Being an “ally” is weird. Not only because picking an identity group and declaring yourself their online saviour (instead of just helping people who need help) is weird. But because of the dogmatic, incoherent, almost-always-mean ways people demonstrate their “ally-ship.” In 2022, being an ally means ignoring the mistakes of your side, no matter how egregious, attacking your enemies, no matter how benign, and sticking to the talking-points, no matter how dishonest you have to be to do so.
"I don’t know why you bothered. You have your view, Chimp has his/hers: never the twain shall meet."
I bother because the twain sometimes do meet!😄 And, to be fair, I think Chimp's view, if he's being honest, is the same as mine. Being an ally, in some people's minds, is about being faithful to the orthodoxy. Not being honest or thinking for themselves. That's why they are so quick to block people and why they rely on accusations of bigotry instead of actual arguments.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is convince people like him that it's possible to be both kind *and* honest. That supporting people by being a fanatic makes things worse. Believe it or not, it works sometimes!
I already do. We have nothing to do with each other. And we never did.
Steve, I don't understand why you waste your time with people like the above. "They" (please) are never going to change or yield any ground or seek any compromise; oppositional belligerence is his reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
Over the past few years I've gotten further and further from social networks and comment sections and it's done me a lot of good. I'm less angry and more able to shut down angry reactions before they escalate to saying something I later regret. When someone goads me I don't engage in days of flaming anymore, I just click Block (or on here, "collapse").
It's not worth it.
The accusation of "transphobia" (asinine word) comes so readily as to be meaningless, even the most supportive are seen as hardened enemies, so why bother? These "activists" are fanatics and most of them are sick in the head.
I know that engaging people on the other sides of issues is What You Do and you have my respect for the idealism, less so for persisting with so many obvious lost causes. At some point you will cross one of those milestones of age, like when the birthday odometer rolls over from 49 to 50, and will start to see your remaining time as too precious to waste on trying to change the world one sick bastard at a time.
“This person has said comments that are cruel/hateful about people like me, therefore they must hate me, therefore I hate them, therefore I am justified in making cruel/hateful comments about them and people like them.” Rinse and repeat.
"This person has said comments that are cruel/hateful about people like me, therefore they must hate me, therefore I hate them,"
The thing is, I don't even object to this. I certainly wouldn't have been defending Caroline Farrow after reading her tweets. If somebody says something cruel/hateful about me, I guess it's justifiable if I respond in kind.
But if somebody else *speaks* to somebody who said something hateful about me, and I decide they must therefore share all of the same views, yeah, that's ridiculous.
Chimp seemed to be more interested in trying to score points by calling you names, trawl for heresy, and deflect discussion rather than cultivating it. There is already too much of that. You have so much more patience than I have.
Seconded. And even when one makes excellent points, they fall on rocky ground.
I read about the man who engaged with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK and got a few hundred to leave the Klan; this is quite an achievement but the KKK has been an embarrassment for a century anyway. The point though is that achievements like this are exceptional and rare. I'm not exactly inarticulate and in all the thousands of conservatives I've engaged with over the decades I have seen exactly two switch sides, and I don't claim credit for it. Two out of thousands is essentially zero.
So .. I've come around to seeing the other pole not as people who can be reached, rather they are enemies who must be soundly defeated because their triumph means the death of all life on earth. There may be some between the poles who have potential, but that center has become increasingly barren (please don't insult me with polls about "independents"; they're just too embarrassed to identify publicly with Republicans but that's how they vote) as the polarization intensifies.
I think it is sometimes interesting to take a question or a seeming paradox and turn it around and make it a statement and even an axiom. Per your saying that you honestly don't understand guilt-by-association: I assume that is because it makes no sense. But it may be illuminating to give the perplexing proposition an unequivocal statement: "I believe in guilt by association. It makes sense to me." Then you have the consistent thread running through everything Chimp said. Your guilt is established by your refusal to condemn J. K. Rowling, whose guilt is established to Chimp's entire satisfaction by HER association with -- i.e., her refusal to condemn -- still OTHER people, and this in spite of her clear record supporting gay rights and even trans rights. You show great patience attempting to reason with him, but in his mind nothing you say or do can get you out from under your guilt, which is open-and-shut based on your associations.
If we contrast his absolute certainty about you with your interest in trying to understand him, we have a microcosm of the national divide and a clue to why the wrong side is winning: people are strongly attracted by narcissistic confidence and certitude.
