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liberal arts

What killed liberal arts are people who think universities are Walmart or that education is a commodity. There is no “education market” that’s going to behave the way a market for video game consoles or brand name sneakers does.

As far as whining about colonialism studies, Marxism, and critical race theory, any field of study that produces something you don’t like is going to get the same criticism that this moronic video coughs up. All you’ve said is “I don’t like what they’re arguing.” So what? So disprove their arguments.

You people act as if those disciplines are closed to everyone but social justice warriors. If you think the field is producing shit that isn’t true, then that’s your opportunity to enter it and challenge their assumptions. You would think free market proponents would appreciate that such a scenario would be an opportunity. What is to stop any of you from doing it?

If you can challenge their assumptions, then do it. But if instead your rebuttal is to piss and moan about it without actually offering up a substantive challenge to the theories they are producing, then why should anyone assume you’re even capable of providing such a challenge, or that such a challenge even exists?  I don’t see one presented in this video, at any rate. And we won’t be seeing any in the comments section either.

The view on offer in this video is just standard anti intellectualism and appealing to the frustrated bitterness of people with an intellectual chip on their shoulder. The conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that colleges should be treated like trade schools, because most of the people who whine about this shit don’t seem to realize that the point of universities is research.

And you have yet to demonstrate that any of these fields are even outside of “the humanist tradition.” We’re supposed to assume this because some 20 year old feminist twit doesn’t like Mozart? It can be argued that something like colonialism studies is simply an extension of the enlightenment. It’s just as easily argued that blind faith and obedience to some lofty, mythologized canon of ideas is actually contrary to the “western humanist tradition.” If you can defend those ideas, then by all means, what is stopping you from doing so? If we take an idea seriously, we ruthlessly criticize it. If it holds up, it’s worth taking seriously, right?

Is critical appraisal, rather than blind faith based on authority, not itself the western humanist tradition?

And speaking of that tradition, didn’t both Plato and Aristotle argue that a “liberal education” made the difference between a free man and slave?  Or are we going to excise them from the “humanist” tradition because we don’t like what they argued as well?  It’s funny how something is a part of the tradition when it supports a preconceived conclusion and banished from it the moment it might challenge that conclusion.  Is that rational inquiry?  It looks like religious faith to me.

hollaback

Male social and sexual invisibility is real. Gee, do you think this could be related to street harassment? By default, if men don’t affect “confidence,” read women’s minds and know if they are attractive to them beforehand, risk socially and all the rest of the garbage that women apparently demand of them in order to successfully fulfill a female imposed role they never even asked for, they fall into a social chasm that doesn’t even exist for most women. Those men disappear. Nobody cares. Nobody is going to throw them a life preserver. It’s that same invisibility which is probably at work when people fail to recognize that men being three times as likely to be homeless is actually a gender issue.

I mean this is like white supremacists making videos about how they’re afraid of black people and rattling off violent crime and incarceration statistics. Seriously, there really isn’t a difference between that and what you’re doing. In their case and in yours, there is no real attempt to understand why crime would be higher in minority neighborhoods that have been devastated by red lining, deindustrialization, and neoliberalism, just as there is no attempt by you to understand why the social landscape women have created for men and the incoherent nature of the role they have saddled men with would produce something like street harassment.

There’s no “love” and revolution. All I see is bourgeois white women’s bigotry and ignorance.

Answer this question: Why is it your humanity which is in question? You’re constantly reminding us that “women are human beings,” as if anybody suggested that they weren’t. Why isn’t it my humanity that is in question, since I’m the one who will be more likely to be accused of “harassment,” and being “rapey,” or “creepy,” when I attempt to navigate the moronic gender role that women have imposed if I expect to have anything resembling a normal social and sexual existence.

Please explain. So far as I can tell, I’m the one who has to remind people that he is human, not you. Nobody will ever accuse you of predation and criminality based on your gender. No airline is going to adopt a policy that won’t allow you to sit next to unaccompanied children. Nobody is going to creep shame you on the internet for taking pictures in a public park because they thought you were a pedophile taking pictures of children to jerk off to later. It’s my gender that is assumed to be dangerous, less than human, in dire need of policing, deconstruction, and relentless scrutiny, not yours.

