RND// To consider the TERF Bigot J.K. Rowling, Vaush, Kat Blaque & Contrapoints Drama bullshit. Idle Thursday internet thoughts (idea fragments) arising:
– Other than ongoing bigotry against trans people and entire communities of by shitlord billionaires who obviously should go fuck themselves off a jagged cliff into the nearest available black hole, this whole debacle appears as much a synthetic manifestation of a toxic (digital) environment, and seems to concern Internet Ontology as it does any other issue. That is, philosophical questions regarding ‘Knowledge in an Online world’ (ie. the social medium as the real toxic message aka unplug the net already.)
Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra And Simulation nails this drama perfectly:
“Rather than creating communication, it [information] exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar. The nondirective interview, speech, listeners who call in, participation at every level, blackmail through speech: ‘You are concerned, you are the event, etc.’ More and more information is invaded by this kind of phantom content, this homeopathic grafting, this awakening dream of communication. A circular arrangement through which one stages the desire of the audience, the antitheater of communication, which, as one knows, is never anything but the recycling in the negative of the traditional institution, the integrated circuit of the negative.”
A depthless, perpetual present where information continually vomits forth. That is, the internet as a form of ontological blackmail, in which one must have a ‘take’ on a subject; silence and non-information is impossible. (The idea of ‘excess’ information is a misnomer; information itself is the default excess.) Viewed through Baudrillard, the old ‘left eats itself’ translates to / mutates into it’s first and final form – a slithery ‘Information Ouroboros’ ie. a really shitty (Deboardian) Spectacle. An implosion of the message in the medium. Mind you, the internets don’t just bring out the worst in people, or turn them into raging assholes; human beings are too often already The Worst.
– In which you also don’t have anything at all to say about this drama, and should keep your slack trap shut because you know less than nothing about anything. Also; speaking up against the fucking Rowlings of this miserable world (made miserable precisely because of fascist shit wipes like this) kinda demands you discuss The Issue.
– Other than understanding the plain fact Rowling is a nakedly full-on, mask-off transphobe bigot with zero awareness, you don’t have strong feeling about the issues or internet personalities involved. (Worse, you decided to mention this useless fact, when / especially because nobody asked.) Despite that however: Vaush (as usual) is nearly right about Everything.
– If the Self Righteous Left have so little neural activity in their twitter-damaged brains they can only imagine one unfunny sexist joke is worth disproportionately more intense political scrutiny and moral finger wagging than some fucking ultra rich terf MUNT deliberately spreading hatred and bigotry at marginalized groups, than they must be as much of a dumb bitch, need to get their fucking priorities in check, stop reading brainless books meant for children and pull that Harry Plotter wand out of their collective backside.)
– In which many on The Left feel they have some god given right to voice their (any) opinion whatsoever on Vausch’s whatever, conveniently forgetting that this is a tried and tested tactic on the right to obfuscate the realer, wider issues ie. their disgusting inhuman sociopolitical policies. Almost no other public figure on The Left get so much push back.
– The online left too often appear a rock-banging bunch of the dumbest, most cosmically useless and politically own-goaling fucks in the cosmos. Conservatives and other right wingers must stare at them every time such micro-drama pops up and laugh themselves hoarse while The Real Issue goes unaddressed and derailed. You can bet that smirking old witch feels pretty pleased with herself while bullshit like this bubbles up in the left’s stinky social media pot – chalking up another easy victory against an ultra-fragmented and internally divided community.
– Half the insufferable dolts on The Left attacking Vausch for his ‘women hating’ aren’t even actually left wing but mere keyboard activists; mere lazy centrists or soft-right wingers in (barely) left wing garb. (Talk about optics!) And yet Vaush is the one who gets told he has to try harder? Suckafuck.
– There’s no one big ‘the left’ (Big Left Other.) You think Vaush, Kat, and Contra are good people, and wish they were all best buddies, united against hatred and stupidity. (But then, just like the term ‘united nations’, you can’t actually be united if you’re a bunch of inherently separate nations. Indeed, the very notion of a unified Left seems a darkly laughable romantic myth; it talks a big talk of communal goals and shared ideals, but is actually a wide and thinly dispersed spectrum of often conflicting beliefs and deep, internally self-contradictory schisms.)
