By David Futrelle
On Sunday, freelance journalist Talia Jane took to Twitter to report a truly grotesque sexual message she’d gotten from a male colleague whom she later identified as Seattle Times reporter Mike Rosenberg.
Then this all happened:
- Rosenberg suspended his Twitter account at Jane’s request.
- The paper suspended Rosenberg while they looked into the matter.
- Twitter suspended, then unsuspended, Jane’s account over an innocuous tweet because some annoying nitwit got mad at her for reporting the DM, and Twitter’s abuse reporting system is so broken that annoying nitwits can get people suspended over innocuous tweets.
- Australian podcaster Aimee Terese, ostensibly a leftist, attacked Jane in a tweet that somehow managed to be even grosser than Rosenberg’s DM, and my mouth dropped open, leaving my lower jaw suspended in the air. (Figuratively.)
Before we get into #4, let’s go back to the original gross DM, sent at the tail end of a late-night conversation between Rosenberg and Jane, when the Seattle reporter suddenly transitioned from such topics as journalism jobs and the cost of living in Seattle to, well, this:
Rosenberg, who has acknowledged that he did indeed send these messages, claims that that last one was meant for someone else whose picture he was presumably masturbating onto. The out-of-the-blue strangeness of his comment had led some to think he may be telling the truth, but Jane isn’t buying this explanation.
You can find out more details on all this in Jane’s original thread, or in some of the news pieces that have been written about it already.
But I’m just going to move on to Aimee Terese’s tweet, though, because, holy hell, it’s in many ways even grosser than Rosenberg’s DM:
(This tweet has since been deleted; I grabbed the clearest screenshot I could find of it here.)
When someone asked if she really meant what she seemed to be saying, she doubled down:
And then she doubled down again:
Terese even tried to lay out a twisted sort-of Marxist case for … attacking someone with a gross sexual tweet for reporting a gross sexual DM.
(In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I am Twitter-friendly with @RivkaGheist and that as far as I can tell she is not in fact “ruling class scum.”)
In other tweets, Terese declared that Jane was “hysterical and cruel,” compared her to an abusive cop, and suggested she was a narcissist because … she once wrote an open letter to her then-employer demanding better pay and working conditions:
Shitting on someone for demanding better pay seems like an odd thing for a supposed Marxist to do, but I guess I don’t understand the finer points of the dialectic.
Terese even doubled down on calling Jane ugly:
Other ostensible leftists jumped into the fray with similar attacks on Jane, including the co-host of the Red Scare podcast:
Writer and podcaster Conner Habib alternated between sarcastic tweets laced with Marxoid jargon and … cum jokes.
Meanwhile, this guy evidently thought that the only thing this discussion needed to make it complete was a meme, er, humorously referencing the Chinese crackdown on students in Tiananmen Square.
Terese retweeted his meme, because of course she did.
It would be one thing if Terese and her pals in this discussion were just some tiny subgrouplet of a subgrouplet on the left.
But in fact they’re part of what seems to be a growing subculture of purported leftists who somehow manage to spend as much time attacking so-called “identity politics” — or IDpol, as they call it — as they do pushing their own reductionist class analysis, which as in this case often turns out to consist of little more than calling people they don’t like “ruling class scum.” They’re a sort of successor to what what was once called the “dirtbag left.”
This subculture now boasts a subreddit of its own — r/stupidpol, with nearly 10,000 subscribers — and it’s gotten celebrity endorsements of sorts from several relatively well-known names like journalist Michael Tracey — formerly of The Young Turks, now an occasional guest on Tucker Carlson’s White Power Hour — and Angela Nagle — a sometime writer for The Baffler and Jacobin whose book on the alt-right has won plaudits from none other than “dapper Nazi” Richard Spencer, who was especially pleased with her extended diatribe against so-caled Tumblrinas.
The Spencer endorsement is no fluke. Given their delight in “triggering” liberals and those on the intersectional left, people like Terese and the whole r/stupidpol crowd bear more than a passing resemblance to the alt-right — so much so that some people describe them as a new variety of NazBol, or National Bolshevism, a sort of mixture of (you guessed it) Nazi-style nationalism and Stalinesque Marxism.