The root cause of street harassment is a female imposed gender role which men never even asked for. Street harassers are like muggers in a failing economy. They are street harassing you because they are sexually and socially invisible in the same way that a mugger is mugging you because he’s powerless in a failing economic system. Street harassment is a sign of male powerlessness, not male power, just as surely as mugging is a sign of powerlessness rather than a sign of power.  The mugger does not feel he is “entitled” to your wallet, but you certainly feel “entitled” to a civil society, even though you don’t bother to ask why it would prove to be less than civil.

I actually appreciate the nuance in your position here, but you’re still pretty far off the mark. You can’t seem to recognize that gender is a dynamic and you also can’t seem to recognize the role that male threat narratives and damseling of women plays in the development of institutionalized racism.  If you do recognize this, then why not do a video on it?

Wasn’t Emmett Till a “street harasser?” You realize there is a long, long history of middle class and upper middle class women (like yourselves, presumably) pointing out the bad guys who end up coerced by the supposed good guys. It’s irrelevant if the bad guys are designated by race, class, religion or nationality. In fact, one might even start to wonder if this segregation among men into good guys and bad guys in order to protect women isn’t how oppressive power structures are constructed in the first place.

Why not start asking how *women* impose masculinity?  You realize that if you follow that rabbit hole down to the bottom, you’ll actually be putting the very foundations of feminism itself in doubt?

You guys seem to believe that the mystical, nefarious, unseen patriarchy wizard produces such commonly observed male behaviors, but in reality, they’re the result of an intergender dynamic. Women are half the culture, so if you want to stop street harassment, then why don’t you start asking serious questions about women’s contribution to the construction of masculinity? You act as if men get to decide what women want and expect of them.  Men are alot less powerful, privileged, and free than you imagine.

Do you know why women get street harassed?  It isn’t because men are “sexually entitled,” it’s because if men don’t actively go out and seek relationships, they die alone, are cut off entirely from any meaningful social existence and things which are basic to human psychological and emotional well being.  It’s precisely because they are raised in a way in which they are told they are not entitled, not to sex, your body, or even any meaningful existence in a social world where they have healthy relationships with other people.  They are instead told to “man up” and climb out of the social chasm they will fall into by default, one which doesn’t even exist for women until they are old.

That’s the context of male socialization and this is where their identity is formed.  Given such a fucked up situation, it stands to reason it will produce social dysfunction, like street harassment and men who view women as the enemy or an object to be conquered rather than a person to relate to, especially when it is the case that forming relationships with women, for an incredibly large portion of the male population, is made into an incoherent uphill battle by women who refuse any reciprocal responsibility and who punish respectful, timid, or socially awkward men who actually abide by what women like yourself prescribe as healthy male behavior.

Indeed, I suspect that you’ll find a lot of street harassers themselves became that way after being routinely ignored by women.  Negative attention is, after all, better than no attention at all in their case.  And we all understand that a guy who is attractive to a woman will be deemed “confident” while a guy who is unattractive will be labeled a harasser or “creep” for the same male behavior.   We do understand that right?

Now would you like to explain how you like “confidence” in a man who makes the first move again?

Curiously, you didn’t think that aspect of this was important enough to include in your video. So, while I’m sure it’s comforting and emotionally satisfying to whine about how men are evil degenerate predators and engage in the condescending and bigoted mommy politics of shaming, as you have done here, men are actually a product of a culture what women have actually imposed.

And no, your little perfunctory disclaimer about men being victims sometimes that you tossed in as a side note doesn’t mean anything.  Sorry.  If you want to solve a problem, like a social problem, you look for its underlying causes.  Only feminists and racists, as in the case of violent crime in minority neighborhoods, refuse to do this, because they prefer instead to assume that the bad guys are simply making bad moral choices rather than asking what context produces so many men making so many bad choices.

You’re whining about something only women have the power to change.  Stamping your feet at the injustice of street harassers to remind them that it’s wrong solves nothing.  Did you not realize that they already know it’s wrong?