People not only think that if you say something about an issue that they not only know the full spectrum of your thought on that issue but also on unrelated ones. If I said that I'm so pro 2nd Amendment that I think everyone should own an M-16 rifle do you think that would tell you what I think about abortion, racism, transsexuals or economic issues?
If I told you that I read the Bible from cover to cover do you think you could infer that I'm a Christian? I like Pete Seeger's music, am I a communist?
Anyone who a functioning mind and memory has noted that political positions come in syndromes. We could get hung up on the imperfect accuracy of generalizations like that but if I guess that someone wearing a MAGA hat is bigoted against gays etc., I may be making an unfair generalization but I am probably right.
Syndromes.
BTW I've gone a lot further than just reading the Bible ... an interest in Gnosticism led me to read a few dozen books on the first few centuries of Christianity including the writings of several early church fathers. Since most fundamentalist bigots have only read the juicy bits in Timothy and Leviticus, I can argue circles around them pointing out what Iranaeus had to say about abusing scripture to support a personal agenda. This used to be fun.
People with 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴 don't embrace all the items on their tribal checklist. They look at separate issues as separate issues. Indeed, it is my reason for disliking extreme political partisanship, it is a syndrome. Are their lots of people who fall into those syndromes? Yes, of course, but assuming it about others maintains the divide. Who does that serve?
As for having a 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺, I try to not make assumptions from that either. I consider it of course but it is not a decider. If it was, thanks to my memory of adult homosexuals offering me money for sex when I was fifteen, I'd be making an assumption about you that I suspect would be unfounded. My memory of the violence of the black guys from the projects that I went to high school with carving people up and beating them down in packs would have me thinking things about Steve that are untrue. Our memories are a limited subset, not the whole. That's where bigotry is found.
The reference to assumptions about reading the Bible cover to cover indicating that the reader is a Christian was a reference to a bad assumption. I don't know the actual number, but I suspect that many become atheists while reading the Bible critically. As an aside, I am well read on world religions, but that wasn't the point.
I suspect you think you're rebutting me but you're doing more the opposite. Of course people with functioning minds examine issues and individuals separately. But as I keep saying, logic is a retrofit and it is a minority retrofit.
Adlai Stevenson on needing a majority.
But a point I keep coming back to is the sneer at any and all generalizations. Smart people are alert to their exceptions; not all gay men offer money to teenage boys (most don't), not all black kids roam in gangs (most don't). I'd say generalization in those cases is bona fide bigotry.
But. Judiciously and unprejudiciously applied, generalization is the most powerful tool we have for making sense of the world. Look at taxonomy. It bears live young that are initially helpless, it feeds them with a nutritious fluid generated in its own body, it has fur. No oppression or presumption in guessing it's a mammal. Then there are the marsupials and monotremes that don't quite fit the generalization. That doesn't mean we should stop gathering mammals into a category.
Same with people. Taking your first example, the gay culture encouraged immaturity and ready capitulation to impulse and didn't have the maturing power of needing to get it together to raise children. That was nothing intrinsic to being gay and a lot of gays managed to grow up anyway. But the culture promoted it, one reason AIDS swept through it like a fire in a dead cornfield and a high wind.
Back to my first, political attitudes very much tend to come in syndromes. I'd call myself pretty far left, and more authoritarian every year as I see what a lousy job we're doing with our precious freedoms, but there are elements of the "leftist syndrome" that are completely unacceptable to me.
AND there is the fact that most people are conformist af and live their lives trying to act like the television tells them they're supposed to. Watch how eagerly people pick up dumb new words and phrases (reach out, share) or succumb to peer pressures and start smoking.
I think we share in disdain for political syndromes. There are places where generalizations are more highly useful than others and I do not discount them out of hand. I just try to not give them more weight than they deserve.
It's almost like China's social credit system, where your score goes down if you're associated with a low scoring person. Basically it's just trying to enforce a social blockade. And that's all "allyship" is.
"Ideas should be judged on their merits. Not by who else agrees with them."
Seems simple enough. I was just gonna say last paragraph, but I thought it was *so* good:
"Although ideas, like life, are like a box of chocolates. We can pick out the ones we like without touching the rest. If we prefer, we can throw out the whole box. But we shouldn’t swallow them all just because a few seem good. We shouldn’t judge them based on who else likes them. And, especially, we shouldn’t be afraid to try a new one from time to time."
