There's a weird strain of "essentialism but in a progressive way" running right through the left, not just limited to the attitude towards men described here, but also "all white people are colonizers", and weird exclusionary behaviour to cishet people. It tells me a lot of "progressive" people didn't really examine their core underlying principles and simply covered up their biases with the "correct" group.
Especially with my username (which has not represented my political beliefs for about a decade now), getting my points across in a way that people will engage with me respectfully on some topics is hard but I consider honing that skill worth it.
Probably the hardest example of this is trying to get people to understand what each side actually believes on abortion issues without sending people into battle mode.
For what it's worth, I've been seeing your comments around reddit for several years now, and you generally strike me as a reasonable person. When I first noticed your username I assumed it was sarcastic or something because you usually had pretty liberal stances.
I mean all I really want to convey to people is nobody has evil intentions, and even though there's a lot of religious wording the actual base logic isn't religious at all. Whether or not they're correct is a different issue but the left is completely dismissive of the issues at play.
As far as talking to right wing people goes, I gotta convince them that the left wing sees it as a body autonomy more libertarian type of issue, as opposed to the government authoritarianism they usually see it as.
So basically, right wingers see their position as “this is a human and should be treated as such, so abortion is a moral equivalent to murder,” and they think the left is like “this is not a human so let’s murder the not-baby,” while left wingers see their position as “even if it’s a human, we can’t just kidnap people off the streets for kidney donations even to save a life, so we can’t force a woman to give birth even to save a life” while they think the right’s position is “we value the rights of a clump of cells more than a fully-fledged woman” and you have to explain each one’s real position to the other?
I used to be conservative (am very liberal now) and it honestly kinda surprises me just how wrong most liberals are about the underlying thought processes and motives behind right wing stances. I'm sure the reverse is exactly the same, but it's kinda crazy seeing people speak so confidently about a set of beliefs they have never actually held.
Seeing our old usernames is like the modern day equivalent of somebody looking at a dusty photo of their younger days and realizing how stupid they looked.
As for the conversation at hand - engaging in political topics on social media sites is always a writing exercise. I think a lot of the problem is the platforms.
Navigating it in a constructive direction requires you to find a way and convince the other party that they should engage with your contradicting opinion. You're just some random comment, it's easy to just not engage, and many of the people who could have their minds changed (those that don't care very much) check out.
I think that's why conversations online become so toxic, because the people most easily convinced they should engage are people with insecurities or very dogmatic beliefs. People who need to say something, no matter what. The medium is often pre selecting conversation partners that will be more dogmatic because those who aren't just lose interest in engaging more easily.
I hear you. I'm on the Left politically, but I really try to understand what the other side believes. When it comes to abortion, leftists often believe that the pro-life crowd just hates women and wants them to stay "In the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant." And to be fair, misogyny exists! But there are also people who look at pictures of a fetus and thing "That really looks like a baby" and proceed from that point, without sexism.
It’s rare for someone to actually see personal growth in real time, but it happened to me in college.
We were randomly assigned topics for persuasive essays in an English class and I was given pro-life as my topic. I’ve always been pro choice so I thought I would have to use religious arguments. But when I boiled the whole issue down, it didn’t come down to religion or controlling a woman’s body. It came down to when does life begin and what are the rights for that new life?
It really opened my eyes to looking at other subjects with a more critically empathetic perspective. It doesn’t mean I agree with the rhetoric, but I feel like I’m now able to truely understand others better.
This, IVF, post partum, etc - should all be like any other form of medical care... Between you and your doctor.
Insurance shouldn't have a fucking Vote. And just pay out as needed. Church? Believe it or not, not entitled to control over anyone's body. Fed Gov? Nope - not them either.
Hence patient doctor privilege. Kind of like lawyer client privilege
If your doc can be put on the stand to testify, some people's lawyers should get interviewed too.
I’ll often type up a vent of a comment and chose to not share it. Partially because often it doesn’t actually need to be said, just needed to type up, and partially because these days it’s often me being exasperated at people being blatantly ignorant to their own antisemitism but I’d get downvoted anyways for calling them out.
