Personally, I never knew “liberal” was as a derogatory term by the left until after college, when I started reading communists online.

(I did hear “neoliberal” a lot, but that’s quite different, and used much more widely)

Very few people in America seem aware of what the “hard left” is actually like.  The mainstream right does worry about communism, but tends to emphasize (real or imagined) coalitions and unities rather than splits (cf. Horowitz’s “Discover The Networks” site) – they mostly tend to claim that the center left is actually a front for communism, or allied with communism, or some other variant on the idea of a “vast left-wing conspiracy,” with “communism” also assumed to be internally united.

Looking at the other side of the picture: I don’t think the American mainstream left is very aware of divisions on the “hard right” either, and tends to lump everything together as well.  But the “hard right” at least has enough of a presence that the typical Democratic voter learns to distinguish (proverbially) between their non-doctrinaire but very racist grandpa, their fundamentalist homeschooling aunt, and their uncle in the Marines who thinks civilians of all stripes are all weak and could use some military discipline.

Many people know that the left has schisms, at least well enough to laugh at the “People’s Front of Judea” joke, but they still tend to think of all hard-leftists as (1) equally marginal and ignorable, (2) distant and indistinguishable but vaguely “cool” allies, or (3) a united coalition of evil.

tenaciousvoidcycle:

@ozymandias271 and @nostalgebraist

So, I find it really weird how both of you made claims about legality. No person said that it was illegal to comment, the main claim was that 1) it was rude and 2) it was actually quite incredibly rude and that people who did it were wrong for doing it. I think most people had an issue with the second claim.
So, my thoughts are as follows:
1) I think the mere fact that tumblr is public and that reblogging is the way to respond implies that individuals should have different expectations of privacy than in communities where all posts can be easily curated.
2) When I read the post that allfeelsallthetime made, I did not get the impression at all that it was a personal post that should not be reblogged. To me, that post seemed very similar to a concern about finding a political group identity and issues with that group, but it does not at all seem obvious to me that the post should not be reblogged or commented upon with hostility.
3) I still find it odd that personal posts are sacrosanct. E.g. If we imagine another post that discusses how the person identifies as a neo-Nazi or believes that [insert school shooter here] was justified, would it still be wrong or rude to comment harshly upon it and, if so, why?

When I mentioned legality, I was making an analogy, not talking about whether the reblog was literally illegal (that may have not been clear, sorry).  What I wrote was:

Of course, you can spread any post you want in this fashion; the site itself won’t stop you.  But – there’s the law, on one hand, and then there’s mores, etiquette, community standards, on the other.  Compare: it may be “a freeeeeee country, man,” but that doesn’t mean I have to approve of the way someone chooses to treat me in public.

The first sentence talks about how “doing things the site permits you to do” is too low a standard for good conduct on tumblr, and the remaining two sentences make an analogy to how “doing things the law permits you to do” is too low a standard for good conduct in civil society.  I made this analogy because the “well, all posts are public” argument reminds me of people who assert that they’re “well within their (legal) rights” when they’re being a dick, when that wasn’t really the issue to begin with.  I.e. there are plenty of things you can do, and which are “right there for the doing” so to speak, but which are still socially disapproved of.  But I’m not especially attached to this analogy and it’s not the crux of my argument.

Re: point 1 – I agree, and they do to some extent, but in fact the social norms that exist are different from the social norms you seem to be saying “should” exist.  I personally think that there is not much point to breaking social norms and then, when people object, saying “well, if I were designing these norms, they would be totally different, so there.”  Sometimes norms are bad, and sometimes bad norms can be changed through an “activist” approach in which people actively break the norms to make the point that they’re bad, but generally I think this works when you have a concerted group of people working together for change, making some waves in the public consciousness.  A single person breaking norms usually just gets dismissed as a dick, and the norms remain.

Re: point 2 – I can see your point, although I’m actually not sure how much this matters (see below).

Re: point 3 – see, I think I would object to rude reblogs of the neo-Nazi’s posts, but not because “personal posts are sacrosanct” or because I’m worried about the neo-Nazi’s poor little feelings.  It’s more because I think that this kind of “rude reblog” is generally pointless, even when the rudeness is justified.  (This is part of why I like the norm – it bakes together “this is mean” and “this is pointless,” and even in situations where it’s justified to be mean, the pointlessness remains.)

