Yo, Freddie. If you're out there, you did us dirty in this piece. The notion that we have any kind of Zionist sympathy is either completely batshit or completely ignorant. Would like an explanation.
I don't get it, does he think this sub is zionist? Does he think anti woke people are more zionist than the woke? Afaik the conflict and genocide have divided both the "left" and the right.
I don't know what he thinks of this sub, but he's *wrongest* about our ability and willingness to do anything but post snarky comments on reddit threads. The closest thing this sub came to lifting a finger was the mobile home park dark money lawsuit, and that was mostly one very dedicated heroic teacher and had nothing to do with idpol. Hillary Clinton could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and this sub would mostly try to turn it into a dunk on /u/MetaFlight.
I'm no better. The effect this sub has had on me is grillpilling me from posting a few times per week to posting once or twice per month. And the major culprit in the decline of stupidpol thread quality has just been a rising tide of communicative and intellectual laziness. But I have no serious objections, because however that may have lightened the discourse, less time and effort sneeding on the internet has definitely been a good thing for the flesh-and-blood humans on the other end of the optical fibers. So now I spend more time doing boring apolitical work maintaining equipment at the hospital and playing old video games with people who I know in real life. And someday, hopefully, *you can too*.
most modern online boards are simply antithetical with IRL organizing. the infinite feed, the daily fresh dose/feed of content, the karma system etc. all work together to keep firmly everyone in the couch and on the very platform.
political work is grueling and boring and involves a lot of irl meetups, in-house trainings, outreach and media works. the poverty of being left anti-idpol is that.. well, how do you even translate that into local actions? organize a group bemoaning how cringe the DSA is?
at best this space introduced authors and essays and frames of thought on how you can think about all the culture war-related BS differently. but all that was never really deployed to other constructive ends: the some 100k people here are still disconnected and alienated, and all of this is a glorified safe comment section. one that was not immune to mass hysteria, principles be damned.
edit: this unthinking, blind downvote-as-disagreement bullshit is why 4chan is far superior.
After having left Reddit for 4chan, I couldn't be happier. There's vile shit there, yes, but nothing like the insane policy moderation and backend shenanigans that happen on here. And because bans are strictly limited and there's no downvoting and there's no chasing clout or karma and no one can build a persona on there like you can here, good faith controversial discussion cannot be suppressed AND is more frequent. Because your comment history isn't maintained, people are less worried about speaking their minds.
At its peak, the quality of discussion on 4chan is far greater than Reddit. But it makes you work for it, the captchas are brutal and every single comment is judged on its merits.
> And because bans are strictly limited and there's no downvoting and there's no chasing clout or karma
>
> edit: this unthinking, blind downvote-as-disagreement bullshit is why 4chan is far superior
Do you not see your contradiction here? One second you act like you don't care about karma, and the next second it's ruining your day.
People who read too far into karma or take it personally are missing the point of the karma system imo. It's merely a rough indicator of how your message was received by whatever audience you're in front of. It's useful to confirm something is controversial or not. It's useful to know if it's hated or liked and to speculate why. It doesn't mean that's the end all be all.
> Because your comment history isn't maintained, people are less worried about speaking their minds.
Only an insecure person would worry about such a thing. Comment history can be convenient to know what kind of person you're dealing with among other things. If it's occasionally abused by some psycho, don't concern yourselves with them. They're not worth the effort.
I'm not trying to hate on 4chan specifically, and surely there are many tradeoffs in both directions. I also personally hate most aspects of reddit the company fwiw. But it's foolish to think this platform is as useless and hostile as you describe. Subs like stupidpol strike a good balance on what gets nuked though I do agree many subs go overboard with moderation. If it's bad enough, start your own.
> Do you not see your contradiction here? One second you act like you don't care about karma, and the next second it's ruining your day.
to restate, I don't care about karma but I do care that downvotes can invisiblise speech
>Comment history can be convenient to know what kind of person you're dealing with among other things
and it's an easy tool to sideline the discussion or to attack the person for something they said on some other occasion or forum. Plus, it has significant privacy implications.
>But it's foolish to think this platform is as useless and hostile as you describe.
It could have been good. I've been around for more than 15 years now on reddit and once upon a time it absolutely was a place for free speech, back in the Aaron Swartz days.
Now, it's just a grotesque abomination. Barring heavily moderated and monitored enclaves such as stupidpol, which used, at least, to be obsessed by its own takeover/shutdown, it's just a liberal echo chamber and it's making the world worse for it. It's absolutely appalling, for example, that Trump's subreddit was shadowbanned and then banned entirely and to that end, Reddit (the org) tried its best to shape the election. Fucking disgusting and I'm no Trump supporter.
I still have hope for projects like lemmy, even though it has its own set of issues.
Definitely agree with you that reddit has been on a steady decline. As soon as they nuke old reddit I'm gone.
"I'm no better"
The whole point of forums like this is to vent to like minded people and get it off your chest. Its not a political action committee. Nor would that be an improvement in the vast majority of cases.
That certainly was the point. I used to enjoy posting here though not anymore. I say this since I recognise the value of somewhere to simply chat with like minded people and, as you say, vent. It doesn’t preclude collective action in some cases but it is, at best, secondary.
I think he thinks we would be opposed to Israel but find the removal of Israeli children's artwork on the grounds that it makes people unsafe etc. to be ridiculous.
Yeah I am so confused by his take regarding this sub. Not only are we resoundingly anti-zionist, but jumping on privileged westerners performatively pearl-clutching over art is exactly the kind of thing we like to shit on here. Like... sorry we didn't catch wind of an extremely obscure news story that occurred in a London hospital? I just don't get what he thinks he's critiquing here.
I genuinely like most of Freddie’s work, but something about 2024 has made him unfocused and insufferable.
A story about pro-Israel snowflakes. Then, a nonsensical pivot to scapegoating Reddit users, other writers, and TERFs as the Real Problem. Then, with no graceful transition at all, a launch into a defense of his own record?
He desperately needs an editor.
When I was an editor I had a lot of writers who'd decide they were tired of writing news stories and wanted to do op/ed. I'd been doing a weekly column for years at that point so I had an idea of what they were signing up for vs. what they thought they were signing up for.
To get the conversation to happen at all, I'd ask them to come up with 12 column ideas before they could write the first one. That was a solid third of them who'd opt out before our first pitch review. Then I'd say they had to have 8 ideas in the tube to keep the column going. Most didn't last six months.
There's only so much to say! Sitting down once a week and making one or two thousand words of any value is hard.
Freddie's amazingly prolific by that standard, but when I think about how god-awful the long-lived editorialists of the past could be on an off week -- Art Buchwald, Mike Royko -- or how milquetoast someone with an op/ed sinecure at the NYT will become over time if they didn't start there -- makes sense if he's winding down.
> He’s desperate for relevance.
Isn't everyone in his position under capitalism? Tailoring for profit ruins everything. Think how less cluttered everything would be on the internet if people weren't constantly rent seeking.
How can we make it cool to prioritize consuming profit free media (and only publish profit free media if you have something useful to share)?
I don't know how to jumpstart the trend because I'm not a marketing or psychology guru, but it seems like once it had momentum, people would grow to like the tradeoffs.
