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Notes -
Surfacing a maybe slightly more obscure reaction to the Lesbian Bar SNAFU discussed below, a comment from MetaFilter (bolding mine):
This commenter nailed one of the main points of disagreement I have with the broader left, i.e., the whole "being charitable" thing, the rejection of the arguments-as-soldiers doctrine. And of course it's good to see a comment like this being heavily upvoted in a de facto progressive space that is still worried about COVID. I'd love to ask that commenter, as well as anyone who upvoted this comment: who has been cultivating the unproductive environment you are describing?
From where I stand, almost every leftist space inevitably ends up doing witch hunts, cancelling people for benign shit (recently DHH and Ed Sheeran, and I can imagine a gorillion other examples), essentially harming their own in the name of the greater good. There's a danger that is, to me, more urgent than COVID: a large portion of people in the West have a culture that incentivizes and perpetuates the same pattern, the outcome of which will inevitably be that no one finds it worthwhile to try to create anything.
This culture is what makes people so eager to ban cops from the bar but not the Soe Noire person, who effectively nuked whatever slim chance Matellian had of keeping the business running, all because Noire paints himself as a victim. Well, cops are ontologically evil, while Noire has a lot of intersectional points in his bag so...
Care for another MetaFilter comment?
I'm not posting this comment to sneer, I just want to talk to the person who posted it. Imagine I'm talking to them, maybe on my knees, pleading.
Like, okay, the problems you described can be fairly debated. Maybe I agree with some and disagree with others, but aren't you at least a little bit curious about the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won? The owners of the bar didn't win - duh. The scarce clientele they had didn't win. I lost brain cells while reading this article, so I guess I didn't win either. People of your tribe showed how they solve problems (and I repeat, this problem appears within ALL leftist spaces; it doesn't just manifest as cancelling): they sat down for three hours and failed to hash out a simple disagreement that maybe should've been an email - or, ideally, there shouldn't have been a disagreement in the first place, because adults understand that a bar has to make money. As for all the more important problems you profess to care about, did the insanity described in the article help you solve them, or are you worse off? And are they really not behaving like "rabid Maoists"?
I don't know, folks. Maybe another one?
Of course, it's "wrecker shit"! How could I have thought that this pattern exists? It's "wrecker shit".
One person should be able to have a disagreement with another, but in leftist spaces we see, time after time, people taking disagreements personally and painting themselves as victims to get others on their side, like Soe Noire does. You did a racism is five years old. Gamergate, whose main character was a professional victim, is more than ten. Is this all "wrecker shit"? It's not - I swear, it's not. It's the same thing, it's the same cultural thing, it's the same thing as with the lesbian bar. How long can we pretend not to notice that good faith is abandoned as soon as it becomes inconvenient?
If you can't describe a problem accurately, you can't solve it. At this point, I just have to conclude that maybe they don't want to solve it.
The idea that this is a "left-wing phenomenon" is wildly at odds with my experience. I can go to any US city (big or small) and find a virtually bottomless supply of left-wing bars, coffee shops, and bookstores just like the one featured in this exposé. Meanwhile, when was the last time you've come across any such establishment that is as right-wing as this place is left-wing?
(Maybe you'll point to shooting/hunting clubs as the right-wing equivalent, which I'll grant, but still, there's a strange asymmetry here. Gun stuff is right-coded because that reflects the demographics of the people who own guns and use them regularly; but meanwhile, there is no particular political tilt in the demand for coffee, alcohol, or books. So where are the right-wing social spaces for those products?)
What about churches? Yes, there are right-wing churches, but there are left-wing churches as well, rainbow flags and all. Maybe not the majority, but enough to show that the "church" as a form of social organization is not the exclusive purview of right-wingers.
But political organizing is where the rubber meets the road. Any attempt to stand up something like the right-wing equivalent of the DSA or Antifa is immediately torn apart by infighting and ideological purity-spiraling. What ever happened to the "Unite the Right" movement? Last I checked, ~every organization involved in that event has fallen apart. In fact, the dominant narrative on the right is to deny that any such organization is even possible. Right-wingers talk about the "Charlottesville hoax"[1] and denounce Patriot Front and January 6 as "fed ops" or lately "SPLC infiltrators". Meanwhile I walk out my door and find no shortage of Pride parades and anti-ICE protests, all seeming to go off like clockwork, with no subsequent chorus of left-wing influencers asserting that these events are "false flags" or whatever.
[1] ICYMI: The supposed "hoax" is the claim that Trump supported the Charlottesville protesters. But if the Right were actually United, you would not find right-wingers saying this; if anything, they'd be motivated to manufacture the opposite hoax, i.e. claim that Trump supports them even if he didn't really.