So, one thing that rude reblogs are bad for is staying away from a group you find odious.  In @wordcubed’s case, this led to a whole bunch of criticism from people socially associated with the original poster, with widely varying levels of politeness or lack thereof.  It’s possible that this is what he wanted to do, but I claim that it’s not generally what people want to do in these cases, and in particular, it becomes less desirable as the odiousness of the group increases.  If I were to reblog a post about a neo-Nazi’s journey of self-discovery to say something amounting to “fuck Nazis,” I would expect to get into a big dust-up with at least that poster themselves, and probably with a bunch of their neo-Nazi-and-similar buddies.  Why on earth would I want this to happen?  I don’t know what “neo-Nazi tumblr” is like and I have no desire to find out.  Moreover, if I (or my followers) find neo-Nazis emotionally repulsive (or triggering, etc.) in addition to just “abstractly evil,” then this is clearly not a desirable situation.

Additionally, this kind of reblog is not likely to sway the opinions of anyone involved.  To someone with a widely disliked ideology, it’s not as though hearing “fuck [ideology]” from a stranger is a new experience (cf.)  If one were responding to a post making a more academic argument for some Nazi tenet or other, then there’s at least the possibility that the resulting argument would lead to someone – if not the original poster, then at least one of their followers – to think, “wow, I thought this person was really smart but it looks like they’re full of shit,” and re-evaluations would happen.  With a post that just incidentally refers to an ideology but is mostly about personal issues, a lot of the resulting conversation will probably be along the lines of “how dare you insult my friends / why shouldn’t I insult bad people,” as it did in this case.  As someone who has seen many versions of this exchange on tumblr, trust me, it never really achieves anything.

Finally, one might object: “but nostalgebraist, are you saying I can’t complain about this ridiculous neo-Nazi post I saw on the internet?”  But of course you can; as I said earlier, this is what vagueblogging is for, or talking to friends, or posting a link in your favorite IRC channel and tearing it apart together, etc.  I just think actually talking to the neo-Nazi in this case is going to be pointless at best and counterproductive at worst – do you really want to poke that hive?  Do you honestly expect there is anything interesting to be found inside it?

(via tenaciousvoidcycle-deactivated2)

hitler’s moms

Now that he was attracting attention, women began to take an interest in him. Most of them were aging ladies who sensed problems behind the inhibitions and complexes of the magnetic young orator, tensions that knowledgeable ministrations could release. Hitler himself later commented on the jealousies among those women who thronged so eagerly and maternally around him. He knew one, he remarked, “whose voice grew hoarse from agitation whenever I exchanged so much as a few words with another woman.” One of them, Carola Hoffmann, widow of a secondary-school teacher, who lived in the Munich suburb of Solln, made a sort of home for him and earned herself the title of “Hitler-Mutti” – Hitler’s Mom. Frau Bruckmann, wife of the publisher of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and a lady descended from an ancient noble line, also took him under her wing. So did the wife of Bechstein, the piano manufacturer. “I wished he were my son,” she said, and later, in order to be allowed to visit him in prison, she alleged that she was his adoptive mother. All of them taken together, their houses, their parties, widened the area around him and helped to make his name known.

(Joachim Fest, Hitler)

I was not happy with the pile-on that happened yesterday.  However, I’m not sure how to distribute blame there.  The problem is, as always, with tumblr: when I reblog something, it’s not clear if the intent is “hey, here’s a statement, everyone talk about it” or “I am having a conversation with the OP and everyone else jumping in is about as awkward as that would be if it happened in Real Flesh World.”

In this case it was the latter.  I already use “don’t reblog” tags sometimes, so I think I should really start using them for those sorts of conversations.  Please check to see if a post has a “don’t reblog” tag before reblogging it.

FWIW, I also will reiterate what I said before: “I think hair-trigger ostracism policies in social groups almost always end up benefitting amoral and abusive people who aren’t above ‘gaming’ them to their own ends, while not even reliably hitting their intended targets.”  I don’t want to be in any social space where I’m expected to instantly ostracize people because they’re in a vaguely defined category.

Note that, say, “neo-Nazi” is not a vague category.  I am happy ostracizing neo-Nazis.  It is pretty easy to tell when someone is a neo-Nazi (or, at the very least, it’s rarely ambiguous).  “Reactionary” is a vague category, and I’ll stand by that.  Every time I’ve seen someone tell me that I should have zero tolerance for “reactionaries” in my communities, it’s really hard to figure out exactly who they’re talking about, and the answer often turns out to be things like “people who are mean to me on the internet when I talk about politics,” in which case it’s just a mutant, weaponized form of the tone argument (”be nice and reasonable, sweetie … or else you won’t ever get to see your friends again.”).

A good rule of thumb that, if used, will obviate all this crap: if you want me to stop being friends with a person, please tell me what they did, not what they are.