I hate it when those “puritanical leftists” (people who hate Strom Thurmond’s strongest soldier) “target” me by raising objections in the comment section of a 2-hour video I made lecturing them for not voting for Biden by equivocating them with my phase as a self-styled nyanarchist. I need to now make this my entire personality, punching left even as I sit in decadence in the center of a world-spanning hive of imperialism.
I was taking about the Buck Angel wars and how those spilled over to anyone who had ever worked with Contrapoints or just wouldn’t publicly denounce her on Twitter but yes, you may also shift the focus onto something else far more harmless in order to justify it. that is a valid option that is open to you and you were afterall, lectured at (RIP, your soul will find justice in this life or the next 🙏)
I’m clearly deflecting by not guessing based on zero indication which of her sagas you were referring to, yes. How cynical and deceptive of me to justify my nefarious anti-genocide rhetoric by explaining a specific situation where people have a reasonable problem with her (one much more relevant in terms of subject matter because it actually relates to the genocide) instead of vagueposting about something that I just expect people to guess at. It’s also my bad for assuming you were talking about her just because everything you said was about “her history as a target” and not about other people who ended up also being impacted.
And you try to make it like I’m victimizing myself, but I’m not. I’m not the victim of shit. I’m just not some crying freak who starts a fight and then acts aggrieved when other people respond to me instead of just listening quietly and donating to my patreon. You’re the one caping for this woman being a “target” of “crusades.” Do you even hear yourself? You’re the one abusing notions of victimhood and projecting that onto me, perhaps because you know that she’s a damn e-celeb who gets paid a copious amount of money for parasocial attachment and arthouse liberal screeds.
two comments that can be summed up as “I don’t blame her, you people are scary and do scary shit with little provocation” is caping. yeah, unfortunately I can hear my own tone there. this probably did feel like an focused personal attack on you and everything you stand for. with all that in mind I’m just going to skip the part where we make little bulleted lists at eachother and let the rest of all that lay where you left it. I’m enjoying fediverse and you aren’t going to be the debate lord who ruins it for me.
You people are scary and do scary shit with little provocation
This is such a ridiculous further escalation from what you already said, which itself was conflating some small segment of the far left that makes the specific mostly-generational schism in the trans community that you mentioned a driving issue.* A lot of them have the normal neoliberal stance on Ukraine/Russia, and a lot of people with the opposition view aren’t interested in debating about transmedicalism (etc.), something you’d probably readily acknowledge in another context in order to disparage them (which, in isolation, would be fair enough in many cases).
But what do you imagine is being accomplished by saying “You people are scary and do scary shit with little provocation”? What is that supposed to be interpreted as? Surely you actually mean something, so tell me what “scary shit” is enacted by “us people” “with little provocation.” The most generous interpretation of this is that you are shadowboxing.
is caping
Yes, justifying her reactionary nonsense with your absurd caricature is caping. I don’t understand what the confusion is, but maybe you just really buy into this totalizing victim narrative instead of just cynically weaponize it.
this probably did feel like an focused personal attack on you and everything you stand for.
Do you not comprehend anything that isn’t a direct victim narrative? I’m not a victim. She never victimized me. I have no idea how she even could issue a personal attack on me. She posed an argument and people responded to her argument, and now she’s made out to be an eternal victim against monolithic crusaders who “have a history of targeting her” and “do scary shit with little provocation.” I have nothing to do with whatever thing with Buck Angel was going on and I don’t think it’s really to anyone’s benefit for me to try to litigate it, but this doesn’t have anything to do with that and the groups involved don’t map onto each other cleanly at all. Your argument is on the level of a #WalkAway “why I left the left” screed, it doesn’t actually make sense either culturally or ideologically.
with all that in mind I’m just going to skip the part where we make little bulleted lists at eachother and let the rest of all that lay where you left it. I’m enjoying fediverse and you aren’t going to be the debate lord who ruins it for me.
