Jesus fucking Christ, Cory, this is patently ridiculous.

[bascule@mas.to]

@artemis ugh, such cringe. Doctorow is a douchebag

[ykantrachelread@social.treehouse.systems]

@Primavera @artemis honestly this is one of the most commonly misinterpreted feminist sound-bytes in social justice-oriented spaces, and it irrationally annoys the hell out of me

"the master's tools" in this metaphor aren't the tools used to build the house. they're the tools that he uses to keep us from destroying it. they're the tools that he uses to keep privileged women and marginalized women from expressing gender-class solidarity with one another and, together, from burning the whole thing to the ground.

in other words, Doctorow is just completely missing the point.

(for the record, the other common misinterpretation I see is from e.g. liberals preaching nonviolence on the assumption that violence is one of the master's tools - and that's equally ridiculous given the above.)

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@artemis

What always trips me up in these exchanges is my confusion between whether someone means a tool (as in "a hammer") versus a tool that belongs to the master. IOW, is the beef in any given scenario the tool itself or is the real point of contention the fact that it's still always in the master's hands and the master won't be persuaded to part with it in any meaningful way?

Unless someone like C.D. makes that clear I'm not even sure what we're debating.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@sayonaraminasan @artemis

The ahistoric need for folks like him to chant "Trump Bad!' around the clock is breaking a lot of brains, I think.

Note: I agree that Trump is bad but too often they act like he came out of nowhere and everything was peaches and cream before that.

[artemis@dice.camp]

@xenophora
Well, that's the thing really: he isn't interested in talking about this & has little to do with what he is saying.

In the blog post, he moves on immediately after this paragraph. It's like it was inserted just for flavor.

At which point, I gotta ask why is he bringing up a Black woman to say that she is wrong about something he doesn't actually even want to talk about.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@artemis

Yeah. I have read good critiques on here about some of Hooks's teachings but this doesn't sound like that at all.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@artemis

And the folks doing the critiques weren't boiling her work down to one or two points and implying that all of it should just be put out with the recycling. [sigh]

[artemis@dice.camp]

@xenophora @sayonaraminasan
Yeah, I think we can acknowledge that the Trump regime is particularly brutal, but Trump et al did not invent this system of plunder & murder. They just saw an opportunity & seized control of the Plunder Machine to plunder as much as they can as fast as they can.

I'm not pining for the days when the people using our tax dollars to murder other people were more classy & less cartoonishly obvious with their corruption & total self-interest.

[artemis@dice.camp]

@xenophora @sayonaraminasan
And honestly...it happened in the most absurd way thanks to Trump, but somebody was going to do it. If not Trump, someone else. Maybe it would have taken a little longer, but we are at the point in the game where the Epstein class are all scrambling to grab whatever is left to grab.

We were headed here.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@artemis @sayonaraminasan

I just accidentally stumbled on to the news that there's yet another fucking miniseries lionizing the fucking Kennedys so I fear you and I and maybe 18 other people are alone in this.

[xenophora@mastodon.art]

@jellyfriend @artemis

lol I forgot all about that fucking site after I got in trouble for trying to share a pro-socialized medicine page with another poster in their comments. This was during Occupy and after getting no moderator response to my complaint, I bailed and never looked back. Fuck all those people.

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@artemis @xenophora @sayonaraminasan Honestly, that line from Lorde has always confused me, but I've liked plenty of things I've read from Lorde, so I figured I'd need to read it in context.

With Doctorow, he's often a good critic of tech and the culture around it, but he's got massive blind spots. And just in the last few days, I've seen more leftists in tech making their separate peace with fascism and their career in maintaining the infrastructure of fascism.

Technology isn't neutral. They have all sorts of cultural assumptions built into them. And we've long passed the point at which we should realize that Marxism barely scratched the surface of how radically we have to change.

[eryops@dice.camp]

@rakoo @theynege @artemis If you skim beneath his shallow surface, he's got nothing underneath his book-peddling business. He'll run away from his current audience that found him out for who he really is into the rightwing sphere where he'll be welcomed with open arms to continue his grift, where he'll never be examined in any serious way.