Thread by @jessesingal

Jezebel

Imagine being a young feminist trying to figure this shit out and being told that, as a white person, you are already celebrated for... having body hair?

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The rise of Feel-Bad Liberalism has been such a disaster and is so obviously a corporate scam

Feel-Bad Liberalism tells you that even though you THINK you have the right politics, really, you're a piece of shit because of some pesky ID category you can't dislodge. Luckily, there's always a training or more content you can consume to try to scrub the stain off.

Feel-Bad Liberalism is inimical to any sort of solidarity because it is designed to carve people up into finer and finer groups as a cheap power play, and to sell them stuff based on the groups they've been shunted into

Feel-Bad Liberalism is a scam and has no capability to address any of the major problems in the US progressives and leftists agree need to be solved. It's a way for mediocre people with nothing of value to say to assert power and sell stuff.

I gotta write an actual piece about this stuff. It's such a dead-end and so many young people are having the Feel-Bad Liberalism model burned into their poor vulnerable malleable brains in their early years as activists or (huge air quotes) "journalists."

If something really has a similar structure as a cult, where you just buy or read more and more and more stuff, but there's never a point where someone pats you on the shoulder and says "you're good now -- you're fine," doesn't that raise certain questions?

"The world's on fire and the far-right is running everything and we need all the help we can get. Will you join us?"

"Yes, I'd love to!"

"Great, but first: You're a fucking piece of shit. You know that, right?"

Normal, healthy adults do not respond to clearly bad-faith or ill-formed or aggressively inflammatory claims about their moral worth coming from internet weirdos with "I'm so sorry! Tell me more!" This is not a normal way to be a person in a really complicated world.

I'll never forget the stripper. The one @tweetertation mentions in her book. A 19-year-old with an unplanned baby on the way talking about her "privilege."

This is what Feel-Bad Liberalism does. It turns people into morons. That friendly apologetic stripper likely got COMPLETELY

fucked over by the fact that our country does not provide people with the basic shit other rich countries do. Ask anyone who isn't super-wealthy who has had a kid! It's insane. It's unfair. And you CANNOT fix this shit if you have 19-year-old strippers who believe themselves to

be "privileged" because they read some dumb idiot websites. The secret is the people who write this stuff don't WANT this 19-year-old stripper to have access to better healthcare and daycare and everything else. They just. Want. Her. To. Feel. Shitty. So she'll keep buying their

pablum. Christ, how do people not see this? It is such a transparent scam. Take the anger that SHOULD be directed at the ridiculous way our society is run and redirect it inward so people hate THEMSELVES instead and come to you for purification, since you claim to offer it.

Rather than go to sleep like I should I'm starting to write some of this up just to get it started

Oh man I obviously have no way of proving this to you, but I swear I wrote the thing on the left last night, eight hours before the thing on the right was tweeted

ON TO SOMETHING

(In conclusion: When the taqueria near me that is tasty shuts down, that's Feel-Bad Liberalism. When my heater clanks loudly in the middle of the night, that's Feel-Bad LIberalism. The Matrix sequels? Feel-Bad Liberalism.)

I know this is coming: People are going to claim that my critiques of "Feel-Bad Liberalism" are really just microwaved critiques of "identity politics." That's not how I see things at all.

Some of these critiques strike me as potentially fair and worth engaging with. What else? What am I missing?