All Thoughts Being Equal

A dive into the inexcusable vitriol burbling up through social media and message boards over the WWU Viking mascot controversy. 4chan and Yik Yak are the main cesspools here, although Breitbart and Twitter make appearances. I. I wish the previous post had been the end of it, me making some criticism at the WWU AS for being silly about social media nonsense, then ending with a half-joking, half-serious suggestion that WWU change its mascot to the Viking... landers. Tee hee!  Or, you know, some fucking asswipes could ruin everything. That could happen, too. What... the... Are you... fucking... kidding... And that's just about when Western Washington University, for the first time in decades, decided to cancel classes on Tuesday, 24 November . Now, these are just the things that were publicly available to me [NB: The 4chan thread has since been deleted] , so there could very well have been additional private threats, emails, or deleted Yik Yak posts that I...

Follow-up to: Diagnosis of an overwhelming fear, pt. 1 ; Adventures in bad statistics, Big Gay edition I. So there's a video going around. A woman dresses pretty generically—jeans, a black crew-neck shirt—and walks around New York City... and experiences "over 100" instances of street harassment in 10 hours over a few days. I have a few problems with this methodology. On the one hand, it's great that people are documenting this sort of everyday experience: one's personal life history doesn't translate well over the Internet, so any little bit helps. On the other hand... The big problem is with the editing. Out of nine major online media sites who reported this— CNN , USA Today , Business Insider , New York Post , Vox , Slate , Huffington Post , Salon , and Jezebel —none of them caught this on the first go around. Then Slate and Salon realized something was up: it's almost all black and Latino men. Yikes. The Jezebel writer had this commentary i...

In my previous post I wondered about the common feminist narrative of an overwhelming fear: that women face so many threats and imminent dangers that it's mentally exhausting just to get through the day. Rather than diagnose that directly (because politics is war and arguments are soldiers ) I want to examine another case of overwhelming fear: that of white male reactionaries. Why? Well, because I'm going to give a presentation on neoreaction later this month, but also because this is prima facie a "safer" discussion topic. The last section of Nick Land's summary of neoreaction (also known as NRx or the "Dark Enlightenment") includes a "multi-part subdigression into racial terror," and attempts to explain the deeper motivations behind stuff like John Derbyshire (formerly of National Review ) giving his son "the Talk" about basically avoiding black people unless a few prove themselves sufficiently safe to befriend. For the recor...

Yesterday I wrote a piece for Little Green Footballs that ended up being part 2 in a three-part series on something nasty in the publication history of Reason magazine. Namely, a "special edition" from February 1976 on historical revisionism... that ended up including some really odious Holocaust denial and reads like a Who's Who of deniers and friends-of-deniers. When called out by PandoDaily , Reason editor Nick Gillespie issued a really weak-tea response: I went back and looked into each alleged denialist contributor to the special edition, and yeah, it shouldn't have been hard for 1976! Reason to say no to these cranks, and even less hard for 2014! Reason to condemn its past self and move on. I won't retread that specific ground here; if you're interested, read the LGF posts here [1], here [2], and here [3]. Instead, let's look more at the meta-level callout by Mark Ames at PandoDaily and response by Nick Gillespie at Reason . In my mind this e...

This post is in response to Danny Canham's post, "The Naked Truth: Continuing a Discussion on Anger." Go read that first , and then come back here. I. Anger is a powerful emotion, but the use of anger in discussion, especially ones as fraught as the discussions around social-justice issues like race and gender and sexuality, can be seen as a sign of rhetorical weakness. At least, when it's the Wrong People who are getting angry. Consider the enthusiasm heaped upon Nevada rancher and sovereign citizen Cliven Bundy (pre-"one more thing I know about the Negro") by the right-wing news media, pundits, and blogosphere. Consider the Tea Party and all its derivatives. It's okay if it's an old white guy getting angry. Somehow anger at a Lost Cause is slightly more normalized than, say, the anger at a Utopia Denied from something like the Occupy movement. That is, the narrative that "we lost something, and we're trying to get it back"...

Western Washington University got launched into the right-wing (and racist ! and Glenn Beck !) blogosphere yesterday, when the conservative advocacy site Campus Reform published an article titled "University calls the amount of white people on campus a ‘failure,’ asks for ideas on how to have fewer" . Yikes! But let's dig deeper.

Delightfully apropos to Katrina's newest post about who's hurting the liberty movement, user Obdicut at Little Green Footballs uncovers a surprising convergence between Glenn Greenwald and Rand Paul's "Southern Avenger." I do not understand how any man with any shred of integrity as a ‘civil rights’ speaker can share the stage with someone named the Southern Avenger. Even the Southern Defender, I could slightly imagine. But vengeance implies someone who thinks a wrong has been done to the South, that there is some reckoning against the enemies of the South that has to come. And that is the really fucking scary kind of racism. Too right. The Lost-Cause neoconfederate nostalgia among some in the liberty movement is, or should be, cause for concern. To be really blunt about it, you can dislike Abraham Lincoln's policy's, but...

Katrina Haffner, president of WWU's libertarian club and a fellow fan of liberty, declares herself a "collectivist" in this post :  I have been called a "collectivist" by some libertarians, as if it was a derogatory word. I will admit: I am a collectivist. So many times have I seen libertarians bashing collectivism and embracing individualism - identifying with being a part of a group is "bad" (hmmm, how about libertarianism?) . Why is that? How is being a part of a group a bad thing? And why do libertarians place an emphasis on the individual? That's sure to rankle most libertarians, who may have a different definition of the word than she does.

or, A waltz down the primrose path of I-don't-even-know-what I've been meaning to finish the companion piece to this blog post (forming the third in a trilogy of social justice musings) but then Facebook happened. Okay, I might have poked a hornet's nest with this one, but I really want to understand a certain mindset. There's a certain kind of person who holds social justice as a very high goal (not bad; in fact, commendable) but who takes up the arms and armor of highly charged political language. I don't know what to call these people other than "social justice crusaders." They're activists-plus. They confuse the hell out of me. Just to get some things out of the way: I think I share their goals. I want social justice for everyone—a society where everyone is treated equitably, without undue irrational privilege or prejudice. Not judged by the color of their skin (or their religion, or their choice of whom to love or...) but by the content of...