went swimming with my dad and got up to my knees in mud. gerard way was right when he said we deserve to live in the real world with real things and real people. im gonna blow up my computer

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/728886929370857472/httpswwwtumblrcomolderthannetfic728767139305

Agree with this. I mean I’m an academic who in grad school was often in discussions with people who were Terminally Online, but the dumb ways they applied tumblr discourse in class were usually the least of their problems (as in they were often awful people in their ACTIONS outside of class. That said I’ll never forget the person, who was not a gay or bisexual man himself but was a straight trans man who acted like that identity meant he could speak for the entire LGBTQ community based on stuff he read on Tumblr and never doing the actual class reading, claiming that the way Wayne Koestenbaum described gay man’s attachment to female opera divas in The Queen’s Throat had “consent issues.” This was a guy who later got investigated by Title IX for graphically discussing his sex life with other grad students, including female TAs when he was a student instructor).

But I think where I saw the most obnoxious and insidious ways that Tumblr discourse shit infected irl academic discourse was you’d have some older academic who wasn’t super online but cared a lot about social justice and wanting to do the right thing, and would hear about some concept third hand and think it sounded good and not have the broader context a regular Tumblr, Twitter, etc. person would have to know why it wasn’t, or that the person behind it was abusive or didn’t really know their stuff (I’m thinking about stuff like Medieval POC being promoted by academics who just liked the idea of highlighting more instances of POC in pre-modern European history, didn’t know that the person behind it was a racefaker with a history of deeply racist statements, and weren’t specifically art historians or really digging all that deep into her posts to know that she was getting some basic stuff wrong). My frustration a lot as a grad student who is familiar with Tumblr, and with the feminist blogosphere of the late 00s/early 10s before it where a lot of “Tumblr social justice” first developed, was trying to explain that there were people within that culture who were pro-SJ and feminist and antiracist and so on, and from marginalized groups themselves, who had legitimate objections to these concepts being applied to academia that didn’t come from unfamiliarity or “college students just need to grow up” style thinking that you saw in Jonathan Chait style thinkpieces.

For instance, I objected to and continue to object to “mandatory trigger warnings” because I’ve read about and seen in action how they’re often used by students to box in female and POC faculty — already disproportionately hurt by student evaluations — for not running their class or discussing issues of race, gender, etc. in a way that perfectly fits their ideas from Online Discourse. They’re harder on us for this than similar white male faculty, especially older ones, and older white male allies need to be more aware of this when they extrapolate from their own experiences. (Also students IME will get way angrier if a film by or about marginalized people is “triggering” even though it’s impossible to show some aspects of systemic misogyny or racism on screen without doing that — think movies like Do the Right Thing — than they will a similarly “triggering” film by and about white dudes that has no larger Social Point to Make with its triggering content. And I say this as someone who always gives students a heads up beforehand, but some really think that those movies shouldn’t be shown AT ALL and I’m increasingly getting students asking me to accommodate trigger warning requests for vague Tumblr stuff like “unreality” and I’m so tired.)

Thanks for letting me rant about “Tumblr SJ” and academia in your inbox lol

--

The whole slavic anon talk got me thinking, but I don't do original posts so I thought maybe you'd like this little thinkpiece/explanation. Don't feel the need to respond.

Slavic radbrl's extreme defensiveness over being accused of racism/"mixed up with the rest of white people" points me to extreme disconnection from their own community with a pinch of being terminally online. Navigating the power dynamic where you're white but not white enough to be considered part of the "civilized world" is hard and can be painful at times, which is why you'd see slavic people trying so hard to stick with poc with the whole "we're not like other white people" rhetoric. Because xenophobia is never talked or taken about seriously they can't explain why we're treated like that by western europeans, so searching for community with poc just makes sense to them. You see the word racism used by slavic ppl instead of what it actually is (xenophobia) for the exact same reason.

(also, there's legitimate movements to recognise slavic people as people of color, most of them seem to be spearheaded as Ukrainians or people of Ukrainian ancestry, which is not a coincidence imo)

Getting a reality check that yeah, you're still an opressor class, actually, sets off a defensive response in many people because they've personally never gotten the privileges of being a part of the opressor class (or, yknow. Never realised they did), which makes sense, but honestly I'd expect a better attitude from the community that seems to understand how intersectionality works.

