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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@MK
What everyone else said, basically. I doubt he’s really doing much in the way of advocating. And, considering *gestures toward all this*, I rather hope he’s not. I wouldn’t wish his ilk on sex workers or their movement
@Robert
I envy your internet
The term ‘berniebros’ was coined specifically for Sanders’ bigoted edgelord supporters. Kinda by definition, berniebros are sexist. #notallberniefans, etc etc
@Mish
I mean, I didn’t quite sashay on stage to theme music and neon signage or anything 😛
The rumors of my demise have been slightly exaggerated I’m afraid
@Axe, glad to hear the demise is not happening! I’ve only been on here very sporadically lately but I’d noticed you were awol. Missed you 🙂
Re Assange – a lot of Australian lefties still swear undying loyalty to him, sadly. I used to be one of them.
@Axecalibur: Middle Name Danger
Glad to see that you’re still alive. We all missed you.
@Robert Park
Do you even know what “Bernie Bro” means?
There are lots of Bernie supporters who are perfectly lovely, and plenty of Dem non-Bernie supporters who are awful, but there are definitely also a lot of Bernie supporters who live up to every stereotype of the “Bernie Bro” and then some, who are huge assholes who are either outright misogynists or at the very least dismissive of feminist issues, even tho some of them are women. It’s not a tiny group.
Also, thanks, everyone for the supportive comments earlier in the thread! Though I have to admit I am wearing clown shoes right now; it’s kind of embarrassing.
And on that Tiananmen square meme, I think it’s supposed to be ironically mocking Jane for supposedly pretending to be heroic despite not literally staring down tanks. The meme somehow manages to be both disrespectful to her and to the man in the original picture.
Berniebro,
Why are you using a poll comparing Clinton voters to voters for various Republicans to prove that Sanders supporters are less racist? It didn’t even address Sanders supporters.
Also, perceived aggression has its limits. Women and people of color tend to be perceived as aggressive for merely stating an opinion. That survey doesn’t measure actual aggressive online behavior.
I’m also not sure why there’s that freeze peach infographic in the middle. What does that have to do with anything? It comes off like you’re trying to defend online harassment.
Axecalibur, but that’s the whole point. Why wasn’t a similar term coined for Clinton supporters and the same criticism applied to onesself even though the surveys show them to be worse on those accounts than Sanders supporters? It was a political tool and smear, not a honest reckoning of bad behavior and was used as easy dismissal.
weirwoodtreehugger, I posted a link that compared Sanders and Clinton supporters too in the previous post but I’ll repost it here if you missed it:
https://i.imgur.com/YF1ARUG
Also I don’t necessarily buy your explanation for those differences, not only because Sanders had plenty of female and poc support despite the Bernie bro narrative but also because if you check the infographic men were more likely to call both Sanders and Clinton supporters more aggressive by a similar difference, 3-4%. So if there’s a bias like the one you brought up, which I wouldn’t doubt especially towards black people, it’s applied evenly with men of all camps perceiving more aggression.
It’s true that black voters went for Clinton overall but young black voters, like all young people, went for Sanders. Sanders’ supporters also skewed female a little bit, not male, unlike Clinton’s. Not to mention the greater support among LGBT and poorer people
But as I said, a lot of this might just be driven by age:
The results are the same. Sanders supporters are less sexist, less racist, poorer, more LGBT. If the smear Bernie bro is applied supposedly to a segment as a political tool, what do we call Hillary supporters at least that nasty segment of theirs? Hillary harassers?
But no one is claiming that all or most of Sanders supporters are harassers. It’s a specific subset AKA Bernie bros. That’s what the term is referring to.
There are definitely centrist Democrats with racist views, no one is claiming otherwise. But there just wasn’t the same phenomena of Clinton supporters brigading and harassing women and POC.
BTW, I was a Sanders supporter until around spring or summer of 2016 because I was disappointed with his lack of willingness to reign in the harassment from some of his followers. I even liked him before it was cool. So don’t approach me like I’m a Clinton superfan.