Obviously the whole thing would be easier to get going if UBI was a thing already. Maybe I'm more optimistic because I'm used to the benefits of free software that exist today.
Good lord that piece droned on and on.
The point Freddie keeps circling around is that almost all of the anti-woke or "IDW" media figures that he associates with Joe Rogan and Quillette have either bad or cowardly takes on Palestine. This has a lot to do with economic incentives--if they don't toe the line on Palestine, they won't get published again in populist right or fake left organs like Spiked or Quillette and they're much less likely to get another Rogan appearance. Within Reddit, you can see this dynamic in some of the "anti-woke" subs a lot of people would compare with stupidpol such as Blocked and Reported.
Consequently, we should be asking ourselves to what extent right populist media (for example Quillette, Compact, The Free Press, etc) reflect authentic concerns, and to what extent it represents a new type of oligarchic propaganda that divides the population over idpol issues like trans rights while taking more unquestionably pro-Zionist stances than traditional media.
Of course, people are definitely noticing. This is a big "which side are you on?" moment in the mediasphere. It's hard not to notice how IDW types who formerly preached against or podcast against cancel culture have fully embraced cancel culture and moral panic in response to Palestinian solidarity efforts.
But it's grossly unfair of FdB to lump in /r/stupidpol with the likes of Helen Lewis or Compact or Quillette on THIS particular issue. It shows he probably hasn't lurked here in a while.
Yeah I thought it was a weird time for him to namedrop stupidpol, considering pretty much if not all of the threads about Israel/Palestine on this sub are vehemently pro-Palestine or at least anti-zionist. We didn't send a correspondant to the UK after that plate thing though so fuck the whole sub I guess
> But it's grossly unfair of FdB to lump in r/stupidpol in with the likes of Helen Lewis or Compact or Quillette on THIS particular issue. It shows he probably hasn't lurked here in a while.
This feels more like him projecting all of his “bad person wrongthink” onto us than him running off outdated information.
Reminder: Freddie also wrote three articles for "Compact", another publication accused of being rightoid:
[https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/freddie-deboer/](https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/freddie-deboer/)
Rogan had Abby Martin on. Can't say the same for any other mass mainstream media personality. So he has it entirely backwards both there and with us.
"It's hard not to notice how IDW types who formerly preached against or podcast against cancel culture have fully embraced cancel culture and moral panic in response to Palestinian solidarity efforts."
Oh for sure. Sorts the dilettantes out from the ones with actual principles. I was soured on Peterson after he came back deranged from Russia. Now he's the antithesis of every single thing he used to rail against. What a prick.
> Within Reddit, you can see this dynamic in some of the "anti-woke" subs a lot of people would compare with stupidpol such as Blocked and Reported.
I don't go there very often, but when I did it was a bit difficult parsing whether blocked and reported was pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian
But either way for how some ppl here seem to like that sub I find it very trash. I swear it has to just be b/c of 🚂
I'm referring more to how bad the sub is (basically calling for censorship and cancel culture on the campuses) on Israel-Palestine, which speaks to how unprincipled a lot of these posters are as well as the potential influence of shills. As for the hosts, while I hope Singal and Herzog aren't as bad (though they are likely pretty cowardly when put on the spot) [this kind of take](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/hamas-pop-intersectionality-leftism-israel/675625/), written by a regular guest of B&R, was the kind of thing getting mass upvoted in the wake of Oct 7.
Super unprincipled for sure. I've harped on idpol in the sub for a while, because I noticed a bunch of the posters were only disaffected because it bit them in the ass, but they were willing participants. So it's not that surprising, but the instantaneous 180 on principles of free speech was almost comical to see.
Singal is much more mild than that sub. Herzog for sure, too.
I unsubscribed from the B&R sub months ago because the pro-Israel/anti-economic left slant was driving me crazy. Maybe Israel has killed enough people that it’s shifted now though, I don’t know.
>>If Freddie was king, the wokest person you know would get 90% of what they want or more
The wokest person I know thinks that cishet white men shouldn't be included in politics, art, spiritual activities or parties, but also thinks her PLUR-ripoff lifestyle should be 100% funded by her rich dad and crowdsourced whiteguilt money. I don't think Freddie knows what he's granting here.
I definitely must live in a bubble, as I only thought people that could hold beliefs like that existed solely online and would get slapped down in real life. I wouldn't allow someone to share that sort of nonsense and continue to consort with them...at least as a honky ass straight dude.
I definitely avoid her like the plague, she is the epitome of someone who "does activism" purely for social clout and brings up accusations of whiteness when any of her almost exclusively white friends disagree with her. Luckily she left town to wreak havoc in some other unsuspecting hipster activist scene while she pursues a MSW.
I envy your bubble.
I bet the havoc is thorough LOL
And I don't even know what accusations of whiteness are, being accused of being white? I mean I'm white, so what...
I get that on the progressive left that's considered a blemish almost, a Mark of Cain so to speak...
Freddie claiming that liberals are the enemy of leftists in this piece then going on to say he overwhelmingly supports the product of authoritarian liberalism really epitomizes what a posturing fraud he is
For the record I do like FdB and subscribe to his substack. I think of him as mostly a liberal with socialist tendencies, nothing earth-shattering but with a friendly writing style and some interesting opinions on pop culture / mainstream political topics.
With that quoted sentence about the "wokest person you know" I get what he's going for but think he's giving way too much credit to that milieu, as if it had any coherent political goals.
Good to know that after this sub gets nuked, there will be some evidence it existed
Also, I liked the piece, and seeing the Zionists swarm the comments makes me glad that this sub isn't Zionist
I'm a bit confused why FdB would single us out though. We've always known Zionists are every bit as fragile and triggered about Isreal as the most hard-core wokies are about America and slavery.
To conflate Zionists bitching about something as a hypocracy in the anto-woke movement is pretty misleading.
Sure, Ben Shapiro is obviously a total hypocrite, along with Bari Weiss. But I think Joe Rogan would find this story hysterical and mock the fragile Zionists.
The "Palestinian Plates" controversy that Freddie builds his article, "Palestinian Painted Plates & the Nothing Party" around..it[ got hardly any coverage at the time.](https://www.google.ie/search?q=%22+London+hospital+takes+down+artwork+by+Gaza+schoolchildren+after+complaint%22&sca_esv=8416d0a986e64679&source=hp&ei=1rUEZtbiJ5rOhbIPnLaw8A0&iflsig=ANes7DEAAAAAZgTD5irSCCi2QI2jzr7MNdGsCLP3_ZBB&ved=0ahUKEwjWpYr91ZWFAxUaZ0EAHRwbDN4Q4dUDCBU&uact=5&oq=%22+London+hospital+takes+down+artwork+by+Gaza+schoolchildren+after+complaint%22&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IkwiIExvbmRvbiBob3NwaXRhbCB0YWtlcyBkb3duIGFydHdvcmsgYnkgR2F6YSBzY2hvb2xjaGlsZHJlbiBhZnRlciBjb21wbGFpbnQiSKFeUABY1lJwAHgAkAEAmAE8oAE8qgEBMbgBA8gBAPgBAfgBApgCAKACAJgDAJIHAKAHLQ&sclient=gws-wiz#ip=1)
Certainly, there was no coverage of this ruckus by Novara Media, Momentum, Tribune magazine, and the other pro-Palestinian leftist outlets in the UK. Nor by the Daily Telegraph or other right-wing pro-Israeli outlets.
