Makes sense.
I wonder if he’s a millennial, with his old-fangled writing articles, with words? That Dean guy looks about 15, makes me feel old. 
I’m flattered that you mixed me up with our esteemed colleague Boudicca, but she gets all the credit for that statement.
I am interested in your thoughts on the article(s), when you find the time.
I’m also curious if there was a reason for this question, and if I passed or failed whatever test you guys had in mind…
Oh, I missed this before. Yeah, I interpreted “calling bullshit” as an accusation of dishonesty. As in the card game where you lie about what cards you have and lose if someone “calls bullshit”.
I think lots of people use it like LHOD (including me):
Random MAGA supporter: “Trump is protecting American workers!”
Me: “Bullshit!”
They’re not lying, they’re just supremely misinformed.
Quoted by DemonTree, not written by DemonTree. – no, wait a minute, that appears to me to have been quoted by @Babale and then re-quoted by DemonTree.
Thank you for text description. Yeah, that’s a pretty massive misstep, however it was meant – both in that she came into that sort of place to do anything other than listen, and I’d say considerably more so that she did so despite the apparently-prior express objections of the people she was claiming to defend. Just coming into the place might have been a misunderstanding; but she’s seriously disrespecting the people she said she was defending even while she claims to defend them.
I’m not going to try to figure out enough of everything else that went on to form an opinion as to whether she could still be considered a good spokesperson for the group. But that strikes me as pretty major, not micro at all.
I see it used both ways often enough that I think it needs to be used cautiously in the second sense because people may hear/read it in the first.
Based on this article, which seems credible (though obviously it’s only one side), it sounds as though you described it pretty accurately (although IIRC you said the tour was cancelled due to this brouhaha, but it looks like the blowup actually happened after the tour). Certainly seems like a case of groupthink and cancel culture run amok, and that’s disturbing.
I still wonder, though, whether this sort of dynamic is really more common on the left than anywhere else (obviously the specific nature of the accusations is uniquely lefty).
It seems like the new media ecosystem may encourage this sort of behavior. All these people, though hopefully they’re sincere in what they’re saying, are ultimately trying to get paid by attracting eyeballs. And you can get a lot more attention by attacking the leaders on your own side for impurity than by joining the chorus agreeing with them.
The root cause of this appears to have been that some “creators” of color were angry about not being invited on the tour and claimed their exclusion was about race. And they may have had a valid point for all I know, but I’m much less inclined to take such complaints seriously when it appears that the only people making them have a direct personal financial interest.
I agree that she made poor choices. What I find most disturbing, though, is that the article describes how many people involved didn’t seem to have a big problem with Zee’s conduct at the time, but then publicly denounced her once it became clear that was the popular position. That’s definitely not a healthy group dynamic.
I wanted to learn what a Zoomer Centrist was consuming from the expert.
Well, I knew it was Rogan but I was curious to see how you would spin it.
The rest was just common knowledge stuff you could get from an axios article.
I think we both happened to quote the same part of the original article, there.
I’m gonna have to completely disagree with you, there; if you’re running an event, and you find out that there is a public meeting where people are criticizing your event in potentially harmful ways, it’s totally valid for you to jump into that public conversation to present your side of the story.
It may or may not be advisable to do so, but it’s hardly inappropriate.
To be clear, she isn’t a spokesperson; she is the founder of and the person running the PAC that’s funding the tour, and who brought everyone involved together. There is no tour without her.
Yeah, I noticed this guy phrase it this way - my understanding is that the tour was supposed to continue following Charlie Kirk to other universities, Texas A&M was just the first stop.
The fallout from the event hasn’t settled yet, so it’s possible that she’ll end up stepping down (although according to this article, the position she was filling for the PAC was unpaid, she was doing this as a passion project, and so there is no way they’ll be able to hire a replacement director for the PAC because there’s just no money for paying a salary) or that they’ll find an alternate source of funding; or, perhaps more likely, that she’ll find someone else to give her PAC’s money to and start a new tour.
It’s the sort of dynamic that ruins things I want to see succeed, like initiatives from the Left to do various things.
If right wing organizations and projects fall apart because one guy dated a trans woman in college and another guy’s mom is Indian and a third guy turns out to be Jewish - well, good, I’m glad they can’t get anything done. That’s not a problem I want to solve, if you see what I mean.