@Robert Park:
And you’re still talking about the average Sanders supporter, and ignoring the fact that everybody else has been talking about a particular loud subset of Sanders supporters who were more willing to vote for Trump than Clinton afterward, despite the ideological differences.
By continuing to expound on this, you’re also not exactly differentiating yourself from precisely that sort of Sanders supporter aside from being willing to use the more progressive supporters as camouflage.
(People understandably get upset from constant complaints that Clinton was what lost the election, and that Sanders would have managed to beat Trump. That’s hardly a guarantee… we know that the Republican party apparatus had smear jobs ready for Sanders if he had won the primaries.)
@Jenora
“And you’re still talking about the average Sanders supporter, and ignoring the fact that everybody else has been talking about a particular loud subset of Sanders supporters who were more willing to vote for Trump than Clinton afterward, despite the ideological differences.”
Not exactly. I’m talking about the fact that this “Bernie bro” catchphrase became popular on the Clintonite internet, often as an attempt to smear the average Sanders supporter too, while no similar pithy phrase was applied to Clinton supporters. There’s an obvious asymmetry in characterization here despite no obvious difference in behavior or even slightly better behavior by Sanders supporters. After all, this whole conversation started when kupo mentioned that “of course (Aimee) is a Bernie bro” and I wondered why that should be so obvious and after that laughing at my statement that Sanders supporters are more progressive and less sexist or aggressive on average.
The fact that the specific Clinton supporters who used this sort of catchphrase used it to characterize political opponents but not their own bad actors nearly as much tells you that this was more about politics than promoting good behavior. As long as we’re realistic about that being the case. If those Clinton supporters cared mostly about bad behavior like they said they’d have come up with something like “Hillary men” too. But they didn’t and that tells me a lot.
“By continuing to expound on this, you’re also not exactly differentiating yourself from precisely that sort of Sanders supporter aside from being willing to use the more progressive supporters as camouflage.”
The whole point is that, like most Sanders supporters, I am that progressive supporter who gets tired of the Bernie bro narrative being expounded by people who disagree with the reality shown by the statistics I cited.
“People understandably get upset from constant complaints that Clinton was what lost the election”
And people also even more understandably get upset from constant comments about Bernie bros but I don’t see you defending me on that, instead you basically called me a “Bernie bro” as well. Sanders winning is a maybe, I agree, but Sanders supporters being better behaved and more progressive on average is a definite yes. And I don’t see anything wrong with reminding people who bring up the Bernie bro characterization out of the blue what the reality of the situation is. The specific person Aimee behaved badly in this particular case yet the broader characterization was brought up once again.
weirwoodtreehugger even doubles down on this anecdote that I’m free to disagree with, especially after citing those statistics: “But there just wasn’t the same phenomena of Clinton supporters brigading and harassing women and POC”. So do you agree or disagree with this comment that Sander supporters somehow were the sole perpetrators of this supposedly unique phenomenon?
@Robert
Again I express envy that your internet (and meatspace) is a somewhat less horrid place to live for marginalized people than mine
Bruh…
Welp, we can’t talk about toxic masculinity anymore, cos violence is not solely perpetrated by dudes
Welp, we can’t talk about white supremacists anymore, cos Candace Owens punk ass
Welp, we can’t talk about the gigatons of industrial waste, cos somebody used a plastic straw *gasp*
(all of those are real things btw, unfortunately)
Difference in scale, not strictly kind. Do catch up
@Oogly
Uhhh, same 🙂
…
…
…oh shi-
@All
If it walks like a duck…
I know what I saw during the election, which was a bunch of shitty Bernie Bros (NOT bernie sanders supporters, we are talking about the *Bernie Bros*) being super shitty to people.
Perhaps you didn’t see it.
But there is a *reason* that ‘Bernie Bro’ caught on, and there isn’t really a comparable one for the problematic Clinton supporters. (Of which there obviously were, humans are going to be humans.)
