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[aarontoyne-blog]

Okay so, I’ve been a huge fan of Andrew Callaghan for quite some time now, so when the news came out that he was allegedly a sexual predator i was pretty devastated. Honestly there is a major lack of male role models on the internet at the moment and he has been one of my major inspirations recently. I think that the work he is doing in the field of journalism is so important in a world where media is almost entirely dominated by corporate punditry and wholesale distribution of ignorance. 

 To be honest, as soon as i heard the news i knew instantly that regardless of the facts, his reputation would take a major hit given the demographic of people that tend to watch his content. The thing that has been pissing me off about the situation is the way in which this whole saga has been covered by the main progressive political personalities on the internet (Hasan, Vaush, h3 etc.) It has become so clear to me that there are certain issues in modern day politics that bring out the worst in both progressives and conservatives. What i mean by this is the tendency to fucking switch off your brain and generate your opinion as if you were solving a maths problem. If you are a young man with some conservative tendancies, your reaction will almost always be “he didn’t rape anyone, she said yes how can she be complaining after the fact”, and ultimately ignore that there is anything wrong with the action. On the other side of the debate i saw a video of Ethan Klein having to justify to his audience the claim that he didn’t want Andrew to commit suicide, a comment that instantly had people calling him out for “playing defence for a sexual predator”. Then you have Vaush and Hasan both so clearly reading from the fucking progressive handbook “what we say online when someone is accused of SA”. I understand the logic and i dont think that any of these guys have anything other than good intentions with thier positions but i think that its undeniable that, either directly or inadvertantly, they are influencing a whole generation of young progressive people not to think deeply about something before making a judgement. None of them will say it that way, and to be honest they always have something to say in response to a criticism like this, but to me it seems like they are so wrapped up in their ideology that they dont even know that this a habit/trend pretty consistently throughout their coverage.

The reason i think that this is important is that i see this so consistently in political analysis both in the large corporations and also the internet personalities that discuss it as a part of thier content ( which seems to be every fucking person with a platform these days). We are getting more and more devisive politically and it’s making me really pesimistic about the state of the world. I’m honestly as progressive as they come politically, but i keep getting this feeling that progressive politics doesn’t actually have the product that its selling. Most of the time it is people in a position of genuine priveledge trying to dunk on someone less educated than them to satisfy a level of moral superiority that we dont like to talk about but is almost always there if we are really honest with ourselves. This is not to say that i think those guys are having a negative effect with their content, i really do agree the the majority of their political takes, i just think that this is a major problem that is not adressed enough. 

I dont really know what the answer is and to be honest, i don’t see this as getting better any time soon, because even if youve got the best intentions and a progressive world view, sympathy for people on the other side of the political spectrum and real, deep analysis and thought is seen as being obstructive and centerist or contrarian. Maybe i’m just thinking too much :9