My ex said one thing in all the years he threw his life away on spiritualism that was profound in its truth:
"our weaknesses are extensions of our strengths"
Wow. For we on what the Marching Morons call "the left," our openness to new ideas and to a breadth of viewpoints is a strength, no question.
But its extension into timidity to condemn bad viewpoints has become our weakness. This was the most corrosive consequence of postmodernism. For me being a politically and sexually active gay man during the HIV crisis this peaked in dealing with the issue of HIV+ gay men deliberately infecting others with lies about their HIV status and even perforating condoms; these were murderers yet very few gay men could bring themselves to condemn them. Just yapping bullshit about "personal responsibility," I had one guy sweating and trembling and finally running away in terror, unable to make the most obvious value judgment.
Yes we need to be able to examine other viewpoints. We also need to be ready to identify wrong ones.
It’s also part of the cancel culture, which is dangerous. It’s not allyship to go around digging in the past of a person to find that one « mistake » from an other person. It’s so exausting (sorry for the spelling mistake, i speak french!!)
The thing that's sad with Jk Rowling is they've attacked her for stating she believes for example that restrooms need to be a safe space for women and if I'm not mistaken, trans women also, and that more needs to be done to insure that.
Chimp isn't an ally, she's a bully, a fanatic and the left's equivalent of MAGA. She's the stereotypical little snowflake who goes digging and demands 100% unquestioning obedience. Cripes, these people will be holding Purity Balls next.
This is why I'm thinking of voting independent this fall rather than Democrat, as I've done my whole life. These people have taken over the party and sometimes I think Nancy Pelosi is our John McCain - an old person solely retaining critical thinking faculties. When she's gone the inmates will take over the asylum, too.
I don't want the Wokenazis in charge any more than I do the Trumpanzees. It's like Hitler (far right) vs Stalin (far left). Which dictatorship would you like to live in? Heads they win, tails we lose.
I find the two to be almost interchangeable. Except where the trumpanzees want to kill a lot of people, the wokes want to enforce a viewpoint of ever greater rigidity. The trumps have their guns, the wokes have their neologisms.
That wouldn't be a lot more abusive than they already are in words.
On Medium they're actually organized; even stating an objective fact they don't like leads to a pile-on as they email their storm trooper army to all report the post and get the writer banned. I think there's similar repressive organization on the social networks, too.
And getting disgusted with them just validates their persecution mania.
They're no more "left" than the MAGAts are "conservative."
Sounds like i'm not missing much. Yes, I think that's overall what's going on. So far, Substack seems to be largely impervious. And my blog is a safe space for unpopular opinion, at least for now I guess. Not sure how easily Wix (my platform provider) or any other would cave if pressured by the wokenazis.
Scary times we live in. One wonders at what point they'll normalize violent behaviour. I'm guessing it will build on the current violence normalization transforming the right.
When one side stops playing by the rules e.g. honesty in debate then the other side can either disarm itself by remaining on the high road, and losing, or follow the first side into deceit and foul play and retain a chance at winning. Or, in our case, surviving.
The weakness of the Democrats is infuriating. Obama's cowardly centricity, Biden's milquetoast timidity, these are killing us. We need someone more like LBJ, willing to go as low as needed to triumph. LBJ would call in Manchin and engage in raw extortion and Manchin would bring up his lunch in terror of what would happen to him if he didn't give LBJ the vote he wanted.
LBJ would show a Republican senator a photograph of him in bed with his underage mistress and say "you give me that vote or this picture goes above the fold in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning."
That's how y'get Capone. That's the Chicaga way.
But no. Biden does nothing, Garland does nothing, Schumer does nothing, and we keep losing. Say goodbye to the animals, say goodbye to democracy, say goodbye to human kindness.
I don't think the LBJ/J Edgar Hoover way works so well anymore. The right can't be shamed. Look who they voted for - many of them, including the so-called Christians, voted for Trump because of their single-issue desire to rid America of abortion. If Trump can't shame them, no one can. How many of them have been busted fucking dudes while bitching about homosexuality and fighting gay rights? How many fought against gay marriage while disrespecting their own marriage with other men (or the occasional Christian weirdo who had an actual mistress). I share your fury against the Democrats, I've found them a bunch of pussies for years too. These motherfuckers are going to let the Republicans go free, and Trump, while prosecuting his foot soldiers (frankly, I'm surprised they have the balls and labia even for that) but shaming them is an utter waste of time. How about enforcing the fucking law and making sure EVERYONE who needs to goes to jail? Guessing that wouldn't go over well because then when the GOP comes back, they'll go after every Democrat who's pulled some shit of his/her own.