You also realise that this isn’t 2016 again though, right? And that seeing Bernie come back in again is not something that people are necessarily excited for?
He was the leftier candidate in the 2016 election, but he isn’t necessarily the leftiest one now. He was woefully bad on anything other than economics, and he’s still bad on it.
Did you see his performance at that WoC conference? It was not good. I can dig up the links to the videos if you want, but watching it was just an ‘ughhhhh’ moment.
Ughhhhhh.
ETA: Also what Axe said! You can criticise a group even if other people are doing Bad Things. Sheesh!
*waves at Axe* good to see you ’round.
The thing about die-hard Sanders supporters that truly puzzles me is their insistence that he would certainly have beaten Trump. It reminds me of a housemate at UC Berkeley in 1980, lamenting Reagan’s win and saying plaintively, ‘I can’t understand how he won – nobody I know voted for him!’
People who thought Clinton was too far Left were never going to vote for Sanders.
@Kevin
Yeah, it reminds me of similar posts I’ve seen on Swedish schools, but the school I went in had one entirely different tray for halal meatballs and sausages (with the unintentionally alarming text Muslim, only one per serving on it).
But seriously, if there is a threat to Swedish culture, it’s not from immigrants, it’s from American cultural imperialism and American brands replacing local stuff. If anyone in the English-speaking world actually wants to support and preserve Swedish culture, they should boycott all inferior Hollywood remakes of Swedish movies and TV-series and watch the originals with subtitles.
@Robert:
People who thought Clinton was too far left have an Overton Window that looks like an arrow slit. I mean, really. She, like Obama, was about as left-wing as Richard Nixon.
(Signed, a Canadian who is really damn annoyed that the part of our right-wing who thinks the U.S. right wing is something to emulate chewed up and spat out the less-extreme part of the Canadian right wing years ago.)
@Robert Park:
My comment wasn’t so much about calling you a ‘Bernie Bro’ as it was wondering if this is really the hill you want to die on. Though Rhuu’s comment also applies. The fact that you are treating defending Sanders from any accusations that he had some horrible supporters as being the most important says a lot more about you than it does about Sanders.
I said this to somebody else a few days ago: people treating personal slights (or, in this case, insults to their heroes) as things that need to be defended to the death are really one aspect of the general issues discussed here anyway.
@Robert:
Clinton lost in significant part due to poor Dem turnout. She didn’t generate a lot of enthusiasm from some sections of the base. Sanders did generate enthusiasm from those sections of the base — particularly younger and more progressive voters.
And she lost by such a narrow margin — a couple hundred thousand votes in a handful of counties in three states — it is very likely just a bit more Dem turnout in those states (all of which went Bernie in the primary) would have made Trump lose by a narrow margin instead.
We can never be 100% certain what would have happened. But I think it likely Sanders would have won. Or even a Clinton/Sanders ticket.
There seems to have been a contingent of upper-echelon DNCers who were sufficiently in bed with corporate interests that their preference order was Clinton – Trump – Sanders so they’d rather lose with Clinton than win with Sanders; and a lot more who thought Clinton would do better with black voters in southeast states than a) Sanders would or b) Clinton actually did.
All of this is 20/20 hindsight, of course. If they’d known going in that it would come down to a couple hundred thousand Rust Belt votes they might have made different choices.
Clintonite internet?
My days of not taking Robert Park seriously are certainly coming to a middle.
Anyway, I’m on the bus so I don’t feel like digging it up now, but I saw a poll where 25% of Sanders supporters would vote for Trump if anyone but Bernie won the 2020 nomination. Practically every day on Twitter I see Bernie Bros arguing that Elizabeth Warren isn’t good enough for them.
It’s that cult of personality shit that annoys me. There’s a whole lot of so called progressives who want to see this country turn into a dystopia just to punish us for not voting their guy in.