I think (I hope!) that’s overstating it a bit. But these folks are truly the political equivalent of a creepy DM slide.
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@Talonknife
I expect she is one.
http://cdn-webimages.wimages.net/051771a9b022d31893317b28f9819a0d756dbb.jpg
@ Kupo:
I re-read it about ninety times, and the meaning of the tweet became clear(er)… the last sentence, however, is pure word-porn
@ Katamount:
Research “Leave It To Beaver” and “Life With Father”, you’ll get a very in-depth understanding of those values. Their existence in the “real” world, however, cannot be established or confirmed independently of those television shows
Ah! One last bit of trivia here.
“Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dweller” was the false name that some government person told our protagonists in the movie. It was to get them off the trail of the real C.H.U.D. meaning (i.e. Contamination Hazard Urban Disposal). So you’re both right.
I have a real love for terrible horror movies; my dad and I watched that one way more than it deserved.
As a Swede, I can relate. Few things grinds my gears more than seeing clueless English and American persons rag on about how Sweden has been turned into some kind of near-apocalyptic hellhole thanks to progressiveness and immigrants, and the big irony is that if all the English-speaking people actually got their wish and Scandinavia reverted back to the values it’s people had a 1000 years ago, instead of relying on voluntary immigrants to do all the gross and low-paying jobs, people would go on viking raids and enslave anglo-saxon people to do those jobs instead.
Also, Charles XII, the king white nationalists in Sweden have been so keen on appropriating as their symbol, spent a decade as a refugee in Turkey until the Sultan couldn’t stand his mooching to the point he had to forcibly throw him out.
WTF is going on in this thread? I just had a conversation on /co/ about Noelle Stevenson that was less vitriolic than what this Aimee Terese is throwing out.
I didn’t expect to see ‘Sailor Socialism’ act like a fucking dickhead on Twitter.
@ Katamount:
Well, the flood-prevention planning the city’s been doing since Hurricane Hazel is going to be tested this spring if the lake rises as high as predicted (fingers crossed).
The Orangemen still parade every year— I’m told they still make sure their route goes by the largest Catholic church in the downtown area and whoop as they pass it— but that congregation is now mostly Filipino and basically shrugs and goes “sorry, we refuse to be drawn into your Celtic tribal wars lol.”
@nathanHevenstone
This is honestly why i despise “ironic” memes of Stalin or gulag/guillotine jokes. Because it minimizes the genuinely fucked up shit that did happen in those regimes in favor of edgelording. See: that shithead communist dog account
@ Scanisaurus
Even in the UK we get the same nonsense, but claiming it’s happened here, usually from Americans. And the UK remains about 90 to 95 per cent white, with a large (albeit mainly ‘cultural’) Christian majority even after a long period of ‘uncontrolled’ (read: ‘non – white’) immigration. That said, the xenophobic narrative is even here gaining traction among the more sensible. Only yesterday someone I know to be level – headed forwarded a piece of islamophobic bilge to me, which claimed all UK schools were serving only halal meat at lunch time. Five minutes work confirmed that in my area at least, pork is still on the school lunch menu. Not so halal that, and I told him so.
@Kevin
Yes, we’re reaching the point where the sheer flooding effect is enough to override even sensible people’s faculties.
And just earlier today, lobster emperor himself tweeted how he hates the term Islamophobia because war against Christians.
Looking at your link, not all but a lot of these guys are probably your basic denizens of internet communities centered around bullying and general edginess and the leftist spin is either incidental or forgotten at this point for many of them. Or if it’s really there, it’s often tied to a weird undercurrent of white male identity politics. At least a few of them seem to be outright right wingers trying to keep up a thin pretense of being left wing in some sense or they’re some sort of third positionist caricature.
But no, most of them including the obnoxious types described above really do are some flavor of leftist in economic terms at least. I’m not sure about social terms since our shared generation in over half of Europe and much of the USA are actually quite progressive. They might actually represent a conservative segment in that domain. Also it’s quite interesting and easy to guess which half of Europe is the more socially progressive one. The one that didn’t experience communism but mostly what we’d call between social democracy and neoliberalism. Not to ignore certain bouts of fascism that persisted even after the rest of Europe was communist or downplay other factors but all things considered.