I'm sure that a big part of that timidity is the knowledge that their houses would be firebombed and their children abducted and murdered. No question.
But we can't abandon our principles out of fear of what the Republicans might do next time they gain power, because they will do it whether or not they have hurts to avenge. We need to get them out of power and keep them out of power.
Participation in the insurrection is documented enough to put a substantial portion of the Republican congress into prison or tied up legally trying to stay out of prison. And next time their base tries something the cops don't pull punches anymore.
And don't worry about starting a civil war. It's already started.
I know. I expect it's going to get a LOT more violent soon, like in November.
You're right that we can't abandon our principles out of fear of what the Republicans will do next. Our principles CAN'T be abandoning the rule of law like they have. That makes us no better than they. I agree we need to keep them out of power but I'm not going to vote against my own interests, and I find the Democrats as hostile to women's rights as Republicans are. Oh big deal, the Republicans finally got rid of Roe. They did it with the consent and assent of millions of women who didn't care enough to vote intelligently, or to vote at all (Five Thirty Eight speculates that progressives who didn't vote at all in 2016 might have stopped Trump's victory as they probably would have swung back some of his swing states).
Unfortunately, there's no easy quick answer to this. I suspect it's a little like early Nazi Germany, but for *genuine* progressives and egalitarians. Right now you *can* leave if you want. Perhaps later you'll be told to get out. And then one day you can't leave anymore and political prisoners are digging their own mass graves.
I don't think America's ready for rule of law. I don't know what the answer is, Chris, but if we start turning as lawless and terrorist as them then we'll be truly lost too.
"Which government would you rather have lived with, Hitler's or Stalin's?"
Read Wm. Shirer's "The Nightmare Years," about the period before the Third Reich. America isn't a little like early Nazi Germany, it's a *lot* like early Nazi Germany.
I remember 2016 without a trace of fondness. All the "Jill" people, all the "Bernie" people, all the "I'm not voting because they both suck" people. No question but that we could have dodged the Trump bullet and kept Kavanaugh and Twirly-Eyes Barrett and Gorsuch off the bench, And the people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for "Hillary" are probably the same people who want to make 2024 about gender identity
I keep remembering that Biden was the guy who told some gun nut who said Biden was going to take away his guns that he was "full of shit," and I had such hope that he would be a fighter.
It's not too late. An arrested Trump would be a study in crying tantrum and would do more to defuse Trumpism than his death would.
The abortion ruling guarantees the deaths of thousands of women. Digging our own graves to be machine-gunned into isn't very many steps from that.
I haven't read that one, but I've read a few others on the subject, one, can't remember the name at this point, was about the time leading up to the rise of Hitler and beyond, because Bush had just gotten re-elected and I was trying to understand why people were embracing such a brainless authoritarian (oooooohhhhh, I had no idea how great he was in retrospect).
'Hitler's Willing Executioners', which I read more recently (about 10-12 years go) go into it as well.
But I don't see why that leads to we must become the enemy we fight.
Americans are totally fucked up in their conception of what a 'white ally' is. They are solidly deluded by the racism into believing that all 'white' people are 'privileged.' In fact, it is absolutely impossible to know what kind of oppression issues any individual is struggling with. However, if they are perceptibly a POC, it's obvious they are from a group that has done a bang-up job at overcoming oppression. They have been world leaders on the subject for at least the past 150 years.
The 'white ally' is, in fact, a person who admires that quality and is hoping some of it will rub off on them. They are not there to save anyone but themselves, and are relying on the kindness of strangers to effectuate that. Unfortunately, that rarely ever happens since those people who have accomplished so much in overcoming oppression have no clue who they actually are and completely miss the boat on being the mentors they are supposed to be. They have failed to shoulder their Mission from God. Such a disappointment.
"If you didn't support homophobia and transphobia then you wouldn't go around supporting someone who does, not like they are disagreeing about something inconsequential."
I would have stopped there. As if the ridiculous opening accusation wasn't enough, the someone/they pairing remains a deal-breaker. To hell with these people.
I don’t know why you bothered. You have your view, Chimp has his/hers: never the twain shall meet.
PS the T should be taken off LGBT. The interests of the parties have diverged.