It’s amazing how you can argue all you want and sling accusations but it’s the people responding to those accusations who are “debate lords” ruining things “for you.” Like Contra, the option was always open to you to just keep your mouth shut or else to accept that coming in hot invites a response, but you need to have it both ways. You’re just participating in a debate and then putting “disengage” as a little coda at the end to . . . well, I’m not really sure what you imagine it accomplishes and I suppose I shouldn’t presume. Is it a last word thing? Are you just that self-oblivious? I can’t tell.
Also, please tell me about the “scary shit” that we people do.
*I will mention here for the benefit of other Hexbears that I’m not saying these leftists are incorrect, though a lot of the time people view it as not all that helpful except in cases of someone making the antithesis their platform, like how trying to make a lot of noise about Norm Finklestein being a codger regarding trans issues is not all that productive when that’s not his field of advocacy. Noting it is good of course, and so is pushing back when he says something stupid regarding that or anything else of social significance, but trying to make it the main bit of discourse relating to him instead of his substantial and beneficial scholarship on Israel/Palestine is short-sighted and I think that most people agree with me here. There’s a big difference between a progressive who is backward in some respects outside of their specialty and someone who calls themselves progressive but then makes their specialty being backwards, like what Rowling’s “advocacy” has devolved into over time.
Anyway, my point isn’t to take some specific stance on Buck Angel Discourse^tm, but to say that it’s obviously not relevant to the immediate issues of MENA region geopolitics, which I hoped didn’t need to be specified. I think if someone’s really concerned with trans people in Gaza, they should probably oppose the biggest killer of trans people in Gaza, which is Israel.
gish-gallops off 8 different esoteric Mesopotamian translations of what I said in only 7 miles of text
“literally repeat for me what scary things ‘we people’ do? btw quick clarification for the hexbesties in the crowd…”
nah I can see now this is like a little performance you’re doing. and I gotta admit you do have me monologuing to a brick wall for an embarrassing amount of time. you should have been there in 2016 the gamergate guys would have never seen you coming.
I don’t consider some hexbear being annoying because they misunderstood me to be “scary,” just like you aren’t being “scary.” This also has nothing to do with Contra unless you can demonstrate several different levels of generalizability (I can outline them for you, but you’ve repeatedly said tl;dr so I will wait for a prompt), and it still wouldn’t answer my question because Hexbear isn’t a threat, it’s just a headache. What’s “scary”?
This is still fundamentally you coming in caping for this neoliberal ghoul’s disgusting takes on Gaza because . . . what? Some people got mad at her for platforming Buck Angel or whatever, and now she’s a perpetual “target” of a monolithic left who she is justified in make her entire personality being contrarian towards? Even when the subject isn’t inter-generational trans community disputes in the anglosphere but a genocide in Gaza? None of this makes any sense.
Edit: Also I feel like I’m taking bait by mentioning this as you handwave basically every subject mentioned up to this point, but what does Gamergate have to do with anything?
edit reply: sorry, it’s a tactic for arguing. when somebody has a wide variety of dissections of what you said are making multiple interpretations simultaneously, you’re supposed to walk past them and choose the one you can win. gamergate didn’t have anything to do with this, I was just being shitty. other than being a place and time when a lot of trashy argument tactics were adapted to the online space.
okay, I’ll level with you. thanks for not making me read a novel this time, I am american and can’t read. what’s scary wasn’t anything that was said to me here. It is what happens when people with a large leftist following or even just in a large leftist space have a bad take and the resulting inquisition spills onto adjacent or non-adjacent people who just have a “similar vibe”. it’s scary because it trickles down and the audience were doing to for entertainment.
no, Contra is fine, she’s made of money and can dry her tears with gift kerchiefs from the Clinton’s for years. but in doing this ritual we set a precedent for purity testing and purging eachother and I’m pretty sure way less of us on the left have patreon bucks to survive or can chill with the Clintons when we lose our community. it’s scary because we do it for fun and it’s beginning to define the movement more than equity or liberty do. I’m sure that sounds like exaggeration, I don’t know how to convince you it’s not and I am sorry for that. But it’s why I keep being the dumbass in the crowd who says “hey this is scary, can we not?”. As an aside, I don’t think it helps people in Gaza but I’ve been avoiding saying that to try and stay focused on one thing.