Since you refuse to recognize that women are half the culture and provide the most important aspects of the social landscape in which male identity is formed, my question to you is why I should give a flying fuck about street harassment?  Seriously, why should I care?  What purpose could the conversation possibly serve if there is no possible solution to it?  And how could there be a solution if you refuse to recognize the origin of the problem?  How do you solve a problem whose origin you refuse to admit?  Oh that’s right, you’re not actually interested in solving the problem, but in whining, demonizing, shaming, and attention whoring.  Yeah, sorry, I have better things to do.

In the end, you’ll be old and nobody will look at you.  You’ll be as sexually invisible as most men were their entire lives. Then you’ll complain about the beauty myth, objectification, and male imposed standards of beauty, so I fail to see why I should care about how horrible you think it is to be sexually attractive.  I no loner give a fuck, sorry.

Fourteen year old “street harasser” Emmett Till, murdered by the Klan for whistling at a white woman:

 

 

steve shives makes me ashamed to have a penis

I’m not a violent person, but I have to admit, if this fucking simpering, self-deluding, mangina said this shit to my face, I can’t be sure if I wouldn’t throttle him, consequences be damned.  Look at this fucking goof hiding his bald spot beneath his hat while apologizing for his existence in the mancave to which his obese, henpecking wife relegated him.  Jesus fucking christ, what a trainwreck. This must be what they mean by being “triggered.”

I said:

Hey, Steve, can you please explain how it is that the “privileged” gender is 3 times as likely to be homeless, 4 times as likely to die by violence while you fret about women’s safety, 3 times as likely to commit suicide, experiences 90% of workplace injuries and deaths, and suffer a sentencing disparity between the genders that is six times the one that exists between the races?

Read it again, Steve. The sentencing disparity between men and women is 6 times the one that exists between the races, while men are 4 times as likely to be assaulted or die by violence as women. So, your assumption that embittered redditor manbabies are being “overly sensitive” about being demonized and accused of violence and predation in order to protect western women who are the literally the single safest demographic of human beings on the face of the planet is really kind of irrational, now isn’t it.

In fact, it’s a bit like telling black men, who are demonized most of all, that they’re being “overly sensitive” if they should take exception when a racist shop clerk follows them around a store because they believe they’re going to steal something or when they get pulled over and potentially shot for the crime of being seen driving in the wrong neighborhood.  It’s called “bigotry,” genius.  What makes bigotry possible is a dehumanizing threat narrative. See how that works? Would you like to bust out your intersectional matrix of oppression chart and show me precisely what the fucking difference is?

You know the funny part? You don’t have a response.  You won’t respond to this comment because you can’t. And you and I both know it.

And are you really so clueless that you can’t see that accusing men of “misogyny” and being “bitter” about the above mentioned issues is no different than conservatives who accuse female feminists of being “bitter” and unable to attract a man?

The cognitive dissonance must be unreal. You people are the left’s version of social and religious conservatives. You’re an embarrassment and you’re dragging the left over a cliff. Please go away. Thanks.

gynocentric nerds

Masculinity Is an Anxiety Disorder: Breaking Down the Nerd Box

Two things regarding the masculinity-is-a-social-construct-guy.

1. He doesn’t recognize that his own experience of gender is interpreted for him by women via the culture. Men defer to women and derive their sense of moral, civic, and social acceptability from the perception of how they treat women and children. So while men have experiences that are similar to that of other men, the way they understand those experiences is supplied to them by a culture that defers to a female interpretation of male reality. That’s why he’s apologizing for masculinity’s existence and denouncing it – because women denounce it and see it as a problem, threat, a source of oppression, etc. It’s not masculinity as it actually is that he’s denouncing, but masculinity as women imagine it to be. Taken to its extreme, a guy like that could interpret normal emotional responses he may have to things as gender political sins or believe that he should feel guilt for his own natural sexual inclinations.

2. It doesn’t occur to the guy that the forms of masculinity he sees on display within the culture are actually a response to women’s expectations. If he’s truly a “gender fluid nerd,” or whatever, he probably has a lot less experience of actively hitting on women and trying to model himself after what they appear to respond to while avoiding those things they don’t seem to respond to. He imagines this hypermasculine cartoon is somehow the result of the imaginary patriarchy, when in reality it is simply the result of men catering to women’s sexual (and social) preferences.

