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    Younger KennedyHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:03am

    The letter and its signees are a joke. They are distinctly not the Left (at best the Center Left). Sady Doyle herself engages in online harassment all the time, Feminista Jones is an anti-Semite, and the fact that any of them felt comfortable acting like their Twitter beefs are comparable to FUCKING STONEWALL should tell you all you need to know about the level of narcissism and delusion at work here.

    This is the crowd that tried to defend that foreclosure lawyer “Brienne of Snarth” who tweeted that she didn’t care about that kid who was killed by an alligator in Florida because the kid was white and she blamed the dad. BoS also purposely obscured the fact that she was white in her profile.

    These people are assholes.

    Edit: I would add one other thing. It’s probably best to be mistrustful of anyone who tries to set themselves up as the paragons of any political movement. Left, Right, the fight for control of those terms has little to do with the substance of the movements in general. I consider myself a Leftist, but I would never try to claim Left politics as some essential part of myself or vice versa. They’re just my beliefs.

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      burnedoneanddoneYounger Kennedy
      7/15/16 11:06am

      It’s the narcissistic assholes of the left that make the right have ammo against the rest of us sane and reasonable liberals.

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      occultwesternYounger Kennedy
      7/15/16 11:08am

      The whole thing is a mess but the Pure Economics alt left is a bunch of vultures too. The American Left is a disaster right now.

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    VanNostrandHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:17am

    This is the sad state of liberalism today. What the fuck am I reading? People get caught up in the stupidest, most trivial shit.

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      Icecold DavisVanNostrand
      7/15/16 11:20am

      This isn’t liberalism, just a narcissistic Twitter account with 500 followers pretending to be a movement.

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      KomradKickassIcecold Davis
      7/15/16 11:25am

      That seems like 50% of the 20 something liberals I know.

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    SlickWillieHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:07am

    Read the first correction and now I’m a conservative

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      VanNostrandSlickWillie
      7/15/16 11:20am

      Yup, just bought tickets for the RNC.

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      KomradKickassSlickWillie
      7/15/16 11:24am

      Congratulations! Your free gun and pickup truck are in the mail.

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    jezbannedHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:07am

    “(The people who wrote this letter do not like me personally, which is fine, and, indeed, perhaps, a mark of maturity!)”

    From the letter:

    Gawker publishes a response to the incident, by a white and male writer, Hamilton Nolan. The article, entitled “Don’t Piss On Your Best Friend,” sums up the women’s actions as follows: “It is stupid, don’t do it.” Nolan goes on, at length, to describe which political tactics are “appropriate” and inappropriate for Black Lives Matter protesters, and concludes: “If you truly care about such inequality, you should be planning to vote for Bernie Sanders… closing the racial wealth gap is probably the single most effective thing that any politician could do to help advance the cause of ending structural racism in America.”

    The enemy, in other words, is not whiteness but capitalism. And so it continues.

    Is there something else where they called you a poopyhead or otherwise indicated some sort of personal dislike? Or did they criticize something you wrote that they felt was tone deaf? Maybe the dismissal of their criticism as they “do not like me personally” is part of the problem.

    But hey, at least you got a chuckle out of the deal?

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      zanmaniajezbanned
      7/15/16 11:19am

      I think in the specific context of who wrote the open letter, it’s safe to say not liking a person’s opinion is tantamount to not liking them as a person.

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      StoneMustardjezbanned
      7/15/16 11:26am

      Yeah, that piece Hamilton wrote was pretty bad. Was funny when Deadspin had a piece at the same time that was a lot less tone-deaf and understood the protesters better than Gawker.

      This letter idea was dumb, though.

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    ArdenHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:29am

    I’m actually glad this is happening. The formation of the Tea Party and the popularity of all the Militia Cosplayers has kept the Conservative implosion in such hilarious focus that we Liberals never really had the chance to recognize that our own house needs cleaning until recently.