There totally are right wing bars. I've stumbled into them before even in Chicago. They're not so explicit, it's usually more local community first with the implicit assumption that the local community is right wing. But they definitely exist.
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Treated as a threat to society and target for law enforcement. Enrique Tarrio was sentenced to decades in prison as punishment for being the anti-antifa. Resisting leftist thugs will not be tolerated. A bunch of right-libertarian stoners get COINTELPRO'd in the Governor Whitmer kidnapping FBI-led conspiracy. Etc, etc.
These groups are filled to the brim with feds. The police state works and is aimed in one direction.
Is this what we're calling seditious conspiracy these days?
This is funny given the verb you used to describe the maybe-entrapment the Wolverine Watchmen faced was a program that almost solely targeted leftists.
The reason he was nailed with decades of imprisonment is because he is the leaders of the Proud Boys. This is a "show me the man and I'll show you the crime" situation.
I am of course familiar with the history of COINTELPRO. The 1970s were 50 years ago. We've moved past leftists being targetted and have been stuck on militias and "right wing extremists" for decades now. Ruby Ridge was 24 years ago.
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Lefties agree with my assessment on Twitter, therefore I'm right: https://x.com/ArmandDoma/status/2102985712509637118
(jk)
I think there's a special flavor of this thing on the left - it's hard for me to imagine a lot of people on the right hiding behind their victimhood, or how much they are oppressed.
There's plenty of outgroup-homogeneity-bias to go around. I realize that I may have been committing some of that myself in my comments here, in framing "accusing people of being government operatives" as the central example of organizational dysfunction, when in fact it is a peculiarly right-wing tendency, just as "oppression Olympics" is a peculiarly left-wing form. Each side can look at the other, see the lack of the particular type of dysfunction they're most familiar with, and assume the grass is greener.
But still, we can step back and look at concrete results. Whatever's going on behind the scenes in left-wing groups, that's not preventing them from opening up scores of retail shops in every city nationwide, whereas the right wing has a lot of catching up to do.
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Shortly after you posted that, another reply arrived doing just that. The specifics may vary, but invoking victimhood to dodge responsibility is too effective a tactic for any group to forgo.
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How would she know? Would she admit that even if it were true?
The thing is, I honestly think they did (to a fair degree, with caveats, etc). I couldn't have imagined thinking of myself as any kind of conservative 10 years. But the difference between the right now and the right pre-GamerGate is huge. They really do seem, on average, to be much more sane and reasonable and realistic than they were.
And it's really juxtaposed by the way I think most of the left went completely off the rails and untethered.
She's probably pointing to MAGA, which, honestly, I wouldn't say is all rational. And to be completely fair to her, the president of US whipped his base into frenzy. But "the right" isn't just MAGA, there are a lot of different worldviews and opinions on the right, a lot of diversity of thought.
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An example of a fairly small, low-cost-to-entry organization is an indie game studio. These can be so small, in fact, that they can be done as one-man-bands, but then can scale up from there. Why don't we see more right-wing indies?
Five Nights At Freddie's is one of the most successful indie games of all time, and it earned him a ton of money and fame and a massive fanbase. Then it was revealed that Scott Cawthon was Red Tribe.
Strangely, harassment, death threats and literal home invasions of a popular celebrity did not draw support for that celebrity, nor condemnation of such tactics, nor broad discourse that online toxicity was a serious problem. The Dev did not receive wall-to-wall coverage portraying him as a saintly victim from a sympathetic press, who oddly failed to coordinate broad-spectrum condemnation for the internet trolls and other deplorables engaging in this horrifying behavior. The Dev was not invited to speak at the UN.
Scott Cawthon will not be making any more video games.
"political infighting" and "ideological purity spiraling" is not what I have observed killing attempts to stand up right-wing equivalents to the DSA or Antifa. Selective prosecution seems like a much larger factor. This is your reminder that posting anonymous "It's okay to be white" posters on a college campus resulted in an actual investigation by the for-real FBI.
Also riots and the occasional, wildly celebrated political murder. Mustn't forget those.
We will be fired from our jobs and beaten in the streets if we do the right-wing equivalents of these things, and the police will look the other way for those inflicting the latter. This does not mean that right-wing political action is impossible, only much, much harder, with the concomitant increased likelihood that coordinated meanness outside the standard system of procedures will ultimately prove necessary. We'll get there, don't you worry.
The prolife movement and gun rights movement have been extraordinarily successful- much more so than the DSA- in right wing organizing.
What tends to happen is that right wing ideas about race are mostly embraced by very disagreeable people who cannot cooperate. But there’s plenty of anti-LGBT orgs, gun rights orgs, anti-tax orgs, socially conservative groups, etc.
Assuming that you are referring to the notion that there are intrinsic differences in "quality" between racial groups and that these differences should be allowed to influence policy, I question the extent to which these ideas are meaningfully "right wing". At least in the context of American politics.
