#leftest

[kinialohaguy]

Weirdo

Aloha kākou. According to the left, if you’re not Woke enough, then you’re a weirdo, a creep, and you don’t belong here. If you believe in God, then you’re weird. If you have a family that consists of a biological man, woman, and straight children, then you’re not enlightened enough. You’re not mainstream enough. You don’t belong. You’re a weirdo. The attacks on God have removed prayer from…

[jamesblack13]

that funny feeling on the internet,it’s like someone intended it.

[rebellum]

The whole transandrophobia discussion thing is weird bc it feels like it's a bunch of poc and jewish trans people being like "here are my experiences of how specifically being MASCULINE had affected me, and the discrimination and violence I experienced based on that. And here is how that relates to me being a racial/ethnic minority"

And then a few loud white trans people going "ohhh you wanna be oppressed so bad you *slur*. This is why there aren't any poc in your movement it's because REAL poc understand intersectionality"

[keep-looking-to-the-sky-me]

There's something so funny and horrific about how children and teens, especially queer ones, are getting what little body atonomy rights striped away to the point where child labor is coming back, and white queer millennials think that thats the biggest threat in society cause of cringe sex take online. That's not a n@zi your quote tweeting, harassing,condescending to,taking screenshots of etc, that a queer child who just got out on middle school and has leftist ideals in every other political aspect. Treat them according.

I'm sorry but the biggest treat to queer liberation right now is not an 8th grader who doesn't understand kink, its the n@zis marching on the streets that want both you and that child you hate so much died.

[honeylemony]

Some of you can't even PRETEND to withhold your vote to make Dems move left.

[arrowpunk]

I want to make it very very clear to everyone who sees my posts about my wife and follows my blog that I am a lesbian, I am sapphic, I am a dyke, I am gay married to my wife, these are posts about queer love, about my queer love for my wife it is very very important to me that you know this

[princesamermaid]

embarassing. I had 2 drive out of work while this coworker who isnt rlly my coworker cuz i dont work with him also did. Even more embarassing. Hewent to the store that ny dad made me drive 2. As well.

[a-walking-fandom-reference]

i honestly kind of get offended when people say they hate country music like that’s a whole ass genre you’re discounting that’s pretty bold to say and trust me i know there is bad country music i’m from the midwest i am surrounded by bad country music but like judging a genre based on their top 40 maybe isn’t the best way to go about it also… you’d say you hate country to dolly parton’s face HER FACE!

[walls-actual-ly]

it feels like 1932,

politicians, journalists, and professors are suddenly declaring their allegiance to rightwing anti-democratic parties / decisions made by ministries, meanwhile charity organisations are worrying that they might not receive funding again, scientists reasonably fear getting blacklisted for their p democracy opinions, the police beats up antifascists for protesting fascists and fascist militants get away with incredibly short sentences cause bringing an axe to a fight with leftists is "self-defense" :)

[kinialohaguy]

Spatial Delirium

Aloha kākou. The Supreme Court Ruling confirming Presidential Immunity has caused a firestorm of vitriol hatred across the Fake News Media and Unsocial Media sites. An explosion of death threats and calls for violence has escalated beyond insanity. It’s not so much about the court’s ruling, but more about Donald Trump, the man. The left would have never lost its collective mind if it were anyone…

[wonderfultoweird]

I indirectly caused an accident today. let someone in to left turn and the last car on the right slammed into them while they were turning. I don't know if this is going to give me bad karma or not but i will be thinking about it all day.

[drdemonprince]

what was your journey from libertarian to leftest/anarchist like?

well, as a teen i hated authority and society and wanted complete freedom so i was a libertarian. then i realized i was gay and trans and libertarianism weren't gonna do shit for me. when obama won in 2008 i noticed that i felt relieved, even though i had not voted for him. I went away to academia shortly after that, and became surrounded by liberal people, all of them doing research with a liberal point of view, and what do you know, product of my social environment and queer and desperate for acceptance among the group that said they cared about me, I became a liberal too.

over time academia mistreated me and rejected me for who i really was, and i started to transition and realize that i was disabled. i became more left-leaning frankly because it seemed like that was the only way to be able to survive as what i was, identity wise, and find anyone at all who would correctly gender me or tolerate me. if you want to be able to hang out with other trans people and have them treat you right, there are values you basically have to say that you subscribe to. anyone who didn't subscribe to those political values was mistreated, viewed skeptically, talked to like they were dumb, and ostracized. and some of those values did make sense to me, whereas others didn't.