    Now it’s important to stress that there is a very real distinction between “the Liberal side of politics has lost focus of liberal values as we slide ever rightward” versus the currently popular sentiment of “The Feminazi SJWs are destroying my Video Games and ruining college campuses and also All Lives Matter!” the former is a very real thing. The latter is what you hear if you ask Siri to translate the sounds of the grunting, breathless masturbation of the creature in their mother’s basement.

    The Left has its share of idiots, like Anti-vaxers/GMO morons we need to jetison but it also has a great number of people willing to pass on Liberal ideologies like Socialized healthcare or income equality, for more right-leaning Centrist positions. The Left has been sliding further and further to the right over time to where Democrats are now basically Conservative Lite who just happen to be cool with gays and weed. What used to be standard Liberal ideals are now being called pipedreams, or “too dangerous to worry about now” while mile after mile of ground is given willingly to backwards, regressive Conservative ideas.

    We’re going to have our own “Tea Party” soon, and frankly it can’t come fast enough.

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      Cam/ronArden
      7/15/16 11:42am

      I’d say the American Left’s long history of factionalism, infighting, and holier-than-thou smugness (i.e. “We’re the real, authentic revolutionaries and you’re just a bourgeois sellout!”) has done more damage than anything inflicted by the Right.

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      Misteaks were madeArden
      7/15/16 11:46am

      There is one already...ThePriceofEggsinMalta describes it very nicely from the Lena Dunham/Movie Poster post:

      Well, it’s been around for a while, but in a slightly different (or more specific) context than what we’re talking about here. There’s a Wikipedia page for the original use, which says basically that someone who is a regressive leftist rebels so hard against the racist (typically right-wing) stereotyping of all Muslims as terrorists that they dismiss any legitimate criticism of any Islamic groups as racist. There’s much more to it, obviously, but that’s it in a nutshell.

      So I guess, the term “regressive left” has a wider application, but is kind of along the same lines. When I use the term, I’m not speaking of it in the way Nawaz does. I guess broadly, it’s the way a segment of the left will adopt rather authoritarian stances on liberal topics. Some of the most vicious “politically correct” proponents fall into this realm. The idea that it’s OK to restrict free speech if that speech is hurtful. The idea that it’s OK to destroy or censor works of art if that art portrays something we’re not comfortable with. Shooting down any legitimate criticism by claiming racism/sexism/etc. Some people who ascribe any legitimate criticism of Israel to anti-Semitism, for example. Or in this case, people who are so against guns that they’ll cut them out of movie posters.

      It’s a politically-loaded term, for sure. And I’m finding it hard to try to describe it without sounding like I support right-wing viewpoints (I most certainly don’t). And there are blurry lines, because I think a lot of people who use “regressive left” as an insult are the same types of people who would, say, support Trump and would in turn refute legitimate criticism of his racist shit as being “political correctness run amok.”

      I guess what it comes down to, at a really basic level, is that a true liberal should support the Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote (“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”) whereas a regressive leftist would say “I disapprove of what you say, and you can’t say that here because it’s a safe space, and really we should make a law that forbids you from saying it in the first place.”

      I’m not sure if any of that makes sense or makes anything any clearer for you.

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    Ed SpockHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:00am

    Eons from now when aliens discover the ruins of humanity, and attempt to find out why we became extinct, I’m pretty sure their research is going to come to the conclusion that the invention of Twitter was the watershed moment when our own doom was sealed.

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      IanEd Spock
      7/15/16 11:03am

      I would say the internet in general. While its praises can be sung, it has bred underlying negatives.

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      Icecold DavisEd Spock
      7/15/16 11:17am

      But Facebook is the true Antichrist.