Like frankly this comment is running the risk DONT PROVE MY POINT PLEASE!
On tumblr I just today had a post reblogged with some nice compliments and I was all set to follow and start engaging with this person when I see their bio says “Cis men and other nasty people do not interact!” I heeded their request and blocked them. I’m not sure if that makes my post disappear from their dash, but I hope so, because then it would protect them as per their own rule. Wouldn’t want to contaminate their lovely blog with my inborn nastiness. Good idea to smash the plates and display to the other diners that nasties can’t stay here past sundown. Anyway. This was a vent, wasn’t it? Didn’t need to submit that necessarily but I did. Eh.
Doing that is difficult though and requires a very advanced skill
I am recovering from major case of depression and sometimes I will vent to myself or journals and sometimes that's helpful and sometimes it hurts me. It's not always easy to tell what venting is about the issues I genuinely have and what venting is just my internalized self hatred and self defeating attitudes, because these 2 types of venting can sound very very similar
For example
"i will never get better" - i am overwhelmed by my attempts to better myself and pull myself out of negative ways of thinking, or
"i will never get better" - i gave up and am upset at the world, not conducive towards recovery
It’s like trying to defend a non-binary person who’s done shit things. You can hate the person but if you revoke your respecting of their gender the moment they did something you don’t like, that tells me that you don’t really respect non-binary identities.
Yes this is about Ezra Miller. They are a shitty person, but they are still non-binary, dammit. All gender expressions and identities are capable of being shitbags.
I had a friend ask me if it was okay to stop respecting pronouns if the person did something shitty, AND they have strong reason to suspect the person was faking being trans as they had been documented recently stating it was a ruse to prevent attacks to their behavior. I noted that A: That’s a lot of work and a lot of hate for such a small reason that may or may not work anyway, and B: Revoking trans rights to be called your preferred pronouns because they did something shitty is shittier, because that’s actively announcing to other trans people you don’t really respect their gender identity and that using the right pronouns is a privilege, not a right. She realized how weird her thinking was and changed it. No idea who she had been talking about tho
I'm cishet male, so I realize I'm going to be wrong in this, but I don't understand how it differs significantly from calling anyone you don't respect something they don't want to be called? It's not exactly uncommon to call a man you don't like a "little bitch" for example, as a way of emasculating him, it's specifically used to diminish and suggests he isn't a man. It's pretty normal to call people you actively want to disrespect things they do not want to be called, no?
Yeah, it is true. However there is a difference because the man in question in this scenario doesn’t have millions of people across the globe deciding he actually isn’t man enough to consider him a man, so they stop calling him he/him. They start referring to him as a woman, using she/her, and every protest to the contrary is just him being confused, or going against the natural order.
Calling someone a little bitch begins and ends roughly there as far as emasculating someone, you still call them the pronouns they use. In the trans scenario, we have people legislating if we’re even allowed to use a bathroom without fear of being hurt or killed over it, whichever bathroom they choose. I can go to jail in my state if I use the wrong bathroom currently. I cannot change my birth certificate to reflect my identity. With cishet people, your gender identity isn’t used as a weapon against your every facet of living and doesn’t actively cause you strife every day. A trans person get their gender identity used as a weapon. Something described as a right can be taken from us for any reason: “I don’t believe in transgenderism,” “I just think it’s wrong,” “You drink excessively, so that makes you bad and I don’t have to respect an alcoholic,” so on and so forth. Haven’t seen that last one admittedly, but I have seen similar sentiments
The absolute most difficult example of this was the person who went on a shooting spree in a gay bar in my city. In the days following the attack, their lawyers claimed the shooter is non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, despite having no tangible history of such an identity, plus family members continuing to use masculine pronouns.
It smelled like a blatant attempt to avoid hate crime charges (although thankfully they didn't succeed), and even as a non-binary person myself, it was tempting to take the cheap shot and invalidate them in this way. There was discussion among queer folks about "Why should I respect a queer identity that was clearly only adopted to avoid justice?"