I have an acquaintance like that. He started by ranting about the divisiveness of identity politics but soon went into white male identity politics himself. Not exactly a white nationalist or a men’s rights activist but he became as obnoxious as his worst targets of derision were. And those targets were more prominent writers at first but soon became random tumblr girls. There’s a lot of that on there. At first I actually thought I was looking at TumblrInAction but I think calling people trannies is frowned upon in TumblrInAction.
Also, Aimee Terese was clearly using identity politics when making that tweet attacking you: “a man stepping on the neck of dissenting women” is framed in obvious identity politics terms, whether you agree with it or not. They might say, oh, we put it in terms that would show up your hypocrisy which isn’t particularly convincing for a few reasons.
Lastly, this Talia woman seems to come from a pretty working class background overall, or at least a downward mobile middle class one. Is their argument that she’s suffering from internalized neoliberalism in exposing a guy who sent her that kind of message? There’s an easy analogue in a certain phrase fans of identity politics use that could be easily applied to Aimee in this case but for some reason they’d regard it as ridiculous in that case.
Turan, I haven’t seen many/any leftists think that Assange is anything but some sort of right-libertarian but I’m sure that position exists out there too. The point is more about whistleblowers and less about rapists naturally so I think you’re eliding some details there. Not that the whistleblowing itself in his case doesn’t have an ideological bent overall but I want the people I support to be even more transparent than the ones I don’t anyway. But I agree that there’s a weird segment who gets oddly incensed every time the accusations get brought up, even when it isn’t about detracting from the whistleblowing.
weirwoodtreehugger, I think you’re mushing different groups together which is interesting on its own. I’ve seen far more of what you’d describe as progressive leftists take that generic anti-USA stance than this kind of anti identity politics crowd who like to portray themselves as the more mature, non-kneejerk crowd. For my part, I think that the higher projection capabilities of the USA and its much more intense interference throughout the world have to be kept in mind when that anti-USA stance is mentioned. If Sweden were world police, I’m sure plenty of people might regard one of the most progressive countries around with the same suspicion they regard a middling one, by western standards, like the USA.
kupo, why of course? Bernie bros are consistently the most progressive and least sexist demographic in the USA, much more than Clinton supporters were, as all surveys show. The people who are calling Aimee out the most since they’re politically closest to her in the first place are fellow Bernie bros. This might have something to do with Bernie supporters being younger on average but even in the same age group my guess is that Bernie bros will edge out Hillary sisters as being more socially progressive.
Wow, tankies are seriously the worst, I mentioned them in the Sinagogue attack threads as those not so indirectly antisemitic “”lefties””, who think not recognizing Isreal is the rational response to Isreal politics’ imperialism and violence and international communities struggling to even recognize Palestine. Along with Nazbols. It used to be a tendency also associated with Nazi Maoism, I think mostly in past, and in Europe they are often called “redbrowns” for their strong intersection with “black” aka fascist or reactionary talking points in a Venn diagram :).
They often reply that redbrowns is a slur coined by Eeltsin’s spin doctors and think tanks to slam those opposing his regime as a Us proxy. Regardless to how I might share some if not most of criticism toward Eltsin, the descriptor correctly described some of the positions shared by a part, though not all, of the politcal spectrum, especially of former Ussr apparatus, Stalin revivalists mixed with filo Orthodox jingoists. One of those Redbrown, very little red, has been Putin.
Using this line of defence now, would be akin to saying that Terf is a slur.
Not sure how these people would appreciate Sanders, as he’s a Jew, or is he one of the “good ones”, like in the Kkk case for that Poc friend?
Why bring up his age, though? Biden is barely younger and they don’t seem in worse health shape than Trump :).
I’m afraid to ask, but re: that one Axecalibur comment, what in the fucking hell is wrong with being a sex workers’ rights advocate???
I guess you could read it as suspiciously bro-y since he’s a guy, but A. men are also sex workers and B. supporting sex workers is something that a lot of both mainstream and radical feminism do get wrong a lot of the time, and it’s literally life or death for a bunch of people, particularly trans people of color.
Take that SWERF (Sex Worker-Exclusionary Radical Feminist) nonsense out of here, tbh. Glad they haven’t seemed to comment again.
