http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/04/open-letter-to-open-minded-progressives.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31711047)

"why?"

"i read a few sentences and it seemed like it"

"oh ok good. good reasoning"

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31711341)

Decentralized government - govt at the state and local level - while still prone to corruption, is much more easy to hold accountable and keep them transparent. Not to mention more economically efficient - you can literally see what your local govt is spending your money on.

The core of the argument against shitlibbery is that smaller decentralized govt is inherently more economically efficient, less prone to corruption, more transparent, and more easily help accountable at the ballot box.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31711550)

Tradition uncontestably accretes social utility only by time-tested successes, so, we should be careful not to seem too dismissive of what millions of humans who came before have bequeathed us, unless all are inherently bad, incapable of looking after their posterity. Liberals have no faith in themselves projhect this deficiency onto others. This is a kind of error of attribution, wherein, when someone else fucks up the cause was something inhereant to him, but when we fuck up the cause lay outside us, with our environment.

This is also why concepts like “systemic forces,” and “institutionalized –isms,” sound enough if used in certain narratives, yet resistant to serious attempts at being quantifed--are so appealing to those among us seemingly most eager to dictate what everyone else (in whom, again, those have no faith) ought to do.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31711712)

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/07/27/antiracism-our-flawed-new-religion.html

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/02/08/if-youre-not-careful-whos-in-and-whos-out-becomes-the-only-question/

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/

http://www.vox.com/2016/9/20/12915036/race-criminal-justice-inequality-glenn-loury-ta-nehisi-coates

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31721311)

I only have my own views of what counts as shitlib and what doesn't. But a first thing to note is that shitlibbery is not a stable set of stances or positions, is not an easily delineated set of practices, is not particularly convenient or inconvenient for any entrenched economic interests, and is not always easy to distinguish from other social and political phenomena. If shitlibbery is real, and if it's as pervasive and fecund as we think it is, then it's of necessity much broader and more flexible than many first-blush accounts might give it credit for.

For example, many people who first encounter shitlibbery in conversations about race and gender start with the idea that it involves an a priori rejection of biological explanations for group differences. Under this view, shitlibbery is the idea that every broad pattern that differentiates one otherwise-differentiable group of people from another is socially or culturally determined. (The most radical form of this idea comes in gender theory articles expressing consternation at instances of oppression such as childbirth being "socially constructed as female".) But plenty of transgender shitlibs are happy to have some supporting research on correlations between gender dysphoria and mismatched brain and body "sex", and shitlibs for years have enforced the view that genetic factors alone determine sexual orientation - a view only now being rigorously challenged, quite conveniently right after gay marriage legalization was enforced by Supreme Court mandate. And on the other side, there are shitlibs (like Joan Wallach Scott in the 1990s) who argue not that there are no good biological explanations, but that biology (as a scientific discipline) is socially and culturally constructed just like anything else - that, e.g., "sex" is just as socially constructed as "gender".

Even shitlibs who do strongly reject biological explanations as such will not always find talk about society or culture more palatable. So, for example, we have the doctrine of cultural relativism, under which no culture's practices can be judged as any better or worse than any other culture's. So, for example, in the early 1990s you had Gayatri Spivak, maybe the most celebrated "postcolonial" theorist and the popularizer of the term "subaltern", saying in "culture war" interviews that it wasn't just that the Western canon was oppressive, imperialist, etc., but that the very practice of constructing a syllabus for an academic class involved some kind of "silencing" or "erasure" or something. It is not just common but expected that a public rejection of cultural relativism - i.e., a statement that some culture X is better or worse than some culture Y - will be called racist. The exception is that one is allowed to call non-Western, non-imperial, non-colonial etc. nations, cultures, societies etc. better than Western, imperial, colonial etc. nations, cultures, societies etc. But don't take that allowance as endorsement, either - just as conservative critics of shitlibbery might, plenty of academic shitlibs will out-shitlib this view by reciting the oppressive history of that other place, and might even call the person who prefers it racist for adhering to some kind of primitivist or "noble savage" view. (There is also a more reasonable view of cultural relativism, which holds merely that one shouldn't take for granted that Western democracies are uniquely or even particularly good. But this can be subsumed under a normal intellectual mandate against taking strong substantive positions for granted. Nor can we think of shitlibbery as an overarching relativism, either. Mental health and disability advocates often find it crucial to emphasize how their mentally or physically impaired constituencies experience an actually genuinely worse lower quality of life than their neurotypical or standardly-abled counterparts.)

