Knowing what the basic ideological structure of your society is does not translate into “doing politics” or “caring about politics” and not even exactly to “knowing politics”. In fact since you bring up ideology, I will say that taking an outside view of dominant Western ideology one can conclude it is remarkably easy to figure out its result, compared to the extensive processing one must do within the framework provided by this ideology to get the same output.
Consider racefail09, where sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics, nonetheless found themselves in no end of trouble for violating obscure and difficult to detect taboos, found themselves in grave and potentially career threatening trouble, despite determined and terrified effort to conform.
Non political people are always getting in trouble for ideological violations—for example using “gay” or “twat” as curse word rather than “prick”, and as racefail09 demonstrates, even highly political people who purport to have all the correct politics can and do regularly get in trouble.
Racefail09 is suggestive of the Maoist self criticism movement. When collectivization was considerably less successful and complete than it had been officially decreed to be, Mao concluded that ten percent of the party were traitors, so it became necessary to find and punish that many traitors, regardless of whether they existed or not, and no amount of knowledge of what was necessary to conform ideologically could save one.
Consider racefail09, where sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics
Not at all. The people who complained about supposed racism in the original post should have been trolled hard for disputing the author’s motives in wishing to write fiction about minority folks—and seeking to do it “right”, i.e. minimizing outgroup biases. Their original arguments were non-sensical and should have been exposed as such. Instead what we got from the folks on the author’s side was lots and lots of arguments about how minority people should have no say in the matter, and how pseudonymous/anonymous critics should be disregarded for not making their identity known (even though unprivileged critics have lots of reasons for being pseudonymous). The complainers’ faction replied by correctly accusing the authors’ side of racist bias, and that was that. It could no longer be sensibly argued that the OP authors were in the right when seeking to write about cultural outgroups in an unbiased way, so the debate was effectively lost.
Hardly a marker of “sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics”.
Consider racefail09, where sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics nonetheless found themselves in no end of trouble for violating obscure and difficult to detect taboos,
Not at all.… Instead what we got from the folks on the author’s side was lots and lots of arguments about how minority people should have no say in the matter,
PC bunkum so utterly ludicrous that the fact that it is tolerated discredits this forum.
Consider racefail09, where sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics, nonetheless found themselves in no end of trouble for violating obscure and difficult to detect taboos, found themselves in grave and potentially career threatening trouble, despite determined and terrified effort to conform.
Non political people are always getting in trouble for ideological violations—for example using “gay” or “twat” as curse word rather than “prick”, and as racefail09 demonstrates, even highly political people who purport to have all the correct politics can and do regularly get in trouble.
Racefail09 is suggestive of the Maoist self criticism movement. When collectivization was considerably less successful and complete than it had been officially decreed to be, Mao concluded that ten percent of the party were traitors, so it became necessary to find and punish that many traitors, regardless of whether they existed or not, and no amount of knowledge of what was necessary to conform ideologically could save one.
Not at all. The people who complained about supposed racism in the original post should have been trolled hard for disputing the author’s motives in wishing to write fiction about minority folks—and seeking to do it “right”, i.e. minimizing outgroup biases. Their original arguments were non-sensical and should have been exposed as such. Instead what we got from the folks on the author’s side was lots and lots of arguments about how minority people should have no say in the matter, and how pseudonymous/anonymous critics should be disregarded for not making their identity known (even though unprivileged critics have lots of reasons for being pseudonymous). The complainers’ faction replied by correctly accusing the authors’ side of racist bias, and that was that. It could no longer be sensibly argued that the OP authors were in the right when seeking to write about cultural outgroups in an unbiased way, so the debate was effectively lost.
Hardly a marker of “sophisticated people with great skill in expressing themselves and intimate knowledge of our politics”.
PC bunkum so utterly ludicrous that the fact that it is tolerated discredits this forum.