But there's also this disconnect where slavic people tend to be very distant from our (admittedly pretty ugly) history and culture, only nit-picking the bits they like, because the rest of it reminds them that we ultimately live in a culture that is incredibly misogynist, racist, homophobic and xenophobic, which doesn't fit with the idea of being that perfect victim a lot of slavic ppl on the internet strive to be.

There's this idea that the only way to gain sympathy from the west (which we subconsciously aim for despite all out sneers at them because sometimes it feels like it's the only way for our countries to survive, and sometimes it actually is) is to make them realise we never actually "deserved" the way we treated. Facing all the pain we've caused to Roma and Jewish people and countless other nations makes you doubt and think that maybe you *did* deserve that - which is a very wrong way to go to begin with, but it's just easier to distance yourself from your history - your responsibility - and live in that comfy little bubble where your people never done any wrong because understanding that we still don't deserve the shit we get from the west despite all this, but at the same time should finally take some action against racism and discrimination we take part in today and at least apologise for what we did in the past takes some damn reflexion and mental resource and thought not all people are capable of. Especially not those who came to radbrl to escape the already painful reality with having to deal with Eastern European men, lol.

Not an excuse, of course, this phenomenon just seems very interesting to me personally since I observe it often in real life too.

(also the whole "slavic countries, aside from Russia" thing just feels so pretentious to me as a Ukrainian. I'd bet some serious money these people only mean Russia's attitude towards Ukraine that came to light recently and maybe other Eastern European countries, but not the North Asian native people that Russian colonised and killed because they wouldn't have even added that little "except Russia" to the list of they knew their own country's history with racism, which I'm sure there is some. Also, all that aside, is Russia not overwhelmingly slavic with slavic mindset and culture anyway? What's your reason for putting it aside like that, anon? Uncomfortable with the fact they're part of our ethnicity? Yeah, me too.)

Hi! Thank you for your input. You made a lot of good points, especially regarding the lack of education about xenophobia, and I don't think I can add much besides saying 'yeah that's true', especially since I'm a Westerner it wouldn't be fair of me to speak over you.

However as a Romani woman there are some parts where I disagree with you. I don't think Slavic people are trying to stick with people of colour by saying they are not like other white people. To me the very statement that Slavic people aren't like other white people is baffling. We can agree that Slavic people face xenophobia and persecution in the West based on the idea that they are not white *enough*, but the emphasis here is on "enough". They are still white and they have historically oppressed Romani people and they continue to do so. I don't see Slavic people distancing themselves from whiteness as an attempt at solidarity with poc. Roma have faced and still face institutionalized segregation, police brutality, forced sterilization, being put in ghettos, being denied access to school and healthcare, they never got compensation for slavery or for the pogroms and massacres they survived. Because the majority of us (esp. in Eastern Europe) are visibly brown and have a dark skin. Slavic people can't relate to that and the fact that they still continue to be so racist against Roma (like, the situation of Roma in Eastern Europe is so appalling, human rights violations are being committed against Roma everyday and we all know it) yet think of themselves as different from other white people is laughable at best. I am not only talking about myself here, all the other Romani women I've talked to on the matter echoed that sentiment and some were way, way less polite than I am when talking about this, because they live(d) in Eastern European countries and they have experienced racism first hand.

The idea that Slavic people are somehow different from other white people lies on the idea that racism against Roma is less reprehensible that racism against other people of colour. Slavic people who argue they are different from white westerners say they never colonized third world countries and say they never enslaved black Africans. So they recognize that racism against third world people and black people is bad. But they can't apply the same thinking when it comes to racism against Roma.