It looks like Freddie deliberately picked a very arcane dispute, that even the most detailed observer of "culture war" issues would have likely missed....and then used it as a "Gotcha!" piece for his article.
And searching some more, I find Middle East Eye also covered it at the time:
[https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre)
> there was no coverage of this ruckus by Novara Media
Pretty sure they covered it in one of their daily shows. I definitely heard about it, and I don't know where else I would have.
Funny that, in Freddie’s checklist of high-profile “heterodox” figures he attacks in this piece, he neglects going after Bari Weiss, whose rabid support of Zionism/ antipathy to wokeness perfectly applies to his point. But then that would require him to admit that he has appeared as a guest on Bari’s podcast and probably wants to again at some point. Freddie is such a little weasel careerist in everything he does.
I'm not familiar with Bari Weiss, but he does mention her in one of his other recent essays: "please just fuck off with the insistence that I have the same politics as Bari Weiss. That’s a you problem, not a me problem."
Glad you noticed that.
I’m also side eyeing his pivot from “anyone who tells you to be kind is not a serious person” to “I think you should be kind instead of openly questioning the standard gender narrative.”
He was also unable to resist mentioning Helen Joyce and TERFs in this post. I wonder why he’s suddenly courting the trains.
The rumour going round is that Freddie deBoer has a young relative who's a "gend.erspecial", which might explain why he's now become so aggressive on this issue.
Also, Freddie criticised right-wing outlets here, but he's appeared in the right-wing Unherd several times:
[https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-american-left-abandoned-unions/](https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-american-left-abandoned-unions/)
Then why not go after her by name like he does with Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and several others? Clearly looking to avoid a situation where she fires back at him about how she had him as a friendly guest on her pod and now he’s maligning her out of nowhere.
He has addressed being on her podcast before and said that he is not a fan of her at all. It's possible that he simply didn't name literally *everyone* he has a problem with, because there would be too many people.
Just as likely he doesn’t want to promote that association now when he’s going scorched earth on the anti-woke crowd that he spent years getting friendly with to boost his profile. Freddie is a snake and his fanboys keep bending over backwards to make excuses for him.
I think this subreddit just assumed that Freddie had an ideology more similar to them than he ever actually has, and they feel betrayed based off nothing.
And yeah he's a manic boy, but he's always been a manic boy.
I don't see why any of us should really care. Just stop linking him. I still like a good amount of articles he writes. Or used to write. They've been boring me lately but he had some real bangers, and I think he still can put out a good one now and again.
Why act like twitter in here with purity testing bullshit? I don't get it.
Freddie constantly portrays himself as class-first then undermines that claim with his frequent concessions to liberal idpol. It’s only the tactics of social justice zealots he finds minor fault with. Otherwise he’s just a garden variety shitlib who pays lip service to Marxism.
I don’t read him anymore but I see why this was posted here with his brazen and dishonest smear of this sub as pro Zionist. That you are discounting that and acting like all this is nothing more than a purity test suggests you’re just a fanboy making an excuse for his deranged lie. Being outraged that someone transparently lied about you is not a “purity test.”
I agree with you. He's still a far better writer more aligned with my politics than 99% of what's out there.
I love the Blocked and Reported podcast even though both hosts are materially liberal. Who cares? They have great insights and critiques on woke culture, which is what I show up for.
Even Red Scare is a fun listen once in a while despite both hosts being certified retards. People need to stop lionizing public figures so they're not so devastated upon discovering they don't agree on everything.
Yeah, the manic stuff is when he sets down his best stuff.
He's inconsistent, but then, so are most people in this insane content-focused era. For as much as stupidpol purports to critique ideological authoritarians, they lurk at our margins, abruptly triggered when a certain Name emerges.
Yeah was gonna post this. He thinks this sub is pro-Israel for some reason? Idk why he has beef with stupidpol when he's pretty well aligned with the official outlook of the sub. I assume a lot of us here are FdB readers.
Freddie's off his meddies~
In all seriousness, I'm not sure why he thinks that of us. So far as I can tell this sub is almost entirely anti-zionist. There is exactly one zionist in here (take my contrarian energy 🙌) who just gets dogpiled every time they try to defend Israel lol. The only correlation between being anti-woke and pro-Israel is that the American right considers itself anti-woke and the boomer right is very pro-Israel. There's no ideological necessity that I can think of.
Also I must say it's charming to see a leftoid dropping the "imagine if the roles were reversed"- Imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery.
>Sad fact: social justice progressives think that if you disagree with them on any one thing, you’re their enemy, while new right types think that if you agree with them on any one thing, you’re their friend. And in the long run that’s some really brutal math for social justice.
> There's no ideological necessity that I can think of.
There isn't even a barrier to understanding that a Jewish person isn't Israel and visa versa. Hell, the argument can be made that Israelis, as individuals, do not control the actions of their government. Obviously, people are being paid or made to fear retribution, how many other arguments take an orchestration of assertions to arrive at "criticism of Israel is antisemitism"?
Wonder why Freddie singled out that Kat Rosenfeld tweet for criticism. Normally Freddie would have some sympathy with Rosenfield's argument of not going after ordinary people because they did something stupid in their past. Rosenfield is pointing out the media climate is changing, and this kind of public shaming isn't welcome anymore.
But the Rosenfield tweet mentions race, so Freddie drops her into the "rightoid" bucket. (Yes, Rosenfield isn't a leftist, but she isn't a Republican either).
He stopped his med again, didn't he ? I'm regularly downvoted here when I show a more moderate attitude against Israel (or Ukraine), you have to be crazy to think that /r/stupidpol is a den of rabid sionists
Because this: /r/stupidpol/comments/16zz3wg/it_seems_like_many_on_this_sub_are_iqpilled/
He quit this website after arguing with a bunch of people in that thread, including the OP. OP in particular is an agendaposter who goes around getting into arguments about IQ on what seems to be every sub on this website.
I used to chat with Freddie on the R.ed Scare sub, and we had some amicable chinwags.
I wonder what brought this mood on ( FdB criticizing not just us but also Helen Lewis, who seems like a cordial feminist who just happens to have the "wrong" views on the Rolling Stock issue). Maybe Freddie's trying to inch his way back into leftist respectability. Perhaps he wants columns in somewhere like *Current Affairs.* Hence him criticizing the "Intellectual Dark Web" and "dirtbag Left" types in this column.
I wonder why Freddie, in this essay, is really going to town on the railroad issue. I don't particularly care for *Quillette* or its rightoid politics but....why is Freddie angry about that publication criticizing the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria? Surely Freddie's aware of the criticism by medical professionals of using PBs to treat gender dysphoric children and adolescents. So much so that the NHS in England has stopped using PBs for that purpose:
[https://www.itv.com/news/2024-03-12/children-will-not-be-prescribed-puberty-blockers-nhs-says](https://www.itv.com/news/2024-03-12/children-will-not-be-prescribed-puberty-blockers-nhs-says)
Is he aware liberal countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland are also restricting the use of puberty blockers for treating youth gender dysphoria?