Others who first encounter shitlibbery in the realm of gender identity or religion begin with the idea that it involves a rejection of constraints on group identification. Under this view, shitlibbery is what allows people to call themselves anything they want - a person can be a member of a religion without believing anything written in its holy books or following any of that book's rules; a person can "identify as" a gender like "blue" or "rainbow" or "sky"; and so on. But politically-focused shitlibs often don't follow this rule either. Rachel Dolezal wasn't universally "licensed" to identify as black, for example, although many shitlibs noted the inconsistency and felt efforts to explain it away were weak (contrary to popular views here, plenty of smart academic shitlibs *do* feel a pull toward consistency and coherence in their views). Forget Dolezal, though: Advocate magazine recently published a piece arguing that Peter Thiel shouldn't be called gay, drawing comparisons to Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law, who has argued that African-American conservatives might not really be "black" in the right sense. This is a radicalization of the tactic of "strategic essentialism" (Spivak again).

Similarly, we shouldn't think of shitlibbery as the full-scale removal of boundaries on identification in service to leftist causes or plaintive linguistic penitents. The Tumblrinxs who call themselves sky-gendered (or whatever) do find some sympathetic ears among shitlibs, but just as many (I haven't done a survey, but I'm guessing at least as many) would castigate at least some of them for comparing their imaginative journeys to the lived experience of transgender dysphoria and so on. Another setting where boundaries don't seem likely to keep expanding despite the existence of an active further-left constituency is animal rights. Widely unreported in the wake of professional athletes' Black Lives Matter protests of the national anthem was the actual suspension of a baseball player for tweeting that certain criminals and/or protesters were "animals". Plenty of academics and activists believe that animals should be viewed on a continuum if not a par with humans, but it is not plausible to suggest that outrage at a person being called, for example, a "gorilla" or a "dog" will ever be eschewed for the reason that gorillas and dogs are just as worthwhile as humans. Some calculus of oppression simply dictates that this won't happen.

Some think of shitlibbery as the legacy of Marx, and indeed on the right "cultural Marxism" is a name for some of the elements of what we think of as shitlibbery. But actually leftists have disagreed wildly for over half a century about the extension of Marxian concepts to social and cultural relations and to aspects of "identity" like race, sex, gender, religion, and so on. Politically, many of the most strident critics of "identity politics" are old-style "class leftists", who are all too happy to note the ease with which major corporate conglomerates integrate shitlib shibboleths (shitlibboleths?) into Human Resources departments and so on. Laurie Penny, rightly lambasted for phrases like "the disaster of heterosexuality", also wrote once wrote that "Public 'career feminists' have been more concerned with getting more women into 'boardrooms', when the problem is that there are altogether too many boardrooms, and none of them are on fire." Noam Chomsky, Frederic Jameson, and Terry Eagleton are among the academic leftists known for criticizing postmodernism; Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play", the lecture which is said to have brought academic shitlibbery from France to the United States, was immediately criticized for limiting the possibility of revolution to frivolous semantic games.