@Axecalibur
“Difference in scale, not strictly kind. Do catch up”
I clearly didn’t say we shouldn’t talk about those things and most of my first post was talking about those things in relation to fellow leftists on twitter and reddit which I think you read. I asked if Jenora agreed with the characterization by weirwoodtreehugger that somehow Sanders supporters brought something uniquely awful to the situation, that e.g. Clinton supporters don’t, despite all evidence to the contrary. Do you agree or disagree with that and if you disagree, why didn’t you address that comment as well since it’s the specific thing I was replying to?
@Rhuu
“But there is a *reason* that ‘Bernie Bro’ caught on, and there isn’t really a comparable one for the problematic Clinton supporters. (Of which there obviously were, humans are going to be humans.)”
What if the reason was the simple attempt to weaponize it against the broad Sanders support instead? After all the only crowd it caught on with was Clinton supporters, political enemies in that context. I’ll repeat that the statistics show a different picture to the one that supposedly was the case that people keep defending here. If I say I disagree with you and I actually saw Clinton supporters behave worse than Sanders supporters, is my opinion or yours closer to the reality of the situation somehow?
That the whole thread of discussion started with a user making the statement that this woman obviously is a Bernie bro and that Bernie supporters are actually somehow not more progressive on those issues than Clinton supporters, despite the opposite being true.
It’s weird how people go back and forth from “you can criticize all groups for Bad Stuff but also the group you’re talking about is Uniquely Bad compared to the one we’re defending despite statistical evidence to the contrary” or at least don’t address the second part of that statement when others make it which is the part I’m disagreeing with in the first place.
@Jenora
I’ll repeat that my argument was solely about setting the case straight about Sanders supporters quite likely being the more progressive and perhaps even less aggressive crowd on average, after people recited the Bernie bro narrative because of Aimee. Not that no bad actors supported Sanders. Again that was not my point. And yes, I don’t see anything wrong with dying on the hill of disputing a narrative that’s a distortion of reality to the extent that the opposite might be true. If someone doesn’t like it, they can not bring up the argument in the first place. If they do, I can argue against it in turn.
@Surplus
“a couple hundred thousand votes in a handful of counties in three states — it is very likely just a bit more Dem turnout in those states (all of which went Bernie in the primary) would have made Trump lose by a narrow margin instead.”
Absolutely. We certainly can’t know for sure but there’s a good chance it would have turned out that way. I’m not too optimistic but it’s a fair argument.
@weirwoodtreehugger
In fact as I said before, the same to a smaller percentage of Sanders supporters went for Trump than Clinton supporters went for McCain, which would agree with the situation of Sanders supporters leaning on average at least somewhat to the left of Clinton supporters.
https://twitter.com/forecasterenten/status/900442254426427394
Check the numbers there for example.
Case in point,
The reply to this tweet
https://twitter.com/Caissie/status/1126514592178302976?s=19
The original tweet is referring to the recent spate of brutally repressive forced birther bills passed in various states specifically because we now have a right wing Trump SCOTUS that will potentially effectively overturn Roe vs Wade. The guy who replied derisively? Check his timeline. It is full of Bernie worship and hate for all the other candidates. It’s all he tweets about. He’s such a leftist that he’s totally fine with all this Republic of Gilead shit that’s going down.
And Bernie bro, don’t come at me with 2008 numbers. A year is a lifetime in politics. Let alone 11 years. Do you think Warren or Harris supporters are going to vote for Trump in 2020? You seem to really be living in the past here.
Robert Park:
Why are you the way that you are?
But seriously… what’s wrong with your reading comprehension? weirwoodtreehugger is very obviously talking about Bernie Bros, which literally everyone knows is a small subset of Bernie supporters.
