Many liberals were like Bill Maher and wanted Milo gone because they were watching themselves craving to make him mainstream, and had to disown this fact to keep their equilibrium. They weren't ready, so he's locked away to keep them from seeing more of a powerful part of themselves they can only now condemn. So now we go through this period where we find out how many of the left were pro-pedophilia (Bill Maher himself, for instance; Salon.com published pro-pedophilia materials; many liberal anthropologists, noting the amount of adult-child sex in the tribes they study, have been pro-pedophilia for years, and it goes on and on, principally because it's something the Right could be imagined as having no sympathy with for it being outside their very limited understanding of what constitutes acceptable sexual pairings), and where it is becoming respectable for members of the left to pretty much sound like MRA in denouncing the Lena Dunhams and Hillary Clintons of the world (Jessa Crispin in her new book, for instance -- she even likes nationalism over cosmopolitanism, apparently), as well as "special snowflakes," "trigger warnings, "safe spaces," etc: anything upper-echelon progressive. And then when this is just all out and everyone's accommodated to a sort of sullen, "everyone's full of shit" point of view, many on the left will welcome Milo back into the mainstream because he's useful for setting detonations in place they can claim no association with, just enjoy the repercussions. You don't think Bill Maher wanted Milo on his show to accelerate the advancement of hate speech and the discrediting of protections against society's most vulnerable. He did. And Bill Maher is mentally better off than at least half of Americans; he's never been drawn to be a member of the Right.
Jessa Crispin just wrote a book -- "Why I'm not a feminist" -- where she argues that current feminists are narcissists who are projecting everything they don't like about themselves into "shit containers" -- i.e., men. She's got favourable pedigree, however, and just got a very respectful write-up in the New Yorker. Her argument fits in with all those on the left decrying "identity liberalism" right now, and for the life of me I can't see a difference between them and Milo. They all seem foremost interested in taking down the Hillary Clintons and Lena Dunhams of the world. Anyone "spoiled." They're all going to leave us with some version of a country, headed by a "strong man," with everyone on the lookout for anyone "uppity." They all WANT a 1984.
The left was more interesting in the 1960s. It was more empowering to be progressive in the 1960s. The last 30 yrs have been about narrowing how much we allow all that's out there to change us, as we keep solid our own somewhat fragile emotional equilibrium. Thus our credential society -- unlike the 1960s/70s, you'll only get a listen if you hold degrees from the right places, are properly credentialed, and to possess that you have to be someone who knew how play to prof's preferences, or someone who never really held a thought that diverged from aggregate preferences. And the tactical mind and the somnambulist one, is a big direction away from the unconcerned, freely exploring one -- the "free speech" liberated one, that Milo, while no where near the same breed, DOES draw forth remembrances of. The result is that we encounter daily news that holds some truth, but which we know cannot become an avenue for exciting investigation because some aspect of it might destabilize some extra-psychic "girder" out there that must remain the same lest its unsettling result in an unleashing of psychic tumult. So we do, yes, live in an age a subsequent one will probably dismiss as too much under the thumb of tut-tutters, like the 1920s generation dismissed the pre-war times, the pre-war left, as still beholden to the Victorian matriarch, and uninteresting for it. This however is our lot. It sucks, but it's out lot. There is no one there -- or no large group/movement -- that argues against political correctness, that I find immune to a deeper instinct to set up certain groups of people as dispensable. I sense how it will materialize 5 steps down the line: an argument for denying all sympathy and for quarantines. I find this just as much with liberal Richard Dawkins as I do with conservative Milo as I do with Jezebel editor Jessica Crispin. I wish it were otherwise. As Jessica Crispin argues, the New Yorker these days IS a bit dental office. So too Paris Review. You know absolutely coming in what you're going to get -- essentially about shoring up assumptions people already had and need, while convinced its blazing new trails; thereby making "hot shots" seem like absurditiies.
