By David Futrelle
Browsing the Jordan Peterson subreddit today, I scrolled past the link to an article on a right-wing clickbait site asserting that “Hate Crime Hoaxes are More Common than You Think.”
I paused for a moment at a post denouncing “More State Enforced Cultural Marxism” — by which the OP meant programs to teach children that gay and trans people exist. I sighed a little at the post declaring that “It is time to talk about female privilege.” (Pretty sure it isn’t.)
But I stopped dead at this post:
Was this person reading the same subreddit I was? I scrolled up to the top of the page. Yep, I was remembering correctly: this was still the literal top unstickied post, with more than 200 upvotes, complaining about a joke on Twitter suggesting that perhaps it was a teensy bit silly for white dudes to get quite so bent out of shape about a woman playing Captain Marvel:
Huh, I wondered. Was it possible that perhaps the victimhood-lamenters of the Jordan Peterson subreddit kind of, sort of, like playing the victims themselves?
No, I thought, that couldn’t be true.That would be too hypocritical, even for them, I must be wrong.
I mean, it’s not like the Jordan Peterson subreddit is chock-full of whiny laments by white dudes convinced they’re being denied their rightful share of success by evil SJWs and unqualified people of color.
Oh wait.
It’s not like some of them have convinced themselves that “neo-Marxist” SJWs and uppity “Black Females” are conspiring to destroy their careers, deny them healthcare, and take away their right to vote.
It’s not like they’re furious that men might no longer be celebrated as the noble heroes responsible for every good thing accomplished in the history of Western Civilization — including all a dose paintings by da ottist youse all may know as da Vince!
It’s not like they’re furious at the SJW’s supposed anti-white-male-doctor agenda — whether the doctors in question are real or fictional.
In the comments to that post, one of the more reasonable Jordan Peterson fans concedes that maybe only “97-98 out of a 100” real-world heroes are men.
It must be hard for members of such a truly oppressed class to ward off the temptation to play the victim. I, for one, salute the denizens of the Jordan Peterson subreddit for their heroism in standing up against victimhood culture.
NOTE FOR EXTREMELY LITERAL-MINDED READERS: Post may contain sarcasm.
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Incontinence combined with weakness in the hind limbs suggests a possible spinal injury or similar problem. It’s almost certainly a CNS problem, and therefore serious. 🙁
Meantime, some food for thought:
http://www.leftvoice.org/Abolish-ICE-and-Abolish-the-Border-Too-A-Socialist-Perspective
@ Kupo and Susan
Thank you. I’m gonna make him a vet appointment and hope for the best. I’m really hoping he’s just crapping in the bed to protest something and its not incontinences. At first I thought it was accident because he a long hair fluffy ball and sometimes it get caught in his hair around his bum. But it keeps happening so either he’s doing it on purpose to tell me something or he can’t help it. He’s not peeing or spaying anywhere though like cats normally do when their upset about something.
Might not be relevant at all, but … our (elderly) dog has always had slightly weaker back legs and now with advancing age her back legs are distinctly weak and wobbly. This makes it more difficult to adopt and maintain the having-a-crap position, which may – I don’t know, but may – have something to do with the fact that she is quite often incontinent lately; only wrt crapping indoors sometimes, though – holding on until she can pee outside has never yet been a problem (and of course the muscles involved and the position are a bit different).
I think she leaves it too long, and then can’t make it to the garden quickly enough. So I just wondered if something similar might be happening with your cat, Lainy – it’s harder to control the position, so he leaves it until it’s kind of too late and then doesn’t make it to the litter box in time, is that a possibility?
Anyway, it’s just a thought – I hope you can find out what the problem is and alleviate it. Wishing you and cat all the best :-s
Off topic, but I’ve been reading about the recent extinction of the Bramble Cay Melomys – believed to have died out sometime in the past decade due to their habitat becoming flooded with seawater, but only recently confirmed – and I’ve been seeing comments from climate-change deniers and flat-earthers, who are declaring this a hoax. I used be able to make sense of their stupid most of the time, but now some of them seem to be subscribing to an entirely new model of physics that bears, at most, only a superficial resemblance to anything real. Plus criticism of the very concept of peer review as if it were a form of groupthink. Makes me want to scream “Where did you get your education, Honest Jeff’s Discount Science Academy (might not be pseudoscience)?”