I’m a(n admittedly reticent) Bernie supporter, and I was even back in 2016 (although I think he failed race issues [Black Lives Matter, reparations, etc] rather spectacularly and that’s why he did so badly in the south with Black people; I also think he failed gender issues, and LGBTQ issues, rather spectacularly, as well). I did vote for Clinton in the general, however, for the same reason I’m going to vote Dem regardless again…
In 2016, I felt that Trump was way too fucking dangerous to risk, and so told everyone I could to hold their nose and vote for Clinton because we had to keep Trump from taking office. These last two years have proven me right, so I’m less interested in getting my favorite politician to be the Democratic candidate (in part because that would be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), and more interested in getting Trump as far away from the White House as fucking possible.
Meanwhile, I’ll probably vote for Bernie Sanders… or Elizabeth Warren… in the upcoming primaries. I haven’t decided yet.
I say all that to say that I understand wanting to defend your fave. But you are defending yourself and your fave from literally nothing.
There’s an old adage that goes “if it doesn’t apply to you, then they aren’t talking about you. If you have to tell people that it doesn’t apply to you, then it probably does.”
Go ask Imani Gandy or Elon James White or Rod and Karen Morrow or Sarah Jeong if Bernie Bros exist. I’m sure they’d be happy to point you to the reams of harassment they got from Bernie Bros (including, BTW, Glenn fucking Greenwald) in 2016 on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere… the racism, the misogyny, the general bigotry… I, being a fan of theirs, watched it unfold in real time.
Here… let’s take a trip down Memory Lane, shall we?
https://www.vox.com/2016/2/4/10918710/berniebro-bernie-bro
I just want to highlight that there at the top of the quote…
“Often, though, when supporters of Clinton or critics of Sanders complain about “Bernie Bros,” they’re not actually talking about Sanders supporters as a whole. They’re talking about a specific subset of Sanders supporters who are particularly active on social media (especially Twitter) and can be particularly aggressive in defending their candidate.”
Get it?
https://rewire.news/article/2016/02/22/yes-progressives-berniebro-problem/
There’s a shit ton of evidence that a small part of Sanders’ fanbase was made up of trolling assholes who made their voices extremely loud by attacking, harassing, and threatening anyone who dared critique Sanders… even if they voted for him! (Like Ta Nehisi-Coates)
Again… we’re talking about Bernie Bros; not Sanders’ supporters. If you’re not a Bernie Bro, then there’s no need to get defensive. The only reason you’d be getting defensive is if you do indeed fall into the group that’s being talked about.
BERNIE
BROS
ARE
NOT
BERNIE
SUPPORTERS.
You say (and also please start quoting, you can click the little button above the space where you are typing in your comments. If you don’t see it, enable javascript or disable noscript.)
‘Bernie Bro’ =/= A Bernie supporter.
You say
While we have made *painfully* clear that of *course* this person is a Bernie Bro. Of course they are. Because they see surface level solutions to things. And they are a terrible person.
I would expect an *actual* progressive to be, y’know, progressive. And more informed on issues. Like one would expect a supporter of a ‘socialist’ candidate to be? Wouldn’t you?
Since she’s not, but also is supporting Bernie, that puts her into the ‘bro’ category. Ugh.
Re: this particular topic – why aren’t *you* surprised that a Bernie supporter would basically say “you’re ugly so you should feel lucky that someone would be attracted to you/sexually harass you”?
You’re giving us a lot of grief over how ‘progressive’ bernie supporters are. Well, there’s a supporter. Look at what she says. Why aren’t you taking *her* to task?
@weirwoodtreehugger
Why, because they show Clinton supporters to be more centrist on average as all surveys tell us and that ruins the Clinton and Clinton supporters are more progressive narrative? Let’s see how many former Clinton supporters refuse to vote for Sanders if he’s the nominee, if we manage to get data on that.
@Nathan Hevenstone
As I said, he won Black millennials. Clinton won both older whites and blacks compared to younger ones so that’s not a good argument. Our peer group was won over by Sanders regardless of race.