Why would anyone believe that women have no say-so in what masculinity is? If men are “insecure in their masculinity,” why do we believe that it’s other men, “society,” or “the patriarchy,” making them insecure? What if it’s just women doing it? Do feminists seriously believe that men care more about what other men think than what women think? Do feminists think that men get to decide what women want and expect of them? What happens to men who can’t figure out or adhere to what women expect of them?  Whatever portion of masculinity is socially constructed would be just as constructed by women, would it not? If it’s men’s sexual value that is always in question, while women’s is typically guaranteed, then logic suggests that it may even be the case that there is no masculinity apart from women’s preferences. What if the socially constructed portion of masculinity begins and ends with women’s preferences exclusively?

If that’s true and you can prove it, then you can toss feminist theory – all of it – on the ash heap of history, since the only people who could change any of this would be women, not men. If feminists wanted to change it, they’d have to aim their policing and shaming at other women, since the only choice men have is social/sexual invisibility or adhering to the masculine role that women expect. If the source of women’s oppression is hegemonic masculinity and if the origin of hegemonic masculinity is in women’s sexual preferences, then the origin of women’s oppression is women’s sexual preferences. You can flush 40 years of feminist advocacy down the fuckin toilet. Buh bye.

In the article, the author admits that “We have to acknowledge that many self–described nerds tend to be socially and romantically inept.”  Isn’t it fascinating how he can’t put two and two together? It never occurs to him that his inability to be classically masculine simply makes him less interesting and attractive to women. The simplest of all competing theories has never even been considered or recognized by him, not even once.

He says, “Whether the woman is knowledgeable or not—even if the woman knows more than the man—in many if not most cases, the man has no intention of engaging with her as an equal. It is simply too threatening to his self–perceived masculinity. In this way the Box becomes an inadvertent shield against intimacy, one that can cripple a man’s ability to form and maintain relationships.”  He naturally assumes that his “self perceived masculinity” will never have any relationship to what women perceive as masculine, and to whatever degree he picked up these ideas about masculinity from the culture, it never occurs to him that those ideas might be rooted in men’s experiences of real world women, or that the way men judge themselves and one another is a response to the way they believe women evaluate men and their masculinity.

Why does the author believe that women want his vulnerability or that they would find it attractive? Why does he believe that women want a man who is their equal? What does he base this on?

political correctness

Non mathic said:

“Unfortunately we aren’t all equal when it comes to jokes and ridicule. For instance, making fun of the disabled just comes off as mean, petty, and lazy; there’s not really a greater message, and “cuz it’s funny” isn’t good enough. Just because someone finds something funny doesn’t suddenly make it some untouchable symbol: it’s still completely fine to criticize and disagree with it.

I think a lot of people use the “too PC” lingo in exactly the way that they think “lazy liberals” do, in that they want to try and stifle any criticism from the start. It’s kind of like someone who wants to yell “Fuck you” but doesn’t want to hear “Fuck you” back.

Most left-leaning people seem to not like seeing jokes further degrade and demean the already degraded and demeaned, as those kinds of jokes just reinforce the difficulties and structures those groups face. Did Blackface elevate African Americans, or did it reinforce stereotypes and racism? Not all laughter is out of joy and happiness, and it can easily have a core of hatred and bigotry that I’d rather see fade away.”

I responded:

I think the problem is that very often the political correctness crusader makes his criticisms out of his own form of hatred. A lot of people on the left are often attacking the kind of person they imagine would make such a joke, rather than the person who did actually make the joke, and so they’re projecting on to that person intentions he didn’t actually have.

A good example would be a joke Tosh told recently in which he explained how he replaced his sister’s mace with silly string, resulting in her getting raped. Feminists complained for all the reasons you cite here, but if you listen to the joke, there is no demeaning of women or trivializing of rape. The reason it was funny was precisely because society does take rape seriously.

