{"id":82473,"date":"2022-06-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82473"},"modified":"2022-06-17T05:50:13","modified_gmt":"2022-06-17T10:50:13","slug":"parody-is-obsolete","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=82473","title":{"rendered":"Parody Is Obsolete"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

One of the best of Dennis Prager’s many great aphorisms is “everything the Left touches, it destroys”. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Along with, apparently, itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read Charles Cooke’s satirical take<\/a> on the recent meltdown at…well, any number of leftist institutions, as the Woke Mob eats itself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“What”, I thought, “could better than a Cooke takedown?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Only the actual article being (as far as events allow) lampooned<\/a>, and the facts and history presented – which read as first-class, if unintentional, parody on their own. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is, of course, a caricature of the left: that socialists and communists spend more time in meetings and fighting with each other than changing the world. But in the wake of Donald Trump\u2019s presidential election, and then Joe Biden\u2019s, it has become nearly all-consuming for some organizations, spreading beyond subcultures of the left and into major liberal institutions. \u201cMy last nine months, I was spending 90 to 95 percent of my time on internal strife. Whereas [before] that would have been 25-30 percent tops,\u201d the\u00a0former executive director said. He added that the same portion of his deputies\u2019 time was similarly spent on internal reckonings.<\/p>

\u201cMost people thought that their worst critics were their competitors, and they\u2019re finding out that their worst critics are on their own payroll,\u201d said Loretta Ross, an author and activist who has been prominent in the movement for decades, having founded the reproductive justice collective SisterSong<\/a>.<\/p>

\u201cWe\u2019re dealing with a workforce that\u2019s becoming younger, more female, more people of color, more politically woke \u2014 I hate to use that term in a way it shouldn\u2019t be used \u2014 and less loyal in the traditional way to a job, because the whole economic rationale for keeping a job or having a job has changed.\u201d That lack of loyalty is not the fault of employees, Ross said, but was foisted on them by a precarious economy that broke the professional-social contract. That has left workers with less patience for inequities in the workplace.<\/p>

\u201cAll my ED [executive director] friends, everybody\u2019s going through some shit, nobody\u2019s immune,\u201d said one who has yet to depart.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

It appears they’ve shot themselves in the foot with their own ideology:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The silence stems partly, one senior leader in an organization said, from a fear of feeding right-wing trolls who are working to undermine the left. Adopting their language and framing feels like surrendering to malign forces, but ignoring it has only allowed the issues to fester. \u201cThe right has labeled it \u2018cancel culture\u2019 or \u2018callout culture,\u2019\u201d he said, \u201cso when we talk about our own movement, it\u2019s hard because we\u2019re using the frame of the right. It\u2019s very hard because there\u2019s all these associations and analysis that we disagree with, when we\u2019re using their frame. So it\u2019s like, \u2018How do we talk about it?\u2019\u201d<\/p>

For years, recruiting young people into the movement felt like a win-win, he said: new energy for the movement and the chance to give a person a lease on a newly liberated life, dedicated to the pursuit of justice. But that\u2019s no longer the case. \u201cI got to a point like three years ago where I had a crisis of faith, like, I don\u2019t even know, most of these spaces on the left are just not \u2014 they\u2019re not healthy. Like all these people are just not \u2014 they\u2019re not doing well,\u201d he said. \u201cThe dynamic, the toxic dynamic of whatever you want to call it \u2014 callout culture, cancel culture, whatever \u2014 is creating this really intense thing, and no one is able to acknowledge it, no one\u2019s able to talk about it, no one\u2019s able to say how bad it is.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That’s the good news. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The bad news? It reads like an ideological mirror image of the Minnsota GOP. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the best of Dennis Prager’s many great aphorisms is “everything the Left touches, it destroys”. Along with, apparently, itself. I read Charles Cooke’s satirical take on the recent meltdown at…well, any number of leftist institutions, as the Woke Mob eats itself. “What”, I thought, “could better than a Cooke takedown?” Only the actual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82473"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82476,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82473\/revisions\/82476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}