"I don’t know why you bothered. You have your view, Chimp has his/hers: never the twain shall meet."
I bother because the twain sometimes do meet!😄 And, to be fair, I think Chimp's view, if he's being honest, is the same as mine. Being an ally, in some people's minds, is about being faithful to the orthodoxy. Not being honest or thinking for themselves. That's why they are so quick to block people and why they rely on accusations of bigotry instead of actual arguments.
One of the things I try to do with my writing is convince people like him that it's possible to be both kind *and* honest. That supporting people by being a fanatic makes things worse. Believe it or not, it works sometimes!
I already do. We have nothing to do with each other. And we never did.
Steve, I don't understand why you waste your time with people like the above. "They" (please) are never going to change or yield any ground or seek any compromise; oppositional belligerence is his reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
Over the past few years I've gotten further and further from social networks and comment sections and it's done me a lot of good. I'm less angry and more able to shut down angry reactions before they escalate to saying something I later regret. When someone goads me I don't engage in days of flaming anymore, I just click Block (or on here, "collapse").
It's not worth it.
The accusation of "transphobia" (asinine word) comes so readily as to be meaningless, even the most supportive are seen as hardened enemies, so why bother? These "activists" are fanatics and most of them are sick in the head.
I know that engaging people on the other sides of issues is What You Do and you have my respect for the idealism, less so for persisting with so many obvious lost causes. At some point you will cross one of those milestones of age, like when the birthday odometer rolls over from 49 to 50, and will start to see your remaining time as too precious to waste on trying to change the world one sick bastard at a time.
“This person has said comments that are cruel/hateful about people like me, therefore they must hate me, therefore I hate them, therefore I am justified in making cruel/hateful comments about them and people like them.” Rinse and repeat.
"This person has said comments that are cruel/hateful about people like me, therefore they must hate me, therefore I hate them,"
The thing is, I don't even object to this. I certainly wouldn't have been defending Caroline Farrow after reading her tweets. If somebody says something cruel/hateful about me, I guess it's justifiable if I respond in kind.
But if somebody else *speaks* to somebody who said something hateful about me, and I decide they must therefore share all of the same views, yeah, that's ridiculous.
Chimp seemed to be more interested in trying to score points by calling you names, trawl for heresy, and deflect discussion rather than cultivating it. There is already too much of that. You have so much more patience than I have.
Seconded. And even when one makes excellent points, they fall on rocky ground.
I read about the man who engaged with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK and got a few hundred to leave the Klan; this is quite an achievement but the KKK has been an embarrassment for a century anyway. The point though is that achievements like this are exceptional and rare. I'm not exactly inarticulate and in all the thousands of conservatives I've engaged with over the decades I have seen exactly two switch sides, and I don't claim credit for it. Two out of thousands is essentially zero.
So .. I've come around to seeing the other pole not as people who can be reached, rather they are enemies who must be soundly defeated because their triumph means the death of all life on earth. There may be some between the poles who have potential, but that center has become increasingly barren (please don't insult me with polls about "independents"; they're just too embarrassed to identify publicly with Republicans but that's how they vote) as the polarization intensifies.
I think it is sometimes interesting to take a question or a seeming paradox and turn it around and make it a statement and even an axiom. Per your saying that you honestly don't understand guilt-by-association: I assume that is because it makes no sense. But it may be illuminating to give the perplexing proposition an unequivocal statement: "I believe in guilt by association. It makes sense to me." Then you have the consistent thread running through everything Chimp said. Your guilt is established by your refusal to condemn J. K. Rowling, whose guilt is established to Chimp's entire satisfaction by HER association with -- i.e., her refusal to condemn -- still OTHER people, and this in spite of her clear record supporting gay rights and even trans rights. You show great patience attempting to reason with him, but in his mind nothing you say or do can get you out from under your guilt, which is open-and-shut based on your associations.
If we contrast his absolute certainty about you with your interest in trying to understand him, we have a microcosm of the national divide and a clue to why the wrong side is winning: people are strongly attracted by narcissistic confidence and certitude.
People not only think that if you say something about an issue that they not only know the full spectrum of your thought on that issue but also on unrelated ones. If I said that I'm so pro 2nd Amendment that I think everyone should own an M-16 rifle do you think that would tell you what I think about abortion, racism, transsexuals or economic issues?
If I told you that I read the Bible from cover to cover do you think you could infer that I'm a Christian? I like Pete Seeger's music, am I a communist?