While I acknowledge that the experiences and perceptions of those coming from Europe and Asia will differ, the US right has never really made "blood and soil" or ethnic tribalism in general a core pillar of it's identity the way that say the German right has. If anything the opposite has been the case, with the US right espousing a peculiar form of "blank-slatism" exemplified by appeals to the Declaration of Independence, and the rhetoric of men like Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Billy Graham, and Clarence Thomas.
In one of those ironic UNO reversal moments I actually kind of agree with Joe Biden when he says "if you are thinking about voting for Trump you aren't really black" but by the same token I would turn that around and say that if you're thinking about voting for a progressive in the year of our lord 2026 you aren't "white" either
It's like one of those Gian'Carlo Esposito memes...
"You want to discriminate against people on the basis of their skin color. I want to discriminate against people on the basis of their behavior. We are not the same."
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Being slightly cheeky, what this story shows is that it is not, in fact, possible for a one-man indie studio to make a game. In addition to 1 developer, you also need a legion of supporters ready to condemn harassment / death threats / home invasions directed against the developer, a bunch of sympathetic press outlets, and 193 state-level actors. The left has this organizational apparatus and so they are able to make indie video games; the right doesn't, so they don't.
In other words, Why did you force me to do this? I just wanted to play video games.
In the years since Gamergate, has the right made any progress on this front? Maybe, but it seems like most initiatives in that direction are continually stymied by lack of interest (or outright condemnation) from other right-wingers.
As a game developer, you will likely have to contract some of the following:
You can do some of these in-house, but most likely your team does not possess every skill required to make a game. And even if it does, this is a field where much success depends on networking. By being explicitly right wing, you make yourself a pariah. The explicitly left wing will boycott you, and even neutral parties won't associate with you out of fear of being labelled a Nazi far-right bigot.
Meanwhile, the more classically conservative fields like finance and law are more than happy just keeping their mouths shut and doing their jobs.
So if you want success in game development, you better keep your conservative opinions to yourself.
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In the most practical way you're right. You take over politics, you take over everything else, but that's not what I'd call "creating things". The discipline it takes to take over something may be admired in it's own way, but I don't think a lot of people admired the Spartans for their contributions to science, art, philosophy, or culture generally, which is what comes to my mind when someone brings up "creating things".
No, the very real, and not at all supposed hoax, was that Trump called white supremacists "very fine people" by saying there are some on both sides of the Charlottesville controversy. You're trying to rewrite history.
The point I'm making is independent of the truth-of-the-matter of what Trump actually said about Charlottesville. The point is that the way the narrative played out shows that there is no united right-wing movement equivalent to that on the left. If there were, you would've found that the dominant right-wing narrative was one of the following:
(In fact, a handful of people did say this, but they were relegated to the fringe on the right.)
Where are the right-wing institutions for these things? All academic faculties (with the possible exception of economics) are left-dominated. Same with art museums and film festivals. Maybe if you're right-leaning you'd denounce such things as "not real art" - maybe so, but then, who is preserving the "classical" cultural heritage? Where are the right-wing symphony orchestras and Shakespearean theater companies?
The right and left polices the “far” right wing (no one wants to be called a crypto Nazi) thereby prioritizing moderation as opposed to purity. The far left is tolerated and thus more and more results in purity spirals.
Have you considered that the establishment/conventional right just doesn’t agree with aryan race warriors rather than being intimidated into moderation?
You don’t need to be an aryan race warrior before the race establishment right gets upset.
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I have, but they have dissuaded me from believing that by adopting the same cancellation tactics they've spent a decade decrying.
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I don't think you should get to say things that are flatly untrue as you making your broader point.
And what are they doing with that domination? They might be holding on to science by the skin of their teeth, but there has been no worthwhile contribution to any of the other fields for years if not decades.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make by saying this. That conservatives are so inept that they can't create their own institutions despite the existing liberal ones not doing anything worthwhile for decades? Seems like low-hanging fruit if you ask me.
Two points: First at a minimum, it's the same point you are trying to make. How is not being able to achieve anything worthwhile while holding these institutions any less inept. Thus any criticism kf conservatives of thisnsort is hollow.
Second, I think holding the institutions gives you an advantage. It's a lot easier to do something while holding them the it is to start them from scratch. As an example just look at the utter failure to offer a relevant alternative to Twitter after Musk bought it, despite all the huffing and puffing, and all the media coordinating to try to move people to other networks. If you are holding all the institutions, and achieving nothing, you are more inept.
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I wasn't intending to make any claim with the word "supposed" about the underlying truth of the supposition, only that there are some people who are supposing. If that word is unclear, you can substitute "alleged" or "claimed".
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