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    MattHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 12:13pm

    Am I the only one that thinks its fucking ridiculous that one of the complaints was that they included a factual account of something that occurred in public? I’m referencing the objection that Marissa Johnson apparently made to the letter’s inclusion of her protest at that Sanders rally in Portland. And then to act as though the mere mention of something of it entitles someone to be paid for it? Jesus Christ.... I mean, the open letter is a mess, as well as the whole #WeAreTheLeft thing in general, but i really don’t buy the whole idea that people deserve to be compensated for shit they do in public for free. But then again, considering there are student activists that have made demands of universities to literally pay them to demonstrate, its not terribly surprising.

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      AbdullahTheGaslighterMatt
      7/15/16 12:38pm

      Isn’t Marissa Johnson is just a thirsty troll?

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      MattAbdullahTheGaslighter
      7/15/16 12:48pm

      I have no idea but what I’m talking about is not limited to her. I’ve seen the idea crop up from time to time that people that are Twitter activists are somehow being denied fair compensation when people use their work on Twitter in their own (sometimes paid) work. Which to me is like, a little spurious. If you want your intellectual labor to make money, then don’t put it out there on a free platform. There’s a more legitimate argument that kinda goes along with this about people failing to attribute ideas and arguments to people, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

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    accesscodeHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:25am

    The letter was quite right in a lot of respects about the perceived roles of women in society. What you’ve written here seems a bit .... pointless.

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      Stenchofaburneraccesscode
      7/15/16 11:37am

      Also, the so called “explainers” he linked to have an axe to grind. I agree that the public faces of this open letter are not exactly the left but more liberal/ progressive. I do not even love their work per se but the posts HamNo linked to are not exactly objective about the whole thing. Also, as non white woman, I am tired of white men claiming that identity politics are a problem and instead it’s all about class. Of course it is for them. The rest of us can, apparently, wait till they are “liberated” and then, when they are in charge, they will end racism, misogyny, etc on our behalf, right?

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      accesscodeStenchofaburner
      7/15/16 11:52am

      My belief is that identity politics are only called that when they aren’t white male identity politics. White identity politics are considered “mainstream” and so, not an identity issue. But, in reality, the idea that many middle class males have of themselves and the way in which they view women and people of color is as a “less than” or “we go first; you follow” thing. That must really change. The letter spoke to me because they are right. IT IS ALL IDENTITY POLITICS. Some of us are just pretending the economy isn’t a personal issue.

      Here’s another one that will piss them off:


      http://bostonreview.net/forum/kate-man…

      It’s interesting to watch the misogyny and sexism just unfold as predicted in the comments.

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    antisamHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 11:12am

    Once again, Woke Twitter’s atomized concept of identity precludes the possibility of collective organizing or consciousness-raising, and the project descends into bickering about semantics. Who could have guessed?

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      SnakeMcEyepatchantisam
      7/15/16 11:29am

      I used to go back and forth on whether the slippery slope concept was relevant to this kind of identity politics. Years ago, it was up in the air whether arguing that acknowledging every minor subculture would lead to total chaos. Surely it was just a glib way of undercutting legitimate multicultural issues...

      ...well, looks like we’re sliding down that fucker pretty quickly. I eagerly await the arguments between East Coast, West Coast, and Midwestern trans activists on how the various groups are oppressing and doing violence to one another by not explicitly acknowledging their unique experiences in the preamble to a thought a piece on why Snickers bars are racist...

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      Burntttantisam
      7/15/16 11:31am

      Starred for “atomized” — I’m imagining discrete identities spreading like individual droplets of particularly cloying fragrance.

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    emooHamilton Nolan
    7/15/16 12:31pm

    In the future, we will not discuss politics. We will share bingo cards and who ever can check off the most qualifiers and identities will automatically be deferred to by the other progressives.

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      Srynersonemoo
      7/15/16 1:00pm

      QUESTION: I have a Twitter account for purposes of commenting on various blogs such as this one, but I never tweet on it — can I mark the “Twitter User” square on the second card?

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      emooSrynerson
      7/15/16 1:38pm

      Your authoritarian attempt to apply rules has disqualified you from playing. This is about your feelings, man.

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