Some people take that frivolity as the starting point of shitlibbery. Glenn Loury brings this up in the Vox article I mentioned above. In some ways this tracks the high versus low culture "war" which was part and parcel of the canon wars of the 90s. It may be just an interesting coincidence that Melissa Click, the professor who asked black protesters to "muscle" out a student reporter at the University of Missouri, publishes articles on the Twilight series and basically nothing else. If frivolity is the starting point of shitlibbery, we have some sense of why its public struggles often involve things like renaming buildings, changing crests, public instances of cultural appropriation, apologies for slips of the tongue, and so on. The background theory here is that frivolous demands are convenient for entrenched interests because acceding to them requires no "real" change. But this neglects the fact that shitlibbery's most frivolous causes are often its most fervently opposed. It also fails to differentiate shitlibbery from other political phenomena. Conservatives are fiercely interested in symbolic issues such as whether someone calls the Islamic State "ISIS", "ISIL", or "Daesh", whether someone uses the specific phrase "radical Islamic terror", whether someone wears a flag pin on his or her lapel, whether potatoes prepared in a certain way are called "French fries" or "Freedom fries", and so on.

A similar idea is that shitlibbery is unique because of the volume of disingenuous or at least self-interested public political activity ("virtue signaling") it generates on the part of private citizens. Indeed, a recent survey compared citizens of multiple countries across metrics like voter turnout, attendance of rallies, participation in protests, and expression of views on social media. Americans were average or worse in most areas apart from the political use of social media, where we came first by a long shot. Still, I don't think this can be the essence of shitlibbery, for three reasons. First, we don't call all political use of social media shitlib. There are plenty of tweeters, both famous and obscure, of centrist, conservative, and reactionary bents. An alt-righter who tweets under their own name does not become shitlib for doing so. Second, it seems analytically possible to "think shitlib thoughts" to oneself. Somebody who watches TV and thinks nothing but "This show isn't diverse enough", "This show uses antiquated tropes of male dominance", "The characters in this show don't ask people's pronouns before addressing them", and so on seems to be having shitlib thoughts, even if they never say anything like this out loud. Third, the idea that shitlibbery simply means virtue signaling explains nothing to the student of shitlibbery. For the phenomenon to be explained we need to understand which posts and tweets would in fact signal virtue; ideally, we want to understand how and why they do so.

A lot of people associate shitlibbery with the censorship and quasi-censorious suppression of various sorts of ideas, especially ideas that contradict some of the common shitlib views considered and rejected above as boundary conditions for shitlibbery. It's true that multiple shitlib arguments exist against free speech, academic freedom, etc., and it's true that shitlib "callout culture" and similar practices have harsh chilling effects. Still, speech remains freer in the United States than in many other regimes, past and current; it is thus hard to reconcile the shitlibbery-as-censorship view with the notion that the United States is a frequent, perhaps exemplary, practitioner of shitlibbery. Further, for many if not all situations in which shitlibbery manifests as censorship, it is easy to imagine shitlibbery manifesting in some other way, but remaining shitlib. For example, shitlib students often protest anti-shitlib campus speakers, who are then disinvited. In probably all of these cases there exists some shitlib professor who could debate the speaker in lieu of that speaker being disinvited. This professor could easily engage in shitlibbery by taking certain positions, speaking in a certain way, etc., and the student body could easily engage in shitlibbery by wildly preferring them to the disinvited speaker. So analytically there is no necessary connection between censorship and shitlibbery.

This is all just to say that many of the common ways of viewing shitlibbery seem to identify important aspects of its political realization but fail to get at its essence. It is possible that the concept simply does not hang together. So in this hypothetical series, part 3 would offer a new theory on the essence of shitlibbery.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31722433)

If you write up the full thing I hope you try to get it out into the world, under a pseudonym or otherwise

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31728737)

edit: thank you

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31728905)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31804667)

To further the discussion, I'd like to suggest the following a possible uniting factor of shitlibbery: The apparent rejection of any steady worldview in favor of always going further, even if this eventually creates incoherence.

Everybody on XO has seen this, of course, as it takes many different forms. The slippery-slope policy pushes where gay marriage is pushed because it "won't affect" straight people but ends with straights being forced to participate in such weddings or face ruinous fines. The routine destruction of other libs because of some minor deviation from the current orthodoxy, even if it's clearly an accident. The constant invention of new pronouns and labels for some weak reason or practically no reason at all ("Hispanic" becomes "Latino" becomes "Latin@" becomes "Latinx"). The cyclical approach to diversity, where segregation leads to integration which in turn triggers demands for new segregation, perhaps by the same exact people. 'Race' flips from meaningless social construct to indelible core of 'identity' almost from day to day based on which formulation will make it easiest to undermine existing norms and institutions.