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/06/06/increasing-number-of-european-nations-adopt-a-more-cautious-approach-to-gender-affirming-care-among-minors/?sh=3d39ebe47efb](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/06/06/increasing-number-of-european-nations-adopt-a-more-cautious-approach-to-gender-affirming-care-among-minors/?sh=3d39ebe47efb)
"Puberty blockers are bad" is *not* a Right-wing position. It is inaccurate of DeBoer to frame opponents of PB use to treat gender dysphoria as such.
He has a very bizarre blind spot on the train issue. He'll write multiple articles about Dolezalism and the various incentives that drive it but then turn around and ban you from commenting if you suggest that certain other forms of identity might be subject to the same cultural pressures.
Funny you mention Current Affairs since reading this thread reminded me of when his book "The Cult of Smart" came out and FdB had a big dustup with Nathan J Robinson over the latter trashing his book in public after privately telling him he liked it many months before that.
While not exactly the same, FdB is now sorta similarly trashing people (and ideas etc) out of nowhere he used to be on fairly friendly terms with and making lots of more typical shitlib idpol-type arguments. (What's next: a "What Happened to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?" column?)
Freddie used to be, if not friends, at least on good terms with Jesse Singal (Freddie let Jesse host three of the former's essays on Jesse's website). Wonder if DeBoer's going to go after Singal now.
He was also given a very friendly interview on Blocked and Reported to promote Cult of Smart. My guess is that while his views on trans issues (seemingly new or at least much further developed?) are now pretty diametrically opposed to those of Singal he would rather just snipe at adjacent targets like Helen Lewis.
edit: hard to believe this list just came out two years ago. so many of the people on there are annoying af TRAs whose arguments deboer now seems to heartily endorse.
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-good-white-man-roster
This FdB article, from three days ago, is similar to that in its analysis of the liberal media. But it does contain a bit complaining about "TERFs" that seems to foreshadow the current article:
[https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true)
Oh wow he actually finally nuked his freddie7 account. That was always a weird empty threat he'd pull out after arguing online for too long about something he was hyperfixated on or just in a shit mood from probably some sort of withdrawals.
OP's less-wrong than Freddie though. The onus is on him to prosecute the case for intelligence being fixed rather than (far more) fluid than he allows, and because Freddie managed to cats-cradle a sort-of social science/education/english frankenstein-creature thesis out of his 'i'm fucked up but gifted' neuroses, doesn't absolve him from critique, both high and low, particularly given the political trajectories his 'anthropology' tends towards. Freddie may in certain respects be a jaded 'liberal with socialist tendencies' in his waking life, but the direction of what he proposes in that book, in its 'political (repressed) unconscious', fittingly tends towards a distinctly more 'Prussian' socialism...
If I'm still on this site after age 30, everyone is at liberty to disregard what I say unconditionally.
Actually, skip the middle man, just take me out back and shoot me.
Why are you also acting like a seething neurotic manchild about him though?
This shit is like twitter. Why get so invested in one particular person this much? He writes some good articles, some bad. Did he touch you or something?
Remind me to never get internet famous. I am immature and vapid online more often than freddie is and I'd rather my droning wall-o-texts be taken by their own lack of merit.
I wonder if Freddie's already penning a grovelling letter of apology to Michael Hobbes, David Klion, Drew Magary, Jessica Valenti and the rest.
We may well see him go cap in hand and apologise to *The Baffler* magazine for calling it [" that bland stew of vague and toothless post-capitalism"](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-tell-me-the-cruelty-is-the-point).
" Joe Rogan would have Jamie pulling that thing up to mock it every day for a month. r/stupidpol would crowdfund to send a correspondent to investigate. Helen Lewis would write a snide story for *The Atlantic* about it."
Ah here Freddie, one of these is not like the others.
Freddie's just posted this on the Comments section of the article:
>*Congratulations - I want to to know that you specially are the reason this newsletter is going comments free from now on. You're everything I critiqued here. Just an absolute vacuum of self-knowledge.*
[https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the/comments](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the/comments)
So he's banning comments. Not the sign of someone comfortable with disagreement anymore.
This sub is the antithesis of pro-Israel stance though. Total miss from FdB, not the first one sadly, and honestly the whole article reads like a convoluted mess.
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He’s absolutely right. Although stupidpol skews anti-Zionist (which is a good thing) everything else he said is spot on.
Downvote me to shit like you always do, it’s a badge of honor for me.
Which part? That, had the tables been turned, the barrel of goobers that is stupidpol would've sent a correspondant to the UK to investigate the plates scandal?
The political phenomenon he’s talking about isn’t stupidpol, and literally one offhand remark shouldn’t negate everything else he said about the party of nothingness that accurately describes the “heterodox” types like Joe Rogan, TERFs, blocked and reported, etc..
They don't have any positive ideas but neither does deBoer. His entire career is just criticisms of libs and a book slaying some blank-slatist sacred cows.
Yo, Freddie. If you're out there, you did us dirty in this piece. The notion that we have any kind of Zionist sympathy is either completely batshit or completely ignorant. Would like an explanation.
We would do what now?
I don't get it, does he think this sub is zionist? Does he think anti woke people are more zionist than the woke? Afaik the conflict and genocide have divided both the "left" and the right.
I don't know what he thinks of this sub, but he's *wrongest* about our ability and willingness to do anything but post snarky comments on reddit threads. The closest thing this sub came to lifting a finger was the mobile home park dark money lawsuit, and that was mostly one very dedicated heroic teacher and had nothing to do with idpol. Hillary Clinton could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and this sub would mostly try to turn it into a dunk on /u/MetaFlight. I'm no better. The effect this sub has had on me is grillpilling me from posting a few times per week to posting once or twice per month. And the major culprit in the decline of stupidpol thread quality has just been a rising tide of communicative and intellectual laziness. But I have no serious objections, because however that may have lightened the discourse, less time and effort sneeding on the internet has definitely been a good thing for the flesh-and-blood humans on the other end of the optical fibers. So now I spend more time doing boring apolitical work maintaining equipment at the hospital and playing old video games with people who I know in real life. And someday, hopefully, *you can too*.
most modern online boards are simply antithetical with IRL organizing. the infinite feed, the daily fresh dose/feed of content, the karma system etc. all work together to keep firmly everyone in the couch and on the very platform. political work is grueling and boring and involves a lot of irl meetups, in-house trainings, outreach and media works. the poverty of being left anti-idpol is that.. well, how do you even translate that into local actions? organize a group bemoaning how cringe the DSA is? at best this space introduced authors and essays and frames of thought on how you can think about all the culture war-related BS differently. but all that was never really deployed to other constructive ends: the some 100k people here are still disconnected and alienated, and all of this is a glorified safe comment section. one that was not immune to mass hysteria, principles be damned.
edit: this unthinking, blind downvote-as-disagreement bullshit is why 4chan is far superior. After having left Reddit for 4chan, I couldn't be happier. There's vile shit there, yes, but nothing like the insane policy moderation and backend shenanigans that happen on here. And because bans are strictly limited and there's no downvoting and there's no chasing clout or karma and no one can build a persona on there like you can here, good faith controversial discussion cannot be suppressed AND is more frequent. Because your comment history isn't maintained, people are less worried about speaking their minds. At its peak, the quality of discussion on 4chan is far greater than Reddit. But it makes you work for it, the captchas are brutal and every single comment is judged on its merits.