For the same reason, I wouldn't say Slavic people who say this are nit-picking bits of their history to leave aside the parts they don't like. I think it's actively rewriting history to try and pretend Slavic people were never racist against Roma to the same extent white westerners were to other poc. And this erasure has deep consequences on the lives of Roma today: they still haven't gotten reparation for slavery and we barely got any reparation for the Holocaust. The reason white people erase anti-Roma racism from history is because they don't want to compensate us and they don't want to acknowledge anti-Roma racism is bad, because they hate us. And the idea that Slavic people were not like other white people or were even people of colour (ridiculous considering that they have a white skin) has been used to silence acknowledging the severity of anti-Roma racism. Years ago when I was talking about Czech policemen kneeling on a Romani man's neck and smothering him to death, Czech users replied by insulting me, saying I was racist against Czech people, put me on blocklists, and then sent me anon hate telling me my whole family should be shot and Europe should be cleaned of gypsies.

So I think the main characteristic of that "not like other whites" phenomenon is how it erases the history of anti-Roma racism and acts like it isn't as bad as what other poc go through when Romani rights are constantly violated every other day in Slavic countries. But I do agree with a lot of what you are saying, I don't think Slavic people's anti-Roma racism or antisemitism should be used to justify persecuting them, and I agree that more people should be aware of how xenophobia is and works. I agree that there must be a lot of psychological reasons behind this phenomenon, you highlighted them very well and it was very interesting!

terminally online anticapitalists still have capitalist propaganda so lodged into their brains and beings they have to apply capitalism to every aspect of their lives anyway, and they write shitty thinkpieces about it that i never want to have to read again

i just wish disk horse on makeup could remove itself from this presumption of choice and agency, about whether women wear makeup to “empower themselves” and whether they Should Do That or Should Not Do That, etc. like sorry but a lot of us (most of us) don’t have a fucking choice about whether to wear makeup in our daily lives and the fact that the disk horse almost never acknowledges that reality speaks to the fact that this site is a bunch of 18 year old kids who have never once had a real job.

okokok this is about to be a piping hot take. but i honestly think if h2o were made today it wouldn't have been nearly as gay as it was back in the early aughts

hear me out. western media in the early 2000s was soooo homophobic that the mere existence of gay people was consistently called into question. we're talking about a virulently homophobic, lesbophobic, and biphobic culture that failed to represent The Gays except maybe as the butt of some deeply unfunny joke. watch any episode of friends and you'll pick up what i'm putting down. now i'm not saying we've like cured homophobia at a structural level this decade but we have made such great strides in representation since then with canon gays in children's media and conversations about the importance of lgbt kids seeing themselves in media hitting the mainstream

in a weird, roundabout way, the pervasive homophobia of the early 00s actually contributes to a plausible queer reading of the text. the h2o writers likely would never have considered that emma and rikki's banter, chemistry, and dynamic could be construed as romantic since conversations about sexual difference weren't anywhere near mainstream back then. it wouldn't have even crossed their minds that the girlies could be gay for each other. perhaps someone who was in the trenches of the h2o fandom back in the day can speak to this, but it is hard for me to imagine even older viewers noticing some of the queer themes at play given the homophobic culture that dictated media, and vice versa

how and ever if h2o were made today i strongly feel that the gay of it all would have been dialled down substantially. parents watching h2o with their kids would have clutched their pearls at emma and rikki's interactions or heard the girls reiterate time and again that they are more important to each other than boys and alerted the censors. if h2o was written and aired in the early 2020s, thinkpieces would circulate about whether rikki and emma actually qualified as gay rep, and the steven universe/v*ltron/she ra industrial complex would be discoursing to high heaven about the queer themes present in the text. i honestly feel that the writers would have tried to avoid this outcome in the first place by making the show significantly less gay, thus avoiding having to implicate it in such discourse and hand-wringing from concerned parents

'but tumblr user hoziersgf,' i hear you cry, 'mako mermaids is a part of the same canon and aired around the time when conversations about lgbt rep in children's media began to gain traction in the early 2010s. those girlies sure were not even remotely heterosexual yet the terminally online gays never got a hold of mako mermaids!' to that i say that mako mermaids never reached the same levels of success and acclaim purely from a numbers standpoint as h2o, but i don't really have an adequate rebuttal that isn't just 'the overall quality of mako mermaids is objectively worse than the likes of a lot of children's media with canon gay rep from the same cultural moment'

anyway it is very sad? funny to think that homophobia likely played a part in our enjoyment of the gay mermaid show many years on. none of this is to say that the h2o writers were all violent homophobes, but we are all conditioned by the culture which we inhabit, and the deeply rooted homophobia of the early 2000s actually lends itself well to queer readings of the text. whether the h2o girlies 'count' as gay rep is probably discourse better saved for another post. what i will say is that i see myself in emma, in rikki, in cleo, in their bond and their sisterhood and the secret they share, whether the writers intended for me to feel seen in that way or not