People read way too much into things.
Anyone who a functioning mind and memory has noted that political positions come in syndromes. We could get hung up on the imperfect accuracy of generalizations like that but if I guess that someone wearing a MAGA hat is bigoted against gays etc., I may be making an unfair generalization but I am probably right.
Syndromes.
BTW I've gone a lot further than just reading the Bible ... an interest in Gnosticism led me to read a few dozen books on the first few centuries of Christianity including the writings of several early church fathers. Since most fundamentalist bigots have only read the juicy bits in Timothy and Leviticus, I can argue circles around them pointing out what Iranaeus had to say about abusing scripture to support a personal agenda. This used to be fun.
Recommended: https://smile.amazon.com/Doctrine-Practice-Early-Church-Stuart/dp/0802806295/ref=sr_1_2
People with 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴 don't embrace all the items on their tribal checklist. They look at separate issues as separate issues. Indeed, it is my reason for disliking extreme political partisanship, it is a syndrome. Are their lots of people who fall into those syndromes? Yes, of course, but assuming it about others maintains the divide. Who does that serve?
As for having a 𝘧𝘶𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘺, I try to not make assumptions from that either. I consider it of course but it is not a decider. If it was, thanks to my memory of adult homosexuals offering me money for sex when I was fifteen, I'd be making an assumption about you that I suspect would be unfounded. My memory of the violence of the black guys from the projects that I went to high school with carving people up and beating them down in packs would have me thinking things about Steve that are untrue. Our memories are a limited subset, not the whole. That's where bigotry is found.
The reference to assumptions about reading the Bible cover to cover indicating that the reader is a Christian was a reference to a bad assumption. I don't know the actual number, but I suspect that many become atheists while reading the Bible critically. As an aside, I am well read on world religions, but that wasn't the point.
I suspect you think you're rebutting me but you're doing more the opposite. Of course people with functioning minds examine issues and individuals separately. But as I keep saying, logic is a retrofit and it is a minority retrofit.
Adlai Stevenson on needing a majority.
But a point I keep coming back to is the sneer at any and all generalizations. Smart people are alert to their exceptions; not all gay men offer money to teenage boys (most don't), not all black kids roam in gangs (most don't). I'd say generalization in those cases is bona fide bigotry.
But. Judiciously and unprejudiciously applied, generalization is the most powerful tool we have for making sense of the world. Look at taxonomy. It bears live young that are initially helpless, it feeds them with a nutritious fluid generated in its own body, it has fur. No oppression or presumption in guessing it's a mammal. Then there are the marsupials and monotremes that don't quite fit the generalization. That doesn't mean we should stop gathering mammals into a category.
Same with people. Taking your first example, the gay culture encouraged immaturity and ready capitulation to impulse and didn't have the maturing power of needing to get it together to raise children. That was nothing intrinsic to being gay and a lot of gays managed to grow up anyway. But the culture promoted it, one reason AIDS swept through it like a fire in a dead cornfield and a high wind.
Back to my first, political attitudes very much tend to come in syndromes. I'd call myself pretty far left, and more authoritarian every year as I see what a lousy job we're doing with our precious freedoms, but there are elements of the "leftist syndrome" that are completely unacceptable to me.
AND there is the fact that most people are conformist af and live their lives trying to act like the television tells them they're supposed to. Watch how eagerly people pick up dumb new words and phrases (reach out, share) or succumb to peer pressures and start smoking.
I think we share in disdain for political syndromes. There are places where generalizations are more highly useful than others and I do not discount them out of hand. I just try to not give them more weight than they deserve.
It's almost like China's social credit system, where your score goes down if you're associated with a low scoring person. Basically it's just trying to enforce a social blockade. And that's all "allyship" is.
I believe this takes top prize for bizarre.
"Ideas should be judged on their merits. Not by who else agrees with them."
Seems simple enough. I was just gonna say last paragraph, but I thought it was *so* good:
"Although ideas, like life, are like a box of chocolates. We can pick out the ones we like without touching the rest. If we prefer, we can throw out the whole box. But we shouldn’t swallow them all just because a few seem good. We shouldn’t judge them based on who else likes them. And, especially, we shouldn’t be afraid to try a new one from time to time."
My ex said one thing in all the years he threw his life away on spiritualism that was profound in its truth:
"our weaknesses are extensions of our strengths"
Wow. For we on what the Marching Morons call "the left," our openness to new ideas and to a breadth of viewpoints is a strength, no question.
