"But everything is political, isn't it?" The question is insistent, it always comes back, in part because there is more than a little truth to the assertion it presupposes. Everything is political in the sense that any action we take or decision we make or conclusion we reach rests on assumptions, norms, and values not everyone would affirm. That is, everything we do is rooted in a contestable point of origin; and since the realm of the contestable is the realm of politics, everything is political.
But this sense in which everything is political is so general (no action escapes it) that there isn't very much that can be done with it; it doesn't tell you anything about the entities (all entities) to which it applies. If everything is political, to say of something that it is political is not to distinguish it from anything else; and if you want to know what a particular thing is or how it works, you will have to go back to the ordinary distinctions that will still serve to mark one thing off from another even if, on a very abstract level, they are both political.
Literary criticism and partisan politics are both political in this general sense -- any style of their performance will be controversial in the field -- but the point of the one is to produce a true account of a poem, while the point of the second is to win elections. If you mix them up and try for an account of a poem that will help a favored candidate or advance a political cause (unlikely but possible scenarios), you will only be pretending to practice literary criticism, and you will be exploiting for partisan purposes the discipline in whose name you supposedly act."
"I'm fucking sick of the Internet (especially coming into 2016) [...] and people on the Internet having this Social Justice Warrior-like mindset towards everything. Everybody gets triggered about everything, everybody gets offended about everything. You can't let out any non-filtered opinion here on YouTube without taking a bashing or without taking some kind of bullshit punishment from YouTube."
"Personally, liberal students scare the shit out of me. I know how to get conservative students to question their beliefs and confront awful truths, and I know that, should one of these conservative students make a facebook page calling me a communist or else seek to formally protest my liberal lies, the university would have my back. I would not get fired for pissing off a Republican, so long as I did so respectfully, and so long as it happened in the course of legitimate classroom instruction.
The same cannot be said of liberal students. All it takes is one slip—not even an outright challenging of their beliefs, but even momentarily exposing them to any uncomfortable thought or imagery—and that’s it, your classroom is triggering, you are insensitive, kids are bringing mattresses to your office hours[1] and there’s a twitter petition out demanding you chop off your hand in repentance."
"Trump won. It's over. Enjoy your new world, the "I'm offended” generation. You're the one to blame.
This is the answer for all the political correctness hysteria out there.
When every single joke is 'racist', when every innocent flirt is 'sexist', when every halloween costume is 'cultural appropriation', when a cartoon makes you need a 'safe space', when every little comment is 'offensive'... You'll get a Trump for president.
And you deserve it!"
—Ahmed Imamovic, Facebook post from the aftermath of the 2016 US Election, via Imgur
The Contributor Covenant version on which the RFC is based is authored and maintained by intersectional technologist and transgender feminist Coraline Ada Ehmke. Ehmke believes that open source is a political movement:
From the onset open source has been inherently a political movement, a reaction against the socially damaging, anti-competitive motivations of governments and corporations. It began as a campaign for social liberty and digital freedom, a celebration of the success of communal efforts in the face of rampant capitalism. What is this if not a political movement?
—– Why Hackers Must Welcome Social Justice Advocates
Whether or not this description of open source is accurate, it is true that Ehmke thinks of open source as a political arena. As such, one must read the Contributor Covenant as a political document, with political means and political ends. Specifically, it is a tool for Social Justice.
As a tool for Social Justice, it recognizes no boundaries between project, person, and politics. This attitude is written into the Contributor Covenant with the text, “This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.” So, when is a project participant not representing the project? The answer appears to be “never.”
That is, a project participant is always representative of the project. We can see one example of this from the “Opalgate” incident. In reference to a Twitter conversation where Opal is not the subject, Ehmke opens an Opal project issue, and then attempts (with a Social Justice mob of backers) to intimidate the project managers into removing one of the Twitter conversants from the project because of his non-project-related speech.
Internet Rando: Why can't you keep politics out of your books? A: That's impossible. All art is political. Internet Rando: Can't you be less in your face about it? A: I could, but no.
"The He-Man episode "The Problem with Power", without a doubt presents a political quandary. In addition, there are two opposing forces, each with their own internal power structures. But the political undertones in this basic story are easily applicable to nearly any similar situation in any time frame by anyone of nearly any ideology.