i saw people pushed to the social margins for being libertarians, for instance, as if that is a political ideology that carries any danger when some random trans woman with a very weak social support system says in a support group that she maybe kinda subscribes to it. i was even terrified of people finding out that i used to believe in anything "wrong" according to the social dogma, for a while. but i tried to make the most sense of the confusing tangle of community held beliefs as i could, so that i wouldnt be completely ostracized from both straight and queer society at once. and so I was vaguely leftist, but with a confused understanding of systemic oppression based on identity (among lots of other things, like abolition and anti-colonialism), and a deep terror of ever saying anything that would ever get me criticized/cancelled/viewed as a bad person.

and then the pandemic happened and i wasn't so beholden to mass community scrutiny anymore. i read a ton i looked at how politics actually plays out, and i got a little bit more capable and secure in myself and came to similarly feel awed by how much people are really capable of when they aren't being controlled or dependent upon approval in order to survive. and anarchy basically asserted that it had always been there in me, i just hadn't known the name for it. and by then i felt safe and strong enough and had enough faith in others to decide it was okay to have opinions that others disagreed with, and that i wouldn't starve out in the cold if i gave voice to them.

like a lot of people, i had misconceptions about what anarchism really was and writers like Graeber, Wengrow, Solnit, etc really disabused me of that notion and made me understand that it wasn't a scary worldview at all, it was the most human and accepting one there really was out there.

My political journey has not been especially principled or philosophical, it has been emotional, intuitive, and rooted in a lot of social influences. i think that's what most political ideologies are about for people, ultimately, belonging and safety.

I was originally a political scientist by training and in that field's body of research we see that most people do not have consistent political belief systems, they agree to a mish-mosh of statements and support various policies that don't all add up in a logically explicable way. they also don't tend to have stable views over time. just as i think morality is a pretty bad explanation of why humans do what they do, and why we help eachother and avoid doing harm, it's very evident that political ideology is a piss poor predictor of political behavior or affiliation. the far clearer explanation far more consistent with the evidence is that people politically align themselves based on their social milleu and their feelings.

this is why i always feel myself holding back from dying for a cause, and blanch when MLMs start talking about needing to do all they can to bring about communism with an almost religious fervor (beyond the fact that such thinking also doesn't line up with a lot of communist thought and theory about how capitalism falls anyway). i dont think that any of these ideologies really carry all that much weight or influence people's actions, affiliations, or political behavior on the level we all pretend that they do. i dont think they're "real". anarchy is more of a philosophy of how to relate to other people in daily life, for me, rather than a religion about how the world needs to be or where we specifically need to be heading. it's more big-I Ideological for plenty of other people, and again, i blanch when they start preaching about it as if their whole life is in service to the idea of it. I think we do anarchism by living as if we're free, every day. and that's what i care about, if i'm being honest. feeling free, safe, and cared for by some other people, without conditions, right now.

[anexperimentallife]

The US far right has been working on their plan since AT LEAST the 1960s, when I was a kid listening to evangelicals talking about their plan to take over the US, and eventually the world. It's called "Christian Dominionism," and it's a fascist ideology which goes hand in glove with the GOP's plans.

Although it was not expressed so much to the world at large, this plan was OPENLY and FREQUENTLY discussed in far right circles. We kids, if we asked about it, were told that it was "God's Will." Ask any exvangelical about it, and they'll confirm. (Part of why I know so much about these dangerous and deluded folks is I WAS ONE OF THEM in my youth.)

And where has that plan gotten them? Well, the GOP recently released a hundreds of pages long document filled with their intentions if they win--including a nationwide abortion ban and a repeal of anti-discrimination laws, among other things.

Trump has already signaled his intent to create a military dictatorship if elected, by repealing laws against using the military against US citizens on US soil sp he can deploy them against dissenters, etc., and if the GOP pick up a few more congressional seats, he can do it. The GOP has already pushed to repeal presidential term limits, and Trump has indicated he'd like to be president for life.

So I'm amazed at all the people who think withholding their vote and letting the GOP win is going to somehow fix things and "push the Dems left."

You wanna know how to push US politics leftward? You're not gonna like it, because it takes actual work beyond stomping your foot and pouting and performatively showing everyone how "pure" you are by refusing to vote.

You have to start the same way the far right did (and again, they've been OPENLY talking about and pursuing this plan since I was a kid in the 1960s, AT LEAST)--they started by getting the most extreme right wingers they possibly could into any position they could. Positions like school board member, police chief, sherrif, city prosecuter, city council member, municipal judge, mayor, governor, hell, fucking dog catcher.

They encouraged far right extremists to become police officers and military personnel and work their way up the ranks to the point at which even the famously-racist FBI reported that major city police departments across the nation were pretty much taken over by members of white supremacist organizations.

In formerly reasonable churches, right wingers pushed for the hiring and training of more and more right wing pastors and mire right-wing theology.

More affluent right-wingers bought local papers and broadcasters, and as their political power grew, they changed laws to make it easier for a single entity to control the news--until now a mere handful of entities own nearly every major media outlet in the US.