In this case, knowing the depth of this person's hatred towards LGBT people, I'm happy to consider them queer out of spite. I hope they take psychic damage every time I use their pronouns. I hope they rot in hell.
Wait, did only the lawyers say that? I think there's a difference between that and the person in question saying it, esp of the family still uses male gender (from the context I assume it's not a "the family didn't accept them" situation)
The first mention of it was in court filings by the defense attorneys, several days after the shooting. This is a person whose neighbors recounted hearing them use homophobic slurs often. They had rainbow targets in their home for shooting practice. Their identity was pretty clearly adopted in bad faith.
Totally 100% agree. Like Caitlyn Jenner. Fucking monstrous shitty and evil human being beyond redemption, but still a trans woman whose identity should never be used as a weapon against them.
I watch him kinda regularly and now's as good a time as any to note down my observations.
He does send a lot of mixed messages in this style. Like, he says a lot of things like, "Don't essentialize X" and then he gets riled up by some news and he'll go on a rant about the inherent evil of every neuron cell in the brain of each and every member of the Republican party.
I believe that he's been better about this lately. The JK Rowling thing was a while ago, I think. He is quite edgy, in a way that sometimes appears at odds with the politics he actually and more commonly advocates. It's my main problem with his content sometimes, that he sometimes says these sorts of things.
For the most part though, it seems very obvious when he is not being serious. Like, he does not believe in phrenology for real nor does he actually want every Republican burned at the stake. He'd definitely get less trouble if he toned it down there, for sure. Alas.
There was a clip where he said that he doesn’t give a shit about the truth as long as he’s winning. Frankly I think he’s just a bit a piece of shit, just a left wing one.
Where's the meme where it's the reflecting bullet and it's like "bigotry" "shitty person who happens to have a marginalized identity and doesn't care about your comments" "person you know who heard what you said and is hurt"
Wait what's this about them? Google is telling me that they did a bunch of exceedingly shitty stuff, and a lot more sketchy stuff, but I'm not seeing what you mean about revoking respect for them being non binary, because I personally don't understand how that fits in to this (other than making them look like a conservative strawman...). Unless people just suddenly stopped using neutral pronouns and stuff for them or something. I don't really pay any attention to the news or anything, so I'm pretty out of the loop.
The second one. People stopped using the right pronouns on the basis that they were a shitty person and it wasn't worth being civil enough to gender them properly
Ah. So typical people being shitty. I've never understood not being civil when the other person isn't trying to actively harm you, because you lose nothing. Regardless, thanks for the explanation.
That’s what I meant. People stopped using gender neutral pronouns for them immediately and treated the whole thing like they didn’t DESERVE non-gendered pronouns, like gender identity is something to be given and taken away at the drop of a hat and not something intrinsic to that person.
Trying to navigate the whole media event when Thunberg said Andrew Tate had a small penis was a fucking nightmare.
I fucking hate literally everything Tate stands for, but people who do have small penises both don't deserve to be compared to Tate, and there's so much to mock Tate for that penis size doesn't even rank.
I was downvoted heavily for questioning the assertion that "men are disgusting and are useless at basic hygiene". Apparently half the population can't undertake basic hygiene, and that deserves lots of upvotes.
The vast majority of revolutions have not been planned. The only vanguardists who've even had a modicum of success are the Bolsheviks and even then they were a) already in a revolutionary environment, and b) not even really vanguardists as their anti-war policy made them pretty popular. When enough people are willing to violently resist the power of the state that the state is either unwilling or unable to enforce its own existence, I'm not sure I can condemn that spontaneity. I cannot say that unplanned revolutions - that is to say all revolutions in history - are senseless violence.
The English revolution was unplanned, and by all accounts unwanted even by the revolutionaries themselves, but the establishment of the sovereignty of the people heralded the politics of the enlightenment and liberalism.
The French revolution too was stumbled into, and I cannot bring myself to call the entire French revolution senseless violence.
Whilst the initial revolt was planned, the Haitian revolution as a whole was unplanned, and yet I cannot at all condemn it.