But its extension into timidity to condemn bad viewpoints has become our weakness. This was the most corrosive consequence of postmodernism. For me being a politically and sexually active gay man during the HIV crisis this peaked in dealing with the issue of HIV+ gay men deliberately infecting others with lies about their HIV status and even perforating condoms; these were murderers yet very few gay men could bring themselves to condemn them. Just yapping bullshit about "personal responsibility," I had one guy sweating and trembling and finally running away in terror, unable to make the most obvious value judgment.
Yes we need to be able to examine other viewpoints. We also need to be ready to identify wrong ones.
For example, "a trans woman is a woman."
I don't always agree, but *big* "Yup" on this one. TY for reply.
If two people agree on everything then one of them is superfluous.
YW.
Lol... Hadn't heard that one. TY again.
It’s also part of the cancel culture, which is dangerous. It’s not allyship to go around digging in the past of a person to find that one « mistake » from an other person. It’s so exausting (sorry for the spelling mistake, i speak french!!)
The thing that's sad with Jk Rowling is they've attacked her for stating she believes for example that restrooms need to be a safe space for women and if I'm not mistaken, trans women also, and that more needs to be done to insure that.
Chimp isn't an ally, she's a bully, a fanatic and the left's equivalent of MAGA. She's the stereotypical little snowflake who goes digging and demands 100% unquestioning obedience. Cripes, these people will be holding Purity Balls next.
This is why I'm thinking of voting independent this fall rather than Democrat, as I've done my whole life. These people have taken over the party and sometimes I think Nancy Pelosi is our John McCain - an old person solely retaining critical thinking faculties. When she's gone the inmates will take over the asylum, too.
I don't want the Wokenazis in charge any more than I do the Trumpanzees. It's like Hitler (far right) vs Stalin (far left). Which dictatorship would you like to live in? Heads they win, tails we lose.
I find the two to be almost interchangeable. Except where the trumpanzees want to kill a lot of people, the wokes want to enforce a viewpoint of ever greater rigidity. The trumps have their guns, the wokes have their neologisms.
For now. I'm not sure I wouldn't put it past the 'woke' to get violent.
That wouldn't be a lot more abusive than they already are in words.
On Medium they're actually organized; even stating an objective fact they don't like leads to a pile-on as they email their storm trooper army to all report the post and get the writer banned. I think there's similar repressive organization on the social networks, too.
And getting disgusted with them just validates their persecution mania.
They're no more "left" than the MAGAts are "conservative."
Sounds like i'm not missing much. Yes, I think that's overall what's going on. So far, Substack seems to be largely impervious. And my blog is a safe space for unpopular opinion, at least for now I guess. Not sure how easily Wix (my platform provider) or any other would cave if pressured by the wokenazis.
Scary times we live in. One wonders at what point they'll normalize violent behaviour. I'm guessing it will build on the current violence normalization transforming the right.
This invokes one of my most troubling thoughts.
When one side stops playing by the rules e.g. honesty in debate then the other side can either disarm itself by remaining on the high road, and losing, or follow the first side into deceit and foul play and retain a chance at winning. Or, in our case, surviving.
The weakness of the Democrats is infuriating. Obama's cowardly centricity, Biden's milquetoast timidity, these are killing us. We need someone more like LBJ, willing to go as low as needed to triumph. LBJ would call in Manchin and engage in raw extortion and Manchin would bring up his lunch in terror of what would happen to him if he didn't give LBJ the vote he wanted.
LBJ would show a Republican senator a photograph of him in bed with his underage mistress and say "you give me that vote or this picture goes above the fold in every newspaper in America tomorrow morning."
That's how y'get Capone. That's the Chicaga way.
But no. Biden does nothing, Garland does nothing, Schumer does nothing, and we keep losing. Say goodbye to the animals, say goodbye to democracy, say goodbye to human kindness.
I don't think the LBJ/J Edgar Hoover way works so well anymore. The right can't be shamed. Look who they voted for - many of them, including the so-called Christians, voted for Trump because of their single-issue desire to rid America of abortion. If Trump can't shame them, no one can. How many of them have been busted fucking dudes while bitching about homosexuality and fighting gay rights? How many fought against gay marriage while disrespecting their own marriage with other men (or the occasional Christian weirdo who had an actual mistress). I share your fury against the Democrats, I've found them a bunch of pussies for years too. These motherfuckers are going to let the Republicans go free, and Trump, while prosecuting his foot soldiers (frankly, I'm surprised they have the balls and labia even for that) but shaming them is an utter waste of time. How about enforcing the fucking law and making sure EVERYONE who needs to goes to jail? Guessing that wouldn't go over well because then when the GOP comes back, they'll go after every Democrat who's pulled some shit of his/her own.