Like, I guess Cadance Owens leaving the Daily Wire is an example of right wing infighting? I don’t know if this stuff happens more often to us or to them, but either way, we should reduce how much it happens to us, because that will make us stronger. Whether that’s because we’re catching up to their level of unity, or because we’re pulling ahead - it benefits us to do that.
I’m sure that plays a role; but it seems like what the audience is specifically demanding here is ideological purity, not just any sort of “drama”. The reason I get that feeling, and I could be wrong about that, but we see that the creators, who were originally being accused of impropriety, were able to get back on the crowd’s good side by condemning Zee. If this was about attention seeking by attacking large targets, Dean and Parker are much bigger targets in the social media environment that the (much more obscure, behind the scenes) Zee. So why were they able to avoid so much of the criticism by simply joining in?
I’ll note that Peyton, the guy who initially started the shitstorm by going public with the accusations (and who I think is actually white, by the way) is still targeting Dean specifically in his current content, and I agree he seems motivated entirely by attention. But now the big creators threw Zee under the bus, they’ve mostly managed to escape criticism, which implies the main motivator for community interest in the events is perceived ideological purity.
If that’s why they denounced her, I agree. If what happened was that many of them didn’t realize why what she’d done was a problem at first, but upon reading more of the arguments made against it did see why it was a problem, that’s different.
I think it also matters whether they denounced her in the sense of saying she was a horrible irredeemable person, or whether they just said that it seemed she wasn’t a good spokesperson for the group, or a good representative of its ideas, at that time. The second could easily be true without the first being true at all. But I’m not likely to read the entire transcript of a four-hours-plus discussion, let alone spend four hours plus watching the thing.
Reads to me like it wasn’t a public conversation, but a private one. The fact that there were multiple people involved in it doesn’t automatically make it public. If there’s a large party having a fight at a restaurant, the fact that you can hear it doesn’t mean it’s fine for you to butt in.
Then she’s inextricably tangled with it. Somebody else could organize a similar tour, though. – although this:
reads to me as if the major block to getting a replacement was/is financial.
Yeah, it was the most relevant part.
Lol. That’s not why right-wing projects fall apart. There was a huge fight on Twitter recently between nativist Maga people who want to pretty much ban immigration, and libertarian business types, led by Musk, who want to increase H1Bs. Turns out a lot of these white male Zoomers who supported the Republicans want to get tech jobs, and believe employers use these visas to bring in Indians to undercut them
I guess the point here is that if the right does it too, it’s less a result of the ideology and more external factors like social media. But I don’t think this is a new thing: religious purity policing and religious schisms have been around forever. The old communist left was famous for splitting, and for hating their close ideological cousins far more than anyone on the other side, as parodied in The Life of Brian. It’s probably a result of an ideology that claims anyone who disagrees is not just wrong, but immoral and even dangerous. These both attract and encourage zealots.
I mean, the maga movement also attacks the impure. I think that’s just an aspect of human nature.
Okay, this is helpful to know, and again, I apologize. I meant to say that your argument lacks merit, but I absolutely did not mean that I thought you were being dishonest, and I apologize for that implication, and I’ll not use “bullshit” again just to mean "bad argument. (If I forget, please call me out on it).
Thing is, I think you’re putting forward a much more nuanced argument here than the lousy (IMO) argument you offered in GD, and I’d love to engage with you on it, because there are parts I agree with and think comprise a valid critique of some tendencies on the left–but the way you suddenly switch to ROFL and aLtErNaTe caps in the midst of a discussion is just too off-putting.
I didn’t engage with you to this level in GD because historically when I put forward that level of effort I’ve been met with goal post shifting. So I wanted to be very clear on where the goal is before I take my shot, and that’s not something I’m about to apologize for.
I put the ROFL smiley in GD because I asked you to firmly lay down the goal posts and you responded with what I perceived as confirmation that if I had been silly enough to spend time and effort seeking out a cite to begin with, I’d have been met with shifted goal posts. Which I find as abrasive and annoying as you find my ROFL smiley.
(I’ll also note that at this point, since the last time we talked about alternating caps, you have used it more than I have, in posts complaining about me. Literally the only time I’ve deployed it since was yesterday, when I used it to refer to “centrists” like Joe Rogan and Asmongold who aren’t really “centrist” at all - a group I’d have hoped we can all get behind shitting on.)
