M-L-M Mayhem!

A common adage about the "alt-right" repeated ad nauseum on social media by liberal journalists and alt-right trolls themselves is that its emergence has a lot to do with angry online leftists, particularly the "Social Justice Warriors" (SJWs), as well as call-out culture, identity politics, virtue signalling, etc. The assumption here is that most of these new white supremacists wouldn't have existed if they weren't dog-piled by self-righteous SJWs or anti-oppression university academics: these alienated young whites could have been won over if they had been treated differently, and it is in fact the committed anti-capitalist broad left that is at fault for the resurgence of white supremacy not the white supremacists themselves. In some ways this reads like a new version of the horse-shoe theory and, like the horse-shoe theory, it is thoroughly unscientific. To be fair, I get the concern of the more well-meaning individuals who make this claim. They wonder

Finally, after many months and a lot of shameless self-promotion for my books, I edited the final chapter and epilogue of Right Against Right , formatted them, and made them available for download. I apologize for the 5 month delay; the editing and layout didn't take me that long so I have no idea why I waited so long. For those who might be unfamiliar with this serialized extended essay, Right Against Right  is my longer and more involved discussion on the problematic of free speech. It should be relevant in a context where the convention of free speech is being mobilized by reactionaries against progressives and when liberals, because of their dedication to this convention, support the former over the latter. It is also opposed to pseudo-progressive valorizations of the convention of free speech in that it argues that this convention is thoroughly liberal. (The prologue is available here , the first chapter here , and the second chapter here .) In the third chapter I exa

Having lost the US election to Trump reactionism, rather than recognize their role in the reemergence of fascism the Democrats have resorted to magical thinking. Rather than realizing they were part of the problem of fascism––that they enabled Trump, that they were part of the settler-garrison racist ethos that is USAmerica and thus presented not even the ghost of a marginal alternative––the Democrats resorted to conspiracy theories about Russian hacking. As one of my good friends joked, the neo-liberals that once prided themselves in their hawkish realism have taken to bandying about the kind of conspiracy theory crackpot explanations that they always accused Republicans of making. Anything but realize that there is something deeply wrong with US democracy and the USAmerican project. This magical thinking is all the more ludicrous since, like most conspiracy theories, it is necessarily ineffective. Trump will still be inaugurated in a few days, the liberals will crow about foreign h

Continuing the serial of my pamphlet on bourgeois free speech, I'm posting the link to its second chapter. This chapter concerns the boundaries of free speech, the metaphor of the marketplace of ideas, the supposed "black market of ideas" that is used in anti-censorship discourses, and the free market logic behind this liberal discourse. It leads up to the concept of the harm principle which will be discussed in the following chapter. Download Right Against Right (Chapter 2)

Once again, like the aborted Torsion and Tension manuscript, I have a project that did not make the roster of publication submission. Unlike Torsion and Tension , that I eventually withheld because I thought it was incomplete, I was unable to submit this particular (and smaller) manuscript for publication because it was initially meant to be part of a series of extended essays that I was unable to consolidate. The point of this series was to produce a number of very small books––the non-fiction equivalent of novellas or novelletes––that were designed to interrogate particular ruling class conventions. Here was the original proposed series blurb: Excavating Bourgeois Ideas is a series of extended essays intended to provide a radical “thinking through” of key ruling ideas of the ruling class. The point with each of these engagements is not to provide a thorough engagement of the subject matter but instead to promote a thoughtful but polemical introduction to the concepts in question

Trump's victory is not an anachronism. USAmerica has always been a settler-colony par excellence , more muscular in its colonialism and white supremacy than Canada and even the late British Empire, and so the emergence of a fascist figurehead is in fact a consummation of what that country has always been. Trump represents a certain apex of what this national project's essence, though stripped of its liberal pretensions. The fact that a rich rapist who was successful only insofar as his dad loaned him money––who pretends to be a self-made man despite having weathered bankruptcy because of his inheritance––and because he was a media spectacle, and yet at the same time could pretend he was the accomplishment of the American Dream demonstrates that this dream is not only vacuous but that it is in fact based on the reality of Founding Fathers: wealthy, slave-owning, settler aristocrats who liked to proclaim their colony's "greatness" while pursuing the most egregious a

Is there anything more annoying than those individuals who imagine that they are "saving the left from itself"? You know the people I mean and if you don't you will soon: self-proclaimed gadflies who believe that their own personal understanding of the world is more rational and correct that the left as a whole, who worry that the left is going to far (and sometimes inaccurately use the words "fascist" when they aren't using "totalitarian" to describe said left), who maintain that they are the true left critics of progressive populations who just don't get it, who natter on about liberal free speech as if this convention is inherently progressive, who are repulsed by political violence, and who occasionally like to cite Orwell. None of this is to say that the broad and mainstream anti-capitalist left does not deserve critique from this very same left, that lines of demarcation need to be drawn between tendencies, and that some practices the l

Lionel Shriver's recent complaint about charges of "cultural appropriation" has caused me to think again about the uses and abuses of the term. For those unfamiliar with Shriver's speech regarding cultural appropriation it goes something like this: at the Brisbane Writer's Festival the author of We Need To Talk About Kevin  and The Mandibles delivered a speech about " fiction and identity politics " that was about the right of authors to write and represent any culture they desired and that all charges of racism or cultural appropriation were attacks on a writer's essential right to free expression. Since the speech was driven by her anger at a particular criticism made of The Mandibles , it was in many ways a knee-jerk "how dare you tell me what I can write about" screed. In the context of recent debates in literary forums about the ethics of representation that have raised a number of important concerns (i.e. when and how is it justified

Once in a while some truly terrible pieces of left anaylsis come along that confirm each other's intellectual vapidness: two articles that read as if they were written for each other by two frienemies on different sides of a poorly understood debate, justifying their respective analysis in their hermetically sealed echo chamber they believe is reality. When this happens the temptation is to believe in poetic fate or synchronicity: what a weird coincidence! This was my instinct when I read that self-important " We Are The Left " article around the same time that I read another eye-roll inducing Identity Politics is Shit article: they must have been written for each other, they both take the analysis of their opposite as the straw-person of their object of critique and in doing so become caricatures of themselves. First, the article by "We Are The Left" that is entitled, with the same self-importance, "An Open Letter on Identity Politics To and From the Le

Ever since I wrote the rather polemical blog post Whose Speech and For Whom  four years ago I have been receiving, whenever it is reshared each year, complaints from people amongst the left who really want to preserve the liberal notion of free speech and completely misunderstand the motivation of the post in question.  Of course it doesn't help that this post is taken for some kind of total legislation against free speech/expression by those who have a monolithic conception of capitalism, but this is only a secondary problem considering that the offended parties, if they bothered to really read this article and similar ones, wouldn't be writing me asinine complaints about how I don't understand the importance of free speech.  How I am undermining the very existence of this blog by supposedly claiming I have no right to freely complain about free speech when I am freely speaking. How I benefit from free speech.  And etc. At this point I'm becoming rather annoyed by th