People make jokes and reveal themselves to be shitty bigoted people. Others can call them out on it. All that is fine, but it’s another matter when we’re pulling fire alarms during people’s lectures or shows, banning their accounts, deleting their posts, and actively trying to get them fired from jobs.  It’s another matter entirely when we believe that everybody else has to walk on eggshells around us or else be dehumanized and persecuted.  It’s really a bit much to suggest that such people are interested in a debate of any kind, isn’t it?

As the Tosh joke demonstrates, very often people are just looking for a reason to get outraged and they’re actually just revealing their own form of intolerance and bigotry in witch hunting others whose every word gets deliberately misinterpreted in the most sinister way possible.  This is especially true when it comes to feminism since so many of them have such a drastically distorted and erroneous interpretation of men’s experience and their intentions. Everything men say and do is interpreted as “misogyny” to the point where the way some guy sits on a subway seat is interpreted as a deliberate attempt by a patriarchal oppressor to dominate physical space or some guy’s shirt is interpreted as a threatening the trembling womenfolk and scaring them away from STEM.

And the “punching up” argument doesn’t work considering that in many cases it’s upper middle class college educated white women doing the punching. Who do they think they are “punching up” at exactly? Downwardly mobile, increasingly marginalized, less well educated men whose incomes have been stagnating for a generation while their labor participation rate fell?  Yeah, you’re really speaking up for the marginalized and throwing a rock a goliath, person who will never be accused of predation and moral inferiority based on your gender.  Tell us more about institutionalized sexism, person who doesn’t seem to realize that the sentencing disparity between men and women is six times the one that exists between the races.  Yeah, look how marginalized you are, person who has a hearing at the UN where she can complain about people telling her she “sucks” on the internet and expect it to be treated with all the seriousness of genocide in Darfur.  Give me a fucking break.

It’s seriously getting old and it’s reaching the point where otherwise left leaning and liberal people are jumping ship. The PC policing, demonizing and shaming is way past the point of diminished marginal returns.  I’m not defending this bullshit anymore.  It’s all based on a pretty questionable premise anyway. Do we really believe that social, historical, and political outcomes begin simply with people’s beliefs and prejudices? If that’s what the left believes, then it is on the same side of the debate as religious and social conservatives because rational people on the other side of the debate would ask what underlying conditions produce beliefs in the first place.  And yes, you’re a “lazy liberal” if you think throwing tantrums about pronouns is going to change that underlying condition.

obligations are not privileges

Regarding the wage gap, when you say “it’s the result of personal choice,” what feminists are hearing is “personal responsibility, libtard!” What they’re thinking is, “yes, in a patriarchal society women are boxed in and forced into motherhood by society’s expectations of them.” So, every time you correctly make this argument, you’re just talking past them because they don’t recognize that women make legitimate choices of their own, not in consenting to sex, careers, motherhood, or anything else.

They don’t recognize women’s agency so nothing is ever their fault and women make no contribution to the existing set of cultural norms, as if men get to decide what women want and expect of them. No widely observed behavior among men – like choosing careers that pay more or working longer hours – can ever be a response to expectations and demands that women make upon men.  The idea that such a thing is possible has never even occurred to them, not in 40 years of feminist scholarship, theorizing, and advocacy.

What needs to be emphasized is what Warren Farrell argued for decades, which is that choosing to opt out and have children is a choice, one that women have and which men do not have. The reason men don’t have this choice is not because of the patriarchy, but because women do not allow men this choice, since it’s women that expect men to be breadwinners.

This is why men subordinate most of their career decisions to making money, because they have less choice than women have regarding careers, not more.

They don’t have the option to consider things like “work/life” balance if they expect to be suitable mates. It’s women who ultimately choose mates, and we can see statistically that married men out earn both women and unmarried men, meaning that women expect men to be breadwinners. It’s as simple as that.

Look at Norway, for instance, where it is now the case that 26% of men go without having children while only 13% of women do. Women will share above average mates, while a portion of the male population becomes superfluous if it should become the case that men are not earning as much if not more than women on average. That is the result of women’s choices and a corresponding lack of male choice, not the patriarchy.

It is not male privilege, but female privilege and the wage gap reflects this female privilege. For men it is not privilege, but obligation.