I want to preface that I mean this very sincerely and not as a potshot: If you really want productive conversations and hate when someone is a “debate lord,” you might find yourself better-served by focusing less on tactics for arguing and more on tactics for communicating. Part of the reason I say this beyond your own admission is that you’re being really all-over-the-place here, and seem to be presenting multiple contradictory stances based on what you’re responding to (e.g. Is Contra justified? Is this about Contra at all? etc.) Two of the reasons that I wrote at length were because I tend to want to address things exhaustively and I accepted leaving myself more open to a potshot (which you took immediately) just to make what I was saying as clear as I could manage. When you called this a “gish-gallop” I sort of gave up on that approach as an axiom, but that combined with being tired means I might fail to communicate myself, so be prepared I guess:
I think that what you’re talking about now is a) almost nothing to do with the original post, b) not true, based on seeming to not really understand “the crowd,” and c) very counterproductive. All of these can be summarized together: It is good to criticize public figures for saying abhorrent things that damage society, and most people do it not because it’s fun (though they certainly try to make it more fun for themselves a lot of the time, e.g. with colorful language like you also use) but because there’s a serious problem, like deflecting from the severity of an ongoing genocide, that they find to be intolerable. There can be no justice where Clintonites speak unchallenged, and there is no equity between the silenced cries of tens of thousands of dead children and the bloviating of this liberal dweeb who will cry “cancel culture” for receiving pushback even in a situation as stark as this one. I don’t think wringing our hands about some impurity of spirit possessing “the crowd” is beneficial to “the movement,” especially in the context of spinning a victim narrative about someone like Contra.
But there is no movement, there are just a bunch of people in various spaces who mostly don’t know what to do and, by merit of having problems they can’t hide from in a mansion, feel threatened and acutely perceive a need to defend themselves from. Helping these people to organize is good. Giving them concrete feedback and ideological engagement is good. Hemming and hawing about the content of their hearts is not. I think you know that this personal discomfort has nothing to do with Gaza and that giving the slightest trace of a safe quarter to imperial apologia is much worse than whatever smug satisfaction you imagine is felt by what you experience as a nasty mob as it silences the smol bean influencers by . . . just speaking over them. I think letting such people stand unchallenged is the much scarier option, and anyone who professes to care about human benefit would do well to come up with a framework for producing a materialist analysis of how to pursue such a thing rather than concerning themselves with if the vibes are off.
If it makes you feel better, a cool thing about not being a public figure is that you typically don’t have an audience and therefore don’t get this kind of pushback, and it’s much easier to just engage with people as people. Remember that thing that you made fun of me for, of just writing a few extra sentences to make my angle more legible to a likely third party? That’s toward the high end of the level of propriety that you will ever need, and even that is uncommon.
no, Contra is fine, she’s made of money and can dry her tears with gift kerchiefs from the Clinton’s for years. but in doing this ritual we set a precedent for purity testing and purging eachother
I’m fine with purging “leftists” who insist on defending US empire and genocide when it’s done by Democrats. Anyone doing that isn’t “on the left” and is more than likely to be the one calling the cops/gestapo on you when the time comes.
You are doing the exact same thing contra does, you are the one who started by vague posting, and then when confronted discussed a hyper-specific online thing (the Buck Angel Wars or whatever the fuck that is) that happened, then continue to use that to say that our specific criticism and speculation are incorrect, or that ‘we’, who have absolutely nothing to do with whatever bullshit is happening on Twitter, are somehow responsible for her backing a literal liberal genocidier and repeatedly being sympathetic with the right-wing and actively hostile towards the left (regardless of whatever drama was going on, this shit was going on early for her).
