outside this blog).

There are some cases in which the common term should be changed—for example, most of the terminology referring to high weight should be scrapped, since the primary term is a pejorative masquerading as a neutral medical term. But in this case, the community has roundly rejected it. This is not the case for expressions like Hispanic, Latino, or psychiatric disability (or even mental illness). None of these are pejoratives, and all of them are used by community members in ways that Latine is not.

A random list of political bullshit I’m tired of

2024-03-01 / / 0 Comments
  • Promoting “decolonial” or “postcolonial” movements that are just racist, nationalist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, chauvinistic, fascist, religious fundamentalist, reactionary, intolerant tripe that merely mirrors former colonisers’ crimes. Or if they’re not regressive right-wing juntas, they’re capitalist, “reformist” states that sell the country out to the highest imperialist bidder, as long as that imperialist isn’t one that they were recently ruled by. And, of course, some countries can exemplify both these tendencies. (America, Burma, Jamaica, Ukraine, Nigeria, Israel and Palestine, I’m looking at all of you.)
  • Related to the earlier point, promoting a “decolonial” (I actually hate this expression) approach that comes primarily from highly educated, upper-middle-class or upper-class members of colonised cultures. (Uh, like me. Just the highly educated part, though—I grew up working class and am now part of the squeezed middle-middle class.)
  • Thinking that all social injustices can be solved by voting in the right politicians.
  • Refusing to vote when one candidate is a milquetoast liberal and the other one is a borderline fascist. I don’t like centrist Democrats either, but Donald Trump was and is more dangerous. This kind of voting is harm reduction. (Unfortunately, it’s practically impossible to do foreign-policy harm reduction in American electoral politics—this needs to be a long-term project—but at least you can do something about domestic policy.)
  • Stringing together a lot of jargonistic terms that cause people to shut down. It feels as though I’m being hit over the head with words like bourgeois, settler-colonialist, base and superstructure, decolonial, carceral, cisheteropatriarchy, kyriarchy. You shouldn’t need a master’s degree in women’s & gender studies or political science to get involved with activism. I hate cops as much as the next leftist, but you should be clearer.
  • Repeating terms like neoliberal and bourgeois as though it were self-evident what they meant. (Admittedly, I have referred to neoliberalism here, and I probably shouldn’t have, since it’s vague.)

 

Passive-aggressive pastels

2024-01-03 / / 0 Comments

(a rare content warning for this blog: brief mention of child abuse)

A graphic on a purple/pink/blue gradient background that says 'Passive-Aggressive Pastels: You are lovely and valid. Except when you piss me off. Then fuck you.' There are disco ball, heart and star decorations.

I talk a lot about social justice assholes, usually the more obvious ones. After all, I was raised by blatant assholes (well, blatant once the doors were closed). Depraved, abusive, cultish, creepy, incestuous, manipulative, cruel, selfish assholes. We’re talking about fathers who leer at their middle-school children’s bodies—and mothers who go a bit further. We’re talking about the kinds of people who yell for hours on end at their hapless nine-year-old because their bedroom was mess or they struggled with long-multiplication drills, until that nine-year-old dissolves into a puddle of self-abasement and misery.

So if you seem too nice, my instinct is to bolt, since you’re taught that everyone who cares about you is going to give you tough love, even if that “love” is nothing but unvarnished abuse and cruelty. It’s not that I want to be around jerks. I don’t attract them the way I used to. But I prefer nice people with an edge, a tendency towards sarcasm and self-depreciation. The kinds who will satirise what they’ve gone through, rather than sit in an affirmation circle.

Well-meaning wielders of saccharine platitudes

If you seem too earnest and you are over the age of 21, I’m going to wonder whether you’re trying to sell me something, or if you’re gullible enough to have someone else sell you something. Of course, these people probably are earnest, but the focus on affirmation and supposed antidotes to the 24/7 cycle of bad news that I sometimes find online gives off that too-nice, I-can’t-trust-this feeling. Everything I read makes me think of lying in a bath with strawberry candles around the ledges, bath foam skimming off the top (probably from a Lush bath bomb), chill-out music playing on Spotify on your phone. They’ll say you’re valid, that you deserve to be here, that you are loved and welcomed.

They’ll pull out their Sacred Affirmation Tarot Cards, make hazy graphics on Canva with goopy 1970s-revival fonts and soft purple-and-blue gradients (admittedly, I do like that aesthetic every so often), light Our Lady of Queer Revival candles that riff off the Catholic ones, make Instagram posts that lavish praise on all their followers and fans, write confessional posts about how I Am Multiply Marginalised And You Can Too.