This idea, I think, allows for distinguishing shitlib political ferment from that of other worldviews. Basically, if you take a U.S. conservative or a monarchist or an old-school communist, you could probably take his opinions and easily imagine what his "ideal society" would look like. But doing this with a shitlib is probably not possible because their approach to the world invites constant mutation.

Edit: LOL, didn't notice the second part when I posted this. Looks like we're in general agreement on this front.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31808528)

So for example, they are very prone to what Pinker calls the euphemism treadmill because they think that we're always one perfect word away from respecting each other. Respect means dignity with titles and symbols of respect rather than deeper shared cultural understanding. This is because their model of racism or sexism is a caste system rather than frictions between people who have differences.

Another example you could look at is the street harassment video that twist mentions. It's generally understood by everyone who has lived in a city that black and Hispanic guys are more likely than white guys to catcall a girl. By merely unintentionally documenting that fact in an attempt to show people NYC catcalling, the makers of the videos were accused of feeding into the "false" stereotype that blacks catcall more than whites. That minority groups could have a special relationship to sexism that is unrelated to white oppression pretty much blows their minds and forces them to say insane things, like that the video was selectively edited. (I have seen some particularly untied people claiming that white oppression led to a black culture of sexism, but most just deny that it's true)

Admittedly I'm still not sure if this is *the* phenomenon known as shitlibbery or just part of it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31808589)

http://www.snopes.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/detroit-hiroshima.jpg

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31722493)

once shitlibbery reaches a critical point it's nearly impossible to stop because it dismantles the tools that can be used to stop it -- it even removes the ability of a person to perceive themselves as a shitlib (they may think of themselves as moderates or even conservatives)

how many times have u hung out with ur otherwise smart manhattan friends, who parrot the same thing and are startled when u object to some of that tripe as if u were saying that the world was flat

for this reason shitlibbery operates best when it's a dissident voice without reaching critical mass. de blasio, etc. probably were effective dissenters but god help us all when they take power.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31805117)

It's difficult to know how to convince someone that a cultural force exists. We posit constructs like shitlibbery to explain variegated phenomena, but there is always the option of recourse to other explanations, or of minimizing the phenomena so as to suggest they don't stand in need of explanation at all. For instance, people pooh-pooh concerns about "identity politics" by saying: "All politics is identity politics." People pooh-pooh concerns about "political correctness" by saying: "Political correctness is nothing more than politeness." People pooh-pooh concerns about "campus censorship" by saying: "What you call 'censorship', I call 'speech in response to speech', or even at the extreme, 'the consequences of speech'."

Yet we can make a case that these phenomena exist if we can prove that thinking in terms of them leads to better predictions. For example, a theory of "campus censorship" would predict that some common viewpoints among students do not make their way into college newspapers, or that students holding these viewpoints disproportionately lose campus jobs or face disciplinary action for vague reasons. A theory of "speech following speech" will not make such predictions. A theory of "identity politics" will predict an obsession with race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and so on, whereas a theory of "politics as usual" will not make that prediction.

Shitlibbery is related to the above phenomena, and partially includes them, as well as phenomena like cultural Marxism, regressive leftism, social justice warrior-ism, the politics of victimization, media centralization, virtue signaling, cultural infantalization and neoteny, the erosion of the high culture/low culture distinction, conspicuous consumption, two-party political polarization, the politicization of science and journalism, bureaucratization and corporatization, various forms of postmodernism and relativism, and so on. At least I think it does: most of us think shitlibbery, so to speak, has its hands in a lot of pies (is that the phrase?). It doesn't exactly need all of these other things going on, but they help it along immensely.

