Here, SHOULD YOU DARE, you will find a piece of pop-culture criticism that I wholly despise. I hate it as much as any piece of pop-culture writing I've ever read. I hate it so much that I have been unable to write a proper response to it, because a proper response would involve, I think, an exploration and explication of my own philosophy of aesthetics--which would be a bit much for a blog post, even for me! Anywho, here you are: (http://www.avclub.com/…/south-park-raised-generation-trolls…)
In short, the writer of that article concludes that South Park is responsible for our current political climate. He equivocates about this point over and over again, but ultimately concludes that a cartoon that reached 4 million people per episode at the *height* of its popularity is to blame for a generation of trolls who've changed the world. What the article wants you to believe is that Matt Stone and Trey Parker must take responsibility not for their creation, words, and ideas, but for the fucking idiots who misinterpreted them to their own idiotic ends.
So why bring this up, if I don't plan on doing the actual work of explaining what I hate about it?
We're now a few days into the Google "Anti-Diversity Screed" controversy. Here, SHOULD YOU DARE, you will find maybe the only centrist or center-left or leftist media outlet that treated the controversy in an intellectually honest way. (https://www.theatlantic.com/…/the-most-common-error…/536181/) "The balance of his memo argues that he is not against pursuing greater gender diversity at Google; he says it is against the current means Google is using to pursue that end and the way the company conceives of tradeoffs between the good of diversity and other goods."
When Gizmodo first published the memo, it ran with this headline: "Exclusive: Here's The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google." Gizmodo did not include the hyperlinks to the academic studies and other research the author of the memo was citing, despite claiming to be publishing the "screed" in "full," though they did note their omission. Despite the fact that the memo explicitly calls for increased gender diversity at Google, the wider media took Gizmodo's narrative and ran with it, and every woke-ish publication you can name on the internet ran a piece on the misogynistic engineer's anti-woman manifesto.
I have very little interest in debating the merits of this GoogleGoober's take on how best to achieve gender diversity inside his former workplace, and just as little interest in debating the merits of the academic research he linked to, or how he interpreted it or possibly misunderstood it. (***See exception below.***) What *is* interesting to me is the willful misrepresentation of his argument at the outset, perhaps as a hedge against the *other people* who would inevitably take up their own misconstrued versions of his arguments and turn them into something explicitly hateful and unequivocally bad.
(That the author of the memo immediately made himself a useful idiot to the likes of psychopathic cult leader Stefan Molyneux does not excuse the wildly unfair framing of the original memo. I won't link to Molyneux on the off chance that one more person might accidentally fall under his lunatic spell, but the GoogleGoober did a lengthy interview with him shortly after the story went viral.)
The guy who wrote the South Park article wants me to condemn Matt and Trey because there are people who watched a poorly animated Al Gore scream hysterically about Manbearpig and decided that the moral lesson there was "climate change is fake news." The overwhelming narrative of this Google memo is that we should reject it out of hand because it argued that women are intellectually inferior to men and not suited to the engineering and coding work being done at Google. But the memo did not make that argument.
The distance between *what this actually says* and *how our enemies are going to use this against us* has been entirely eliminated, regardless of the actual original content. "We must interpret what is before us only in the terms that the lowest common denominator will interpret it, and then reject the whole thing without a second thought," they're effectively saying. Or, it must be South Park's fault that some Twitter egg or Pepe the Frog quotes Cartman's "your tears are delicious" while shitting on your heartfelt terror about the Trumpian State online. That asshole certainly wouldn't have found some other way to bum you out, if South Park had never existed, I guess.
So rather than a discussion about how Google can more effectively move toward greater gender diversity, and how this one Goober's approach might be flawed, and how Google's own approach might be flawed, we're left to screech only the dumbest possible things back and forth at one another. (This year's internal diversity report doesn't do a lot to suggest that Google's approach has been a roaring success, on its own terms: http://fortune.com/2017/06/29/google-2017-diversity-report/) And even if you conclude that this one engineer's opinions are retrograde and dumb, who gives a shit?! He's one dude! He can't fix the problem or make it substantially worse any more than Google can itself reverse-engineer the Thousands-Years Reign of the Patriarchy to guarantee that they have a fifty-fifty pool of qualified applicants from which to make their hiring decisions.
The point is that the entire Google memo controversy has been fabricated out of a false premise--that the memo is an "anti-diversity screed." This is bad, but it's good for the clicks, right?
What's the real, calculable damage, aside from the obvious stuff I'm always whining about, with all the John Oliver hate and a full-on decade bitching about *everyone besides me* having the wrong discussion? What is the worst case, slippery slope, nation-unraveling version of events, you want to know?
A different argument with utterly false premises has concocted a fight out of the thin air where our president's ego is meant to be. And it might just, you know--if we're not careful--it might just end America. (So it goes?)
Click it. Click it and read it. It's short. Here it is, again.
Nearly half of Republicans believe Donald Trump actually won the popular vote because millions of illegal aliens voted for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. 56% of Republicans apparently would support the postponing of the 2020 election if Trump and Congressional Republicans supported the idea.
How much of this hypothetical is a result of your standard ideological conservatism's deference to strength and authority? How much is people fucking with the pollster? How much is sincerely-held terrifying stupidity? Who knows!
What I do know is that Donald Trump said that the 2016 election was going to be rigged, and then he won, and afterward he said it was rigged anyway. He made the false claim that millions of people voted illegally, and exclusively for his opponent. He then used that false premise to launch an "investigation" into voter fraud, an investigation whose outcome is predetermined, and for which recommendations will have been prepared long in advance of any actual information being discovered. And now half the people in his party would support postponing the next election until we can figure out just what the hell is going on, or whatever.
But yeah, it's South Park's fault. South Park couldn't possibly be a satirical reflection of our shitty world. No, South Park's driving this bus.
***Here we are, "below." Above, I said that I had no interest in the merits of this whole...thing, one way or another. More accurately, I don't have the inclination to have that argument here. But! I would like to point out that there is a certain amount of shit-eating here that "the left" should be forced to endure. A lot of the sociological research and evolutionary psychology stuff and gender norms data he's pointing to are very much real, as anyone who has ever blamed *THE PATRIARCHY* for anything will attest. There's a real cognitive disconnect between the alleged "all-consuming power of the ingrained patriarchy" and what happens anytime somebody points to noted and obvious outcomes of an all-powerful patriarchy to make an argument that most professed opponents of said patriarchy don't agree with. Personally, I think most of the claims of social psychology have (at best) no moral real-world applicability, and are (at worst) often utter bullshit and based on unreplicable bad science. But that's mostly neither here nor there.***
*sub-headlined against blargher's wishes by the Assignment Desk
