The Antisocial Socialist

Warning! This is a very half-assed theory post about some thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head lately and should not be taken as any more than that. It's punching up but since it has to do with public shaming, humiliation, and embarrassment, as well as discussions of transphobia and racism, I am putting it all under a cut in case that's a trigger for folks.

If you want to read about how I'm a good person, this isn't a post about that. And if you want a more deeply considered opinion from a smart person, check out ContraPoints' video about cringe, which a better blogger would have rewatched before wading back into this Discourse.

( brace yourself, discourse is coming )

Or, Why You Can't Win a Debate with Jordan Peterson or His Fanboys


Back when I was a kid—contrary to what my students believe, this is well after dinosaurs roamed the earth—the idea that said earth was flat was laughable. To say that someone was a Flat Earther tended to be hyperbole; it was to state that they believed in something so outlandish that they might as well claim that the earth is flat. Now, of course, in this post-truth age, Flat Earth theory is treated in the media as a valid theory to be debated right next to the conventional, verifiable fact that the earth is round, because Round Eartherism is one extreme and Flat Eartherism is another extreme, and the truth must lie somewhere in the middle.

I was not a kid when evolutionary psychology passed from a fad to a joke, and remember the process well. It was as though the chattering class realized, all at once, that this bizarre construct made no sense whatsoever and let's never talk about the time we decided that The Flintstones represented an accurate portrait of the lifestyles of prehistoric man and for some reason it was also the natural default for gender dynamics. This was likely around the time that the guy who popularized the Paleo Diet dropped dead of a heart attack at 51. The two might have been related, actually.

A lot of ideas seem like they make some kind of intuitive sense, but fall apart upon further examination. Eugenics, for example, probably made sense at one point. A binary theory of gender linked to chromosomes, now disproven by science and the fact that there are humans who have something other than XX or XY chromosomes. One would dearly hope that the end of chattel slavery, World War II, and the Civil Rights era might have put the question of whether the Aryan race was the best one, or even existed as a discrete thing, to rest once and for all—and for some time it was the case that only a fringe minority of whackjobs believed it was still in question.

Sadly, we do in fact live in a post-truth era, and harried schoolteachers find themselves having to deal with the phenomenon that is Jordan B. Peterson, pop-psychologist to the stars, Alt Reich gateway drug, and lobster aficionado. Friends outside the education field, or those who are lucky enough to not have white 16-21-year-old boys as their primary demographic, keep asking me why I keep harping on this guy, but all the TAs, contract faculty, and high school teachers in primarily white schools nod their heads. This is a guy who has a lot to say about subjects that he knows nothing about, and perhaps because of this, is wildly popular amongst people with just a little bit of knowledge.

Now, Lobster Boy himself is not a neo-Nazi, but like fellow Canadians Paul Fromm and Ernst Zundel, he has a lot of rather horrible ideas hidden behind facades of FREEZED PEACH and JUST ASKING QUESTIONS. The official line from him and his followers tends to be that they were Classical Liberals (whatever that means) until some Social Justice Warrior hurt their feelings, and this has made them question the consensus of eggheads in ivory towers re: whether you get to oppress other people or not. And to be honest, he's not that many degrees away from Fromm and Zundel, both in real life associations and in ideology. I shy away from slippery slopes, but his YouTube videos are basically a mudslide down a steep cliff in a tsunami into an ocean of Pepe icons and triple parentheses.

Recently, I posted this rather excellent review of Lobster Boy's latest opus to Facebook (if you haven't read it, go do so now. I'll wait. The review, I mean. Not the book.). A fellow (left-leaning) teacher seemed upset at this, and other attempts to silence Peterson's Right To Free Speech, saying that if he was so popular, didn't it make sense to read what he had to say?

To which I responded, no, not at all. There is no point. I've listened to some of his videos and read some of his articles, and I've come to the conclusion that reading any more is acutely counterproductive, particularly if money or clicks are involved.

