When 'sp!ked' started using the
Disqus comment facility around 2012, I managed to unite some of those adhering to certain, puritanical, paternalistic (!) strands of feminism,
and the more homogenised 'men's rights activists', against me, by criticising both their purportedly, diametrically opposed worldviews.
However, whilst some of the former would actually respond with a comment, the latter would mostly just 'down-vote'.
Leaving it to the most argumentative cranks, amongst the MRA's, such as
Steven Moxon to mechanically repeat his mechanistic arguments.
Moxon and some other MRA's took up residence in Spiked's comment threads. Often being the first to respond to new articles, about nearly anything.
The only thing that bothered me about being 'down-voted', was when a number did it, rather than formulating a verbal response, and seemingly like sheep.
However, the satisfaction of having prompted demonstrations, of the commonalities across supposedly antagonistic forms of identity politics, did rather counterbalance that frustration.
Spiked stopped using Disqus, several years later, by which time, I hadn't posted a comment there for quite long. Whilst still using my Disqus account elsewhere online, which isn't without its problems:
https://randocity.com/2017/10/26/why-you...your-site/
https://fatfrogmedia.com/delete-disqus-c...wordpress/
I currently have the same avatar there, Rihanna in a 'Think While It's Still Legal' t-shirt, but not the same name, and I'm intrigued to see if anyone can find my profile!
I rejected identity politics, around the turn of the 1990s, when it was the preserve of a minority of mostly conspiracists and cranks, largely on North American, and West European campuses, and other enclaves, such as the Greater London Council.
Not too long after, I became involved in a left-wing organisation, and I recall one day ending a magazine sale, on a major high street, and some members of the Nation of Islam, who had been doing similar nearby, said to me, and a couple of other black guys, including one who was in our group's orbit, but not on the sale, "stay black!".
None of us were hung up on black identity, so it didn't have the desired effect, and we didn't respond to them.
'Stay woke!' has been a more widely exchanged exhortation.
Language is a fluid, public phenomenon, and dictionaries are logs of how words are and have been used, rather than necessarily authorities on how they should be used.
Ludwig Wittgenstein said that in many instances, meaning is use, thereby undermining attempts to stifle language.
'Woke' might have become worn out through overuse as an insult, but its critical use by both left and right, is to criticise bien pensant/'right-thinking'
insomniasts, whose politics is more about moral exhibitionism, than really trying to understand and change anything.
Not that it doesn't have practical consequences, nonetheless.
In some of my earliest forum posts, I wrote about criticising identity politics, including transgender activists, and black lives matter, both of which I compared to wacky, 'counter-cultural' political groups of the 1960s and 70s.
Although they've yet to go down the route of the Baader Meinhof gang, and Red Arny Faction, they still have a lot in common with the 'Cultural Revolution' in China.
Hence, reasoned arguments can be a dead end, as when I tried that with the 'BabeTV' blogger, when he dismissed critics of transgender politics as a "hate group".
The Little Scotlander party has possibly gone the furthest, in Britain, in trying to institutionalise biophobic, transgender identity politics.
However, whilst those arguments more widely, descend into competing, blinkered reductionisms, the religious beliefs of one Scottish politician, who shows no sign of trying to impose them on others, has eclipsed more active religious fundamentalists, such as in Wakefield, where there's been a showtrial for blaspheming Islam, and in USA, where one prominent left-wing Muslim politician wants an international law against criticising Islam.
Needless to say, they're not exactly vocal with any support for women challenging violent religious fundamentalists in Iran.
I hope those who are pissed pissedofferson by my long posts, will consider it rather redundant, to bother saying so in this thread!