I should note now that different people probably use the term differently. My usage here may be unique. For just one example, many genuine conservatives here would probably count Sanders-esque democratic socialism as a form of shitlibbery. I by and large do not. My reasons for that will become clear a bit later. One thing that's important to point out is that the fact that Sanders was arguably defeated, or at least attacked, by some aspect of shitlibbery does not itself count against calling him a shitlib, or calling his movement part of shitlibbery. To see why, just remember the New York catcalling video: a document made to expose sexism, but later accused of racism. Both the video and the outcry against it on the grounds of overrepresentation of minority catcallers were consummate examples of shitlibbery, in an example of the now-frequent "Oppression Olympics" which academics who subscribe to privilege theory try so hard to avoid, but activists who talk about privilege court openly.

This is crucial to note: There is no contradiction in saying that shitlibbery is in some sense attacking shitlibbery. In fact, I think this is a feature of shitlibbery, not a bug - or at least it would be from the perspective of some probably-nonexistent man behind the curtain.

One way to motivate the idea that something like shitlibbery has been happening is by historical contrast. I believe OP is around my age, and thus the friends he's trying to convince were probably in American public elementary, middle, and high schools around when I was. Certainly we all recognize the pace of technological progress in our lifetimes: the first computer I got was a Windows 95 desktop which ran at something like 133MHz; it had 16MB of RAM, a 14.4k modem, and a 1GB hard drive which would have cost $100 retail. Now a question to ask is: have our politics - especially our cultural politics and our political culture - proceeded at a normal political pace, or at the pace of our technological development?

I held wacky political views as a kid. I don't remember many other people sharing them. I thought gay people should be able to marry each other, for example. The Defense of Marriage Act passed the House 342-67 and the Senate 84-14. To this day, no viable presidential candidate has openly supported gay marriage on their first campaign. And yet I'd wager that very few of OP's friends are members of a social group where it is not taboo to oppose gay marriage. Or take political correctness. Many people claim that current political correctness controversies recapitulate the clashes of the 90s. But this isn't the case. The Bell Curve, for example, was a politically incorrect book in the 90s, because of the nature of an explanation it gave about certain group differences. Right now, however, it is taboo to even mention those differences; to do so on a college campus would probably constitute a "microaggression" resulting in a "bias incident", the resolution of which the campus would accomplish with the help of several different kinds of administrators, administrators who probably got M.Ed.s and similar degrees in programs where Foucault, Bourdieu, Fanon, Spivak, Judith Butler, and so on were not radicals tacked on to the end of a syllabus just to give students a taste, but formed the bulk of the material.

It is not just the speed of the shift. Fashions may change at different speeds at different times. It is - well - there remains a certain hipster cool in abstaining from technology. It's neat to not be on Facebook. It's neat to have a flip phone. It might be even neater to have no cell phone at all. We had a meme here a few years ago about people showing up to coffeeshops with typewriters. But there is no political equivalent. Quite the opposite: Political positions and kinds of expression that were normal a few decades ago have now been completely extinguished. Do not underestimate how insane this has been. We all know at least a few Baby Boomers who threw around words like "faggot" and "chink", or at least "homo" and "Oriental", in the 90s. Those same Boomers would today nod quietly if asked whether an employee of theirs should be fired for using those words on Twitter. There is no hipster cool of cultural politics, no space for retro or even happy nostalgia. To ensure progress, it seems, shitlibbery has enforced silence and amnesia.

As it turns out, I don't think that's quite the heuristical man behind the curtain's goal, but as I say, I may be defining shitlibbery in an idiosyncratic way. Maybe by the end of this I'll find a better term that fits my own usage and isn't parasitic on the XOism.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31805634)

to my mind, this is a quintessential feature of shitlibbery -- this never-ending race to the bottom of virtue signaling. in fact, shitlibbery's tendency to cannabalize itself in an insatiable march leftward probably explains a great deal of what you wrote that follows the above quote (the pace of change, the inexcusability of "outdated" views, and so on).

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31805777)

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2387235-on-liberty

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3395708&forum_id=2#31808461)