His philosophy, such that it is (and political philosophy is not his field; his doctorate is in psychology and he's not actually good at that), is a cobbled-together rehash of many different ideas that are self-evidently bullshit and have been debunked by brighter minds than I. No one with any intellectual credibility really takes evolutionary psychology seriously anymore. Same with the gender binary. Western chauvinism is taken seriously by lunatics like white supremacists and the President of the United States, I suppose, but philosophers and political scientists have by and large rejected it. Woo sells well, but you're unlucky to find a reputable doctor who advises sticking jade eggs up your twat. And no one with a grade school understanding of the evolutionary tree would buy that lobster behaviour is an accurate predictor of human behaviour.

But Peterson's very perniciousness is that he is such a slippery fellow, and such a sloppy writer, that it's impossible to discern exactly what he believes. That's Just Asking Questions in action; push too far in a reactionary direction and you were merely intellectually curious. This, I think, is part of why he is so popular—he is good at wise-sounding aphorisms that appeal to the sorts of men who see themselves as deficient or oppressed, but his politics are deniable and vague enough that his fanboys can fill in their own meanings.

And such a person is useless to debate. I'm curious to watch his face-off with Zizek, who actually has a lot of the same problems despite being more to the left, because a) it's going to be a hilarious shitshow, b) they'll probably both be coked up going in, and c) Peterson is almost certainly going to win despite being much, much stupider. (Confession of a former Zizek fangirl: I was wrong, mea culpa.)

As I explained to my colleague, the primary reason for this is that the liberal and the reactionary have very different victory conditions in a debate. (The hard left no-platforms someone like Peterson, which is where I'm coming from.) The liberal believes she is engaging in a war of ideas. She will win the debate by making more points, supported by more facts, that adhere to more rigorous logic. Her goal is to prove herself right and her opponent wrong, and lest you think that I'm bashing liberals here, I will admit to a tremendous amount of sympathy with this goal. That really ought to be the goal of a debate. That's how it was when I was a kid learning how to win debates.

But the reactionary—be it Nazi Classic or Alt Reich—does not share this goal. The reactionary knows that his ideas are illogical, because the reactionary believes in the primacy of emotion over reason. That's why he's a reactionary—because he rejects the Enlightenment tradition. He knows that in a free market of ideas, if such a thing ever existed, his ideas would be unpopular. His goal is to have his ideas accepted as ideas worth debating in the first place. He is like a Flat Earther in that respect; he wants his feelings to be put on a level playing field with empirical science. Once that happens, it doesn't matter if he wins or loses; his ideas have been accepted into the mainstream.

So the second you fall into a debating trap, be it with JBP or one of his followers, you have lost. It doesn't matter how logical you are. It doesn't matter how correct you are. You have acknowledged that a bunch of debunked hokum deserves to be considered along with serious political philosophy, that Deepak Chopra (either one, really) can share a stage with Stephen Hawking and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. You have gotten into a shit-flinging fight with a baboon, and whoever wins, you're both going to get covered in shit.

Sadly, we as a society are already sliding down that slippery, shitty slope. Ignoring Lobster Boy and the crustacean trend he represents are not options. The only valid responses seem intuitively wrong to the logical mind, and of these, the only viably non-violent ones are no-platforming and mockery. You cannot engage his ideas as ideas any more than you can engage a debating partner who hasn't done the background readings and instead of formulating an argument, pulls down his pants and farts in your face. 

("But Sabotabby! Isn't viciously mocking the fash and/or suppressing their FREEZED PEACH what turned Classical Liberals such as JBP and his acolyte Lindsay Shepherd into Alt Reich darlings?" If you believe that, dear friends, I have a bridge to sell you. They were like that already, and carefully constructed the narrative they spin. Besides, aren't these guys all about Manly Masculinity and the primacy of the brave individual? Can SJWs like me have such an impact on their feelings as to make them cry and drive them down a dark path?)

You can't throw shit better than a baboon. You can't nail Jell-O to a wall. And you can't win a debate where you don't understand the other side's victory conditions.