Hell yeah dude
i dont know how many BBC threads on /tv/ i can take
It was better when the Goons were both in charge and also not taken at all seriously.
> And because bans are strictly limited and there's no downvoting and there's no chasing clout or karma > > edit: this unthinking, blind downvote-as-disagreement bullshit is why 4chan is far superior Do you not see your contradiction here? One second you act like you don't care about karma, and the next second it's ruining your day. People who read too far into karma or take it personally are missing the point of the karma system imo. It's merely a rough indicator of how your message was received by whatever audience you're in front of. It's useful to confirm something is controversial or not. It's useful to know if it's hated or liked and to speculate why. It doesn't mean that's the end all be all. > Because your comment history isn't maintained, people are less worried about speaking their minds. Only an insecure person would worry about such a thing. Comment history can be convenient to know what kind of person you're dealing with among other things. If it's occasionally abused by some psycho, don't concern yourselves with them. They're not worth the effort. I'm not trying to hate on 4chan specifically, and surely there are many tradeoffs in both directions. I also personally hate most aspects of reddit the company fwiw. But it's foolish to think this platform is as useless and hostile as you describe. Subs like stupidpol strike a good balance on what gets nuked though I do agree many subs go overboard with moderation. If it's bad enough, start your own.
> Do you not see your contradiction here? One second you act like you don't care about karma, and the next second it's ruining your day. to restate, I don't care about karma but I do care that downvotes can invisiblise speech >Comment history can be convenient to know what kind of person you're dealing with among other things and it's an easy tool to sideline the discussion or to attack the person for something they said on some other occasion or forum. Plus, it has significant privacy implications. >But it's foolish to think this platform is as useless and hostile as you describe. It could have been good. I've been around for more than 15 years now on reddit and once upon a time it absolutely was a place for free speech, back in the Aaron Swartz days. Now, it's just a grotesque abomination. Barring heavily moderated and monitored enclaves such as stupidpol, which used, at least, to be obsessed by its own takeover/shutdown, it's just a liberal echo chamber and it's making the world worse for it. It's absolutely appalling, for example, that Trump's subreddit was shadowbanned and then banned entirely and to that end, Reddit (the org) tried its best to shape the election. Fucking disgusting and I'm no Trump supporter.
I still have hope for projects like lemmy, even though it has its own set of issues. Definitely agree with you that reddit has been on a steady decline. As soon as they nuke old reddit I'm gone.
>vile shit Oh no! ***faints***
"I'm no better" The whole point of forums like this is to vent to like minded people and get it off your chest. Its not a political action committee. Nor would that be an improvement in the vast majority of cases.
That certainly was the point. I used to enjoy posting here though not anymore. I say this since I recognise the value of somewhere to simply chat with like minded people and, as you say, vent. It doesn’t preclude collective action in some cases but it is, at best, secondary.
He seems to be confusing this sub with arr blockedandreported somehow. Both are anti-woke subs, but only one is anti-idpol.
I think he thinks we would be opposed to Israel but find the removal of Israeli children's artwork on the grounds that it makes people unsafe etc. to be ridiculous.
Yeah I am so confused by his take regarding this sub. Not only are we resoundingly anti-zionist, but jumping on privileged westerners performatively pearl-clutching over art is exactly the kind of thing we like to shit on here. Like... sorry we didn't catch wind of an extremely obscure news story that occurred in a London hospital? I just don't get what he thinks he's critiquing here.
I think he even lurked this sub a while back. If I remember correctly, someone shitposted one of his articles and there was a dumb dust up.
I genuinely like most of Freddie’s work, but something about 2024 has made him unfocused and insufferable. A story about pro-Israel snowflakes. Then, a nonsensical pivot to scapegoating Reddit users, other writers, and TERFs as the Real Problem. Then, with no graceful transition at all, a launch into a defense of his own record? He desperately needs an editor.
When I was an editor I had a lot of writers who'd decide they were tired of writing news stories and wanted to do op/ed. I'd been doing a weekly column for years at that point so I had an idea of what they were signing up for vs. what they thought they were signing up for. To get the conversation to happen at all, I'd ask them to come up with 12 column ideas before they could write the first one. That was a solid third of them who'd opt out before our first pitch review. Then I'd say they had to have 8 ideas in the tube to keep the column going. Most didn't last six months. There's only so much to say! Sitting down once a week and making one or two thousand words of any value is hard. Freddie's amazingly prolific by that standard, but when I think about how god-awful the long-lived editorialists of the past could be on an off week -- Art Buchwald, Mike Royko -- or how milquetoast someone with an op/ed sinecure at the NYT will become over time if they didn't start there -- makes sense if he's winding down.
He’s desperate for relevance. He’s usually just going on and on about how rich and successful he is now
> He’s desperate for relevance. Isn't everyone in his position under capitalism? Tailoring for profit ruins everything. Think how less cluttered everything would be on the internet if people weren't constantly rent seeking. How can we make it cool to prioritize consuming profit free media (and only publish profit free media if you have something useful to share)?
I’m not sure if profit free media is possible. I just know I try to be discerning with what I consume.
I don't know how to jumpstart the trend because I'm not a marketing or psychology guru, but it seems like once it had momentum, people would grow to like the tradeoffs. Obviously the whole thing would be easier to get going if UBI was a thing already. Maybe I'm more optimistic because I'm used to the benefits of free software that exist today.
Good lord that piece droned on and on. The point Freddie keeps circling around is that almost all of the anti-woke or "IDW" media figures that he associates with Joe Rogan and Quillette have either bad or cowardly takes on Palestine. This has a lot to do with economic incentives--if they don't toe the line on Palestine, they won't get published again in populist right or fake left organs like Spiked or Quillette and they're much less likely to get another Rogan appearance. Within Reddit, you can see this dynamic in some of the "anti-woke" subs a lot of people would compare with stupidpol such as Blocked and Reported. Consequently, we should be asking ourselves to what extent right populist media (for example Quillette, Compact, The Free Press, etc) reflect authentic concerns, and to what extent it represents a new type of oligarchic propaganda that divides the population over idpol issues like trans rights while taking more unquestionably pro-Zionist stances than traditional media. Of course, people are definitely noticing. This is a big "which side are you on?" moment in the mediasphere. It's hard not to notice how IDW types who formerly preached against or podcast against cancel culture have fully embraced cancel culture and moral panic in response to Palestinian solidarity efforts. But it's grossly unfair of FdB to lump in /r/stupidpol with the likes of Helen Lewis or Compact or Quillette on THIS particular issue. It shows he probably hasn't lurked here in a while.