Why are his supporters more LGBT than Clinton supporters then? Again, look at the surveys I quoted above. If Sanders somehow failed on all those issues, it’s weird how those groups were overrepresented in his voters compared to everyone else’s. I can understand if you’re making a “best of the worst” argument but the point I’m arguing here is that Sanders was still obviously seen as the best on these issues, despite what some Clintonites tell us.
Do you have any similar statistics to dispute what I quoted in my other posts?
You are the one who isn’t getting my point. I understand the “Bernie bro” smear is supposedly about that small part of Sanders supporters but you should re-read more carefully what I wrote on that topic in every comment of mine as well as this whole post.
I’m not defending my fave, I’m just setting the story straight on which crowd is in fact the more progressive and the one that produces less harassment on the internet, despite there being no equivalent easy smear for Clinton supporters. I mean I’m getting called a Bernie bro here for citing some statistics and you tell me this wasn’t used as an easy smear but only appropriately?
That rhetorical trick is really weird. “If you disagree with my characterizations, you’re obviously guilty of those characterizations”. I’ll reiterate what specifically I’m getting defensive about. As a Sanders supporter don’t you find it a bit weird that the Clinton crowd came up with that characterization but didn’t took their own supporters to task with a similar one or that a broad anti Clinton supporter smear didn’t take hold among Sanders supporters?
@Rhuu
Did you read my first post? Because that’s exactly what I did, commenting on that kind of individual. That’s what my first comment on this post was mostly about then when I mentioned that Sanders supporters are more progressive and less aggressive on the internet on average, according to statistics rather than random anecdotes, so I wonder why there’s a “Bernie bro” meme that took such hold on the Clintonite internet but nothing like that by Sanders supporters, I got a nice meme disputing that.
A similar question to all the people as Rhuu asked to me, especially Nathan who apparently supported Sanders over Clinton, that I’ve quoted here: why didn’t you similarly comment on the posts who said that there’s something uniquely abusive about (a subset of) Sanders supporters compared to Clinton supporters, like weirwoodtreehugger explicitly did, which is what the Bernie bro narrative was all about when we’re honest about it like weirwoodtreehugger was or who disputed the statistics I brought for no apparent reason but instead only commented on my disagreement? I’ve asked before but I’ll ask again: do you agree or disagree with them? If you don’t, “why aren’t you taking them to task”?
And more female as well. Look at the stats I cited above. One could make the argument that the use of “bro” was also a way to downplay the fact that Sanders supporters were more female than Clinton supporters on average. That’s the kind of weaponization of identity politics I’d take issue with. Ultimately trying to paint a political group of people as bros despite being more female than your political group is.
Yeah, sure, the obvious interpretation is that “bro” is just a reference to some aspects of more male oriented culture and that it was used as gender-neutral here. But the further implications of its use shouldn’t escape us especially when I’ve seen plenty of people be really amazed in the past when I showed them that Sanders supporters were more female.
@Park
I just wanna sit on this one for a bit, cos it’s in my craw. Like, the idea that scale by itself can’t make things unique or the ignorance that scale requires inherent uniqueness. To go back to a previous example, me using a disposable straw and the plastic pollution on the scale of industry *are* in fact totally unique processes. It’s really both sidesy, and that’s the kinda thing that leads to straw bans. Republicans are actively destroying democracy in order to keep black people from voting and immigrants from asylum, but the Democrats gerrymandered Maryland, so same thing basically…
Similarly (tho to a lesser extent before somebody who doesn’t grasp analogy says anything), a few mean Clinton fans (me among them, Clinton fan and big meanie) are not the same as the GGesque hate mob that surrounded Sanders. And which he and his campaign fuckin helped cultivate, let’s not forget. If nothing else, the fact that he and his campaign found it powerfully difficult to plainly denounce the mob (lotta talk of how much sense it makes for the mob to be angry at the system, man) is enough for me to call it “uniquely awful”
So, to answer your question:
Yes, thanks for asking
Robert Park,
I told you why it doesn’t make sense to use 2008 numbers. Clearly you are incapable of engaging in good faith.