This is literally ‘I have no choice but to embrace fascism because people were mean to me online.’
If you don’t want us to ‘ruin this’ for you, get the fuck up out of our instance then or keep your snide little comments to yourself. There are no victims here.
I hate it when those “puritanical leftists” (people who hate Strom Thurmond’s strongest soldier) “target” me by raising objections in the comment section of a 2-hour video I made lecturing them for not voting for Biden by equivocating them with my phase as a self-styled nyanarchist. I need to now make this my entire personality, punching left even as I sit in decadence in the center of a world-spanning hive of imperialism.
I was taking about the Buck Angel wars and how those spilled over to anyone who had ever worked with Contrapoints or just wouldn’t publicly denounce her on Twitter but yes, you may also shift the focus onto something else far more harmless in order to justify it. that is a valid option that is open to you and you were afterall, lectured at (RIP, your soul will find justice in this life or the next 🙏)
I’m clearly deflecting by not guessing based on zero indication which of her sagas you were referring to, yes. How cynical and deceptive of me to justify my nefarious anti-genocide rhetoric by explaining a specific situation where people have a reasonable problem with her (one much more relevant in terms of subject matter because it actually relates to the genocide) instead of vagueposting about something that I just expect people to guess at. It’s also my bad for assuming you were talking about her just because everything you said was about “her history as a target” and not about other people who ended up also being impacted.
And you try to make it like I’m victimizing myself, but I’m not. I’m not the victim of shit. I’m just not some crying freak who starts a fight and then acts aggrieved when other people respond to me instead of just listening quietly and donating to my patreon. You’re the one caping for this woman being a “target” of “crusades.” Do you even hear yourself? You’re the one abusing notions of victimhood and projecting that onto me, perhaps because you know that she’s a damn e-celeb who gets paid a copious amount of money for parasocial attachment and arthouse liberal screeds.
two comments that can be summed up as “I don’t blame her, you people are scary and do scary shit with little provocation” is caping. yeah, unfortunately I can hear my own tone there. this probably did feel like an focused personal attack on you and everything you stand for. with all that in mind I’m just going to skip the part where we make little bulleted lists at eachother and let the rest of all that lay where you left it. I’m enjoying fediverse and you aren’t going to be the debate lord who ruins it for me.
This is such a ridiculous further escalation from what you already said, which itself was conflating some small segment of the far left that makes the specific mostly-generational schism in the trans community that you mentioned a driving issue.* A lot of them have the normal neoliberal stance on Ukraine/Russia, and a lot of people with the opposition view aren’t interested in debating about transmedicalism (etc.), something you’d probably readily acknowledge in another context in order to disparage them (which, in isolation, would be fair enough in many cases).
But what do you imagine is being accomplished by saying “You people are scary and do scary shit with little provocation”? What is that supposed to be interpreted as? Surely you actually mean something, so tell me what “scary shit” is enacted by “us people” “with little provocation.” The most generous interpretation of this is that you are shadowboxing.
Yes, justifying her reactionary nonsense with your absurd caricature is caping. I don’t understand what the confusion is, but maybe you just really buy into this totalizing victim narrative instead of just cynically weaponize it.
Do you not comprehend anything that isn’t a direct victim narrative? I’m not a victim. She never victimized me. I have no idea how she even could issue a personal attack on me. She posed an argument and people responded to her argument, and now she’s made out to be an eternal victim against monolithic crusaders who “have a history of targeting her” and “do scary shit with little provocation.” I have nothing to do with whatever thing with Buck Angel was going on and I don’t think it’s really to anyone’s benefit for me to try to litigate it, but this doesn’t have anything to do with that and the groups involved don’t map onto each other cleanly at all. Your argument is on the level of a #WalkAway “why I left the left” screed, it doesn’t actually make sense either culturally or ideologically.