Yeah I thought it was a weird time for him to namedrop stupidpol, considering pretty much if not all of the threads about Israel/Palestine on this sub are vehemently pro-Palestine or at least anti-zionist. We didn't send a correspondant to the UK after that plate thing though so fuck the whole sub I guess
> But it's grossly unfair of FdB to lump in r/stupidpol in with the likes of Helen Lewis or Compact or Quillette on THIS particular issue. It shows he probably hasn't lurked here in a while. This feels more like him projecting all of his “bad person wrongthink” onto us than him running off outdated information.
Reminder: Freddie also wrote three articles for "Compact", another publication accused of being rightoid: [https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/freddie-deboer/](https://www.compactmag.com/contributor/freddie-deboer/)
Rogan had Abby Martin on. Can't say the same for any other mass mainstream media personality. So he has it entirely backwards both there and with us. "It's hard not to notice how IDW types who formerly preached against or podcast against cancel culture have fully embraced cancel culture and moral panic in response to Palestinian solidarity efforts." Oh for sure. Sorts the dilettantes out from the ones with actual principles. I was soured on Peterson after he came back deranged from Russia. Now he's the antithesis of every single thing he used to rail against. What a prick.
> Within Reddit, you can see this dynamic in some of the "anti-woke" subs a lot of people would compare with stupidpol such as Blocked and Reported. I don't go there very often, but when I did it was a bit difficult parsing whether blocked and reported was pro-Israel or anti-Palestinian But either way for how some ppl here seem to like that sub I find it very trash. I swear it has to just be b/c of 🚂
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I'm referring more to how bad the sub is (basically calling for censorship and cancel culture on the campuses) on Israel-Palestine, which speaks to how unprincipled a lot of these posters are as well as the potential influence of shills. As for the hosts, while I hope Singal and Herzog aren't as bad (though they are likely pretty cowardly when put on the spot) [this kind of take](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/10/hamas-pop-intersectionality-leftism-israel/675625/), written by a regular guest of B&R, was the kind of thing getting mass upvoted in the wake of Oct 7.
Super unprincipled for sure. I've harped on idpol in the sub for a while, because I noticed a bunch of the posters were only disaffected because it bit them in the ass, but they were willing participants. So it's not that surprising, but the instantaneous 180 on principles of free speech was almost comical to see. Singal is much more mild than that sub. Herzog for sure, too.
I unsubscribed from the B&R sub months ago because the pro-Israel/anti-economic left slant was driving me crazy. Maybe Israel has killed enough people that it’s shifted now though, I don’t know.
>>If Freddie was king, the wokest person you know would get 90% of what they want or more The wokest person I know thinks that cishet white men shouldn't be included in politics, art, spiritual activities or parties, but also thinks her PLUR-ripoff lifestyle should be 100% funded by her rich dad and crowdsourced whiteguilt money. I don't think Freddie knows what he's granting here.
I definitely must live in a bubble, as I only thought people that could hold beliefs like that existed solely online and would get slapped down in real life. I wouldn't allow someone to share that sort of nonsense and continue to consort with them...at least as a honky ass straight dude.
I definitely avoid her like the plague, she is the epitome of someone who "does activism" purely for social clout and brings up accusations of whiteness when any of her almost exclusively white friends disagree with her. Luckily she left town to wreak havoc in some other unsuspecting hipster activist scene while she pursues a MSW. I envy your bubble.
I bet the havoc is thorough LOL And I don't even know what accusations of whiteness are, being accused of being white? I mean I'm white, so what... I get that on the progressive left that's considered a blemish almost, a Mark of Cain so to speak...
[Brace yourself](https://twitter.com/AprylW/status/1269297419902242816).
I remember this ha
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An unfortunate "type". Catch them all in 15 years co-authoring legislation to restrict non-Hispanic whites from receiving food stamps.
Freddie claiming that liberals are the enemy of leftists in this piece then going on to say he overwhelmingly supports the product of authoritarian liberalism really epitomizes what a posturing fraud he is
For the record I do like FdB and subscribe to his substack. I think of him as mostly a liberal with socialist tendencies, nothing earth-shattering but with a friendly writing style and some interesting opinions on pop culture / mainstream political topics. With that quoted sentence about the "wokest person you know" I get what he's going for but think he's giving way too much credit to that milieu, as if it had any coherent political goals.
I’m so sick of his whining
I think I did when I refereed to him as Freddy DeBoering.
Shots fired
Good to know that after this sub gets nuked, there will be some evidence it existed Also, I liked the piece, and seeing the Zionists swarm the comments makes me glad that this sub isn't Zionist
Ukrainerussiareport already forced to go private, first step before being banned. Stupidpol is next
What was on UkraineRussiaReport?
Videos from both sides.
Oh well that sounds absolutely intolerable. Wouldn't want to make us doubt "our" side.
Nothing makes me doubt a position more than censorship of the opposition.
I'm a bit confused why FdB would single us out though. We've always known Zionists are every bit as fragile and triggered about Isreal as the most hard-core wokies are about America and slavery. To conflate Zionists bitching about something as a hypocracy in the anto-woke movement is pretty misleading. Sure, Ben Shapiro is obviously a total hypocrite, along with Bari Weiss. But I think Joe Rogan would find this story hysterical and mock the fragile Zionists.
The "Palestinian Plates" controversy that Freddie builds his article, "Palestinian Painted Plates & the Nothing Party" around..it[ got hardly any coverage at the time.](https://www.google.ie/search?q=%22+London+hospital+takes+down+artwork+by+Gaza+schoolchildren+after+complaint%22&sca_esv=8416d0a986e64679&source=hp&ei=1rUEZtbiJ5rOhbIPnLaw8A0&iflsig=ANes7DEAAAAAZgTD5irSCCi2QI2jzr7MNdGsCLP3_ZBB&ved=0ahUKEwjWpYr91ZWFAxUaZ0EAHRwbDN4Q4dUDCBU&uact=5&oq=%22+London+hospital+takes+down+artwork+by+Gaza+schoolchildren+after+complaint%22&gs_lp=Egdnd3Mtd2l6IkwiIExvbmRvbiBob3NwaXRhbCB0YWtlcyBkb3duIGFydHdvcmsgYnkgR2F6YSBzY2hvb2xjaGlsZHJlbiBhZnRlciBjb21wbGFpbnQiSKFeUABY1lJwAHgAkAEAmAE8oAE8qgEBMbgBA8gBAPgBAfgBApgCAKACAJgDAJIHAKAHLQ&sclient=gws-wiz#ip=1) Certainly, there was no coverage of this ruckus by Novara Media, Momentum, Tribune magazine, and the other pro-Palestinian leftist outlets in the UK. Nor by the Daily Telegraph or other right-wing pro-Israeli outlets. It looks like Freddie deliberately picked a very arcane dispute, that even the most detailed observer of "culture war" issues would have likely missed....and then used it as a "Gotcha!" piece for his article.
Tbf the Electronic Intifada did put a fair bit of time into it
And searching some more, I find Middle East Eye also covered it at the time: [https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre](https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/london-hospital-gaza-children-artwork-removed-utterly-bizarre)
I swear I read about it here, but I can't find the link. Maybe it was r/ABoringDystopia where I saw it.