The way I read Axe’s comment, MK, was basically “how can you claim that you are a *sex worker rights activist* when you are telling a woman that *she should be grateful* that someone wanted to well… Do what he did. (Work computer, oh dear.)
Axe is saying (If I’m reading it right!) that you can’t go “you should be grateful, you uggo”, because that is reeeeeeally close to “you were harassed/assaulted/etc because you were too pretty/your makeup was too nice/that dress was too short”. It’s also a really short walk to “You fit this category (sex worker) so you can’t be this (harassed/assaulted/etc)”.
Axe is calling out someone who *claims* they aren’t a SWERF, but sure is associating with someone who is sayin’ some pretty shitty things.
Axe, please feel free to correct me if I read you wrong!
He’s also someone who’s been around on this blog for a long time, though his gravatar has sadly changed. Q__Q
@Robert Park
Hi, I wholeheartedly agree with you, you stole my words on what I was about to say about Bernie supporters (you say “Ninja’d”?), as he’s far from a tankie, that I know and how could someone that actually shares more Trumpian and manospherian talking points support Sanders. And I read those statistics.
About she going identity politics on David for criticizing her, I’m almost sure it’s a “gotcha” trolling attempt based on their strawmen idea of “sjw’s” as people who believe you can’t criticize a woman for saying bullshit if you are a man, you can’t criticize a Poc or a gay person on the base of privilege and what they call oppression olympics. Though mostly they don’t actually believe this but it’s an idea which is convenient to caricature and distort as something completely unreasonable. Many actually think the reserved quotas can be filled with lower qualification on the bases of being minorities while it doesn’t work this way, but at most on par qualifications. There are aspects to improve, definitely but not to that extent.
This way being her a woman is to her a checkmate for David accusing him of incoherence to feminism “See all ok as long as a woman agree with him, such feminist”, while there’s such incoherence only on the basis of her totally inconsistent premise. I saw something like that pulled by some black people for Trump, but I don’t wanna run the risk to stereotype any of them, so I only mean some.
Some trolls here posed as a jew or a black trans woman while defending the aggression of muslim woman in the train, remember?
Or a jew black trans woman, not sure.
Black to the “class first”, while I don’t approve of many neoliberal policies, I don’t see the contraddiction with civil rights and leftists should not enable this non existing contrapposition and the reactionary talking points masking as social and economic concerns, which see a ploy against the west and “giving rights to minorities, gays while dismantling social ones”. First off at most civil rights try to help these cathegories being on par with relatively more privileged cathegory on some social axis, but they spare them of no consequences of social cuts.
I read Axe’s comment the same way as Rhuu, and knowing Axe I’d be surprised if it was meant any other way. Probably just a miscommunication?
I’m also really annoyed that I didn’t notice Axe’s comment at first because I haven’t seen him in ages how are you Axe???
@Robert Park, Ingmar:
That said, there was a rather vocal subgroup of Sanders supporters who didn’t seem to have any trouble voting for Trump after Clinton won the nomination.
I can think of four reasons why:
1. They were lying about being Sanders supporters in the first place (particularly the ‘look what you made me do!’ types)
2. They were just being petty and voting against Clinton because she’d beaten ‘our guy’
3. They were just straight-out misogynists
4. They were edgelord types who didn’t care about being progressive so much as they wanted an outsider to kick over the existing system, and both Sanders and Trump qualified.
As with most vocal subgroups, they probably sounded like a much larger group than they actually were. It’s quite likely that, on average, Sanders supporters were far more progressive than other groups in that election. But there was a very loud sub-group that wasn’t. Probably composed of the same sorts of people that have completely ruined many of the organized atheist groups.
So… in a bit of defense of M K, when I initially read Axe’s comment, I took it the same way M K did, but before I made my own comment I read it again and saw how everyone else is reading it… a sort of “I don’t trust this person’s motivations for being a ‘sex worker’s rights advocate'”. Like… do they read and appreciate Greta Christina? What about Melissa Gira Grant? (Just as two examples… there are so many more.) Or is he the “I support my right to give women money and expect sex in return” type who only claims to support sex worker’s rights for said selfish reasons?