– Why, one wonders does nobody realize and talk about the possibility that Thought Itself is perhaps inherently fragmented, contradictory and internally divided..?
– One possible term for what happened in this RowlingTerf-Vausch-Blaque-Contra Drama or RTVBCD could be an ‘IOS’ (Infinite Optics Stall or Strangeloop):
- Famous Rich Bigot X continues laughing & tweeting hated unchallenged.
- Socialist Hero We Don’t Even Deserve Y replies – with added (eg.) unfunny comment tacked on.
- Famous Rich Bigot X ‘responds’ (ie. starts bullying again) by retweeting comment.
- Leftards Who Just Can’t STFU keep spitting “OK.. BUT WHAT ABOUT *that* problematic comment by Socialist Hero We Don’t Even Deserve? Baaad optics dude – more ammo for the right – just take the L!”
- Goto 1: Repeat until utterly sick and exhausted (/of the online left and all its pathetic pettiness.)
– In which the notion that ‘all this Drama™ could have been easily solved in private through DMs’ has been easily disproved by the fact nobody on The Left is truly able to listen to anyone else, because they’re all techno-hell bent on being seen as / playing the pathetic game of ‘more Left than thou’. Talking entirely at cross purposes, displaying dubious unchecked fist premises and assumptions about the real (hugely limited and limiting) nature of modern electronic communications networks, or the truer inherent willingness of the other party to listen and respond in ‘good faith’ (whatever that means), etc.
- Fuck the cesspool that is all social media; the fact it’s all so public, and massively mediated is precisely what’s wrong with it. When Vausch said to Nat he didn’t think Twitter was the best place for a discussion, her eventually blocking him was perfect proof social media wasn’t, and never is. (Heck, you’d go as far to suggest human language itself isn’t the best place for a discussion.) As the Talking Heads state in Crosseyed And Painless: “Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don’t do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.” (Now etch that on the inside of Shapiro’s empty skull with a sharpie.)
– To consider Kat had every right to repeatedly reject Vaush’s repeated polite invitation to respond to his incredibly reasonable, well thought out and rationally presented arguments. There are some things whitecisboys just can’t and won’t understand, eg. that constantly trying to engage with others through incessant good faith invitations to engage in honest, forthcoming debate sometimes won’t change a goddam thing. Indeed, such rabidly narcissitic ‘conversations’ (often based on asymmetric power dynamics) amount to borderline ‘Inverse Sealioning‘, if there’s such a thing.
The messenger is just as important as the message, and the two can’t easily or conveniently separated. That is, one may know that truth, speak it – and yet not live or feel that truth in their bones, their heart, every single day. For some it’s life and death, for others at the end of the day merely words, however strongly or passionately felt. White breadtube neckbeard debate bros can be read as intensely annoying and horribly egotistical, precisely because they’re S.G.F.R (So Goddam Fucking Reasonable.) Their cool, calm, collected professionalism can often be simply read as unchecked white privilege. It can be utterly exhausting for marginalized people to have to repeatedly listen to their reasonable, well intentioned arguments – even if entirely correct.
– Another thing: a whiteboy making sexist comments about a black woman’s sexual organs he’s personally seen just isn’t, and can’t be the same as a black woman making ‘sexist’ about your great white moby. It’s a false equivalency. (Speaking generally, Vausch has far more power in society than Kat or Contra.)
– Contra can block who the fuck she wants; you’re sure the poor Left will survive if madam sempai fails to notice any particular political fanboy commentator.
– General philosophical rule: shut up more, listen more. Just because you have (and enjoy) a reasonable, well researched, perfectly valid point you’ve every reasonable right to make, which is important to make – it still doesn’t automatically mean you should make it, Mr. Sobchak. As Zen states: 99% accuracy is not as good as silence. You feel you’ve already said too much – if anything – on this matter, and will now stop. (How much more better however, to not even have begun?)
// how to play big science