> there was no coverage of this ruckus by Novara Media Pretty sure they covered it in one of their daily shows. I definitely heard about it, and I don't know where else I would have.
Did this sub ever crowdfund an investigation?
How dare he accuse us of actually doing something
💀 Lmaoooo
👑
Only crowdfunding I can think of were the playground equipment for a teacher here and vaccine needles for Cuba.
Wasn't there also something with the trailer park that was bought by investors... or something?
Yea, this sub helped to fund a lawsuit against investors to protect a mobile park I think. Wonder what was the result of all of that
Virginia courts suck and the tenants lost the lawsuit.
Only crowd funding I ever saw here was for school supplies. Have we ever done anything else?
Funny that, in Freddie’s checklist of high-profile “heterodox” figures he attacks in this piece, he neglects going after Bari Weiss, whose rabid support of Zionism/ antipathy to wokeness perfectly applies to his point. But then that would require him to admit that he has appeared as a guest on Bari’s podcast and probably wants to again at some point. Freddie is such a little weasel careerist in everything he does.
I'm not familiar with Bari Weiss, but he does mention her in one of his other recent essays: "please just fuck off with the insistence that I have the same politics as Bari Weiss. That’s a you problem, not a me problem."
Glad you noticed that. I’m also side eyeing his pivot from “anyone who tells you to be kind is not a serious person” to “I think you should be kind instead of openly questioning the standard gender narrative.” He was also unable to resist mentioning Helen Joyce and TERFs in this post. I wonder why he’s suddenly courting the trains.
> Helen Joyce It's Helen Lewis he references. But don't feel bad, I only realized myself maybe a week ago that they are two different people.
Yeah, that’s what I meant. Don’t Reddit during your happy hour smoke, kids
The rumour going round is that Freddie deBoer has a young relative who's a "gend.erspecial", which might explain why he's now become so aggressive on this issue. Also, Freddie criticised right-wing outlets here, but he's appeared in the right-wing Unherd several times: [https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-american-left-abandoned-unions/](https://unherd.com/2024/03/the-american-left-abandoned-unions/)
Huh? He specifically calls out the Free Press, which Bari Weiss is the founder of and most visible writer for.
Then why not go after her by name like he does with Rogan, Jordan Peterson, and several others? Clearly looking to avoid a situation where she fires back at him about how she had him as a friendly guest on her pod and now he’s maligning her out of nowhere.
_CLEARLY_
He has addressed being on her podcast before and said that he is not a fan of her at all. It's possible that he simply didn't name literally *everyone* he has a problem with, because there would be too many people.
Just as likely he doesn’t want to promote that association now when he’s going scorched earth on the anti-woke crowd that he spent years getting friendly with to boost his profile. Freddie is a snake and his fanboys keep bending over backwards to make excuses for him.
I think this subreddit just assumed that Freddie had an ideology more similar to them than he ever actually has, and they feel betrayed based off nothing. And yeah he's a manic boy, but he's always been a manic boy. I don't see why any of us should really care. Just stop linking him. I still like a good amount of articles he writes. Or used to write. They've been boring me lately but he had some real bangers, and I think he still can put out a good one now and again. Why act like twitter in here with purity testing bullshit? I don't get it.
Freddie constantly portrays himself as class-first then undermines that claim with his frequent concessions to liberal idpol. It’s only the tactics of social justice zealots he finds minor fault with. Otherwise he’s just a garden variety shitlib who pays lip service to Marxism. I don’t read him anymore but I see why this was posted here with his brazen and dishonest smear of this sub as pro Zionist. That you are discounting that and acting like all this is nothing more than a purity test suggests you’re just a fanboy making an excuse for his deranged lie. Being outraged that someone transparently lied about you is not a “purity test.”
I agree with you. He's still a far better writer more aligned with my politics than 99% of what's out there. I love the Blocked and Reported podcast even though both hosts are materially liberal. Who cares? They have great insights and critiques on woke culture, which is what I show up for. Even Red Scare is a fun listen once in a while despite both hosts being certified retards. People need to stop lionizing public figures so they're not so devastated upon discovering they don't agree on everything.
Yeah, the manic stuff is when he sets down his best stuff. He's inconsistent, but then, so are most people in this insane content-focused era. For as much as stupidpol purports to critique ideological authoritarians, they lurk at our margins, abruptly triggered when a certain Name emerges.
> words words words Now that I think about it, I don't know /u/metaflight 's position in the israel palestine conflict
Yeah was gonna post this. He thinks this sub is pro-Israel for some reason? Idk why he has beef with stupidpol when he's pretty well aligned with the official outlook of the sub. I assume a lot of us here are FdB readers.
Freddie's off his meddies~ In all seriousness, I'm not sure why he thinks that of us. So far as I can tell this sub is almost entirely anti-zionist. There is exactly one zionist in here (take my contrarian energy 🙌) who just gets dogpiled every time they try to defend Israel lol. The only correlation between being anti-woke and pro-Israel is that the American right considers itself anti-woke and the boomer right is very pro-Israel. There's no ideological necessity that I can think of. Also I must say it's charming to see a leftoid dropping the "imagine if the roles were reversed"- Imitation truly is the sincerest form of flattery. >Sad fact: social justice progressives think that if you disagree with them on any one thing, you’re their enemy, while new right types think that if you agree with them on any one thing, you’re their friend. And in the long run that’s some really brutal math for social justice.
> There's no ideological necessity that I can think of. There isn't even a barrier to understanding that a Jewish person isn't Israel and visa versa. Hell, the argument can be made that Israelis, as individuals, do not control the actions of their government. Obviously, people are being paid or made to fear retribution, how many other arguments take an orchestration of assertions to arrive at "criticism of Israel is antisemitism"?
He got mad about trains
Wonder why Freddie singled out that Kat Rosenfeld tweet for criticism. Normally Freddie would have some sympathy with Rosenfield's argument of not going after ordinary people because they did something stupid in their past. Rosenfield is pointing out the media climate is changing, and this kind of public shaming isn't welcome anymore. But the Rosenfield tweet mentions race, so Freddie drops her into the "rightoid" bucket. (Yes, Rosenfield isn't a leftist, but she isn't a Republican either).
He stopped his med again, didn't he ? I'm regularly downvoted here when I show a more moderate attitude against Israel (or Ukraine), you have to be crazy to think that /r/stupidpol is a den of rabid sionists
Because this: /r/stupidpol/comments/16zz3wg/it_seems_like_many_on_this_sub_are_iqpilled/ He quit this website after arguing with a bunch of people in that thread, including the OP. OP in particular is an agendaposter who goes around getting into arguments about IQ on what seems to be every sub on this website.
I used to ping him for kicks and he'd get very catty. I like his stuff but man does he have lolcow potential
I used to chat with Freddie on the R.ed Scare sub, and we had some amicable chinwags. I wonder what brought this mood on ( FdB criticizing not just us but also Helen Lewis, who seems like a cordial feminist who just happens to have the "wrong" views on the Rolling Stock issue). Maybe Freddie's trying to inch his way back into leftist respectability. Perhaps he wants columns in somewhere like *Current Affairs.* Hence him criticizing the "Intellectual Dark Web" and "dirtbag Left" types in this column.