Obligations are not privileges. How else are men to respond to that if not by tying their identities and social value to making money above other concerns? Why else would he be doing it if it was not the case that women demand men be breadwinners?

Let me ask the question this way: Do we think that men who make less than the average female in a given population are more likely to be married or less? Research shows that we can estimate by the dollar amount how likely a man is to be married, that is how strong and direct the correlation between male earnings and the likelihood of marriage is. There’s no speculation here. Women demand you have a job that is as good or better than theirs or else you are socially and sexually invisible.

So, on the one hand, women create profound social consequences for men if they do not make as much if not more than women, then on the other, they claim that greater male earnings are proof of women’s oppression.

The way to frame this side of the debate is to emphasize, as Warren Farrell has done, that men have less choices regarding careers, not that women simply “make choices” which result in them making less money. Until the debate is framed this way, you might as well be talking to a brick wall. No feminist is going to even understand the counter argument.

the “social justice community”

I wrote the following in the comments section:

Listen man, I come from the Marxist activist left – the one that exists in the real world outside of the internet – and I jumped ship years ago because of the identity politics cultism, “safe space” inquisitions, and bullshit. And it’s not like my politics have changed.

You can dismissively brand me a “brocialist” who considers identity politics “divisive.” I’ll happily accept the label.

There is no possibility of a social justice “community” on youtube or anywhere else because in every single case what is going to happen is that attention seeking women who see rape culture and microaggressions around every corner are going to damsel themselves, probably the way JJ did (I don’t know the details) and set everybody against one another.

It’s really a shame to see identity politics lunacy drag anticapitalism and the radical left over a cliff, especially when the case can be made that it’s fundamentally antithetical to Marxism. Marx was a historical materialist, not an idealist. He would never have argued that white supremacy or sexism was the cause of this or that historical or political outcome, as if the motive force of historical change is mean people who believe evil things. He would have instead looked at the underlying material conditions which produced the belief system precisely because he recognized that the bad guys always believe they are the good guys. As Socrates said “nobody knowingly does wrong.”

Since so many members of the identity politics left think this way, this actually puts them on the same side as religious conservatives and other bigots in their thinking about political economy. They don’t view people as products of systems, but as evil interlopers, morally inferior villains, and so on. In short, they turn their enemies into “the other” just as surely as religious conservatives and other bigots do.

The right, of course, is only all too happy to conflate their teenager mean-girls persecution politics with what are legitimate and important criticisms of capitalism. Everybody loses. I wouldn’t bother trying to rehabilitate the social justice community on youtube. It’s a lost cause. If it’s dead, it should stay dead. Good riddance.

In the comments section on Sargon’s channel, I wrote:

This is always going to happen within the “social justice community” because of the toxic nature of their politics. It’s based on purity tests, persecution, demonization of others, and purges, not on solidarity, empathy, understanding, or even concern for the truth. It’s not even about politics, but about little teenager cliques and belonging to a social group.

This is true for the social justice community outside of the internet. I was an IWW organizer for years, and there was no shortage of “harassment” allegations throughout the ranks, no shortage of drama queens and attention whores who appear on the scene and set guys against one another. It’s a pretty clear pattern of behavior, one that women generally have a lot of responsibility for, but of course men are never going allow themselves to consider that possibility because they’re all too busy trying to out white knight one another and throw each other under the bus.

The white knighting and lack of critical engagement with women’s ideas or their behavior is actually a mark of their ideological commitment. It’s about “listening and believing,” not justice.

It’s embarrassing how they can’t see the arrested, 8th grade mean-girl sociology at work because they’re so insecure and desperate to be acceptable to women. I think it’s pretty obvious that a girl who is insecure, wants attention, and spends 24/7 thinking about rape and microaggressions is probably going to be more inclined to misinterpret and mischaracterize her interactions with men. She’s going to see microaggressions and rape culture where it doesn’t exist, and this is always going to be a wedge which sets men against one another. There’s really no possibility of a “social justice community” here or anywhere else for this very reason.

This isn’t the first SJW community implosion on youtube, nor will it be the last.

libertarianism

Somebody in a comment somewhere said that “socialism = debt.”