It’s amazing how you can argue all you want and sling accusations but it’s the people responding to those accusations who are “debate lords” ruining things “for you.” Like Contra, the option was always open to you to just keep your mouth shut or else to accept that coming in hot invites a response, but you need to have it both ways. You’re just participating in a debate and then putting “disengage” as a little coda at the end to . . . well, I’m not really sure what you imagine it accomplishes and I suppose I shouldn’t presume. Is it a last word thing? Are you just that self-oblivious? I can’t tell.
Also, please tell me about the “scary shit” that we people do.
*I will mention here for the benefit of other Hexbears that I’m not saying these leftists are incorrect, though a lot of the time people view it as not all that helpful except in cases of someone making the antithesis their platform, like how trying to make a lot of noise about Norm Finklestein being a codger regarding trans issues is not all that productive when that’s not his field of advocacy. Noting it is good of course, and so is pushing back when he says something stupid regarding that or anything else of social significance, but trying to make it the main bit of discourse relating to him instead of his substantial and beneficial scholarship on Israel/Palestine is short-sighted and I think that most people agree with me here. There’s a big difference between a progressive who is backward in some respects outside of their specialty and someone who calls themselves progressive but then makes their specialty being backwards, like what Rowling’s “advocacy” has devolved into over time.
Anyway, my point isn’t to take some specific stance on Buck Angel Discourse^tm, but to say that it’s obviously not relevant to the immediate issues of MENA region geopolitics, which I hoped didn’t need to be specified. I think if someone’s really concerned with trans people in Gaza, they should probably oppose the biggest killer of trans people in Gaza, which is Israel.
“you could have just kept your mouth shut”
gish-gallops off 8 different esoteric Mesopotamian translations of what I said in only 7 miles of text
“literally repeat for me what scary things ‘we people’ do? btw quick clarification for the hexbesties in the crowd…”
nah I can see now this is like a little performance you’re doing. and I gotta admit you do have me monologuing to a brick wall for an embarrassing amount of time. you should have been there in 2016 the gamergate guys would have never seen you coming.
I don’t consider some hexbear being annoying because they misunderstood me to be “scary,” just like you aren’t being “scary.” This also has nothing to do with Contra unless you can demonstrate several different levels of generalizability (I can outline them for you, but you’ve repeatedly said tl;dr so I will wait for a prompt), and it still wouldn’t answer my question because Hexbear isn’t a threat, it’s just a headache. What’s “scary”?
This is still fundamentally you coming in caping for this neoliberal ghoul’s disgusting takes on Gaza because . . . what? Some people got mad at her for platforming Buck Angel or whatever, and now she’s a perpetual “target” of a monolithic left who she is justified in make her entire personality being contrarian towards? Even when the subject isn’t inter-generational trans community disputes in the anglosphere but a genocide in Gaza? None of this makes any sense.
Edit: Also I feel like I’m taking bait by mentioning this as you handwave basically every subject mentioned up to this point, but what does Gamergate have to do with anything?
edit reply: sorry, it’s a tactic for arguing. when somebody has a wide variety of dissections of what you said are making multiple interpretations simultaneously, you’re supposed to walk past them and choose the one you can win. gamergate didn’t have anything to do with this, I was just being shitty. other than being a place and time when a lot of trashy argument tactics were adapted to the online space.
okay, I’ll level with you. thanks for not making me read a novel this time, I am american and can’t read. what’s scary wasn’t anything that was said to me here. It is what happens when people with a large leftist following or even just in a large leftist space have a bad take and the resulting inquisition spills onto adjacent or non-adjacent people who just have a “similar vibe”. it’s scary because it trickles down and the audience were doing to for entertainment.
no, Contra is fine, she’s made of money and can dry her tears with gift kerchiefs from the Clinton’s for years. but in doing this ritual we set a precedent for purity testing and purging eachother and I’m pretty sure way less of us on the left have patreon bucks to survive or can chill with the Clintons when we lose our community. it’s scary because we do it for fun and it’s beginning to define the movement more than equity or liberty do. I’m sure that sounds like exaggeration, I don’t know how to convince you it’s not and I am sorry for that. But it’s why I keep being the dumbass in the crowd who says “hey this is scary, can we not?”. As an aside, I don’t think it helps people in Gaza but I’ve been avoiding saying that to try and stay focused on one thing.
