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Great post. Calls to disown problematic friends and family are the most repugnant part of the “social justice” movement.

We just got done with the holidays, where as usual a bunch of tools racked up likes on Twitter condemning anyone who eats dinner with Republican relatives. As if boycotting family events over politics will help a single person anywhere.

No wonder the movement is so unpopular, when everything people value can be construed as literal violence. America, your family, the holidays themselves (colonialism). Just stay home in the dark and tweet correct opinions, for justice.

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Everything you’ve said is true, but I do think it’s largely an illusion that we all have to be trapped in this condemnatory nightmare. We, meaning all of us whose professional lives are not connected to having a public persona. Just stop spending time on these internet platforms. When you think of something clever, just say it out loud, laugh about it in real life with a friend, and let it vanish into the ether. Watch a movie and then don’t immediately Google what others thought of it. Write down your thoughts on things in private, without tailoring it to an audience of people you don’t have regard or respect for. Let them all drown in their own ever shrinking pool of excrement, fighting to drag each other along. It’s too late for Patton Oswald, but the rest of us don’t need to share the books we read, the friends we keep, and the ideas we have with millions of people and open ourselves up to the roar of their judgment. It’s hard when you are used to curating yourself for public consumption to come back to a primarily private sense of yourself but I think it’s the most important thing you can do for your own well being and quality of life.

By the way, I loved the first part of this post. You must have been an excellent teacher.

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022Liked by Freddie deBoer

Choosing Prole as your starter character cripples your early campaign and you are limited to Hard or Legendary difficulty, but it does give you a +2 save vs cancelation and a roster of support characters to buff and heal.

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Jan 4, 2022·edited Jan 4, 2022

Great post.

I struggle to put my finger on exactly what changed, in our culture and politics, from my initial awakening (2004, Bush re-election campaign) to the present day. It's clear to me that *so* much is different, and it's also clear to me that "wokeness" or "social justice" or "Twitter progressivism" or *whatever you want to call it* is an essential part of it. That particular movement, whether I agree with its ideas or not, dominates my intellectual life. And I think a key part of what I struggle with is that it's hard for me to clearly articulate my issues with it.

Partially, this is because there is a motte-and-bailey dynamic happening here, where stated one way, the ideas underpinning Twitter progressivism are uncontroversial, but then, stated another way, they require me to renounce, I don't know, my brother for voting for Trump, or the traditional liberal defense of free speech, or any number of things that I am pretty sure I am never going to renounce.

The other reason why it's hard to clearly state an opposition to Twitter progressivism is that what I am against is less a set of ideas, and more a particular critical orientation. An orientation that I wouldn't call wrong, but I would, echoing many of the commenters here, call joyless. Seeking the most negative, provocative, inflammatory interpretations of everyday life and culture, rubbing everyone else's faces in the grossness and misery of life, and using all of that to elevate oneself in competitive social, cultural, and political circles. There is a high-minded cruelty to all of this, exacerbated by social media, and I think it haunts all of us, whether we buy into the movement or not. And the critical voice of the movement, the one that finds fault with everything, that voice, once it found me, I was never able to get rid of it. There is some sort of memetic poisoning that happened when I discovered Twitter progressivism, and I'm not sure much can be done to cure me of it. I can't really turn the voice off, even if I think it's toxic bullshit. Even calling it "toxic" shows just how thoroughly it has already defeated me :).

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I have asked many people - both online and in person - what it was that Chapelle actually said that was so offensive, and I haven't gotten an answer yet. I choose to remain ignorant until one of these very angry people tells me what it was that I am supposed to be angry about.

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There has to be something utterly soul crushing to be a supplicant weenie like Oswalt, on a grand, shameless, public scale. I wonder if he hates that he has to be such a weenie, if he had to let Chappelle know “hey, buddy, I gotta write a mea culpa for posting that photo of us. You’re still my bud, but I gotta put food on the table and my agent tells me I have to do this if I ever want to work in this town again. Nothing personal. We good?” This is what passes for a comedian these days.

I’ve been told repeatedly that conservatives are the OG moral scolds, and I believe it, though that deserves some qualification. Since I’ve lived in the US, conservatives in the particular cities I’ve lived in, and in the broader national media, have had zero social or cultural power. Their scolds were met with deafening guffaws. Maybe in some rural towns they ruled with an iron fist and stamped out all wrong think. I think this was likely and pervasive in many places. But they never had power in big cities or in media or entertainment, at least not in the last 35 years that I’ve seen.