Affirmation is all well and good, of course—but the words often ring hollow when you’re reading yet more news stories about how politicians in Texas or Russia want to ban you from existence, or about doctors who think that your kind should be wiped off the planet once they find enough “biomarkers,” or about how the planet’s going to burn if the world’s governments (mostly the US government) don’t get off their goddamn asses and do something. You get “good news” sites with magazine headlines like “What if everything turned out OK?” It’s not going to be OK if you’re just handing out platitudes and cute puppies, which is all you’re doing. (That’s what happened when I googled sites for good news after I was trying to break out of the Russia/Ukraine/GOP doomscrolling habit. And I was hit with high-fructose-corn-syrup glurge instead.) And no amount of affirmation is going to topple Ron DeSantis, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Bashar al-Assad, Viktor Orbán, or any other authoritarian dipshit from power (or in the case of Trump, keeping him from regaining it).

If you’re my actual friend, I know you mean it when you affirm me. I know it’s real and not just glurge. And because it’s real, I value it. But it doesn’t feel the same when I’m coming across it on a random Instagram feed, tweet (yes, I’m still calling it Twitter because fuck Elon Musk that’s why), or blog post.

What–or who–the hell are passive-aggressive pastels, anyway?

Methodological faults aside, the well-meaning wielders of saccharine platitudes really do want to do the right thing. Those really aren’t the people I’m pissed off at. Not at all. The ones I’m pissed off at are the kinds who are just as unpleasant and obnoxious as their blatant Social Justice Asshole counterparts, but they cover it all in affirmations about validity and lives that matter. A good friend of mine calls this aesthetic “passive-aggressive pastels.” (I’ll call them PAPs for short, which fits—after all, most of their posts are pap and little more.)

These are the Smol Beans™ on Tumblr (or TikTok nowadays, but I wouldn’t touch TikTok with a bargepole) who will pat you on the back as long as you perform wokeness the way they do. But once you step out of line, they’ll bite you in the back with passive-aggressive posts about how you’re being negative, how you’re being oppressive, violent, abusive, destructive. People like this tend to aim their passive aggression at members of their own community—for example, queer people, feminists, or disabled people. Often PAPs get away with this behaviour because they’re operating in small subcultures that are frequently marginalised or isolated in mainstream culture. This was often the case for queer and trans people in the early 2000s and 2010s, and that continues to be the case today for queer people who also belong to other minority groups (e.g., Black queer people in majority-white countries, or queer disabled people). And it’s absolutely the case in mental health/Mad/mental illness/psychiatric disability support groups, since it’s hard to find support when any mental health condition or perceived mental health condition is heavily stigmatised—unless it’s anxiety and minor clinical depression, that is. But try talking to your average person about bipolar, schizophrenia, DID/multiplicity/plurality, any personality disorder… people will look at you as though you’ve grown two heads. And this is where the PAPs come in. They know you’re a captive audience. They’ll shower you with love and attention. And no matter how much they turn on you and claim that you’re suddenly the Worst Person Ever, you keep coming back because there’s nowhere else to turn.

At least the normal Social Justice Assholes are honest. You know they’re jerks. They’ll rant and rave about how Hamas should kill Israeli citizens to right historic wrongs, call for the decapitation of every white cis man in sight, claim that trans women are all secret rapists there to violate women’s “sex-based rights.” PAPs will make the same claims, but under a haze of cutesy graphics and cryptic Instagram posts. They use use the same kinds of social policing methods as the Nice Southern Ladies I grew up around, the kinds who say “bless her heart,” but you know they’re silently hurling dark imprecations at the one who is supposedly being blessed. Like the Nice Southern Ladies, PAPs have authoritarian ideas and political stances, but they tend to use concern trolling and rhetorical sleight of hand rather than open claims. Nice Southern Ladies have “Live, Laugh, Love,” “#Blessed,” or “John 3:16” posters from Etsy on their walls. PAPs, on the other hand, will have “Protect Trans Lives” or “Black Lives Matter.”

The upshot is that PAPs, Nice Southern Ladies, Social Justice Assholes, and fire-and-brimstone right-wingers are all authoritarian jerks who value social conformity over human dignity, pluralism, or real equity. It’s just a different coat of paint.