And then they used every victory as leverage for the next one, and worked their way up. I mean, there's more, like the capitalization on economic and social anxiety and their inentional exacerbation of same so they could take advantage of it, but that's intertwined with the rest.

Essentially, they got this far because they put the work in.

If the US left is going to turn things around (and if it's not already too late), we've got to do the same, but it takes RESEARCHING and PROMOTING your local and state candidates, attending city council and school board meetings, and shit like that. It's actual fucking work to fix a country.

And then, after you've done all that--and after you've shown up to primaries to try to get any non-authoritarian leftist candidate you can nominated--then you vote for the leftest folks you're able to in the general. If there are no remotely leftist candidates, you vote for the centrist or right winger who will do the least damage.

Again, that's what the US far right has been doing for decades. Taking action. Wherever possible, taking new ground, but when they couldn't do that, ceding as little ground as possible. If they couldn't win, they made damn sure to do everything in their power to try to keep actual decent human beings from winning.

Actually doing the work doesn't have the emotional satisfaction of a grand gesture, but it definitely shows who is serious about making a difference and who would rather let everything burn than sully their imagined purity by voting for anything less than perfection.

Listen, Trump is not going to end the genocide in Gaza--in fact he increased tensions between the Israeli occupation and Palestine. And the GOP will never be persuaded. Hell, they want to let Russia take Ukraine and declare open season on asylum seekers.

The Dems suck. But the GOP is far, far worse, and will do MORE damage, and kill FAR MORE innocents. And if allowed to do so, will make it even harder to change the system than it is now. They've already PUBLICLY ADMITTED that their only chance of victory is keeping people from voting. Don't play into their hands.

Under current circumstances, you know what the Dems are going to do if Biden and a bunch of other Dems lose for not being pure enough? You think they'll be all like, "Oh, no! The left sure taught us a lesson by handing the country to the GOP! We'd better shift to the left!"

No. They're going to sip champagne in their multi-million dollar mansions and have meetings about how they need to move FURTHER RIGHT to win elections, because the left doesn't vote.

And if the US becomes a military dictatorship, most of the high ranking ones will simply take their fortunes and leave.

Yup, it'd sure teach ol' Joe a lesson to force him to spend the rest of his days sipping cocktails on the Riviera.

Look beyond the single battle and think strategically. That's how the GOP keeps gaining power. And refusing to act strategically is why the left is losing. We cannot take the hill we want right now. But if we lose the hills we've already taken, we risk losing the entire goddamn war.

So fucking vote. Work to get every leftist you can in any office you can. And if you can't do that, support the one who will do the least harm.

And if it takes voting for that shitbag Biden to keep Trump and the GOP out, hold your fucking nose and pull the goddamn lever.

[ms-demeanor]

Maybe sort of a bleak question but unfortunately I binge listened to a bunch of Behind the Bastards episodes recently and. Like. I know most of that show is water is wet information to your average leftest but. So. I guess how do you keep from giving into despair about the wide sweeping repeating trends of human history?

Remember that being nice to each other and helping each other is a wide sweeping repeating trend of human history too. Look up people helping each other after disasters, read the history of people helping each other escape from danger and helping to rebuild and make communities when they're thrown together.

Legitimately if you are feeling a doom spiral after listening to a bunch of current news stuff go find someplace local that feeds people and volunteer with them. Go out and work in person with people to improve people's lives and I promise that you will feel better.

But also this can be a good lesson on your own capacity for information intake and burnout. Sometimes you need to limit your own exposure to things that feel terrible. People have different tolerances for this kind of thing, and maybe in the future do smaller binges of BTB and mix it in with something that's more positive or less painful to process.

And I guess if you're already listening to coolzone podcasts, skip BTB for a while and listen to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff with Margaret Killjoy; it's like the inverse of BTB and might work as a palate cleanser.

[mornington-the-crescent]

Tim Allen: "Leftest hate conservative shows and cancel them"

The Left: "How dare you say that! We're canceling your show"

JD Vance: "The democrat elite is made up of rich ivy league folks, who think a lower class hillbilly like myself is weird, so I've always been an outsider"

The Left: "How dare you say that! As punishment we are now going to call you and anyone we think might support you weird."

The left can't stop telling on themselves and confirming what conservatives have been saying.

With a lot of things, they literally cannot resist taking the bait. Even when they know that it's bait, they can't stop themselves.

[pet-shop-of-horror-fan]

I think the absolute worst normalized ableist language in leftest spaces is every term they come up with to mock people with brain damage.

[Brainworms, smooth brain, drooling wojak, ect.]

(It often mocks people who are developmentally disabled as well, because ableist do not care about the difference, or about either group.)

Sorry, mate(/s), but you’re not better then the people who use the, “Reeee,” meme, or otherwise use disability as an insult.