I responded:

Capitalism = private debt, socialism = public debt. Private consumer spending is 2/3rds economic growth in most western economies so… you lose, unless you want to explain how people can generate aggregate demand necessary for growth in an economy in which income increasingly services debt to the exclusion of everything else.

Libertarian free trade cultism destroyed in two graphs:

mommy politics

The irony of all this is that if you drop Marx into it, you can easily cleave the left’s critique of capitalism from the SJW bullshit, since Marx was arguing that our underlying economic circumstance is what produces culture, rather than culture producing our economic circumstance.

What Kevin and other SJW identity politics types are arguing is that culture dictates our economic circumstance, rather than the other way around. This actually puts people like Kevin on the same side of the debate as right wing religious conservatives, contra Marx. That is why they think “education,” (i.e. shaming and persecution politics) and all the rest of it will stamp out racism just as surely as religious conservatives believe that faith-based education will stamp out sin.  It’s just a left wing moral paternalism and forced conformity which is really not so different than the right wing religious version of it.

SJWs, like religious conservatives, believe that history produces bad outcomes, like racism, because of mean and evil people who do evil or stupid shit. They never ask *why* people believe those things or what experiences of material and economic reality would produce those beliefs.

By contrast, the Marxist simply looks at the underlying economic reality and reasons that racism persists because of the way economic competition divides people socially.  It makes no difference if people are divided into racial groups, genders, nationalities, religious affiliations, etc., because some workers will blame other workers for the failure of the system, if it should fail, and in doing so will insulate the owners of capital from the prospect of class revolt from that other group of workers who blames the owners of capital instead. So German workers blame Jews rather than the industrialists and conservatives when the bottom falls out just as American racists blame welfare loafing blacks and immigrants rather than Goldman Sachs, as if a banker or a capitalist had to be Jewish to rip you off or as if you had to be Guatemalan or Mexican to want to flee poverty for opportunity.

So that’s why racism develops and persists.   Nobody needs to design it or even understand it for it to develop, since you can find some version of this underlying social dynamic in virtually any society. There needn’t be any Illuminati or Bilderbergs behind the scenes to bring about this extremely typical outcome.  It will arise on its own as a matter of spontaneous order, just like any price in a market, because it is chosen by nobody if it emerges out of the interactions between people.

Those who own capital will need to find common cause with some element of the lower class if they face the real prospect of revolt.  As for the lower class which competes with itself for jobs, resources, social status, and so on, it will always segregate into different groups based on whatever arbitrary criteria because people depend on culture and norms to know how to behave around one another.  Lacking any other recourse, they always flock to people who seem to be most like themselves because they know nothing else.

One element of the working class will identify with the values of their employers, or the ruling class, and sees itself as the aspiring ruling class, the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” while the other element of the working class rejects the value system of the ruling class and asserts its own values which are particular to its experience. There’s really nothing mysterious about it.  How else would it work?

The former group become fascists, vigilantes, religious conservatives, right wing hardliners who complain about immigrants taking their jobs while opposing attempts to unionize the shop, the latter group becomes socialists, communists, reformers, non-conformists, people who try to unionize the factory which can no longer pay people enough to live on.  The former group says “Man up and work harder, you whining losers, and maybe you’d win the game,” the latter group says “this game is rigged, you fucking idiots, there’s no way to win and in the end we all lose.”

As for the ruling class, it merely tries to find legitimacy by finding common cause with whatever element of the lower classes are willing to support it, usually because it is also divided and fighting with itself, with one faction looking to find common cause with the lower class which it can wield against the other.  There’s no evil puppet masters pulling the strings.  It’s not even clear if the ruling class recognizes that it is bullshitting whatever element of the lower class it is courting ideologically, since many of them may actually come to believe their own bullshit and rationalizations.  What difference does it make anyway?

The divide and conquer scheme need not be a scheme at all.  There simply isn’t any other way for this political economy to develop if the system should cease to work for the majority of its participants and instead produces the political will to revise the power structure or its existing class hierarchy.  It’s the same reason that the European colonials could control Rwanda by playing the Hutus and Tutsis against one another. The same reason Britain could control N. Ireland by playing Scottish immigrants against the Native Irish.  The same reason we all segregate ourselves into alphas and betas, come to think of it.