If we write and do, to keep faith with what is best in ourselves, we may have to do it for a people ten years' ahead. The left now will view you suspiciously, while the right will sense insufficient intrinsic hate. Ten years from now they'll get you, and hopefully require you.
The way the Milo thing is going to pan out is by expanding discussion of Left support for pedophilia (the Left isn't actually FOR pedophilia, of course; it's against bigotry and sadistic treatment of people in general. But in pursuit of this it has counted amongst themselves people of very averse dispositions. See pro-pedophilia articles in such magazines as Salon.com for example.). When the climate is switching to one where a populace wants to war against its most "spoiled" citizens -- i.e., progressives -- everything brought into public discussion and acknowledged as a unambiguous, truth-revealing weapon that cuts through all deception to reveal one's essential evil core, gets quickly re-directed so that it's a weapon against them, the liberal class. The only thing that matters here is that the Left is pointing at something that counts as absolute proof against a cause. The only thing that matters here is that all sides have decided that a holy sword of truth exists, that turns away all ambiguity. It's a way of thinking that properly belongs with the Right, in the way that pro-Life can only mean to those of this movement, blood-craving parents thirsting on the death of their unborn children. You don't think Bill Maher is going to turn this thing around so that it points mostly at Muslims? He will. I hope the Left is expecting this. Right now however I see them on my twitter feed celebrating the glory of their absolute victory over Milo. They should be wise and know that in this climate, with "your" influenced receding, "you're" not now going to be able to confine child rape as an issue concerning only the Catholic faith. And if you can hate Catholics for what they're doing, encourage it even, then surely you can hate...
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This paragraph comes very close to DeMausian psychohistory (my interest), and it's wonderful to see it appear for consideration in such a well-read magazine (frankly, it makes what's being discussed at official psychohistory sites seem timid in comparison). My disagreement, other than the central one that her targets here are not being accurately described but are subject to the same projection -- from her -- that she discusses/lambasts in the article, is that nationalism doesn't come as an answer to self-doubt, it comes as an answer to self-recrimination: if you feel spoiled, and about to be punished for it, you cling back to a parental country, to ancestors, defensively, so to not feel worthy of attack. It's not about joining something larger, something "great," and so feel less puny and useless, because what causes people to become nationalists isn't their feeling small but their feeling self-actualized: actually kinda big, in a not-permitted kind of way. This is why it is not just the poor who become nationalists but the thriving... being a Trump-voter was not synonymous with being poor.
: Part of this is simple projection. All the aspects of yourself that you are ashamed of or fear that you possess (weakness, anger, irrationality) can be easily forgotten if you assign those traits to someone you are not. If you strongly identify as one thing, your opposite can be not only a scapegoat, but a shit storehouse. Anything you’d like to distance yourself from can simply be stored in the identity of your opposite. “This group over here is ___________ [enter whatever disgusting thing you can’t bear to see inside of yourself]. I belong to the group that is the opposite of this, and so therefore I possess the opposite qualities.”
This is meant to convince both yourself and your audience of your value. When someone has a gap in their sense of self, or in their sense of the value of themselves, that gap can be filled with the sense of the group with which they identify. Nationalism tends to strengthen during times of struggle. Individuals fall on hard times, they find themselves suffering from unemployment or poverty or displacement, which causes self-doubt. People erase that self-doubt, or at least cover it up, by suddenly proclaiming participation in a larger project, the project of a nation. Their nation is great, their nation has a tremendous history, and so they are allowed to participate in that greatness, to possess it, to play a part in that tremendous history.
The error in this article is that one can also use other people as shit-containers for YOUR OWN NARCISSISM, your own guilt-inducing sense of being special, of being happy, successful, not just for your own powerlessness, destructiveness, etc. This is what Jess Crispin is doing, I think. She is feeling what is called "growth panic" for her own success, and so disowns it by projecting it onto her peers and THEY become the ones who are bad for being so attendant to themselves, while she feels emptied of the "crime."
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