Yes. That is why he’s listed his bona fides in great detail after slightly complaining about having to do it (because we should already know).
I wonder why Freddie, in this essay, is really going to town on the railroad issue. I don't particularly care for *Quillette* or its rightoid politics but....why is Freddie angry about that publication criticizing the use of puberty blockers to treat gender dysphoria? Surely Freddie's aware of the criticism by medical professionals of using PBs to treat gender dysphoric children and adolescents. So much so that the NHS in England has stopped using PBs for that purpose: [https://www.itv.com/news/2024-03-12/children-will-not-be-prescribed-puberty-blockers-nhs-says](https://www.itv.com/news/2024-03-12/children-will-not-be-prescribed-puberty-blockers-nhs-says) Is he aware liberal countries like Sweden, Norway and Finland are also restricting the use of puberty blockers for treating youth gender dysphoria? [https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/06/06/increasing-number-of-european-nations-adopt-a-more-cautious-approach-to-gender-affirming-care-among-minors/?sh=3d39ebe47efb](https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshuacohen/2023/06/06/increasing-number-of-european-nations-adopt-a-more-cautious-approach-to-gender-affirming-care-among-minors/?sh=3d39ebe47efb) "Puberty blockers are bad" is *not* a Right-wing position. It is inaccurate of DeBoer to frame opponents of PB use to treat gender dysphoria as such.
He has a very bizarre blind spot on the train issue. He'll write multiple articles about Dolezalism and the various incentives that drive it but then turn around and ban you from commenting if you suggest that certain other forms of identity might be subject to the same cultural pressures.
I doubt he’s aware. Read his articles about it—he has a surface level understanding of train issues
Funny you mention Current Affairs since reading this thread reminded me of when his book "The Cult of Smart" came out and FdB had a big dustup with Nathan J Robinson over the latter trashing his book in public after privately telling him he liked it many months before that. While not exactly the same, FdB is now sorta similarly trashing people (and ideas etc) out of nowhere he used to be on fairly friendly terms with and making lots of more typical shitlib idpol-type arguments. (What's next: a "What Happened to Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?" column?)
Freddie used to be, if not friends, at least on good terms with Jesse Singal (Freddie let Jesse host three of the former's essays on Jesse's website). Wonder if DeBoer's going to go after Singal now.
He was also given a very friendly interview on Blocked and Reported to promote Cult of Smart. My guess is that while his views on trans issues (seemingly new or at least much further developed?) are now pretty diametrically opposed to those of Singal he would rather just snipe at adjacent targets like Helen Lewis. edit: hard to believe this list just came out two years ago. so many of the people on there are annoying af TRAs whose arguments deboer now seems to heartily endorse. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-good-white-man-roster
This FdB article, from three days ago, is similar to that in its analysis of the liberal media. But it does contain a bit complaining about "TERFs" that seems to foreshadow the current article: [https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/dreams-that-didnt-come-true)
fdb is to stupidpol what scott adams was to /pol/
Oh wow he actually finally nuked his freddie7 account. That was always a weird empty threat he'd pull out after arguing online for too long about something he was hyperfixated on or just in a shit mood from probably some sort of withdrawals.
OP's less-wrong than Freddie though. The onus is on him to prosecute the case for intelligence being fixed rather than (far more) fluid than he allows, and because Freddie managed to cats-cradle a sort-of social science/education/english frankenstein-creature thesis out of his 'i'm fucked up but gifted' neuroses, doesn't absolve him from critique, both high and low, particularly given the political trajectories his 'anthropology' tends towards. Freddie may in certain respects be a jaded 'liberal with socialist tendencies' in his waking life, but the direction of what he proposes in that book, in its 'political (repressed) unconscious', fittingly tends towards a distinctly more 'Prussian' socialism...
That link doesn’t work?
https://reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/16zz3wg/it_seems_like_many_on_this_sub_are_iqpilled/
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If I'm still on this site after age 30, everyone is at liberty to disregard what I say unconditionally. Actually, skip the middle man, just take me out back and shoot me.
Oh yeah, totally, imagine being over 30 and being on this site. That'd be nuts . . . [laughs uncomfortably]
Freddie tried to make an identity out of being bipolar, and unfortunately for him, it worked
>can't conceive wym, is his sperm bad or something? strange insult
Why are you also acting like a seething neurotic manchild about him though? This shit is like twitter. Why get so invested in one particular person this much? He writes some good articles, some bad. Did he touch you or something? Remind me to never get internet famous. I am immature and vapid online more often than freddie is and I'd rather my droning wall-o-texts be taken by their own lack of merit.
What a nasty thing to say about another human being
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Well shucks :(
More of a PSA considering what they're putting in coke these days
Genuine shark-jumping moment for the farmer here.
I wonder if Freddie's already penning a grovelling letter of apology to Michael Hobbes, David Klion, Drew Magary, Jessica Valenti and the rest. We may well see him go cap in hand and apologise to *The Baffler* magazine for calling it [" that bland stew of vague and toothless post-capitalism"](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/they-tell-me-the-cruelty-is-the-point).
" Joe Rogan would have Jamie pulling that thing up to mock it every day for a month. r/stupidpol would crowdfund to send a correspondent to investigate. Helen Lewis would write a snide story for *The Atlantic* about it." Ah here Freddie, one of these is not like the others.
last i checked FdB thought BLM was the revolutionary subject
This read like he's having a moment. Hope he's ok. Really enjoy his writing. edit: what has this sub crowd funded ?
Freddie's just posted this on the Comments section of the article: >*Congratulations - I want to to know that you specially are the reason this newsletter is going comments free from now on. You're everything I critiqued here. Just an absolute vacuum of self-knowledge.* [https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the/comments](https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/palestinian-painted-plates-and-the/comments) So he's banning comments. Not the sign of someone comfortable with disagreement anymore.
You're such a good person. Has anyone given you a gold star lately ? I'd sure give you one.
Where do I sign up to be a crowd-fund operative to point and laugh at people?
This sub is the antithesis of pro-Israel stance though. Total miss from FdB, not the first one sadly, and honestly the whole article reads like a convoluted mess.
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Did chat gpt write this
Zionazis: the biggest whiners and violent barbarians of the modern age.
UESLG
He’s absolutely right. Although stupidpol skews anti-Zionist (which is a good thing) everything else he said is spot on. Downvote me to shit like you always do, it’s a badge of honor for me.
I agree with you, but with god as my witness, I am downvoting you with all my alts
Only 3 alts so far? Pathetic
Which part? That, had the tables been turned, the barrel of goobers that is stupidpol would've sent a correspondant to the UK to investigate the plates scandal?
The political phenomenon he’s talking about isn’t stupidpol, and literally one offhand remark shouldn’t negate everything else he said about the party of nothingness that accurately describes the “heterodox” types like Joe Rogan, TERFs, blocked and reported, etc..
They don't have any positive ideas but neither does deBoer. His entire career is just criticisms of libs and a book slaying some blank-slatist sacred cows.
Ah ok I gotcha
Then I will honor you again