@ Opposablethumbs
It could be a possibility. I have found him craping on the stairs that go down stairs to his little box, and I have found him crapping near the little box. He has sometimes crapped in the room where the litter box is but not in it. That one took forever to find because I had a plastic bag full of clothes to take to donate. My other Cat, who is only a few years old found where he crapped and covered it with that plastic bag thinking she was helping. I mean I know that was her because jessie has never covered his crapped, even when he was a kitten. The other cat does it for him.
I’ve also heard that when the back legs get weak sometimes they prefer to crap in shallower litter boxes, so that is a possibility.
It does sound sort of like it’s a “can’t get into the litter box” probbo for your little sweetie. Not that I’m suggesting you shouldn’t take him to the vet! It’s always good to get our fuzzy friends a checkup once in awhile, especially cats. They’re so resilient, they don’t really show signs until problems are serious. But if you can find a shallow litter box tray, it may help. I hope it works <3
@Snowberry:
It’s pretty much all conspiracy theories and motivated reasoning at this point. Once someone has decided that:
A) Climate Change can’t be happening
B) Those people who think they’re so smart don’t see what I see
C) Therefore anybody who says Climate Change happens is lying
then that person will find some way to justify away any description of reality as yet another lie.
Some of these people aren’t well-educated and are annoyed at being considered ‘stupid’. The ones that are well educated (though usually in other fields) are often the dangerous ones because they can come up with reasonable-sounding excuses.
Over at Slacktivist, Fred Clark had an article which pointed to a Guardian article on How Facebook and YouTube help spread anti-vaxxer propaganda and added his own generalization:
I’ve said before that the Internet is great at community-building, it just doesn’t care very much about what sorts of communities it builds. And people have been talking for a while about how Facebook and the like make it effortless to seal yourself in a bubble of seeing only the sort of ‘news’ you want.
The idea that ‘you may also like’ recommendation algorithms are helping to foster the breakdown of society is a disturbing one, but I can’t entirely find fault with the logic.
Re Marvel: My daughter is totally in love with the new(ish?) Ms. Marvel. I was never a big comics fan and honestly if it weren’t for Ms. Marvel I still wouldn’t be, but we both love it. Wonder what Jordan Peterson and his ilk think of it (actually I’m not sure I want to know).
Let’s see if I can add an image…
And this:
I suspect hate crimes are, if anything, UNDER-reported.
Oops. Nope. That didn’t work. None of those should be links; I was trying to link to a Wiki photo of Ms. Marvel. Le sigh…
What’s this I’ve been hearing about a blockquote monster?
@Bookworm in hajib:
The ‘blockquote monster’ is when you manage to mis-handle the blockquote tags.
As for the image, you missed the ‘:’ between ‘https’ and ‘//’, for one thing. Basically, you need to include the full URL, and if the URL ends with a ‘.jpg’ or ‘.gif’ it will usually get auto-installed. So:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/db/Kamala_Khan.jpg
becomes
(In the first line, I put : in place of the ‘:’ and . in place of the ‘.’ to hopefully prevent WordPress from doing the autoconversion.)
@Jenora Feuer:
I would hardly be surprised at this point, but at the same time, it’s rather alien to my own experiences. I don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Reddit, or Pinterest, or Instagram, or much of anything really.
I mean, I do use eBay and Amazon occasionally when I can’t easily find/get something elsewhere. And I do visit YouTube from time to time, to see if there’s any videos of something in particular. And, okay, maybe a few random videos from PBS’s Space Time or Kurgesagt. And Fetlife, if that counts as a major site. And fine, I use Google as a search engine the most often. But basically, the big names see little or none of my patronage, because frankly, I’ve never needed them. I can wander the internet on my own just fine, and I don’t want anyone trying to shunt me into an information bubble, thank you very much. Admittedly, that wasn’t the reason why my internet habits developed that way, but I’m glad they did.