In colonial Virginia, playing black against white after Bacon’s Rebellion was the whole reason that the special legal designation of blacks came to exist in the first place.  Before Bacon’s Rebellion, which united both blacks and whites against Virginia landowners, blacks could own slaves and property, they could marry whites and so on.  After the rebellion, the ruling class responded by lifting poor whites above poor blacks on the class totem and thereby insulating themselves from the prospect of class revolt in a system that increasingly came to rely almost exclusively on black slave labor.  In the event of a slave revolt, they could surely count on all the working class white aspiring slaveholders to defend them just as surely as David Koch can count on lower working class whites in 21st century America to vote their own benefits and workplace protections away.

The class war is always neutralized by being recast as a cultural, national, religious, or racial war.  We could go on and on and on with historical examples of the same phenomenon if we were so inclined.  The bottom line here is simply that racism in colonial Virginia, as elsewhere, had less to do with culture and belief systems but more to do with the underlying condition in which people adopt those belief systems.

Now consider the difference between this Marxist view and what SJWs are arguing: The SJWs aren’t looking at the underlying context or structural origin of racism. On the contrary, they’ve identified the “cis hetero patriarchy” and “white supremacy” as the culprits. They’re blaming belief systems themselves, not asking what underlying context would produce such beliefs.

Why would anybody adopt such a belief system? Go ahead and ask SJWs. They have no idea. I guess because cis hetero white men are mean and evil. We just need to “educate” them and the problem will be solved.  This is why they’re so concerned with policing language, pronouns, shaming, demonizing, excluding, and so on.  The SJW critique of the existing society is exclusively a moral one.  In a recent video by marinashutup, for instance, she explains that “racial prejudice causes injustice.”  In reality, however, it’s already existing structural economic and institutional injustice which produces prejudice as a means of explaining that injustice, either to legitimize it or legitimize resistance to it.

Really think about how stupid this view is.  If we were to interpret history this way, we would have to conlcude that Europeans bought African slaves because they were mean, evil, or were told to do it by a mystical holy book; what is more likely, however, is that they did it because they needed cheap labor and the Africans were selling slaves. The culture, religious, moral, and ideological justifications for it came after the fact. In other words, economic and material reality gives rise to cultural reality, not the other way around.

People like Kevin don’t speak for the left and they are actually arguing the opposite of what the actual Marxist left argues. They’re a product of a dying anticommunist and liberal 20th century left wing consensus that turned a blind eye to structural causes for racism, sexism, etc. in order to avoid criticism of capitalism.

Here’s an interview with Leah Gordon, an academic who recently wrote a book about this very phenomenon in 20th century Cold War social science.  She calls it “racial individualism.”

SJWs are not Marxists.  Their politics isn’t “Marxist” or even on a continuum with Marxism, socialism, or communism, but is actually just the moral paternalism that originates with 20th century bourgeois white women’s understanding of the world.  It’s mommy politics, a big part of the reason why we’re still fighting the drug war to keep little Timmy off drugs so that he doesn’t become a burnout like “those people,” y’know, the “losers.”  It’s why we’re periodically trying to ban pornography or put labels on records with explicit lyrics or why feminists morality crusaders, who are really just the progeny of yesterday’s temperance movement, so often find themselves on the same side of debates as religious conservatives and other self-appointed saviors who promise to protect society from itself.

People forget that the “soccer mom” democratic left in the United States is still considered “the left.”  It’s just the female half of the blue dog left.  They’re basically just conservatives who support unions (sometimes) and their way of thinking about the world is, for all practical purposes, identical to their right wing social conservative counterparts.  It’s based on fear of the other, not understanding or solidarity; on the inclination to coerce the imaginary bad guys, not the inclination to question power structures which coerce others.  That’s the real origin of what we’re calling feminism, not Horkheimer and Marcuse.  The modern feminist left carries not the torch that belongs to the cultural Marxist (or any Marxist), but the one that belongs to the petty, self righteous, authoritarian bourgeois do-gooder.