There is, as happens so often these days, a spectre haunting the imagination of the western left. That specter is most commonly dubbed ”strasserism”, though it has other names, such as ”redbrownism”, ”nazbolism”, or more unwieldy names like ”Angela Nagle leftism”. When I came into the left at the beginning of the last decade, these terms did not exist in any meaningful way. As far as me and the people I knew were concerned, ”strasserite” was an incredibly obscure term used exclusively by online neo-nazis is their petty, internicine conflicts. None of us paid them or their silly ideological totems any heed.

At the beginning of the first half of the 2010’s, the left I was a part of was finally starting to feel hopeful again, after the disorientation and loss of direction that came with the fall of actually existing socialism. During the long winter years of the 90’s and early 00’s, people either hopelessly and bitterly clung to a prophecy that everyone else had now fully discarded, or they tried finding new boutique causes to replace the ones that had failed. To take my native Sweden as an example, two of the more significant new causes were opposing the neo-nazis and opposing globalization. There were some victories – or at least, people liked to think so – but the idea of actually achieving political power was dead in everything but name. The left mostly came to accept the role as the social conscience of liberalism, or in the case of antifascism, fancied itself as the Batman protecting end-of-history Gotham City. The streets of triumphant liberal society might have been gritty, the politicians corrupt and undeserving, but antifascist Batman still rose out of bed every night to protect the craven and the low from monsters lurking in the shadows. Or so they liked to think. Most of the time, they just hung out and drank beer.

…

All the details of the intervening decade are beyond the scope of this essay, but it’s fair to say that the left today is more broken and politically defunct than at any point since the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, a case can be made that the crisis facing the left today is more serious than the crisis of the late 80s and early 90s. ”Left populism” as a political model has failed. Jeremy Corbyn has presided over the worst labour party showing in nearly a century. The ”Sanders moment” is over, and there’s no sequel to any of these failed left projects anywhere in sight. This decline is likely terminal and irreversible, because unlike the decline in the 90s, the left no longer has any significant working class support. In fact, with each new ”left revival” a la Corbyn, the constant bleeding of working class support only seems to accelerate. Comrade Bhaskar at Jacobin magazine touts the (in)famous AOC as the next new great presidential candidate and hope for global socialism, but anyone with an IQ somewhere north of the melting point of water – or at least, anyone who doesn’t have a paper he’s eagerly trying to sell you – knows that this is a truly desperate flight of fancy that will never come to pass, not in a million years.

…

We first begin with the obvious. Strasserism does not actually exist. Nobody reads the Strasser brothers, not even the neo-nazis who threw accusations of strasserism at each other decades before anyone else. Nobody outside of Russia – and for that matter, nobody inside of Russia – cares about the intellectual output of the National Bolshevik party, if such an output were to be shown to exist. The reason the term strasserism has been brought out from the dustbin of history by the contemporary left is because said left is currently in the middle of a social and political panic, and this panic has at least two central functions. Firstly, panics such as these are one way for a group of believers to deal with a situation where prophecy fails. For the left, the only thing it knows today is constant failure. Like any religious cult, the failure of prophecy can only be redeemed by shedding the blood of those members identified as polluting the faith. The price of social cohesion is the turn toward constant purges.

…

Partaking in this ritual of self-depreciation does not mark you as an outsider. It is only if you break the rules of the game, only if you acknowledge the man behind the curtain, only if you point to the basic truth hidden behind this outer layer of ironic self-mockery that you become one of us, one of the so-called strasserites. This truth is a fairly simple marxist truth. Classes have class interests, and so the idea that you could have a political movement – the left – that was well and truly dominated by one class, yet still wholly committed to the class interests of another class, but also just too bumbling and out of touch to ever do a good job of looking out for the class it supposedly ”really” cares about is, to put it extremely mildly, a dubious idea. It is much more likely that a political movement dominated by one class will also be more or less entirely dedicated to pursuing the class interests of that class, while also being unable to take any strong action that goes against the interests of its dominant class.