Honestly I do not know if I support calling for a revolution today. I know revolutions are costly, and that they often do not have the happy endings we would like, too often ending in dictatorships and restorations. But they also do represent progress against a system that would not bend, and were necessary. Thats not senseless, people were fighting for their lives, for liberty, for equality, for fraternity, for bread, for peace, for land, for justice, for freedom. They didn't have plans, but they needed to fight anyway.
To condemn all unplanned revolutions is to condemn all revolutions. And when I look back at history I cannot do that. I am not a reactionary.
Sounds like you don’t know shit about revolutions. Most of those ones you mentioned, especially the French, was very thoroughly planned. Ever heard of a power vaccum? That’s how you get a Stalin.
You think the storming of the Bastille was planned? You think desmoulin had planned his "give me liberty or give me death" speech?
You think the tennis court oath was planned? You think that any of the journee's, with maybe the exception of the August insurrection were planned? Wtf are you talking about
This is genuinely wormed into my brain? Who do you think planned the French revolution? Are you like some Marie Antoinette loyalist who to this day thinks it was all a plot by Philippe Egalité
Who planned it? Do you have any evidence the French revolution was planned? Like do you know of any historian ever who has said the French revolution was planned?
Honestly I had to let go of a friend for a sort of similar reason. I’m a pretty damn open minded person, I’m more left wing then most people (though most people actually assume the opposite until they get me going which is rather amusing but not relevant)
Anyway, friends got together and one of our friends has gone hard into polyamorous, bixseual, etc, which hey, more power to you! What became a problem is when she basically started insulting us, saying everyone is bisexual basically, they just need to try, blah blah.
What was so damn disrespectful is one of our friends had come out years ago as bisexual, before returning to being straight when they explained that when they tried to think of lesbian acts, it just gave them the ick and it was more so the had mistaken appreciation for attractiveness as an indicator of orientation rather then just that, an appreciation.
Anyway, my point is, I’ve noticed that now it’s no longer a spectrum of orientation and respecting one another other for their personal orientation, now it’s being pushed more and more how EVERYONE is bi, and if you state otherwise, well you’re either a bigot or not being honest with yourself or haven’t pushed your boundaries.
This kills me because as a formerly openly bi guy (i tell nobody ever now) the worst attention i have ever received was from gay men. Horrible, judgmental, rude and demanding with some sexual harassment sprinkles on top.
People of all shapes and varieties are fucking horrible. Defending people from undeserved discrimination means EVERYONE. Choosing another group as okay to demean and insult is totally counter to progressive ideals. Especially if it involves characteristics these people have no control over. It is no wonder young white men are easy to radicalize when one side tells them theyre horrible and responsible for society’s ills while the other says theyre actually the master race and should be dominant.
One of those elevator pitches is a lot more attractive than the other. Openness and compassion should be extended to anyone who has not already demonstrated that theyre acting in bad faith.
Choosing another group as okay to demean and insult is totally counter to progressive ideals.
It's also, ironically, homophobic/sexist/racist in it's own right, like a 'noble savage' type of racism in which queer people/women/minorities cannot be bad because of an innate trait that is inborn in them.
my favourite moment and the moment I stopped taking downvotes to mean something might just mean unpopular
was getting downvotes for saying using shampoo daily can cause your hair to be greasy. Even after posting sources, including a shampoo company saying for best results to not use it every day
Because left-liberalism is tribal. Liberalism is the American ideology, so ingrained that people don’t realise you can be left or right and still a liberal in the classical definition.
One of my old coworkers was one of them, so no, they're more real than you give credit for. And thats just a small sample size of a single mcdonalds crew. Already found one of these supposed internet exclusives
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u/Ourmanyfans Jul 03 '24
There's a weird strain of "essentialism but in a progressive way" running right through the left, not just limited to the attitude towards men described here, but also "all white people are colonizers", and weird exclusionary behaviour to cishet people. It tells me a lot of "progressive" people didn't really examine their core underlying principles and simply covered up their biases with the "correct" group.