Chris Smalls, the guy who led the successful Amazon unionisation campaign, being criticised for going on Fox News to discuss it felt like a pretty striking example of what I'm talking about re: the appearance of progress vs. actual progress.The main thing about this stuff for me is that it feels very superficial. There's a lot of money and terminology being thrown around, but is it actually doing any good? Are ordinary people's lives being improved? It often feels to me like the Tories redefining poverty in order to avoid being seen to have missed their own targets. A great deal of effort going into the appearance of progress.
This person sounds pretty fucked up in any language. I think you are right to draw attention to the jargon though cos my feeling is that they are using it as a kind of smokescreen to express their unpleasant sentiments. Even this person would probably baulk at openly saying what they mean, which is something akin to "I just can't be arsed to wash the little bitch's hair for her" but I reckon that they have written it like this in an attempt to convince themselves that they are not being selfish or uncaring in any way... with some success I'd guess, given that it was probably this emboldened state which meant that they felt fine to say it online somewhere (twitter reading back - the worst place!), thinking that this horrible burden of emotional labour they described would win over everyone who read it in the same fashion.I'm wary of that sort of, I don't really know how to describe it, professional language? Technical language? There's someone currently getting piled on on Twitter for making a thread about their kids with that sort of phrasing, like they're talking about clients or customers. They described washing their daughter's hair as "emotional labour" and complained that the teenager they'd fostered coming to them for support was unhealthy and treating them - the parent - like a therapist...
I think defining people as a negative would be incredibly unpleasant. I doubt anyone wants to be defined in terms of what they're not.I was surprised the first time I heard it but I now understand, to an extent, how, in India, they have "veg" and "non-veg".
So they don't bother with "meat" cos that throws up a lot of issues.
So I just think "white" and "non-White" would be more clear.
BUT I do understand that there is something very unpalatable about that. Just seems wrong. So I do have a degree of sympathy for the people who have to come up with these things, they're never gonna get it right. What I find really annoying is the people who go along with it without questioning it or explaining how it's tricky.
Or misunderstood. And used all the same.there was definitely a point at which these kinds of slightly conceptual terms that broadly come from 'left discourse' went from being something that i knew about, had read about in one or two places, would never have mentioned in real life because no-one would know what i was on about......became fairly commonly understood.
I've been very struck over the last few years by the right co-opting this kind of thing. Once it was left-wing academics talking about how there were no absolute facts and that narratives and perspectives were all important. And for a long time the right (and not just the right in fact, people from all over the political spectrum grew hugely frustrated with this kind of thing. Hence the Sokal Hoax etc) fought tooth and nail against it... until, it feels, someone suddenly said "Hang on a minute, no facts you say? Hmmm" and then - I'm not sure of the mechanism by which it fed through - shortly after that you get Trump completely abandoning facts as we previously understood them, except of course, he's not talking about the previously unexpressed narratives of the downtrodden, he's moved to a position where truth is whatever the loudest shouter says it is, confident in the fact that he has a very loud voice.In light of stuff like this, I think right-wing claims that the (academic) "far left" is corrupting our country are somewhat understandable. My main counterargument, having embodied this kind of woke academia before, is that much of it is done in good faith, but is just out of touch with how academic and nitpicky it seems to people who don't purely live in their heads.
Oh shit, sorry to hear about that. How you doing now? Through the worst I'm hoping if you can get on here and moan about it.Tea, just spent last Wednesday to today in the worst pain I’ve ever been in. If you have fentanyl administered in a British hospital, something is drastically wrong
Trivial equivalence but reminds me of what I said about CSI NY two days ago - as the actual quality of police officers and the work they do decreases to laughable levels (this was in the context of the cock-ups relating to the recent subway shooting), tv programmes tell us more and more powerfully how great they are. Now I don't think that Fox Crime is in league with the police or anything but I guess I have the idea that reflexively they are on the same side - that of the status quo - and it does somehow feel that as the elements of the establishment get worse instead of striving to improve that, it just spends money on telling us that actually things are getting better.The main thing about this stuff for me is that it feels very superficial. There's a lot of money and terminology being thrown around, but is it actually doing any good? Are ordinary people's lives being improved? It often feels to me like the Tories redefining poverty in order to avoid being seen to have missed their own targets. A great deal of effort going into the appearance of progress.
I don't think Trump was the first to do this on the right, and I certainly don't think he came up with the idea of it. I'm just saying that at some point the majority of the right seemed to abandon their position of "Some things are clear and absolute and this is one of them and we're correct" in favour of a new style of argument in which, as long as they said it loudly and confidently enough, they could just say whatever they wanted regardless of whether it was true or had any supporting evidence. And needless to say this meant that they could make much stronger and more harmful claims than was previously possible. And Trump is perhaps the greatest and most visible exponent of this even though I'm sure he has no idea where the origins of that type of rhetoric lie (no pun intended) and is probably not even aware that he's doing it.You had the (allegedly) Karl Rove thing prior to Trump too, mind you.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Mark citing Marshall Berman on Stalin in Capitalist Realism comes to mind too,Trivial equivalence but reminds me of what I said about CSI NY two days ago - as the actual quality of police officers and the work they do decreases to laughable levels (this was in the context of the cock-ups relating to the recent subway shooting), tv programmes tell us more and more powerfully how great they are. Now I don't think that Fox Crime is in league with the police or anything but I guess I have the idea that reflexively they are on the same side - that of the status quo - and it does somehow feel that as the elements of the establishment get worse instead of striving to improve that, it just spends money on telling us that actually things are getting better.
You had the (allegedly) Karl Rove thing prior to Trump too, mind you.
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
Yeah as many criticisms as I voice about liberal culture, which I tend to take for granted, it's really nothing compared to stuff like this - IE the criticisms I'd voice about conservative culture, which is ultimately why I'm a liberal. Just feels obvious to me.In Portugal we still have good old-fashioned overt acism which always catches me by surprise. I saw my friend Renato on Saturday and he told me that he had gone to this club called Incognito and someone came up to him and said "Oh, I see they're letting black people in here now".
Since I have been living here there I have witnessed the following directly or been told of by friends - all things that really kinda surprised me in their blatancy apart from everything else.
- people looking for flats being told by the estate agent "You won't want to live here, there are too many blacks in this area"
- taxi driver saying to us "Don't go to that beach, it's near to a train station and so loads of blacks go there. You want to go to a beach far from a station cos they can't afford cars"
- walking with a friend who wore a headscarf and someone (a black person) made a comment about her. Later a member of our group expressed outrage that "an n-word" could insult a muslim like that.
- numerous incidents that Renato has told me about including the above
- an Asian guy that we know constantly being turned away from Lux without explanation, including the other day when he was on the guest-list