And “book banning” is not the term I’d use to describe the parents trying to keep some books out of school. “Book banning” is pregnant with so much meaning, a lever you pull that simultaneously evokes many horrors of totalitarianism, oppression, and thought policing. At its core it means banning a book, everywhere. That’s why it’s such a repugnant and dangerous practice. Parents not wanting their 11 year olds casually picking up in their school library a comic book depiction of underage blow jobs is not banning a book everywhere, only making decisions about what’s age appropriate. Though I don’t agree that this effort should be enforced through laws. I support school curriculum transparency laws, and process and approval laws, but not book or ideology blacklist laws.

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When I used to twitter, I followed both Ellis and Oswalt, and I saw them transform from clever, kind, reasonable people into petty, virtue chasing, unhinged moral maniacs in real time and it really bummed me out. Their gradual mental putrefaction due to exposure to that platform was just one of the many reasons I hopped off the twitter hate-bus. Like Freddie says, it’s no surprise that the leopards eventually came for their faces, but it doesn’t make it any less useless, tragic or pointless. I used to really enjoy their faces.

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I love the discussion of Gawain as the tension between Chivalric duty and Christian duty. This is a theme of a whole bunch of medieval literature, both fiction like the Arthurian romances and "non-fiction" literature like historical chronicles.

One can argue that this is because nearly all of the literature that we have was written by the social classes that this problem mattered to -- the aristocratic warrior/master class who directly experienced those tensions, and the clerical class that was adjacent to that class but was positioned with enough distance to critique its value system.

It's a more open question, unfortunately, whether such tensions mattered at all to the vast laboring class. We have a lot fewer sources for their moral voices, and those that we do have are still usually filtered through the eyes of the clerics and nobles who wrote the stuff down. Did a peasant actually feel any tension between different forms of moral obligation? Nobody was trying to make them be chivalrous, so was it just church morality vs. general human shittiness, with no third force? Or were there other forms of obligation, like family loyalty or pre-Christian agrarian cultural values, that competed with Christianity for the peasant heart?

Then again, one could argue that the voices that we have are the voices that matter to historical development, since, tautologically, only the literate class could read and write about ethical problems, so only the literate class could think of ethical problems as historical topics worthy of being discussed. We simply aren't the intellectual inheritors of the medieval working class, since they could leave no intellectual inheritance (or perhaps, whatever inheritance they could leave was in the form of traditional material behaviors, which were basically all destroyed by industrialization -- if you want to think like a peasant, you'll have to learn how to swing a scythe).

All we can take from the past is what we have been given by the scribblers in monasteries and courts. So of course we think of medieval times as a great struggle between Christianity and Chivalry, because that's what it was for monks and knights.

We can, like Nietzsche, see this as part of a huge historical epic stretching from Moses to the French Revolution -- and we might be right about that even if 98% of the population in any given historical year never spent a minute thinking about it.

Likewise, Twitter is a conversation that "doesn't matter" to the vast majority of people -- but it matters very much to the literate class that spends time worrying about moral problems. We're all still just monks and knights, caring about monk/knight stuff while most people just keep living their lives.

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I’m about your age, similar background and education. Two thoughts.

First, I was an excellent English student, but I decided not to major or pursue it further because I realized that I all needed to do to get As on papers was make stuff up. Words in the texts were just malleable puzzle pieces. Talk about some parallel phrasing here, a common theme there, and I was praised and rewarded - regardless of whether my claim bore any relation to actual authorial intent, etc. I’m not suggesting the discipline of literature is illegitimate, more that this kind of associational interpretation was really the main skill I was taught through college. That exercise is now wielded on an exponential scale due to the proliferation of the written word through social media, such essentially anything can constantly “smack of,” “raise questions about,” “provide cover for,” etc. This has resulted in some really wild claims that collapse vital distinctions between present and past, individual and systemic problems, and (as you’ve noted) political aims and new social/etiquette norms. We disagree somewhat, but we’re also all talking about our own interpretation of different things, and so all that cuts through is the infinite ways in which That Person Is Bad. To the extent my fellow PMCs and I feel a lack of meaning, it’s partly because this is all we were trained to do.

Second, my main inculcation in moral values and heroic myths came through (1) learning about the Civil Rights Movement throughout primary and secondary education (along with slavery, Jim Crow, etc - all vital and good), and (2) the 2000s politics of gay marriage, which crystallized a political lens and a particular notion of righteousness (and evilness of opponents) among my general demographic, particularly those of us who for whatever reason couldn’t really grok Iraq or economics at that point. I still hold the values I learned through those processes, but they’re being stretched into uber-explanations of the world that they were never meant to be - partly because they embody the most quasi-religious beliefs many of us hold and it feels good to be righteous. And again, because the actual policy and process questions are complicated and frankly boring to many, people seize on the belief that they’re doing their civic duty by participating in denunciation culture (and all those likes don’t hurt either).