Jenora, how vocal it was might be a bit subjective since I barely run into them other than very rarely on the internet and they all love this anti identity politics narrative despite often voting on at least implicit identity politics grounds themselves. I’ve similarly met my fair share of Clinton supporters who are pretty vocally hostile but I never particularly cared to make up a narrative about Clinton supporters.
And that’s the more important general point I wanted to highlight with that part of my comment. We have this weird narrative about Bernie bros being repeated among some people who I’m sure know better but there’s no equivalent narrative about Hillary bros when more Hillary supporters went for McCain over Obama, Hillary supports can be equally toxic online and they don’t seem to have less sexist views when surveyed, in fact they have more so on average which however might just be a result of age. This might be a good example of the kind of identity politics weaponizing on the left I personally dislike. “Bros supporting a white bro” while ignoring the reality of the situation. If one’s feeling charitable they could see it as wanting to police teammates’ bad behavior but sadly it’s much more often used as a political cudgel while similar, apparently more common behavior is excused.
But I think your four explanations all make sense and are types I’ve run into.
There’s definitely a whole subset of people who claim they vote for one specific Democrat and only that Democrat. I’ve been seeing a lot of people on Twitter making the claim that they have some Republican relative who will vote for Biden but if any other Dem wins, will vote Trump again. Funny how it’s always an old white dude that is the only acceptable Democrat, huh?
It’s all bullshit. These people aren’t Democrats or Democratic voters (distinct categories as there are lots of us who vote Democratic strategically but think most of the body is not left enough) and were never going to vote for any Democrat. These are just bad faith attempts to poison the election process and demand coddling and attention.
@weirwoodtreehugger: chief manatee:
That’s definitely a group, yes. The annoying part is that there seems to be a significant chunk of the Democratic Party apparatus that agrees with them, and has been dutifully tacking towards the ‘center’ while following the Republicans off the cliff. Which was what led to Clinton being the ‘safe’ choice last time, because she wasn’t going to rock the boat with all the big corporate donors.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that anybody who would still vote for Trump in a 2020 election after everything that has happened is unlikely to be swayed by any sort of reason at this point. Which means tacking towards the fabled ‘center’ is not only pointless, because there aren’t really any votes to pick up from that side; it’s self-defeating because you’re just alienating a lot of the more leftward-leaning folks who are, as you say, only vote Democratic strategically because the party left them behind decades ago.
The good news is that a lot of the new blood in the party is aware of this. The bad news is that the old blood is getting nastier about the threats from within.
That said, of the four groups I mentioned above, I still suspect that category 4 (didn’t care about actual opinions, just wanted an outsider to kick over the anthill so they could watch the panicked ants scrambling around) is one of the bigger ones. These are the folks who are still insisting that Trump is ‘draining the swamp’ when in reality he’s just covering it over with even more toxic sludge.
I truly don’t understand the mentality from centrist Dems that if they just nominate a centrist enough candidate, the Republicans will be willing to work with them in good faith and the voters will flock to said candidate.
Barrack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton are by no means radical leftists. You wouldn’t know it from listening to Republicans talk about them.
@WWTH
It’s really quite straightforward; they’re amoral corporatists who have zero interest in changing the status quo.
kupo, you might not like the possibility but very likely that’s how it is.
http://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/rngs/USA-ELECTION-RACE/010020H7174/USA-ELECTION-RACE.jpg
http://onlineharassmentdata.org/img/election-socialmedia-infographic-v3.jpg
One can find plenty of issues with self-reported surveys in general but the picture these paint is very different to the one some Hillary supporters have tried to promote. Certainly there’s nothing to suggest that Hillary supporters are less sexist and racist on average or that they are less aggressive online. It’s also interesting but probably not surprising that Kasich supporters on the Republican side are both seen as less aggressive and aren’t nearly as -ist of any sort compared to the average Republican.
But average age must have something to do with at least the difference in racial and sexual attitudes, if not how aggressive they come across as:
Young Americans are simply much more progressive on social matters and they went much more for Sanders. A comparison within age groups would be more instructive but my guess is that there will simply be an even smaller difference in that case. Either way, this narrative is fairly well debunked.