Today, in a fit of pique, the following occurred to me (prompted by me posting a leftist pop culture critique, only to be told that the author of said post was being called out at the moment, though for reasons that had nothing to do with his post):


Okay, that's not completely fair, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that the left has become even more of a toxic and humourless wasteland than it was the last time I was regularly going to protests, with less effect. Say what you will about grim Stalinist and Maoist dystopias, at least they were effective. What passes for activism these days is not, largely because call-out culture, about which many pixels have been spilled, targets our friends rather than our enemies. 

Also, I am pretty sure that there is not much overlap between "people who are heavily, or even slightly involved in real-life activism" and "people who call out problematic people over the internet." I can't prove it, though.

That's not to say that we should pretend that problematic ideas and people don't exist in our movement. Of course they do. And we shouldn't tolerate sexism or racism and transphobia from our allies any more than we tolerate it from our enemies, but the perfect is the enemy of the good. A rigid adherence to standards nurtured in academia and inaccessible to the vast majority of people who feel that shit is fucked up and wrong is not productive, and it's not like we have so many friends that we can afford to alienate most of them.*

At the root of this, I think, is an overabundance of seriousness. We have focused so much on creating the perfect political terminology, actions that walk the line between confronting capital and creating a safe space**, ensuring that our meetings take place under appropriately sterile circumstances, that we have failed to create a lively, dynamic culture that extends past the protest and meeting and Facebook re-share and into our daily lives. In short, we have forgotten that this struggle should be fun.

"But wait," my straw-activist† exclaims. "You're not taking this seriously! Not everyone has the privilege of being an activist because it's fun."

Of course, no one's an activist because it's fun. It's not fun. Even when you get to fight with a Nazi, it's much more scary than anything else. I would vastly rather marathon Netflix on the couch than wake up at ass o' clock to march in the streets, and I really do it because I'm compelled, because I don't have the privilege of ignoring the world's drunken flailing towards fascism. Because if we lose, I die and my friends die. Fun isn't the end goal here; it's part of the process.

If you look at movements throughout the world and throughout history, you'll see that desperate times and privation and hard, often fatal struggles, did not stop people from having a sense of humour or building community and culture. Witness the dark satire in the plays of Brecht, the poetry of the Zapatistas, the songs of Joe Hill. What I see missing on the left is the hopeful alternative, the shared art and music and theatre, the giant puppets in the street protests, the creative actions, the meetings in pubs†† that bleed into social gatherings. The idea of fighting for and not just fighting against. Even totalitarian state communism had its enjoyable moments; strangely enough these days the only people I see really creating an active, vibrant political culture are tankies. The very people who you'd expect to be the most uptight and humourless are the ones manufacturing memes like they're boots for the revolution. And good on them; it's why I like tankies more than most people whose politics I, on paper, agree with.

It's a matter of pragmatism, not warm fuzzies. Seriousness is unsustainable. Most of the young people currently calling out this that and the other thing††† will not, long-term, be involved in activism. Anger is a good temporary fuel, but it burns out quickly once jobs and kids come into the picture. The way to retain people and to draw more into the movement is by building links that are less easily severed—those of friendship and community.

Among the most effective groups I was ever a part of had as its core members myself (then an anarchist), a Trotskyist, two MLMs, and a Cuban revolution fanboy. We did not have much political common ground with each other, much less with some of our allies. What we did have was a simple shared goal and debriefing sessions at skeezy bars that degenerated into drunken giggling that had nothing, superficially, to do with politics. I don't doubt that these types of connections are happening now, on an individual level, but I don't see it happening at a larger scale. I don't know how to make it happen—most of the new comrades I meet manage to piss me off within 30 seconds of interaction—but I think it needs to. I know it needs to.

It's worked for the far-right. Their schoolyard humour got Cheeto Benito elected. People who like the spadgebasket like him because, for whatever reason, they find him funny. They're in no small part desperate, jobless, broke, and suffering, but they can find the space for a laugh.

In other words, more giant puppets, people. More biting satire and music and graffiti and I don't care what, just lighten the fuck up and stop trying to make everything perfect and safe.