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"It’s one thing to find Chappelle’s words bigoted and offensive, a perfectly fair position. It’s another thing to think that the people ostensibly fighting against them here are actually motivated in good faith, given that this action can't possibly help trans rights."

I agree with the whole post, but I know some of these people, and believe me they are deluded enough to think that they're helping, and that it has to do with "holding people accountable," and making society better somehow because "we won't tolerate" the bad things, and so the bad things will stop. And the vulnerable and marginalized will be safe! They really believe this.

The reality is, they feel vulnerable and marginalized, and basically powerless, and this makes them feel more in control. It's a cheap solidarity (with the people who agree with them against the baddies who don't) and an illusion of accomplishment that feeds some kind of receptor. Dopamine? I don't know, but they're like rats pulling the lever for the thing. Or me playing bubble spinner.

We do these things because we feel powerless and life is not good and we don't have any idea how to make it better, so we go for the fix. I know I'm doing it -- I'm not such an idiot that I think breaking my previous record on bubble spinner is Doing The Work -- but they really don't know better.

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Nailed it. The Left is now the Right, meaning that the Social Justice set are now the ones doing all the moralizing and scolding and public shaming whereas in the past it was religious nuts.

You know, my politics haven't changed much. I'm still the same anti-authoritarian, left-leaning, pro-free speech guy I always have been. It's just that the group abusing its grip on the culture has changed in the past few decades. There are days when I hate these wokescolds and their sneering, condescending attitudes so much that it eclipses my hate for far right conspiracy mongerers. I dunno, it's just a personality quirk.

And the anti-anti-cancel culture types like Michael Hobbes? Oooooh, I REALLY hate that guy. I have to fight the urge to throw my phone across the room whenever I see what he's up to.

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More than anything what I take from this post is that deep knowledge of religion and history and literature would temper what you characterize as the "directionless moralism within our aspirational classes." The introduction to this essay was perfect to me. It takes the issues to a higher plane before addressing the actions today. Had I not been a reader of medieval poetry and a child who carefully balanced indulgences against my sins I might not have responded so intently, but I was.*

I've been in an ongoing struggle with a young person abt. 22 who covers local politics (very well) but can't stop his directionless moralism. He characterizes people with whom he doesn't agree as "terrible" and there is no quarter. I have decided that if someone hasn't read at least __Notes from Underground__ I can't take anything they moralize about as having any substance.

*And in spite of the abolition of indulgences to knock off time in purgatory I still think there is a scorecard out there...I mean someone kept track of all those rosaries I said for less time in limbo, didn't they? And you could be forgiven, right along, which was to me a good part of my childhood religion.

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Jesus. "Coward" is a good, serviceable word, but somehow it doesn't seem quite adequate to describe what Oswalt and his ilk are. "Lickspittle." That's a good one - maybe we should bring it back. And it doesn't necessarily spring from fear of loss of material security, does it? Remember the dust-up a few years ago when Stephen King was reckless enough to say something to the effect that all he judged a writer by was the quality of his or her work? The usual suspects exploded and he backed down tout suite. Why? He's old and fabulously rich and his sales probably couldn't be much hurt by the flesh-eating living dead of Twitter. But the outlandish success and popularity and financial security earned by a lifetime of labor somehow hasn't earned him the freedom to say what he thinks and not give a damn whether it upsets anyone or not.

I gripe sometimes about the vulgarization of our culture, but sometimes the only appropriate - even honorable - response is a hard, fast "Fuck you!"

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Will you kindly stop writing such damn good essays so that I can get some work done in 2022?

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I enjoyed the way you brought religion in to the conversation. One of my favorite lines from the prophets is Micah "do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with your god."

Those nine words create, in a nutshell, an infinite philosophical space.

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There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new examples every day and new ways of teaching these lessons. Thank you for a great article.

And I'm glad this isn't an anti-woke article. First and foremost because you and everyone reading this could recite it in their sleep without reading it. But more importantly because, as you correctly point out, the woke mob is just the most visible and - temporarily - powerful force, but the impulse to shame and to police and to banish exists everywhere.

As the pendulum swings away from Peak Woke (I'm pretty sure it has, and we're starting the backswing now) the temptation among many will be to be holier than the stragglers. People who have sat on the sidelines and tutted will become as vicious as those they once opposed. The mob will morph. Better not to join the mob at all.

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