You’re absolutely right, I’m being much more nuanced here. That’s because after we moved to this thread I started engaging on the topic with @Thing.Fish, who - while I’ve had plenty of disagreements with - is very good about not shifting the goal posts in the middle of a discussion, and who was happy to nail down exactly what questions I’m meant to be citing.
The difference is in the level of sincerity I perceived each of you as coming at this from. Now, you say you have been sincere - fine, I will take your word for that being your goal - but it isn’t the sense I got from my interaction with you.
I my smiley bothers you that much, next time a situation like that arises I won’t use a ROFL smiley, I’ll just say “Wow” or something.
Yes. It’s a bad aspect of human nature, much like racism, sexism etc are expressions of aspects of human nature. But unlike those, it’s enabled by progressive/social justice/whatever you want to call it ideas, and the people involved have for years denied that it’s a problem. Like @Babale , I think if the Maga movement is attacking the impure, that’s a them problem, and you should never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake. But if people who want to do good are doing bad things, losing sight of their goals, and refusing to admit or fix the problems with their movement… at some point, they just aren’t doing good anymore.
I mostly use “that’s bullshit” to mean, “you are wrong, you should investigate the crap you believe”. I don’t think I’ve ever used it to mean, “you are lying”.
I’ve actually been astonished recently to observe a bunch of reports (not in my forums, thankfully) of the word “bullshit” that i thought were obviously used the way i use it where some poster took extreme umbrage to being called a liar. Which was not close to how i read it.
So i think @thorny_locust is right, that it’s a phrase one should use with caution. It’s obviously misunderstood in a bad way. But i also think that those of you who are getting upset because you think other posters are accusing you of lying ought to take a deep breath and consider that you might be misreading those posts.
Fwiw, i mostly say, “that’s bullshit” when arguing politics with my brother, who’ll use it back at me. My brother has entered some nutty and destructive ideas in the last couple of decades, but I’ve never known him to lie. I’m pretty honest, too.
I’ve been seeing an awful lot of claims from the Right lately that claim anyone who disagrees is not just wrong, but immoral and even dangerous.
Such claims generally seem to be aimed at the Democrats – except, of course, when they’re aimed at somebody like Liz Cheney. And I think to some extent they’re used within the Right in an attempt to stop their voters from listening to anything outside their bubble, and to attempt to stop them from noticing when they disagree with what’s being said inside their bubble – so they’re trying to use it to hold their voting bloc together instead of tearing it apart. It’s the same attitude, though; and, by its essential nature, the more it wins out the more likely it is to schism internally and turn on itself.
Huh. When I say that you’re offering a much more nuanced argument, I mean that you went from saying,
[with the implied DO spend a lot of time “ordering the pyramid of oppression”]
to
It’s not at all a problem that you’ve moderated the initial response that I called bullshit on. It’s good. That’s how discussion works: you thought more about what you said, and presumably realized that your initial answer was a bit flip and inaccurate, and gave a better answer.
I’m not going to call that “moving the goalposts.”
When I said that I’d never seen progressives spending a lot of time ordering the pyramid of oppression, I was responding to a glib claim. When you started making a more nuanced claim, about how leftists sometimes get too far up their asses about whose identity allows criticism of what, I asked for evidence of what you were talking about that wouldn’t require me to watch multiple videos. And that’s moving the goalposts?
No. That’s me trying to understand what you’re talking about and not wanting to watch a bunch of videos to understand it.
In this thread, you’ve offered the kind of evidence that we can talk about much more easily. And you’ve disavowed the “pyramid of oppression” language. Again, that’s good. Asking folks to make less glib claims, and to offer textual evidence, is not moving the goalposts.
Seems to me a lot of these problems could be avoided if, when someone makes a broad and seemingly contentious claim, other people asked them to clarify exactly what they are saying rather than immediately demanding cites. I’m very sympathetic to @Babale not wanting to spend ages digging them up, given how low the average effort-to-reward ratio is.
After listening to only a small part of the video, I heard plenty that fits the ‘oppression pyramid’ model of who is allowed to say what. But OC no one is literally talking about an oppression pyramid.