Preporuke za čitanje i gledanje

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— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) August 13, 2018

As the Jeong drama demonstrates, the view that “woke” white-bashing is a harmless, justified, and perhaps even commendable form of “punching up” is now mainstream in liberal/progressive culture in North America (and some other Western countries). And yet another culture-war episode from four years ago—one that, as it happens, Romano also covered in detail—shows that this mindset can cause very real damage.


The defense of “punching up” is a fundamental part of the left-identitarian ideology (also known as “social justice” or “intersectionality”) that has become the quasi-official progressive creed in the 2010s.  In this creed, all human interaction is seen primarily through the lens of “power dynamics” and the “oppression/privilege” hierarchy; thus, hostile or demeaning speech is judged by whether the speaker and the target are “privileged” or “marginalized.”


There are many reasons, both moral and practical, to criticize this ideology. It inevitably undermines modern Western society’s hard-won taboo on racial insults and is likely to provoke a backlash. It relies on crude and often skewed definitions of power, privilege and oppression—so that, for instance, Jeong, a Harvard Law School graduate and successful journalist from a minority group with higher income and lower incarceration rates than white Americans, can outscore an unemployed white high school dropout in “oppression points.”

But another incident the following year—which received fairly little notice outside the science fiction/fantasy community, but was the subject of a long article by Romano in the digital culture magazine The Daily Dot—offers a far more dramatic example of wreckage left by a serial harasser cloaked in the mantle of “anti-racism” and “social justice.”

In September 2014, the sci-fi/fantasy world was rocked by revelations about the bizarre online past of a much-praised young author in the field, the Thai-born, Hong Kong-based Benjanun Sriduangkaew, one of that year’s finalists for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Sriduangkaew was outed as a notorious social justice “rage-blogger” known by the fitting moniker “Requires Hate” (a shortened version of the title of her blog, “Requires Only That You Hate”), whose vitriol-soaked takedowns and callouts of “problematic” works and authors had sown fear in the SFF community since 2011.

Vlada koja ozbiljno reši da se oslobodi epidemije toksične mikroplastike, mogla bi, sasvim očigledno, da oporezuje one koji proizvode i prodaju robu upakovanu na taj način. Kazneno oporezivanje ne samo da bi obeshrabrilo upotrebu pakovanja za jednokratnu upotrebu, već bi se moglo iskoristiti i za finansiranje oporavka već ugroženih ekosistema.


Umesto toga, debata o upotrebi plastičnih kesa prebacuje teret na individualne kupce. Odgovornost za smanjivanje plastičnog otpada nije na vladama ili multinacionalnim kompanijama ili instituacijama koje poseduju realnu moć, već je na užurbanom roditelju koji na putu s posla hoće da reši problem porodičnog ručka.

But “white savior” objections to Glory and Free State are a different matter. Those films hinge largely on the prominence of black agency, which race-first critics apparently deem irrelevant. Their objection is not that blacks’ agency is absent; it is rather about who is represented as leading their efforts. Decisions by blacks to support nonblack candidates or social policies not expressed in race-first terms are interpreted as evidence of flawed, limited, misguided, or otherwise co-opted black agency. The idea that blacks, like everyone else, make their history under conditions not of their own choosing becomes irrelevant, just another instance of insufficient symbolic representation.

That’s why I hate New Year’s. I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside for rest. I choose my pauses myself, when I feel drunk with the intensity of life and I want to plunge into animality to draw from it new vigor.

I got my first pubic hair when I was 2 years old.

I couldn’t talk, I could barely walk, but I started growing a bush. Or so they tell me. I have no recollection of a time before puberty, before the carnal cravings, the impulses, the angst and anger and violence. There was no prelapsarian age of innocence for me; I was born, I took a huge bite of the apple, and, by 2 years old, I was pretty much ready to get busy with Eve.

It was the same for my father, and for his father, and for his father, and for the men in my family going back as far as we have records. We’ve all carried the same hereditary genetic mutation. On chromosome 2 in the DNA of all human beings, there’s a gene called the luteinizing hormone/choriogonadotropin receptor (LHCGR). In women of reproductive age, the LHCGR triggers ovulation; in men, it triggers testosterone production. But somewhere back in the lost recesses of my family’s genetic history, an unfortunate ancestor of mine was born with a mutant LHCGR gene.

Having a mutant LHCGR gene leads to what doctors now call familial male-limited precocious puberty, an extremely rare disease that affects only men because you have to have testicles, which is why it’s also called testotoxicosis. The condition tricks the testicles into thinking the body is ready to go through puberty — so wham, the floodgates open and the body is saturated with testosterone. The result is premature everything: bone growth, muscle development, body hair, the full menu of dramatic physical changes that accompany puberty. Only instead of being 13, you’re 2.

[size=32]the issue is not to explain why, in the aftermath of a severe financial and economic crisis in the capitalist core, accompanied by a massive upward transfer of wealth by ruling centrists, blue and red, right-wing—and, in a few instances, left-wing—outsiders have come to power, but rather why these politicians have largely remained within the established framework. In short, the question is not why our contemporary politics resembles those of the 1930s, but why it does not. For this, it is necessary to take the comparison seriously, systematically contrasting the era of classical fascism—roughly, from 1922 to 1939—with the present period, in order to enable greater theoretical and political clarity about the situation today. I do so along four comparative axes: geopolitical context, economic crisis, relations of class and nation and, finally, the character of civil society and of political parties. I focus here on the Trump administration rather than generalizing for the whole spectrum of contemporary right-wing parties and leaders. [/size]