Also, a lot of the left in the West has a pretension to multiculturalism that is undermined by acknowledgement that in some places people believe really shitty things. So they have to downplay these differences or else come across as too imperialist.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian @danlistensto
You also see this come out when, for example, a communist party supports ISIS against American imperialism or people start downplaying the violence of the Syrian state because it looks bad when the far left doesn’t immediately make the U.S. the big bad in some situation.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian
but this is what I don't understand. you're saying its just pure factionalism then? "I support the enemy of my enemy" is really driving all this shit? Like, they seriously think that ISIS is acceptable because Republicans dislike ISIS?
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Replying to @danlistensto @NatrlContrarian
The "fetishization of the marginalized" thing seems non-explanatory also. Islamic extremism is incredibly damaging to those same marginalized muslim communities in western countries. Do they think they're helping those communities out by being blind to the serious problems?
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Replying to @danlistensto
I think that the counterculture of the 60s made a great deal of the importance of an outside to modern culture. The status quo was bad and the best way to destroy it was to unite those who were marginalized by it.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian @danlistensto
So the marginal and transgressive were vaporized as being key to the overturning of the system. I think this played a role in how identity politics became the big thing on the left (that and the fact that it isn’t actually radical). Difference became a good in itself.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian @danlistensto
Here we can see a parallel in how the third worldists view capitalism as only being conquerable by a non-capitalist outside to the capitalist system. Hence Foucault’s early support for Khomeini’s “revolution” and the support we still see for Iran from some.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian
I always thought post-revolution Iran was very "second world". adjacent to soviet periphery, buying weapons from Russia, far more industrialized than the true third world and never colonized (not explicitly anyway).
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Replying to @danlistensto
In the original conception I think first world was the western sphere, second the Soviets’, and third everyone else. For Foucault I just wanted to draw attention to the way he saw it originally as progressive in an anti-liberal and anti-capitalist way.
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Replying to @NatrlContrarian @danlistensto
His support suggested a longing for something novel without a great deal of concern for how it could be oppressive. The third worldism is a different tendency, but something that shares similarities to this view in its desire for the Other.
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fetishization is the right word. maybe should use a stronger term: xenophilia
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