P.S. If you hadn't noticed, I'm under the same name on LJ and DW. I'm not jumping ship on the latter, ridiculous TOS or not, seeing as I have a paid account at least through next year. But if you wanna add me on DW for the same fun content and fewer icons, by all means do so.

* I say this as someone who holds a lot of grudges. There are people on the left who, for reasons of offences committed recently and otherwise, I cannot be in the same room with.

** This is impossible BTW.

† Not really. I've met loads of people like this.

†† You can't do that, Sabotabby. That's ableist!

††† Today I learned that Love Life of an Asian Guy is racist and misogynist, and that PissPigGranddad—who as far as I'm concerned is a fucking hero—is a "war tourist."

I don't actually think it's World War III or the end of the world at the moment, so more ranting about the problem of balance in politics. Two positions I've taken, both in response to stupid comments by supposed centrists:

1. Trevor Noah would never invite an ISIS member onto his show to “get the other side’s perspective.” That’s why the liberal narrative of free speech is so ethically vacuous.

I don't remember the last time I encountered an ardent defender of the concept known as "free speech" who wasn't a raging racist. I'm not sure how the right managed to snatch that one out from under our noses, but like "libertarian," I don't think we're gonna get this one back. Sorry guys.

The reason why ISIS is not included in debates about free speech is because we're all sensible people and we know where that kind of discourse leads. Yeah, a certain percentage of people reading/watching/listening to an ISIS ideologue's opinion—let's be generous and say most people—are going to say, "wow, that guy's a real shithead, listen to him say shitty things, ugh." But a not-insignificant number are going to react in the opposite way—this fellow's saying something I've felt deep in my heart for a long time, and look, he's saying it publicly, it must be socially acceptable."

This is how the Alt Reich gained ascendancy. The media gave them a sympathetic narrative, stopped portraying them as fringe freaks not even worthy of an interview, reported on their hairstyles and suits, demanded that the liberal elite sympathize with their plights. (Can you imagine a similar discourse around ISIS? Even though for the average fighter—not the ideologues—there may be a much more compelling reason, such as starvation, forcing their hand?)

An ethically consistent liberal or centrist would fight as valiantly for the rights of terrorists to be heard as it does for the rights of racist white dudes to spout off hate speech, but there is no ethical consistency in liberalism or centrism.


2. The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people who don't know very much about politics that the horseshoe theory has any sort of intellectual merit.

I was halfheartedly debating with a self-described centrist who was insisting that fascism could be either a right- or left-wing ideology, and that neo-liberalism was a left-wing ideology. I guess 227 years of political history, fought for and bled for by countless Very Smart People, was just not good enough for this fellow, who like so many on the internet, believes that a 15-second Google search qualifies him as a political scientist. (To be fair, I'm not even sure he did that.) The horseshoe theory is referenced commonly amongst the walking Dunning-Kruger effects that inhabit certain corners of the internet, and I'm sick to death of it.

There are, of course, common features in the extreme left and the extreme right. However, all of these commonalities can just as easily describe those in the centre (not to mention that the centre is a rightward-drifting moving target). Probably more so—anecdotally, the most authoritarian types I've encountered in meatspace described themselves as centrists. A conservative may have some moral convictions, even if I disagree with them; a centrist is merely politically and ethically avoidant. It is the perverted sense of balance that led to the above problem wherein the Alt Reich were given a platform rather than being sent scuttling back to the sewers where they belong.

Imagine you've fled unthinkable horror in your homeland to journey over 9000 km to a country where you don't speak the language. You have nothing but what you've managed to carry with you. Maybe you're living in a hotel, maybe some stranger's basement. You are desperately trying to get your life back together.

After all that, would you want to be reading Twilight?

(Fun fact: Twilight is the most frequently donated book.)

If you don't want used binders and notebooks that your kid has scribbled on with half the pages missing, why would a Syrian refugee?

Same with rusty kitchen stuff.

No one wants your dictionaries. Paper dictionaries are obsolete. That goes for people who donate to my Little Free Library too, by the way.

If you donate dirty kitchenware and appliances and don't wash them, I am silently judging you out loud to the other volunteers. Have some self-respect.

