By David Futrelle
Probably none of you have been wondering just what Aimee Terese has been up to lately but I’m going to tell you anyway.
Therese — the skidmarxist Twitter troll with strangely reactionary views on everything but Bernie Sanders — recently took a few moments from one of her interminable squabbles with leftists who think she’s a reactionary idiot to offer some thoughts on vibrators. Naturally, she’s against them.
She began by taking issue with a jokey photo that replaced the hammer in the famous communist hammer-and-sickle with a Hitachi Magic Wand.
When others responded to her humorless anti-vibrator jab with mockery, she puled out her Marxism Buzzword Cheat Sheet and doubled down.
THE WORKING CLASS HAS NO TIME FOR YOUR PETTY BOURGEOIS ORGASMS!
I’m not sure that, say, Emma Goldman would have agreed on this one. Didn’t she once famously declare “if I can’t dance with myself I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”
Well, it was something like that.
Changing the subject somewhat, Terese decided to weigh in on environmental activist Greta Thunberg and … 12-year-olds having sex?
After reading this through several times, I’m going to give Terese the benefit of the doubt and assume that she’s not seriously calling for the age of consent to be lowered to twelve.
No, she seems rather to be suggesting that we shouldn’t listen to Greta Thunberg because she’s twelve.
Which is a weird argument to make given that Thunberg is actually sixteen. It’s also a little disingenuous, given that Terese doesn’t want anyone listening to environmentalists of any age.
In a tweet today Terese came so close (yet so far away) to a moment of real self-awareness.
Why might that be, Aimee? Why?
Principal Skinner once found himself in a similar predicament.
H/T — Thanks to Twitter’s @WreckerCaucus for keeping tabs on Terese and other reactionary skidmarxists.
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@Beyond Ocean
She’s a woman.
All, I never, ever referred to Ms Terese as being indicative of all Marxists. I’ve found distaste with Marxists of all stripes, from Leninists to Trots to Tankies to Maoists, et c.
And be careful as a lot of your responses are beginning to sound like No True Scotsman fallacies 😉
No arron yours is a straw man.
You said you dont like all marxists, communists, etc. Which shows you really didn’t speak or listen or spend time with them. Becuase true marxists, true communists, they care about each other, about workers and about society.
Your single sentence patronising saying “you’re sounding like no true scotsman” makes NO SENSE. You made an ignorant and confusing comment and people replied to tell you that. No true scotsman does not work becuase Aimee is clearly not a marxist. She used language like that but look at what she is actually SAYING. Try to understand what she believes, and you will clearly see (unless you are trying not to see on purpose) that her beliefs dont even match AT ALL to those of marxists. But then your original comment and this one make it quite clear that you dont know much about Marxism or communism at all
To add onto what Valentin said:
Also, there are significant differences between the different kinds of ideologies Aron listed. There is a big difference, for example, between Maoism and Trotskyism.
Also, to say that one individual is not representative of a group that she doesn’t belong to is not a No True Scotsman fallacy. It would be a No True Scotsman fallacy if I changed the definition of Marxism to exclude her, but she never fit the existing definition in the first place. I thought that was an established fact.
@Lainy:
Well, you can’t copyright the works of government, and this was a propaganda poster. Therefore I suspect this is in the public domain, but I don’t know for sure. Despite the appearance on the propaganda poster, things can get complicated. For instance, the government could have paid a use-fee to the photographer who took Rosie’s picture, and then the propaganda poster as a whole wouldn’t be copyrightable, but as soon as you took Rosie’s image out of that context, you might violate the copyright of the original photographer.
On the other hand, “fair use” can do considerable work now that her image is so widely and deeply embedded in popular culture, and excerpting a work for comment or parody is fair use.
Of course, if you aren’t making money on your rip off, it likely doesn’t matter anyway (it could, but in all probability doesn’t). Maybe I’ll look up Rosie specifically later, if I have time.
@Crip Dyke
AFAICT it is public domain in the United States. At least I think that’s what this means. From Wikimedia Commons:
You know more about copyright law than I do, so if I am interpreting this all wrong please ignore.
@Naglfar:
Useful info, but of course government works aren’t copyrightable anyway (See this answer on Quora.)
