Really good Cracked.com comment

This was a comment that was posted on a recent article on Cracked.com - a site that I frequent that has, in recent years, become increasingly used as a soapbox for what I would characterize as "left-wing authoritarian" viewpoints on a broad variety of social issues. I think that EVERYONE should read this multiple times and really soak in what it's saying no matter what your politics are, because it really applies to everyone even though it's directed at a specific group of people. Hope you enjoy it; I certainly did.

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Mister_Z

11-26-2015 | 12:59 pm

I don't have a problem with you (as in, Cracked columnists and bloggers) tackling political subjects, the problem I have is that you guys really suck at it.

First, to put it as honestly as I can, you're real assholes about it. You keep acting like angsty teenagers who are discovering their ability to get outraged: you make emphatic and overdramatic comments about topics you claim to be oh-so passionate about (and to be fair, you probably genuinely are) yet the content of your work shows how superficial your understanding of these problems is.

Seriously, some of the stuff you put out shows such a basic lack of understanding of the problems at hand it’s getting surreal. Just recently we had those Adam Tod Brown articles that not only claim that Donald Trump is exactly the same as Hitler but where a major argument is that he's trying to appeal to minorities… just like Hitler?

I really don’t understand how you can write s**t like this and then be surprised that people would question the legitimacy of your analysis. (Paradoxically, now that Trumps has suggested a mandatory registration for Muslim citizens, something that actually is straight out of the Nazi handbook only with Muslims instead of Jews, there isn’t a single mention of it on Cracked)

Same thing with that time one columnist said that not finding vaginas terrifying is misogynistic and that he's right because Amanda Mannen exists (and apparently if she agrees with him that means that all women do because I guess he believes women are a hive mind), because as we all know one of the worst hardships that women face today is that people are just too damn positive about their sexuality. Of course, while the author mentioned that article in a later one, he did not acknowledge the multiple female users who said they weren’t impressed with having their privates compared to torture devices.

Yet you act like you've got it all figured out and like you're the only ones who truly understand these issues, and in fact like you're the only ones who care about them, as if until you came around, no-one else ever considered issues like gender equality, LGBT rights or race relationships.

In turn, this fallacy that you are the only ones who care about these topics causes the next problem: your inability to differentiate between people disagreeing with you personally and people disagreeing with your opinions.

You, like many slacktivists (and I'm sorry to say, Cracked but most of your writers really are slacktivists), seem to be under the impression that - because you're convinced that no-one else in the World cares about equal rights - if anyone disagrees with you that something is offensive, it must mean that they disagree with you that sexism, homophobia or racism even exist or that they’re problems. It’s a convenient way to not only dismiss but also vilify any deviation from your personal morals by declaring it to be part of an agenda to keep everyone but White males down.

You really do come across like it never even enters your mind that maybe; just maybe your interpretation of things isn’t indisputably true just because you think it is, you never seem to consider that other people’s interpretations are just as valid. You don’t bother listening to their arguments; you immediately dismiss them as bigoted because hey, they disagree with only people in the World who care about equality so they MUST be prejudiced! No good person would ever disagree with you, would they?

That’s the problem right there, you really need to learn that there is a difference between saying “I don’t think this is misogynistic” and saying “I think misogyny is right. All women should go in the kitchen and make me a sandwich”.

And the best part? There’s nothing saying that just because someone disagrees with you means YOU are wrong either and by all means you should make your case and explain why you think something is offensive or oppressive if you genuinely believe it to be. All we’re asking is that you please, for the love of God stop being so obnoxious about it by immediately going for the “y’all who disagree with me are assholes because I’m for equal rights and you disagree with me therefore you disagree with equal rights” rhetoric.

That’s what I keep trying to explain to people on the Internet and I’m running out of ideas on how to make them understand it: I’m pretty sure the vast majority of people around the World agree that all people should be treated as equal, so please stop saying that people who disagree with you on the way to accomplish it are trying to oppress the rest of Humanity. And don’t act shocked that people don’t like it when you do that.

This brings me to the next problem, the “you’re either with us or you’re against us” attitude, which surprisingly common on Cracked considering how many times Wong himself has criticized this behaviour. And yet I keep seeing articles going on and on about how anyone who disagrees with Cracked’s beliefs is sexist/racist/homophobic/etc because, say it with me now, they think they’re the only ones who care about equal rights. Just look at this passage from this very article:

"If you write about pop culture and never write about, say, racial stereotypes in movies, then you're making a strong political statement (specifically, that racial stereotypes in movies aren't worth noticing or worrying about)"

I’m sorry but how does that make any sense? If these themes aren’t relevant to the work being discussed, how is not mentioning them supporting them? To say that is forcing people to pick a side because if they don’t and try to show some perspective and not be partisan, then it’s not as easy to slap a label on them and treat them as either friend or foe. No open-mindedness allowed, pick a side, we’re at war!