I want to preface that I mean this very sincerely and not as a potshot: If you really want productive conversations and hate when someone is a “debate lord,” you might find yourself better-served by focusing less on tactics for arguing and more on tactics for communicating. Part of the reason I say this beyond your own admission is that you’re being really all-over-the-place here, and seem to be presenting multiple contradictory stances based on what you’re responding to (e.g. Is Contra justified? Is this about Contra at all? etc.) Two of the reasons that I wrote at length were because I tend to want to address things exhaustively and I accepted leaving myself more open to a potshot (which you took immediately) just to make what I was saying as clear as I could manage. When you called this a “gish-gallop” I sort of gave up on that approach as an axiom, but that combined with being tired means I might fail to communicate myself, so be prepared I guess:
I think that what you’re talking about now is a) almost nothing to do with the original post, b) not true, based on seeming to not really understand “the crowd,” and c) very counterproductive. All of these can be summarized together: It is good to criticize public figures for saying abhorrent things that damage society, and most people do it not because it’s fun (though they certainly try to make it more fun for themselves a lot of the time, e.g. with colorful language like you also use) but because there’s a serious problem, like deflecting from the severity of an ongoing genocide, that they find to be intolerable. There can be no justice where Clintonites speak unchallenged, and there is no equity between the silenced cries of tens of thousands of dead children and the bloviating of this liberal dweeb who will cry “cancel culture” for receiving pushback even in a situation as stark as this one. I don’t think wringing our hands about some impurity of spirit possessing “the crowd” is beneficial to “the movement,” especially in the context of spinning a victim narrative about someone like Contra.
But there is no movement, there are just a bunch of people in various spaces who mostly don’t know what to do and, by merit of having problems they can’t hide from in a mansion, feel threatened and acutely perceive a need to defend themselves from. Helping these people to organize is good. Giving them concrete feedback and ideological engagement is good. Hemming and hawing about the content of their hearts is not. I think you know that this personal discomfort has nothing to do with Gaza and that giving the slightest trace of a safe quarter to imperial apologia is much worse than whatever smug satisfaction you imagine is felt by what you experience as a nasty mob as it silences the smol bean influencers by . . . just speaking over them. I think letting such people stand unchallenged is the much scarier option, and anyone who professes to care about human benefit would do well to come up with a framework for producing a materialist analysis of how to pursue such a thing rather than concerning themselves with if the vibes are off.
If it makes you feel better, a cool thing about not being a public figure is that you typically don’t have an audience and therefore don’t get this kind of pushback, and it’s much easier to just engage with people as people. Remember that thing that you made fun of me for, of just writing a few extra sentences to make my angle more legible to a likely third party? That’s toward the high end of the level of propriety that you will ever need, and even that is uncommon.
I’m fine with purging “leftists” who insist on defending US empire and genocide when it’s done by Democrats. Anyone doing that isn’t “on the left” and is more than likely to be the one calling the cops/gestapo on you when the time comes.
Stop projecting.
You are doing the exact same thing contra does, you are the one who started by vague posting, and then when confronted discussed a hyper-specific online thing (the Buck Angel Wars or whatever the fuck that is) that happened, then continue to use that to say that our specific criticism and speculation are incorrect, or that ‘we’, who have absolutely nothing to do with whatever bullshit is happening on Twitter, are somehow responsible for her backing a literal liberal genocidier and repeatedly being sympathetic with the right-wing and actively hostile towards the left (regardless of whatever drama was going on, this shit was going on early for her).
This is literally ‘I have no choice but to embrace fascism because people were mean to me online.’
If you don’t want us to ‘ruin this’ for you, get the fuck up out of our instance then or keep your snide little comments to yourself. There are no victims here.