Compare and contrast that with the Animated Soviet Propaganda piece, which very specifically tells you who to hate. and why to hate them, by couching the antagonist in a contrived situation carefully orchestrated to communicate a specific on-the-nose political message.
This is a basic distinction that any high school level student ought to be able to make. A distinction that’s far too nuanced for the SJW pea-brain to grasp. It’s the distinction between political propaganda and genuine art.
So you can imagine my amusement when I stumbled across an authoritative article written by a non-authority, which boldly lectured people decades older and wiser than him on the nature of politics in art."
"I miss the days when social media was just pictures of people's food. I used to make fun of that, I used be like: "Stop posting pictures of your food!"Now, I want that more than ever. Please show me your breakfast, please show me your lunch, please show me your dinner, because I just want that.
And don't add that breakfast, lunch and dinner picture with your opinions on politics or race or religion or whether the earth is a certain size or shape."
"[Social Justice Warriors] will whine and complain that everything is intrinsically political, you know? In their conception of the cosmos, even the refusal to make a political statement is, in itself, a political statement. If you were to write a story about the life and times of a Zen rock garden, I'm sure you could find an SJW critic who was willing to assign each stone their own race and gender. So, that's the first rule of SJW club. Everything has to be political. Everything is a political statement, no matter what. There's no such thing as art for the sake of artistic freedom, or narrative for the sake of narrative consistency.
In SJW-land, everything in a story is merely a reflection of the author's intentions. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a bigot, then the author is a bigot. If a story contains a positive depiction of a character who's a fascist, then the author is a fascist. If a story contains a bunch of orcs that kidnap and rape fair maidens, then that means the author tacitly supports rape or is depicting a stereotypical version of swarthy barbarian hordes through the lens of colonialism or something. They have this kind of weird, superstitious idea that not only are authors incapable of depicting anything that goes against their belief system or personal experiences, but that the values expressed in fiction are a form of thought contagion.
You see where this is going? If you're a pacifist, then according to an SJW, you can't write about war. If you're white, you can't write about what it's like to be black. If you're a man, you can't write about the experiences of women, and so on and so forth. Basically, SJWs not only assume that people are so shallow that they believe literally every single thing they read, fictional or not, they also assume that people are incapable of imagining experiences that they've never had, or entertaining thoughts that they disagree with. They never really follow that logic to its conclusion, however. If a white person can't write about what it's like to be black, or a man can't write about what it's like to be a woman, then how can Tolkien write about what it's like to live in Middle-earth, given that he'd never actually lived there, because it doesn't exist? "Lived experiences" aren't necessary if someone has a little thing called an imagination."
sing along with me
🎶saying you don’t want politics in your stories
is itself a political opinion
and it means you just want to see your politics in stories instead
and stories have always been political
because politics is about people and power
and so are stories🎶
— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 9, 2018
next verse
🎶and if you say that thing about stories being apolitical
it’s probably code for ‘I don’t like certain people showing up in those stories’
people acknowledged and with agency
which probably also means you don’t like those people showing up in real life
you jerk🎶
— Chuck Wendig (@ChuckWendig) July 9, 2018
Replying to @ChuckWendig
You are projecting, dear. "Everything is political" is an excuse for totalitarian iconoclasts (such as yourself, apparently) to inject their ideology into everything. You're in pretty bad company, please reconsider.
— @Banned_Ali
Aaaand blocked. Gosh, these "everything is political" types sure don't like to be reminded of their political predecessors do they. <screenshot: blocked by @ChuckWendig>
— @Banned_Ali
Replying to @ChuckWendig
When people say this they normally mean FORCED politics
As in there being no subtlety or it serves no purpose or even detracts from the story itself, which normally comes from a "politics first, story second" type of mindset rather than just making a good story
— @SilencedMerc
Guess the narrative isn't allowed to be questioned lol <screenshot: blocked by @ChuckWendig>
— @SilencedMerc
Replying to @ChuckWendig
With respect to your writing, Mr. Wendig, I'm going to quote from Matt Stover, "In a democracy, everything is political. And everyone." -Palpatine, "Revenge of the Sith" novel
— @waywardson2016
Replying to @ChuckWendig
I don’t care about stories being political. I’m just sick of you guys hammering home the same boring left wing allegories in the most hamfisted way possible.
— @depraved_mutant