In fact, it’s worse than that; it’s not just forcing them to pick a side; it’s forcing one ONTO them. “You didn’t blindly agree with me therefore you support everything I disagree with” (funny how this anti-logic only applies to stuff the person saying it disagrees with, huh?).

This is an especially bad one as it creates a very unhealthy if not downright toxic attitude where people must not only agree with you on the general principle, they must agree with you on every single detail and any deviation from your own morals is an inacceptable affront that must be removed; you MUST follow the dogmas of the group or suffer the consequences.

Think I’m exaggerating? Check out the frankly disturbingly vitriolic reactions to Brianna Wu, one of the main victims of GamerGate, having the audacity to meet an outspoken pro-GG man and having conversation with him, going so far as saying afterwards that it was rather pleasant and that even though they disagree, he is not a bad man. Oh the hate she got for refusing to vilify an “enemy” and actually do something constructive.

Something else you can look up, a young fanartist who calls herself “Zamii” who f*****g ATTEMPTED SUICIDE after she was bullied by a bunch of hashtag activists for publishing “problematic” fanart (is there any non-ironic use of the word “problematic” on the Internet that isn’t followed by massive douchbaggery?). And she didn’t overreact to one or two nasty comments, OVER 40 BLOGS were created for the sole purpose of insulting her.

Now obviously Cracked isn’t nearly at this point but, as this article further attests, they really do have this “us vs them” mentality. Just go back through their articles and take a shot for every time they use such adjectives as “awful”, “terrible” and “horrible” to describe opinions that differ from them, let alone any criticism they might get. You can’t keep this kind of confrontational and aggressive attitude and be shocked that people aren’t super thrilled about it when you basically tell them that if they don’t blindly agree with you, they’re supporting racism, sexism, homophobia and hatred in general.

Now to be fair, Wong did specify “if you NEVER write” about such topics. Okay, fair enough. I still disagree but I can see the point that if you frequently write about pop culture, it seems odd that you’d never come across an opportunity to discuss the subject.

However, the problem is that Cracked (and again, many other Internet “activists”) has this really bad tendency to nitpick details and twist and stretch them until they find something, anything to harp on and get outraged over and then shame the author for it as if it was their plan all along because coincidences can’t exist (even when you have to perform Olympics levels of stretching to make it offensive).

I'm sorry but no, not everything has a subtext (in fact, I would argue that most things don't). This is the core problem with many Cracked articles on social and political issues and indeed the problem with slacktivists/hashtag activists/SJWs/whatever you want to call them. You guys are so obsessed with “implications”, most of which only exist in your mind, that you no longer give any attention to what is actually being said and done, the facts right in front of your eyes.

You’re not listening to what people tell you, you’re listening to what YOU are making people say. It’s like you just found the glasses from “They Live” and you’re so busy trying it on everything you see that you don’t notice the person being stabbed right in front of you. And you won’t accomplish anything constructive as long as you keep that mindset.

Once you develop some humility and start actually listening to what people say instead of what you want to hear, realize that no, just because someone disagrees with you doesn’t mean they’re either stupid or evil or both and that facts and principles are more important than sides, THEN you will genuinely be doing something constructive and then people will respect you as people who are genuinely trying to make the world a better place.

But as long as you keep up the partisan bullshit and care more about defending a side than defending the principles it claims to represent then I’m sorry but there won’t be anything respectable about what you’re doing.

And I think what I find most annoying about this kind of stuff is that if any site should know better, it’s you because you have these POV articles which are almost always incredibly eye-opening, especially since the whole point of it is that they’re (mostly) written from the point of view of people who actually experienced those things first-hand.

And you know what else makes these articles great? The persons writing them or being interviewed for them DON’T subscribe to any of that “if you disagree with me you’re a terrible person” bullshit and feel far more open to people disagreeing with them. And yet you, the people publishing these articles, never seem to learn from them and keep this frankly pedantic attitude.

Don’t get me wrong, Cracked, I still like you and I understand that you mean well. It’s just… hot damn do I wish you’d drop the holier-than-thou crap. Please, quit being the angsty high-school kid who can’t stop going on about how everything sucks and is corrupt and anyone who says otherwise is just a sheep working for The Man and become the relaxed college kid who’s still passionate about these subjects but learned to lighten the f**k up.

Ooh boy, even by my standards that was a long one. If any of you actually stuck with me through the whole thing, thanks a lot. For real. Even if all my doorstopper of a comment did was make you want to rip out my eyes and testicles and put my testicles where my eyes were and my eyes where my testicles were, I genuinely thank you for taking the time to read it all. I hope I managed to keep it at least semi-coherent and that I succeeded in giving people food for thought.



TL;DR version: we don’t hate you being political, Cracked (well, most of us anyway). We hate that you're being dicks about it.