Again, I think that there’s no problem, but I’m not absolutely sure because there was an original photo of an actual person that was used to create the first poster. If the government licensed that image rather than purchased it, then even though the poster as a whole is not copyrighted and can be reproduced in its entirety, excerpting just Rosie’s image could conceivably violate the original photographer’s copyright on the original image which other artists then rendered as a drawing later.
If you actually wanted to make money on Rosie’s image (like if you were making a movie about her) you’d want more information.
But really, for non-commercial purposes it’s hard to see how any claim might exist that you’d be diluting or otherwise spoiling. I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m giving actual legal advice on any specific issue, but I would certainly use the Rosie character freely unless and until I was basing some money-making business decision on it.
“Rosie the Riveter” is… complicated— am I right in thinking the image on the vibrator was the “We Can Do It” poster? Because that image was not originally Rosie the Riveter, but it’s associated with her now, partly because the Norman Rockwell painting that *was* titled “Rosie the Riveter” was and may still be protected by the Rockwell estate: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Can_Do_It!
I can half-see her logic here – like “capitalism convinces us that physical pleasure is something that is achievable and desirable, and then sells us products purporting to provide such pleasure – but, all true comrades know that orgasms are a bourgeois excess, and that the workers’ only passion should be working in manufacturing facilities to produce rivets, spigots and trunnions”. So long as you accept all the flawed premises, the reasoning is sound!
@Diptych
Welcome to reactionary logic.
The mentions of orgasms as bourgeois reminds me of a bizarre antifeminist op ed by Camille Paglia (which was expertly dissected by Cliff Pervocracy).
Then I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is, it has come up with some technological solution that can get rid of all the bad stuff before it ruins everything. The bad news (for aspiring oil tycoons) is that what it came up with is windmills and solar panels and EVs.
You misunderstand me. These folks do not consider gasoline, natural gas, or coal to be bad things. They’re actually good things because they’re used to make rich people even richer and the world is a naturally just place where rich people deserve to be super rich because they’re just better and more deserving than everyone else.
The only bad things that actually exist are the ones that directly negatively impact the individual right-winger personally. By the time that climate change has progressed enough to do that (no, massive fires and floods and killer extreme weather doesn’t count, that’s all just bad luck), the right-wingers are sure that there will be some kind of magical carbon vacuum cleaner developed that will instantly reverse all the damage and allow for the unchanged (lbr, increased) perpetual consumption of fossil fuels.
Aron
All, I never, ever referred to Ms Terese as being indicative of all Marxists. I’ve found distaste with Marxists of all stripes, from Leninists to Trots to Tankies to Maoists, et c
This is why I can’t stand Marxists of any stripe. Also I’m proudly bourgeois.
Meh.
Aron
Well it sure would be embarrassing for you if you had a comment that made it clear you found her indicative of Marxists as a whole something like….Oh I don’t know
Sure would be embarrassing for you!
No idea how the Blockqoute ended up taking my comment and not his but the point stands.
I suppose you could justify opposition to sex toys with a questionable interpreting the “opium of the masses” passage, seeing them as another false comfort that distracts people from seeing their chains. But that doesn’t seem to be the argument being made.
@Specialffrog
But most religions oppose sex toys and masturbation, and Marx said that religion was the opiate of the masses, so wouldn’t he have probably been ok with sex toys?
@Naglfar: I didn’t say it was a _good_ argument, just a more coherent one. Besides, it doesn’t require any affinity between religion and sex toys. If you see religion as a tool cynically used by those in power to keep the masses distracted from their suffering it’s not much of a leap to see the same group using other forms of tools in the same manner.
But I agree that it doesn’t really work. The passage is explicitly a call to reject illusory happiness in favour of real happiness.
The Skidmarxists are reactionary trolls posing as legitimate leftists. If they actually think of themselves as socialists or progressives, they understand nothing about either.
True, that seems a bit like No True Scotsman, but the opinions the Skidmarxists display are incoherent and incompatible with the actual values of those two groups.
Wild Geeters has a twitter thread about the ‘communist threat of vibrators’:
https://twitter.com/classiclib3ral/status/1196881747801186304
*grin*
How about Squidmarxists?
Is that a Cthulu worshiping Marxist?
Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Capital R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn! Ia! Ia! Means of production fhtagn!