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6 tweets,
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1/ I'm in the midst of a genuinely useful back and forth w/@jaycaspiankang but I wanna highlight this because, rightly or wrongly, this is my critique of FBL! It focuses on stuff only a tiny slice of elite progressives care about and treats it as THE path to social-justice 
2/ progress. When The Outline tells you you shouldn't use the word "space colony" because colonization is bad, or Jezebel shames some girl for a good-intentioned social-media campaign about a very real feminine-beauty-standards problem, or a training tells you "America is a
3/ melting pot" is a harmful phrase, you are being informed, falsely, that you can't be a good progressive or leftist unless you embrace a *very specific* set of claims that 95% of the world doesn't give a shit about. The "America is a melting pot" thing is SUCH a good example.
4/ Out in the real world, this is not considered an offensive phrase by the vast majority of people. That's what I mean about Feel-Bad Liberalism -- the goal is to expand the reservoir of things you feel bad about beyond what is reasonable. "Reasonable" is tricky to define, and
5/ suffice it to say if my argument were "Ugh, darn PC liberals telling people to stop using ethnic slurs!," I'd be an idiot. Sometimes people SHOULD feel bad. So the trick in fully defining FBL is coming up with an appropriate line, which is a subjective enterprise. But either
6/ way, it's interesting that Jay, who I respect a ton as a writer and thinker, is claiming that *I'm* overblowing a tiny slice of minutiae, when that, to me is a pretty good working definition for what FBL is and why it's a problem.