The “Kyiv, not Kiev” thing is performative bullshit

2023-12-31 / / 1 Comment

In case you haven’t noticed, I habitually refer to the capital of Ukraine as “Kiev,” despite the general turn towards “Kyiv” over the past four years in the Anglophone media. Why do I refuse to use “Kyiv”? Because the entire thing was a dumb campaign run by Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs under the ultranationalist president Petro Poroshenko back in 2018 or so, targeted at airports and English-speaking news sites (apparently nobody cared much about Spanish, French or German media, which mostly use Kiev or Kiew). I suspect the reason why “Kyiv” caught on was that (a) the media were discussing it more because of Ukraine’s involvement in Trump’s impeachment, (b) everyone was salty at Russia for the electoral interference back in 2016, and (c) Trump was being investigated for Russian ties in 2018. And since there was so much pre-existing anti-Russian sentiment, it was easy for Ukrainian nationalists and the compliant media to double down in early 2022. And in doing so, they turned “Kiev” into a shibboleth: anyone, especially news sites, who uses the traditional name is open to criticism for “opposing Ukraine’s sovereignty” or “supporting Russian imperialism.” (No, I oppose Ukrainian nationalism. There’s a difference.)

I’ve noticed that some antinationalist Ukrainians, as well as government critics, frequently use “Kiev,” rather than “Kyiv.” This doesn’t seem to be limited to native Russian-speakers or people from Eastern Ukraine, because I’ve seen it from antinationalist Western Ukrainians as well. (These Ukrainians seem to use geography and history as a guide to how they refer to places in English, so places in the west like Lviv, Vinnytsia, and Rivne get Ukrainian names, whereas Kiev and other heavily Russian-speaking areas like Kharkov, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev, and Odessa get Russian ones.) Admittedly, this is anecdotal, not scientific.

On top of that, Kiev is historically Russian-speaking. Even nowadays, very few preschoolers in Kiev speak Ukrainian regularly—and this was nine years after nationalist administrations took over and banned the use of Russian in education.

(And if you really want to get into the weeds, “Kiev” resembles the historic name much more than “Kyiv” does. But I’m not going to do that.)

The #KyivNotKiev thing is 100% performative bullshit. Seriously, I blame Donald Trump for this. (It’s always a good idea to blame Trump.) I hate Vladimir Putin and oppose the invasion, but that doesn’t mean that I’m going to defend the nationalist bullshit emanating from some parts of the Ukrainian government and its supporters.

Kiev me a break! Ukraine’s divisive language policies get worse

2023-12-10 / / 0 Comments

[all links in Russian]

A few days ago, Volodymyr Zelensky signed a new law that increases protections for speakers of official EU languages in Ukraine (the good part), but removes the time limit for the current restrictions on the use of Russian (the bad thing). This law is unconstitutional—although the Ukrainian constitution deems Ukrainian the sole state language, there are provisions to protect the use of Russian and other languages—but the Kiev regime has been using the constitution as toilet paper. Yet again, Ukraine is continuing to divide its people rather than uniting them. If they keep doing things like this, they won’t have a state left to defend. Russia will continue to exploit Ukraine’s refusal to incorporate its ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking citizens (who may or may not support the Russian government; I suspect most of them don’t).

Russia doesn’t even need to fabricate propaganda about the mistreatment of Russians or Russian-speakers (not the claims about genocide, which are fabricated, but the ethnic-chauvinist “total Ukrainianisation”). The Ukrainian government is doing it for them. And then disgruntled Ukrainian citizens who are tired of being told that they can’t speak Russian, or that all Russians are synonymous with Putin, get fed up and start working directly with the Russians. Or maybe they’re in an occupied area and just need to eat, so they will “collaborate” with the local Russian-installed authorities. Ukrainian propagandists act accordingly and claim that they’ve been proven right, so they make life even harder for the “superfluous Ukrainians.” But then the Russians seize on the new anti-Russian laws and regulations, claiming that it is they who were right. And the cycle continues inexorably until someone gets the sense to say, “Wait a moment. Why are we doing this? All we’re doing is playing into the Russians’ hands.”

Is it any wonder that a country that constantly scores own-goals is failing on the battlefield? I despise Putin and want Russian troops off Ukrainian territory, but the bunglers in Kiev can’t seem to get their act together and work strategically—or avoid alienating at least a fifth of its population. And I suspect that its reckless actions, both with regard to domestic and military policy, have led to its inability to regain most of the territory it lost last year.

ProleWiki is always good for a laugh.

2023-12-05 / / 0 Comments

The last I checked, China, Russia, and Iran all had empires. All three of these countries have had leaders typically called emperors.  “Anti-American” and “anti-imperialist” are not synonymous. If you’re an expansionist country with a leader called an emperor, you’re an imperialist power or have a history of imperialism. Russia, China, and Iran may have different geopolitical interests from the US and its allies, but that doesn’t stop them from being imperialist powers.

