Trump

[GhostofKinski]

I am hoping all this succeeds in finally galvanizing the left to move beyond stultified and elitist identity politics.

I wish I had your optimism, sincerely.
It’s just gonna polarize us even more I think.

 

[kid charlemagne]

apparently theres a big protest or rally in nyc tomorrow..... i will be prepared

 

[Clinamenic]

I wish I had your optimism, sincerely.
It’s just gonna polarize us even more I think.

I mean I definitely feel this vibe shift among my leftist friends, a sense of aimlessness and a need to recalibrate in some more effective direction. It seems totally plausible to me that there is a post-woke or anti-woke silent majority on the left, i.e. that most of us are actually sick of all the pronoun discourse, and that it will just take some kind of critical mass for people to feel comfortable breaking from puritanical ranks. It is optimistic, but perhaps a more realistic alternative is that we keep swinging between extreme cultural polarities.

 

[GhostofKinski]

All that (the obsession with pronouns, woke nonsense) is going to be key. Finkelstein’s book ‘I’ll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It’ is a phenomenal left critique of woke culture. I asked him if he had read Fisher’s ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’ and he said he hadn’t.

Anyway, this is a tough/wedge issue.
If it were about overturning Citizens United or Universal Healthcare I’d be more optimistic.
The right is (aside from breaking the law/trampling on the constitution) gonna end up throwing a thick layer of sealant on keeping the most radical elements of the working class (the armed white people) firmly on their side. And it’s gonna be as simple as showing rail thin green haired nonbinary trustfarians jumping on police cars along side the lumpin proletariat scumbags that will use this issue to loot Nike stores and burn shit.
The optics won’t work in our favor.
I am delighted though to read your response and it does give me a glimmer that even the younger generation are tired of the nonsense too easily exploited by those in power.
☘️

 

[Clinamenic]

i would deport @Clinamenic if i had the option

You’d send me back to the desert of the real?

 

[Mr. Tea]

I mean I definitely feel this vibe shift among my leftist friends, a sense of aimlessness and a need to recalibrate in some more effective direction. It seems totally plausible to me that there is a post-woke or anti-woke silent majority on the left, i.e. that most of us are actually sick of all the pronoun discourse, and that it will just take some kind of critical mass for people to feel comfortable breaking from puritanical ranks. It is optimistic, but perhaps a more realistic alternative is that we keep swinging between extreme cultural polarities.

It's tricky, isn't it. My instinct is that the US (and wider Western) left would at least not be harming itself if it were to focus a bit less on identity politics and a bit more on class consciousness. Or at least if it recognised more often that class and wealth are aspects of identity in themselves, and that white men really are a disadvantaged minority in academia and the culture industry if they are also working class.

OTOH, this could very easily lead to a situation where the dominant culture of opposition and protest comes to see the woke left, not the authoritarian right, as its main enemy, and then you've just got a bunch of able-bodied straight white guys, half of them Marxists and the other half crypto bros, putting aside their economic differences in the name of what's really important, viz. the right to say "pussy", "faggot" and "retard" without being scolded by a fat lesbian with blue hair and big glasses. I mean, I don't follow any of these 'scumbag left' podcasts, but from what I've read about them, they're already pretty clearly heading in this direction.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah I agree, if I understand you correctly, and that I think depends on a (perhaps pedantic but still substantive) distinction between anti-woke and post-woke, i.e. where the former just relapses into based ignorance, the former simply embodies the plurality of intersectionality without being consumed by the ostentatious genuflections and superficial purity tests. That is, one can be compassionate without being woke.

And a lot of it, in my opinion, requires being much more patient with people who haven't come to embody such values (because it is hard work), rather than militantly scolding them and effectively intensifying their reactionary impulses. Its that last aspect which has especially disappointed me about the left in the last decade: a seemingly complete disregard for the actual psycho-sociological consequences of reprimanding people for not uttering the right social justice shibboleths, i.e. how it effectively just pushes the cultural overton window to the right, without even that effectively promoting progressive values.

 

[Clinamenic]

And thankfully I do it is totally plausible, even likely, that the primary Democrat base would be much more receptive to what I'm describing, than to more shrill SJW cultural mandates.

 

[Mr. Tea]

And thankfully I do it is totally plausible, even likely, that the primary Democrat base would be much more receptive to what I'm describing, than to more shrill SJW cultural mandates.

A moratorium on professsors of racism studies fulminating against the unbearable whiteness of Luigi Mangione probably wouldn't hurt, either.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yes it all fuels MAGA so well, but its like most of us lack the second-order cognition to recognize that. In a sense its like we liberals have forcibly externalized our guilt-based neurosis onto our surrounding conservative neighbors who are even less inclined to process such things.

 

[Clinamenic]

 

[Mr. Tea]

View attachment 23049

The "authoritarian left" bit is pretty funny. Does the person who made this think the USSR didn't have cops or something?

 

[GhostofKinski]

Draft Luigi 2028


If they haven’t executed him by then. I know capital punishment cases take decades in most cases but something tells me they’ll want to make a very clear example out of him.
Running him from prison though, Bobby Sands was elected MP days away from death. It was a watershed moment.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

I am hoping all this succeeds in finally galvanizing the left to move beyond stultified and elitist identity politics.

This is still identity politics, make no mistake.

 

[mixed_biscuits]

What I don't understand is why the left doesn't campaign to meaningfully change the law rather than accepting the law but enforcing it shoddily? I guess it's because being lax in its application can show a leniency on their part, making them look like "nice people".

 

[GhostofKinski]

The "authoritarian left" bit is pretty funny. Does the person who made this think the USSR didn't have cops or something?

Didn’t Chomsky used to say that the only two powers that considered the USSR communist was the USSR & the U.S./GB?
The Soviets loved it because it made them sound like they had Marxist street cred. The West called them Communists so it made them look Democrat & Free.

It’s the same with the ‘Socialist’ candidates here. They front for the worst, parasites who prey on the WC/poor for the same reason & the tax cuts for the wealthy fuck the worker right gets to hit them over the head with it.
Go commit a crime in Cuba, see if they are defunding the police

 

[Mr. Tea]

The "authoritarian left" bit is pretty funny. Does the person who made this think the USSR didn't have cops or something?

Oh hang on, this is about the car, isn't it - they're those self-driving ones, aren't they? They don't operate in the UK (yet).

 

[other_life]

you motherfuckers are to a man dumb as rocks and it amazes me every day that this is the website that got planet mu's footwork comp off the ground and the website that put me on to j.h. prynne and a place where people used to try to outdo one another interpreting the wake. used to be a real country

 

[luka]

you motherfuckers are to a man dumb as rocks and it amazes me every day that this is the website that got planet mu's footwork comp off the ground and the website that put me on to j.h. prynne and a place where people used to try to outdo one another interpreting the wake. used to be a real country

What should we think about trump? We need guidance

 

[Clinamenic]

Oh hang on, this is about the car, isn't it - they're those self-driving ones, aren't they? They don't operate in the UK (yet).

Yeah it’s about the Waymo, and it oddly makes a lot of sense