cultural cataclysms
I know the genre. The internet is a big place, all types post all types. But mostly a-normal in one manner and other. Enter “Libs of Tik tok”. Slot it next to — what was the name? — ” People of Walmart” or something like that. And it appears to be not a horrible site. Except when it is.
I suppose if they wanted to film these proceedings they would be candidates for that thing. Except they wouldn’t be — their fashion sense was not draggy enough.:
A few years’ back I was at a coffee shop in a major book store I treated a tad like a library in picking up books for reading as I drunk coffee. I was a reading a book on modern conspiracy theories and the politicians mainstreaming them. So comes a quote from a congress critter or other — that the goal of some educational program or other is to make kids as gay as possible — gays even gayer and straights just gayish.
Meantime, behind me is this group of young educators, radicals, a collection of thirty year olds one foot in some college tenure track and one foot in a radical study group. They were shifting through a bunch of books to build a syllabus. “And this one I love love love”, she says. The title is along the lines of ” The queering of the environment” (the environment referring to trees and airs and plastics). It dismantles the patriarchy, capitalism, and various buzzwords which I have heard to inter-mingle and reference as cultural affects derived from Marxism is tantamount to the Nazis reference of “cultural bolshevikism”.
“But,” the radical go-getting professor sighed. “I am afraid my students just aren’t ready for this one.” And she lightly packs it away and proceeds to find the track of books that can lead to the advanced study represented by “The Queering of the Environment”.
To what extent the conspiracy minded tea party politician waging against making everyone as gay as possible has his enemy in this study grouping educating someone’s mind, I can not say, except to say that they do show he is right to some degree. Sitting there at World Cup at Powells reading that while at the same time hearing that was jarring to say the least. I imagine throwing the two in the same room, just so they might
You do, though, wander into easily mistaken reference points easily decontextualized, out of the sea of crazy yahoos with dreams and schemes of a definitionally unattainable utopia. So:
Then a few days later I was scrolling through Facebook and came across a Fox News post about a professor defending/denying comments he made about “children enjoying sexual attacks by pedihiles” the headline implied. Naturally there where some FB comments that amounted to death threats against the professor. I then read the Fox story and first learned that the original source was Libs on Tic Tok. The professor’s explanation is an example of how comments taken out of context can be extremely distorting and potentially dangerous. He was speaking as part of a academic zoom meeting on the subject of helping child victim of pedihiles. As an “expert” in the filed, one sub category of child victims were those conned by the predator into thinking they were “playing” and manipulated into thinking that was happening to them was “fun”…when of course they were being raped by sick individuals. In cases like this, the professor said, when the victims have been manipulated into thinking this was “fun”, there needs to be a much different approach to first make them realize it was not “fun”, but bad. How that gets translated into the professor saying kids enjoy being raped by a pedihile on Libs of Tic Tok part is both shocking and totally irresponsible language (that is indeed protected by the first amendment). And now that professor has people commenting (in the same state he lives in) that he should be killed, because Libs of Tic Toc grossly took out of context what he was really saying. Now The Washington Post story makes sense. Like the story pointed out, this is what this anonymous account does.
Not a bad site. Except when it is. And I would hope for enough intellectual honesty to make distinctions, but I doubt it is there.