Holy shit that is a long article.
Yeah - search for “debate over the question of cancel culture has been spinning for years” and read from there.
Lol idealists ruining everything. I swear to god people who prioritize form over function are going to be a major contributing factor to the demise of our species.
I don’t think it’s idealists. You need idealism to not become a hack who doesn’t care if anything happens so long as you’re in power.
Part of it is only slightly mentioned but these groups don’t have a connection to the groups they’re supposed to represent.
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If anything, the article portrays the bosses as the idealists. Employees being selfish, getting offended by trivial things, becoming disillusioned and inventing conspiracy theories is fun and games when the employees of a corporation are doing it, but it’s a problem when you care about the organization’s mission.
Winning power requires working in coalition with people who, by definition, do not agree with you on everything; otherwise they’d be part of your organization and not a separate organization working with you in coalition. Winning power requires unity in the face of a greater opposition, which runs counter to a desire to live a just life in each moment.
Similar concept. Good discussion on HackerNews: Stanford’s war on social life | Hacker News
Outdoor House, located in Jenkins in Suites, had partnered with the Outdoor Center on campus since the 2015-16 academic year to form a community centered around outdoor education. Stanford rejected Outdoor House’s application on April 6, as well as its appeal of their decision to continue as a theme house on Tuesday.
The URGC also wrote that Outdoor House should pursue “meaningful engagement with faculty and staff in the important areas of equity and inclusion to more fully address the cultural concerns of the previous outdoor house that you included so explicitly in your application.” The house’s theme applicants focused on shifting its framework to address issues inherent in centering a house around outdoor culture — a traditionally white and wealthy space. In a Letter to the Community, Outdoor House community members wrote that “Centered on expensive hobbies, the house has not shown enough regard to the people we exclude, the land we recreate on, or perspectives outside the mainstream interpretation of outdoor recreation.”
“We realized this was an opportunity to reorient our community, and create a space actively opposed to the harmful norms of ‘outdoorsiness’ in America,” they continued. “Our application imagined a theme house which removes recreation from the spotlight in favor of education, reflection, and action.”
Come on. Hiking is an expensive hobby? I hike a lot in the mountains around LA where I can assure you white people are in the minority. Put hiking trails near where minorities live and they will use the heck out of them.
Some more discussion I saw on twitter:
https://twitter.com/robneyer/status/1536534677128826880
https://twitter.com/tompeyer/status/1536541037505794049
if you’re a stereotypical poor minority you’d probably need to find the time and energy to go hike to begin with. not likely to be high on the list of priorities.
i see this kind of thing brought up all the time on hiking trails near me and inevitably you only see super duper privileged white shitheads on those trails. idk why that is. it just is though.
I can tell you that Latinos in LA love hiking. I’m in a mostly Latino hiking group, of which there are many. And I see tons of other minorities out there. I hear tons of different languages.
If you go to Kenneth Hahn recreation area near a lot of black neighborhoods, you will see plenty of black people.
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ah yea as i edited my post i’m in the OC area which is overwhelmingly white (w a big latino community) and I just hardly have ever seen anyone but the most affluent on these trails and I cant really say why at all. they dont cost anything and are pretty close drives to a lot of cities nearby.
Something I’ve moved on politically over the last 5-10 years is that I now think that leftist political movements struggle to function if they are not grounded in unionism and labor power. Because if you try to ground them in the intellectual left instead, what you end up with is a) masturbatory infighting as described in the article and b) a party which drifts towards looking after the material interests of the bourgeoise intellectual left.
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But what can we do when the majority of workers(white) are racists and even among the POCs there is more than a sprinkling of all the other -isms.
That’s the beauty of a union fight. At least in theory. You look left and right on the picket line and see all the diversity then you look at management and see rich white assholes. When you fight for your own rights you inadvertently (at first) fight for the rights of your minority co-workers. If you find solidarity in the struggle against management maybe you start to generalise outward. When I was getting my ass beat, the cop was white and the guy who had my back was black. If that happens enough you start to think differently.
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Well I have a couple answers to that. One is that I don’t think that’s a static situation. People become racist or not because of their upbringing and experiences, it’s not like it is in their genes. Union activity can create solidarity across boundaries like that.