How about that trend for making French onion soup in French onion soup bowls? It was kind of weird, wasn't it? I see we all regret that phase of our lives. I'm craving French onion soup, though.

Unlike the refugees, you allegedly speak English. Why not read what we do and do not accept, and thus save a volunteer (i.e., me) a trip to Value Village in -30°C weather to drop off clothes we can't accept?

If at any point in this blanket's history your baby has puked on it, I guarantee that I will be able to smell it. I don't care how much you washed it. I don't care if no one else can smell it because they all have kids and are used to it. I still smell it and it will haunt my nightmares.

How can one man amass so many kitchen tongs? And yet it all came from the same guy. Are kitchen tong horders a thing?

People who donate pillows still in their packaging: You are my fucking heroes and I hope you get all the Valentine's Day orgasms you want.

People who donate anything still in its packaging, especially if there is a picture of the thing on the packaging: We love you and I hope you are showered with unicorns and puppies and love.

Whoever brought the red velvet and white chocolate cookies: I could fucking kiss you.

People who raid hotel rooms and donate the little bottles of shampoo: What is wrong with you? Reconsider your life choices.

Companies who give out water bottles with their logos on it: You know where those things end up, right?

The moral of the story: Don't donate trash. You know what happens when you donate your trash to charity? Some volunteer has to throw it out or donate it to another, less discerning charity. And they'll probably throw it out. They might even need to pay for junk removal. So you are hurting the cause, not helping. You know the difference between useful things and garbage, so why not donate useful things and throw the garbage out yourself?

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you know I have serious issues with Free the Children and its corporate wing, Me to We. I have issues with them because they take jobs away from the very communities they claim to help, because they appropriate the language and form of activism to guide impressionable children through meaningless activities designed to make them feel like they're "raising awareness" rather than self-organizing, because they are a for-profit company allowed to set up franchises in publicly funded schools, and because the smug faces of the Kielburger brothers are the very reason why the Germans coined the term backpfeifengesicht.

But you know me, I'm an extremist of the loony left, so of course I'd have issues with liberals. However, this organization is so perfidious even liberals should have problems with it. Case in point: They are litigious bastards who quash every critical media piece published about them. Seriously, try Googling "free the children + controversy" and see what happens. No supposed charity is free from controversy—except this one. Reason being that they are very good at getting criticism of themselves scrubbed, up to and including pulping a Toronto Life exposé about their corruption.

Now they've managed to get a CBC documentary about voluntourism, Volunteers Unleashed, yanked. The very excellent Canadaland has the scoop, including the two clips that the Kielburgers don't want you to see.

Just a little reminder that censorship doesn't need to look like jackboots and burning books to effectively silence dissent. Go watch them before Canadaland gets sued too!

The internets, and my little corner of it, are full of big-hearted liberals professing concern for the health and welfare of our Honourable Wife-Beating, Crack-Smoking, I-Did-It-In-A-Drunken-Stupor Mayor. Yes, there's a fair amount of schadenfreude among my friends and to some degree among the media, but the heartfelt pleas for him to "get the help he needs" and all the bleeding-heart sympathy for his addiction problems actually do seem to predominate. Maybe that's why he's had a bump in the polls (as opposed to his usual bumps of coke); people feel sorry for his teary addict routine. At the heart of this loud-mouthed, sexist, racist, homophobic, austerity-pushing pig-rapist is a broken man. Pity him.

I don't.

And let me be clear: I believe that drug addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue. I believe in the decriminalization of all drugs, including crack. I do not believe that addiction is a choice per se.

However, I also believe that the addict has agency, and that addiction can spiral well beyond the life of the individual afflicted and destroy the lives of others, and to that extent, an addict must be responsible for him or herself. Addiction isn't an excuse. Plenty of addicts live lives of quiet desperation, damaging only themselves; the ones who use their sickness as a bludgeon against others, against their consent, bear some responsibility.

Amidst all the public concern for the Laughable Bumblefuck on the part of the chattering class, I hear little concern for his wife and kids, and their physical and emotional safety. We know he's assaulted his wife. I can't imagine that his kids will grow up undamaged. Where's the sympathy for them?