But that leaves me with a blind spot – I actually don’t know what it’s like for people to be trapped in an information bubble.
Yay, it worked.
And, Bookworm in hijab, I’m sorry for mis-typing your ‘nym in the previous comment.
And I should have said at the end ‘I put : in place of ‘:’ and . in place of ‘.’ to prevent WordPress from doing the autoconversion.’ Now I remember why I don’t mess with direct HTML too often.
Arrg, how does that get re-rendered? I meant : for ‘:’. Let’s see WordPress re-interpret THAT.
@ Jenora Feuer,
Thanks! And that’s exactly the pic I was after. 😀
I don’t comment on internet stuff very often….actually, discovering this site has caused a huge jump in online time for me (worth it!), so I usually feel very clumsy with things like this. I have been inordinately pleased with the fact that I’ve successfully quoted before…
I first encountered Monica Rambeau in “Nextwave”, which was ridiculously entertaining.
This is kind of apropos of nothing but I’m thinking again of incels who are convinced trans women are just guys trying to get on some kind of sweet lady gravy train due to a present unpleasant situation. See, my facial hair is really quite dark for my skin tone so even getting a very close shave leaves me with a shadow that’s very hard to entirely mask. Since these little terrorists won’t listen to reason, I’m being forced to unleash my dogs of war on them. And as I’m sure you’re aware, this is going to hurt me much more than it’ll hurt them. But yeah, I’m totally luckier than any billionaire or whatever it was they maintained.
Embracing victimhood is pathetic, say pathetic men embracing their white male victimhood…
And you know something? For once, I’m inclined to actually agree with them.
https://twitter.com/JessicaValenti/status/1100100628473434112?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
@Snowberry:
I don’t use Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or most of the big sites. I have a tendency to find a thing I like and stick to it, and I’m old enough to have been on Usenet, predating the development of the Web entirely. I was still using AIM up to the day it finally shut down. (I use Discord for that now.)
The thing is, especially in areas which didn’t get significant Internet access until relatively recently, for many folks Facebook is the Internet, as they rarely go anywhere else except maybe to follow links from Facebook, before going right back there. And that’s exactly the way Facebook wants it, because they sell advertising. It’s also the way that a number of countries want it, because it’s a lot easier to control what people see if you can just lean on one company. And if the people there don’t know any better because Facebook was already their front page or the default on their smartphone… why would they think to look anywhere else?
It’s the old network TV model: the users aren’t the customers, they’re the product, and they’re being sold to the advertisers who are the real customers.
@Bookworm in hijab:
I’ll admit I was more of a DC person than a Marvel person when it came to comics, so the first time I’d heard of the new Ms Marvel was from Elizabeth Sandifer’s article on the whole mess with the ‘Rabid Puppies’ and their hijacking of the Hugo Awards in SF, Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons, because it was one of the finalists for the Hugo Award (it would later win, but the winners hadn’t been announced when the essay was written).
To quite from the article:
Gynandromorph lobster to confuse the Peterson fans.
@Robert:
I am enough of An Old to remember Monica Rambeau when she was Captain Marvel but enjoyed seeing her again in Nextwave. “Ridiculously entertaining” is a good way of summing up that comic: it is a deliriously over-the-top celebration of superhero comics for their own sake, a comic that delights in its own absurdity and blows a raspberry in the face of every po-faced grimdark plotline ever. As the author himself (quoted over on TV Tropes) put it:
(It’s also quite a feminist comic under all the mockery in that there are more women members on the Nextwave team than men– almost unheard-of for superhero teams– and they are far more competent than their male counterparts. Well, mostly more competent.)
@Nequam
That tweet is perfect.
Random upcomming Ms. Marvel covers because why not…
