I've already recounted annoyance at the author's rhetoric. Here are a few more flaws and inaccuracies:
Shorter Shag: he lobs cliches into the maws of his readers.
Long Shag:
1. He practices a neato kind of lying described by Howard Zinn: acknowledge that you don't have your shit straight, that it's not really how things are, that it's probably sloppy, but say it anyway.
2. Don't document anything. Define terms but never source the definition. Never point to an author, anywhere.
3. Paint a diverse social movement - the New Left - as containing no contradictions. Point to some other amorphous blob that supposedly emerged in the 1990s and call it the "post- new left" and also describe it as having no contradictions, but a clear trajectory.
4. Use the term "new left" and, with a straight face, maintain that among New Left movements in the 60s and 70s use of the term exploitation was common. Or, use the term New Left to refer to a more loosely defined social movement and continue to maintain, with a straight face, to suggest that they dropped words like exploitation or expressed their struggles as primarily about capitalist exploitation and that they did so without protest from others or dissent, that such language was uncontested outside marxist / party/labor circles.
5. maintin that people only spoke of oppression and not privilege in the New left, and ignore - for instance - the 1969 debate among SDS leadership where the National Office faction wanted to wage "all out war on white skin privileges" and the Progressive Labor faction was all boo hissy about "student power" and criticized Black power as "bourgeois nationalism".
6. Maintain that consciousness raising was widely used term outside of feminist circles and that, even within feminist circles, it wasn't hotly contested and what the consequences were as a result of that contestation.
Next, conveniently leave out the fact that consciousness raising invovled a temporary separatism to create a "safe space" away from men, away from white feminists, away from straights, away from the able-bodied, etc.
7. Say that new lefties used terms like "people" and spoke universally to all oppressed people, conveniently ignoring that for awhile, the phrase wasn't "people" but men, brotherhood, brothers, man, mankind, brethren.
8. Make this claim about the widespread use of "folks" instead of "people" and ingore a more likely explanation such as "These folks are doing X" sounds qualitatively different than "These people are doing X". Erm, "these people" is kind of like saying the n word sometimes and can be easily misconstrued. Since you are analyzing mostly online talk, not surprising people go for "these folks" instead of "these people".
But hey, if you got some content analysis to show for your effort, some evidence about language use in each era might, you know, be helpful.
No? Nevermind, just a thought.
Still, I guess it is worthwhile to engage in motive mongering and say that the reason they use folks is because, sadly, lefties are thinking in terms of particularities instead of universalities. Gosh! no one wants to speak in a universalizing language like "the people" and, boy, doesn't that suck and limit us and keep change from happening. Because, yup, if we'd just been allowed to keep struggling for the people and making universal claims about what all people want everywhere, things woulda worked out.
9. Make an equivalence between an informal practice, calling out, and a theorized practice, consciousness raising. while both are hotly contested in the environments where they are used, the equivalence suggests that calling out has the imprimatur of some sort of unified "post-new left" in the say way that, for instance, consciousness raising came with workshops on how to do it, books about it as a "method" attendant to a theory, etc.
10. Use incredibly weird and ghostly language to describe a New left focus on alliances. These apparently are the result of a confluence that arise from struggles that are oriented "oward the coordinated pursuit of common aims". We do not know how these things happen, only that they do, and this is to be contrasted with a less worthy condition in which "allies" "take direction" from people in oppressed groups.
The horror! The shame. I mean, at least when you are involved in the new left, there is a strange force that kicks in and everything just 'conflows' toward the coordinated pursuit of common aims" and no one has to 'take direction" from anyone.
The spirit moves!
11. I don't even know what to make of the I am Trayvon/I am Not Trayvon part. At this point this author is seriously confused and never read a word of what got said during those discussions. If you got something I'm not aware of, be specific, name names and quote blogs. Or would that be haaaaaaaaaaaaaaard?
12. claim that liberation was the dominant language of the 60s? Really? Because I seem to recall the deep despair people had by the end of the 60s when it was all about rights and the language, liberation, was dropped? I mean, if you are going to periodize and some of the stufy you are talking about as characterizing two decades didn't even make it into one of them, maybe you should consider that the analysis is about as subtle as the cudgel in the hands of the bad guy at the end of Donkey Kong. Since we are being all retro and stuph.
shag
On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 12:50 PM, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd be interested in hearing how the article is any dumber, or more
> grossly simplified or New Agey, than the language it reports.
>
> If it has flaws or inaccuracies, what are they? Serious question.
>
> On Tue, Feb 4, 2014 at 7:28 PM, Eric Beck <ersatzdog at gmail.com> wrote:
> > This article is d-u-m. Grossly simplified, newagey taxonomy. So of course
> > it's been seized upon by conservative, class-first-and-only leftists as
> > revealing the shortcomings of today's (allegedly) individualist,
> > therapeutic identitarians. Bleck.
> >
> > On Tuesday, February 4, 2014, Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> There's lots of interest here for those from the right mileaus. I
> >> might follow up with some thoughts later, but will start with the link
> >> for now.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://rabble.ca/news/2014/02/check-your-privilege-rise-post-new-left-political-vocabulary
> >>
> > ___________________________________
> > http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
> mægen lytlað."
>
> ___________________________________
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>