Amidst all the wishes that he would get the help he needs, where are those volunteering to help addicts who are less white, less rich, less famous? The ones that Ford blocked harm-reduction initiatives for, the ones he suggested dry out in a jail cell, the ones he wanted to run out of town? When are they going to get the help they need?

What about the city? The kids in Scarborough who, because he's run the city for the past three years in a drunken stupor, are still cut off from educational, work, and recreational possibilities because he blocked the expansion of a functional transit system? The working poor who need affordable housing, the destitute who need shelters? Where's the sympathy for all the ordinary people he's fucked over?

Addiction's a tough ride no matter who you are, but Ford is a man who's had literally every possible privilege handed to him and every chance to get clean. He's insanely rich, politically connected, white, male, and heterosexual. If a guy like that can't get his shit together and check into a rehab, fuck him. Even if he did, fuck him anyway. Sobering up is unlikely to make him less of a jizzbag. I work with people who came to this country with nothing, who've had to scramble up to barely surviving and get shat on by the SUN for doing so, and the most out-of-control violent gangbangers I've ever met have destroyed fewer lives than this piece of shit.

At the risk of getting personal, I've been at the receiving end of someone else's drug addiction. Multiple times, actually. It's not pretty. It's not a victimless crime. I see my own experience writ large and ugly and all the guilty mushy liberals praying for his recovery.

All of Toronto is Ford's battered spouse, begging him to get help when we should be booting him in the ass. Let him dry out in a jail cell. Let him beg for change in a cardboard box. We owe every single junkie and dealer and petty thug in Toronto our sympathy and aid before we throw one iota of it in Ford's direction.

Let him destroy himself. The world will be a better place.

It's really hard to have a thoughtful and nuanced discussion on What Is To Be Done About Syria. (For the record, I desperately want to see Assad's regime go down in flames, but I'm not convinced that U.S. military intervention is going to accomplish that without making things much worse. And no, I don't have a solution. I'm Sabotabby From the Internet, not a geopolitical mastermind.)

Facebook is particularly bad in that I have a wide spectrum of opinions represented on my feed, most of which are quite stupid. There are also a wide spectrum of opinions represented on my LJ friends list, but even when I disagree with you guys, you've at least got the brains to back up your opinions with facts and arguments instead of posting memes.

But hey, you know what I think that we can all agree won't work? Fasting for peace, then posting about it on Facebook. Fuck a bunch of smug, pretentious hippies. Did I fall asleep and wake up in the fucking 60s or something? I'm sure the multitudes of starving Syrian refugees honestly give a shit that you're forgoing food on their behalf. I am amazed that, of all of the bad options presented to deal with this humanitarian clusterfuck, someone I know has managed to find the worst one.

Remember when Orson Scott Card was going to overthrow the American government if gay marriage became legal?

Now he's pleading for tolerance. Um. OSC, you're on the board of an organization that has, as pretty much its sole mandate, intolerance.

A boycott is not censorship. No one owes OSC, or anyone else, a living as a writer. No one owes him a platform from which to spew his bigotry. Man, I hope this movie flops harder than a dying fish.

Just finished reading the very much hyped The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking. Since I have this issue with people telling me to "stay positive," I figured it'd be up my alley, but no. It pays lip-service to a critique of the cult of positive thinking, then goes on about the Stoics (or a pop psychology version of the Stoics, anyway; I have too many friends in philosophy to not cringe at that chapter), Zen Buddhism, and Eckhart Tolle. I know next to nothing about Eckhart Tolle besides what a co-worker said about him this one time, but I'm already sick of him.

Basically, it was "live in the now" type advice that I'm sure is very helpful for people whose now sucks less than mine does. I'm so sick of that crap. It's just as useless and privileged as the turn-that-frown-upside-down nonsense that pervades Western culture. And it ends up, despite protests to the contrary, ultimately just as disempowering.

Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America by Barbara Ehrenreich covers the same basic concept (and is referenced in the book) but is a gazillion times better and 99.99% woo-free.