…

There was a socialism before Marx, and it was utopian and based on human reason and moral progress. There are good reasons for why this brand of socialism fell out of favor, but within its context one can definitely hold the view that a small class of enlightened and educated well-to-do people, acting out of the goodness of their own hearts, will eventually bring about socialism by lifting up the poor, racist and/or stupid proles. You don’t have to agree with it, but it fits together.

A central premise of marxist, materialist or scientific socialism, on the other hand, is that classes simply cannot act this way. Classes pursue their own interests and act politically not out of greed, or generosity, or any other personal bit of sentiment, but due to historical and economical pressures. It is this very simple fact that makes the ”materialism” of someone like Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin magazine, and of most leftists of his stripe in general, so incredibly contradictory. For it to work, there has to be an unstated agreement among the faithful to never seriously use the tools of marxist analysis on the left itself. Any and all self-examination must remain on the level of personal discussion (”can person so and so really be a socialist, when her parents are so rich?”). The punishment for transgression against this agreement, for breaking the most sacred code of Omerta the modern left has, is swift and severe: you will get cancelled for this, and you will be added to the ever growing list of ”strasserites” and ”secret nazis” who tried to lure the faithful away from the true path. What happened to Angela Nagle is instructive in this regard; her article, The Left Case Against Open Borders, was an attempt to argue against unrestricted immigration from a class-based, materialist perspective. It’s quite likely – and also quite amusing – that she would probably have recieved less sustained hate online if she had written that immigration shouldn’t be allowed as long as non-white people talk funny and smell bad.

…

I bring my own example up not to relitigate old battles but to underline the point that the sin that earns people the label of ”strasserite” or ”chud” or ”redbrown nazi” has nothing to do with racist animus, or even the issue of immigration more generally. Conjuring up the threat of racism and the ghosts of Nazi Germany is not done because it is true, but because it is necessary. In my case, having a father who came to Sweden to work from central Africa proved to be an embarassing but fairly minor speed bump on the way to declaring me a fighter for aryan blood purity. There is nothing foolish or irrational about any of this; our esteemed comrades are simply doing the only thing they can do, faced with a contradiction they are unable to resolve and a movement that is rapidly falling apart.

…

While I don’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself, I would claim that the ”strasserite” class-analysis of politics in the west and the role of the left today has a few central features. To start: as the economies in western countries have shifted over the past decades, a new sort of class of people has sprung up and grown in social and political importance. In the united states, the most common name for this class is PMCs; the professional-managerial classes. Their name is less important than their function and political trajectory. To brutally simplify things for the sake of brevity, the notable feature of many PMCs as political actors is a blend of political liberalism and cultural progressivism, merged with a political project aimed at increasingly subsidizing their own reproduction as a class, ideally by means of state transfers. The state should forgive student debt. The state should dabble in reparations. The state should hire ”ideas people” to write up reports and thinkpieces about reparations. The state should create new racial justice commissions, or just generally create more jobs that can employ people who by dint of belonging to this class feel that them taking a job at Walmart means that capitalism has failed and it’s time for a revolution. The most radical, put-upon and economically insecure parts of this class today naturally gravitate toward the left, because the left is – no matter what leftists delude themselves by saying – a fairly focused, competent and credible class project. When Corbyn came out of nowhere and became Labour party leader, it was a real grassroots movement that brought him there; a grassroots movement of students and people who either have ambition to move up the ladder or a legitimate fear of looming proletarianization, of falling down the social and economic ladder and finding themselves joining the proles.

