revealed! where tumblr sjws actually come from!

[reddragdiva]

in which someone literally posits that the root cause of tumblr social justice warriors turns out to be ... an obscure and short-lived somethingawful forum that neither you nor any sjw you’ve ever met in your life has ever heard of nor would care about. a subforum for ron paul fans, no less (the “laissez faire” forum). somehow, ron paul fans literally caused tumblr sjws.

this is the internet equivalent of explaining your loss of absolute cultural hegemony to yourself by concocting a conspiracy theory called cultural marxism that you trace back to a bunch of obscure and forgettable academics called the frankfurt school. though of course it was those darn jews all along!

(curiously unexplained: the beatles.)

the attraction of this sort of claim is that if an utterly unknown political subforum on the internet can bring about such sweeping cultural change, then he has hope that his own mra gamergatey outpost of the dark enlightenment could one day hit the big time. i don’t buy it myself.

sa is the quintessence of sneer culture, but treating it as the unknowable protean bogeyman final boss of the internet that is the ultimate source of every bad thing and its opposite bad thing may not constitute a good source of workable social theories.

Comments

[tcpip]

> a bunch of obscure and forgettable academics called the frankfurt school

Hey! The Frankfurt School are among my favourites!

[reddragdiva]

Sorry, the rest of us never heard of them until the recent idiocy ;-)

[tcpip]

Theordore Adorno, the greatest musicologist (and scathing critic of jazz) of the 20th century? Herbert Marcuse's synthesis of Freud and Marx? Jurgen Habermas, the greatest living social theorist?

These are the rock stars of political theory I tell you!

[damerell]

I think the realisation, post-GG, that now the Goons were a haven of reasonable people - not just "by comparison" but by being quite keen on excoriating the 'gaters and the MRAs and so forth - was when I started to suspect I'd moved to Bizarro World.

[reddragdiva]

The place is considerably better than its reputation. At least the bits I'm reading.

[damerell]

Part of what gave me this epiphany was that I had not expected to read this and this from EVE's chief Goon. Besides being apposite, they're also very amusing, and one of the first pieces I saw clearly making the "even if this nonsense were all true, what did you _expect_ from games journalism, FFS?" point.

[greylock]

In which someone literally posits that the root cause of tumblr social justice warriors turns out to be ... an obscure and short-lived somethingawful forum

Well, Hitler got his start in an obscure beer hall in Munich, so, as the great poet Paul Kelly wrote: "From little things, big things grow" (or something like that.)

you trace back to a bunch of obscure and forgettable academics called the frankfurt school

I thought this was snark, but now I am not so sure.

[reddragdiva]

People who use the term "cultural Marxism" in seriousness actually believe that it is a conspiracy that actually exists and dates back in an unbroken line to these guys, who planned it all out.

[greylock]

My university professors didn't, but it was a simpler time.

But in a world where... people believe in Masons and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I'm really not surprised.