There are tankies—yes, hardened Stalin-idolising tankies—in Russia who seem to get the difference.

A screenshot of ProleWiki's "state media of anti-imperialist" countries, including Chinese, Iranian and Russian state media.

Why the American left struggles to win the “proletariat”

2023-11-30 / / 0 Comments

Despite all the claims to fight for the working class, a lot of American leftists don’t know how to talk to or about your average working-class person. (This probably applies to other countries that were on the left side of the Iron Curtain too, though I can’t be 100% sure.) And no, this has nothing to do with identity politics—that’s for later. Right now, I’m focusing on the struggles of daily life.

I grew up working class. I knew very few adults, other than teachers and medical professionals (and a single relative), who had bachelor’s degrees, much less master’s degrees and PhDs. Having a degree was a big deal; most of these people finished high school and went straight into the workforce if they didn’t do a stint at a community college first. People do not throw around terms like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “material conditions.” Instead, they’ll say “the little guy” and “the bosses.” People talk plainly and clearly; they don’t go in circles using management-speak and Marxist jargon.

When working-class people talk about their material conditions, they give concrete examples, not turgid treatises on Engels and Žižek:

“When I was growing up in the 1960s, you could get a burger for 16 cents. Now you’ll be lucky to get one for $6.”

“They closed down the factory 20 years ago because they outsourced all the work to China. Dad had a hard time getting a job after that and needed to go on benefits.”

“I broke my hip and couldn’t do my job any more, but unemployment couldn’t cover my rent. I got evicted and had to stay in a shelter just to stay alive.”

“They’ve got us under surveillance all the time. You can’t even get up to go to the bathroom without logging it on a time sheet.”

“I’m getting early and late shifts stacked together at Amazon and can’t get any sleep.”

“I need to see the doctor, but my job doesn’t give me benefits, my state didn’t expand Medicaid, and I can’t afford an Obamacare plan.”

Despite their purported focus on material conditions, many leftists (especially Marxists) spend more time spouting academic-sounding jargon rather than listening to the people they want to defend. I’ve lived in the professional middle-class world for just over a decade now. But I’ve tried not to forget where I came from or what my values were. I still detest jargon and doublespeak and piles of abstractions that sound pretty on paper but mean nothing in practice.

Want to support the working class? Then listen. Don’t call them the “proletariat.” Say “you and me,” “your average person,” “the little guy.” Don’t talk about the “bourgeoisie.” Say “the bosses,” “the big guys,” or give names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett. It’s a lot easier to grasp it if you talk about specific people rather than a nebulous “bourgeoisie.” Put down Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Make it easy for people to imagine a better world. If you want to talk about material conditions, then fucking describe them. If you want to talk about how companies exploit their employees, then give examples. Some leftists do this, but it’s typically covered in a pile of jargon.

And your average working-class American isn’t going to be thrilled to talk about communism or socialism, either, especially if they’re older. The same people who want the government to provide them with healthcare and housing, or their unions to protect their rights, are the same ones who will turn around and denounce communism. “The country’s becoming more communist every minute,” someone—a sixtyish woman working in a unionised job—said to me recently. Communism isn’t a concrete set of political demands; it’s an abstract evil force that they associate with the Soviet Union (though they’ll usually call it “Russia”) and the Cold War. Like it or not, Marx’s better ideas have been tainted by association with the terrors inflicted by Stalin and his imitators. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is going to make people think of Stalin, not workers’ taking control over what they produce, as they do in worker-owned cooperatives. When you ask them to think of a socialist country, they’ll think about dictatorial regimes like the USSR and North Korea.

This isn’t to say that working-class people are stupid because they think of Stalin and Kim Jong Un when you mention socialism.  Quite the contrary. They may not have read a word of Marx, but they can tell you exactly how alienated they are from their job, how exploited they feel by their bosses, how much they want to put food on the table without accounting for every penny, how frustrated they are when they talk and no one listens.

If you want workers to rise up against unfair conditions, if you want to spur a mass movement, you need to be able to meet people where they are. You can’t just wait for everything to suck so much that people will join the Socialist Equity Party of Liberation instead of voting for the tried-and-true Republicans and Democrats who actually know how to win an election. They’re just going to pull the lever for Biden or Trump. It’s impossible to have a mass movement if you don’t know how to reach the masses, but a lot of “materialist” leftists don’t seem to get that—they’re trapped in the ivory tower as much as their “pseudo-leftist” progressive counterparts are.

Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Ditch the jargon. And then you’ll have a movement.

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