The particular form of ”pro-worker” rhetoric these members of the PMC use mostly boils down to a sort of charity. Vote for us, and we’ll give you higher benefits and free broadband, Labour recently tried to tell the recalcitrant workers of the north. It didn’t work. This mode of ”charity” is hardly selfless – it would be a free ”gift” from these PMC activists given to their precious salt of the earth proletarians, and like all gifts it would be reliant on the goodwill and generosity of the giver. Its main function would also surely be to feather the ever growing number of nests for this class of comfortable, university-educated administrators. And when some leftists start seriously debating why ”racists” should be denied medical care from the NHS, one starts getting a sense of just how much hierarchical domination their future ”worker’s paradise” promises to deliver to the working poor.

The point here is not a moral one. After Labour lost, one exasperated member and activist despaired over how blind the workers were, how easily fooled they were by tory propaganda. ”Don’t they see how evil capitalism is? How brutal and unfair it is?”, this activist wrote: ”I have many friends with good grades who are stuck working at grocery stores, stocking shelves”. Anyone who pretends to be some sort of materialist cannot in good conscience make fun of sentiments like this; it is completely rational for someone in that position to think that ”the evils of capitalism” are somehow laid bare for the world to see when their friends are forced to stock shelves like a common peon in order to pay the rent. That the other workers at the grocery store probably find this way of thinking completely ludicrous and arrogant is obviously besides the point.  Politically speaking, the fury and energy that proletarianization engenders should never be underestimated, because it causes political explosions. Jeremy Corbyn successfully challenged the political cartel that had been running Labour on the back of such a political explosion.

We should not make fun of an activist who despairs at the state of the world when good, solid middle class people with solid middle class grades can no longer achieve the middle class lifestyle they were promised. It is however a basic political truth that a worker’s movement consisting of people who are angry at the prospect social and economic ”demotion” – in other words, people who are fighting against the cruel fate of having to become workers – cannot ever succeed. Promising free broadband, or unlimited Space Communism, or some other stupid fantasy world where getting angry at having to work like a normal person is acceptable because nobody has to work won’t really change that.

…

The grand political divide that sundered the house of modern ”socialism” boils down to the question of which class should have its interests taken care of in the first instance. It is all well and good to talk about ”doing both”, or try to soothe workers by saying that once socialism wins, nobody will work, so they’ll all be taken care of then.  A century ago Joe Hill mocked the preachers who tried to placate starving workers by promising them there’d be plenty of pie up in the sky after they were all dead. Today, Aaron Bastani does an even more pathetic job within that vaunted political tradition, promising the british working class asteroid mining and fully automated communist holodecks once The Revolution(tm) succeeds. Until that day comes, though, it can’t really be helped that they’ll have to stay under the thumb of – and fight the battles for – the downwardly mobile professionals, huh? After all, who will build all those fancy asteroid miners if little Junior suddenly has to work at Starbucks like a common plebeian?

This is not a question of left incompetence, or Brexit suddenly wrecking everything, or something that Bernie woulda, coulda, shoulda done. The left is bleeding working class support everywhere. The left is picking up support among the more affluent and well-to-do stratas everywhere. The left is merging with greens and liberal ”progressives” everywhere. This is not incompetence, or cowardice. It is not personal, nor can it be fixed by the actions of individual persons; it is a vindication of historical materialism, and it is playing out right before our very eyes.

It is time for the ”socialism” of the professional and managerial classes and the socialism of the working classes to part ways. The former is moribund and a historical dead-end. The latter, I think, still has a case to be made for it. More importantly – and personal experience from outside the left bears this out  – it still has an audience that is willing to listen to it.

…

Workers aren’t stupid. They’re not evil. They haven’t been ”tricked by the media”. They need no false shepherds to guide them, no well-paid moral commissars to teach them to not randomly slaughter their neighbors because of muh racism. They have abandoned the left parties because the left parties have abandoned them, not ”culturally” as some proponents of identity politics would like you to think, but materially. They know their own class interests, and they know that the left is inimical to those interests. This is good news, at least for those of us with the courage and political will needed to help them free themselves from their so-called ”betters”. Let the Labour activists of London lament over how ”disappointed” they are that the working class has stopped following orders. We will not be like you. We will not promise new masters and new yokes to live under, new aristocracies and ”vanguards” to subsidize, new cadres of people selling them moral sermons and sensitivity courses. We will promise them a chance at revenge.