I'm sure that a big part of that timidity is the knowledge that their houses would be firebombed and their children abducted and murdered. No question.
But we can't abandon our principles out of fear of what the Republicans might do next time they gain power, because they will do it whether or not they have hurts to avenge. We need to get them out of power and keep them out of power.
Participation in the insurrection is documented enough to put a substantial portion of the Republican congress into prison or tied up legally trying to stay out of prison. And next time their base tries something the cops don't pull punches anymore.
And don't worry about starting a civil war. It's already started.
I know. I expect it's going to get a LOT more violent soon, like in November.
You're right that we can't abandon our principles out of fear of what the Republicans will do next. Our principles CAN'T be abandoning the rule of law like they have. That makes us no better than they. I agree we need to keep them out of power but I'm not going to vote against my own interests, and I find the Democrats as hostile to women's rights as Republicans are. Oh big deal, the Republicans finally got rid of Roe. They did it with the consent and assent of millions of women who didn't care enough to vote intelligently, or to vote at all (Five Thirty Eight speculates that progressives who didn't vote at all in 2016 might have stopped Trump's victory as they probably would have swung back some of his swing states).
Unfortunately, there's no easy quick answer to this. I suspect it's a little like early Nazi Germany, but for *genuine* progressives and egalitarians. Right now you *can* leave if you want. Perhaps later you'll be told to get out. And then one day you can't leave anymore and political prisoners are digging their own mass graves.
I don't think America's ready for rule of law. I don't know what the answer is, Chris, but if we start turning as lawless and terrorist as them then we'll be truly lost too.
"Which government would you rather have lived with, Hitler's or Stalin's?"
Read Wm. Shirer's "The Nightmare Years," about the period before the Third Reich. America isn't a little like early Nazi Germany, it's a *lot* like early Nazi Germany.
I remember 2016 without a trace of fondness. All the "Jill" people, all the "Bernie" people, all the "I'm not voting because they both suck" people. No question but that we could have dodged the Trump bullet and kept Kavanaugh and Twirly-Eyes Barrett and Gorsuch off the bench, And the people who couldn't bring themselves to vote for "Hillary" are probably the same people who want to make 2024 about gender identity
I keep remembering that Biden was the guy who told some gun nut who said Biden was going to take away his guns that he was "full of shit," and I had such hope that he would be a fighter.
It's not too late. An arrested Trump would be a study in crying tantrum and would do more to defuse Trumpism than his death would.
The abortion ruling guarantees the deaths of thousands of women. Digging our own graves to be machine-gunned into isn't very many steps from that.
I haven't read that one, but I've read a few others on the subject, one, can't remember the name at this point, was about the time leading up to the rise of Hitler and beyond, because Bush had just gotten re-elected and I was trying to understand why people were embracing such a brainless authoritarian (oooooohhhhh, I had no idea how great he was in retrospect).
'Hitler's Willing Executioners', which I read more recently (about 10-12 years go) go into it as well.
But I don't see why that leads to we must become the enemy we fight.
Americans are totally fucked up in their conception of what a 'white ally' is. They are solidly deluded by the racism into believing that all 'white' people are 'privileged.' In fact, it is absolutely impossible to know what kind of oppression issues any individual is struggling with. However, if they are perceptibly a POC, it's obvious they are from a group that has done a bang-up job at overcoming oppression. They have been world leaders on the subject for at least the past 150 years.
The 'white ally' is, in fact, a person who admires that quality and is hoping some of it will rub off on them. They are not there to save anyone but themselves, and are relying on the kindness of strangers to effectuate that. Unfortunately, that rarely ever happens since those people who have accomplished so much in overcoming oppression have no clue who they actually are and completely miss the boat on being the mentors they are supposed to be. They have failed to shoulder their Mission from God. Such a disappointment.
"If you didn't support homophobia and transphobia then you wouldn't go around supporting someone who does, not like they are disagreeing about something inconsequential."
I would have stopped there. As if the ridiculous opening accusation wasn't enough, the someone/they pairing remains a deal-breaker. To hell with these people.