But maybe that’s a bit pie-in-the-sky; I mean it’s not like the New Deal era solved racism. Fine. But then my question is, how come bigotry and racism is the only bright line? Most Democrats are happy to make common cause with people who oppose M4A and won’t do more than pay lip service to getting drug prices down. People fucking die in the United States because they try to go without insulin to save money. How come “compromise with people who support a system which bankrupts people who need medical care” is acceptable, but “compromise with people with retrograde social views” is unthinkable? It seems to me that this just comes down to bourgeoise sensibilities, like people find it personally disgusting and therefore won’t associate with it. I think it helps that being, you know, an LGBTIQ+ ALLY or whatever costs people nothing, materially, whereas going to the mat over left-wing economic priorities might actually require them to compromise their own material self-interest.
I am not saying “let’s tolerate open racism”, but the internal troublemaking described in the article is typically over disputes that are not even close to open racism.
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I wonder if @skydiver8 has input on this, I think she has encountered this in the wild, people who want to fine-tune the internal apparatus of the party as opposed to achieving anything concrete.
I have had similar frustrations at Greens meetings here, something I refer to as “Activist Brain”. Like at a party meeting one time there was a call to brainstorm ideas for ways the party can improve its outreach. And one guy was like “we should link up with Extinction Rebellion”. And it’s like, the Greens are a party founded on environmentalism. We are a political party, not an activist organisation. The purpose of a political party is to get votes. How the hell will “linking up with Extinction Rebellion” help us do that? How many people are there out there who are blackpilled on climate change and are not already voting Greens?
I was struck by this in the article:
Mark Rudd, an early member of SDS, helped convert it to the Weather Underground, a role he now regrets. “After the war was over, a lot of the left went on a complete and total dead end,” he said. “We don’t want power. We’re allergic to it. It’s not in our DNA. We don’t like coercion. We don’t like hegemony.”
That’s Activist Brain. It’s a mentality that doesn’t even consider actually having and wielding power, it just assumes that existing power structures are a fact of life and your job is how best to rail against them.
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Isn’t this what Dems have been trying to do with their Hillbilly Elegy nonsense? Or constantly sucking up to our Hero Cops? In practical terms, there just isn’t a body of racist yambags who are persuadable on M4A or other left wing ideas. Fox News has made sure that rightwing ideology is a big package deal.
Curious about your thoughts on this part of the article: (staff at an abortion rights organization were in the midst of a unionization drive when the Alito opinion dropped)
"That very night, a story in Politico rocked the abortion rights world by revealing that the Supreme Court had decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, publishing a devastating draft opinion by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by four others. It was the moment the reproductive justice movement had been anticipating for years, and protesters immediately flooded the steps of the Supreme Court.
The next morning, the staff, however, was back at work on its union drive, with its first post thanking the public for its support of the effort: “Seeing your messages, likes, follows, and retweets reaffirms our determination as we wait to hear from Guttmacher leadership.”
Reading the room, a follow-up post added that they were “still reeling from last night’s leaked draft of the #SCOTUS decision to overturn Roe,” expressing “solidarity with abortion workers.”
Throughout May, Guttmacher’s staff regularly updated the public on its battle with management over voluntary recognition. In mid-May, workers at the Groundswell Fund, one of the largest funders of reproductive justice organizations, announced that their five-month struggle with management over unionizing had resulted in voluntary recognition.
Such recognition wouldn’t come for Guttmacher’s staff. On June 1, the workers said they’d rejected management’s offer because it demanded “months of no strike and non-disparagement clauses.” Instead, they would seek an election, they announced.
“It’s a symptom of poor threat assessment,” said Ross. “They can’t identify the main threat.”
Should these workers drop the unionization campaign because abortion politics appears to be hitting a critical moment? Would your opinion change depending on what the union was demanding and what conditions it was trying to change within the organization?
Another factor is that there is really no need to compromise on hate. Health care is expensive and hard to deliver and health care demand is a problem that has to be worked on and it by necessity involves coordination and cooperation, likely between people with different views on how to do it. That’s not really true of retrograde social views. Homophobia and misogyny and racism and other forms of hate may be inevitable (yay human nature) but they are not actually necessary and there really isn’t a good reason to compromise with them other than short term convenience.
That is correct. The club had to change their charter to focus more on reflection and social justice then on actual outdoor activities. Whether in practice that amounts to anything more than lip service I have no idea.